Karl Marx: nature and critique of the political economy

The relationship between the productive forces and nature is an essential dimension of Marx's materialist interpretation of history. This interpretation is, at the same time, materialistic and naturalistic. The concept of productive forces is constructed from nature, and nature is understood and conceptualized from the development of such forces. The tendential fall in the rate of profit encloses in its content the possible course that the relation between productive forces and nature follows within capitalism. The key mediation between both, work, as a transhistorical category, must be distinguished from its historical configuration as alienated work, in order to rescue such relationship from the subjection under capital in which it finds itself.