On October 28, 2021, political leaders in the Malaysian state of Sabah on the island of Borneo signed an agreement with the Singapore shell company Hoch Standard, without the knowledge of Indigenous communities, giving the company title to the management and marketing of “natural capital/ecosystem services” on two million hectares of a forest ecosystem for one hundred to two hundred years.
According to Burgess, the Indigenous communities—there are thirty-nine Indigenous ethnic groups in the forest reserves in Sabah, making up a population of more than twenty-five thousand—“actually don’t know that their jungles…are going to be conserved for 200 years” by the agreement, which is aimed at “restoring jungles,” providing benefits so as to “uplift” them, “bringing them back into normal society.” Tierra Australia is closely connected to major multinational banks in the capitalist core, such as Credit Suisse and HSBC, along with major Singapore Banks, all of which have been heavily involved in investments in natural capital.
As evidence of the extraordinary corruption at the time, some $1.6 billion in timber rent went missing under their management, while Kitingan’s personal wealth during his nine years as director of the foundation rose suddenly to $1 billion.
This coincided with the consolidation and rise to global prominence of the Glasgow Financial Alliance for Net Zero, advertising itself as representing multinational banking and money managements adding up to $130 trillion dollars in financial assets, and led by some of the very same multinational banks, such as Credit Suisse and HSBC, with which Tierra Australia was connected.6 Golokin was present at the Glasgow UN climate negotiations seeking to drum up global finance for the Hoch Standard-Sabah Nature Conservation Agreement, which he claims is designed to draw out the potential of Sabah forest’s “lazy assets,” a term referring to ecosystem services not incorporated into the market.
Economist Robert Costanza and his associates valued the world’s “seventeen” ecosystems in 2011 at $145 trillion annually .12 This last figure has been promoted by the Intrinsic Exchange Group as representing a virtually unlimited set of metaphorical gold mines for the taking by natural asset corporations.
Plans for the expropriation and accumulation of natural capital by global finance are primarily directed today at the Global South.
Yet, not only is the logic behind this fallacious, but it is also likely to widen the associated colossal financial bubbles, while accelerating destruction of planetary ecosystems and of the earth as a safe home for humanity.
In his critique of “the fetish character of capital,” in the Grundrisse and Capital, Marx highlighted the views—far exceeding “the fantasies of the alchemists”—of the late-eighteenth-century British political-economic writer and nonconformist minister Richard Price, a friend of Benjamin Franklin and Joseph Priestley.
For Marx, Price’s “150 millions of earths all solid gold” was a cosmic fantasy of “the innate power capital,” in which capital becomes “a self-reproducing being…a value perennating and increasing by virtue of an innate quality,” without any reference to real material and historical conditions.
It was the conflict between production of commodities as use values, on the one hand, and exchange value, on the other, that lay at the core of all capitalist contradictions.21 What nature itself provided, apart from labor time, was in the capitalist system a mere “free gift…to capital” and not incorporated directly in its accounting of value production, where it was treated as a mere externality.22 Nevertheless, the monopolization of elements of scarce land/nature gave rise to monopoly rents, which were withdrawn from total surplus value feeding the coffers of owners of natural resources.
In neoclassical economics, as it emerged in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, distinct from classical political economy, the concept of natural-material use values was removed from the fundamental framework in economics, leaving only exchange value in the conception of wealth.
In the early twentieth century, during his most productive period as a chemist in Glasgow, he became acquainted with socialist ideas, principally the Romantic-radical tradition, in which the main sources of inspiration at the time were figures such as Percy Bysshe Shelley, Thomas Carlyle, John Ruskin, Walt Whitman, and William Morris.
In 1918, he joined the newly created National Union of Scientific Workers, through which he became closely acquainted with the zoologist, Marxist, ultra-materialist, and author of An Outline of Psychology, Henry Lyster Jameson, with whom Soddy carried out an extensive correspondence.32 In the context of his correspondence with Jameson, Soddy entered into studies of Marx and Ruskin, as well as the work of the late nineteenth-century theorist of banking and credit Henry Dunning Macleod.33 The result of these studies was Cartesian Economics , in which Soddy challenged the innate power of money.
In approaching economics from the standpoint of natural science, he brought back the notion of real wealth as the useful embodiment of matter/energy, thereby questioning the exchange-value orientation of the capitalist economy.
In this context, Soddy resurrected the use-value perspective of classical political economy, seeing real wealth as consisting of natural-material use values and distinguishing this from exchange value and mere financial claims to wealth.
If, in Marx’s critique of political economy, as Soddy explained, the exploitation of socially necessary labor power was the sole source of “exchange-value or money-price” under capitalism, this was to be distinguished from real wealth, where nature and labor together constituted the fundamental bases—something that many of Marx’s own followers had failed to understand.
Blackett, Soddy referred to the loss of productivity of the soil and the general waste in the economy, arguing that society should be ruled by the productive elements of society concerned with “the creation of its wealth rather than of its debts,” and who retained a connection to the earth.
Perversely, when the financial explosion that has characterized modern monopoly-finance capital resumed soon after, it was to be coupled with a search for new real asset bases from which to further leverage global finance.
In the wildlife fish user days calculus, the various forms of wildlife are valued by the average amount of money an individual sportsperson is willing to pay in pursuit of particular type of wildlife with the expectation of killing it, thus establishing its value.
Based on such studies of inferred consumer preferences, Costanza and his associates apply a “benefit transfer” method, extrapolating the imputed value for a particular ecosystem service in one localized context, such as the water purifying role of a particular river system, where consumer preferences have been established, and then extending that to entirely different ecological contexts, in which studies have not taken place.
