Byron Harmon Philo thesis May 2013 Markowitz

Byron Lloyd Harmon

Rethinking the exploitation of Nature

Phil 492 May 27th 2013
Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements of the Philosophy Major

We cant solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them. Albert Einstein

With thanks to Peter Kiernan, Austin Schock, Prof. Jerry Gray, Prof. Smaldone, Prof. Bowersox, andTrevor Fast. With love for Eloise Bacher without whom this paper would not have been possible.

Byron Harmon Philo thesis May 2013 Markowitz

Contents
Introduction .................................................................................................................................................. 2 The Analogy................................................................................................................................................... 2 Redefining Production .................................................................................................................................. 6 What Kind of Nature is Required ................................................................................................................ 10 Redefining compensation ........................................................................................................................... 15 Conclusion ................................................................................................................................................... 18

Introduction
Globally we extract far more from nature than we give back. Natures production is exploited in a manner comparable to the industrial proletariat with none of the benefits returning. While environmental destruction has been common throughout capitalisms brief history, the immediacy of the problem is ever more pressing. Unfortunately the gravity of the situation is not self-evident to all. Even excluding climbing CO2 output, the exponential extractive capabilities of capitalism pit it in conflict with a finite planet. The evidence of environmental degradation is overwhelming both emotionally and in empirical weight. It suggests that the current way of thinking will not solve the problem. I propose an alternative understanding of man and natures economic behavior through an analogy with Marxs labor theory of value. I will examine the foundational philosophical changes and considerations that would allow for such an analogy.

The Analogy
The analogy that I will be putting forward works by building off of Marxs Labor theory of value; consequently I will begin with a discussion of Marxs labor theory of value and then
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proceed to build up the analogy alongside the labor theory of value. It will be prudent to begin with the commodity. For Marx a commodity is a good that is produced because of its exchange value. That is, in a commodity producing society we might imagine that if I were a barrel maker, I would produce barrels not because they have direct use value to myself (though they may) but because I can exchange the barrels for money which I can then exchange for goods which have a use-value to me. In this series of exchanges, if all items are exchanged at their market value then no added value is created as the first good has the same exchange value as the end goods. Marx claims that capitalism turns this basic commodity economy on its head. Rather than proceeding commodity-> money -> commodity (C-M-C) a capitalist begins with money, buys a commodity, mixes this commodity with labor in the productive process, and then sells the resulting commodity for a larger sum of money (M-C-P-C-M.) It is in this productive process that human labor power is added to commodities in order to produce a commodity of even greater value. We might imagine that a pencil has a greater exchange-value than its constituent parts and this difference in value comes out of the human labor power that is embodied in the new pencil. For Marx the exchange-value of a commodity equals the labor power expended in the production of that good. Human labor power, for Marx, is a commodity. That is, the cost of a day of labor is the cost of producing that labor. In other words, in order for a worker to labor he/she must be given sufficient rest and sustenance. With market forces driving down wages, proletarians are paid just enough to have them physically return to the factory the next day to continue working and provide for their families so that future proletarians may clamber to the factory. In Contrast the value created by a workers labor far exceeds the cost of the labor. Marx provides the example of
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a farmer in Indonesia who in the span of 6 hours produces enough sustenance for a week, in a capitalist society this farmer would be paid 6 hours worth of goods in exchange for a week of labor. During this week he would then be able to create the equivalent of many days of sustenance. It is in this difference in value that surplus value is created in a capitalist society and appropriated privately. In summation a capitalist utilizes the proletariat as an input of production paying them just enough to produce and return the following day and reap the difference in value. Marx draws a number of conclusions from his Labor Theory of value which are relevant to the analogy. The first is a strong and tangible claim about the injustice of the capitalist mode of production. By making it clear that wealth of the bourgeoisie comes from the labor of the proletariat, more specifically that it is derived from the difference in how much use value their labor creates and how much theyre paid simply to be able to return. The proletariat labors socially yet their product is appropriated privately. Marx even goes so far as to assert that despite the exponentially growing means to produce goods and massive market gluts created by overproduction, the proletariat is actually further impoverished by the capitalist system. It is abundantly clear that he means for the system to be changed in favor of the proletariat. Additionally, he sees the surplus (the difference between what the proletariat is paid for their labor power and the resulting exchange value) being a type of measurable ground over which the class struggle takes places, both classes, the proletariat and the bourgeoisie, fighting over a greater share and pitting them antagonistically against one another; fueling the dialectic. I submit that we ought to conceive of capitalist exploitation of nature in an analogous manner. We can understand the economic relationship between the capitalist and nature in similar terms.
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The capitalist must expend certain resources, comparable to the meager payments to have laborers return, in order to reap economic benefit from the land. Imagine that we have an industrial farmer, in order to continuously benefit from the land he must maintain his land, give it the ability to reproduce itself. Just like the worker who must be sustained in order to return to labor, so too must a field be sustained or it will become barren. It is clear that capitalists are creating a surplus value through the exploitation of nature. They invest an amount in seeds, fertilizer, and other goods and extract a commodity of greater value. If we place our industrial farmer on different plots of land with significantly varying fertilities and assume the capital and labor inputs to be constant it is self-evident that differences in crop yields is not contingent upon the constant input of human labor or capital. Like the proletariat whom Marx claims is made worse off and driven into a state more barbarous than a cave dweller, so too is nature destroyed and despoiled. In fact, analogously nature is rarely compensated enough for it to return and reproduce its labor. It is a worker who is starving and compelled to return to work. Where nature is used by humans, on aggregate, we do not return or leave it in a state where it can reproduce that production. Capitalism leaves nature each day less and less able to continue existing. Like Marxs labor theory of value this analogous framework would lend itself to a number of conclusions. Perhaps the most prominent is that like the workers who should benefit from their labor so too should nature. That is, nature should be made to benefit from its relationship to humans. Additionally, it also pits nature in conflict with the capitalist mode of production. While nature cannot struggle in the same way as human proletarians, the wellbeing of nature is in direct conflict with continued capitalist growth and production. There is a material

