Introduction
This is the third part of of a series of criticisms of a recently published pamphlet on climate change and class, titled Climate Change is a Class Issue (2024), written by Sarah Glynn, a radical activist and writer located in the United Kingdom, and John Clarke, a radical activist located in Toronto.
The first part questioned whether their view that the exploitation of workers and the natural world are similar if not identical. I demonstrated that nowhere do Glynn and Clarke indicate how exploitation of workers and the exploitation of the natural world are similar. I also pointed out that what they mean by exploitation could probably be equivalent to the meaning of “oppression” for them–but although such terms are related, they are not by any means the same.
I argued that the pamphlet in no way provides anyone with an understanding of the specific nature of capitalist exploitation, in the first instance in relation to the exchange process between an employer and workers. The immediate exchange process hides the exploitative relation that exists between the employer and the workers in that it makes it appear as though the workers receive a wage equivalent to the value of what they produce, but in fact workers, as a class, produce a surplus of value, which forms the basis for the profits of employers.
Finally, I showed that the authors, despite the apparent identity of the exploitation of workers and the natural world in a capitalist society priorize the exploitation of the natural world over the exploitation of workers–a strategy bound to fail since it does not focus on the central aspect of capitalist production and exchange–the constant need to produce a surplus of value, to invest it and reinvest the surplus value in an infinite process on a finite planet.
The first section of the second part showed that the capitalist exploitation of workers does not just involve immediate exchange between workers and employers (hiring) and the subsequent exploitation of workers but also previous exploitation of workers so that the present hiring and exploitation of workers is reinforced by past exploitation and the accumulation of the profit (a surplus of value); the weight of past exploitation becomes ever more oppressive for workers.
The second section of the second part continued on with the same theme, but looked at the problem by considering the concept of simple reproduction (reproducing or maintaing the past exploitation of workers and the present exploitation of workers as a way of contrasting it with extended reproduction, or the accumulation of capital.
Humans and the Natural World as One or as Differentiated
Apart from the criticisms already made in the first two parts, we can look at the issue from another point of view, as described by Andreas Malm (2018), in The Progress of this Storm: Nature and Society in a Warming World. Malm is particularly critical of Jason Moore’s approach to the relation of the human world to the natural world in the context of a capitalist society:
Of late, however, the metabolic rift school has come under sustained fire from Jason W. Moore. In a series of essays culminating in Capitalism and the Web of Life, he seeks to demonstrate that Foster and colleagues repeat the original sin of Cartesian dualism. The proof of their guilt lies, first of all, in their choice of conjunctions: they speak of nature and society, of interaction between the spheres, of capital as having an ecological regime. Moore wants the ‘and’ replaced with an ‘in’. It should be labour-in-nature, capital-in-nature, and so on – never and, the false bridge that betrays a worldview of nature/society as two hemispheres divided by a chasm. Likewise, one must not talk of metabolism between any two things, but always have to say through – and most essential of all: capitalism does not have an ecological regime, it is an ecological regime. By developing these series of conjunction swaps, in effusions of supposedly non-Cartesian [supposedly non-dualistic point of view, where the dualistic point of view is typically of pure mind or spirit divided from the human body and the material world] language games of hyphenation and formulae, Moore proposes his ‘worldecology’ as a superior dialectical framework, to great acclaim from parts of the academic radical ecology community.
Although Glynn and Clarke do refer to Foster’s work (which refers to the “metabolic rift), and although Glynn and Clarke do not indeed follow Moore in abolishing class distinctions, by equating class exploitation and capitalist exploitation of the natural world, they may well in the future fall prey to drawing similar conclusions as Moore (from Malm):
The double collapse partly flows from a view of dialectics as a method not so much for articulating antagonism as for achieving holism. It would be edifying here to keep in mind the admonition of Levins and Lewontin:
‘There is a one-sidedness in the holism that stresses the connectedness of the world but ignores the relative autonomy of parts.’ Among the effects of that one-sidedness is that the parts disappear from view.
By equating capitalist exploitation of workers and capitalist exploitation of the natural world, the specificity of capitalist exploitation (a part of the totality of the world) vanishes.
