3 Law of Value

Jason Moore

Every civilization must decide what is, and what is not, valuable. The Marxist tradition makes occasional reference to a “law of value.”

Historians of capitalism don’t much care to speak of a law of value, much less put it to work, some also reject it as a kind of metaphysics. But there are hopeful signs that this lacuanue is being addressed. Recently, value thinking has made a comeback of sorts—some pushing to grasp how value is rooted in historical capitalism’s production of nature.

Among Marxist Greens, the dominant approach remains Nature and Capitalism, Nature plus Capitalism. In this, the “exploitation of nature and labor” are co-productive of capi- talist development - a move that confuses, even elides, how capitalism values the specific contributions of both.

Absent synthesis, Marxist Greens chose an arithmetic rather than dialectical solution. What happened was an intellectual override of Marx’s value thinking by a historical materialism largely cleansed of its value relations. Crystallized by the groundbreaking work of John Bellamy Foster and his colleagues, historical materialism was recon- figured as ontological dualism: the “metabolism of nature and soci- ety”. Humans make history, and so does nature. This solved a big problem. It addressed a major lacuna in Marxist thought, putting Nature into the frame. The history of capitalism could now be addressed through an expanded conceptualization: the history of capitalism equals the exploitation of nature and labor. End- less accumulation equals the degradation of nature equals catastro- phe. The law of value is sometimes invoked, but as window dressing, not part of the window itself

The difficulty emerges in the lack of explanation of how value is produced, and how the relations of value are reproduced on an ex- tended scale. Historical materialism cleansed of its value relations al- lows for a certain ease of description: there is a “metabolic rift” be- tween human and natural systems; capitalism is a human system; capitalism does terrible stuff to natural systems. Catastrophe ensues. The problem with all of this is that it doesn’t really explain how these historical processes work. This becomes a problem because effective political strategy and policy responses must have a sense of how cap- italism has transformed the biosphere, and how the biosphere is transforming capitalism. This is what a value-relational approach can offer.

Working from the curious abstraction that humans are separate from nature—as if the air we breathe, the food we eat, the energy we use have no meaningful analytics—the Green position cannot answer its fundamental questions: How do we view nature, in part or as a whole, as valuable? What are the ethics of a sustainable civilization? How are the valuations of nature practiced in the modern world through markets, states, and ideas?

Such questions can only be addressed by inverting the great bi- ases of Green Thought. Not, “How are humans separate from na- ture?”, but “How do humans “fit” in the web of life?” Not, “How are humans destroying nature?”, but “How do humans put nature, hu- man natures included, to work?” These are the questions that might allow for a more nearly adequate analysis of how capitalism works through nature, and how nature works through capitalism. Effective answers will turn on our capacity to see humans as part of nature, to see civilizations as producers and products of particular, historical na- tures, and to see those historical natures at work in the birth and de- velopment, not just the “collapse” of civilizations. On offer through a reconstruction of Marx’s value thinking is the possibility of joining the politico-economic and ethico-political dimensions of “laws of value” in successive historical systems.

From land to labour productivity

For capitalism, the choice has been clear, and peculiar. “Value” is determined by labor productivity in commodity production: the average labor-time embedded in the average commodity. This kind of value was unprecedented, and its expressions were spectacular. For feudalism, and tributary civiliza- tions in general, wealth turned on land productivity.

Cheap Natures

A capitalist looks at a forest and sees dollar signs, an environmentalist trees and birds and soils, a world-ecologist how humans and other species have co-produced the forest and how that “bundled” forest simultaneously conditions and constrains capital to- day. It is this ethico-political moment of capitalism’s Cheap Nature strategy that is today in question as never before, as movements for food sovereignty, climate justice, and de-growth challenge valuations of wealth and power premised on capital and its dualist ontology.

