Value, nature, and the vortex of accumulation

Richard Walker, Jason W. Moore
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引用次数: 7

Abstract

Of all the domains of Marxian political economy, nature is by far the most vexing. Is nature an economic input as in the notion of natural resources; is it the object of labour in the process of production; or is it something broader, as in the idea of land and the territory upon which capitalism develops? Such questions rest on a conception of extrahuman nature, but some have argued that because people are part of nature, then resources, labour, and conditions of production include the social integument of built environments, levels of education, and the work of families. But does this go far enough? Perhaps capitalism should be thought of as a “life process” that unfolds within the web of life? But even there lies a crucial debate about whether the chief problem of political economy is the fundamental rift between capitalism and nature or whether the web of life is imbricated in every accumulation strategy and the crisisprone process of capitalist expansion. These are some of the key questions posed by Marxist theory since the 1980s (Walker 1979 ; 2016 ; Smith 1984 ; O’Connor 1998 ; Harvey 1996 ; Burkett 1999 ; Foster 2000 ; Moore 2015a ; Foster, Clark and York 2010 ). This chapter grows out of our long conversation around the relations of nature and capital. It takes shape out of our conviction that political economy has too often taken a back seat to larger musings in which philosophy has been foregrounded and economic theory treated as derivative rather than requiring additional argumentation. This tendency has at times discouraged a clear analytical reckoning with the fundamentals of Marxian theory such as capital accumulation, the labour process, commodity circulation, and the theory of value. Our purpose here is to elaborate a model of capitalinnature outlined in Capitalism in the Web of Life , but which remains preliminary (Moore 2015a ). Why bother with value theory? When the classical political economists began to deploy a theory of value to understand the economy it was because the
价值,自然,和积累的漩涡
在马克思主义政治经济学的所有领域中,自然是迄今为止最令人烦恼的。在自然资源概念中,自然是一种经济投入吗?它是生产过程中的劳动对象吗?或者是更广泛的概念,比如资本主义赖以发展的土地和领土?这些问题建立在超人性的概念上,但有些人认为,因为人是自然的一部分,所以资源、劳动力和生产条件包括建筑环境的社会因素、教育水平和家庭工作。但这足够了吗?也许资本主义应该被认为是在生命之网中展开的“生命过程”?但即便如此,也存在着一场至关重要的辩论,即政治经济学的主要问题是资本主义与自然之间的根本裂痕,还是生命之网在每一种积累策略和资本主义扩张的危机倾向过程中都是错综复杂的。这些是1980年代以来马克思主义理论提出的一些关键问题(Walker 1979;2016;史密斯1984;O’connor 1998;哈维1996;Burkett 1999;Foster 2000;Moore 2015a;福斯特,克拉克和约克2010)。这一章是我们关于自然和资本关系的长时间谈话的结果。它的形成源于我们的信念,即政治经济学常常让位于更大的思考,在这些思考中,哲学被放在前台,经济理论被视为衍生品,而不需要额外的论证。这种倾向有时阻碍了对马克思主义理论基础的清晰分析,如资本积累、劳动过程、商品流通和价值论。我们在这里的目的是阐述《生命之网中的资本主义》中概述的资本主义自然模型,但这仍然是初步的(Moore 2015a)。为什么要用价值理论呢?当古典政治经济学家开始运用价值理论来理解经济时,那是因为
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