WeeklyWorker

29.10.2026
Photosynthesis: most important source of energy is the Sun

Nature cannot go ignored

There are still those on the left who say ‘labour creates all wealth’. Seemingly militant, seemingly pro-worker, seemingly anti-capitalist, but profoundly wrong, says Jack Conrad

All societies produce in their own way. Yet alike, no matter what the form of society, production, as a necessarily connected process, is always a process of reproduction. Not only of products, not only of social relations, but also, at a most fundamental level, of the metabolic interaction between human society and nature.1 It follows that if the metabolic interaction between human society and nature has been thrown violently off balance, fouled-up, wrecked, by the relentless, short-term pursuit of profit, then this will have a profound impact - not only on the reproduction of products, but the reproduction of social relations too.

Therefore, note, the 2025 warning issued by the Institute and Faculty of Actuaries. If anthropogenically induced global heating is allowed to continue at the current rate, the global economy faces a catastrophic 50% loss of GDP between the years 2070 and 2090. This risks triggering mass mortality, mass displacement and widespread state failures that threaten to bring about the collapse of civilisation itself.2

The simple fact of the matter is that human society evolved under very specific climatic conditions. There is no way complex life - let alone we humans - could have emerged during the Hadean, Archean or Proterozoic eons, which together spanned roughly four billion years (84% of Earth’s existence3). The atmospheric composition, temperatures and cosmic radiation levels were completely hostile. Complex life exploded in the Cambrian period, as temperatures cooled, oxygen levels rose and the protective ozone layer came into existence. Even then complex life was confined to the balmy oceans and seas.

Our species

Our species, dating back to Homo erectus, has been around for a mere 2.5 million years, and required what we might call a Goldilocks zone in terms of climatic conditions: not too cold and not too hot. Since then, of course, our sub-species, Homo sapiens sapiens, has left its African Eden and learnt to survive in the Himalayas, the high Arctic and on micro Pacific atolls. Nonetheless, when it comes to our extensive modern-day agriculture, which supports the vast majority of the world’s eight billion population, what it requires is maintaining the benign climatic conditions of the Holocene, not a disastrous return, as is threatened, to the conditions of the Pliocene (+2°C to +4.1°C hotter than preindustrial levels) or the Miocene (+5.3°C to +11.5°C hotter).

Any rational, any scientific, study of society, as a necessarily reproductive process, must, therefore, give due recognition to nature as its environment - including, of course, planet Earth, along with all its atmospheric, biological, hydraulic and geological systems, but also the Sun, the moon and the cosmos too.4 After all, nature forms a unity, of which we are a part, and on which we inescapably depend.

One only needs to think about it for the briefest moment. The food we eat, the air we breathe, the water we drink all come from nature. Likewise the energy we use. That is obvious with wind, hydro, solar, tidal, geothermal and nuclear power. Fossil fuels too. Oil, gas and coal are extracted from the Earth’s crust, though ultimately they derive their potential energy from the Sun. The photons chemically bonded in now long-dead vegetation, via photosynthesis, are released as kinetic energy when we burn hydrocarbons.

In point of fact, our nearest star, the Sun, is our biggest and most important energy source by far. Every major physical and biological process on Earth is driven by the Sun: weather and climate, ocean currents, the water cycle, etc. Each second the Sun converts more than four million tons of mass into radiating light and heat. Specifically, through the process of nuclear fusion some 600 million tons of hydrogen becomes 596 million tons of helium and this releases 3.8 x 1026 joules of energy into space (matching Albert Einstein’s classic E=mc2 formula). Enough, incidentally, to run the entire US grid for the next nine billion years.5

Everything we work on as raw materials likewise comes from nature: wood, grains, metals, stone, water, gases, chemicals, etc. Humans take such things either directly or indirectly from nature and transform them into various products, which go, in the last analysis, into articles of consumption.

Though we only consume them indirectly, from the simplest to the most complex, the same can be said of tools and machines. Our hominin ancestors used sharpened sticks, stone chips and rock hammers and anvils: prey could thereby be stabbed, carcases butchered and bones cracked open to get at the highly nutritious marrow. All such tools, it should be noted, were taken from nature with very little modification.

