Reading Capital in an Age of Climate Change

Abstract

While there is a robust literature on how capitalism is the root cause of climate change, few have systematically explored Karl Marx’s most important finished work—Volume 1 of Capital —to excavate the climate repercussions. In this paper, I will review some of the key concepts in Capital —value, the hidden abode of production, surplus value, the accumulation of capital, primitive accumulation and the expropriation of the expropriators—and explain their relevance to the climate crisis. Above all, Marx’s Capital is an analysis of a system of production that escapes our social and collective control. Moreover, the dramatically presented “historical tendency of capitalist accumulation” toward working-class expropriation laid out in Chapter 32—which some view as outdated—takes on new urgency given the need to take social control over production and plan a transition to a non-fossil fuel mode of production.