Entirely on a whim, this afternoon I googled the phrase "Ecological Economics" just to see if there was anything that could help me develop my own half-baked extemperaneous reflections on the shortcomings of neoclassical pricing and the labour theory of value. Lo and behold, there's an entire school of economists devoted to the subject:
Ecological economics distinguishes itself from neoclassical economics primarily by its assertion that the economy is an embedded within an environmental system. Ecology deals with the energy and matter transactions of life and the Earth, and the human economy is by definition contained within this system. Ecological economists feel neoclassical economics has ignored the environment, at best relegating it to be a subset of the human economy.
However, this belief disagrees with much of what the natural sciences have learned about the world, and, according to Ecological Economics, completely ignores the contributions of Nature to the creation of wealth e.g., the planetary endowment of scarce matter and energy, along with the complex and biologically diverse ecosystems that provide goods and ecosystem services directly to human communities: micro- and macro-climate regulation, water recycling, water purification, storm water regulation, waste absorption, food and medicine production, pollination, protection from solar and cosmic radiation, the view of a starry night sky, etc.
It turns out that there's even an International Society for Ecological Economics. And most considerately, the site carries an entire volume, an ebook entitled An Introduction to Ecological Economics. Chapter 2, here, gives a brief historical run-down of the development of the theory and, in reference to the shortcomings of Marxism, says,
Marx and his followers in communist countries have made a negative contribution to the allocative efficiency problem, even while highlighting issues of just distribution. Their ideological rejection of rent and interest as necessary prices, and their insistence on a labor theory of value that neglected nature’s contribution were responsible for much of the environmental destruction in communist countries.
Well, that's what I said four years ago. I could have saved myself a lot of pfaffing around if I'd had the sense back then to do some simple checking.
Bugger.
25 comments:
More balls. Marx didn't reject the contribution of nature. In fact, he said the development of capitalism would necessarily exhaust the two sources of its wealth: the worker and the soil. As for "allocative efficiency", are you then a "market socialist", or "market anarchist", John?
Well, you'll see from the past comments four years ago that I pointed out that Marx acknowledged that Nature was a source of wealth. But neither Marxism nor neoclassical economics factor in the contribution made by ecological resources in their measurement of social wealth. Neoclassical economics thinks the price of something is the cost of extracting it and therefore that the raw materials have no intrisic value of their own; Marxism fails to acknowledge that the source of surplus energy, in not just humans but all animals (and not therefore some magical quality of labour), comes from the fact that it requires less energy to consume and extract raw materials than actually resides in them. The quantity of this surplus over the cost of its extraction will determine such things as the social wealth of the society as a whole, the levels of technological and cultural development, and the likelihood of success in workers' struggles for a shorter working day, just as an example. And consequently such things like whether or not profit margins will rise or fall. The labour theory of value generates all of this from the worker's energies, once again implying that nature contributes nothing of value when it's precisely the stored-up energy released by the manufacture and consumption of commodities that allows capitalism to reproduce itself, building an economy on depleting the planet's resources.
PS A better grasp of Marx might have led the authors to an alternative explanation for the environmental destruction in "communist" countries, including present-day China – namely, the inherent drive to expand implicit in capitalist commodity production, even when the capital accumulation is directed by the state.
Whether or not "communist" countries were Marxist in any way is a debate I'm happy to leave to another day. Besides, a drive to industrialization rather than capitalist accumulation is all that's required to deplete resources or generate pollution.
Raw materials do not have value by definition in Marxian economics. They have use-value, but not exchange value. "Surplus energy" is not a category that even exists in Marx, as far as I'm aware, so it's hard to know how to respond. It all seems very confusing to me. You seem to be saying that price really is inherent in the soil, a view Marx poured much scorn on (put the soil under a microscope, turn it this way and that, weigh it, you'll never discover its price).
I should add, raw materials that are still in the ground and haven't been worked on...
Yup, I know that about Marxian economics. That's my point, and why I believe Bookchin is right about the need for new categories and why ecological economics is right about human economies being only part of a greater ecology. There are aspects of the real economy that neither neoclassical economics nor Marxist economics actually put a value on, and that's why they encounter explanatory difficulties. I've no idea whether or not this ecological economics provides an explanatory framework that's more inclusive and powerful; I've only just become aware of it. But it appears to be trying to deal with the aporia that I feel exists in other economic frameworks.
I believe the "price" problem is something that's actually debated within eco eco. I'm not sure how to answer it myself, to be honest, because I don't think it's purely an economic issue, but then that's in part because I think there's no clear-cut demarcation between economics and politics, culture, etc etc.
I'll just have do some reading!
But it's this confusing use of the word "value" that I object to. What does it mean to say that Marx "doesn't put a value" on, say, the environment? He does put a value on it. He says it's a use-value, and no more has "value" than does love or truth or beauty, although capitalism may of course attach prices to all these things. If it means there is no way that Marx's system can be used to determine a pricetag for the environment, then that is true, and a bloody good thing too!
I probably shouldn't have used the term "value" in that context because you're going to interpret it the only way you know how! ;-) I shall avoid using the term from now on.