By contrast, perhaps the most complex machine commercially available nowadays is the ASML Extreme Ultraviolet (EUV) Lithography Machine. It makes the microchips found in the latest smartphones, supercomputers and AI hardware. About the size of a double-decker bus, it weighs in at 180 tons and can be bought for approximately £284 million. To generate the 13.5-nanometre EUV light wavelength needed to etch chips, the ASML machine inserts microscopic droplets of molten ultra-pure tin into a vacuum chamber. A high-power industrial laser then double-blasts each droplet. The first flattens the droplet like a pancake; the second vaporises it into a plasma cloud reaching to over 220,000°C - nearly 40 times hotter than the Sun’s surface. This happens 50,000 times every second.6 While not discounting for a single moment the immense human contribution in terms of mental labour, the metals, silicon, ceramics, rare earths and hydrogen and nitrogen gases necessary for the production of the ASML chips are, of course, taken from nature.

Even when there are foolish boasts about ‘conquering nature’, the most that can ever be achieved by human ingenuity, including AI, is making use of nature’s laws. Take the cutting-edge technology exploiting the strange qualities of sub-atomic particles needed to build the next generation of quantum computers (superposition, entanglement and tunnelling). What might otherwise take a supercomputer a millennium can thereby be calculated within hours.7 Instead of being limited by a fixed 0 or 1, both states can be held simultaneously, as a probability. But the point remains: all such properties reside in nature.

One-sided left

So nothing can be more mistaken than treating humanity as if it exists outside nature, or that it can ignore nature. Of course, as regular readers of this paper will know, there are many on the left who do exactly that.

For years, for decades, Socialist Worker carried this ‘What we stand for’ formulation (or something very like it): “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). Adopted in the mid-1970s, the SWP wanted to display its militant workerism.

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 a formulation that grants labour almost supernatural powers.

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.”8

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.”9

3. Up north, in Canada, the International Socialists have: “Capitalist monopolies control the Earth’s resources, but workers everywhere actually create the wealth.”10

4. Down under, in Australia, there is Solidarity: “Although workers create society’s wealth, they have no control over production or distribution.”11

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.”12

There are leftwing intellectuals too. Call to the stand Tithi Bhattacharya, history professor at Purdue university in the US. She takes it for granted that “labour produces all wealth in society”. Bhattacharya freely admits the debt she owes to former SWP leader Chris Harman.13 There are others besides. Maurizio Lazzarato coined the term, “immaterial labour”, and claimed that it has created a new wealth-making paradigm for capitalism (essentially ignoring the role of nature).14 Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri likewise centred immaterial labour, when it comes to wealth-making. They were thinking of computer coding, information and image processing, downloading films, etc (forgetting about the banks of interlinked computers, huge inputs of power and water needed to run datacentres).15

When it comes to the SWP itself, one can safely presume that our repeated polemics eventually had their effect, albeit never acknowledged. A few years ago, in 2024, 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.” A rephrasing that conspicuously still leaves nature out of the picture.

It is not just the workerist tradition. The World Socialist Web Site almost treats discounting nature as a sectarian badge of honour. It flaunts contempt for the petty bourgeois greens and so-called climate doomsters. Hence we read: “working people, through their labour, create all the wealth of society”. And, again, it is: “bus and tram drivers, factory workers, teachers, postal workers and all other sections of the working class who create all the wealth”.16 The Northite WSWS (otherwise known as the Socialist Equality Party) is, of course, rooted in the International Committee of the Fourth International and the Gerry Healy tradition.

There is also the Grantite tradition. Having swapped the Clause 4 socialism of Militant Tendency and Socialist Appeal for the infantile leftism of the Revolutionary Communist Party, we read this unexpected line: “Workers create all the wealth, but the capitalists own the means of production”.17 Why unexpected? Well simply because of Reason in revolt, the 1995 book written jointly by Alan Woods and Ted Grant.18 My guess, however, is that, while members are press-ganged into buying this 448-page study of Marxism and the “most important scientific discoveries of the 20th century”, it usually goes completely unread.

That would appear to be the case. After all, from the same tradition, there is the Nick Wrack-Edmund Potts draft programme: “The working class does all the work. It produces all the goods and provides all the services” (clause 17). The same claim is repeated: “The working class … is the class that produces everything and delivers all the services we rely on” (clause 56). And again: “Nothing is produced or delivered without the working class doing it” (clause 57).19 Comrade Wrack, it should be pointed out, was appointed editor of Militant in 1994 (he resigned in 1996 shortly before the special conference of Militant Labour voted to change its name to Socialist Party in England and Wales20).

ABCs of Marxism

Admittedly, for those unacquainted with the ABCs of Marxism, the formulations cited above might appear perfectly acceptable. They are superficially anti-capitalist and apparently militantly pro-worker. But there are three standout problems.

