Metabolism, energy, and entropy in Marx's critique of political economy: Beyond the Podolinsky myth

Theory and Society

Volumn 35, Issue 1, 2006, Pages 109-156

  Burkett, Paul ^a   Foster, John Bellamy ^b  

^a INDIANA STATE UNIVERSITY   (United States)

^b UNIVERSITY OF OREGON   (United States)

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 30744476329     PISSN: 03042421     EISSN: 15737853     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1007/s11186-006-6781-2     Document Type: Article

References (268)

1. Juan Martinez-Alier and J.M. Naredo, "A Marxist Precursor of Ecological Economics: Podolinsky," Journal of Peasant Studies 9/2 (1982): 207-224;
2. see also Juan Martinez-Alier, Ecological Economics (Oxford, UK: Basil Blackwell, 1987).
3. That Podolinsky's work elicited an indifferent or dismissive reaction from Marx and Engels is commonly cited as an established fact by ecological economists, environmental sociologists, environmental historians, and ecosocialists, among them, Robert Kaufmann, "Biophysical and Marxist Economics," Ecological Modeling 38/1-2 (1987): 91;
4. Anna Bramwell, Ecology in the Twentieth Century (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989): 86;
5. Jean-Paul Deléage, "Eco-Marxist Critique of Political Economy," in Martin O'Connor, editor, Is Capitalism Sustainable? (New York: Guilford, 1994): 49;
6. Tim Hayward, Ecological Thought: An Introduction (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 1994): 226;
7. David Pepper, Modern Environmentalism (London: Routledge, 1996): 230;
8. Ariel Salleh, Ecofeminism as Politics (London: Zed Books, 1997): 155;
9. Alf Hornborg, "Towards an Ecological Theory of Unequal Exchange," Ecological Economics 25/1 (1998): 129;
10. James O'Connor, Natural Causes (New York: Guilford, 1998): 3;
11. Cutler J. Cleveland, "Biophysical Economics," in John Gowdy and Kozo Mayumi, editors, Bioeconomics and Sustainability (Northampton, MA: Edward Elgar, 1999): 128;
12. John Barry, "Marxism and Ecology," in Andrew Gamble, David Marsh, and Tony Tant, editors, Marxism and Social Science (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1999): 277-278;
13. Juan Martinez-Alier, "Marxism, Social Metabolism, and Ecologically Unequal Exchange," Paper Presented at the Conference on World System Theory and the Environment. Lund University, Sweden, September 2003, 11.
14. To use Engels's description of the issues raised by Podolinsky's work, in his December 19, 1882 letter to Marx (Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Collected Works, Vol. 46 (New York: International Publishers, 1992): 410).
15. John Bellamy Foster and Paul Burkett, "Ecological Economics and Classical Marxism: The 'Podolinsky Business' Reconsidered," Organization & Environment 17/1 (2004): 32-60.
16. Herman E. Daly, Steady-state Economics, Second Edition (London: Earthscan, 1992): 23.
17. John Tyndall, Heat Considered as a Law of Motion (London: Longman, Green & Co., 1863).
18. On these and other aspects of Marx and Engels's natural scientific studies, see Pradip Baksi, "Karl Marx's Study of Science and Technology," Nature, Society, and Thought 9/3 (1996): 261-296;
19. Pradip Baksi, "MEGA IV/31: Natural Science Notes of Marx and Engels, 1877-1883," Nature, Society, and Thought 14/4 (2001): 377-390. Additional specific examples are noted in Sections II and III of the present paper.
