WeeklyWorker

24.07.2025
Nature, not labour, prime source of wealth

Nature’s goods and services

Despite talking about protecting the natural world and condemning capitalism for bringing about climate catastrophe, there are still those on the left who take it for granted that the working class produces everything. Jack Conrad spells out the ABCs of Marxism

For years, for decades, Socialist Worker carried this ‘What we stand for’ formulation: “Workers create all the wealth under capitalism. A new society can only be constructed when they collectively seize control of that wealth and plan its production and distribution according to need” (Proposition one). And, no surprise, the Socialist Workers Party’s dozen or two imitators and clones - organised in the International Socialist Tendency - loyally, crassly, present their own version of the bullshit.

Five examples:

  1. In the United States the now liquidated International Socialist Organization: “Workers create society’s wealth, but have no control over its production and distribution. A socialist society can only be built when workers collectively take control of that wealth and democratically plan its production and distribution, according to present and future human needs instead of profit.”1
  2. Its diminutive IST rump, Marx 21, likewise declares: “We believe that workers create all the wealth under capitalism, which is a system run by a tiny, wealthy elite. A new society can only be constructed when we, the workers, collectively seize control of that wealth and plan production and distribution according to human need.”2
  3. Up north, in Canada, the International Socialists have: “Capitalist monopolies control the Earth’s resources, but workers everywhere actually create the wealth.”3
  4. Down under, in Australia, there is Solidarity: “Although workers create society’s wealth, they have no control over production or distribution.”4
  5. Then, finally, in terms of our brief IST survey, we have Workers’ Democracy in Poland (formerly Socialist Solidarity). In line with the others, we are told: “While workers create social wealth, they have no control over the production and distribution of goods. In pursuit of increasing profits, global capitalism, cultivated by corporations backed by the power of the strongest and richest countries in the world, leads to a progressive stratification of income.”5

When it comes to the SWP itself, one can safely presume that our repeated polemics eventually had an unacknowledged effect. A few years ago there was a forced tweak. ‘What we fight for’ now reads: “Under capitalism workers’ labour creates all profit. A socialist society can only be constructed when the working class seizes control of the means of production and democratically plans how they are used.”

Draft and daft

Pitiably, ‘For a communist future’, the draft programme written by comrades Nick Wrack and Edmund Potts, for Talking About Socialism, echoes not our repeated polemics, but the bullshit. Of course, this is not due to any loyalty to the IST tradition. The ideological antecedents of TAS lie more in the Militant Tendency tradition (now Socialist Party in England and Wales, Scottish Socialist Party, Socialist Alternative and the Revolutionary Communist Party).

True, TAS recently committed itself to building a mass Communist Party in Great Britain, an aim which we fully share, not least when it came to Forging Communist Unity and a binding fusion conference (regrettably, a perspective almost instantly abandoned by TAS when faced with the prospect of being in a minority).

However, the purpose of this article is not to deal with the irresponsible refusal of TAS to even keep on talking. Instead, my purpose is to critique the TAS version of the SWP-IST bullshit.

Let us see what the comrades write about climate change and nature in their draft programme. Clause 22 says the capitalist system “destroys the natural world around us, creating a climate catastrophe.” Clause 47 repeats these exact same words: capitalism “destroys the natural world around us, creating a climate catastrophe.” Clause 40 reads in full: “Capitalism needs profit and doesn’t care about the consequences. It plunders the earth for raw materials and pumps out deadly pollutants into the atmosphere and waters, without consideration of the consequences. It degrades and destroys the natural environment. It causes the climate crisis which affects us all.” And clause 23 declares: “We want to protect the natural world for the sake of generations to come.”6

Apart from the daft repetition and complete absence of concrete, immediate, demands, there is nothing objectionable here from the Marxist point of view. No, the problem lies with clauses 17, 56 and 57. Clause 17: “The working class does all the work. It produces all the goods and provides all the services.” The same claim is repeated in clause 56: “The working class … is the class that produces everything and delivers all the services we rely on.” And clause 57 too: “Nothing is produced or delivered without the working class doing it.”

In mitigation, it should be said that despite having a whole history of active involvement on the left, Nick Wrack and Ed Potts, the two leading TAS comrades, have no history whatsoever of championing, working towards, let alone drafting, a Communist Party programme. Therefore, experienced comrades with no principled programmatic experience. Put another way, their draft programme has its origins entirely in their negative factional response to our CPGB Draft programme within the context of the FCU process. It should be added, however, that both comrades Wrack and Potts are trained lawyers. Being exact with words is part of their profession. So we must take it that they mean what they say and say what they mean.

