Henry McLaughlin
Department of Politics, University of California, Santa Cruz
Nature refers to the natural, or material world, the physical substance and its order which constitute reality. In relation to political economy, a given concept of nature inevitably leads to particular views of politics and/or economics. “Nature” might imply an entity separate from, the same as, or related to culture/society, the naturalization of social constructs or historical phenomena, or the existence of a pre-political “state of nature,” and thus provide a particular lens with which to view today’s environmental and political-economic crises. Our conception of nature influences both systems and subsequent analyses of political economy. Conversely, political economy has a great effect on nature. Nature can both encompass political economy and be subsumed by it; nature both defines and is defined by political economy. This keyword entry will first survey the idea of nature in politics and political economy throughout Western history, then discuss contemporary debates over the concept.
Amongst the Ancients, the physikoi or “students of nature” were concerned with nature, or physis, and stood in contrast to Sophists who emphasized nomos, convention or law (a predecessor to “nature vs. nurture”). Aristotle sought to explain the natural world and moral philosophy in tandem, and famously declared “that man is by nature a political animal” [sic] (Politics 1.1253a), raising the ever-present question regarding our human place in nature, and the potential for a unique human nature. He also criticized profiting from interest and the use of money as an end rather than as a means, claiming that was “not by nature” (Politics 1.1257a-1258a). The connection between nature and politics would be more pronounced in Hellenistic Greece and Ancient Rome (our English word comes from the Latin natura, meaning “birth”) which prescribed a natural order to politics and household management. Medieval views of nature largely built off of Aristotle and the Christian nature as creation, while Renaissance views of nature harkened back to the Ancients. Dante, for one, echoed Aristotle by placing usurers in the “hottest part of hell (circle 7) because they [make] money not from the productive sources… Nature or Art, but from speculative changes in interest rates” (Mazzucato 2018, 64).
The Enlightenment and scientific method brought new mechanistic conceptions of nature, and new political and economics ideas regarding sovereignty and property. René Descartes’ mind-body dualism is often cited as a reflection of the split between nature and society under emergent capitalism. Nature (body) became divorced from active history, merely “stuff” to be acted upon or taken advantage of by a society of colonial powers (mind). Nature also appeared in Thomas Hobbes’ and John Locke’s respective atomist philosophies and concepts of the “state of nature.” Hobbes argued for a supreme sovereign, or “Leviathan,” to repress a state of nature where there was “war of all against all” and where life was “nasty, brutish, and short” (Hobbes 1839, 113, 117). Locke on the other hand, saw pre-political humans living together in reason, without a common judge. We supposedly gave up this place in nature to create a political sphere for the public to flourish; Locke used this to justify a natural right to property. Where Aristotle saw politics as a part of nature, both Hobbes and Locke saw the political world as supplanting a prior theoretical state of nature (although they hold two very different conceptions of that nature). In the eighteenth century, coinciding with the formalization of capitalism, the discipline of political economy, and the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, nature continued to largely be viewed as passive stuff for exploitation, but not without significant pushback. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, romantics like Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, and transcendentalists such as Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson idealized nature and wrote positively of its inherent good. Nature had a vital aspect which influenced the organic attributes of their political-economic thinking, opposed to the mechanistic nature and political economy of capitalism.
Among political economists of the early modern period, physiocrats like François Quesnay viewed nature, specifically land, as the source of all value. According to Mariana Mazzacuto, Quesnay understood “the economy as a ‘metabolic’ system… Contrasting sharply with the prevailing mercantilist thinking that gave gold a privileged place… Nature actually produced new things: grain out of small seeds for food, trees out of saplings and mineral ores from the earth from which houses and ships and machinery were built” (35- 36). “Productive” work involved bringing these natural resources into society, while everything else (no matter how necessary) was classified as “unproductive.” For Adam Smith and David Ricardo, on the other hand, labor was the source of wealth, not nature. However, Smith’s famous work is after all an inquiry into the “nature” of the wealth of nations, and here we might also locate the origins of longstanding maneuver to naturalize capitalist political economy. Smith used the term “natural price” to describe a price equal to the cost of production (Smith 1776, 83). The market had natural qualities.