20. Martinez-Alier and Naredo, "A Marxian Precursor of Ecological Economics";
21. Martinez-Alier, Ecological Economics. The German version of Podolinsky's article was published in two installments:
22. Sergei Podolinsky, "Menschliche Arbeit und Einheit der Kraft," Die Neue Zeit, 1/9 (1883): 413-424
23. Sergei Podolinsky, "Menschliche Arbeit und Einheit der Kraft," Die Neue Zeit, 1/10 (1883): 449-457.
24. Engels's two letters to Marx are dated December 19, 1882 and December 22, 1882; see Marx and Engels, Collected Works, Vol. 46, pp. 410-414. The Italian version of Podolinsky's work, like the German one, was published in two installments:
25. Sergei Podolinsky, "Il Socialismo e l'Unita delle Forze Fisiche," La Plebe, 14/3 (1881): 13-16 and
26. Sergei Podolinsky, "Il Socialismo e l'Unita delle Forze Fisiche," La Plebe, 14/4 (1881): 5-15.
27. Sergei Podolinsky, "Le Socialisme et l''Unitédes Forces Physiques," La Revue Socialiste, 8 (1880): 353-365.
28. These extracts, roughly 1800 words long, are to be published sometime in the next few years in Volume IV/27 of Historisch-Kritische Gesamtausgabe, commonly known as MEGA, the plan of which is to provide the first truly comprehensive collection of Marx and Engels's writings in their original languages.
29. A much longer rendition of Podolinsky's analysis was published in the Russian journal Slovo in 1880. It has recently been reprinted (in Russian) in book form: Sergei Podolinsky, Human Labor and Its Relation to the Distribution of Energy (Moscow: Noosfera, 1991). This Russian version contains more extended discussions of energetics and of the general importance of plants, animals, and human beings for the terrestrial distribution of energy.
30. This is based on our comparison of Marx's notes to an unpublished English translation of Podolinsky's La Revue Socialiste article by our colleague Mark Hudson.
31. See Sergei Podolinsky, "Socialism and the Unity of Physical Forces" (translated by Angelo Di Salvo and Mark Hudson), Organization & Environment 17/1 (2004): 61-75.
32. Sadi Carnot, Reflections on the Motive Power of Fire (Gloucester, MA: Peter Smith, 1977).
33. Elias L. Khalil, "Entropy Law and Exhaustion of Natural Resources: Is Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen's Paradigm Defensible?," Ecological Economics 2/2 (1990): 171.
34. Elias L. Khalil, "Entropy Law and Exhaustion of Natural Resources: Is Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen's Paradigm Defensible?," Ecological Economics 2/2 (1990): Ibid., 170, emphasis in original.
35. Gabriel A. Lozada, "A Defense of Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen's Paradigm," Ecological Economics 3/2 (1991): 157.
36. A.G. Williamson, "The Second Law of Thermodynamics and the Economic Process," Ecological Economics 7/1 (1993): 70-71.
37. C. Biancardi, A. Donati, and S. Ulgiati, "On the Relationship Between the Economic Process, the Carnot Cycle and the Entropy Law," Ecological Economics 8/1 (1993): 9, emphasis added.
38. C. Biancardi, A. Donati, and S. Ulgiati, "On the Relationship Between the Economic Process, the Carnot Cycle and the Entropy Law," Ecological Economics 8/1 (1993):Ibid, 10.
39. Marx and Engels, Collected Works, Vol. 46, 411, emphasis in original.
40. Frederick Engels, "The Mark," in Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Collected Works, Vol. 24 (New York: International Publishers, 1978): 439-456. That Marx would raise ecological, including metabolic, issues at this time is unsurprising in light of his reaffirmation, less than two years earlier in his Notes on Adolph Wagner, of the open-system character of his own analysis of capitalism. Referring to the method used in Capital, Marx wrote: "I have employed the word [Stoffwechsel] for the 'natural' process of production as the material exchange ⋯ between man and nature."
41. (Karl Marx, Texts on Method (Oxford, UK: Basil Blackwell, 1975): 209.) Stoffwechsel translates as metabolism.
42. Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen, "Energy and Economic Myths," Southern Economic Journal 41/3 (1975): 347-381;
43. Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen, Energy and Economic Myths (New York: Pergamon, 1976);
44. Herman E. Daly, "Postscript: Unresolved Problems and Issues for Further Research," in Herman E. Daly and Alfred F. Umaña, editors, Energy, Economics, and the Environment (Boulder, CO: Westview, 1981): 165-185.
45. Alfredo Saad-Filho, The Value of Marx (London: Routledge, 2002);
46. Paul Burkett, "The Value Problem in Ecological Economics: Lessons from the Physiocrats and Marx," Organization & Environment 16/2 (2003): 137-167.
47. Podolinsky, "Socialism and the Unity of Physical Forces," 61, emphasis in original.
48. Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen, "The Entropy Law and the Economic Problem," in Herman E. Daly, editor, Economics, Ecology, Ethics (San Francisco: W.H. Freeman, 1973): 50.