The justification offered for this is that, unless an economic value is placed on nature’s services, they will continue to be treated as a free gift or externality, to be robbed.57 Yet, in the words of heterodox economist Guy Standing, while it is claimed that “unless a price is placed on every bit of nature, it will not be treated as having value,” it is nonetheless true that “a price only comes when something is for sale, when it becomes a commodity.” The UK government is now arguing that landowners by virtue of simply owning and monopolizing land are “providers of ecosystem services” who deserve to be paid financial compensation for offering these “services” associated with the land, previously viewed as free gifts of nature, such as ecosystem services of water purification, pollination of crops, biodiversity, and carbon sequestration.58 The monetization of the environment thus allows for an enormous expansion of the circuit of exchange value and monopoly rent in the name of ecological sustainability.
Since an old growth forest, in which trees are sometimes a century or more old, means that the growth rate of the mature trees is much reduced, falling below the rate of interest, the market demands that such old growth be liquidated on the spot, to be replaced by younger, faster growing trees.
In the process of being capitalized, the global commons will be cut up and monopolized by a few private interests, who will turn them into revenue streams to be bundled together as financial assets, including various kinds of derivatives.
Where actual conservation of natural assets is concerned, a “blended” financial arrangement is typically adopted in which governments take on most of the costs, owning and investing in the forests, and private firms reap the benefits, receiving a disproportionate share of the resulting revenue.
And then that debt is sliced up into collateralised debt obligations and all the other marvelous devices that worked so well last time around.
For Burgess of Tierra Australia, in a paper on capitalizing the world’s ecosystems, beginning with the natural capital of Indigenous populations in Australia and Malaysia’s Sabah state in Borneo, the monetization of the world’s ecosystem services can underwrite a whole new global financial system, providing through “its productive value…the underlying asset for a stable universal medium of exchange.”69 In reality, what is meant is the leveraging up of the credit/debt system worldwide through the financialization of the earth, with the expropriation of Indigenous lands as its basis.
As John Maynard Keynes observed in The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money in 1936, in the midst of the Great Depression: “Speculators may do no harm as bubbles on a steady stream of enterprise.
Yet, operating on the principle of thinkers such as Marx, Ruskin, Soddy, and Daly, in which real wealth consists of natural-material use values, and indeed the earth itself, what was being measured in the pricing of ecosystem services was not real wealth, but rather the increased drain on the world’s resources, their growing scarcity.72 Based on this, the realm of commodity exchange was being enhanced—not for purposes of conservation, but as a further basis of capital accumulation, representing the acceleration of processes that had created metabolic rifts in nature’s ecosystem processes in the first place.
Nature, or earth matter, was eternal , while earth capital was not.73 The creation of earth capital, as a distinct social form, required the creation of private-property titles, and thus original expropriation of the land/earth, transforming what was previously the commons into a realm of private commodity value.74 Monopolization of the land gave rise to a system of rents, imposed by the landlords on society as a whole, paid out of the total surplus product.
The concept of natural capital as it is now employed today is nothing other than an attempt to extend this alienation to nature and humanity as a whole, monetizing ecosystem services so as to generate a new financial ecological regime: a social and historical relation in which the entire earth is for sale.
“If ecosystems are…considered capital assets,” then they are by definition, he tells us, “ecological capital” to be conceived in exchange-value terms. Ecological capital as a whole thus stands for the totality of the world’s ecosystems, seen as constituting mere “forms of capital.” All ecological problems for Barbier have a single solution: “capitalizing on nature.”77 In this view, nature, the earth, the basis of all life and existence, presumably stretching to the universe itself, is capital, measured in money.
The effects of this rift in the earth’s metabolism, and in humanity’s social metabolism with the earth, are to be seen everywhere, including in the most developed capitalist states, as witnessed by carbon markets and water privatization.
In Kenya, for example, members of the Sengwer community—who over the last decade and a half have faced forced mass evictions at gunpoint and the burning down and destruction of their villages by the Kenyan Forest Service in alignment with international capital—are waging a struggle to defend the forest and water towers .
In Zambia, peasants have been fighting a battle against the financial expropriation of their land by Agrivision Africa, which has as one of its investors the World Bank’s International Finance Corporation.83 Some countries, such as Ghana and Botswana, have promoted laws that give customarily held lands the legal clout of private property.84 But in most of sub-Saharan Africa, Indigenous land rights are tenuous in private property terms. Given growing scarcity of resources and the incessant drive for natural capital, Indigenous and smallholders are fighting to defend their lives, communities, and lands.
That’s what they are after.”86 India’s massive farmers’ movement in 2020–21 represented an enormous mobilization of small farmers against the growing agribusiness domination of Indian agriculture, and the attempts to turn the earth and food into capital.87 In the United States, the massive 2020 solidarity/George Floyd protests emanating largely from the working class and youth in support of a Black-led movement can be seen an indication of the level of resistance to racial capitalism only waiting to burst out as material conditions, particularly in urban built environments, polarize.
Within this wider collective perspective, in agreement with natural science, human production is properly viewed as complementary with natural-material systems and cannot be reduced to a universal system of commodity value—based on the fallacious notion that all of existence is commensurate with and can be measured in terms of money.
Its very existence demands our disappearance.” The only response to such a destructive system raised to a planetary level is a universal struggle for nature and humanity, demanding a peoples’ sovereignty of the earth and of production.