With that in mind, it is vital to point out that nature is nowhere to be found in the clauses about goods and services: ie, wealth. Admittedly, for those unacquainted with the ABCs of Marxism the Wrack-Potts formulations might appear perfectly acceptable. Yes, they are superficially anti-capitalist and apparently militantly pro-worker. But there are two standout problems.

Firstly, the TAS statements are simply wrong. Workers do not create all goods and services (ie, wealth) under capitalism. Secondly, they treat workers merely as wage-slaves, the producers of goods and services - not feeling, thinking, emotional human beings - a mirror image of capitalist political economy.

Let us discuss wealth. To do that we have to go back to basics. Every reader will know Marx’s formula: M-C-M': M standing for ‘money’, C for ‘commodity’, and the vital ' for the extra, the surplus, the profit made at the end of each circuit. However, in the embryonic form of mercantile capitalism, the secret of making something out of nothing is not to be found in workers and their labour: no, it is to be found in the existence of distinct ‘world economies’. A ‘world economy’ being an economically autonomous geographical zone, whose internal links give it “a certain organic unity” (Ferdinand Braudel).7

The merchants’ ships, wagons and pack animals join and exploit each separate ‘world economy’. Eg, Muslim Arab traders bought cheap in India and China and sold dear to Christendom (Byzantium and the feudal kingdoms, principalities and city-states of Europe). Merchants parasitically acted as intermediaries between such spaces. Mark-ups on spices, silks and ceramics were fabulous - way beyond the cost of transport. There were no socially determining capitalist relations of production. Unequal exchange was the key to the merchant’s wealth and capital accumulation.

Under fully developed capitalism surplus value derives, yes, from the surplus labour performed by workers during the process of production. Hence this (extended) formula for the circuit of money: M-C … P … C'-M'.

Through repeated enclosure acts, state terrorism and relentless market competition, the direct producers are separated from the means of production. Peasants and petty artisans fall into the ranks of the proletariat and have to present themselves daily, weekly, monthly for hire. It is that or destitution, hunger and eventual starvation.

Yet on average, we can assume, for the sake of the argument, that capital purchases labour-power at a ‘fair’ market price. As sellers of that commodity - labour-power - workers receive back its full worth. Again on average; again for the sake of the argument. Wages then buy the means of subsistence necessary for the production and reproduction of the worker as a wage-slave. Only as a human being are they robbed.

Capital, as an entity in its own right, has no concern for the worker. Capital, because it is only interested in self-expansion, would compel workers to work for 24 hours a day and seven days a week if such a feat were physically possible. Nor has capital, again as capital, any concern for the commodity created by the combination of labour-power, the instruments of labour and raw materials - albeit brought together under its auspices. The resulting commodity could be of the highest possible quality or complete rubbish. But, as long as it sells, and sells at a profit, that is what counts. Hence, for capital, wealth comes in the form of value, surplus value and, above all, money. In other words, exchange value.

Of course, for capitalists, as individuals, wealth also comes in the form of use values. Despite the myths of Max Weber and the so-called Protestant work ethic, no-one should imagine them living an ascetic, self-denying existence. Especially given this - the second gilded age - they have never had it so good.

The super-rich indulge themselves … and often to extraordinary excess. Private islands, premier football clubs, instantly recognisable art works, superyachts, rocketing off into near space and flitting from one palatial residence to another.8 Even philanthropy and charity-mongering is a form of extravagant consumption, by which the elite feed their already grossly overinflated egos (and divert attention away from the grubby side of their businesses). Think Bill Gates, George Soros, Warren Buffet and Michael Bloomburg.9

When it comes to more commonplace CEOs, they consider corporate jets, chauffeur-driven cars, English butlers, Filipino maids, Saville Row suits, vintage wines, trophy wives and the right to grope female employees as perks of the job (yes, most are male, sociopathic and aggressively self-entitled10). Meantime, nearly half the world’s population live on less than $6.85 per person, per day11 and a third have no access to safe drinking water.12

Either way, while for capital wealth is self-expanding money or value, for the human being wealth is use value - what fulfils some desire, what gives pleasure, what is useful. Because use value so obviously relies on subjective judgement, Marx quite correctly gave the widest possible definition. Whether needs arise from the “stomach or from fancy” makes no difference.13

Use value is therefore not just about physical needs: it encompasses the imagination too. Indeed, a use value may be purely imaginary. Its essence is to be found in the human being rather than the “goods and services” themselves. The consumer determines use value (ie, utility).

