Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
the earth, the violation of 'natural laws,' and the multiplication of environmental
risks and hazards.
1
In order to make sense of Harvey's remark, what sort of envi-
ronmentalism it outfi ts, and why Harvey as a Marxist would utter it, we need to
look closely at how Marx comes to his concept of the environment. He comes to
it with a question: How do we interact with the environment and why do we interact
with it the way we do? I will begin with two observations.
First, Marx was a thinker of the actual material situations that frame people's
lives and that, wittingly or not, they are in the process of changing. He was inter-
ested in what people do and what they think, given the materials and social settings
they have to work with. Through the ages people have devised different truths about
the world, because they have lived in the world in different ways, and lived together
in that world in different ways too. People's consciousness of themselves and the
surroundings with which they interact is inextricable from how they practically
experience each other and the world and from the intentions they carry forward to
the world beyond themselves. It hardly needs saying that Marx focused most
intently on the
social
qualities of those practical experiences and intentions. And
this for the simple reason that individuals are not the sole authors of their own
experiences, intentions, and thoughts. Some readers will understand this last state-
ment in terms of the infl uence of family and friends, of ethnic or race relations, of
religious belief, and other shaping forces. Marx was not inured to these but had a
special interest in the difference made by our (in)access to the resources, tools, and
technology used to sustain life in capitalist societies, versus other kinds of societies
(e.g., slave, feudal or mixed, but also societies to come). That is, it is crucial to
consider how life is framed by questions of who controls the fruits of labour, who
controls the tools necessary to perform labour, and who controls the concept of
labour itself? The 'controls' are socially not individually authored. They are also
malleable. Yet they are
not
obvious, precisely because 'common sense' ossifi es the
answers.
Second, at the same time it appears Marx was a thinker of universals. He was
interested in what generalisations might be drawn from the diversity of actual con-
crete situations. For example, in so far as life among other human beings, in con-
junction with a non-human environment, is a common feature across time and
space, should not we have an interest in what compels us in a general sort of way
to interact with others and with an external environment? That is, we can not
simply, naively, step into the heart of a given social/historical situation, into the
specifi cs of a given mode of interaction, without also wondering about what con-
spires to bring about an interaction and compose it in the fi rst place. That human
beings are
in and of
nature was a fi rst rule for Marx that held true everywhere.
These two observations intersect in a revealing and instructive way in a chapter
Marx wrote on the labour process for the fi rst volume of
Capital
. A previous chapter
of this topic has already established that in capitalism working classes do not own
means of production; they are owners of the capacity to work (labour power)
which, in order to sustain their lives, they sell for a wage to capitalists: 'Hence, what
the capitalist sets the labourer to produce, is a particular use-value, a specifi ed
article'. It is these use values, in the form of commodities, that workers buy back
in order to meet their needs. But 'the fact that the production of use-values, or
goods, is carried on under the control of a capitalist and on his behalf, does not
alter the general character of that production' (Marx, 1967, p. 177). For this reason
the labour process has to be considered apart from any particular instance of it.
