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Capital & Class
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DOI: 10.1177/030981680007200102
2000 24: 5 Capital & Class
Noel Castree
Marxism and the Production of Nature
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5
M
ARXS RUMINATIONS ON NATURE were notoriously
sparse. Despite (or because of) this, Marxists have
spent more than a century mining his texts in order to
piece together otherwise disparate, and often gnomic, comments
and asides on capitalism and nature. From Engels (1956) The
Dialectics of Nature to Schmidts (1971) The Concept of Nature in
Marx to Reiner Grundmanns (1991a) Marxism and Ecology
and beyond,
1
Marxs silence on the question of nature has been
decisively rectified. Consequently, the Marxist tradition now
enjoys a well-stocked library of concepts and arguments with
which to articulate a theory of nature. That this should be so as
the twentieth century has given way to the twenty first is
particularly fortunate and appropriate: for in government,
business and civil society worldwide nature is on the agenda as
never before. Whether it be the Greenhouse Effect, Dolly the
cloned sheep or the Human Genome Project, it seems that nature
has become one of the privileged subjects of pre- and now post-
millennial angst and aspiration. In light of this, the ongoing
Marxist interest in nature represents a timely convergence of
theoretical developments with real world issues and events.
Marxism and the Production of
Nature
by Noel Castree
This essay surveys a century of debate on the Marx-nature question.
It seeks to expose, critique and reformulate a set of foundational
assumptions which, it is argued, have informed this debate. Three
main arguments are put forward. First, it is suggested that successive
attempts to expound a Marxian theory of nature have see-sawed
between naturalistic and social constructionist positions. Second,
as such many Marxist theories of nature are shown (ironically) to have
much in common with forms of bourgeois and anti-bourgeois
environmentalism they otherwise oppose. Finally, as a way out of the
impasse of Marxian thinking on nature, a conception of the production
of nature is tentatively put forward.
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Specically, it holds out the promise of a Marxism which, through
a critical analysis of capitalisms ecological impacts, can work on
two fronts simultaneously: rst, against the kind of bourgeois
technocentrism (of which environmental economics is
emblematic) which suggests that nature can be successfully
managed within existing socio-economic frameworks; and
second, against the kind of radical ecocentrism (exemplied by
many deep green organisations like Earth First!) which suggests
that a fast-disappearing rst nature can be saved by reverting
to non-industrial modes of production. By negotiating these
antinomies, such an ecological Marxism can (contra bourgeois
worldviews) show the folly of merely tinkering with capitalism
while (contra more extreme green worldviews) also demonstrating
that any post-capitalist future cannot be based on a return to
nature in itself .
2
However, the conditions which will allow Marxism to
actualise its considerable green potential are, not surprisingly,
manifold and complex. Two problems loom large. First, there is
the obvious problem that environmental policy circles are
dominated by neo-liberal thinking, while oppositional green
politics and action (as in green political parties, environmental
non-governmental organisations and environmental new social
movements) has, understandably, often been detached from
the debates over Marxism and nature because of the latters
typically academic nature.
3
In the second place, considerable
academic debate still rages over the Marx-nature-capitalism
question. For example, the exchange between Benton (1989,
1992) and Grundmann (1991b), in conjunction with Burketts
(1996, 1997, 1998) successive critiques, indicates that there is still
much disagreement over the meaning and ecological signicance
of even core categories (like value). The well-stocked library
of Marxian concepts and arguments on nature, to which I
referred above, is thus heterogenous in its contents. In one
sense this is all to the good, of course, since intellectual
disagreement is surely vital if Marx-nature debates are not to
ossify. But, on the other side, it does make it difficult to distil a
coherent Marxian position on the question of nature that might
be translated into practical action against the apologetics of
bourgeois policy makers and the well meaning but fuzzy logics
of radical ecocentrists.
In light of these introductory comments, it may be thought that
this essay seeks to address this theory-practice gap by (i) resolving
6 Capital & Class #72
some of the theoretical disagreements between scholars of the
Marx-nature question over key categories like value and (ii) show-
ing how such theoretical disquisition can be rendered less abstract
and speak to a more practical form of eco-Marxism beyond the
ivory tower. Though such an endeavour would be a worthy (if
very ambitious) one, my aims here are in fact rather different and
slightly more limited. For it will be my contention that debates on
the Marx-nature question need, in at least one crucial respect, to
become more rather than less abstract before they can usefully
inform (and learn from) a grass-roots ecoMarxism. This may
seem a contradictory, even perverse, claim. But I hope to make
good on it in three ways. First, I will argue that much of the
present and past Marxian work on nature remains locked
(unwittingly) in a worldview which is ontologically, theoretically
and politically disabling. For all the careful attention to specic
concepts,
4
for all the erstwhile differences between extant
interpretations of the Marx-nature-capitalism nexus, I want to
suggest that at a higher level of abstraction many Marxian
approaches to nature operate, usually unconsciously, with a set
of foundational presuppositions which are of questionable
intellectual and practical value. In this respect, then, seemingly
different interpretations of Marx, nature and capitalism are in fact
unified by their common adherence to a set of paradigmatic
assumptions which organiseand, importantly, circumscribe
the field of debate. It will be my aim to expose and critique
these organising assumptions.
Second, I will show that they are assumptions which,
surprising and ironic though it is, most Marxian theories of
nature share with the bourgeois and radical ecocentric
worldviews they otherwise oppose. At the most abstract level,
therefore, if not at the level of specific concepts and arguments,
much of the ongoing work on Marx and nature is ordered and
enframed in ways not dissimilar to its establishment and green
rivals. Following the work of social theorist and critic of science
Bruno Latour (1993), I shall call this ordering framework
modern in his specialist sense of the word. For Latour, post-
Enlightenment thought has been founded on what he calls
the Modern Constitution. This unwritten, but powerful,
Constitution has set the basic terms of academic, social and
political debate in Europe, North America and beyond. Central
to this Constitution, he argues, has been the Nature-Society
dualism. So pervasive it is taken for granted, this seemingly
Marxism and the Production of Nature 7
unquestionable dualism, Latour claims, has long facilitated
the exercise of various forms of social power. By separating
Nature and Society off into putatively independent realms, he
contends, it has become possible for various actors in various
situations to appeal to imperatives supposedly intrinsic to
either domain in order to authorise the implementation (or not)
of specific courses of action with particular social and ecological
consequences. More controversially, in an attempt to undermine
the seeming ordinariness and innocence of the Nature-Society
dualism, Latour (ibid.) claimsto cite the title of perhaps his
most contentious bookthat in fact We Have Never Been
Modern. What he means here is that Nature and Society do not
offer solid hooks to which we might attach our interpretation
(ibid.: 95). In his view Nature and Society are specifically
modern constructs which conceal the reality of non-modern
worlds in which what we label Nature and Society are constantly
mixed and hybridised into what he calls networks and what
Michel Serres (1987) calls quasi-objects, quasi-subjects. In
an era of genetically engineered food, biomedical implants and
chemically induced climate change, his conclusion is that we are
entering the non-modern world without ever having really left
it (ibid.: 130).
5
It may seem rather odd to cite Latours argument in prosecut-
ing a case against Marxist treatments of nature. I say this because,
as is well known, Marx and twentieth century Marxists have,
precisely, contested natures separateness from society. In
particular, Marxs critique of Malthusian reasoning about natural
limits to growthsince recapitulated and elaborated by Meek
(1955), Harvey (1974), Wiltgen (1981) and Benton (1989)has
long served as a powerful vehicle for resisting social programmes
enacted in the name of the supposedly ineluctable forces of
nature.
