Capitalism, Nature and Climate Change: A Structural Analysis

In a letter to Ludwig Kugelmann (11 July, 1868), Marx clarifies his viewpoint that the work process is both the point and the form of the interaction (or the ‘metabolic’ relation) between humans and nature. First, he maintains that the performance of labour is necessary for and central to human existence and, second, he makes clear that no social form of production can escape natural laws. In relation to the first proposal, he suggests that ‘every child knows that any nation that stopped working, not for a year, but let us say, just for a few weeks, would perish’ (Marx, 1988, p. 67). And, as ‘every child knows, too’, social labour needs to be distributed ‘in specific proportions’ in order to match the ‘differing amounts of needs’. Labour is the form in which humans interact with nature through the exchange and transformation of organic matter. As economic agents, humans ‘both confront the nature-imposed conditions of the processes found in the material world and affect these processes through labour’ (Clark and York, 2005, p. 398). The ways in which social production are organised change, but these social transformations ‘can only change’ the ‘form of manifestation’ of natural laws in the work processes. ‘Natural laws cannot be abolished at all’. Hence, the ‘only thing that can change […] is the form in which those laws assert themselves’.