Firstly, all such statements are simply wrong. Workers do not create all wealth under capitalism. Secondly, even if workers create all wealth, it hardly follows that a socialist system ought to be established as a result. Thirdly, claims that workers create all wealth still treat them as wage-slaves, organised together in workplaces and supplied with raw materials and instruments of labour by the capitalist class, not feeling, thinking, emotional human beings with their own interests, accumulated experiences and collective ambitions. The capitalist class, not the working class, thereby becomes the real wealth makers.

So, let us discuss wealth. To do that we have to go back to basics. Every reader will be familiar with Marx’s M-C-M' formula: 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” (Fernand Braudel).21

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 mature 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 its proper market price. As sellers of that commodity - labour-power - workers receive back its full value. 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. So everything appears fair and square. However, as a human being the worker is robbed, their living labour not only pays for itself, it generates surplus-value (realised as profit).

Capital is a vampiric entity. It has no concern for the worker except as an object of exploitation. Capital, as accumulated dead labour, is solely interested in engorging itself by sucking the life-energy out of the worker. Capital, as accumulated dead labour, would compel the worker to work for 24 hours a day and seven days a week, if such a feat were physically possible.

Nor has capital, again as accumulated dead labour, any concern for the commodity created by the combination of labour-power, raw materials and instruments of labour - 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, self-expanding 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.22 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.23 Even philanthropy and charity-mongering is a form of extravagant consumption, by which the elite feed their already grossly overinflated egos (that and diverting attention away from the grubby side of their businesses). Think Bill Gates, George Soros, Warren Buffett and Michael Bloomberg.24

When it comes to more commonplace CEOs, they consider corporate jets, chauffeur-driven cars, English butlers, Filipino maids, Savile 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-entitled25). Meantime, nearly half the world’s population live on less than $6.85 per person, per day26 and a third have no access to safe drinking water.27

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.28

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).

Consumption

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, smartphones, 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”.29 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).30

Workers and capitalists alike consume use values that come in the form of commodities 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, local restaurants, micro-breweries, self-employed plumbers, electricians, new-age healers and taxi drivers, partnerships of accountants, solicitors and doctors, etc - all produce use values (ie, wealth) and aim at the end of each financial year to realise a profit. With that in mind - and there are millions of such businesses in Britain alone31 - it is surely an elementary error to baldly state that “workers’ labour creates all profit” or 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 the beam, however.

First paragraph

In his Critique of the Gotha programme (1875) Marx is quite explicit: “Labour is not the source of all wealth.”32 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 SWP, IST, RCP, WSWS, etc.

Some necessary background. The Gotha unity congress in 1875 represented an unprincipled unification, joining together Lassallean 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 Lassalleans, 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).33

It should be added that Marx was probably keen to write his Critique, not least due to Mikhail Bakunin, his greatest rival in the First International. In his Statism and anarchy (1873) the founder of modern anarchism portrayed Marx as a German nationalist and an “authoritarian” worshipper of state power. Marx would have been eager to guard his reputation by putting the record straight. 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)”.34

As a canny political fighter Marx chose to point the finger of blame at Ferdinand Lassalle, when it came to the “fundamental statutes of his party in Germany”. Lassalle was the real German nationalist and worshipper of state power.35 No less to the point, Lassalle took his lead on political economy from one Johann Karl Rodbertus, who was in turn influenced by the seminal writings of Adam Smith and David Ricardo.

Together Smith and Ricardo helped shift the emphasis in economic thought away from the Physiocrats and their belief that the ‘bounty of nature’ was the true source of all wealth: agriculture yields more output than the seeds and labour put into it. Industry and trade are ‘sterile’, they merely shuffle things around. The Physiocrats championed large-scale capitalist landed property. Instead, Smith and Ricardo developed a labour theory of value which naturalised the market and therefore the exploitation of workers.36 Smith and Ricardo were, in effect, the ideologues of the merchant manufacturers and industrial capitalists of their day. Either way, Lassalle took it as axiomatic that labour was the sole source of wealth.

Marx could, therefore, with a good conscience credit Lassalle with being the spiritual father of the draft Gotha programme, including the above-quoted first paragraph. True, Lassalle had been in his grave for nearly a decade, killed in a silly duel over a love affair. It has to be admitted, moreover, that Marx’s own leading pupils - August Bebel and Wilhelm Liebknecht - were quite capable of making such howlers in their own right.

No help, no prompting from Lassalle’s doctrinaire successors 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, at first, Marx went largely unheeded: “Labour is the source of all wealth”, “all other classes” are a reactionary bloc, the “iron law of wages” and other such Lassallean shibboleths remained intact.37 Especially for Liebknecht, unity is what really counted.