There was some economist a while back who tried to put a price on the entire environment, wasn't there? Can't remember his name now. But your joke is apt, because the economy does indeed use up the environment without paying the price for it; it pays the price for the energy used to extract it (labour costs) but nothing for the energy stored up in the raw materials themselves and released into the economy by the commodity's consumption. That surplus comes for free, as it were, and because nobody pays for it, there's no incentive to conserve it. I think this is what's behind carbon trading and efforts to put a price on "the Commons" (or Nature as a whole, as yer man tried to do), in order to encourage restraint.
But aparently that's environmental economics, a whole other discipline, and it's frowned on by ecological economists. ;-)
Well, that's the bourgeoisie for you. Every problem can be fixed by technology or by sticking a price on it!
We'll leave that for now then. But what about my other question. Are you a "market socialist"? Or "market anarchist", if such a thing exists?
I've no idea. What are they?
I mean, do you believe that a socialist/anarchist revolution will necessarily entail the abolition of markets/money/prices and so on? Or are you a shoulder-shrugger, like Chomsky?
Dunno
*shrugs shoulders*
I've often thought that collective ownership of the means of production, while a sine qua non of socialism, isn't worth the paper it's written on if it isn't accompanied by collective control of the means of production as well. What's more, they're no good unless they're also accompanied by collective ownership and control of the FRUITS of production; assigning distribution to an unaccountable bureaucracy would be a recipe for new class formations. That said, what mechanism is put in place is something I've been meaning to look at for ages. Have you read Michael Albert's Parecon? I've had it on my shelf for a couple of years at least but still haven't got round to reading it as yet.
And I don't have the conviction yet to be a shoulder-shrugger a la Chomsky. :-)
Fair enough, I agree with everything you said there! I've not read Parecon, but I've dipped into it and I think I get the gist. As far as I remember, they still envision a role for markets, wages and so on. As you probably know, I'm convinced the SPGB has it about right – we have to think about transcending such things, not reforming them, and establishing a moneyless, stateless, classless society where there is democratic ownership and control of the means for producing and distributing wealth and there is free access to consumer goods on the basis "from each according to ability, to each according to need". (Interestingly, the conspiracists in the Zeitgeist Movement have stumbled upon more or less exactly the same idea.)
Or, in other words, anarchism is all right as long as we're following Kropotkin, not Proudhon!
Cheers
I agree with all that too. Hooray!
Didn't Cornelius Castoriadis have some rather pointed things to say about this idea of getting rid of money etc (in Workers' Councils and the Economics of Self Management, I think)? Great to see that Murdoch's pay wall ddidn't work on that WSJ extract you've put in above. Mind you, its about the only thing I've seen in a Murdoch paper I'd have wanted to pay for since Jonty Meades had to give up the restaurant reviewing.
Hi Mike--
Needless to say, I wouldn't have posted the link if I'd have had to pay Murdoch anything. I still feel dirty just linking to it.
I'd have to go and look up my Castoriadis for that reference. Not sure if it was him or Solidarity who advocated the same wage for everyone on the grounds that it's impossible to measure where one person's contribution to a product begins and someone else's ends. But that's equally an argument that can be made in favour of abolishing the wage system altogether, I suspect.
The entire text is online. And it seems to me that CC was saying rather more than you imply, although the section was a little shorter than I remembered it being.It was more about prices and money. Plus there was the usual Solidarity footnote aimed at unnamed but clearly SPGB style objections. Check it out. (I have 2 hard copies of the thing but can't lay my hands on either.)
Aye, he probably said a lot more, but I wouldn't necessairly want to be defending it.
I take your point. I mean, the way he writes about economics anyone would think he was some sort of professional economist or something.
Indeed, Mike. A professional economist from Greece, with a background in Trotskyism and Lacanian psychoanalysis, writing about economics in French, his works then translated into English. :-)
Was he a Lacanian? Serious question - I had formed the impression that along with some colleagues he'd started a sort of independent Freudian stream and that it was rather different to the Lacanian stream.
I don't speak Freudian, you understand. But I once knew a man who did.
He started off in Lacan's circle but broke with Lacan, though over what I couldn't tell you. Disagreements over grammar, I shouldn't wonder.
Whether sessions should last 5 or 6 minutes? Only joking. On the basis of his writings, I get the impression that you might have got stuck with Old Cornelius for about 3 and a half hours, and that you wouldn't get to say much apart from Hello. Did he actually do any curative psychotherapy as such?
Yeah, as far as I know he was a practicing psychoanalyst. The Jeff Klooger book I reviewed last year had some stuff on his Freudianism, and comments turn up now and again in his essays on society on things like childhood development, but I can't recall having seen any published writings specifically devoted to psychoanalysis in English. But then I haven't been looking. I used to have to teach Freud for Philosophy A level, and that was enough to convince me of its lack of credibility. What I've read of Lacan, and it isn't much, tbh, has only confirmed my earlier impression.
My interest in Castoriadis came through his social and political writings. His theories as a whole do mesh together to provide a coherent worldview, but it's not once that I share, even if I find a lot that I agree with in his works.
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