When everything becomes capital.
In recent years I have been increasingly struck by the use of the word capital in contexts that seem far removed from the strictly economic sphere. We hear of human capital, natural capital, social capital. Expressions that have spread through common and institutional language, becoming almost neutral. Yet they are not.
To call nature capital means to reduce it to a measurable, countable, monetizable resource. Forests, oceans, rivers or entire ecosystems are presented as deposits of economic value, instruments at the service of growth. No longer living entities with their own autonomy, but functional objects whose yield and loss can be calculated.
The same happens with so-called human capital. Language turns people, skills, bodies and relationships into productive factors. Individuals with desires, limits and rights are redefined as resources to be optimized, corporate assets to be put to use. In this perspective the value of each person coincides with their capacity to generate profit, leaving in the shadows all that does not directly produce economic growth: care, fragility, the time subtracted from work.
Language is never neutral. As Karl Polanyi wrote, capitalist modernity tends to “disembed” the economy from society, while at the same time forcing society as a whole to conform to the logic of the market. Speaking of natural or human capital already means accepting that this logic can encompass everything. It is a process of semantic colonization: it penetrates words, reshapes perception, and reorients our imagination.
Pierre Bourdieu also warned against an overly extensive use of the concept of capital. His attempt to deconstruct forms of symbolic power – cultural, social, economic – was not intended to naturalize economic logic, but to reveal its implications of domination. The current abuse of the word “capital,” however, seems to function in the opposite way: not as a critical tool, but as a further expansion of economic rationality into spheres that should remain autonomous.
Silvia Federici, for her part, has shown how capitalism was also built on the capacity to subjugate and render invisible reproductive labor, in other words life itself, transforming it into a free resource. Speaking of human capital or even capital of care risks repeating the same gesture: disguising, under a technical language, the appropriation of what should never be commodified.
Yet another possibility exists. We can describe water, air and forests as commons. We can speak of knowledge, creativity and relationships as social wealth that belongs to no one and cannot be measured in terms of profit. Restoring weight to words means remembering that not everything can be translated into economic value.
What allows us to live – ecosystems, networks of affection, practices of daily care – is not capital. It is the very basis of life, fragile and irreplaceable. Precisely because it is not capital, it resists reduction to a commodity and remains something we can only inhabit, share and protect.