Not that the SWP’s first and second generation of leaders - Tony Cliff, Duncan Hallas, Chris Harman, John Rees, Lindsey German and Martin Smith - were cribbing from Lassalle ... or, for that matter, Johann Karl Rodbertus (an ethical critic of capitalist exploitation). That much is obvious. No, we have a clear case of historical reflex, opportunism recurring, economism spontaneously regenerating - as it inevitably does, given the material conditions of capitalism and the oppressed position of the working class.

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. Sadly, the SWP, IST, WSWS and RCP are typical.

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: left social democracy, pacifism, feminism, black separatism, petty nationalism, identity politics, intersectionalism, greenism, etc. Hence the SWP’s execrable popular fronts, not least, in the context of this article, the Campaign Against Climate Change - founded in 2001 as an attempt to jump on the green bandwagon.

Politically CACC is safe, soggy and quite frankly monumentally stupid. Capitalism, socialism, the working class - all go unmentioned. Sacrificed in the name of broadness. Then there is the CACC name itself. ‘Climate’ and ‘change’ go together like ‘weather’ and ‘change’. The two are inseparable. The weather changes from hour to hour, day to day and month to month. Imagine a ‘Campaign Against Weather Change’. It would be absurd.

Climate is big weather. Karen Bice gives the following definition: climate “is simply weather ‘averaged’ over a time period of one year or more”.38 In other words, there is nothing fixed about the climate. Climate change has never ceased, is ongoing and must therefore be considered inevitable. Notions of a static, an unchanging climate, are, therefore, to put it mildly, misconceived.

Anyway, according to its ‘mission statement’, the CACC exists to “influence those with the greatest power” to “minimise” the “harmful effects of climate change” with the “utmost speed and resolution”. Flattering courtiers similarly pleaded to Canute, the 11th century king of Norway, Denmark and England, to reverse the incoming tide. Needless to say, as he famously showed (purportedly on Thorney Island), no-one, not even he, could pull off such a feat. Nor, despite CACC “street demonstrations” and avoidance of “detailed questions” in the attempt to “bring together as many people as possible”, can we really expect “those with the greatest power” to agree an “international climate treaty” that will actually “minimise” the “harmful effects of climate change”.39

Well, admittedly, since that CACC ‘mission statement’ was first written, an “international climate treaty” has been agreed. With much fanfare, the Cop21 Paris agreement was adopted on December 12 2015. Signed on April 22 2016 by 195 parties, it supposedly became effective on November 4 2016. But will this international climate treaty really “minimise” the “harmful effects of climate change”? Hardly: CO2 emissions continue to rise.40

Surely then, to “minimise” those “harmful effects” our sights must be set far higher than “street demonstrations” (or the stunts of Greenpeace, Just Stop Oil and Extinction Rebellion). We must talk about capitalism. We must talk about socialism. We must talk about organising the working class into the ruling class. The CACC ‘mission statement’ needs more than a long-overdue update. No, an entirely different kind of politics is needed.41

Dialectics

There are those who give discounting nature a seemingly sophisticated philosophical justification by taking their cue from the young Georg Lukács. Interestingly, not John Rees - a self-declared admirer of Lukács, especially his writings on method, the party, class and class consciousness.42 In History and class consciousness Lukács admonished Engels because - following Hegel - he “extended” the dialectic into nature, instead of confining it to historical change, thought and the interaction of human subject and object.43 As if nature does not obey the same three “most general” dialectical laws as history, thought and society, namely:

1. The law of the transformation of quantity into quality and vice versa.

2. The law of the interpenetration of opposites.

3. The law of the negation of the negation.44

To suggest otherwise is surely to deviate in the direction of idealism.45

Nonetheless, the anti-Engels theme was enthusiastically taken up by the Frankfurt school, then in the 1960s by the New Left and finally by the Eurocommunists. Engels was blamed for the Second International’s ‘passive evolutionism’, Stalin’s diamat, even the horrors of the 1930s purges - the original sin being located in Anti-Dühring and the Dialectics of nature.

As an opening gambit, the ‘crude’ Engels was cleaved away from his life-long friend, collaborator and co-thinker, Marx. A travesty still peddled on the academic left: eg, Kohei Saito (an unashamed advocate of popular frontism).46 In the main, however, this disparate trend has given up on all Marxist, socialist and progressive pretensions. Mainly as atomised individuals, they have clutched at mainstream liberalism - that or outright reaction and despairing obscurantism.