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contradiction, like the class struggle of the proletariat and the bourgeoisie, between the bourgeois mode of production and the wellbeing of nature.

Redefining Production
There are a number of problems with this analogy as it stands. These problems are largely conceptual relating to how we conceive of nature in economic terms. Even from a Marxist lens it is not entirely clear what it means for nature to produce economically, or what it means to compensate nature for its labor in the manner that we would commonly compensate a worker for their labor. It is troubling for the analogy that nature seems to recreate itself spontaneously whereas humans seem in a much more concrete manner to need compensation in order to reproduce their labor. The remainder of this paper will be dedicated to exploring these questions and examining what kinds of foundational changes would need to be made to support my proposition. As stated above, even from a Marxist lens, it is not well understood what it means for nature to produce economically. We intuit that in order to produce that a being must furnish that good upon the market and that a tree does not produce itself, but that it simply grows. A tree does not furnish itself upon the market. To be more specific, there is a certain intent that goes along with production. In Das Kapital Marx discusses this intent, that what separates the bee from the architect is that the architect must realize or effect an object from his imagination where the bee does not effect its imagination. But even for Marx it is clear that animals still engage in

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the physical aspect of labor; spiders weave and bees build. The importance of imagination1 is unclear. In a purely material sense, the end product is the same regardless if the creator was realizing their imagination. If a human or a horse plows a field, the net result is the same, namely the plowing of the field. Assuming the quality is the same, the field would appear to have the same use-value imparted upon it by both the horse and the human, imagination can be said to contribute nothing to the end product. Though, it should be added that it is not likely that a horse would spontaneously plow a field without the intervention of a human on some level. In which case one might argue that the training of the horse and the horse realizing that conditioning in the plowing of the field are the tangible result of human imagination. If this is the case then let us consider a second scenario in which you have two humans working on an assembly line. In this situation the first human focuses on their work, having a clear picture in their mind of the end product. The second human has been working in the factory for many years and has their function down as muscle memory, they simply go through the steps unthinking like a car driver who spaces out and finds themself at their destination. Let us assume that these workers are in charge of the same process, but in different parts of the factory and that the products they create are identical in quality. Here, it seems most clear that whether one labors is not contingent upon whether one realizes their imagination. In this light human labor and the production of nature appear similar. Both the production of humans and nature creates use-value manifested in a object, the addition of human imagination does not concretely change the end product in any measurable way. Materially speaking they are the same.