Expanded

Obviously use values are bought on the market for money and come in the form of commodities produced through a capitalist process based on the exploitation of labour. However, capital not only has an interest, a drive, to exploit labour and maximise surplus labour: in pursuit of profit, capital also seeks to maximise sales and therefore to expand consumption.

Capitalists, in what Marx called department I, sell raw materials and the instruments of labour to other capitalists: steel, electricity, machine tools, computer chips, etc. Capitalists in department II sell the means of consumption to other capitalists … and to workers too (food, clothing, housing, drink, package holidays, TV subscriptions, smart phones, music concerts, etc). While the individual capitalist, the particular capital, attempts to minimise the wages of the workers they employ, capital as many capitals, capital as a system, pushes and promotes all manner of novel wants and artificial needs.

Hence celebrity endorsements, influencers and the huge advertising sector, which works day and night to transform the “luxury goods of the aristocracy into the necessities of everyday life”.14 That and the class struggle, conducted by workers themselves, combine to constantly overcome the barrier represented by the limited purchasing power of the working class. Part of what the working class produces is therefore sold back to the working class … and historically on an ever-increasing scale.

That way, workers manage to partially develop themselves as human beings. Not that their needs are ever fully met. There is a steady stream of the latest must-haves. Capital, capital accumulation and the lifestyles of the rich list always run far ahead. The lot of the working class therefore remains one of relative impoverishment and “chronic dissatisfaction” (Thorstein Veblen).15

Workers and capitalists alike consume use values that come in the form of commodities and from the sphere of capitalist relations of production and the exploitation of wage labour (there are, though we shall not explore it here, non-commodity use values, such as domestic labour - cleaning, cooking, looking after the kids, maintaining the car, putting up shelves, decorating, etc).

Doubtless, once again workers and capitalists alike also consume some commodities that, directly or indirectly, come from small-scale enterprises. Family farms, pop-up restaurants, fish ’n’ chips shops, curry houses, craft breweries, self-employed plumbers, electricians and taxi drivers, partnerships of accountants, solicitors and doctors, etc - all produce use values and therefore, by definition, goods and services (ie, wealth) too. With that in mind - and there are millions of them in Britain alone16 - it is surely an elementary error to baldly state that the “working class … is the class that produces everything and delivers all the services we rely on”.

In theoretical terms, forgetting, passing over, the middle classes is a mote - a mere speck of dust in the eye. There exists a beam, however.

First paragraph

In his Critique of the Gotha programme (1875) Marx is quite explicit: “Labour is not the source of all wealth.”17 There is nature too. Marx writes here against the first paragraph of the draft programme of what was to become the German Social Democratic Party. It has a strangely familiar ring: “Labour is the source of all wealth and culture and, since useful labour is possible only in society and through society, the proceeds of labour belong undiminished with equal right to all members of society.” A ghostly anticipation of the TAS statement: “the working class … is the class that produces everything and delivers all the services we rely on”.

Some necessary background. The Gotha unity congress in 1875 represented an unprincipled unification, joining together Lasallean state socialists and the Eisenachers - the followers of Marx, led by August Bebel and Wilhelm Liebknecht. Marx supported unity, but not unity which involved weakening the programme. Note, the Lasalleans, not least because of their dictatorial internal regime, were in steep decline: their trade unions broke away and various splits joined the Eisenachers.

However, the Eisenachers did make unwarranted programmatic concessions: eg, “producer associations assisted by the state” ... Not in itself a disaster, but the central role accorded to the state and state aid nostrums left the door ajar for a “Bonapartist state-socialist workers’ party” (Engels).18

It should be added that Marx was probably eager, primed, itching to write his Critique due to Mikhail Bakunin. In his Statism and anarchy (1873) the founder of modern anarchism portrayed Marx as a German nationalist and an “authoritarian” worshipper of state power. Not only that: Marx was said to have been responsible for the programme and every step taken by the Eisenachers since day one. Eg, “The supreme objective of all his efforts, as is proclaimed to us by the fundamental statutes of his party in Germany, is the establishment of the great People’s State (Volksstaat)”.19

