ABSTRACT
I Nature and capital The object of classical political economy is to establish the 'natural' determination of the categories of bourgeois economy. This object is achieved, however, only in a contradictory and paradoxical sense. The immediate claim of classical thought is the grounding of the relations of capital in nature; but it finds that in so grounding those relations the category of nature, the fixed point with reference to which the capitalist world is conceptualized, comes loose from its moorings and, far from remaining fixed, shifts in meaning across the entire spectrum of bourgeois social theory. This fluctuation involves classical political economy in an attempt to reconcile within a single construction the most radically disparate conceptions of social life. On one side, the latter determined as an element of nature (the self-reproduction of nature in the Ricardian 'corn economy' or in the physiocratic conception of productive and unproductive labor) finds its origins both historically and conceptually outside of society. On the other side, nature, once brought into contact with the relations of bourgeois economy, loses its irreducible natural character and slips into a form indistinguishable from bourgeois economy. When classical political economy argues that the world of capital and its relations is natural it at once argues that the social world is rooted outside of itself and that the sphere outside of the social world in which bourgeois economy is rooted is the world of capital. The categories of bourgeois economy find their determination outside of capital, in nature. Yet when classical thought looks outside of capital for its natural ground it finds that that nature, once made concrete, is nothing other than capital itself. In order that classical thought be able to conceive the ground of capital as nature it must conceive nature as capital.