49. Charles Perrings, Economy and Environment (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987): 5.
50. Amos H. Hawley, "Human Ecological and Marxian Theories," American Journal of Sociology 89/4 (1984): 912.
51. Paul Burkett, Marx and Nature (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1999);
52. John Bellamy Foster, "Marx's Theory of Metabolic Rift: Classical Foundations for Environmental Sociology," American Journal of Sociology 105/2 (1999): 366-405;
53. John Bellamy Foster, Marx's Ecology (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2000);
54. Foster and Burkett, "Ecological Economics and Classical Marxism."
55. Karl Marx, Capital (Three Volumes) (New York: Vintage, 1981), Vol. I, 290.
56. Karl Marx, Capital, 1981,Vol. I, Ibid., 647.
57. Karl Marx, Capital, 1981,Vol. I, Ibid., 133-134.
58. Marx castigated the Gotha Programme for asserting that "labour is the source of all wealth," because to do so was to ascribe "supernatural creative power to labour."
59. Karl Marx, Critique of the Gotha Program (New York: International Publishers, 1966): 3, emphasis in original.
60. Engels to Marx, December 19, 1882, in Marx and Engels, Collected Works, Vol. 46, 411, emphasis in original.
61. Daly, "Postscript," 169.
62. Anneliese Griese and Gerd Pawelzig, "Why Did Marx and Engels Concern Themselves with Natural Science?," Nature, Society, and Thought 8/ 2 (1995): 132;
63. see also Foster, Marx's Ecology, 157-158.
64. Griese and Pawelzig, "Why Did Marx and Engels Concern Themselves with Natural Science?," 132-133. Engels's use of the metabolism concept in Dialectics of Nature also adhered to "the physiologists' definition." This is clear from the following definition of life: "Life is the mode of existence of protein bodies, the essential element of which consists in continual metabolic interchange with the natural environment outside them, and which ceases with the cessation of this metabolism, bringing about the decomposition of the protein⋯[M]etabolism is the characteristic activity of protein bodies."
65. Frederick Engels, Dialectics of Nature (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1964): 306-307, emphasis in original.
66. Burkett, Marx and Nature, Chapters 9 and 10;
67. Foster, Marx's Ecology, Chapters 4 and 5. For historical applications of Marx's metabolic rift theme (including the rift between city and country) from a world-system perspective,
68. see Jason W. Moore, "Environmental Crises and the Metabolic Rift in World-Historical Perspective," Organization & Environment 13/2 (2000): 123-157;
69. Jason W. Moore, "The Modern World-System as Environmental History?: Ecology and the Rise of Capitalism," Theory and Society 32/3 (2003): 307-377.
70. Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen, "Energy Analysis and Economic Valuation," Southern Economic Journal 45/4 (1979): 1039.
71. Marx, Capital, Vol. I, 198, 90.
72. Marx, Capital, Vol. I, Ibid., 126.
73. See Burkett, Marx and Nature, 26, for a full documentation of this point.
74. Marx, Capital, Vol. I, 133.
75. Marx, Capital, Vol. I, Ibid., 131.
76. Marx, Capital, Vol. I, Ibid., 295.
77. Marx, Capital, Vol. I, Ibid., 270.
78. Marx, Capital, Vol. I, Ibid., 310.
79. Marx, Capital, Vol. I, Ibid., 323.
80. Karl Marx, Capital, Vol. I (New York: International Publishers, 1967): 215. When quoting from this edition of Volume I of Capital we will refer to it as the "International Edition"; Otherwise all quotes of Capital are from the 1981 Vintage edition.
81. Marx, Capital, Vol. I, 275.
82. Marx, Capital, Vol. I, Ibid.
83. Marx, Capital, Vol. I, Ibid., 274.
84. Marx, Capital, Vol. I, Ibid., 275.
85. Marx, Capital, Vol. I, Ibid. The physical requirements of reproduction not only of the individual laborer but also whole families supported by, and supporting, the worker are always explicit in Marx. While "a certain mass of necessaries must be consumed by a man to grow up and maintain his life,⋯ another amount" is required "to bring up a certain quota of children." In order "to maintain and reproduce itself, to perpetuate its physical existence, the working class must receive the necessaries absolutely indispensable for living and multiplying."
