Under capitalism, that value is produced through labour, by workers, who receive less in wages or other benefits (such as education or health services, paid for through taxation) than the value they produce.  

The excess, the “surplus,” is taken as profit by the owners of capital, either for personal consumption or to invest in more capital to generate yet more wealth.  

Quite a few of the Q&A in this series (there’s a link to a list below) have looked at this process in more detail, including the role of what Marx called “fictitious capital” — wealth generated through financial transactions (including credit) or simply through the ownership of land and housing (“dead capital”) which increases in value without the input of any labour at all.    

So: what’s natural capital? Recently, economic capital (physical and financial) has been joined by a whole load of other capitals. Sociologists, for example, speak of human capital (individual or collective knowledge and skills) and social capital (networks of relationships or shared understanding and values).  

All are problematic. For example, social capital is presented usually as commensurable and politically neutral. But the social capital of an old boy’s public school network sitting on each other’s remuneration boards is very different from that of socialists trying to build a better society. 

Natural capital is even more problematic.  

For Marxists there are only two sources of value — nature and human labour. And labour is the only source of “new” value. Land for Marx could be a source of rent (a form of “fictitious capital”) but was not of itself able to generate new value unless subject to labour, for example by the production of agricultural goods.  

But under financialised capitalism, nature itself has become a focus of capital accumulation, increasing in exchange value without the need for the investment of labour. Alongside this a new lexicon has developed.  

Landscapes, habitats and ecosystem processes, including the ability of biogeochemical cycles to adsorb waste and maintain planetary equilibria, are now conceived of as providers of “ecosystem services”; benefit streams; assets that, once quantified, can be substituted.  

The loss of one asset — a wood, wetland, or river — can be compensated by the creation or enhancement of another asset that provides the same “service.” In this way, environmentally destructive activities are seen as acceptable — provided gains elsewhere lead to “no net loss” to the “services” in question.  

The orthodox explanation for negative environmental consequences of commercial activities is that the degradation of nature is an “externality,” unpriced in market calculations.  

The solution has conventionally been to value environmental “goods” by entering shadow prices based either on contingent valuation (asking people how much they would pay to “keep” something) or by market behaviour (e.g., visitor expenditure) into a cost-benefit analysis.    

But under financialised capitalism “real” markets are created through tradeable rights to pollute (emissions trading) and offset markets. Emissions trading allows companies to emit CO2 and other pollutants within a cap.  

The rights can be bought and sold. Offset markets allow environmental damage to be compensated through the purchase of credits which pay for purportedly equivalent enhancements elsewhere.  

Most organisations claiming to be carbon-neutral do so by buying cheap offset credits for as little as £6 per tonne of CO2 — largely for carbon sequestration schemes (not all of them genuine) in developing countries.  

This monetisation, commodification, marketisation — this financialisation of nature — is now promoted by official policy bodies working in tandem with large corporations. The British government even has its own “natural capital committee.” This all goes well beyond what commentators have called the “cultural poverty of constructing nature as service provider.”  

Carbon trading is now one of the world’s biggest markets — a profitable asset stream. The systemic “growth imperatives” of capitalist society are hugely exacerbated by financialisation, which depends on debt, interest and returns on investment.  

All are a claim on future growth and appropriation of surplus value. Worse, they also create a perverse asset class; their value depends on the continuation of environmentally damaging activity.  

A river’s capacity to adsorb waste is of value only as long as its pollution continues: a forest’s worth as a carbon sink exists only as long as excessive CO2 emissions continue.  

As Ted Benton, Marxist sociologist, convener of the Red-Green Study Group and author of a host of books on nature (including the Collins New Naturalist guides to bumblebees, grasshoppers and crickets and others on butterflies) declares: “In the UK, there is a virtually complete governing consensus on the use of the language of natural capital across government departments, agencies and the larger NGOs — dissent from it has come to be seen as barely rational.”

One bizarre result is that nature conservation itself is increasingly dependent on contributions from the perpetrators of environmental damage. The discourse of natural capital — ecosystem services, mitigation, offsetting and “net zero” — has become normalised, not least through the participation of environmentalists themselves.  

Global conservation bodies such as the International Union for the Conservation of Nature are increasingly dependent on — and act as vehicles for — corporate “investment” that allows companies to claim that they are “carbon neutral.”  

In Britain the company Palladium (a commercial “global giving platform”) works with National Park Authorities through its “Revere” project. This funnels money into restoration schemes for woods, grassland, wetlands and peatlands, by selling “ecosystem services” to firms wishing to offset their carbon emissions, deliver biodiversity offsets or compensate for other negative environmental impacts.  

Through their subsidiary Wilder Carbon, the Wildlife Trusts offer British companies a price of upwards from £45 per tonne of CO2. They calculate that “rewilding” semi-natural and degraded habitats could lock in sufficient carbon to “offset” 17 years of domestic, international and military flights — i.e., business as usual.  

These conservation organisations focus on their primary goals of nature conservation, at least — but in the process they provide greenwash, a smokescreen for corporations and financial institutions to continue to pollute the planet — a process which, we now know, threatens global catastrophe.  

It’s easy to be seduced by this new “greenspeak.” But neither “green capitalism” nor individual lifestyle choices — both promoted so vigorously by corporate and financial interests — offer any solution to this most pressing problem of our time.  

As Barry Commoner, a Marxist ecologist and one of the founders of the modern environmental movement put it a half-century ago in his book, the Closing Circle:  

“The world is being carried to the brink of ecological disaster, not by a singular fault, which some clever scheme can correct, but by the phalanx of powerful economic, political and social forces that constitute the march of history.  

“Anyone who proposes to cure the environmental crisis undertakes thereby to change the course of history.”  

Fifty years later most members of groups such as Extinction Rebellion, Insulate Britain and other environmental activist groups would agree. 

Linked to a broader understanding of the political economy of capitalism, to the struggle for genuinely socialist policies and to the potential strength of organised labour, this holds out at least some hope that change may be possible.  

An article on the UN climate change conference (COP26) in the current issue of the journal Theory and Struggle (free online to members of the Marx Memorial Library) and an earlier 2020 article “Climate, capital, class and crisis” develop this answer in greater depth. More information together with copies of earlier Q&As (this is number 81) can be found on MML’s website www.marx-memorial-library.org.uk.