Energy, work and value. The crisis of capitalism/nature nexus

In this paper the author tries to suggest that global economic crisis and ecological crisis are strictly interdependent and this interdependence is based on energy and raw materials shortage. The basic idea is that the decreasing natural fertility of capital is the cause of the decreasing global rate of profit of global capital, as suggested by Marx. Many scholars using different methods of assessment certify this current trend. Due to these global and entangled phenomena, the author suggests to read in different ways the relationships between energy, labour and value. More energy for less living labour is leading to a profound crisis of capitalism/nature dialectic. A renewed materialist vision of capitalist global dynamics is needed to understand the accelerating feedback between capital and ecological crisis. The triggering aspect is the ratio between energy and labour for the production of value. But at the same time, the shortage of material absorbers of living, valorizing, and abstract labour have radical consequences on the generation of value, and profit. The paper tries also to show that an energetics interpretation of abstract labour is not contrasting its socio-historical organization aimed at the value generation. In this direction, the paper finally suggest also that labour is both a trans-historical tool for the management of the metabolic exchange between society and nature and a generator and conservator of value under capitalist condition of production and exchange.