Why Capitalism Relies on Nature and Care Work It Does Not Pay For
April 1, 2026
Dawn, Winter Ridge, BLM rangeland, southern Oregon. Photo: Jeffrey St. Clair.
Modern economies depend on a range of essential inputs that are not fully priced or exchanged in markets. These include ecosystem functions—such as clean air, climate regulation, and biodiversity—as well as care and reproductive work, including raising children, maintaining households, and supporting the elderly. Despite their immense value, they have been privatized or commodified only to a limited extent. This presents a tension at the core of capitalism: a system expected to be expansionist and to convert ever more aspects of human life into markets continues to rely on forms of nature and human activity that resist enclosure, ownership, and pricing, even as they are subject to degradation. In this sense, the system depends on conditions it does not fully reproduce and may, over time, undermine.
One explanation for this limited commodification is that many ecosystem functions are inherently difficult to define, enclose, and trade. Even the term “ecosystem services” can be somewhat misleading, as it suggests a bounded, deliverable output, whereas many of these processes are better understood as ongoing functions or flows within complex systems. They are not easily reduced to discrete units of ownership, and in many cases, they are mobile, such as the air we breathe or species that migrate across regions. Others are not mobile enough to capitalize on, as their benefits are tied to specific places—you can only make use of the shade of a tree where it stands. These functions cannot be stored, and their reproduction depends on intact ecosystems rather than isolated production processes. Most are also non-exclusive, meaning that many people benefit from them simultaneously. Those natural resources that can be more easily enclosed and measured—such as farmland or mineral deposits—have largely already been privatized, leaving behind a set of ecological functions that are structurally resistant to commodification.
The limited development of markets for nature reflects these constraints. Environmental markets that do exist are typically not spontaneous outcomes of market expansion but are created through administrative or institutional frameworks. Carbon trading systems such as the EU’s Emissions Trading System are a prominent example. Their effectiveness depends less on market dynamics than on externally imposed limits, such as emissions caps set by governments. Within these systems, market mechanisms may determine the allocation of emissions among participants, but they do not necessarily generate new value in aggregate or drive capital accumulation as conventional markets do. The overall level of emissions is set politically, not by supply and demand, which means that the “market” operates within boundaries that it does not determine. In that sense, what is often described as a market for nature is, to a significant extent, an administratively constructed mechanism.
A related line of argument questions whether nature can be meaningfully assigned a monetary value. If money is understood not simply as a representation of value but as the system through which value is defined and measured, then those aspects of the world that are not priced may appear to have no value within economic systems. This turns a common assumption on its head. Rather than money reflecting pre-existing values, it may be more accurate to say that monetary systems play a central role in determining what counts as value in the first place. Ecosystems may therefore be treated as valueless not because they lack importance, but because they fall outside the forms of valuation that markets can recognize. Attempts to calculate the value of ecosystem “services” can be seen as efforts to translate complex, interdependent processes into monetary terms, often with limited success and significant simplification.
A similar dynamic can be observed in relation to care and reproductive work. Activities such as education, cooking, childcare, and eldercare have increasingly been moved out of households and into wage labor, with these services provided in both public and private sectors. In this sense, capitalism has expanded into domains previously organized outside the market. By making these activities into salaried work, economic activity is extended, as wages are spent in markets or collected through taxation and redistributed by governments, which in turn fund further wage-based activity. This creates a reinforcing dynamic in which more aspects of life are drawn into monetary exchange systems. At the same time, much of this work remains only partially commodified or continues to take place outside formal markets. The generation and maintenance of human life—sometimes described as social reproduction—remain essential to the functioning of the economy, yet they are often undervalued in economic terms or treated as external to the production of value.
The partial commodification of care work also highlights how market expansion can intersect with broader social and cultural changes. The movement of household labor into wage labor has been associated with shifts in gender roles and increased labor force participation, particularly among women, while also creating new markets for services such as childcare, prepared food, and domestic labor-saving technologies. In some cases, these developments have been framed as forms of increased choice or liberation, even as they expand the reach of market systems into everyday life. Historical examples of marketing have explicitly linked convenience and consumption to such narratives, illustrating how economic and cultural shifts can reinforce one another. This does not necessarily resolve the underlying tension between market valuation and the activities required to sustain human life, but rather reorganizes how that tension is expressed.
The parallel between nature and care work points to a broader structural feature. Many forms of labor and natural processes widely recognized as necessary for sustaining human life are not fully captured by systems of monetary valuation. If economic value is defined primarily by prices, then activities and processes that resist pricing may appear to have little or no value, despite their fundamental importance. This is not simply a gap in accounting. It reflects a deeper misalignment between what is economically rewarded and what is required for the continued reproduction of both ecological and social systems.
The consequences of this tension can be observed in both environmental and social domains. The degradation of ecosystems is well documented and has direct implications for the continued functioning of natural systems on which economic activity depends. At the same time, there are concerns about the erosion of social structures that support care and reproduction, including households, extended families, and communities. Some of these functions have been taken over by the state or the market, while others have diminished without clear substitutes. In this sense, the degradation of natural systems has a parallel in the strain placed on systems of social reproduction, as both are drawn into and reshaped by economic pressures. Broader cultural shifts toward individualism may also weaken non-market forms of care. These developments have been discussed in relation to declining fertility rates, rising loneliness, and pressures on systems of care—sometimes interpreted as part of broader structural pressures, although the causal relationships remain debated.
These dynamics can also be understood through the concept of the commons. Many ecosystem functions and aspects of social reproduction have characteristics of common resources: they are shared, difficult to exclude users from, and vulnerable to overuse or degradation. When such resources are subjected to market pressures, they may be transformed into sources of profit, thereby intensifying competition and straining the underlying systems. The interaction between markets and commons is therefore not neutral. Introducing market logics into shared systems can alter patterns of use and responsibility in ways that do not necessarily support long-term sustainability.
Historical examples illustrate how economic systems can draw people into market relations even where alternative forms of livelihood exist. In colonial contexts, for instance, taxes were sometimes imposed in monetary form, requiring individuals to earn wages in order to meet those obligations. This helped to create labor markets and integrate populations into cash-based economies, even in settings where subsistence systems had previously dominated. As noted by Wangari Maathai, such policies effectively compelled participation in wage labor without formal coercion by making access to money a condition of social and economic survival. These dynamics highlight how participation in market systems is often shaped by institutional structures rather than being purely a matter of individual choice.
Taken together, these dynamics suggest that capitalism depends on forms of value that it neither fully recognizes nor reproduces through market mechanisms. The reliance on unpriced ecosystem functions and undervalued care and reproductive work highlights limits in how economic systems account for the conditions of their own existence. Rather than being peripheral, these “free” inputs are central to economic activity, even as they remain only partially integrated into systems of exchange and valuation. This creates a structural tension in which the system depends on resources and forms of labor that it does not adequately sustain, raising the possibility that it may, over time, erode the very foundations on which it relies.
This article was produced for the Observatory by Earth • Food • Life, a project of the Independent Media Institute. It is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0).
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