Marx and the Dephysicalisation of the Landscape

Abstract

AbstractThis chapter relies on Marx’s later critiques of capitalism (which focused on the relationship between property rights and nature) to explain the final hallmark of property: alienability. Using Marx's metabolic rift theory, the  chapter considers how the abstraction of land was achieved through the separation of culture and nature, which created distance between people and their embedded relations with land. This is illustrated with examples from rundale communities in Ireland and the slave colonies of the Caribbean. Converting landscapes to plantation monoculture to maximise exploitation  destabilised the landscape dynamic, facilitating displacement, oppression, and enslavement, and  socio-ecological crises such as the Famine. The chapter thus draws attention to the spatial consequences of land's dephysicalisation in property law.