Nature's ‘Free Gifts' and the Ecological Significance of Value

This article argues that far from containing an anti-ecological bias, Marx's ‘free appropriation’ category clarifies the contradictions between the true sources of wealth (the combination of nature and social labor) and capitalism's monetary representation of wealth as abstract labor time. On this basis, it is shown that some of the most popular ecological criticisms of Marx's value analysis fail to grasp Marx's basic demarcation of value, exchange value, and use value. Properly understood, Marx's analysis provides much keener insights into capitalism's environmental problems than do the essentially ahistorical approaches of those who would uncritically ascribe ‘value’ to nature.