86. Karl Marx, Value, Price and Profit (New York: International Publishers, 1976): 39, 57.
87. Marx, Capital, Vol. I, 283.
88. Marx, Capital, Vol. I, Ibid., 128, 323, 134-135. Marx was always very careful to explain that there was no new materiality being created. Rather, matter-energy takes a new form as a result of labor.
89. See, for example, his footnote to Lucretius (Marx, Capital, Vol. I, Ibid., 323).
90. Marx, Capital, Vol. I, Ibid., 274-275, emphasis added.
91. Capital, Vol. I, International Edition, 171.
92. Ludimar Hermann, Elements of Human Physiology, Fifth Edition (London: Smith and Elder, 1875);
93. Baksi, "MEGA IV/31," 378.
94. Marx, Capital, Vol. I, 276-277.
95. Justus von Liebig, "On the Connection and Equivalence of Forces," in Edward L. Youmans, editor, The Correlation and Conservation of Forces (New York: D. Appleton & Co., 1864): 387-397.
96. Hermann, Elements of Human Physiology, 199-200, 215-225.
97. Marx, Capital, Vol. I, 664.
98. Marx, Capital, Vol. I, 664 Ibid.
99. In a letter to Lion Philips, written on August 17, 1864, Marx reports: "I recently had an opportunity of looking at a very important scientific work, Grove's Correlation of Physical Forces. He demonstrates that mechanical motive force, heat, light, electricity, magnetism and CHEMICAL AFFINITY are all in effect simply modifications of the same force, and mutually generate, replace, merge into each other, etc."
100. Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Collected Works, Vol. 41 (New York: International Publishers, 1985): 551, capitalization in original.
101. Marx reaffirmed his excitement with Grove's work two weeks later in a letter to Engels, suggesting that Grove "is beyond doubt the most philosophical of the English (and indeed German!) natural scientists" (Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Collected Works, Vol. 41,1985 Ibid., 553). Marx did not dispense this kind of praise very often.
102. William Robert Grove, On the Correlation of Physical Forces, in Edward L. Youmans, editor, The Correlation and Conservation of Forces (New York: D. Appleton & Co., 1864): 1-208;
103. Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Selected Correspondence (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1975): 162.
104. Cf. Kenneth M. Stokes, Man and the Biosphere (Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 1994): 52-53;
105. Baksi, "MEGA IV/31," 385.
106. Marx, Capital, Vol. I, 323.
107. Crosbie Smith, The Science of Energy: A Cultural History of Energy and Physics in Victorian Britain (London: The Athlone Press, 1998): 255;
108. David Lindley, Degrees Kelvin: A Tale of Genius, Invention, and Tragedy (Washington, DC: Joseph Henry Press, 2004): 110.
109. Silvanus P. Thompson, The Life of Lord Kelvin, Two Volumes (New York: Chelsea Publishing Co., 1976): Vol. I, 289.
110. Engels, Dialectics of Nature, 315-316, emphases in original.
111. Podolinsky, "Socialism and the Unity of Physical Forces," 64-65;
112. Foster and Burkett, Ecological Economics and Classical Marxism," 39-40.
113. Engels to Marx, December 19, 1882, in Marx and Engels, Collected Works, Vol. 46, 410, emphasis in original. The figure of 10,000 calories of daily food intake per worker seems to have been chosen by Engels without much thought. It is hard to see how even a worker engaged in extremely heavy labor for 16 hours per day could approach such an energy requirement. But the validity of Engels's point does not hinge on the accuracy of his illustrative numbers.
114. Marx and Engels, Collected Works, Vol. 46, 410. Ibid., emphasis in original.
115. Marx and Engels, Collected Works, Vol. 46, 410. Ibid.
116. Martinez-Alier, Ecological Economics, 221;
117. see also Juan Martinez-Alier, "Political Ecology, Distributional Conflicts, and Economic Incommensurability," New Left Review 211 (1995): 71.
118. Engels, Dialectics of Nature, 289-291.
119. Engels to Marx, March 21, 1869, in Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Collected Works, Vol. 43 (New York: International Publishers, 1988): 245-246.