Later in the nineteenth century, Karl Marx’s political economic writings appear to offer a distinctly “promethean” or anti-ecological view of nature (Bellamy Foster 1999, 372). He writes that “Nature builds no machines, no locomotives, railways, electric telegraphs, self-acting mules etc. These are products of human industry; natural material transformed into organs of the human will over nature, or of human participation in nature” (Marx 1939, 14, as cited by Harvey 2019, 147). The means of production are human products both in and over nature, but labor remains the source of value. Nature transforms itself through humanity. However, against those who claimed that Marx wore “ecological blinders” John Bellamy Foster locates the theory of a “metabolic rift” in Marx’s work, writing that Marx was aware of the ecological crisis of his day (diminishing soil fertility), the “extreme separation of town and country under capitalism,” (2002, 6) and “took into account the coevolution of nature and human society” (1999, 373). According to Bellamy Foster, Marx saw capitalism as unable to successfully replenish and maintain its necessary natural environment. Capitalism had effectively destroyed a metabolism with nature inherent in the labor process (Bellamy Foster 1999, 381). While not overtly concerned with political economy, Charles Darwin’s theory of natural selection brought nature back to the center stage of history. Darwin greatly influenced philosophical contemporaries like Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud. Some thinkers perverted his work through “social darwinism,” culminating in the twentieth century with Nazi Germany’s infamous trope of “blood and soil,” the natural relationship between peoples, their productive capacities, and specific lands. This concept of nature is prevalent in some strands of right-wing economic nationalism today.
The term nature is often taken for granted: nature is a reservoir of resources, a thing “out there” which we utilize, maintain, and confront as the climate changes. However, many theoretical questions surrounding the term still concern political economy: can we talk about a determined nature? Do we separate or create a hybrid between nature and society? And is capitalism within nature? These theoretical questions help us frame empirical inquiries regarding resource extraction, climate politics, and management of the commons/public trust. Regarding a determined nature or socially constructed natures, philosopher Kate Soper writes that “it has become increasingly obvious that the reference to ‘nature’ is no more than a kind of shorthand: a convenient, but fairly gestural, concept of ecopolitical argument whose actual meaning (or meanings) in this context are slippery and far from clear” (1999, 47). On the one hand, (deep) ecologists point to a definite, singular nature which precedes and remains distinct from human culture. On the other hand, some critics emphasize nature’s “culturally constructed or purely discursive status” (1999, 48). Noel Castree, for example, writes that “what we call ‘nature’ is shot through with the interests, aims and presuppositions of what we usually take to be its opposites. This means that claims that nature is not socially constituted, in significant measure, are part of the war of persuasion… Making sense of nature is itself explicitly participating in it” (Castree 2014, 142). Soper thinks we must reject both the determinist nature, which places “all human beings as equal enemies of nature” and abstracts from the social relations and sexual division of labor responsible for ecological abuse” and the constructivist view which hurts “the possibility of transnational ecological agreements” (53). On the one hand, the determinist nature ignores the unequal responsibility and geographic effects of climate change. On the other hand, the view which emphasizes ideas of nature might hinder political organization, and at its worst, imply that climate change is also merely an “idea” (Malm 2017, 26).
The question which follows, where (or if) to draw a line between nature and society, is often compared to the Cartesian model. Today, a split is broadly rejected, and scholars often adopt a hybridity where nature and society are no longer (because of capitalism), or never were, distinguishable. According to Andreas Malm, “Much contemporary theory cannot get enough of proclaiming that society and nature have become impossible to tell apart because in fact they are one and the same thing” (44). Malm believes that this hybridity (best exemplified by Bruno Latour) merely regurgitates the Cartesian model because a “unity” still implies two underlying elements. Instead, Malm offers us a clarifying view of substance monism but property dualism, where nature and society are made up of the same stuff but have different properties (65). Here, natural properties affect social properties but not the other way around. Everything is within nature (including society), but society cannot alter the constraints of nature (like gravity).
