Description
Book SynopsisThough infrequently viewed as an environmental thinker, Karl Marx insisted that production as a social and material process is shaped and constrained by both historically developed relations among producers and natural conditions. Paul Burkett shows that it is Marx's overriding concern with human emancipation that impels him to approach nature from the standpoint of materialist history, sociology and critical political economy.
Table of ContentsContents Preface and Acknowledgements vii Introduction 1 Part I Nature and Historical Materialism 1. Requirements of a Social Ecology 17 2. Nature, Labor, and Production 25 3. The Natural Basis of Labor Productivity and Surplus Labor 33 4. Labor and Labor Power as Natural and Social Forces 49 Part II Nature and Capitalism 5. Nature, Labor, and Capitalist Production 57 6. Capital’s “Free Appropriation” of Natural and Social Conditions 69 7. Capitalism and Nature: A Value-Form Approach 79 8. Reconsidering Some Ecological Criticisms of Marx’s Value Analysis 99 9. Capitalism and Environmental Crisis 107 10. Marx’s Working-Day Analysis and Environmental Crisis 133 Part III Nature and Communism 11. Nature and the Historical Progressivity of Capitalism 147 12. Nature and Capitalism’s Historical Limits 175 13. Capital, Nature, and Class Struggle 199 14. Nature and Associated Production 223 Notes 259 References 297 Index 309