Nature of ‘Law’

Let us be clear that “law” is a term we get from Marx, who got it from Hegel. Law, in this sense, is a not an iron law of determi- nation, but rather a law in the “Hegelian sense of the ‘abstract’”. To speak of a law of value, then, is not to engage history in a prisonhouse of structural abstraction, but to advance a working proposition about a durable pattern of power and produc- tion that has been obtained over the time and space of historical cap- italism. To pick up on one of Marx’s favored metaphors, the law of value acts as a kind of gravitational field, shaping broad patterns, yet allowing significant contingency.

The law of value as a durable pattern stems from value relations that unify a contradictory relation between and among hu- mans and the rest of nature. This concept of value therefore defies the Cartesian ordering of reality into a Nature/Society binary.

If the substance of value in histor- ical capitalism is abstract social labor, understood as necessary labor- time, the relations that make this possible reach beyond the point of commodity production, and into the reproduction of labor-power and the appropriation of extra-human natures. It is in this sense that we can speak of the law of value as an organizing principle of capitalism as world-ecology, joining the accumulation of capital, the pursuit of power, and the co-production of nature as an organic whole

Cartesian Dualism

One of the enduring legacies of Cartesian dualism is a privileging of substances over relations in thinking about value.

Marxist Law

The Marxist law of value forgets that that Nature—with capital “N”—contributes to the value of all the products that humans use. To which the Marxist, quite properly, says that the whole basis of Marx’s political economy is the distinction between “wealth” and “value.”

THE LAW OF VALUE AS A LAW OF CHEAP NATURE

The way forward looks something like this. The substance of value is socially necessary labor-time. The drive to advance labor productiv- ity is fundamental to competitive fitness. This means that the exploi- tation of commodified labor-power is central to capital accumula- tion, and to the survival of individual capitalists. But this cannot be the end of the story. For the relations necessary to accumulate ab- stract social labor are necessarily more expansive, in scale, scope, speed, and intensity. Capital must not only ceaselessly accumulate and revolutionize commodity production; it must ceaselessly search for, and find ways to produce, Cheap Natures that can deliver a rising stream of low-cost food, labor-power, energy, and raw materials to the factory gates. (Or office doors, or . . . .) These are the Four Cheaps. The law of value in a capitalist society is a law of Cheap Nature.

Accumulation Waves

Every great wave of accumulation turns on Cheap Nature, understood as use-values produced with a below average value-composition. In systemic terms, Cheap Nature is produced when the interlocking agencies of capital, science, and empire—blunt categories, yes—succeed in releasing new sources of free or low-cost human and extra-human natures for capital.

Cheap Nature as Accumulation Strategy

Cheap Nature is “cheap” in a historically specific sense, defined by the periodic, and radical, reduction in the socially necessary labor- time of these Big Four inputs: food, labor-power, energy, and raw ma- terials. 1 Cheap Nature, as accumulation strategy, works by reducing the value composition, but increasing the technical composition, of capital as a whole.

The genius of capitalism’s Cheap Nature strategy was to rep- resent time as linear, space as flat, and nature as external.

Commodity Frontiers

Commodity frontiers, or frontiers of appropriation, are central. This leads to the tightly connective movements of “internal” restructuring and geographical expansion that restore and reconfigure the Four Cheaps. The great expansions of the long nine- teenth and twentieth centuries turned on cheap coal and oil, cheap metals, and cheap food, alongside the massive destabilization of peas- ant societies from eastern Europe to East Asia.

Capitalism depends on a repertoire of strategies for appropri- ating the unpaid work/energy of humans and the rest of nature out- side of the commodity system. These strategies cannot be reduced to so-called economic relations but are enabled by a mix of science, power, and culture. Crucially, science, power, and culture operate within value’s gravitational field, and are co-constitutive of it.

Exploitation and Appropriation

The implication is explosive: the law of value represents a deter- mination of socially necessary labor-time which occurs simultane- ously through organizational and technical innovation and through strategies of appropriating the unpaid work/energy of “women, na- ture, and colonies”.

Without massive streams of unpaid work/energy from the rest of nature—including that delivered by women—the costs of production would rise, and accumulation would slow.

