CLASSICAL
Marx, Karl. “Chapter Seven: The Labour-Process and the Process of Producing Surplus-Value.” Capital, vol. 1, pt. III, ch. 7, 1867, Marxists Internet Archive,
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch07.htm
In this passage, Marx develops his classical analysis of the transition of production. In the first section, labor produces value. In the second section, Marx shows that value is insufficient for capitalist production. Capitalist production requires surplus-value, or what we today call profit:
“The process of production, considered on the one hand as the unity of the labour-process and the process of creating value, is production of commodities; considered on the other hand as the unity of the labour-process and the process of producing surplus-value, it is the capitalist process of production, or capitalist production of commodities.” (emphasis added)
In the first section, commodities may satisfy human needs. In the second section, commodities must produce return on investment, calculated in money form.
Question: what is the status of “intrisic value” in a social order organized around the ultimate necessity of profit?
Foster, John Bellamy. “Marx, Value, and Nature.” Monthly Review, 1 July 2018,
https://monthlyreview.org/2018/07/01/marx-value-and-nature/
“Ecological crises proper are thus not crises of economic value, but of the disruption and destruction of conditions of ecological reproduction and human development at the expense of future human generations and living species more generally.53 Viewed in this way, the primary ecological contradiction resides in the expropriation of nature as a free gift to capital, leading to “the squandering of the powers of the earth.” This is what Marx meant when he said that the soil was “robbed” of the conditions of its reproduction, thereby generating a rift in the metabolism of humanity and the earth.”
FOCUS ON WASTE
Gellert, Paul K. “R. Scott Frey and the Unfinished Agenda of Unifying Economy and Environment in the World-System from Extraction to Waste.” Journal of World-Systems Research, no. 1, 2019, p. 185. EBSCOhost, doi:10.5195/jwsr.2019.910.
“[Frey] followed Pellow (2007) in arguing that global production is symbiotic with computer technologies and that such technologies are lubricating the movement of wealth to the core and anti-wealth to the periphery.” (189)
“Are We Running Out of Precious Elements?” The Royal Institution, uploaded 13 Feb. 2020, based on program of 20 Nov. 2019, https://youtu.be/GoNGPUVU13U
COLONIAL WORLD SYSTEM, PART ONE
Césaire, Aimé. Discourse on Colonialism. New introduction by Robin D.G. Kelley, 1950, 2000, Monthly Review Press. LibCom.Org, https://libcom.org/files/zz_aime_cesaire_robin_d.g._kelley_discourse_on_colbook4me.org_.pdf
Last, Angela. “We Are the World? Anthropocene Cultural Production between Geopoetics and Geopolitics.” THEORY CULTURE & SOCIETY, vol. 34, no. 2–3, pp. 147–168. EBSCOhost, doi:10.1177/0263276415598626.
“At the centre of Aime´ and Suzanne Césaire’s writing lies the premise that social relations and one’s relation to the land is constructed according to how it suits the most powerful. This premise is paired with the awareness that the land and the world are not a ‘solid and expansive’ resource, but an increasingly out-of-balance system, both in social and material terms: the economy is out of balance with an already precariously balanced nature and, in turn, destabilizes human society. As Aime´ Ce´saire wrote in the editorial of the inaugural issue of Tropiques: ‘it is no longer time to be a parasite upon the world, it is a matter of saving it’.” (155-56)
COLONIAL WORLD SYSTEM, PART TWO
Dussel, Enrique.
https://enriquedussel.com/Books_o.html
58. 2007 Politics of Liberation. A critical world history
(how capitalism organizes the world in terms of center-periphery; and how modern philosophy is organized around property)
or
56. 2008 Twenty theses on politics
(Thesis 18 creating institutions for ‘perpetual life’ [pdf page 134]
NEOCLASSICAL / NEOLIBERAL
Whereas the classical worldview, presented above, casts suspicion upon the system of market values organized around profit, the neoclassical or neoliberal worldview argues that market valuations disclose optimal parameters of human flourishing.
Anderson, Terry. “If Hayek and Coase Were Environmentalists: Linking Economics and Ecology.” Working Group on Economic Policy: WP15102, Hoover Institution, 5 Feb. 2015,
https://www.hoover.org/research/if-hayek-and-coase-were-environmentalists-linking-economics-and-ecology
How the assignment of “property rights” is the solution.
CORPORATE ENVIRONMENTAL ETHICS
The following full-text sources are available via online search at the university library:
Schuler, Douglas A., et al. “Corporate Sustainability Management and Environmental Ethics.” Business Ethics Quarterly, vol. 27, no. 2, Apr. 2017, pp. 213–237.
David Steingard, and William Clark. “The Benefit Corporation as an Exemplar of Integrative Corporate Purpose (ICP): Delivering Maximal Social and Environmental Impact with a New Corporate Form.” Business & Professional Ethics Journal, vol. 35, no. 1, 2016, p. 73.
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