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The Limits to Marxism's Nature?
We have in contention two urges. One of these sees the need for a natural outside
to capital, a set of conditions of capitalist possibility that capitalists cannot make
for themselves, but which they are free to spoil (until state and social movements
intervene): the earth from which are drawn use values, the bodies of workers from
which is drawn labour power, and sociality itself from which is drawn the capacity
to be cooperative at all (cf. Benton, 1989; Altvater, 1991; Swyngedouw, 1999;
Bridge, 2000). The other urge sees a fundamentally altered nature within which no
natural pre-conditions are left untouched. There are 'natural processes', sure enough
but nowhere on the planet do these exist without an admixture from human species
being (cf. Harvey, 1996). The ontological positions taken by these urges are not
easily reconciled. At risk of splitting the difference it is worth noting the limited
truth told by each. Thus, to put a fi ne point on the matter, it is important to say
that when labourers are crushed and beaten, sometimes shot in the street or poi-
soned by coal dust or effectively locked inside the factory gates, it matters to notice
this in and of itself. And surely it is important that ecosystems are destroyed and
communities laid waste? We can read O'Connor as saying there is a history of
capitalism which involves forms of, well, death; deaths that are not going to be
brought back to life by a nature-producing capitalism for which crisis is a use value
during spasms of economic restructuring. (That is to say, perhaps the political sig-
nifi cance of O'Connor's thesis is revealed more strongly through a change of per-
spective: before the signifi cance of ruined production conditions becomes evident
to capital, might they not be made evident to us?) However, if these deaths are to
be struggled against, and if these deaths were once forms of life that capital alone
did not make, must we invoke a natural order to be preserved and conserved as the
alternative? I will get to that question in a moment. What of the truth told by the
'production of nature' thesis? Smith poses the issue himself: there is no getting
around the fact that we are always standing in the middle of a stream that we have
had a hand in making. There is no way to live in a wholly external nature. The
reality we are faced with is the one we have a hand in making. Yet, as he asks, what
would a better politics of produced nature be like if we are not to leave it up to the
astounding acts of recovery and sleight of hand capitalism seems so far to be capable
of? If produced nature is indeed the project, who participates and how, whom does
it serve and whom not?
Marxism is materialism. Everything worth noting; everything we possibly could
note is traceable to being the productive parts of nature that we human beings are; to
what we must do to play those parts; and to the specifi c kinds of collectives (and thus
politics) of humans and non-humans that emerge from the ways the parts are played
out. What more can be said? How can this conversation be moved along? Recent
encounters between geographical Marxism and what some call 'immanentist' phil-
osophy are instructive. I will draw upon some recent work by geographer Bruce Braun
(2006) to make the case. See also Chapter Two of this topic, written by Braun.
The idea of immanence will have some immediate appeal. It posits that 'things'
and 'entities' are, in part, the effects of the processes that constitute them, rather than
the other way around. These processes and the particular ways they come together
congeal in ways that are of highly variable temporal duration and spatial extent -
sometimes very durable, sometimes of seemingly well-bounded extent. But whether
the appearance is that of 'things' like trees or glaciers, or mosquitoes or bees, it would
