1. Eco-systems have enormous sets of real use-values, but as yet these use-values are unsocialised, the ‘services’ of eco-systems aren’t commodities at all. People are not, insofar as money goes, actively ‘valorising’ the release of oxygen from any tree they pass on the street. It is totally unconscious. These eco-systems and their many naturally produced use-values, regardless of whether they are enclosed within a private property, or part of common property in park, for example, remain a ‘public good’, as part of the ‘common wealth’. The simplest way to understand this is that the floating of oxygen produced when a tree breaks down glucose is not enclosed by a fence, even though the fence is where the property right extends. It is therefore, so far, impossible to reach into eco-systems and pull out and privatise all of the use-values capital would want to marketise, socialise, make profit from. The eco-system cannot as yet be formed into sets of commodities.

2. We can think about enclosure in the extensive sense.

Spaces for various use-values to be extracted ‘from the bowels of the earth’, or produced by labour utilising the forces of production, have formed the basis for privatisation. But enclosure of eco-systems would not only be extensive, even though this would begin (continue) as a “protectionist/conservationist” private grabbing of land from either indigenous commons, national commons, or even international commons when speaking on the ocean and sky.

There also exists the intensive enclosure (of time), which includes the increase of the working day, the bleeding of labour into leisure via social media data production, the use of chemical fertilisers to increase the rate of return of vegetable commodities measured against ground rent, etc. The last form of intensive expansion is the mechanisation of fragmented labour – insofar as machines can ‘work’ much faster, and therefore more profitably, than human labour.

3. Enclosure of eco-systems would have an intensive element as well. However, since we occupy a period of capitalism characterised by ‘generalized universal industrialization’, this intensive component would take the form of the industrialisation of the ecology. The intensive which will follow and be simultaneous with the extensive privatisation of eco-systems, is nothing more than the capitalisation of these eco-system use-values. But in order to do so, parts of ecology must be fragmented down further, distilled to their ‘basic functions’, or ‘eco-system services’. Already this is evident in places where the use of artificial fertilisers has led to a massive ‘recession in the population of bees’.

This, in turn, has led to the necessity of humans taking up the labour of pollinating flowers in the area by hand. Here, we begin to see the fragmentation of eco-systems down to ‘pollination services’, leading to a new division of labour, as well as a new market for the use of the ‘synthetic pollen’ commodity.

To save on labour costs by making the process more efficient – perhaps to accelerate this pollination process in accordance with the acceleration of artificial fertilisation processes, all to uphold this ‘natural capital’ of the flower resource, comes the further fragmentation of the pollinating labour process, and the mechanisation of these machinic fragments – the automation of these divisions of labour.

Later comes robo-pollinators, feeding flowers synthetic pollen, all to monetarily fulfil some scarcity in the conditions of profit induced by the death of bees and capital’s ensuing opportunism. This socialisation of the ‘bee-function’ becomes the market for the consumption of synthetic pollen, and then from there develops the commodity of the robo-pollinator, and its consumption as fixed-capital in the form of a productive technology.

4. This fragmentation of use-values develops out of and alongside the epistemology of ‘teleology’ – explanation by purpose. Dominant western science, because of its reactionary nature, awash with newtonian mechanisticism, always asks ‘what purpose does this serve?’. It already presumes the ecology to ‘work’ like the industry. If we are materialists, however, we wouldn’t blame ‘western science’, we would see that both western science and the productive development of capitalism are tied up with the ever expanding creation of consumer markets – the ever dominating tide of capitalisation, which wishes first to fragment totalities into use-values, in order to secondly develop commodities out of them through the realisation of their utility among a consumer base.

5. According to various ‘natural capital’ resources, NC can be split into three sections: Stocks, Flows, and Values. These stocks are natural resources, flows are the services afforded by these stocks, and values are the service’s realisation on the market as useful to business and consumers. As we have seen, human labour becomes the appendage to ‘Flows’, as a mediator of ‘eco-systems services’.

Now for some short practical and philosophical implications of natural capital:

– The private exploitation of labour in this way will lead either to the final assimilation of indigenous people under capital – their ecosystem-protection labour finally commodifiable, or it will lead to the final replacement of indigenous people by wage-exploited settlers doing an appropriated version of indigenous ecological labour.

– The fragmentation of eco-systems into functions leads to immense crises based on the failure to adhere to the ‘relational holism’ of eco-systems. Lores of biodiversity are clear that as more parts out of the network of ecology go extinct, the risk of the whole network falling apart in one fell swoop, drastically increases.

– I would add that the linearisation down to a “function” of ecology, by its fragmentation down into a singular use-value, is only a superficial solution which forgets that due to the necessary physiological coherence of mutual adaption under variation, there is no part of ecology which has one ‘purpose’. The reason why removing one element of the ecology is so bad, is that one element holds together the connections between many other elements. It’s honestly feudal ruling class ideology based on the divine teleology which makes people think that mechanisation of ecology is perfectly okay.

– If labour then needs to strike to raise its conditions, an eco-systems service will go uncompleted for that day. To stop the flow of profit of a natural capitalist is to destroy the natural conditions on which we all live. A general strike carried out by ‘natural’ exploited labourers, therefore becomes impossible. We become fully domesticated under capitalism, unable to defend ourselves from the diminishment of our life’s quality, nor even of the further extinction and mechanisation of nature (which works as a feedback loop). We remain stuck in a stalemate with capital, maybe for centuries, maybe for a couple years. Capital integrates its own demise by projecting its speculated mechanisation into the present, thereby profiting from it, but accelerating destruction of the base on which it acts. Capital generalises the apocalypse and everyone dies, not just ‘people over there’, but everyone.

– Note also that capital’s mechanisation process and ecological extinction are in a contradictory race against one another. As ecologies collapse, only the use-values which can find a market within a naturally determined timeframe, are preserved in their mechanised image. But it remains in the interest of capital, to continue mechanising these services, leading to further mass-extinction, according to the linearisation of these functions, and the intensification of these productive regimes – becoming more and more indifferent to larger timescales. As time goes on, it becomes totally impossible to mechanise parts of ecologies in time for their ‘restoration’. We are left with a totally barren earth, a grotesque hybrid of fixed-capital and bio-engineered carcasses.

The ‘automation’ of Earth can be seen as the most generalised, industrial, development of what Marx says here:

“the worker is brought face to face with the intellectual potentialities of the material process of production as the property of another and as a power which rules over him.”

– If we see even the slightest hint of market-based solutions to climate change to surface, even the slightest possibility of the rise in natural capital, we have to stamp it out and push for the publicly-managed solutions. The democratisation of production with respect to ecology and the defence of Earth from the exchange-value, is the greatest necessity of our time. Whereas in the 20th century, people thought to themselves ‘the time is coming for revolution’, I believe that for the 21st century, a better exclamation would be ‘time is running out for the possibility of revolution’.