Every act of exploitation (of commodified labor-power) therefore depends on an even greater act of appropriation (of un- paid work/energy). Wage-workers are exploited, everyone else, hu- man and extra-human, is appropriated. As goes the old Marxist joke: The only thing worse than being exploited is . . . being appropriated.

In other words: Value doesn’t work unless most work isn’t valued.

Value, then, cannot be regarded as a discrete “economic” process alongside that of class struggle and class formation any more than value-relations can be understood as a social process independent of the web of life. There is no recipe that can deliver us from either abstract structuralism or abstract voluntarism; the most useful guide is to tack back and forth between the logic of capital and the history of capitalism, between the apparently “social” and the seemingly “en- vironmental.”

The essential problem with both Red and Green approaches is their acceptance of modernity’s most basic assumption: Humans are separate from Nature. Marx’s contribution pointed towards a much different line of thinking: Humans are “natural forces” ; they are linked to nature internally; capitalism “robs” us of our “vital forces” in the same way as it robs the soil of its nutrients; our life-activity simultaneously changes us, our relations within nature, and the “historical natures” around us.

The contradictions and contingencies of capital- ism unfold through developments within and between the zone of exploitation and the zone of appropriation. In this, exploitation en- compasses labor-power within the commodity system, while appropriation encompasses the transfers of uncapitalized work/energy necessary to accumulation but not actually penetrated by the capital relation.

Modernity’s law of value is an exceedingly peculiar way of organizing life in a civilization. Born amidst the rise of capitalism after 1450, the law of value enabled an unprecedented historical transition from land productivity to labor productivity as the metric of wealth and power. It was an ingenious civilizational strategy, for it enabled the deployment of capitalist technics—crystallizations of tools and ideas, power and nature—to appropriate the wealth of uncommodified nature (human work included) in service to advancing labor productivity within the zone of commodification. The great leap for- ward in the scale, scope, and speed of landscape and biological transformations in the three centuries after 1450 may be understood in this light.

Marx’s value theory identifies a “deep structure” of historical capitalism. Understanding capitalism as premised on a fundamental disequilibrium in the value relation of capitalization and appropriation in the web of life.

Limits to Capitalism

It would be mystifying to say that the limits of capitalism are ultimately determined by the bio- sphere itself, although in an abstract sense this is true. But this is a view of Nature as an independent system. This is insufficient to un- derstand how capitalism reaches limits, how capitalism has transcended limits historically, and how capitalism has remade successive historical natures in a way that may pose intractable problems for its survival today.

Marx’s conception of value seems to offer a useful way to answer these questions. It allows us to discern not merely the patterns of power, re/production, and accumulation over the longue durée, but the logic animating these patterns’ emergence and evolution - locating value as a gravitational field.

Money

Money is very important, and of course central to capitalist civilization. What money represents, however, is not nearly as obvious. Money is so important in historical capitalism because it is central to three interconnected pro- cesses: 1) carving out a part of human activity, paid work, and giving it special value, 2) de-valuing the rest of nature, so as to put these natures to work for free, or low cost, 3) governing the evolving boundary between capitalization and appropriation, between “economy,” its constitutive relations, and the web of life.

Marx’s essential insight on the role of money-capital in negotiating blockages within the circuit of capital applies equally to those operating within the circuits of Cheap Nature.

Value Thinking

Recognizing capital accumulation as both objective process and subjective project, Marx’s value thinking offers a promising way to comprehend the inner connections between accumulation, biophysical change, and modernity as a whole.

These inner connections could be glimpsed from the origins of modernity. They underpin the epoch-making transformations of land and labor in early modern capitalism (Moore 2017). These transformations were not however, the straightforward result of capital in its economic expression. This strange metric, value, oriented the whole of West-Central Europe towards an equally strange conquest of space. The geographical movements of commodification and appropriation were mutually determined by a symbolic-material reworking of space through value.

