Jan Overwijk

Who or what produces surplus value across the economy-ecology nexus? The question is central to Marxism and to eco-Marxism more specifically. This article argues that only labor-power produces value and develops what it calls the work theory of value. It argues, first, that abstract labor, the source of all value, comes onto the historical scene as labor-power. Second, it shows that labor-power has both a use-value, its capacity to do thermodynamic “work,” and an exchange-value, its wage, and that neither of these are unique to labor-power. Third and fourth, the article offers an immanent critique of labor-power and capital respectively. On this basis, the article concludes that labor-power “produces” value because it is an eccentric commodity, the unique part of the economy that has the power to refuse the transition from ecology to economy. In its struggle with capital, labor-power transforms ecological energy into economic “work” or value.

This book offers a conceptual interrogation of how capital navigates its environment in today's cybernetic capitalism. Offering an immanent perspective, the book develops a unique synthesis of Niklas Luhmann's systems theory and Frankfurt School-style critical theory: a critical systems theory. It uses this theory to analyze neoliberal capitalism in terms of its cybernetic rationalization, the organization and management of society on the basis of cybernetic principles. The book goes beyond existing critiques of cybernetic capitalism that stress the system's colonization of its environment, its making the entirety of social life communicable. As this book uniquely shows, capital no longer aims at total communicability but instead seeks to provoke and exploit the incommunicability of its environment. In this sense, it offers an ecological theory of capitalism, laying conceptual groundwork for understanding the extractivist logic of the Anthropocene.

For the Critical Theory tradition of the Frankfurt School, rationalisation is a central concept that refers to the socio-cultural closure of capitalist modernity due to the proliferation of technical, ‘instrumental’ rationality at the expense of some form of political reason. This picture of rationalisation, however, hinges on a separation of technology and politics that is both empirically and philosophically problematic. This article aims to re-conceptualise the rationalisation thesis through a survey of research from science and technology studies and the conceptual framework of Niklas Luhmann's systems theory. It argues that rationalisation indeed exhibits a logic of closure, namely the ‘operational closure’ of sociotechnical systems of measurement, but that this closure in fact produces the historical logics of technical reason and, paradoxically, also generates spaces of critical-political openness. This opens up the theoretical and practical opportunity of connecting the politically just to the technically efficient.