Politics of devaluation

Abstract

As Kay and Kenney-Lazar show, the concept of value holds appeal for political ecologists who seek to demystify and politicize the socio-ecological relations underpinning capitalist productions of nature. But there are challenges to using value to understand capitalist natures. Much of nature is not priced, and no nature labours for a wage. This makes the labour theory of value, which tends to be prominent even in discussions of a broadly defined value, difficult to apply to nature. Having wrangled with this ourselves, we turn (as Kay and Kenney-Lazar do) to feminist political economists, who have long theorized the unwaged realm within capitalist social relations. We find that these feminists, while not unconcerned with value, are instead often set on understanding how some work is persistently devalued, or denigrated, seen as worthless – which leads them to centre patriarchy in their analyses. Building from this, we suggest the need to centre anthropocentrism – to historicize and denaturalize devaluations of nature – within work on value and capitalist natures.