120. Podolinsky, "Socialism and the Unity of Physical Forces," 61.
121. Throughout this discussion we follow Marx's assumptions, in Volume I of Capital, that commodity prices = commodity values, and that competition among firms has converted all concrete labors into abstract labor simultaneous with the formation of commodity prices (Saad-Filho, The Value of Marx, Chapter 5). Our discussion of the energetics of surplus value builds upon the work of
122. Elmar Altvater, especially "The Foundations of Life (Nature) and the Maintenance of Life (Work)," International Journal of Political Economy 20/1 (1990): 20-25;
123. The Future of the Market (London: Verso, 1993): 188-192;
124. "Ecological and Economic Modalities of Time and Space," in Martin O'Connor, editor, Is Capitalism Sustainable? (New York: Guilford, 1994): 86-88.
125. Marx, Capital, Vol. I, 301.
126. Karl Marx, Grundrisse (New York: Vintage, 1973): 674.
127. Marx, Capital, Vol. I, 300.
128. Marx, Value, Price and Profit, 41, emphases in original.
129. Marx, Grundrisse, 464.
130. Marx, Grundrisse, Ibid., 674.
131. Marx, Grundrisse, Ibid.
132. Marx, Capital, Vol. I, 325. "The matter can also be expressed in this way: If the worker needs only half a working day in order to live a whole day, then, in order to keep alive as a worker, he needs to work only half a day. The second half of the labour day is forced labour, surplus-labour. . . . One half a day's work is objectified in his labouring capacity - to the extent that it exists in him as someone ALIVE or as a LIVING instrument of labour. The worker's entire living day (day of life) is the static result, the objectification of half a day's work. By appropriating the entire day's work and then consuming it in the production process with the materials of which his capital consists, but by giving in exchange only the labour objectified in the worker - i.e. half a day's work - the capitalist creates the surplus value of his capital; in this case, half a day of objectified labour."
133. Marx, Grundrisse, 324, 334, capitalizations in original. Note that Marx here looks at the labor time required to reproduce the worker from the point of view of the capitalist, i.e., as identical to the labor-time equivalent of the commodities purchasable with the wage.
134. Karl Marx, "Economic Manuscript of 1861-63, Continuation," in Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Collected Works, Vol. 33 (New York: International Publishers, 1991): 493, emphases and capitalizations in original.
135. Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Collected Works, Vol. 33, 1991. Ibid., 386.
136. Marx, Capital, Vol. I, 341-342.
137. Marx, Capital, Vol. I, Ibid., 375-376, emphasis added.
138. Wolfgang Krohn and Wolf Schäfer, "Agricultural Chemistry: The Origin and Structure of a Finalized Science," in Wolf Schäfer, editor, Finalization in Science (Boston: D. Reidel, 1983): 32-39;
139. Baksi, "Karl Marx's Study of Science and Technology," 272-274;
140. Baksi, "MEGA IV/31," 380-382;
141. Foster, Marx's Ecology, 149-154.
142. Burkett, Marx and Nature, 88-90;
143. Kozo Mayumi, The Origins of Ecological Economics (New York: Routledge, 2001): 81-84.
144. Marx, Capital, Vol. III, 754.
145. Marx, Capital, Vol. II, 321-322.
146. Marx, Capital, Vol. I, 376.
147. Marx, Capital, Vol. I, Ibid., 348.
148. In the same passage (Marx, Capital, Vol. I, Ibid., 348-349),
149. Marx points to "the diminishing military standard of height in France and Germany" as evidence of labor power's deterioration under the duress of capitalist exploitation - citing data compiled in Liebig's Die Chemie in ihrer Anwendung auf Agricultur und Physiologie (Chemistry in its Application to Agriculture and Physiology), Seventh Edition (Braunschweig: F. Vieweg und Sohn, 1865): 117-118.
150. Karl Marx, Theories of Surplus Value, Part III (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1971): 309-310.
151. Marx, Capital, Vol. I, 494.
152. Marx, Capital, Vol. I, 494. Ibid.
153. Baksi, "Karl Marx's Study of Science and Technology," 274-278.
154. Marx to Engels, January 28, 1863, in Marx and Engels, Collected Works, Vol. 41 (New York: International Publishers, 1985): 449.