The Nature of Capitalist Exploitation: Its Twofold Nature: SURPLUS Value and Surplus VALUE
Again, we can look at the issue from another point of view from that set out in the first two parts of this series. Marx referred to workers being exploited in general in relation to the performance of surplus labour. The performance of SURPLUS labour is thus a necessary component of the nature of capitalist exploitation (and employer exploitation in general). However, workers do not just perform surplus labour–they produce surplus VALUE. This is the second component of capitalist exploitation and separates off capitalist exploitation from exploitation of slaves in the United States and serfs by feudal lords in the medieval period in Europe. Thus, capitalist exploitation involves at a minimum the production of a surplus of value and not just surplus labour.
These two aspects of capitalist exploitation of workers are sometimes illegitimately separated (Glynn and Clarke seem oblivious to the issue). Thus, there are those who focus on criticizing a purely quantitative difference between what workers receive and the value of output; the proponents of this view emphasize SURPLUS value and ignore the nature of value. On the other hand, there are those who focus on criticizing the nature of value and ignore the nature and relevance of the production and distribution of a surplus.
Since Glynn and Clarke are so vague about what they mean by exploitation of workers, it is hard to determine what relevance being exploited has in general as well in the particular case of climate change.
By exploitation, do they mean the production of SURPLUS value or surplus VALUE, or both? It is impossible to say.
It is true that Clarke, in one of his posts, does refer to “surplus value”. From “Doug Ford Retreats from the War on Poverty” (https://johnclarkeblog.com/node/14):
There is no doubt, with profitable investment at a premium, that Canadian capitalism needs to extract more surplus value from the workforce and that there is every interest in ensuring that the income support systems facilitate, rather than impede, this exploitative endeavour.
The casual mention of “surplus value” or “exploitation” without any further explanation hardly suffices to clarify for workers what they face–and this judgement is provided, implicitly, by one of Clarke’s own blogs: His post on his course “Fighting to Win.” Clarke writes:
We are confronting a system that is based on economic exploitation [my emphasis] but this society oppresses people in a range of ways that must be addressed in our discussions and in the struggles we take up.
Of course, capitalist society oppresses people in various ways–racial and sexist oppression, among other forms of oppression, themselves, assume many subforms. However, to say that the system is based on economic exploitation implies that exploitation is central to the way the system functions; otherwise, it is just a word, a cliche used by the left.
In any case, Clarke’s use of the quantitative qualifier “more surplus value” implies that Clarke’s focus is quantiative and has little to do with the qualitiative nature of capitalist exploitation.
One-Sided Emphasis on SURPLUS Value
The one-sided emphasis on a surplus reduces a theory of exploitation to a purely quantitative issue of the production of more value than what the worker receives. From Patrick Murray (2016), The Mismeasure of Wealth: Essays on Marx and Social Form, page 300:
Marx’s use of a divided line to illustrate absolute surplus value in terms of extending the line [using a horizontal line to illustrate the division of the working day into necessary labour required to produce the wages/salary and benefits of workers and the surplus labour performed] and relative surplus value in terms of shortening its first division(necessary labour) is a neat pedagogical stroke. However, it has its risks. It could suggest that Marx’s inquiry into surplus-value addresses solely quantitative considerations: What portion of the working day is devoted to ‘necessary labour’? What portion to ‘surplus labour’? What is the rate of surplus-value (surplus labour over necessary labour)? Concentrating on the lengths and proportions of the line segments can deflect attention from a prior question: What is the dimension of the line? Then it is easy for the bad habits of economics and everyday talk to slip in this answer: the divided line takes the measure of wealth and surplus wealth – instead of value and surplus value. In this way, the divided line can play into the Ricardian socialist misreading of Capital, which the all-consuming issue is the exploitative, class division of wealth. Because it is oblivious to the fundamental issue of the specific social form and purpose of wealth, Ricardian theory – including Ricardian socialism – fails to register the difference between wealth and value. If you overlook the fact that value is not wealth but a specific social form of wealth, then absolute surplus value looks applicable to any class society. Wherever one class lives off the labour of another, the labour of the servile class must be divided into necessary and surplus, and, holding the necessary constant, any lengthening of the working day will increase the surplus wealth appropriated by the dominant class. The division between necessary and surplus labour forms the basis of any system of exploitation, but not just any social sort of labour produces value and surplus value. Marx’s divided line measures not ‘wealth’ but a definite social form of wealth, namely value, which is bound up with special social relations and purposes.