It is clear that for Marx imagination and creative human potential plays and important role in human engagement with or alienation from the product of human labor.

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Where the production of nature becomes more problematic is when nature is the product itself. In other words we might ponder whether a tree produces itself. Does a tree produce itself in the same way that another animal produces an object with use-value? We might also consider fish or livestock in this category. In this case it appears that the tree, or the wood that it is made of, is the product. The first inclination is to say that the tree, fish, or cow simply grew; that they did not build themselves as a human might assemble a house or widget. Since thesis this is an examination pertaining to economics it will be helpful to place the growing of the plant or animal in context of the creation of economic value. Let us imagine that we have a cowherd. The cowherd derives economic value from his/her herd of cattle, whether by the selling of meat or dairy products. Our inclination is to claim that the cowherd mixes their labor with the cows through the process of butchery or the creation of dairy products and the furnishing of these goods on the market for exchange. But the cowherds production is contingent upon the cows. That is, without the cows the cowherds actions would not yield value. The quality of the meat and dairy products is also largely contingent upon the cows. While domestic cows would not have existed without human interference, we can very easily imagine a herd of cattle surviving on its own without the guidance of a cowherd. We might imagine that the herd is made more abundant or larger through the tending of the cowherd, but its existence is not necessarily owed to the cowherd. Rather, we are to conclude that the final product is a function of the actions of the cowherd and some process inherent to the cows. The same can be said of fish and trees. A logger can only derive economic value from a hillside if there are trees to be felled. That is, the process that creates the organism is integral to the production process. So while we may not want to say that nature produces itself like a human produces a widget, it does play the most integral

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role in the production process. In this sense, production is due to or the result of nature. This, the reader will note, is simply a roundabout way of saying that nature produces itself. Or at the very least, that it plays the most essential role in the production of the final product, wood. Next we may wonder to what degree this kind of production is analogous to the social production done by humans. One of Marxs more important insights is that goods are produced socially. In order to produce goods we enter into social relations with others. On a factory floor a worker produces a good with the interaction of his coworkers. It is a reciprocal relationship where actions and goods are exchanged. This social aspect exists even between stages of production of goods. For example a factory must enter into a definite relationship with other people who supply the raw materials and into a relationship with distributers. Goods in capitalism are produced by humans in social relations not individually. Similarly, production cannot take place without humans interacting with nature. Every economic activity interacts with nature. When we eat we draw upon nature. When we fuel our cars we draw upon nature. When we build our houses we draw upon nature. Like our human relationships, our current relation with nature is not a mutually beneficial one. In an analogous sense, nature too produces socially. Just as it takes a village to raise a child, it takes a biotic community to grow a tree. A fish will not spontaneously grow in a sterile body of water. Nor a cow on barren land. Most life relies upon other organisms for nourishment, often to mutual benefit. In the case of a tree, fungus draws water to the roots of the tree, but extracts nutrients from the tree roots. A fir tree does not grow individually. Rather they flourish as part of a larger forest process of succession where a series of smaller to larger plant species build off of one another. Like humans who through their individual actions cumulatively make
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civilization, so too is a forest made. We used different terms to refer to these kinds of relationships rather than social; they are symbiotic, and biological. And, we map them with food chains. Ultimately, they describe a series of interdependent resource relationships. There are some issues with this analogy of social production. The largest is that human social relations in production define human social organization. The mode of human production that is made up of both technology and human relations determines the power relations between humans. The master and the apprentice, the slave and the master, the proletariat and the bourgeoisie, the serf and the feudal lord are all examples of economic relations in human society that define the social hierarchy. This is not to say that certain animal species do or do not have hierarchies within their particular bands or herds. But that it is clear that the interaction of the fungus and the tree is not an economically driven power relation. What comes out of Marxs account of social production is an understanding of the interdependence of human economic behavior, that goods are not produced individually. By extending this analogy first between humans and nature, and then between nature itself, it is clear that goods are produced in an integrally interdependent way from the very most bottom of nature, through all of the natural relationships to where humans extract it from nature. Production is not just social amongst humans but throughout nature inclusive of humans.

