Value, (use) values, and the ecologies of capital : on social form, meaning, and the contested production of nature.

Abstract

This paper connects hitherto distant strands of literature to contribute to the ongoing turn to value theory in socio-ecological studies. Starting from Marx’s understanding of value as social form, I revisit Neil Smith’s contribution to the question of value and nature and argue for a reassessment of the internal relations between valorisation and the ‘vernacular’ dimensions of socio-ecological reproduction. I approach this problem through Bolívar Echeverría’s reconstruction of the category of use-value and his understanding of the pivotal role it plays in Marx’s critique, which allows for an open and non-reductive account of the subsumption of socio-ecologies under capitalism as contradictory entanglements of abstraction and meaning. The paper mobilises these insights alongside Marxian-inspired anthropological theories of value – the work of Terence Turner and David Graeber – in order to sketch elements for a symbolic-materialist framework to approach the question of value in its cultural-moral register, its relation to value as economic form, and issues of moral economy and ecology under capitalism.