6
I accept this. However, two other points warrant
consideration. First, notwithstanding the critique of Malthus, we
shall see that some Marxist work has in fact reintroduced natures
putative separateness in other registers (cf. Burkett, 1998).
Secondly, it is arguable that much of the Marxist work which
apparently abjures this separateness installs a thoroughgoing
and equally problematicsocial constructionism. What we
have, then, is two modalities of work on Marx and nature, one
at some level naturalistic, one at some level anti-naturalistic
and social through and through (cf. Hazelrigg, 1993). The
problem, I will suggest, is that neither modality is satisfactory
because both remain locked within an unhelpful Nature-Society
dualism. To this extent, both therefore participate in the same
assumptions underpinning many bourgeois and radical
ecocentric approaches to nature: for it is possible to contest the
formers embrace of capitalism and the latters attachment to
nature-for-itself without ever leaving the organising eld of the
Nature-Society dichotomy.
Although I will qualify this plenary argument as I go along,
the crux of the issue still remains: how to fashion a Marxist
theory of nature which avoids the Scylla of a residual naturalism
and the Charybdis of an anti-naturalistic social constructionism.
7
Since my intention is not only to undertake a critique, the third
aim of this essay is to offer a solution of sorts: namely, a little-
known reading of the Marx-nature-capitalism triptych which
phrases its claims in terms of the production of nature. At rst
sight, this phrase seems only too redolent of the social
constructionism to which I am objecting. However, it will be my
suggestion that this framework offers the potential for a power-
ful Marxian theory of nature which is not founded on the
Nature-Society dualism. Since I agree with Hazelrigg (ibid.: 104)
that if Marxs thinking retain[s] relevance at the [beginning
of the 21st] century, it must be chiefly because important
constructions not otherwise currently available can be made of
his thinking, then I submit that the production of nature is
one such construction.
My argument proceeds in ve stages. First, I sketch the general
context by considering briefly the intellectual and normative
problems with adhering to the venerable Nature-Society dualism,
in however subtle and reexive a way. In particular, I focus on the
bourgeois technocentrist and radical ecocentric worldviews
which, implicitly or explicitly, most Marxist theories of nature
otherwise oppose. This done, I then begin my review of various
readings of the Marx and nature question. These readings
which are representative of the literature on Marx and nature
rather than exhaustivehave rarely been considered together in
the space of one essay or monograph. Working chronologically,
I start with a brief consideration of the work of Friedrich Engels,
Alfred Schmidt, Sebastiano Timparano and Norman Geras, four
well-known and inuential contributions to the Marx-nature
debate which cover a century of argumentation. Moving into
the present era, I then consider the recent so-called ecoMarxist
workauthored by the likes of Elmar Altvater, Grundmann
and James OConnorwhich has been developed in light of the
supposed environmental crisis currently afflicting the planet. In
both cases I trace a persistent polarity between naturalistic and
social constructionist views. Moving on, I turn, fourthly, to the
work of Ted Benton. I examine Benton separately because it
seems to me that his work lies on the cusp of a non-Modern
Marxian theory of nature without ever quite getting there. Finally,
I offer what I regard as a long overdue presentation of an
alternative tradition of Marxist work on the capitalist production
of nature. I say long overdue because this work has largely
remained conned to debates in geography and has rarely reached
a wider audience. This is unfortunate, because this work is
arguably non-Modern in something like Latours sense (though
not in the same way since, as I shall explain, Latour is not well
disposed towards Marxism). It thus promises to take us beyond
the Nature-Society dualism organising both previous Marxian
work on nature and versions of bourgeois technocentrism and
radical ecocentrism. My conclusion is that the production of
nature approach deserves further development if Marxism is to
make cognitive and political sense as a theory which is green as
well as red.
This essay, as is doubtless clear by now, does not offer a
close and careful reconstruction of specific Marxian concepts
in the way that most of the authors I consider have. Instead, it
works at a higher level of abstraction. To those who complain
it works at too abstract a levelafter all, my concerns seem far
removed from the realities of natures current use and abuse in
this capitalist world of oursI reply with Clive Barnetts (1995:
429) laconic observation that abstraction is a positive
capacity. What he means is that the most abstractand
therefore basicassumptions through which we organise our
worldviews are every bit as important as our everyday
practicesnot least because those assumptions in large part
organise and delimit those practices, in however general a way.
With this in mind, it seems to me that arguments pitched at the
level presented here, far from being ethereal and detached
from worldly practice, are vital if that practice is to be exercised
in politically progressive ways. In short, if a Marxian theory of
nature is ever to inform an environmental politics founded on
non-dualistic lines, then an effort of reconstruction at the level
of basic assumptions is not only required, but materially
important.
8
Nature and Society
The nature-society dualism remains entrenched in both academic
and popular thought and practice. Broadly speaking, it organises
two worldviews that have long been central to capitalist modernity
and which commonly inform approaches to nature in
government, business and civil society: namely, technocentrism
and ecocentrism. Let me stress that I use these terms in a
deliberately heuristic and schematic way, since this is not the
place to review in detail the many different strands of green
thought and practice. The worldviews they describe are therefore
ideal types and in practice their outlines are often fuzzy and
hard to detect.
Ostensibly the techno- and ecocentric worldviews are very
different, though they overlap in such centrist doctrines as
sustainable development and ecological modernisation. On the
one hand, bourgeois technocentrism is anthropocentric. It
typically prioritises instrumental reason and sees the control
and manipulation of nature as a means to the end of human
9
happiness and well-being. Technocentrism incorporates
conservative, Cornucopian and Promethean strands. The former
includes neo-Malthusian authors like Garrett Hardin (1996),
who advocate drastic reductions in population and consumption
levels because of natural limits to growth. The second strand
includes authors like Julian Simon (1997), who point
optimistically to new and future natural resources for human
usage. Finally, the third strand of technocentric thinking includes
agro-food companies like Monsanto who claim (in their question-
able rhetoric) that the active transformation of nature is the path
to human (sic) well-being. By contrast, ecocentricsat least
those at the radical end of the green spectrumplace nature
rather than humanity rst or else put both on an equal existential
and moral footing. They argue for natures inherent rights to
existence and campaign for more-or-less radical measures to
curtail destructive
10
appropriations of nature, such as those
associated with capitalist industrialisation. From the moderate
Greenpeace to the radical Earth First!, ecocentrism is either
partly or emphatically non-anthropocentric.
None of this is new. What is, however, worth emphasising is that
at one level the differences between technocentrism and
ecocentrism are more apparent than real. Odd as it at rst sight
seems, the Sea Shepherds and Monsanto, Friends of the Earth
and the people behind Dolly the sheep, actually have something in
common: they all, in their own specic ways, posit a separation,
distinction or divide between the social and the natural, the human
and the non-human. More specically, they all, again in specic
ways, tend to posit one or other side of this putative dualism as a
prime ontological, causal and normative force in justifying their
arguments and guiding their practices. In recent yearsand not for
the rst timeit is the natural side that has been increasingly
invoked to ground various arguments and policies. Three
modalities of invocation loom large. One is very familiar and
long-standing: it is the pessimism inaugurated by Malthuss natural
limits to growth thesis which time and again reappears in
technocentric (and some ecocentric) discourse. A second modality
in which nature is hypostatised is also familiar and long-standing:
namely, the romanticism of nature-in-itself which supports more
radical ecocentric rhetoric and practice. Finally, there is a more
recent form of nature-discourse in which natures limits are seen
not la Malthusas barriers to human well-being but as
imperfections which science and technology can correct and
manipulate. Among other things, the promotion of genetically
modied crops by agro-foods multinational ts well into this
third category of earth talk (Dryzek, 1998: 1) in which the powers
of society are seen as superior to those of a tameable nature.
