Capital, fictions, and ecology

Abstract

Marx's critique of political economy describes the expanded reproduction of the capital as the basic reality of our societies, and it may seem that Marx ignores two main externalities of the social reproduction of the capital, the domain of symbolic fictions and nature, the presupposed habitat of every social activity. 

This impression is wrong. Marx's capital discovers fiction in the very heart of the circulation of capital: what he calls "commodity fetishism" is a symbolic fiction which is not just an ideology . it structures the very social reality of the capitalist process. Plus ecology was in the very center of Marx's preoccupation in the last decade of his life: he clearly saw how the expanded capitalist production leads to a rift between society and nature, a rift which threatens the very survival of human species. For Marx already, socialism was eco-socialism.