Primary source

Back to the historical Karl 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.”

A penetrating critique of anthropocentric delusions. Certainly, socialism, 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 nature’s revenge: declining soil productivity, desertification, climate shifts, etc. 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.”47 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’.

Yes, 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 as the Physiocrats endlessly repeated, it germinates in the soil, grows and duly ripens without human agency. Nature’s gifts of rain and sunshine are all that is needed.

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)

While I cannot possibly hope to reach such poetic heights, I too get pleasure, even rapture from a love of nature. Sunday morning outings to Ashridge Forest with 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 south-western 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. Walking on Hampstead Heath, picking blackberries, running into the occasional urban fox, following the nesting swans and the progress of their cygnets, the cormorants drying 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, profoundly 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.”48 Capital, as we have argued, has but one interest - vampiric 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 consumption of an ever greater range of commodities. Besides being of capitalism, the working class is uniquely opposed to capitalism.

We have made the argument before and it is worth making again. The political economy of the working class more than challenges capital: it points beyond capital, not only in terms of its perspective, but to the total reorganisation of society and, with that, the ending of humanity’s damaged, brutalised, self-defeating 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”.49

The “enormous waste” under capitalism outraged Marx. The by-products of industry, agriculture and human consumption are dumped on nature in the form of landfill sites, sewage releases, soot particles, greenhouse gases, microplastics, mercury, lead and chemical pollution. Capital volume three contains a section entitled ‘Utilisation of the excretions of production’. Here Marx outlines his commitment to the scientific “reduction” and “re-employment” of waste.50

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 post-1850 capitalism.51 A system which produces for the sake of production, which accumulates for the sake of accumulation, which crowds vast numbers into soulless, crime-ridden concrete jungles and simultaneously denudes nature through 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”.52

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, Colombia 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).53 Wolves should, once again, sing 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 now 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 vision of abundance. On the contrary, the communist social order has every reason to rationally economise and minimise all necessary inputs.

  1. A beginning shamelessly adapted from Leo Tolstoy’s famous opening line in Anna Karenina; that and expanding upon Marx’s logic in Capital. See K Marx Capital Vol 1, Moscow 1970, p578. Note that the term, ‘interaction’, is deliberately chosen over the usual formulation of ‘exchange’, when it comes to nature. Our impact on the rest of nature has tended to be decidedly negative - not only, but especially with the post-1850 epoch of global industry and global agriculture.↩︎

  2. actuaries.org.uk/media-release/current-climate-policies-risk-catastrophic-societal-and-economic-impacts.↩︎

  3. B McGuire The fate of the world: a history of the climate crisis Manchester 2026, pi.↩︎

  4. For anyone who might be tempted to dismiss including the cosmos here as overreach, consider, for one moment, the fate of the dinosaurs. Some 65 million years ago an asteroid of about the size of mount Everest slammed into what is now the Gulf of Mexico and produced an explosion equivalent to a billion Hiroshima-sized nuclear bombs. Besides the immediate impact with its resulting earthquakes, 100-metre-high tsunami and global wildfires, the estimated 325 billion tons of CO2, SO2 and H2O debris, which plumed up into the stratosphere, produced a prolonged ‘nuclear winter’. With even photosynthesis severely impaired, 100% of the non-avian dinosaurs went extinct, along with around 50% of all other land and marine flora and fauna (see science.nasa.gov/earth/deep-impact-and-the-mass-extinction-of-species-65-million-years-ago).↩︎

  5. spaceplace.nasa.gov/sun-heat/en.↩︎

  6. www.asml.com/en/technology/lithography-principles/light-and-lasers; medium.com/the-low-end-disruptor/building-with-starlight-inside-the-impossible-physics-of-euv-lithography-that-builds-all-chips-b1c37f48ed7f; www.reuters.com/world/china/asml-unveils-euv-light-source-advance-that-could-yield-50-more-chips-by-2030-2026-02-23.↩︎

  7. Google Quantum AI and Collaborators, ‘Quantum error correction below the surface code threshold’ Nature Vol 636, December 9 2024, pp527-28.↩︎

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

  9. marx21us.org/about.↩︎

  10. www.socialist.ca/ourstand.↩︎

  11. www.solidarity.net.au/about-us.↩︎

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

  13. T Bhattacharya (ed) Social reproduction theory: remapping class, recentering oppression London 2017, ppix, 1.↩︎

  14. M Lazzarato ‘Immaterial labour’ in P Virno and M Hardt (eds) Radical thought in Italy: a potential politics Minneapolis MN 1996, pp133-47.↩︎