As we know, Marxists have long opposed appeals to nature
in order to legitimate particular courses of social action. Beginning
with Marxs critique of Malthus, the argument has long been
that ideas that draw upon the authority of nature nearly always
have their origin in ideas about society (Ross, 1994: 15), a
position well summarised by Raymond Williams (1980) essay
Ideas of nature. Of course, this has not disposed Marxists to
avoid using the signier nature, nor has it led them to necessarily
ignore or devalue those things we call natural. On the contrary,
as we shall see, a strong current of naturalism
11
has long been
central to many Marxist disquisitions on nature, particularly so
in recent eco-Marxist contributions. However, following the
critique of Malthus, other Marxists have sought to temper
sometimes very stronglythis more-or-less pronounced natural-
ism. In so doing they have emphasised two things. First, that
appeals to nature are often ideological and serve to occlude the
historically specic social processes and relations driving natures
appropriation. Second, and more emphatically, that at one level
nature is conceptually and materially constructed under the aegis
of capital.
At first sight, this double corrective to naturalismbe it
technocentric, ecocentric or Marxian naturalismis appealing.
It radically historicises the human relation to nature and thereby
relativises a supposedly invariant and intransigent nature.
Intellectually and politically, this social constructionist view thus
offers the attractive prospect of a post-capitalist nature which can
be actively fashioned along more socially and ecologically
progressive lines. However, important as this is, it quickly
becomes clear that the social constructionist position is as
dogmatic as any unqualied naturalism. In an era where environ-
mental problems and interventions into nature proliferate (as
much unintentionally as intentionally), little is to be gained by
lurching from the pole of Nature as onto-explanatory to that of
Society. At worst, it installs a hubristic super-constructionism in
which, conceptually and materially, nature is effaceda position
which is, at best, naive and unrealistic.
This see-saw of naturalism and constructionism has long been
recognised by Marxists. My point, however, will be that very few
have managed to negotiate the antinomies of society and nature
particularly well. Even the most supple and dialectical attempts
like that of Benton, who I consider laterultimately founder on
the very dualism they are seeking to overcome. Latours Modern
Constitution has, in other words, been hard to escape. As a way of
putting esh on the bones of these several comments, I want now
to turn, in chronological fashion, to some key contributions to the
Marx-nature debate. I should say immediately that my aim is
not to identify what Marx really said on the question of nature.
12
Rather, I am reading other authors readings of Marx with a view
to establishing the broad parameters of a defensible and useful
Marxian conception of nature. In this regard, I will obviously
depart from those who see Marx as primarily a naturalist or a
constructionist in order to read him as neither.
From Engels to Geras
In the wake of Marxs unsystematic treatment of nature, it was
left to Engels to articulate the rst fully-edged Marxian theory
of nature and to lay out the tenets of a full-blown Marxian
naturalism. The Dialectics of Nature was a meta-theoretical
contribution, one designed to extend historical materialisms
reach into the natural, not just socio-economic, realm. There is,
of course, doubt as to whether Marx would have concurred
with Engels position. Nonetheless, The Dialectics of Nature did
trace a line of continuity from Marx and Engels famous joint-
statement in The German Ideology that matter underpins and
precedes human history and society. In the context of the
pervasive nineteenth century idealism of Hegel, Kant and their
epigones, this axiomatic statement was anything but banal. It
affirmed what Stanley (19978: 458) calls the ontology of
objective nature at the expense of a worldview sublating nature
to Spirit. Moreover, it did so in a way which was far from naive.
Engels, recall, was as much an opponent of Malthusian natural
limits thinking as Marx was. The Dialectics of Naturewith
all its talk of natures dialectical laws, its non-identity with
humanity and its relative autonomythus proposed a qualied,
though still strong, naturalism in which the material world
presented challenges and opportunities to the historically specic
societies which appropriated it.
13
After Engels, it took over seventy years for another signicant
statement on Marxism and nature to appear. To be sure, many
early and mid-twentieth century Marxists did write about nature
(see the useful bibliography provided by Stanley, ibid.), but none
matched the book-length contribution of Alfred Schmidt, whose
The Concept of Nature in Marx appeared in English in 1971.
Clearly, the historical conditions in which Schmidt was writing
differed radically from those prevailing in Engels day. Unlike The
Dialectics of Nature, The Concept of Nature in Marx was scripted
in the context of a neo-Malthusianism arguably as intellectually
and politically pervasive as the idealism which Engels had
struggled against. Ehrlichs (1970) The Population Bomb, Hardins
(1968) The Tragedy of the Commons and Meadows et al.s
(1972) The Limits to Growth were all symptomatic of an era in
which natures supposedly invariant capacities were argued to
impose absolute constraints on economic and population growth.
It is unclear to what extent Schmidt was consciously responding
to this reactionary naturalismit was far more prominent in
Anglophone than German circlesbut the fact remains that
The Concept of Nature in Marx dissented from the strong (if, as
I said, qualified) naturalism of The Dialectics of Nature. Put
differently, Schmidts work might be said to be the first full-
blown social constructionist Marxian theory of nature.
Schmidts inuential treatise, as is well known, assiduously
sought out and assembled Marxs scattered commentaries on
nature. Contra Engels, he relegated those cases where Marx
articulates a full-blooded naturalismsuch as in the Holy Family
where Marx (1975: 46) states that Man (sic) has not created
matter himself. And he cannot create any productive capacity if
the matter does not exist beforehand. Against this, Schmidt
(op. cit.: 27) insisted that Marx did not mean that this extra-
human reality was to be understood ontologically in the sense of
an unmediated objectivism. By de-ontologising nature in itself,
Schmidt not only contested Engels notion of a dialectics of
nature but also focussed attention on the social side of the
nature-society relation. Relation is the operative word here
because Schmidt invoked the metaphor of metabolism to
summarise the Marxist view of nature in which labour (in both
the transhistorical and capitalist sense) becomes the ashpoint of
ongoing society-nature interaction. More specically, Schmidt
reintroduced and reworked the Hegelian distinction between
rst and second nature to argue that Marx saw capitalism as
responsible for transforming environments on a scale
unprecedented in human history. This is not to say that Schmidt
was anti-naturalist: on the contrary, he did not reject the notion
of a non-social or pre-social nature altogether. However, his
point was, rst, that such a nature can only be conceived through
social categories and, second, that Marx ha[d] virtually
nothing to say about this nature-in-itself because nothing can be
said beyond the bare posit (Hazelrigg op. cit.: 117).
In this sense, Schmidts naturalism was present but very
muted. Indeed, ultimately it was so muted as to be altogether
squeezed out by a social constructionism in which capitalism is
seen as responsible for remaking nature anew. As Schmidt (op.
cit.: 61) put it in a particularly forthright statement:
[under capitalism] men (sic) change their own nature as they
progressively deprive external nature of its strangeness and
externality, as they mediate nature through themselves, and as
they make nature itself work for their own purposes.
Here, then, nature is seen as at once external to humanity but
also sublated to it through the motive force of capitalism. Stanley
(op. cit.), in a recent critique, sees Schmidt as lapsing here into a
latent idealism which under-states natures materiality. However,
it might be more accurate to see Schmidts position as a non-
naturalist materialism (to coin a rather cumbersome phrase) in
which it is societynot naturethat is the most important
material realm.
