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has agency how shall that agency be thought of? Geographers interested in these
issues have cautioned against lapsing towards a deterministic view of nature. As put
in Bakker and Bridge's (2006) account, 'If one adopts the ontological position that
non-human entities have active capacities . . . then one needs a way to express the
physicality and causality of the non-human without straying into object fetishism,
or without attributing intrinsic qualities to entities/categories whose boundaries are
'extrinsic' (i.e., that are defi ned, at least in part, socioculturally). To the skeptic,
then, the resurgence of the material after a decade of social constructionism should
be reason for pause, since it raises specters of worn-out dualisms, resurgent physi-
calism, object fetishism and environmental determinism' (p. 8). What many geog-
raphers seek to explain, then, is how non-human entities gain agency not through
their innate properties, but 'through the way they are embedded in a wider set of
sociotechnical relations' (Castree, 1995, p. 13).
4
Having introduced certain classic
Marxist problems and bridging these to environmental matters, I want next to
examine how the question of environmental agency has been taken on in Marxist
inspired research on the environment. I have chosen three infl uential takes on these
issues: nature as both a sustaining and limiting 'outside' to capitalism; nature as
'produced' by capitalism; nature and capitalism as in utter need of conceptual repair
and rethinking. These are to some degree overlapping themes but I will present them
sequentially in the next three sections.
Ecological Marxism: From Environmental Destruction to the
'Second Contradiction' of Capitalism
The above heading alludes to a 'second contradiction' - but what about the 'fi rst'?
Traditionally Marxism identifi es the contradiction between forces and relations of
production as what generates the crises and confl icts, the historical and geographical
'oomph', that provide potential openings for a socialist or communist transition, or
at a minimum, grist for 'anti-capitalist', 'alternative economy' movements. By rela-
tions of production is meant the large-scale question of who owns, controls or
manages means of production, and who does not own, control, or manage those
means. In most of
Capital
, Marx assumed, for purposes of argument and political
strategy, a two-class system: capitalists who own means of production and workers
who do not. Relations of production also refers to intra-class relations: the coopera-
tive and competitive tendencies among capitalists and the same contradictory ten-
dency among workers. (The term is also widened to refer to access and control over
the preponderance of fi nance capital, service industries, and commodity distribu-
tion. Furthermore, the term has been transported into production at the household
scale, where it notices the gender division of labour.) Forces of production is a more
amorphous, fl exible term that refers to the assemblage of given technologies, scien-
tifi c knowledge, labour skills, productive capacity of machinery, and even natural
processes (e.g., physical properties and potentials of water, metals, wood, heat, and
so on), that enter into commodity production. Marx argued that forces and relations
of production were themselves related to each other in contradictory enabling and
constraining ways, as when he proposed that a given technological improvement in
agriculture threw agricultural labourers out of work, while some other technological
improvement allowed for workers to mass together under one roof in an urban
factory, while further labour-saving improvements would lead to a 'surplus army
of the unemployed'. (The idea of a growing surplus of workers, induced specifi cally