What Kind of Nature is Required

The analogy would also require a conception of nature that differs significantly from Marxism. Marx was writing out of the enlightenment tradition where nature was conceived of in mechanistic terms and separated fundamentally from the realm of human activity and

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consideration. Nature in this milieu is passive and subject to the power of humans; it is a resource to be drawn from and used with the same consideration as a tool. Further scientific knowledge, in this view, is a means to greater control and utilization of nature. Much of Marxs writing referencing nature points away from this conception, but nonetheless is still problematic for the analogy as it does not go far enough. In Marxs writing he makes a significant number of references to nature though his focus on human economic behavior. Nature is revealed peripherally to his larger discourse. For Marx, humans are a part of nature. Yet, we are distinct from the other animals in the universality of our production. We are able to look at the production of other animals and build according to our wants and needs. We are able to take an image in our minds and set our will to manifesting that idea in the world around us, whereas other animals seem to set about their production as a matter of instinct. Additionally, in his view nature plays a very strong determining role in human economic behavior. The metal vein determines where we mine. The fertile soil determines where we sow. The forests determine where we log. Despite acknowledging that labor is not the only source of material wealth, of use values produced by labor. As William Petty puts it, labor is its father and the earth its mother. (Das Kapital) Marx still posits that nature is passive to be acted upon by man. He asserts that The soil in the virgin state in which it supplies man with the necessaries or the means of subsistence ready to hand, exists independently of him, and is the universal subject2 of human labour. (Das Kapital) That is, despite all of the dependence upon nature for our economic activity we are still separate from it and nature is the servant to our
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Here it is not entirely clear what sense of the word Subject that Marx is using. Subject of suggests a meaning comparable to a lord and his subjects. If it were meant that nature was that which labor was directed toward or upon, that labor was applied to it, we might imagine that it would be worded that nature was universally subject to, rather than the universal subject of.

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needs and labor. We are to think that nature determines our economic behavior yet is the subject of our labor, at our whim. For the analogy to function, this view needs to be pushed further. Most simply moral consideration would need to be extended to nature, and not because it benefits humans. In Book 1 Chapter1 part 1 of Das Kapital Marx defines use-value citing John Locke The natural worth of anything consists in its fitness to supply the necessities, or serve the conveniences of human life. This is a very limiting definition of use-value. It does not appear a drastic stretch of the imagination that one could apply use-values to non-human entities. It seems straight forward that cat food would have direct use-value to a cat or fodder to livestock. While plants and animals cannot participate per se in the exchange aspect of our economy that is not to say that the goods and products created therein cannot be made to their benefit. Additionally, we need to acknowledge our integral relationship with nature. Just as we are economically interdependent with our fellow humans so too, it seems Marx is saying, do we relate with nature. Marx discusses what he refers to as Species being in regards to humans. Species being is a kind of human nature, specifically our propensity toward creating and molding the world around us and a kind of freedom. In this view our very humanness is alienated under capitalism; we are rent from our social relations, our fellow humans; we are alienated from our labor. We are more and more thrown in an ever more barbarous living condition. Our basic needs that were once a given are one by one commodified and turned into another tool to further enslave us. Humans are pitted against one another finding greater means to extract profit from one another, men cease to be ends in themselves and have become only a means to profit. As nature is harnessed to a greater and greater degree for capitalist production is its species being not also stripped from it? If there
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is some kind of moral imperative to maximize or promote beings fulfilling their species being, it seems that this imperative would also apply to nature. Along a related vein, the extension of human ethical systems to a greater and greater realm of consideration appears to be a larger historical trend. Thinker Aldo Leopold in A Sand County Almanac notes how in ancient Greece there was indeed a system of ethics guiding behavior, but this realm of consideration simply did not apply to slaves. To the Greeks how one treated their slaves was simply beyond good or evil, they were property and could be dispensed with as one pleased. He then notes that as time passes the realm of moral consideration has also expanded to include a larger and larger group of entities. Similarly, Marx writes that humans consciousness is a reflection of our economic activity. That is, our ideation is a result of our mode of production. Correspondingly, Leopold writes The extension of ethics to this third element [referring to the land, animals and plants] in human environment is, if I read the evidence correctly, an evolutionary possibility and an ecological necessity. That is, if the capitalist mode of production comes into conflict with the wellbeing of the environment and our mode of production is, by necessity, forced to change, then so too will our ideation. Ideologically we will be made by our economic circumstance to extend morality to nature. Just as political rights were extended to the bourgeoisie and universal human rights proclaimed (for certain individuals) as capitalism came to realize itself, so too it seems will rights and moral consideration be extended to nature when the economic necessity arises. Moral consideration and value (here referring to ethical weight, rather than in the economic sense of use-value or exchange value) is incorporeal; it is not something inherent or extant to the world. When asked where the inherent value of a human or a tree resides, we can
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poke, prod, measure, titrate, filter, mass spectrometer, and weigh the tree or human and we will never find a physical worldly manifestation of value. Verily, in the words of Protagoras Man is the measure of all things. We may suppose, and this is perhaps a bold assumption, that humans are the only animal that places value upon objects, ideas, and states of affairs in the world around them. An object has subjective value to a particular human insofar as that particular human ascribes value to the object. What we ascribe value to, we might imagine, is the result of instinct, emotion, contemplative reflection, life experience, and social instruction. Often harm occurs because we fail to take the time to ascribe value. In most of our everyday life we act according to habit and without valuing. In this sense value is a verb, it is something that is done before ethical action can be taken either consciously and reflectively or in an axiomatic way. Like Leopolds Greeks who did not apply moral consideration to their slaves, under capitalism, as an aggregate, we do not value or apply moral consideration to nature. When we value, whether conscious or not, we often do not reflect on the logical necessity of doing so. Personal experience suggests that our valuation is not always a thought about the logical necessity for that value. It is not often that we find ourselves contemplating the categorical imperative for action or the utility maximizing consequences of an action. The conclusion is that we dont necessarily need a logically compelling reason to ascribe value but rather that value can be ascribed to nature without recourse to logical justification. Indeed our justification often follows as a consequence of our valuation. For the analogy to function properly and be acted upon with ethical weight as a moral imperative nature must be valued like human life, in an aesthetic way where damage and harm to it appears wrong on its face intrinsically just as the suffering of our fellow humans (at least those that we include in our realm of moral consideration) causes us to react emotively.