14
Indeed, soon after the publication of The Concept of Nature in
Marx, another MarxistDavid Harvey (1974)encapsulated
and concretised this material social constructionism. Where
Schmidts treatise was only indirectly ranged against the pervasive
neo-Malthusianism of the early 1970s, Harveys germinal essay
Population, Resources and the Ideology of Science directly
challenged this worldview in which positive and preventative
checks were justied in the name of a supposedly nite nature.
Specically, Harvey rejected the commonly accepted argument
that Over-population arises because of the scarcity of resources
available for meeting the subsistence needs of the mass of the
population to insist instead that
there are too many people in the world because the particular ends
we have in view (together with the form of social organisation
which we have) and the materials available in nature, that we have
the will and the way to use, are not sufficient to provide us with
those things to which we are accustomed (Harvey ibid.: 274).
In this way, he sought to draw attention away from the limits
purportedly imposed by an intransigent external nature to
suggest, rather, that ecological limits were relative to the specic
socio-economic systems in place at any one time.
If, by the mid-1970s, a certain social constructionism was in
the air viz. the question of Marx, nature and capitalism, it did not
take long for the pendulum to swing back to the naturalism
favoured by Engels. Just after Schmidt and Harvey expounded
their arguments, Sebastiano Timparano (1975) published On
Materialism. Timparanos book was a polemic and his argument
simple:
By materialism we understand above all acknowledgement of
the priority of nature over mind or, if you like, of the physical level
over the biological level, and of the biological level over the socio-
economic and cultural level: both in the sense of chronological
priority and in the sense of the conditioning which nature
still exercises on man (sic) and will continue to exercise at least for
the foreseeable future (Timparano, 1975: 34).
The reference to mind and levels was quite deliberate and
explains Timparanos apparent indifference to the neo-
Malthusianism which Schmidt and Harveys works undermined.
For the target of his animus was not the ecocatastrophists of the
early 70s but something much more internal to academic debates
within Marxism: namely, the latent idealism (as he saw it) of
twentieth century Western Marxismof which Schmidt, with
his Frankfurt School background, was for Timparano a part.
Specifically, Timparano objected to the denigration of the
concrete-real in Althussers then ascendant structural Marxism
(hence the parodic reference to levels) and its symptomatic
silence on nature (see Smith, 1980). In the context of the mid-
1970s, Timparanos reassertion of a Marxist naturalism thus
came as a far more cautious and less optimistic response to the
environmental and population problems of that time than those
offered by Schmidt and Harvey.
The Marxian theory of nature which ended the century of
work just prior to the most recent periodto be surveyed in the
next sectionwas Gerass (1980) Marx and Human Nature:
Refutation of a Legend. In some ways, Geras returned to where
Engels began: by reasserting, at a rather abstract level, the
ontological primacy of nature. In this sense, his analysis was
also concordant with Timparanos. However, unlike the previous
authors discussed, he sought, as the title of his book suggests, to
extend Marxs view of nature from external nature (i.e. the
environment) to human nature. Here, then, Geras argued for a
Marxian theory not just of a putatively separate naturerst or
secondbut of a universal nature which includes human beings
too as biological and embodied entities. Marshalling quotations
spanning the entire course of Marxs intellectual career, Gerass
concern was to refute the view that individuals were merely, or
essentially, ensembles of social relations. Like Timparano, his
animus was very much directed at developments internal to
academic Marxism. In the wake of Althussers theory of ideology,
Geras argued that a wholly anti-naturalistic view of the subject was
as dominant in academic Marxist circles as it was pernicious. The
upshot, he contended, was to so radically historicise the human
subject as to make it virtually an effect of social relations.
Consequently, for him a Marxist emancipatory project was
robbed of a universaland thus (supposedly) unifying and
non-divisivebasis for political action. In this sense, then, Geras
attempt to read Marx as a naturalist at the level of both nature
and humanity was arguably intended to give stabilising force to
our (sic) praxis (Stanley op. cit.: 469).
15
By the mid-1980s, debates on Marx and nature had thus
settled into a recognisable pattern, however varied the individual
contributions might be. From Engels to Geras, a persistent
antinomy emerges in which naturalism and social construction-
ism battled it out, each de-emphasising those aspects of Marxs
work highlighted by the other. This is true even for Gerass work,
which may seem to be the odd one out in terms of the argument
I am putting forward. I say this because his advocacy of a Marxian
view of human nature may seem to have overcome the nature-
society dualism by extending nature into the human realm.
However, this extension merely generalised the dualism while still
remaining locked within its terms of reference. For if Geras was
not to sublate the realm of the social entirely to nature, he had to
leave room for a nominally separate society which was
underpinned by both external and human (universal) nature. So
it is that the most recent round of debates about Marx, nature and
capitalismto which I now turnhave emerged out of a legacy
of dualistic thinking, even if it has not always been acknowledged
or realised. As we shall see, these newer debates have done
relatively little to take us beyond the legacy.
EcoMarxism
By ecoMarxism I mean that growing corpus of work, largely
fashioned in the last decade, which seeks to read Marx as an
actual or potential critic of capitalisms environmental
consequences. The context for this work, as is well-known, is the
emergence of a so-called global environmental crisis in the
1980s and 90s. Where, over twenty ve years ago, Harvey could
afford to turn the tables on resource scarcity and over-
population thinking, recent authors have been much more
concerned about human impacts on and in nature. Their
intention has been to reconstruct Marx along more eco-friendly
or eco-sensitive lines. This is not just because of Marxs relative
silence on nature. More emphatically, it is also because green
critics have tended to see Marx as little more than a Promethean
who, in reality, embodied the wider Enlightenment desire to
subordinate nature to humanity (Soper, 1991). I consider here
just three examples
16
of this new genre of ecoMarxist work (for
a more comprehensive coverage see the collections edited by
Benton [1996] and Martin OConnor [1994]). I choose them
because I think they are in many respects representative of the
wider assumptions guiding the genre and because they are well-
known and inuential.
I begin with the work of James OConnor (1989a, 1989b,
1989c, 1998). OConnors work is varied in its details, but his basic
thesis is well-known. His ambitious and, for the symmetrically-
minded, appealing intention has been to identify a second crisis
theory in Marx to complement the orthodox model of the forces-
relations of production dialectic. Where the latter is internal to
capital and has been the subject of a great deal of Marxian debate
since Marx rst proposed it, OConnor has argued for a so-far less
acknowledged second contradiction of capitalism. If the rst
contradiction issues in periodic crises of over-production (excess
capital, labour and commodities), the second contradiction,
according to OConnor, issues in progressive environmental
crises which result from processes of under-production. By under-
production OConnor does not mean too few commodities etc.
Rather, he means that capitalism treats natureupon which,
he argues, it depends entirely for the production of material (as
opposed to social) wealthas if it were a free good. In other
words, OConnor detects a tendency inherent to capitalism to
under-value and thus, in his terms, under-produce, what he calls
the conditions of production. As Altvater (1993: 219-20) puts it in
a summary of OConnors work,
The fact that the general conditions of production are not
produced in a capitalist way has a fateful consequence: namely,
that (private) capital treats them as if they did not have to be
produced at all, as if they were available without restriction.
Altvater, who is the second ecoMarxist author whose work I
consider, concurs with OConnors intention to develop a
Marxism that it as much a critique of political ecology as
economy. However, his theory is somewhat different in its
construction. Working at a more concrete theoretical level,
Altvater focusses on labour-power as the point of interaction
between society and nature. Since labour-power itself is the
conjunction of both concrete and abstract labour, Altvater (ibid.:
188) is able to consider the labour-process as one of dualisation
wherein lies the possibility of grasping economic processes at
once as transformations of values (value-formation and
valorization) and as transformations of materials and energy.