155. Robert Willis, A System of Apparatus for the Use of Lecturers and Experimenters in Mechanical Philosophy (London: John Weale, 1851).
156. Eric Parkinson, "Talking Technology," Journal of Technology Education 11/1 (1999): 67 (wysiwyg://18/http://scholar.lib.vt.edu/ejournals/JTEv11n1/parkinson.html).
157. Parkinson adds that Willis's model-based approach "was something of a benchmark in education in mechanics. Willis was a clear leader in his field, established a novel, practically-based teaching mode, and communicated his ideas to an influential cadre of future engineers" (Eric Parkinson, "Talking Technology," Journal of Technology Education 11/1 (1999) Ibid., 67).
158. Marx, Capital, Vol. I, 494-495.
159. Marx to Engels, January 28, 1863, in Marx and Engels, Collected Works, Vol. 41, 450.
160. For details on Marx's analysis of capitalism's development and application of science as a form of workers' alienation from the means of production, see Burkett, Marx and Nature, 158-163.
161. Marx, Capital, Vol. I, 497.
162. Marx, Capital, Vol. I, 497. Ibid.
163. Marx, Capital, Vol. I, Ibid., 496.
164. That Engels also had a keen interest in friction, but on a more theoretical level, is clear from the numerous passages on this subject in Dialectics of Nature, e.g., 95-96, 108, 110, 228-229, 252, 258-260, 284, 297. This may help explain why Georgescu-Roegen seems to have very much liked the book.
165. (See Juan Martinez-Alier, "Some Issues in Agrarian and Ecological Economics, In Memory of Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen," Ecological Economics 22/3 (1997): 231.) It is harder to explain how Georgescu missed the more practical discussions of friction in Marx's Capital.
166. Marx, Capital, Vol. I, 497-498.
167. D.S.L. Cardwell, From Watt to Clausius: The Rise of Thermodynamics in the Early Industrial Age (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1971): 67-88;
168. Lindley, Degrees Kelvin, 64-65.
169. Smith, The Science of Energy, 39, 48.
170. Karl Marx, The Poverty of Philosophy (New York: International Publishers, 1963): 109-110;
171. Foster, Marx's Ecology, 280.
172. Marx, Capital, Vol. I, 499.
173. Marx, Capital, Vol. I, 499. Ibid.
174. Marx, Capital, Vol. I, Ibid., 501.
175. Marx, Capital, Vol. I, Ibid., 506.
176. Marx, Capital, Vol. I, Ibid., 499.
177. Marx, Capital, Vol. I, Ibid., 528;
178. cf. Marx, Capital, Vol. I, Ibid., 289-290.
179. Marx, Capital, Vol. II, 248-261.
180. Marx, Value, Price and Profit, 34.
181. Marx, Capital, Vol. I, 637-638.
182. Marx, Capital, Vol. I, Ibid., 288.
183. Marx, Capital, Vol. II, 317.
184. These kinds of processes have been termed "eco-regulated" by Ted Benton, "Marxism and Natural Limits," New Left Review 178 (1989): 51-86. For a detailed rebuttal of Benton's claim that Marx's analysis failed to take such processes into account,
185. see Paul Burkett, "Labor, Eco-Regulation, and Value," Historical Materialism 3 (1998): 125-133;
186. Burkett, Marx and Nature, 41-47. It should be noted in relation to biochemical and energetic processes that the more sophisticated purely energetic approaches do not deny the qualitative aspects of biochemical processes but nonetheless attempt to subsume them under a kind of energetic reductionism.
187. For a contemporary example see Vaclav Smil, General Energetics (New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1991).
188. Carnot, Reflections on the Motive Power of Fire.
189. See, for example, Mario Giampietro and Kozo Mayumi, "Complex Systems and Energy," in Cutler Cleveland, editor, Encyclopedia of Energy, Vol. I (San Diego: Elsevier, 2004): 617-631.
190. Engels to Marx, December 19, 1882, in Marx and Engels, Collected Works, Vol. 46, 411.
191. Marx and Engels, Collected Works, Vol. 46, Ibid., 410-411.
192. Compare, for example, Georgescu-Roegen, "Energy and Economic Myths"
193. and Daly, "Postscript."
