AUTHORIZING ECOCIDE

MARX WITHOUT ABSTRACT LABOUR

Abstract

There are readings of Marx's theories that recognize the centrality of the categorical variable of abstract labor, just as there are those that disregard or ignore it. In this article, we shall assume that readers of the latter approach have made a rationally deliberate choice, thus conceding they grasp the consequences that such suspension or erasure implies for the coherence of Marx's critique of classical economics. The absence of this variable in the mapping of capital circulation, defined as value in motion that self-valorizes, could well share, in contemporary research in philosophy and social sciences, a field of analysis parameterized by the term biopower/biopolitics. Now, the mode of realization of capital eliminates the distinction between biopower and biopolitics. As an already noticeable trend in research, our main objective is to uncover a more serious set of consequences. Using Marx without abstract labor amounts to perpetuating an estrangement regarding the environment as theorized by the discourse of the Anthropocene. It disguises the upshot that, without the practical extension afforded by the category of abstract labor, ecology theory is relevant for only a tiny fraction of the planetary demography. In this article, we argue that by eliminating the category of abstract labor, a rift between biopower and biopolitics deepens so as to neutralize the critical force needed to reach the material roots of an impending catastrophe that, before presenting itself as anthropocenic, can be attested as the perpetuation of ecocidal colonialism.