His tack is to see labour-power as the medium in and through
which two systems with two rather different ordering principles
(ibid.: 204) interact and contradict. On the one side there is
capitalism, which is growth-orientated, form-driven and
indifferent to qualitative issues as to the origin, type and impacts
of the materials used in production. On the other side, Altvater
argues, is nature, whose logics are described by the laws of
thermodynamics, notably the conservation of energy and the
increase of entropy. Given, as he sees it, capitalisms liability to
destroy the environments upon which social (labour value
dened) wealth is based, Altvater argues that we should build into
the functioning of the economic system a series of imperatives
which prevent ecological damage (ibid.: 213)imperatives
presumably dictated by nature in some post-capitalist future.
OConnor and Altvater both point to capitalism as inherently
anti-ecological. In so doing they also articulate a form of
naturalism in which one system (economic) is underpinned and
contradicted by another (ecological). Reiner Grundmannthe
third and nal ecoMarxist author I consider in this sectionhas
proposed a wider, and more constructionist, Marxian critique of
political ecology. In his Marxism and Ecology (1991a), and an
essay in the New Left Review (1991b), Grundmann rejects the
argument that Marxs critique of environmental degradation
was specic only to capitalism. His wider argument is that Marx
focussed on the differential impacts of specic technologies
within whatever mode of production
17
as they are embedded
in and against nature. Unlike OConnor and Altvater,
Grundmann also rejects the idea that given technologies
contradict a putatively independent nature. For him (ibid.:
113), ecological problems arise only from specic ways of dealing
with nature. Moreover, he insists that this specicity can only be
grasped anthropocentrically such that the real issue is not the
abuse of an external nature but, instead, how to rationally and
consciously control nature according to human needs and values.
As he puts it (1991a: 2), anthropocentrism and mastery over
nature, far from causing ecological problems, are the starting-
points from which to address them.
There is much to commend in these and other ecoMarxist
contributions. OConnor, Altvater and Grundmann each, in
different ways, rise to the environmental challenge of the new
century. Moreover each, again in different ways, provide a
valuable corrective to a good deal of the technocentric and the
ecocentric thinking which currently animates the environmental
debate. Against the former, OConnor and Altvater question
whether environmental problems can be dealt with simply by
correcting the marketas environmental economics would, for
example, have itand argue instead for a wider, ecologically
charged critique of capitalism, while Grundmann questions the
optimism usually associated with technological development.
At the same time, all three authors take the ecocentric concern
with nature seriously, but do not lapse into any straightforward
celebration of nature tout court (especially Grundmann).
18
And
yet, as I intimated in my introduction to this essay, ecoMarxism,
like the preceding work on Marx and nature, shares something
with the bourgeois and green views of nature it otherwise opposes:
namely, an ontological, theoretical and normative separation
of the social and the natural realms. In OConnor and Altvater a
naturalism is posited in order to highlight how the two realms
contradict; in Grundmann, by contrast, a constructionism is
posited as the material and discursive basis through which nature
can and should be consciously and safely controlled. In other
words, the recent ecoMarxist work still locks Marxism into a
worldview in which either nature or society (or even both) can be
appealed to in order to ground arguments and justify particular
courses of action.
Benton: a limit case of Modern thinking?
There is, however, an exception to this dualistic rule. Ted Benton,
an ecoMarxist whose work I wish to consider separately, has
arguably gone the furthest in undoing the binary suppositions
structuring ecoMarxism. By implication, his work also contests
the dualistic mind-set animating the earlier work of Engels,
Schmidt, Timparano and Geras. Although some, like Grundmann
(1992), have criticised Benton for favouring the nature side of
the nature-society relation, I want to suggest that his work in fact
represents a limit case of Modern thinking about nature from a
Marxist perspective. In other words, more than perhaps any
previous author, Benton has pushed Marxian thinking on nature
as far as it can go while still remaining within the Modern
Constitution disclosed by Latour.
19
Like OConnor and Altvater, but unlike Grundmann, Benton
(1989, 1991a, 1992) argues that capitalism has a specic liability
to generate environmental crises on both the input (resource) and
the output (pollution) side. He spends considerable time re-
constructing Marxs notion of the labour process (at both the
general and historically specic levels) in order to derive a set of
ecoMarxist concepts adequate to grasping capitalisms dependence
on, and transformation of, nature. I say reconstructing, because
Bentons argument is that the naturalism of Marxs philosophy of
history was not carried through to his economic theory of
capitalism in whichincorrectlyhe tended to over-emphasise
the transformative capacities of capitalist labour.
This is all very interesting and worthwhile (if controversial in its
details: see Burkett, 1998). However, it is Bentons more general
view of the society-nature relation which I want to focus on here.
In this area Benton is arguably far more helpful than most of the
present and past commentators on Marx and nature I have
considered. On the one hand, Benton presents a very strong case
against what he (1989: 52) calls natural limits conservatism in
the Malthusian and neo-Malthusian mold. To this extent, he is
careful to abjure a naturalism based on a supposedly xed nature
which, ineluctably, places constraints on humanity at some given
point. On the other hand, however, Benton also argues that a full-
blown Marxian constructionismin which humanity can treat
nature as a tabula rasais both naive and theoretically dangerous.
Indeed, he regards it as a utopian over-reaction to natural limits
conservatism which, while understandable, goes too far in the
other direction. If, then, neither naturalism nor constructionism will
do, Bentons alternative is to fashion a both/and position which
resorts to neither side of the nature-society dialectic:
What is required is the recognition that each form of social/
economic life has its own specic mode and dynamic of inter-
relation with its own specic contextual conditions, resource
materials, energy sources and naturally mediated unintended
consequences The ecological problems of any form of
social and economic life would have to be theorised as the
outcome of this specic structure of natural/social articulation
(ibid.: 77, emphasis added)
As Benton (ibid.: 78) goes on, this relativisation of both the
social and the natural, encapsulated in the motif of articulation,
avoids both the Scylla of epistemic conservatism and the
Charybdis of social constructionist utopianism. Each form of
social and economic life is understood in terms of its own specic
contextual conditions and limits. These conditions and limits
have real causal importance in enabling a range of social practices
and human purposes which would not otherwise occur, and
also in setting boundaries and limits to their sustainability.
This middle position between the antinomies of naturalism and
constructionism is persuasive and intellectually appealing (see also
Benton, 1994). It certainly stands as an advance over the see-saw
character of previous writings on Marx and nature and offers an
inventive way forward for future historical-materialist work on
nature. However, in terms of the argument I am developing
here, Bentons approach, while it takes us quite far, still does
not take us far enough. I say this because his argument still
operates within the parameters set by the nature-society dualism.
Although it represents a particularly subtle attempt to subvert the
dualism by resorting to the metaphor of articulation, it
nonetheless still instantiates the image of two systems, one
economic, the other ecological, which interact, albeit now in
historically specific and relative ways. Symptomatically, the
inspiration for Bentons third way solution for Marxian
investigations of nature is the Transcendental Realism of Roy
Bhaskar and others. I say symptomatically, because Bhaskar
holds to a naturalismto be sure, highly qualiedin which a
depth-model is employed to argue that basic chemical and
physical laws and processes always underpin the social. At the
same time, he also distinguishes the social and the natural at the
ontological level (see Collier, 1994: Pt. I).
