Valuing the Earth and Each Other

In his critique of capitalism, Marx is fundamentally asking whether or not this system we have created is functioning to maximize human freedom, wealth, and happiness. While Capital seems to depart from the more humanistic and philosophical works of earlier Marx, it is essentially a critique of an economic system that does not fulfill the promises laid out in a humanist ethos. In this paper I will show that in an age of global environmental crisis we need to radically rethink what it means to be citizen in a global-ecological sense. My goal is to demystify the operations of humanism as a rational means of attaining democracy, freedom, and prosperity for all by situating it within the environmental crisis and analyzing the root causes of anthropogenic environmental degradation. By performing a theoretical cross-pollination between deep ecology and Marxism, I hope to illustrate the insights and trappings that both theories have on their own, and suggest a number of useful conjunctions that emerge in this act of discursive recycling. That said, the inability of capitalism and Marxism to conceptualize value outside labour, results in a larger genetic contribution from deep ecology than from Marx. However, I will use Marx's various critiques of capitalism, especially relating to Michael Mikulak 2 alienation, reification of exchange value, and the creation of surplus value, in order to reveal the limitations of an anthropocentric humanist discourse that does not factor nature into the equation, and also to point out some of the limits of the purely biocentric environmentalism espoused by deep ecology. By looking at ideas of species-being, labour, and capitalist production, I argue for the need to incorporate a deep ecological or biocentric perspective into any formulation of value, the good life, freedom, and democracy. Deep ecology is similarly limited because it is riven with contradictions surrounding the practical application of biocentric equality. Moreover, while deep ecology attempts to address the conceptual impasse of binary thinking and the pervasive nature-culture dichotomy, it relies too much on notions of spiritual connection to the earth based on a very bourgeois conception of wilderness/nature, and therefore establishes an ideal that is very likely impossible and perhaps not even desirable. Thus I will argue that Marxism needs to (re)consider the environment, and deep ecology needs to (re)consider the human. In the same way that capitalism obscures the social relations of individuals within a market of commodity exchange by making it appear that the relation is between things, anthropocentric humanism asserts a similar system of individual autonomy that ignores the visible and invisible processes of nature we depend upon. Anthropocentrism is the bourgeoisie capitalist to the biospheric proletariat. For humanistic discourse to have any currency within the age of global environmental crisis, we must extend the scope of the linguistic and ethical address to the various seen and unseen agents within the natural world upon which our mutual survival, quality of life, and ultimately freedom is contingent.

Review: A Journal of the Fernand Braudel Center, 2017

Every civilization must decide what is, and what is not, valuable. The Marxist tradition makes occasional reference to a “law of value.” It is not a phrase that rolls easily off the tongue, apparently. It sounds quaint, curiously out of step with our times. And yet, the tremors of systemic crisis—financial, climate, food, employment—are translating into a new ontological politics that challenge capitalism at its very core: its law of value. Today’s movements for climate justice, food sovereignty, de-growth, the right to the city—and much beyond—underscore a new set of challenges to capitalism’s value system, understood simultaneously in its ethico-political and political-economic dimensions. This new ontological politics has long been implicit in radical politics. But it seems to have reached a new stage today.

Radical Philosophy Review - forthcoming

2017

This paper is a response to commentaries on our article entitled 'Value in capitalist natures: an emerging framework' (Kay and Kenney-Lazar, 2017). We argue that the responses to our initial paper served to broaden our proposed framework and to underscore the need for a unified, but diverse, approach to nature–society studies with value at its center. Extending the argument from the initial article, we continue to see potential for value to act as a bridge that can bring together diverse scholarship in nature–society geography and political ecology. After briefly addressing both the tensions and possibilities for value as a bridging concept, we focus our response primarily around three major threads that emerged across the commentaries. First, we address points raised by the respondents concerning the bounding of capitalism and its permeation into socionatures. Second, we engage with value's inverse and its absence, captured through the concepts of 'devaluation' (Collard and Dempsey) and 'disvalues' (Sullivan). Finally, we close by engaging the possibility of a 'liberatory valuing of nature'—one which recognizes a multiplicity of social and ecological values as a means of working toward more just and emancipatory nature–society relations beyond capitalism. We are grateful to the respondents for their thoughtful and engaging commentaries on our paper. While we initially aimed to simply explore lingering questions concerning how economic value is produced in relation to nature, the debates and discussions that we ventured into showed us how generative the intersections of value and nature could be. Thus, we began advocating a research agenda focused on value in capitalist natures that could place dis-parate forms of nature–society research into conversation. While this has proved to be a challenging task, our interlocutors have immeasurably helped us to move in the right direction. In our view, the capacity for a group of scholars with such diverse research interests, topical foci, and theoretical perspectives to debate the relations between value, nature, and capitalism in quite collaborative ways

Socialist Register, 1998

This paper traces the history of Marxist ecology-ecosocialism-which proclaims itself the solution to our civilizational ecological crisis, a crisis crucially manifested in accelerating climate change from global warming. That crisis prompted the emergency warning on Oct. 8, 2018 by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

Ecological Marxism is distinctive from the environmentalists whose main focus is on the wrongness of anthropocentrism. Even with their diverse approaches, the latter have produced a common portrayal of the autonomy or integrity of nature. Thus, their stress on the debunking of the centrality of humans eventually emphasized on the gaining of new ways of understanding nature. Ecological Marxism, however, followed Marx’s critique of capitalist production and accumulation. As could be expected, the eco-Marxists will no longer just propose a new way of understanding nature, but also a new praxis in dealing with nature—one that stresses on human development as co-evolving with nature. This environmental praxis which takes a socialist-economics turn, has followed a leftist (Red) course but may also have arrived at the intersection of the Green Movement. Through this, the ecological praxis and theory of Marx and his partner, Engels, has come to the fore.

In the face of climate change, moral motivation is central: why should individuals feel compelled to act to combat this problem? I argue that justice-based responses miss two morally salient issues: that the key ethical relationship is between us and the environment, and that there is something in it for us to act to aid our environment. In support of this thesis I draw on two seemingly disparate sources: Pope Francis’ encyclical Laudato Si and the early Marx’s account of human essence as species-being. Francis argues we must see nature as an “other” with whom we have a relationship, rather than dominating nature. Marx considers how we currently interact with “others,” and the harms these interactions cause to us. In both contexts, we harm our environment by not acting to meet its needs, and harm ourselves by making it less likely to develop ourselves as more fully human persons. It is the avoidance of these harms that can motivate us to act against climate change.