Frontier-making

While all civilizations had frontiers of a sort, capitalism did something very different. Before the sixteenth century, a civilization’s frontiers—such as feudal Europe’s drive east of the Elbe—were more- or-less an output of the system. With the rise of capitalism, frontier- making was much more fundamental: not merely a safety value, but a constitutive spatial moment of unlocking the epoch-making potential of endless accumulation. The extension of capitalist power to new, uncommodified spaces became the lifeblood of capitalism.

The appropriation of unpaid work signifies something beyond the important—but still too partial—notion of environmental costs and externalities as “missing” from the determination of value. For capitalism is not merely a system of unpaid costs (“externalities”), but of unpaid work (“invisibilities”).

The “free gifts” of nature are not “low-hanging fruit” that can simply be picked without much time or effort. Cheap Natures are actively produced by human activity bun- dled with the rest of nature; human and extra-human natures both are replete with creativity and contingency. All life is actively, creatively, incessantly engaged in environment-making, such that, in the mod- ern world, human ingenuity (such as it is) and human activity (such as it has been) must activate the work of particular natures in order to appropriate particular streams of unpaid work. Such activation is a co-produced reality, bundling the life-activities of human and extra- human nature in the present, and accumulated over time.

The substance of value is abstract social labor, or socially necessary labor-time, implicated in the production of surplus value. On the other hand, this production of value is particular—it does not value everything, only labor-power in the circuit of capital—and therefore rests upon a series of devalu- ations. Plenty of work, the majority of work in the orbit of capitalism, does not register as valuable.

For good reason, Hribal (2003) asks, “Are animals part of the working class?” The ques- tion itself illuminates the law of value’s absurd, yet consistent, praxis. Although confusion persists on the matter, it is now clear that Marx understood that extra-human natures perform all sorts of useful (but not specifically Valuable) work for capitalist production, and that such useful work was imminent to the capital-relation.

All of these de-valued and un-valued forms of work are, however, outside the value form (the commodity). They do not directly pro- duce value. And yet—and this is a very big and yet—value as abstract labor cannot be produced except through unpaid work/energy. This leads me to an unavoidable conclusion: the value form and the value relation are non-identical.

The “commodification of everything” can only be sustained through the incessant revolutionizing, yes, of the forces of production, but also the relations of reproduction.

The historical condition for socially necessary labor-time is socially necessary unpaid work. De-valued work is an “immanent . . . antithesis” within the generalization of commodity production and exchange.

In this contradiction, between the ex- panded reproduction of capital and the reproduction of life, we have “two universes, two ways of life foreign to each other yet whose wholes explain one another”. The geographical implica- tion of this enabling and constraining tension between paid and un- paid work? The necessity of frontier-making.

Commodity frontiers were so epoch-making because they extended the zone of appropriation faster than the zone of commodification.

The endless frontier strategy of historical capitalism is premised on a vision of the world as endless.

VALUE: SYSTEMIC OR “ECONOMIC” RELATION?

It will consequently not suffice to identify the influence of ab- stract social labor as an “economic” phenomenon, although this re- mains pivotal. The endless frontier strategy of historical capitalism is premised on a vision of the world as endless: this is the conceit of capital and its theology of endless substitutability. At best, substitut- ability occurs within definite limits, primarily those of energy flows and the geographical flexibility they offer. The history of capitalism is one of relentless flexibility rather than endless substitutability.

The conditions through which successive world-ecological revolutions have been realized—each yielding a quantum leap in the mass of “physical bodies” and making new streams of unpaid work/energy available for commodity production—may be understood as a succession of one-off affairs. Capitalism has moved from peat and charcoal to coal to oil, from the breadbaskets of the Vistula, southern England, the American Midwest, from labor frontiers in Europe and Africa, Latin America, and South and East Asia. These are not repeatable events. Substituta- bility does not unfold through infinite time and space.

Abstract social labor, in this reading, is the economic expression of the law of value. That law is unworkable historically without strategies of appropriating cheap nature. Why? Because the creation of socially necessary labor-time is constituted through a shifting balance of human and extra-human work; the co-production of nature, in other words, is constitutive of socially necessary labor-time.