For these reasons, it seems to me that Bentons position on
nature is a limit case of Modern thinking in Latours sense of the
word. Put differently, while its non-dualistic intentions are sound
and to be commended, in practice it nonetheless feigns to
overcome the society-nature binarism without ever quite doing
so. As Latour (op. cit.: 55) puts it, in a statement which could have
been written as a direct critique of Benton,
To resort to dialectical reasoning [is] is no way to exit out of
the difficulty Linking the two poles of Nature and Society by
as many arrows and feedback loops as one wishes does not
relocate the quasi-objects or quasi-subjects
However, the problem with Latour is that his diagnosis of Marxism
is only partly, rather than entirely, correct. While, as I have shown,
many Marxian theories of nature are indeed Modern in his sense,
others are arguably not. How, then, to fashion a non-Modern
Marxian theory of nature which resorts to neither naturalism,
constructionism nor, even, to Bentons attempted synthesis?
20
By
way of an answer I now want to turn to a body of work on the
production of naturethus far little discussed in wider debates on
Marx and naturewhich offers the potential to take those debates
beyond the debilitating nature-society dualism.
The production of nature
Marxian work on the production of nature emerges out of the
discipline of geography. This is noteworthy in two respects. First,
it arguably explains why this work is little known in Marxist
circles, since geography, which occupies a relatively marginal
place in the academic division of labour, has rarely gured in
wider intellectual debates in the twentieth century (see Soja,
1989). Second, and more positively, the geographical provenance
of the production of nature argument is also apt because geography
has long been distinctive as the supposed bridging discipline
between the natural and social sciences. It is not for nothing,
then, that Marxist geographers have long placed nature at the
centre of their theoretical endeavours. As we shall see, the
production of nature argument is original and provocative insofar
as it refuses the nature-society distinction which has organised
geography as much as the technocentric, radical ecocentric and
Marxian views on nature to which I have already referred.
Work on the production of nature originates with, and is
indeed largely synonymous with, the writings of Neil Smith
(1984; 1996; 1998).
21
However, in his most recent work David
Harvey (1996) has qualified his earlier muted (even anti-)
naturalism and now seems sympathetic to the production of
nature thesis. Smiths writings begin with his Uneven Development
(1984), which proposes a geographically inflected Marxian
analysis of capitalism. Among other things, Smiths concern
was to undermine the nature-society dualism as it appeared in
both academic and everyday thought. Academically, Smith
detected this dualism in the bourgeois natural science inaugurated
during the Enlightenment, romantic reactions to it (in philosophy
and literature) and also in most Marxist theories of nature.
Considering both Schmidt and Timparano, Smith (ibid.: 30)
concluded that neither takes us beyond the dualistic treatment
of nature. Likewise, he detected this dualism in the discourses of
both what he (1996: 40) has called the new environmental policy
establishment and its more deep green opponents. Indeed, he
argued that seeing nature as independent from society, in however
qualied a way, amounts to an ideology of nature which obfuscates
the real nature of nature under capitalism.
In what does that real nature consist? Smith concedes that
humanity in general and capitalism in particular cannot
produce, say, geological strata or the atmosphere. However, his
point is that conceptually and practically it is not possible to
comprehend such rst nature as remains today in non-social
terms. Nature is thus always already socially delimited. To this
extent, Smith shares with Schmidt, Harvey and Grundmann a
strong streak of anthropomorphism. Secondly, Smith also insists
that nature at the end of the twentieth century is increasingly a
second nature which is produced within, and as part of, an
increasingly global capitalist system. As Adorno and Horkheimer
famously put it, capitalism has always been one big racket in
nature. However, in the fty years since they wrote these words
this has become even more true. Indeed, Katz (1998) has
identified something like an epochal change in the capitalist
relation to nature at the millennium. Where, for much of the
century, capitalism has continued to push outward in the
appropriation of an extensive nature, today it turns increasingly
inward to further transform an already socialised intensive
nature in which the commodication of everything from plant
genes to human organs indicates natures deep remaking within
the circuits of capital (see also Escobar, 1996). As Smith (1998:
272) laconically puts it, nature is far more malleable than ever
it was [before].
What, then, does it mean to talk of the production of nature?
Like the Marxist constructionisms discussed earlier, it is intended
to oppose the idea of an independent, non-social nature. As
Smith (ibid.: xiv) remarked, the production of nature
sounds quixotic and jars our traditional acceptance of what
had hitherto seemed self-evident it dees the conventional,
even sacrosanct separation of nature and society, and is does so
with abandon and without shame.
Indeed, Smith coined the phrase as a complement to Henri
Lefebvres (1991) deliberately counter-intuitive notion of The
Production of Space, space being another realm long considered
to be pre-given and beyond the scope of social alteration. Of
course, Smith is quite aware that Marx himself never talked of the
production of nature in the sense that he means it. Indeed, for this
reason Smith chooses not to undertake a detailed analysis of
Marxs various comments on nature. His point, rather, is that the
production of nature argument can be logically derived from
Marxs political economy. At base, Smiths notion of production
is remarkably simple. Utilising a rather orthodox reading of
Marxs political economy in which form (value) dominates over
content (use-value, concrete labour), he suggests that capitalism
does more than merely interact with, appropriate or even
articulate with nature. Rather, Smiths much stronger thesis is that
The development of capitalism involves not just a quantitative
but a qualitative development in the relation with nature. It is not
merely a linear expansion of human control over nature, an
enlargement of the domain of second nature at the expense of the
rst. With the production of nature at a world scale, nature is
progressively produced from within and as part of the so-called
second nature (Smith, ibid.: 54).
In other words, under the growth-orientated, competitive and
labour-value orientated conditions specic to capitalism, nature
itself becomes internal to the economic system. Simplifying, this
internalisation takes two forms, namely intentional production
(as, for example, with GMOs) and unintentional production
(as, for example, in the new ecologies created unintentionally by
aquatic, terrestrial and atmospheric pollution). The key to this
internalisation is that naturethe varied realm of use values
becomes embroiled in the logic of exchange value on the world
market. On the basis of this bold, and strikingly simple,
proposition concerning natures production, Smith then puts
forward a theory of uneven development in which various socially
produced natural landscapesagrarian, forest, mineral etc.
become subject to twin forces, internal to capital, of geographical
equalisation and differentiation (for more on this see Smith,
1986 and McIntyre, 1992). In Smiths vision, then, capitalist
production is not only pivotal, it also involves far more than is
implied by the narrow empiricist notion of production as that
which occurs in the labour process/workplace alone (Smith,
1998: 277-8). Following Marxs richer, more expansive denition
in the Grundrisse, Smith understands production in a much
wider sense as the whole global-local system of production,
including distribution, exchange and consumption.
At rst sight, the production of nature argument may seem
little different from the Marxian constructionisms described
earlier. Indeed, to the extent that Smith prefers the semantically
emphatic term production to describe the capitalist relation
to nature his argument might be seen as hyper-constructionist,
discounting nature as such even more than previous Marxists
like Schmidt did. As a corollary, the notion of the production of
nature might also seem dualistic insofar as the explanatory arrows
apparently point in one direction only: from capitalism to nature.
However, I want to suggest otherwise. In fact, I want to suggest
that Smiths production of nature thesis offers a way to think
beyond the either/or of constructionism/naturalism. More
specically, I want to suggest that this non-dualistic conception
allows Marxists to adhere to three things simultaneously: rst, an
ontology which, while it denies a separation between capitalism
and nature, nonetheless refuses to elide one with the other;
second, a supple, non-determinist theory which, in explanatory
terms, accords power and agency to both capital and nature;
and third, a normative perspective which criticises the ecological
impacts of capitalism on historically- and place-specic grounds
without reverting to a politics of nature in or for itself. These three
things, it seems to me, are the rewards to be had once one rejects
the antinomian thinking informing previous work on Marxism
and nature.