The broad question of capitalism’s place in nature is largely defined by how one chooses to answer the prior questions. Looking back to Marx, who saw humanity as both in and over nature, we see that there are no capitalist social relations without nature, but nature is also the object of capitalist domination. Jason W. Moore offers one notable addition to this with his concept of “capitalism in the web of life.” Moore rejects the Cartesian duality, places capitalism in nature, and describes capitalism as a way of organizing nature (Moore 2015, 30). Another notable conception of capitalism and nature is provided by Neil Smith, who also builds off of the hybrid view and argues that capitalism’s goal of producing nature “was written into the DNA of capitalist ambition from the start”; where the production of nature in prior societies was “incidental,” it is inherent in the capitalist system (Neil Smith 2007, 22). Throughout the history of capitalism, the commodification of nature has generally “involved harvesting use values as raw materials for capitalist production” (17). In the neoliberal era, however, a
new generation of ecological commodities … are simultaneously excavated (in exchange value terms) from pre-existing socio-natural relations and as part of their production they are reinserted or remain embedded in socialized nature – the more ‘natural’ the better… [financialization] radically intensifies and deepens the penetration of nature by capital. (17)
What was once a mere pool of resources to be pillaged, nature is now a “biodiversity bank,” a lens which should ostensibly help us care for it (19). However, environmental legislation and the “ecological commodities” of “allowable natural destruction” end up helping financial capitalism expand, and are developed unevenly across the United States and the globe. According to Neil Smith, green capitalism seeks to more carefully destroy and co-produce nature, and this has only accelerated and expanded with financialization: “When the price of ecological credits changes, investment priorities do too; when the weather changes, the price of pollution credits changes as traders anticipate greater or lesser generation of electricity; when interest and currency rates change, environmental policies are directly affected by capital moving in or out” (Neil Smith 2007, 25). What was once considered in social terms (the preservation of nature) is now calculated through the logic of the market. Capitalism expands into and through nature; nature is a new “accumulation strategy.”
Finally, while this keyword entry has been highly theoretical, we should remember that nature is also of immediate concern to political economy in the context of extraction, conservation, and climate change. However, the comparative political economy of resource extraction, the management of natural resources, and (transnational) responses to climate change depend on coherent conceptions of nature, and we would therefore do well to take a critical approach toward the use of the word nature in political economy.
(See Accumulation, Biopolitics, De/Reterritorialization, Extractivism, Fossil Fuels, Primitive Accumulation)
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Aristotle. Aristotle’s Politics. The University of Chicago Press, 2013.
Castree, Noel. Making Sense of Nature: Representation, Politics and Democracy. Routledge, 2014.
Foster, John Bellamy. “Capitalism and Ecology: The Nature of the Contradiction.” Monthly Review, vol. 54, no. 4, 2002, pp. 6–16., doi:10.14452/mr-054-04-2002-08_2.
Foster, John Bellamy. “Marx’s Theory of Metabolic Rift: Classical Foundations for Environmental Sociology.” American Journal of Sociology, vol. 105, no. 2, 1999, pp. 366–405.,doi:10.1086/210315.
Marx, Karl. “Grundrisse: Notebook VII – The Chapter on Capital.” Grundrisse, by Karl Marx, www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1857/grundrisse/ch14.html.
Harvey, David. Marx, Capital, and the Madness of Economic Reason. Oxford University Press, 2019.
Hobbes, Thomas. The English Works of Thomas Hobbes, Vol. 3: Leviathan. Edited by William Molesworth, vol. 3, John Bohn, 1839.
Locke, John. “Property.” Second treatise, §§ 25–51, 123–26. University of Chicago, 1689. https://press-pubs.uchicago.edu/founders/documents/v1ch16s3.html.
Malm, Andreas. The Progress of This Storm: Nature and Society in a Warming World Verso, 2017.
Mazzucato, Mariana. The Value of Everything Making and Taking in the Global Economy. Allen Lane, 2018.
Moore, Jason W. Capitalism in the Web of Life: Ecology and the Accumulation of Capital. Verso, 2015.
Smith, Adam. An Inquiry Into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations. Electric Book Co., 1998.
Smith, Neil. “Nature as Accumulation Strategy.” Socialist Register, 2007: Coming to Terms With Nature, edited by Leo Panitch and Colin Leys, vol. 43, Merlin, 2007, pp. 1–21.
Soper, Kate. “The Politics of Nature: Reflections on Hedonism, Progress and Ecology.” Capitalism Nature Socialism, vol. 10, no. 2, 1999, pp. 47–70., doi:10.1080/10455759909358857.