The expropriation of the commons, its simplification, division, violent seizure, and transformation into private property constituted the fundamental precondition for the historical origin of industrial capitalism. What Karl Marx referred to as the original expropriation of the commons in England and in much of the world (often involving the expropriation of the laborers themselves in various forms of slavery and forced labor) generated the concentrations in wealth and power that propelled the late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Industrial Revolution. In the process, the entire human relation to nature was alienated and upended. As Karl Polanyi wrote in The Great Transformation, “What we call land is an element of nature inextricably interwoven with man’s institutions. To isolate it and form a market for it was perhaps the weirdest of all the undertakings of our ancestors.”

It is hardly surprising in this context that the first references to “natural capital” and to the “earth’s capital stock” arose in this same period in the work of radical and socialist political economists, who sought to defend nature and the commons against the intrusions of the market. Here, the notion of “natural capital” was viewed in terms of the stock of physical properties and natural-material use values constituting real wealth and was seen as opposed to the growing “sense of capitalism” as a system of mere exchange value or cash nexus.

This nineteenth-century notion of “natural capital,” conceived in physical, use-value terms, was to be revived in the 1970s and ’80s as part of an emerging ecological critique. In more recent decades, however, mainstream neoclassical economics (sometimes with the help of ecological economists), together with corporate finance, have completely separated the concept of natural capital from its original use-value-based critique, the memory of which has long receded, conceiving natural capital instead entirely in exchange-value terms, as just another form of financialized capital. This is then used to reinforce the view that the solution to the current ecological crisis of the planet is to make a market out of it.

A turning point in the financial expropriation of the earth occurred from September to November 2021, overlapping with the 2021 UN Climate Change Conference negotiations in Glasgow. Three major interrelated developments occurred at this time: (1) the creation of the Glasgow Financial Alliance for Net Zero embracing most of global capitalist finance; (2) approval of key elements of Article 6 of the Paris Agreement, creating the unified financial rules for global carbon trading markets; and (3) the announcement that the New York Stock Exchange together with the Intrinsic Exchange Group (IEG)—whose investors include the Inter-American Development Bank and the Rockefeller Foundation—was launching a new class of securities associated with natural asset companies (NACs). As the IEG told its investors, while the asset value of the world economy is $512 trillion, the asset value of the earth’s natural capital is estimated at $4 quadrillion ($4,000 trillion), all potentially for the taking.

Together these developments represent a sea change in the capitalization of nature, such that all natural processes that involve ecosystem services to the economy are now increasingly seen to be subject to exchange on the market for profit—all in the name of conservation and climate change. This represents the culmination of a theoretical shift in the dominant economic paradigm aimed at the unlimited accumulation of total capital, now seen as including “natural capital.” The result is to reinforce the Great Expropriation occurring in this century aimed at what Charles Darwin called the earth’s “web of complex relations.”

In order to develop a critical analysis of the current capitalist expropriation of world ecology, it is necessary to explore the concept of natural capital in the work of Marx and other early radical critics within classical political economy. It will then be possible to contrast this to current approaches in neoclassical economics, which views natural capital in purely exchange-value terms, offering this as a solution to the environmental problem. If, in Marx’s analysis, the human economy existed within what he called “the universal metabolism of nature,” in today’s dominant neoclassical economics, according to Dieter Helm, Chairman of the UK Natural Capital Committee, “the environment is part of the economy and needs to be properly integrated into it so that growth opportunities will not be missed. Integrating the environment into the economy is hampered by the almost complete absence of proper accounting for natural assets.” Here, the whole of the Earth System is conceived as a largely unincorporated “part” of the capitalist economy. In Helm’s conception, the capitalist economy faces no outer boundaries but is capable of subsuming all of nature, which then simply becomes part of the overall capitalist system.

Editor: Zhong Yao、Zheng Yifan

From:Monthly Review, Volume 73, Issue 10.（2022-3-1）