Capitalising Nature

Nature, despite being at the centre of all production, does not carry any intrinsic “value.” Value in a capitalist world is created through the mediation of labour, where all production is appropriation of nature (Marx 1973). It is labour which endows the appropriated nature with value. As long as labour itself is seen as nature (Burkett 1999; Burkett and Foster 2006) it is valued, but beyond labour and labour power, nature qua nature has not historically existed as value.

This article borrows liberally from a similar paper presented in a conference titled “Financialisation and False Solutions:Climate-smart Agriculture and Its Alternatives” held in Dhaka on 9–11 August 2017 and organised jointly by the Research Initiatives, Bangladesh and Rosa-Luxemburg-Stiftung.

Nature, despite being at the centre of all production, does not carry any intrinsic “value.” Value in a capitalist world is created through the mediation of labour, where all production is appropriation of nature (Marx 1973). It is labour which endows the appropriated nature with value. As long as labour itself is seen as nature (Burkett 1999; Burkett and Foster 2006) it is valued, but beyond labour and labour power, nature qua nature has not historically existed as value. However, it cannot be said that the absence of value makes nature external to the capitalist production process—as Jason Moore (2015, 2017) has shown, all historic nature since the beginning of the colonial expansion by various European powers in the 15th–16th centuries has been produced by capitalism.

The phenomenon of climate change, however, shows that certain limits have already been crossed and nature qua nature can no longer be exploited ad infinitum. This leads to the present flurry of value-making, of rendering the hitherto invisible values visible (Sukhdev et al 2010; Ghosh 2015). Apparently, climate change can only be halted if capitalism is allowed to discover an adequate profit motive in nature.