Clues to Smiths non-dualistic ontology are found in the
following declarations, drawn randomly from Uneven Develop-
ment: [under capitalism] the development of the material
landscape presents itself as a process of the production of nature
(p. 32); [the task] is to renovate our conception of nature in such
as way that the dualistic world of bourgeois [and deep green]
ideology can be reconstituted as an integrated whole (p. 32); the
unity toward which capitalism drives is certainly a materialist
unity but it is not [simply] the physical or biological unity of the
natural scientist. Rather it is a social unity centred on the
production process (p. 57). Process, unity, integrated whole
these terms are rich in their meaning and indicative of the core
assumption underlying Smiths argument: namely, that the
production of nature is a continuous process in which nature
and capital co-constitute one another in temporally and
geographically varied and contingent ways.
For Smith, then, nature becomes internal to capitalism in
such a way that the very distinction implied by using these terms
is eroded and undermined. The reading of Marx that this entails
is clearly one which sees him as a holistic and process-oriented
thinker (as opposed, say, to an analytical thinker, as Rational
Choice Marxists would have it). Indeed, it is signicant that in
Uneven Development, Smiths interpretation of Marx is in part
derived from Bertell Ollmans (1971) germinal book Alienation.
I say signicant, because it was Ollman, of course, who famously
argued that Marx held to a philosophy of internal relations.
From this perspective, Marx does not compartmentalise the
phenomena he studies into discrete boxes, the relations between
which he then traces. Rather, to borrow Paretos aphorism,
Marxs concepts are for Ollman like bats: for in them one can see
both birds and mice. What this means is that Marx deals less with
factors and causal variables and more with inner-related
moments of what is an ongoingif highly complexmaterial
process in which heterogenous use-values are subject to the
violent, homogenising abstractions of the world market (Ollman,
1993). Indeed, in a telling remark, Smith (1998: 277) has recently
reiterated this non-dualistic processual view of nature in his
declaration that the production of nature argument is more
Hegelian than Kantian in inspirationalbeit a Hegel turned
right side up.
Although this is all very abstract,
22
it nonetheless indicates a
Marxian ontology which is non-dichotomous. With nature
neither separate from society nor society from nature, the
production of nature approach circumvents the absolutisms of
either natural limits conservatism or social constructionist
utopianism. Of course, there are those who will worry that this
relational, processual ontology of what Swyngedouw (1996: 66)
calls socio-nature leaves us with a materialist monismin which
the social and the natural are elided. However, this does not
necessarily follow and is certainly not part of Smiths conception
of capitalist nature. On the contrary, Smith is adamant that the
logics of capital and the functioning of ecologies and bodies are
not at all the same. The capacities and affordances of, say,
Oncomouse
TM
are not at all the same as the accumulation logics
driving its production as a commercial tool for cancer research:
they are, in short, ontologically irreducible. But this does not, in
turn, lead Smith back to a dualistic worldview: for his point is that
in practice capital and nature interleave in diverse ways that alter
their putatively separate existences.
So far so good. But none of the above helps us adequately
address less philosophical and more theoretical questions
concerning causality and agency in the capitalism-nature nexus.
This brings me to the recent work of David Harvey, a writer
who, as I noted, was very much an anti-Malthusian construc-
tionist when first writing about capitalism and nature in the
early 1970s. However, in his more recent worknotably Justice,
Nature and the Geography of Difference (1996)he has
tempered his former anti-naturalism and conceded that
capitalisms ecological and corporeal effects cannot be ignored.
What is interesting, though, is that this switch has been
accomplished without recourse to binarist thinking about the
nature-capitalism nexus. Echoing Smith, Harvey (ibid.: 149)
seeks to approach this nexus by escaping from the stasis of a
swinging pendulum of opinion viz. naturalism or construction-
ism. Instead, therefore, of considering what capitalism does to
nature or vice versa, Harvey insists on two things. First, that we
talk about created ecosystems which both instantiate and reect
[capitalism] in contradictory ways (ibid.: 185). And
second, that we understand capital-nature nature relations as
intensely internally variegated (ibid.: 183): that is, as multiple.
Let me take each claim in turn and illustrate its theoretical
importance.
First, the notion that today most aspects of nature are at some
level created seems only too suggestive of Harveys position on
nature in the 1970s. But, despite appearances, Harveys point is
that these created ecosystems, while intentionally and un-
intentionally produced by capitalism, possess causal powers of
their own and take on agency in relation to the capitalist processes
of which they are a medium and outcome. To phrase all this in
Smiths language, nature may indeed be produced but produced
nature, in turn, cannot be exploited indefinitely: it has a
materiality which cannot be ignored.
23
Second, following
through the implications of Smiths argument that nature-capital
relations are internal, Harveys insistence that these relations are
also intensely differentiated by time and location is theoretically
illuminating. Among other things, it gets Marxists away from the
problematic habitso typical in previous Marx-nature debates
of making general or plenary statements about capital-nature
relations. In a world where capital commodies everything from
trees in Clayoquot Sound to wildlife in the Okavango to human
bodies in medical clinics, it is simply wrong to argue that capital is
either wholly anti-ecological or wholly able to exploit nature
without limit. Rather, as Whatmore and Boucher (1992: 168) put
it, natural relations are always embedded and thereby interact
with, and condition, [capitalist] social relations to varying
extents and in different ways in specic times and spaces. Or, in
Fitzsimmons and Goodmans (1998: 204) terms, dissolving the
abstractions of nature and [capital] allows for a necessary
heterogeneity of outcomes and possibilities for transformation.
The capitalist production of natureswhich, strictly, we need to
talk of in the pluraltherefore means that in particular times and
places in relation to particular environments capitalism is
ecologically harmful whereas in others nature is produced in ways
that have positive social and ecological effects (where the terms
harmful and positive are, of course, always and ineluctably dened
in specic value-laden ways). It all, as they say, depends.
These theoretical-explanatory gains are important and useful.
They suggest a perspective on nature-capitalism relations in
which causality and agency is complex, relative and contingent:
in short, difficult to generalise about. But these gains are not
the only ones. In addition, the non-dualistic assumptions
supporting the production of nature argument also generate
normative pay-offs. Four strike me as particularly important.
Most obviously, the production of nature perspective circumvents
forms of Marxian thinking which justify courses of political
action in the name of a supposedly invariant nature or ineluctable
social imperatives (capitalist or otherwise). More subtly, because
the production of nature approach is anthropomorphic it also
enables a position from which the fate of nature/s can be
considered seriously without declining into a naturalistic
ecocentrism. It is possible to express concern over those things
we routinely call natural while still remaining necessarily
anthropomorphic yet without being anthropocentric (i.e. making
people the only or pre-eminent concern of politics). It seems to
me that this is what, at the broadest level, the production of
nature approach achieves. Thirdly, the production of nature
approach also thereby tempers the melancholic romanticism of
those radical ecocentrists who decry natures destruction, while
also embracing some of technocentrisms optimism as to the
potentially liberating effects of transforming nature/s. In this
respect, the favoured motif of the production of nature/s approach
is creative destruction, a semantically complex notion which
Marx used to capture the two-sided character of capitalist
development.
24
This brings me to a nal point, which concerns
the value-judgements which are necessarily built into all appraisals
of nature-capital relations. If, as Harvey (above) seeks to make
theoretically explicit, some productions of nature are benecial
to human-kind while others are destructive for humanity and/or
nature/s this raises complex questions as to what is considered
beneficial and destructive.
