ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the view that Karl Marx’s Capital, in its widest conception, constituted an ecological critique of political economy. It focuses on how Marx’s Capital itself marks the culmination of his specifically ecological critique of capitalism. Marx’s Capital is unlike any other work in classical political economy in that it is connected throughout to developments in natural science, and is predicated on the existence of natural conditions and natural limits. The core concept that Marx employed beginning in the 1850s to explore the complex, dialectical interconnections of nature and society was metabolism. Marx was led by his dialectical conception of the universal metabolism of nature to form the most radical definition of ecological sustainability ever developed. A crucial aspect of Marx’s method points to the theory of unequal ecological exchange, i.e., to questions of the expropriation or robbery of ecological resources.
