Geoscience Reference
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positing nature in deterministic terms. Talk of 'limits' is always approached care-
fully, the preference being for how present accomplishments might be leveraged
towards a radical future.
Coda
In Marxist scholarship today, there is indeed renewed interest in reading the diver-
sity of Marx's writings. This is a theme worth ending on. A major schism between
some Marxists and some 'greens' is over the latter's accusation that actually existing
socialisms, at least prior to 1989, have been overly productivist, i.e., allowing indus-
trial development to run roughshod over the earth, placing 'man' at the center of
the economy. Was this Marx's view? Again, complexity abounds. Ample evidence
indicates that Marx thought industrial capitalism, with its galloping productive
capacity and its centralising and socialising functions, were creating the conditions
of possibility for an entirely new kind of society, even while leaving a wake of
destruction. But if the question is whether Marx posited people as sole creators of
wealth, and the absolute center of 'value', the answer must be a fi rm 'No'. His 'Cri-
tique of the Gotha Programme' (Marx, 1978, pp. 525-26) is defi nitive on this score.
Addressing a group of socialists' plans for a new economy, he heaps uncompromis-
ing scorn on the notion that labour alone creates wealth. Wealth is a joint accom-
plishment of humans and non-humans he reminded them. That wealth is the
creation of labour alone he considered bourgeois tyranny. And we can or should see
why. It is capitalism, with its history of stripping away means of production only to
leave workers their labour power that posits 'man' as the creator of wealth. It is
capitalism, with its Spartan view of work and its injunction to work harder and
longer, that places 'man' at the center, even as it struggles to undo the accomplish-
ments of 'man' as soon as threatening gains have been made. But it was precisely
this conceit that capitalism cannot make a reality (cf. Negri, 1992; Althusser, 1997;
Dussel, 2001). The capitalist abstraction of 'man' fails; always has, always will.
NOTES
1. It must be noted that environmental themes in Marxist geography, whilst introduced
early in the Marxist turn (e.g., Harvey 1974; cf. Harvey, 1996), remained for some time
a latent interest, more implied than rigorously explored, and playing second fi ddle to
research on urbanisation and industrial location (FitzSimmons, 1989). Strongly Marxist-
infl uenced political ecology in geography would be an important exception (e.g., Watts
1983; Peet and Watts, 1996).
2.
This idea of an average, together with the distinction between labour power and labour
as such, is what sets his ideas apart from other 'labour theories' of value.
3.
One basic idea of Marx's is that the contradictions generated within capital (e.g., between
capital and labour) would be resolved by social powers that capital itself has a hand in
creating. For example, in so far as labour power is developed mutually along with other
means of production, labour develops the capacity to take over production as such,
recognising the superfl uity of 'capital'. See Marx's chapter on 'Machinery and modern
industry' in the fi rst volume of
Capital.
Marx was clearly fascinated by and worked to
foment the new kinds of collective identities that capitalism fostered and depended upon.
His hope was that these collectivities arising as part and parcel of capital would emerge
as social forces potentially transformative of capital. For an excellent discussion of the