As a canny political infighter Marx chose to point the finger of blame at Ferdinand Lassalle (1825‑64). Lassalle was the real German nationalist and worshipper of state power. He had secretly offered to do a deal with Otto von Bismarck. That way, the Bismarck state would have gotten its “own bodyguard proletariat to keep the political activity of the bourgeoisie in check”.20

Marx, therefore, credited Lassalle with being the spiritual father of the draft Gotha programme, including the above-quoted first paragraph. Unfair, perhaps - Lassalle was dead, killed in a silly duel over a love affair. More to the point, Marx’s own pupils - ie, August Bebel and Wilhelm Liebknecht - were quite capable of making elementary blunders, such as overlooking nature, all by themselves. No help, no prompting from Lassalle and his state socialists was needed. But, by blaming Lassalle, Marx was able to give his comrades an escape route - a route which, if taken, would simultaneously save their blushes and draw a clear line of demarcation against Lassallean state socialism. Sad to say, Marx went largely unheeded: “Labour is the source of all wealth”, “all other classes” are a “reactionary body”, the “iron law of wages” and other such Lassallean shibboleths remain.21

Not that past SWP leaders - eg, Tony Cliff, Duncan Hallas, Chris Harman, John Rees, Lindsey German and Martin Smith - were cribbing from Lassalle ... or Bebel, or Liebknecht for that matter. That much is obvious. No, as with our Nick Wrack and Ed Potts today, we have a clear case of historical reflux, opportunism recurring, economism spontaneously regenerating - as it inevitably does, given the material conditions of capitalism and the oppressed position of the working class.

Incidentally, economism needs defining at this point - that is, if we are going to have an informed discussion. Economism is, in essence, a bourgeois-influenced outlook, which restricts, narrows down the horizons of the working class to mere trade unionism … that or, more commonly, it simply denies or belittles the role of high politics and democracy in the struggle for socialism. And, sadly, the SWP and the likes of TAS are hardly alone.

Economism is the dominant outlook of the contemporary left. Not, of course, that economism denies politics altogether. The problem is that, when the economistic left takes up politics, it is not the politics of the working class - ie, orthodox Marxism - no, instead it is the politics of other classes and other ideological trends which they promote: left social democracy, pacifism, greenism, feminism, black separatism, petty nationalism, identity politics, intersectionalism, etc.

Primary source

Anyway, back to Marx. In 1875, he savaged the “hollow phrases” in the draft Gotha programme about “useful labour” and all members of society having an “equal right” to society’s wealth. There is useless labour - labour that fails to produce the intended result. People are not equal, etc, etc.

More to the point, at least when it comes to our main concern here, there is nature. Marx wrote this: “Nature is just as much the source of wealth, of use values (and it is surely of such that material wealth consists!) as labour, which itself is only the manifestation of a force of nature, human labour-power.” Marx goes on to explain that “insofar as man from the outset behaves towards nature” - what he calls the “primary source of all instruments and objects of labour” - as an “owner, treats her as belonging to him, his labour becomes the source of use values, therefore also of wealth.”

That, of course, is to fall under the spell of an anthropocentric delusion, from which, inevitably, all sorts of harmful, unintended consequences follow. Note, the TAS draft programme stupidly, arrogantly, promises that in the future “everyone will share ownership of the world’s resources” (my emphasis).

Socialism, as the first phase of communism, does not raise the working class to the position where it exercises “ownership” over the planet and its natural resources. Such a suggestion merely mimics the fallacies associated with capitalism - as witnessed under bureaucratic socialism - and brings disappointment, ecological degradation and nature’s certain revenge. Humanity can only aspire to be the custodian of nature.

The same nature-labour formula occurs again and again in Marx’s writings. Eg, in Capital, Marx approvingly quotes William Petty: “Labour is its father and the earth its mother.”22 Leave aside the gendered language - which I find deeply unproblematic, given the primacy rightly given to the female sex and in turn nature - what must be grasped is the two-sided source of wealth. Sunshine and water, air and soil, plants and animals - all are ‘gifts from nature’.

Human beings too are part of nature and, just like every other living thing, rely on nature in order to survive. However, humanity applies itself to nature, although in the process of production we often rely on the direct actions of nature. Eg, though a natural product, wheat is selected, sown and harvested by labour; yet it germinates in the soil and needs both rain and sunshine if it is to grow and duly ripen.

