How does Marx integrate ecological insights into the theoretical body of Capital?
Marx’s Capital integrates ecological insights in two general ways. First, Marx emphasizes the separation of workers from the land, from the earth, as the foundation of capitalism. Like other necessary conditions of production which are appropriated by capital, the land (nature) appears to wage-laborers as an external condition of their existence, one which they can only gain access to by agreeing to sell their labor power to the capitalist. This specifically capitalistic separation of the producers from reproductive access to the land is of course an ongoing historical process. As David Harvey has recently emphasized in his work The New Imperialism (Oxford University Press, 2003), this kind of “accumulation by dispossession” has become one of the main sources of profit in capitalism’s current, neoliberal phase. Its ecological significance is just as obvious. By first separating land and laborers and then combining them in production driven by competitive profit-making, capitalism devel
