ABSTRACT
It is widely accepted that capitalism relies on accumulation, expressed both in the growth of capital itself and in stored labor or the commodification and transformation of labor into goods and services. In radical economics, central to this process of accumulation is the unequal ownership of the means of production and capital, the exploitation of labor, and the production of surplus value (Marx 1976 [1867]). The long-run success of capitalism depends on its ability to produce and instill a belief in its core values, especially the ideas that accumulation enhances quality of life, that through hard work anyone can succeed and obtain “the good life,” and that individuals and society can benefit and improve their standard of living through consumption at both individual and social level, as mass consumption of goods and services expands. In order to justify the transformation of nature into useful commodities, capitalism stripped nature of its unity and treated it as the raw materials of production (O'Connor 1998). The capitalist view of nature excluded the possibility that “discrete things” in nature were part of a larger living organism or ought to be treated as independent, living entities with uses beyond those invented by humans. In effect, the ideology of nature produced by capitalism is based on a deconstruction of nature into isolated and abstract, discrete entities. This deconstruction of nature has paved the way for large-scale environmental destruction to facilitate the expansion of the capitalist system of production in ways that are consistent with accumulative tendencies. This is what O'Connor (1998) refers to as the philosophical dichotomy between man and nature as independent rather than related entities. In short, the expansion of accumulation, the extraction of surplus value, and economic growth and consumption drive this system.
