Marx and Nature

Though infrequently viewed as an environmental thinker, Karl Marx insisted that production as a social and material process is shaped and constrained by both historically developed relations among producers and natural conditions. Paul Burkett shows that it is Marx's overriding concern with human emancipation that impels him to approach nature from the standpoint of materialist history, sociology, and critical political economy.

Paul Burkett, PhD , who earned his doctorate in economics from Syracuse University, is a professor of economics at Indiana State University, Terre Haute. His publications include Marxism and Ecological Economics and many articles in scholarly journals.

John Bellamy Foster is a professor of sociology at the University of Oregon and also editor of Monthly Review.

Contents

Preface and Acknowledgements vii
Introduction 1

Part I Nature and Historical Materialism

1. Requirements of a Social Ecology 17

2. Nature, Labor, and Production 25

3. The Natural Basis of Labor Productivity and Surplus Labor 33

4. Labor and Labor Power as Natural and Social Forces 49

Part II Nature and Capitalism

5. Nature, Labor, and Capitalist Production 57

6. Capital’s “Free Appropriation” of Natural and
Social Conditions 69

7. Capitalism and Nature: A Value-Form Approach 79

8. Reconsidering Some Ecological Criticisms of
Marx’s Value Analysis 99

9. Capitalism and Environmental Crisis 107

10. Marx’s Working-Day Analysis and Environmental Crisis 133

Part III Nature and Communism

11. Nature and the Historical Progressivity of Capitalism 147

12. Nature and Capitalism’s Historical Limits 175

13. Capital, Nature, and Class Struggle 199

14. Nature and Associated Production 223

Notes 259

References 297

Index 309