Value and Nature: Rethinking Capitalist Exploitation and Expansion

Value is central to the political economy of capitalism, but Marxian value theory has generally been abandoned when it comes to including nature in the analysis. An important exception is the recent work of Jason Moore, and in this paper an effort is made to fill several lacunae in Moore’s approach. I argue for a unified measure of labor-nature time and joint exploitation of surplus value, then explore the significance of that for capitalist growth via rising productivity and cheap inputs, as well as what these mean for geographic expansion in search of labor and resources. I finish on the classic note of the insatiable drive for capital accumulation and its implications for the fate of the earth.