This one-sided focus on SURPLUS value is reflected in the attempt at engaging in theoretical practice of an activist here in Toronto: Anna Jessup. Jessup posted a comic depicting the exploitation of labour as one where a rich person claims to be rich through hard work, and a worker then queries: “Whose though?” (see Exposing the Intolerance and Censorship of Social Democracy, Part Five, or A Critique of Moral or Utopian Critiques of Exploitation). [By the way, Clarke, on Facebook, on December 26, 2024, posted “Some useful considerations that may help turning FB post comment sections into ugly and impenetrable swamps.” The fifth point was: “5. Have I forgotten that not everyone shares my appetite for lengthy dogmatic diatribes?” During my “debate” with Jessup over the issue, Clarke apparently had indicated his presence without entering into debate (I remember that he and Chris Hedges?, if I remember correctly, made one comment each).
The production of surplus VALUE involves a perpetual focus on the production of a surplus–value becomes a defining feature of SURPLUS value: a surplus without value is not capitalist.
The fact that the surplus assumes the form of value, however, has very much to do with the infinite nature of capitalist production and exchange relations. It could be said–and has been said–that the generalization of the production of value is tantamount to a society where production of surplus value is predominant. As John Weeks (2010) points out, in Capital, Exploitation and Economic Crisis, page 19:
Value acts as a regulator of price once the entire product, all inputs, are monetized;
until this occurs, the product is not a commodity in its entirety and all the
concrete labor time expended on it need not be replaced by money. This occurs
only with the development of capitalist production. It is important not to
become entangled in semantics. “Value” regulates price under capitalist relations
and can be used as a tool of analysis only in capitalist society.
Value is produced by abstract labour, but abstract labour itself as a social force emerges when labour becomes private labour, labour isolated from other labours socially (but materially still forms part of the division of labour). Page 14:
The central characteristic of the capitalist mode of production, from which all others follow, is that the private labor of individuals is not directly social. It must be rendered social by the exchange of products as commodities. Labor is directly social when the status of the worker, the product he/she produces and its subsequent distribution are determined prior to production and distribution. In all societies individuals labor, but within capitalist relations of production this labor is carried out in production units that are socially isolated. Producers discover through the exchange of their products whether their individual production decisions conform to the requirement that society as a whole be reproduced in a sustained manner. This reproduction occurs via the interaction of commodity producers, in which individual labor must be integrated into a social whole. The labor theory of value is the analysis of how individual labor becomes socialized and explains this process through an analysis of how concrete, specific labor is rendered abstract.
As Moishe Postone (1993) points out in his work Time, Labor and Social Domination: A Reinterpretation of Marx’s Critical Theory, the nature of abstract labour and the production of value tends to create a pressure on the employers and through them on the workers to produce as much as possible in as short of time as possible in an ever-increasing level of intensity. Pages 289-290:
… Marx’s example implies that the two dimensions of the commodity form interact. On the one hand, increased productivity redetermines socially necessary labor time and thereby changes the determinations of the social labor hour. That is, the abstract temporal constant which determines value is itself determined by the use value dimension, the level of productivity. On the other hand, although the social labor hour is determined by the general productivity of concrete labor, the total value yielded in that hour remains constant, regardless of the level of the productivity. This implies that each new level of productivity, once it has become socially general, not only redetermines the social labor hour but, in turn, is redetermined by that hour as the “base level” of productivity. The amount of value yielded per unit of abstract time by the new level of productivity is equal to that yielded by the older general level of productivity. In this sense, the level of productivity, the use value dimension, is also determined by the value dimension (as the new base level).
This process of the reciprocal determination of the two dimensions of social labor in capitalism occurs on the level of society as a whole. It is at the heart of a dialectical dynamic intrinsic to the social totality constituted by commodity determined labor. The peculiarity of the dynamic—and this is crucial—is its treadmill effect. Increased productivity increases the amount of value produced per unit of time—until this productivity becomes generalized; at that point the magnitude of value yielded in that time period, because of its abstract and general temporal determination, falls back to its previous level. This results in a new determination of the social labor hour and a new base level of productivity. What emerges, than, is a dialectic of transformation and reconstitution: the socially general levels of productivity and the quantitative determinations of socially necessary labor time change, yet these changes reconstitute the point of departure, that is, the social labor hour and the base level of productivity.