So the two forms of wealth conjoin. Yet, despite that, for the laws of capital, what gives the wheat value is not what is supplied by nature. That has use value, but not value. Value derives from the application of labour-power alone.

There is another - a spiritual, or artistic - dimension to the use value of nature that should never be underestimated:

There is a pleasure in the pathless woods,
There is a rapture on the lonely shore,
There is society, where none intrudes,
By the deep sea, and music in its roar:
I love not man the less, but Nature more.

(George Gordon, Lord Byron Childe Harold’s pilgrimage - 1812)

Leave aside enduring memories of Sunday morning outings to Ashridge Forest with my mum, dad, sister and slightly crazy pet dog, holidays in the Scottish highlands, lone treks in the mid-winter Lake District and touring the Malabar coast in southwestern India. Just looking out over London from my bedroom window each morning and seeing the sunrise, the bright blue sky, the gathering storm clouds, even the drab grey and mists, inspires me. Walking on Hampstead Heath, picking blackberries, glimpsing the occasional urban fox, following the nesting swans and the progress of their cygnets, the cormorants drying their outstretched wings, the swirling, whirling, ever-changing patterns of migrating starlings, the lime-green flash of squawking parakeets, the evening caa-caaing of gathering crows and rooks - all that brings me joy. Turning from my computer to admire the sunset, as I work in my office, humbles me too. In the big scheme of things I’m insignificant, I’m transient, I’m just a little bit of nature.

Sorry are those who do not feel such emotions. They are impoverished. So, surely, wealth cannot be limited to the products of human activity alone. Wealth must include every form of consumption which produces human beings in one respect or another.

Michael Lebowitz rightly considers this of particular significance: “Marx’s identification of nature as a source of wealth is critical in identifying a concept of wealth that goes beyond capital’s perspective.”23 Capital, as we have argued, has but one interest - self-expansion. Capital has no intrinsic concern either for the worker … or nature. And, especially over the last 150 years, and increasingly so, capitalist exploitation of nature has resulted in destruction on a huge scale. Countless species of flora and fauna have already been driven to extinction. Instead of cherishing nature, there is greed, plunder and wanton disregard.

The working class presents the only viable alternative to the destructive reproduction of capital. First, as a countervailing force within capitalism - one which has its own logic, pulling against that of capital. The political economy of the working class brings with it not only higher wages and shorter hours. It is also responsible for health services, social security systems, pensions, universal primary and secondary education … and measures that democratise access to the countryside: eg, the right to roam that came out of the 1932 mass trespass movement and Kinder Scout. Wealth, for the working class, is not merely about the accumulation and consumption of an ever greater range of commodities. Besides being of capitalism, the working class is uniquely opposed to capitalism.

The political economy of the working class more than challenges capital. It points beyond capital - to the total reorganisation of society and, with that, the ending of humanity’s strained, brutalised, crisis-ridden relationship with nature.

Marx was amongst the first to theorise human dependence on nature and the fact that humanity and nature coevolve. He warned, however, that the capitalist process of production is also a “process of destruction”, because it “tears asunder … disturbs the circulation of matter between man and the soil … therefore violates the conditions necessary for lasting fertility”.24

The “enormous waste” under capitalism outraged Marx. The by-products of industry, agriculture and human consumption are squandered and lead to pollution of the air and contamination of streams, rivers and lakes. Capital volume three contains a section entitled ‘Utilisation of the extractions of production’. Here Marx outlines his commitment to the scientific “reduction” and “reemployment” of waste.25

John Bellamy Foster - basing himself solidly on Marx’s considerable writings on ecology - highlights the “metabolic rift” between nature and the human part of nature brought about by capitalism.26 A system which produces for the sake of production, which accumulates for the sake of accumulation, which crowds vast numbers into polluted, soulless, crime-ridden concrete jungles and simultaneously denudes nature with deforestation, cattle ranching, ever bigger farms, mono-crops and, as passionately exposed by Rachel Carson back in the early 1960s, metes out chemical death to “birds, mammals, fishes, and indeed practically every form of wildlife”.27

The Marx-Engels team wanted to re-establish an intimate connection between town and country, agriculture and industry, and rationally redistribute the population. In short they wanted to heal the “metabolic rift” between nature and the human part of nature.