If climate change suppresses agricultural productivity—as it is has been doing for some time now—the value-composition of agricultural production shifts accordingly. Socially necessary labor-time forms and re-forms in and through the web of life.

Early capitalism’s landscape transforma- tions, in their epoch-making totality, were unthinkable without new ways of mapping space, controlling time, and cataloguing external nature—and they are inexplicable solely in terms of world-market or class-structural change. The law of value, far from reducible to abstract social labor, finds its necessary conditions of self-expansion through the creation and subsequent appropriation of cheap human and extra-human natures. These movements of appropriation must, if capital is to forestall the rising costs of production, be secured through extra-economic procedures and processes.

By this I mean something more than the recurrent waves of prim- itive accumulation that we have come to accept as a cyclical phenom- enon of capitalism (Angelis 2007). These also remain pivotal. But be- tween our now cherished dialectic of “expanded reproduction” and “accumulation by dispossession” (Harvey 2003) are those knowledges and associated practices committed to the mapping, quantifying, and rationalizing of human and extra-human natures in service to capital accumulation. Thus the trinity: abstract social labor, abstract social nature, primitive accumulation. This is the relational core of capitalist world-praxis. And the work of this unholy trinity? To produce Cheap Natures. Extend the zone of appropriation. In sum, to deliver labor, food, energy, and raw materials—the Four Cheaps—faster than the accumulating mass of surplus capital derived from the ex- ploitation of labor-power. Why? Because the rate of exploitation of labor-power (within the commodity system) tends to exhaust the life- making capacities that enter into the immediate production of value.

In a world treated as boundless, capital as a whole has evinced a cumulative, but cyclically punctuated, tendency to search out and appropriate new, “physically uncor- rupted” zones of cheap labor, food, energy, and raw materials. Exhaustion signals a rising value composition of capital, and the inflection point of decline for a given production complex to supply a growing stream of unpaid work to regional accumulation. To the degree that “foreign preserves” can be identified and dominated, the relative “degeneration of the industrial population” matters little.

Summary

We can now connect the dots between the rise of capitalism and the emergence of the law of value. Value relations incorporate a double movement to exploitation and appropriation. Within the com- modity system, the exploitation of labor-power reigns supreme, but this supremacy is only possible, given its tendency toward self-exhaustion, to the degree that the appropriation of uncommodified natures counteracts this tendency. This has been difficult to discern because value relations are necessarily much broader than the immediate production of the value form (the commodity). The generalization of commodity production has proceeded through an expansionary web of value relations whose scope and scale extends well beyond production. The problem of capitalist development is one of the uneven globalization of wage-work dialectically joined to the “generalization of its conditions of reproduction”. The centrality of wage-work in certain Marxist perspectives is not wrong but par- tial, given the unsustainability of the circuit of capital as closed system. The difficulty in pursuing this alternative analysis has been rooted in the dualisms immanent to modern thought; for to construct capitalism in this fashion is to transcend the man/woman, nature/society boundaries upon which the whole edifice of modernist thought depends. For not only do we need to unify the distinctive but mutually formative dialectics of human work under capitalism through the nexus of paid/unpaid work, or “productive” and “reproductive” work. We also need to recognize that capitalism’s dynamism has owed everything to appropriating and co-producing ever more creative configurations of human and extra-human work across the longue durée.

Apropriation vs Plunder

Appropriating cheap natures was and is a far more creative act than the dependencia language of plunder allows (e.g., Clark and Foster 2009). “Appropriation” represents a productive activity every bit as much as “exploitation.”

Enabled a rising rate of surplus value by treating the land, simultaneously, as a force of production and a “free gift.”

It did not matter that horrific levels of mortality accompanied this rising labor productivity so long as the costs of appropriation—through indigenous and African slave trades—were sufficiently low.

Sugar and wheat frontiers remade the world only through extraordinary movements of capital, knowledge, and humans, each movement a mighty expenditure of energy aimed at transforming na- ture’s work into the bourgeoisie’s value.

Coal and oil are dramatic examples of this process of appropriating unpaid work, understood in such a relational framework.