This treadmill effect implies, even on the abstract logical level of the problem of the magnitude of value—in other words, before the category of surplus value and the wage labor-capital relation have been introduced—a society that is directionally dynamic, as expressed by the drive for ever-increasing levels of productivity. As we have seen, increased productivity results in short-term increases in the amount of value yielded per unit time, which induces the general adoption of the newer methods of producing; however, once these methods become generalized, the value yielded per unit time returns to its older level. In effect, those producers who had not yet adopted these new methods are now compelled to do so. The introduction of still newer methods of increasing productivity
bring about further short-term increases in value. One consequence of the labor time measure of wealth, then, is that as the temporal constant is redetermined by increased productivity, it induces, in turn, still greater productivity. The result is a directional dynamic in which the two dimensions, concrete labor and abstract labor, productivity and the abstract temporal measure of wealth, constantly redetermine one another. Because, at this stage of the analysis, we cannot explain the necessity that capital accumulate constantly, the dynamic outlined here, does not represent the fully developed immanent historical logic of capitalism. It does, however, represent the initial specification of this logic and delineates the form growth must take in the context of labor-mediated social relations.The reciprocal redetermination of increased productivity and the social labor hour has an objective, lawlike quality that is by no means a mere illusion or mystification. Although social, it is independent of human will. To the extent that one can speak of a Marxian “law of value,” this treadmill dynamic is its initial determination; as we shall see, it describes a pattern of ongoing social transformation and reconstitution as characteristic of capitalist society. The law of value, then, is dynamic
When the production of value is generalized, then such production involves the production of as much surplus as possible, and the production of value becomes denser and denser as the standard of value becomes higher and higher.; the roduction of a surplus of value and the production of value go hand in hand.
One-Sided Emphasis on Surplus VALUE
The opposite mistake is to neglect the production of a SURPLUS of value. An example is an article written by Larry Busk and Elizabeth Portella (2024), “The Contradiction between Use-Value and Exchange-Value: Ecology, Imperialism, and the Telos of Production,” in Emancipations: A Journal of Critical Social Analysis, Volume 3, Issue 1. Unlike Glynne and Clarke, who refer to capitalism in general without really engaging in specifics of the nature of capitalism, do look more concretely at the nature of capitalism, specificaly the opposition between the pursuit of exchange value (or, if you like, price) and use-value (commodities conceived as being useful to human beings in one way or another). They write:
the critique offered here is consistent and distinct. First of all, it focuses on production … At the same time, it does not specify the exploitation of workers as the fundamental problem with commodity production [my emphasis]. … there is a tension within the capitalist production process (rather than between production and something else), a
“contradiction” or “conflict” in the production of use-value and the production of exchange-value.
So, what do Glynn and Clarke mean by the exploitation of workers in a capitalist setting? They claim that it is the same as the exploitation of the natural world.
Glynn and Clarke claim the following (page 37):
Developments on the ground can change people’s outlook more quickly than theoretical debate.
They are social activists–and yet they fail to explain in any detail how capitalist exploitation of the natural world and capitalist exploitation of workers is the same–apart from the fact that capitalists obtain the services of both “free of charge” (and even then they do not refer to that fact).
This implicit idealization of “practice” over theory characterizes much of the radical left activists in Toronto. Such contempt for theory and the idealization of “practice” will certainly not lead to any real challenge of the class power of employers and the associated economic and political structures. Rather, it will lead to disappointment since efforts to change such class power without understanding its nature is bound to lead to butting one’s head against the wall.
Conclusion
Glynn and Clarke provide no justification for equating the capitalist exploitation of workers and the capitalist exploitation of the natural world. Capitalist exploitation involves both the production of a surplus and the surplus taking on the form of value. Despite the “practice” of both of them, they fail to address the specificity of the capitalist exploitation of workers: the immediate relation of an exchange between workers and an employer (and not the class of employers), the apparent identity between the wages of workers and the hours they work (making exploitation vanish in the consciousness of workers), the previous rounds of exploitation actually being used to exchange with workers (with workers not even realizing that they are being exploited by the use of their own previous efforts as a class), and the nature of the surplus taking on the form of value such that it leads to ever increasing intensity and increasing pressure to produce at higher and higher standards.
I may continue on with this series in the form of showing that Canadian unions have joined the bandwagon of “climate change”–while simultaneously talking about “fair contracts,” “fair wages,” “decent work,” etc. But then again, I may not.
The Abolitionary 