194. For further discussion see Burkett, "The Value Problem in Ecological Economics," 140-141.
195. Daly, Steady-state Economics, 23.
196. Daly, Steady-state Economics, 23. Ibid.
197. Paul Burkett, "Entropy in Ecological Economics: A Marxist Intervention," Historical Materialism 13/1 (2005): 117-152.
198. Marx, Capital, Vol. I, 526.
199. Marx, Capital, Vol. I, Ibid., 508.
200. Marx, Capital, Vol. I, Ibid., 503.
201. John Bellamy Foster and Paul Burkett, "The Dialectic of Organic/Inorganic Relations: Marx and the Hegelian Philosophy of Nature," Organization & Environment 13/4 (2000): 412-413.
202. Herman E. Daly, "On Economics as a Life Science," Journal of Political Economy 76/2 (1968): 396-398;
203. John Bellamy Foster and Paul Burkett, "Marx and the Dialectic of Organic/Inorganic Relations," Organization & Environment 14/4 (2001): 452;
204. Foster, Marx's Ecology, 200-204.
205. Marx and Engels, Collected Works, Vol. 46, 412.
206. Marx and Engels, Collected Works, Vol. 46, 412. Ibid.
207. Paul Burkett, Marxism and Ecological Economics: Toward a Red and Green Political Economy (Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill, 2006), forthcoming.
208. Marx, Value, Price and Profit, 34, emphasis in original.
209. Marx, Value, Price and Profit, 34, Ibid.
210. Marx, Capital, Vol. III, 879;
211. Burkett, Marx and Nature, Chapter 6.
212. Marx, Capital, Vol. III, 203.
213. Karl Marx, "Wages," in
214. Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Collected Works, Vol. 6 (New York: International Publishers, 1976): 431.
215. Marx, Capital, Vol. I, 288;
216. see also Marx, Capital, Vol. I, Ibid., 311. "Under raw material we also include the ancillary materials such as indigo, coal, gas, etc.... Even in branches of industry that do not use any specific raw material of their own, there is still raw material in the form of ancillary material or the components of the machinery, etc."
217. (Marx, Capital, Vol. III, 201).
218. Capital, Vol. I, 288.
219. Marx, "Wages," 431, emphasis added. The ancillary materials category also helped Marx analyze situations, mentioned earlier, where biochemical processes make up an essential phase of production. See Burkett, Marx and Nature, 42-43.
220. Marx, Capital, Vol. I, 773, emphasis added. Similarly, when specifying capitalism's inventory requirements, Marx includes "material for labour at the most varied stages of elaboration, as well as ancillary materials. As the scale of production grows, and the productive power of labour grows through cooperation, division of labour, machinery, etc., so does the mass of raw material, ancillaries, etc. that go into the daily reproduction process."
221. Capital, Vol. II, 218-219, emphases added.
222. Capital, Vol. I, 434.
223. Capital, Vol. I, Ibid., 303.
224. Capital, Vol. I, Ibid., 313.
225. Capital, Vol. III, 195.
226. Marx, Capital, Vol. I, 435.
227. Marx, Capital, Vol. I, Ibid., 528;
228. Capital, Vol. II, 208-209.
229. Capital, Vol. II, 250; for details see Stephen Horton, "Value, Waste and the Built Environment: A Marxian Analysis,"
230. Capitalism, Nature, Socialism 8/1 (1997): 127-139.
231. Marx, Capital, Vol. III, 208-209.
232. Ursula Huws, "Material World: The Myth of the Weightless Economy," in Leo Panitch and Colin Leys, editors, Socialist Register 1999: Global Capitalism Versus Democracy (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1999): 29-55;
233. Susan Strasser, Waste and Want: A Social History of Trash (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1999).
234. Engels to Marx, December 19, 1882, in Marx and Engels, Collected Works, Vol. 46, 411, emphasis in original.
235. Marx and Engels, Collected Works, Vol. 46, Ibid., 411.
236. Marx and Engels, Collected Works, Vol. 46, Ibid., emphases in original. Far from dismissing energetic considerations, Engels's comments - informed by Marx's analysis of capitalist productivity growth - show a healthy awareness of how a faulty specification of the relevant dimensions of energy use can generate misleading results. As two leading energy analysts emphasize, one cannot overestimate "the importance of the choice of space and time boundaries" for any "assessment of the energetic requirement of human labor."