The “fertility” of cheap natures was the pedestal for productivity advance within the commodity zone.

One of the key reasons why capitalism was able to consolidate across the early mod- ern era was its ability to appropriate the astounding realities, and realize the extraordinary potentialities, of uncommodified natures worldwide.

The introduction of Cheap Food, as civilizational strategy, “acts like an increase in fixed capital.”

Historical capitalism has been able to resolve its recurrent crises because territorialist and capitalist agencies have been able to extend the zone of appropriation faster than the zone of exploitation. This has allowed capitalism to successively overcome seemingly insuperable “natural limits” through the coercively-enforced and scientifically-enabled restoration of the Four Cheaps: labor-power, food, energy, and raw materials. The Four Cheaps are produced by effecting “accumulation by appropriation” faster than “accumulation by capitalization.” This is possible on a planet where capitalization is limited and most life reproduces without the help of capital: the reality of early but not twenty-first century capitalism. Hence, the centrality of the frontier and imperialism in capital accumulation. Significant enlargements in the zone of appropriation resolve capitalism’s crises by simultaneously reducing the value composition of produc- tion, expanding physical output, and opening new spheres of capital investment. All of this can proceed so long as capitalization is checked, and appropriation liberated. This is, indeed, the history of capital, empire, and science in the modern world: every new era of capitalism brings with it a new industrialization, a new imperialism, a new science.

A new industrialization. A new imperialism. A new science . . . a new nature?

Historical Nature

The convention, even among radicals, is to see nature as “out there.” This is Nature as a set of resources and extra-human relations to be mobilized and treated sustainably or unsustainably. This is indeed one of the realities we must deal with. It is how capital views nature. It is capital’s civilizational project to bring reality into line with this vision. Its geography is the geography of nature-in-capitalism. Nature as contained, controlled, rationally coordinated. At another level of abstract, the web of life works as we all experience it to work: our “environment,” all that surrounds us and flows through us. Here is nature as a whole; we are of it, and “it” shapes all our lives—the lives of civilizations and “big structures” as well. Its geography is the geography of capitalism-in-nature. This is the process of historical capitalism. It is messy, cyclical, and full of surprises.

Capitalism’s law of value therefore represents a project that creates a new historical nature: for the capitalist era and for its successive phases of development.

The illusion is to see capitalist agencies developing new “ecological” regimes just as they have developed new trade regimes or geopolitical arrangements.

Like Arrighi, I see successive long centuries of capitalist develop- ment as central to the story of capitalism: capitalism does not “auto- matically” restructure (Arrighi and Silver 1999). My periodization— readers will detect a familial resemblance to Arrighi’s model—looks something like this: 1) a Germanic-Iberian cycle (c. 1451–1648), in which the expansionary phase turns to relative decline after the 1557 financial crisis; 2) a Dutch-led cycle (c. 1560s–1740s), in which de- cline sets in after 1680; 3) a British-led cycle, c. 1680s–1910s), with relative decline after 1873; 4) an American-led cycle (c. 1870s– 1980s), with relative decline after 1971; and 5) a neoliberal cycle that commenced in the 1970s.

We do not yet know how to reconstruct the narrative in a way that recognizes the double internality of capitalism-in-nature/nature-in-capitalism.

We may now derive a working proposition: the law of value is a way of organizing nature.

Are not the two common usages of value—as morality and economy—implied in capitalism’s law of value?

I do not propose a revision of Marx’s law of value in a strict sense: the substance of capital is abstract social labor. But the rela- tions that make abstract labor’s growth possible cannot be reduced to the economic sphere; they must be grounded in the technics of cap- italist power and the conditions for the expanded reproduction of capital on a world-scale. Neither an adequate history of capitalism, nor a sufficiently dynamic theory of capitalist limits, is possible within an economistic reading of the law of value.