Short-termism

Doubtless, while this goal is today a matter of extreme urgency, not least given the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and its “code red” warning about the world approaching a tipping point - it is hard to imagine the capitalist class, with its endemic short-termism and manic fixation on profits, willingly going along with the far-reaching measures that are needed to avert ecobarbarism. Under the conditions of socialism and working class rule, where the law of the plan has replaced the law of value, that would surely be another matter.

Our aim should be not only to put a stop to destruction and preserve what remains. Of course, the great rain forests of Congo, Indonesia, Peru, Columbia and Brazil must be safeguarded. So too the much depleted life in the oceans and seas. However, more can be done. The riches of nature should be restored and, where possible, enhanced. Grouse moors and upland sheep farming are obvious prime targets for rewilding in a Britain with its “deeply concerning” low levels of biodiversity (Natural History Museum report).28 Wolves should sing once again in a green and pleasant land.

But we can think really big. Mesopotamia - now dry and dusty - can be remade into the lush habitat it was in pre-Sumerian times. The Sahara in Africa and Rajputana in India were home to a wonderful variety of fauna and flora only 5,000 years ago. The parched interior of Australia too. With sufficient resources and careful management they can bloom once again.

The aim of such projects would be restoration, not maximising production and churning out an endless flood of commodities. Hardly the Marxist version of abundance. On the contrary, the communist social order has every reason to rationally economise and minimise all necessary inputs.

In place of capitalism’s squandermania there comes the human being, who is rich in human needs. However, these needs are satisfied not merely by the supply of “goods and services”: they are first and foremost satisfied through the medley of human interconnections and a readjusted and sustainable relationship with nature.

  1. socialistworker.org/where-we-stand.↩︎

  2. marx21us.org/about.↩︎

  3. www.socialist.ca/ourstand.↩︎

  4. solidarity.net.au/about-us.↩︎

  5. pracowniczademokracja.org/?page_id=372.↩︎

  6. All quotes unless otherwise stated from N Wrack and E Potts ‘For a communist future’, version two.↩︎

  7. F Braudel Civilization and capitalism Vol 3, Berkeley CA 1992, p22.↩︎

  8. See I Hay and JV Beaverstock Handbook on wealth and the super-rich Cheltenham 2016; S Tsigos and K Daly The wealth of the elite: towards a new gilded age London 2020.↩︎

  9. See R Lambin, J Roberts and R Surender (eds) Handbook on philanthropy and social policy Cheltenham 2025.↩︎

  10. See P Babiak and RD Hare Snakes and suits: when psychopaths go to work New York NY 2007.↩︎

  11. blogs.worldbank.org/en/developmenttalk/half-global-population-lives-less-us685-person-day.↩︎

  12. www.unicef.org.uk/press-releases/1-in-3-people-globally-do-not-have-access-to-safe-drinking-water-unicef-who.↩︎

  13. K Marx Capital Vol 1, Moscow 1970, p35.↩︎

  14. See G Reith Addictive consumption: capitalism, modernity and excess London 2018.↩︎

  15. See T Veblen The theory of the leisure class Mineola NY 1994, p20.↩︎

  16. In 2024 there were 5.45 million businesses employing between 0 and 49 employees - see www.gov.uk/government/statistics/business-population-estimates-2024/business-population-estimates-for-the-uk-and-regions-2024-statistical-release.↩︎

  17. K Marx and F Engels CW Vol 24, London 1989, p81.↩︎

  18. K Marx and F Engels CW Vol 26, London 1990, p500.↩︎

  19. dwardmac.pitzer.edu/bakunin/marxnfree.html.↩︎

  20. See www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1872/housing-question/ch02.htm; the official K Marx and F Engels CW Vol 24, London 1988, p364 leaves “bodyguard” out of its text.↩︎

  21. history.hanover.edu/courses/excerpts/111gotha.html.↩︎

  22. K Marx Capital Vol 1, Moscow 1970, p43.↩︎

  23. M Lebowitz Beyond Capital Basingstoke 2003, pp13031.↩︎

  24. K Marx Capital Vol 1, Moscow 1970, pp505-6.↩︎

  25. K Marx Capital Vol 3, Moscow 1971, p101.↩︎

  26. JB Foster Marx’s ecology: materialism and nature New York NY 2000, piv.↩︎

  27. R Carson Silent spring Harmondsworth 1991, p87.↩︎

  28. www.nhm.ac.uk/our-science/services/data/biodiversity-intactness-index.html.↩︎