The Deployment of Capital on Nature

Abstract

This article analyzes the form of capitalist appropriation of the geographic space created for nature and the mechanisms of the market’s deployment of natural common goods. The colonization of new territories, the processes of incorporation or subsumption of nature are a condition inherent to capitalist accumulation and not a transitory or new element. While the forms of occupation and territorialization change over time, it is the form of reification and fetishization of nature what is characteristic of capitalist societies. In this way, we should understand the appropriation, signification, exploitation, monopolization and resulting scarcity of natural common goods as a contradiction between capital and nature. This contradiction can also be interpreted by examining the forms of expansion, infinite growth, technological revolution and the spatial solution of capital itself. We consider that a critical view of capitalism is key, above all the theoretical premises of environmental economy, including the perspective of the ecological economy. In the first part of this text, we will concentrate on that argument and then we will develop five contemporary forms of the impact of capital on nature in pursuit of use value, which we have described in terms of processes of bio-commodification, hyper-urbanization, mega-infrastructure, extractivism and agribusiness.