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Redefining compensation
The difference in value between the wage of the worker and the surplus value generated in the production process is of key importance to Marxs labor theory of value and his larger world view. This difference is used as the tangible manifestation of capitalist exploitation of the proletariat. The goal of revolution in this context is the redistribution of the benefits of the proletariats social production. It is clear that the private appropriation of the goods that were produced by the proletariat collectively is viewed as unjust by Marx. To remedy the situation we are to use capitalisms massive productive capabilities to the benefit of all, so that everyone is compensated for their labor. Analogously, nature is also exploited by capitalism. There is a clear difference between what nature is given and what surplus value is extracted from it. Globally capitalism extracts resources from nature at a rate greater than nature is able to replenish itself. Nature in this sense is like the proletariat that is paid just enough to return, except that nature is not even granted this minimum. Instead nature is like a laborer who is paid less than the requisite amount to reproduce their labor, but returns each day until exhaustion. Concretely speaking, this exhaustion takes many forms. We can look at fish stocks which are fished at a greater rate than the fish reproduce. We can look at our diminishing forests that grow slower than we cut them down. We can look at soils that are depleted of nutrients from over utilization. Our intuition is that there is a dissimilarity between the direct payment of a worker for their labor and our use of natural resources. Nature appears to spontaneously regenerate itself whereas a worker cannot but is instead dependent upon their wage. We might rather compare nature to a self-sufficient serf who has greater and greater demands being levied upon him by a feudal lord without any
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compensation or obligations due. In the case of the serf, he is able to sustain himself because he has access to land and resources that are not due to the feudal lord. Under capitalism the wage workers livelihood is completely contingent upon the wage, he needs income to pay for housing, heating, food etc and has no independent source of income. More and more the situation of nature is shifting to resemble the position of the industrial worker. We might imagine that a forests ability to restore itself is independent of capitalism. That is, natural weather patterns and precipitation will allow it to reproduce itself and that this is a source beyond capitalism. And to a large degree this is true. But what of the farmers field? The soil is parched and devoid of nutrients. It is the industrial farmer that provides it with nutrients and water so that it might grow the next harvest. Rivers that once flowed to the ocean now dry up. Where we were once able to extract from nature what we needed, we have been compelled to do so at ever increasing rates. Where nature once provided in sufficient amount, we have replaced with ordered production; production which has its continuance contingent upon the capitalist. Where there were forests that produced timber we have tree farms. Where there were abundant fish we now have fish farms. Just like the industrial worker that Marx claims is worse off under capitalism and stripped of his/her species being, so too is nature. Similar to how Marx draws a number of claims from the labor theory of value regarding the redistribution of wealth and dramatic shift in social relations, we are to draw similar conclusions from the analogy. Marx advocates a dramatic change in social relations and the mode of production. Under capitalism, goods are produced in a series of social relations but are ultimately appropriated into private hands. Political economy tells us that the end or goal of an enterprise is the creation of profit in the interest of the proprietor. Workers are not hired out of
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the good will of the bourgeoisie. The bourgeoisie does not have a vested interest in the wellbeing of those employed beyond that which is profitable to themselves. The relationship of the employer to the employee boils down to callous cash payment. Marx sees the social appropriation of private property as a means to changing the mode of production. Instead of societys production going to benefit the capitalist class this production would be used to the benefit of all and as a means of realizing the enlightenment goals of liberty and freedom for all. Analogously this means that we would have to dramatically rethink the nature of our relationship with nature. It would indeed be a curious thing to suggest that nature appropriate the means of production. Rather, we can instead imagine a relation in which nature was made to benefit from its role in the production process. Instead of simply draining nature of its resources and not providing for nor allowing time for it to restore itself we could produce goods and embark on projects that are conducive to the wellbeing of nature. The wellbeing of nature should be seen as an end in itself. Clearly attempting to value nature in economic terms because it benefits us does not work. In this new view nature is dynamic with human activity. The goal is neither to develop nature to its fullest to meet human economic concerns nor conservation as we know it. A helpful concept in this regard is Professor Callicotts explication of Leopolds concept of ecosystem health. Summarized the view is that The concept of health, in both its literal and figurative sense, is at once descriptive and prescriptive, objective and normative. That is we have this notion of human health wherein certain states are objectively good and bad and that by analogy we can apply this mode of thinking to nature, that certain states of nature are objectively better and others not. Just as we are still figuring things out with human health there is a learning curve involved. Callicott and Leopold also assert that human economic behavior need not be a