Capitalism, as project, seeks to create a world in the image of cap- ital, in which all elements of human and extra-human nature are ef- fectively interchangeable. In the fantasy of neoclassical economics, one “factor” (money, land, resources) can be substituted for another; the elements of production can be moved easily and effortlessly across global space (Perelman 2007). This effort to create a world in the image of capital is what I call capitalism’s correspondence project, through which capital seeks to compel the rest of the world to corre- spond to its desire for a universe of “economic equivalence.”

Extra-human natures, too, resist the grim compulsions of economic equivalence: superweeds frustrate genetically-modified agriculture; animals resist their assigned roles as objects and forces of production. In this way, capitalism’s correspondence project meets up with all man- ner of contending and contentious visions and resistances to create a historical process full of contradictions.

As the flurry of news reports on the “superweeds” sweeping across the GMO soy zones of the United States revealed in 2010–11, biological natures now appear to be evolving faster than the capacity of capital to control them.

These paired movements of geographical expansion and restruc- turing are at the core of capitalism’s successive spatial fixes, necessary to resolve successive conjonctures of overaccumulation. They are consti- tuted through a double movement: 1) the widening and deepening the zone of commodification (value production/abstract social labor), and 2) on an even greater scale, the widening and deepening the zone of appropriation. This latter movement turns on the production of ab- stract social nature. Abstract social nature is produced through the biopolitical, geographical, and scientific-technical knowledges and practices necessary to secure the conditions for renewing the Four Cheaps. This means that new “frontiers” of unpaid work must be iden- tified, and then pressed into the service of capital accumulation.

Capitalsim as a project vs Capitalism as a process

This reading of the law of value allows us to see the difference between capitalism as historical project and capitalism as historical process. As project, capitalist civilization produces both symbolic forms and material relations that lend Cartesian dualism its kernel of truth; the law of value does indeed reproduce a way of seeing reality that is dualist. Capitalism, as project creates the idea and even a cer- tain reality of “the” environment as an external object. The idea of the environment as external object—rather than as oikeios, the crea- tive relation of species and environment-making—is not false, but ra- ther a historical creation of the capitalist world-ecology. The mistake of environmental studies has been to confuse the real historical cre- ation of the idea of environment as external object with the reality: the reality that environments are always inside and outside of us, material and symbolic at once. This is why I emphasize capitalism as a dialectic of project (what the law of value wishes to do, in creating a world that corresponds of value’s interchangeability), and process. Capitalism, as world-historical process, is a co-production of humans and the rest of nature. This co-produced historical reality compels the capitalist project to deal with nature (as oikeios) no matter the utopian fantasies of value and its universe of economic equivalents. As a process of cap- ital accumulation, capitalism must relentlessly dissolve the bounda- ries of life in its voracious internalization and reconfiguration of un- paid work—human and extra-human alike —in service to the utopian project of endless valorization.

For if the production of capital has been the strategic pivot of capitalism, to an even greater extent accumulation has unfolded through the appropriation of planetary work/energy. Such appropriation—yes of cheap resources (“taps”) but also of cheap garbage (“sinks”)—does not produce capital as “value,” but it does produce the relations, spaces, and work/energy that make value possible.

The appropriation of Cheap Na- tures has not only compelled capital to seek out new sources of cheap labor-power, food, energy, and raw materials, but to enclose the at- mosphere as a gigantic dumping ground for greenhouse gases. This enclosure—a relation of capital-in-nature—is today generating barri- ers to capital accumulation that are unprecedented, especially in ag- riculture. And at the risking of putting too fine a point on matters, this enclosure of the atmosphere is a class relation: not only as cause- effect sequence (“the capitalists did it”!) but as a necessary condition of world class relations over the past two centuries.

The geographical flexibility and historical evolution of capitalism as world-ecology.

Value operates through a dialectic of exploitation and appropri- ation that illuminates capitalism’s peculiar relation with, and within, nature. The relations of exploitation produce abstract social labor. The relations of appropriation, producing abstract social nature, en- abled the expanded accumulation of this abstract social labor.

Jason Moore (2018) The Value of Everything? Work, Capital, and Historical Nature in the Capitalist World-Ecology (pdf)