237. Mario Giampietro and David Pimentel, "Energy Efficiency: Assessing the Interaction Between Humans and Their Environment," Ecological Economics 4/2 (1991): 119. Engels's approach to energy accounting, unlike Podolinsky's, encompasses "all the energy consumed at societal level to raise the workers and to support their dependents."
238. Mario Giampietro and David Pimentel, "Energy Efficiency: Assessing the Interaction Between Humans and Their Environment," Ecological Economics 4/2 (1991):: 119. Ibid.
239. Marx, Capital, Vol. I, 638.
240. Marx, Capital, Vol. I, Ibid., 637.
241. Marx, Capital, Vol. I, 637. Ibid., "The natural human waste products, remains of clothing in the form of rags, etc. are the refuse of consumption. The latter are of the greatest importance for agriculture. But there is a colossal wastage in the capitalist economy in proportion to their actual use."
242. Capital, Vol. III, 195.
243. Capital, Vol. I, 638.
244. Marx, Capital, Vol. III, 949.
245. Marx, Capital, Vol. III, Ibid., 949-950.
246. Krohn and Schäfer, "Agricultural Chemistry," 32.
247. Krohn and Schäfer, "Agricultural Chemistry," 32. Ibid.
248. Marx, Capital, Vol. I, 638.
249. Marx, Capital, Vol. I, Ibid., 929-930.
250. Ilya Prigogine and Isabelle Stengers, Order Out of Chaos (New York: Bantam Books, 1984): 252-253.
251. See John Chalmers Morton, "On the Forces Used in Agriculture," Journal of the Society of the Arts (December 9, 1859): 53-68;
252. Marx, Capital, Vol. I, 497-498.
253. Richard B. Alley, The Two-Mile Time Machine (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000): 132.
254. Boris Hessen, "The Social and Economic Roots of Newton's 'Principia'," in
255. Nikolai Bukharin, et al., Science at the Cross Roads (London: Frank Cass and Co., 1971): 203.
256. The foundational work of the treadmill of production perspective is Alan Schnaiberg, The Environment: From Surplus to Scarcity (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980).
257. For more recent perspectives on this tradition in environmental sociology see Richard York and John Bellamy Foster, editors, "The Environment and the Treadmill of Production," Organization & Environment, two-part special issue, 17/3 (2004): 293-362 and
258. "The Environment and the Treadmill of Production," Organization & Environment, two-part special issue,18/1 (2005): 5-107.
259. Karl Marx, Early Writings (New York: Vintage, 1974): 360;
260. Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Collected Works, Vol. 6 (New York: International Publishers, 1976): 434;
261. Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Collected Works, Vol. 8 (New York: International Publishers, 1977): 218;
262. John Bellamy Foster, "The Treadmill of Accumulation," Organization & Environment 18/1 (2005): 7-18.
263. Peter Dickens, Society and Nature: Changing Our Environment, Changing Ourselves (Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2004): 80-81.
264. Marx's concept of metabolic rift is integrated into a general assessment of climate change connected to the treadmill model in Richard York, Eugene Rosa, and Thomas Dietz, "A Rift in Modernity? Assessing the Anthropogenic Sources of Global Climate Change with the Stirpat Model," International Journal of Sociology and Social Policy 23/10 (2003): 31-51.
265. For a more general theoretical analysis of the relation of the metabolic rift to global warming, see Brett Clark and Richard York, "Carbon metabolism: Global capitalism, climate change, and the biospheric rift," Theory and Society 34/4 (2005): 391-428.
266. On the relation of the metabolic rift to ecological imperialism, see John Bellamy Foster and Brett Clark, "Ecological Imperialism: The Curse of Capitalism," in Leo Panitch and Colin Leys, editors, Socialist Register 2004: The New Imperial Challenge (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2004): 186-201.
267. See Richard Levins and Richard Lewontin, The Dialectical Biologist (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985);
268. Brett Clark and Richard York, "Dialectical Nature: Reflections in Honor of the 20th Anniversary of Levins and Lewontins's The Dialectical Biologist," Monthly Review 57/1 (May 2005): 13-22.