Capitalism, Valorization and the Political Economy of Ecological Crisis

THE LAST DECADE OR SO has witnessed considerableintellectual efforts within Marxism to develop coherentanalyses of Marxism’s relationship to environmentalism and political ecology. Some, like Ted Benton, have sought to focus scholarly attention on the relationship between Marxism and ecology particularly by critically examining the question of so-called ‘natural limits ’ in Marx and through such a consideration to evaluate the extent to which Marx can be read as a thinker sympathetic to green themes, values and objectives (Benton, 1989: 51-86). Others, such as Reiner Grundmann, have sought to defend Marxism against green claims that Marxism’s anthropocentrism renders it fundamentally anti green (Grundmann, 1991: 103-120). Still others, notably James O’Connor, have looked to Marxism’s development of the theoretical corpus of political economy and have sought to examine the extent to which Marxist political economy can be extended and developed in ways that can take account of ecological crisis and the concerns of the green movement. Such intellectual scrutiny of the theoretical legacy of Marxism has been important not least because the green movement, taken as a whole, has tended to be critical and dismissive of the socialist movement and what, in particular, it has taken to be its Promethean account of the relationship between human culture and ‘nature’, an account which is said to make Marxism irreconcilable with the green movement. An This article highlights valorization through commodification as a process specific to and defining of the capitalist mode of production as the key dynamic to ecological crisis. It goes on to review recent Marxist scholarship on the political economy of ecological crisis and provides a critical assessment of the wor