  15. M Hardt and A Negri Empire Cambridge MA 2000, pp280, 289-92.↩︎

  16. www.wsws.org/en/articles/2009/03/aigg-m19.html and www.wsws.org/en/articles/2025/12/19/ddqe-d19.html.↩︎

  17. The Communist September 19 2025.↩︎

  18. Here we find it explicitly stated: “Labour is, together with nature, the source of all wealth” (A Woods and T Grant Reason in revolt: Marxist philosophy and modern science London 2012, p329).↩︎

  19. Quoted in J Conrad ‘Nature’s goods and services’ Weekly Worker July 24 2025.↩︎

  20. For Nick Wrack’s letter of resignation as editor of Militant in May 1996, see ‘Climate of mistrust’ Weekly Worker June 26 1997.↩︎

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

  22. This is what Max Weber says about capitalists: “He avoids ostentation and unnecessary expenditure, as well as the conscious enjoyment of his power, and is embarrassed by the outward signs of the social recognition which he receives ... His manner of life is, in other words, often of a certain ascetic tendency ... He gets nothing out of his wealth for himself, except the irrational sense of having done his job well” (The protestant ethic and the spirit of capitalism London 2002 p21).↩︎

  23. 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.↩︎

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  31. 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.↩︎

  32. K Marx and F Engels MECW Vol 24, London 1989, p81.↩︎

  33. K Marx and F Engels MECW Vol 26, London 1990, p500.↩︎

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

  35. Lassalle secretly offered to do a deal with Otto von Bismarck. That way, said Engels, the Bismarck state would have gotten its “own bodyguard proletariat to keep the political activity of the bourgeoisie in check” - see K Marx and F Engels MECW Vol 24, London 1988, p364.↩︎

  36. Not that Smith and Ricardo stood in isolation. Far from it. The French philosopher, Count Destutt de Tracy, explicitly wrote in 1817 that “labour is the source of all wealth” …. “Whence do these idle men derive their revenues? Is it not from the rent paid to them out of the profits of those who employ their capitals - that is to say of those who with their own funds hire labour which produces more than it costs - in a word the industrious men? To these then we must always remount, in order to find the source of all wealth. It is they who really nourish the hireling whom even the others employ” (A Destutt de Tracy A treatise on political economy Auburn AL 2009, p165). Translated and first published in America by his friend, Thomas Jefferson, in 1817.↩︎

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

  38. web.archive.org/web/20070621060432/www.beloit.edu/~SEPM/Earth_Works/Plate_Movements.html.↩︎

  39. www.campaigncc.org/aboutus/missionstatement.↩︎

  40. oilprice.com/The-Environment/Global-Warming/Carbon-Emissions-OnTrack-To-Reach-An-All-Time-High.html.↩︎

  41. For my critique of CACC see The little red climate book London 2023, pp9-10.↩︎

  42. John Rees provides a defence and what he sees as a corrective for Lukács by arguing for two different, separate dialectics - one for society, the other for nature. He goes on: “the natural realm is a persistent element in human history, that human beings will remain partly subject to its laws, and that it is, therefore, inadmissible to compartmentalise the dialectic in the way that, by a sin of omission, Lukács did” (The algebra of revolution: the dialectic and the classical Marxist tradition London 1998, p252). “[P]artly subject to its laws”! No, comrade Rees, we humans can exploit, take advantage of nature’s laws, but we can never escape them. Eg, astronauts can escape Earth’s gravitational pull and float about in their capsules. But to get to the moon they rely on Earth’s gravity as a slingshot. In other words, they remain entirely subject to nature’s laws.↩︎

  43. G Lukács History and class consciousness: studies in Marxist dialectics London 1968, p24n6.↩︎

  44. F Engels MECW Vol 25, London 1987, p356.↩︎

  45. Although the question of the dialectics of nature did not directly feature, Gregory Zinoviev famously denounced Lukács in his political report to the 5th Congress of Comintern on June 26 1924: he branded him a “professorial revisionist” (archivo-obrero.com/protokoll-des-funfter-kongress-der-kommunistischen-internationale-1924).↩︎

  46. See K Saito Marx in the Anthropocene: towards the idea of degrowth communism Cambridge 2022.↩︎

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

  48. M Lebowitz Beyond Capital Basingstoke 2003, pp130-31.↩︎

  49. K Marx Capital Vol 1, Moscow 1970, pp505-06.↩︎

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

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

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

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