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zero sum game and has the potential of coexisting with nature. The concept of ecosystem health provides a basis for action.

Conclusion
The exploitation of nature under capitalism is analogous to the exploitation of the proletariat. Nature, like the proletariat is a source of surplus value. Despite its clear role in production, nature too is further impoverished and immiserated by capitalism. Natures livelihood is more and more contingent upon the bourgeoisie. Like Marxs theories that center around the industrial proletariat that require a reframing of moral consideration and economic production, so too is it only possible to extend Marxs labor theory of value analogously to nature by reframing moral consideration, economic production and compensation to include nature. As demonstrated the extension of these categories to nature are substantial in some aspects, counter intuitive in others, though in many places slight definitional changes. Though in aggregate changes of this sort amount to radically different conception. Given our current environmental situation where nature is exploited globally at a greater rate than it reproduces itself we are currently on limited time. The current way of thinking has created the situation. While that same thinking has brought marginal change advancing the interests of nature, it is doing too little too slowly. It has not stemmed the tide of over exploitation of nature, nor slowed it. While I do not mean to assert that I have the answer, it is clear that we need a new mode of thinking to address the problem, one that aesthetically, emotionally and axiomatically takes the wellbeing of nature into consideration on the same level as human suffering. Seeing a tree being felled unnecessarily should tear at our heart strings, as if one of our fellow humans were needlessly and senselessly being killed. Sadly, we live in a world in which the distant suffering of human beings does not affect us.

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Byron Harmon Philo thesis May 2013 Markowitz Bibliography

Armstrong, Susan J., and Richard George Botzler. Environmental Ethics: Divergence and Convergence. Boston: McGraw-Hill, 2003. Print.

Marx, Karl, and Friedrich Engels. The Marx-Engels Reader. Ed. Robert C. Tucker. New York: Norton, 1978. Print.

Marx, Karl. Capital. Ed. Fredrick Engels. Vol. 1. New York: Random House, 1906. Print.

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