25
These questions cannot be
answered in general terms (absolute or historical) for what is
considered benecial in one locale at a particular point in time
might be considered destructive in another. The conceptual
resources with which to distinguish the two kinds will arise from
contextualised analyses of capital-nature relations in particular
times and places as they affect different constituencies, not the
plenary judgements of dualistic ecoMarxisms, the indiscriminate
mysticism of deep green strands of ecocentrism or the universalist
arrogance of Copernican strands of technocentrism.
Conclusion
I have made three main arguments in this essay. First, that for over
a century Marxian writings on nature have been strung out
between the polar positions of naturalism or constructionism;
second, that these writings are thereby informed by dualistic
assumptions also found in many bourgeois and radical ecocentrist
perspectives on nature; and third, that a conception of the
capitalist production of nature offers rich ontological, theoretical
and normative resources for a supple, non-dichotomous Marxian
conception of the nature-capital nexus. Despite this latter
argument, I do not see the production of nature argument as a fait
accompli, which, like some Hegelian aufhebung, stands as the
crowning achievement of over a century of inquisitions into the
Marx-nature question. But I do think that future debates on
Marxism and nature will have to explicitly address the problems
of dualistic thinking in pursuit of third way approaches to
nature in the twenty rst century that are both/and rather than
either/or. Still, even if others follow the lead of Smith and
Harvey and successfully negotiate the antinomies of the previous
Marx-nature debates, at least one serious and pressing problem
remains. This returns me to the question raised in the introduction
about political practice and the gap between the dry, academic
nature of most Marx-nature debatesof which this essay is an
exampleand the visceral, engaged nature of environmental
politics. Given the counter-intuitive nature of its core theses
and the well-known difficulties academic Marxists have had in
these neo-conservative/neo-liberal times in reaching out from the
ivory tower, communicating the production of nature view to
activistsand also, reciprocally, learning from grass-roots
organisingwill be a truly daunting task. Yet it is a task which
needs urgently to be undertaken because the examination of
basicand usually taken-for-grantedassumptions informing
our understanding of nature is of more than merely academic
signicance. Rather, it has to be central to any present and future
grass-roots ecoMarxism.
______________________________
I am grateful to Ted Benton, Bettina Lange, Les Levidow and Mike Quiggin for
helping me improve an earlier version of this paper.
______________________________
1. I am thinking here, for example, of James OConnors (1998) Natural Causes
and Paul Burketts (1999) Marx and Nature.
2. Let me stress that I am not placing all permutations of green thought and
politics together under one ecocentric umbrella. My criticisms of green
thought, which are necessarily broad brush and schematic in a theoretical
essay like the present one, are aimed mainly at the deep green end of the
spectrum, hence my use of the term radical ecocentric. For a more detailed
consideration of attitudes towards nature see Dryzek (1998).
3. And also, of course, because of Marxisms wider unpopularity after the
collapse of Soviet and Eastern Bloc communism. The equation of Marxism
and actually existing communism has been especially damaging for Marxists
writing and remaining active after the Fall because the public, press and
governments worldwide seem unable to think that Marxism can be anything
other than a totalitarian ideology.
4. Best illustrated, in recent years, in Paul Burketts several careful and
scholarly essays on the ecological signicance of capitalist value.
5. For more on Latour and overcoming dualisms see Murdoch (1997a, 1997b).
6. I should also note here a parallel, but distinct, Marxian literature on the the
ways natures limits are invoked by modern science. Notable writers in
this eld are Robert Young, Richard Levins and Richard Lewontin.
7. Note that in this essay the term constructionism refers to material-physical
constructionism rather than the discursive constructionism which has
been de rigeur in cultural studies this last decade or more.
Acknowledgement
Notes
8. I should also say that I only review the debates in the Anglophone Marxist
tradition in this essay. To this extent, I am, of course, ignoring a whole swathe
of non-English speaking literature on Marx and nature.
9. Which, in practice, usually means particular segments of humanity with the
power to enjoy the full benets of capitalist industrialisation.
10. I put this term in scare quotes because I do not think it is possible to say that
capitalism is ecologically destructive in any absolute sense which can be
dened in non-anthropological ways. Rather, destructive appropriations
of nature can only be dened in relation to historically and geographically
specic social appraisals of what is useful and valuable in nature on economic
and/or moral and/or aesthetic grounds.
11. Naturalism is, of course, a semantically complex term with a rich and
varied history of usage both within Marxism and without. In this essay I use
the term in a deliberately general way to designate any body of thought which
posits a nominally separate or independent natural realm which either
underpins, constrains or enables a nominally separate realm of society.
12. Such a desire still animates some contributions on the Marx-nature question.
For instance, Burkett (1996), as the title of his otherwise excellent essay
suggests, proposes to clear up Some Common Misconceptions About
Nature and Marxs Critique of Political Economy. Here the term mis-
conception clearly implies an ostensibly correct view which it is Burketts
intention to establish. Quite why Marxists still feel compelled to search
for Marxs true meaning on this and other issues eludes me. It surely
misses the point, which is to read Marx in ways which provide theoretically
coherent and empirically relevant analyses of contemporary capitalism
(cf. Althusser and Balibar [1970] on reading Marx).
13. More detailed interpretations of Engels on nature are Parsons (1977) and
Benton (1996).
14. For more on Schmidts reading of Marx on nature see Smith (1984: ch. 1) and
Burkett (1997).
15. This, then, was a kind of natural humanism, if you will, as opposed to a
historical humanism produced as the contingent effect of social relations
globally unifying an otherwise disparate working class constituency.
16. I do not, for example, consider the work of John Bellamy Foster or Paul
Burkett.
17. This is not, of course, to say that the mode of production does not matter:
it clearly does insofar as given technologies may be utilised in different ways
and degreesand with different consequencesdepending upon which
forces and relations of production they are embedded in.
18. As Smith (1996: 49) puts it, nature itself is not much of a Marxist category.
19. Note that, in making this argument, I concur with the spirit (though not
the letter) of Burketts (1998) critique of Benton. I say spirit rather than
letter because I do not think it quite right to characterise Benton as
ultimately neo-Malthusian. In deed, broadly speaking, I think there is
much in common between my objections to dualistic Marxian thinking about
nature and Burketts own ongoing project to avoid the antinomies of
naturalism and hyper-constructionism.
20. There are, I should note, signs in Bentons more recent work that he is alive
to, and has sought to address, the residual dualism informing his thinking
on nature: see Benton (1994).
21. But see also Redclift (1987) and Smith and OKeefe (1980, 1985) for related
theoretical reections..
22. I should say, though, that empirical exemplications of the production of
nature thesis do exist. Though he does not phrase his work in Smiths
terms, it seems to me that Kloppenburgs (1988) germinal First The Seed is
effectively a case study of natures production.
23. Though the point is that this materiality is contingent and time-space
specific. In other words, the limits of a particular environment in a
particular period can only be defined relative to the specific political
economic arrangements it is part of.
24. In an important and sobering essay in the New Left Review, Richard Smith
(1998) uses this notion to describe the awesome environmental consequences
of Chinas ongoing transition from communism to capitalism.
25. Moreover, David Harvey (1996) has recently made the important point
that many socially produced environments and landscapes can only be
relinquished at great social and ecological cost because they are so much a
part of everyday life in a capitalist world economy. This is why, he argues,
a future socialism cannot be based on back-to-nature, small scale settlement
thinking of the kind more radical ecocentrists advocate.
_______________________________
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