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(picture: Heatwave, 2017 © Gerwyn Davies)
In June 2026, most of Europe was suffering a terrifying, prolonged heat wave that broke many records. Since I am not a specialist in analysing all the aspects of a heat wave, I will limit myself to what I see as the fateful and potentially catastrophic consequences of capitalist market logic when it regulates how we react to a heat wave. Capitalist logic, at its most basic, is characterized by the primacy of exchange value over use value: the goal of capitalist circulation is not to create more use value but to increase exchange value. Why is this primacy so catastrophic in the conditions of environmental crises like heat waves?
The barely concealed irrationality of the predominance of exchange value was best formulated two centuries ago by James Maitland, 8th Earl of Lauderdale, known in France as “Citizen Maitland” (he was in Paris during the French Revolution, was a personal friend of Jean‑Paul Marat, and helped to found the British Society of the Friends of the People in 1792). He is known as the author of the so‑called “Lauderdale paradox,” which asserts an inverse correlation between public wealth and private riches: an increase in the latter often serves to diminish the former. “Public wealth,” he wrote, “may be accurately defined to consist of all that man desires, as useful or delightful to him.” Such goods have use value and thus constitute wealth. But private riches, as opposed to wealth, require something additional (i.e., an added limitation), consisting “of all that man desires as useful or delightful to him; which exists in a degree of scarcity.” Scarcity, in other words, is a necessary requirement for something to have value in exchange and to augment private riches. But this is not the case for public wealth, which encompasses all value in use, and thus includes not only what is scarce but also what is abundant. This paradox led Lauderdale to argue that increases in scarcity in such formerly abundant but necessary elements of life as air, water, and food would, if exchange values were then attached to them, enhance individual private riches and indeed the riches of the country—conceived of as “the sum‑total of individual riches”—but only at the expense of the common wealth. For example, if one could monopolize water that had previously been freely available by placing a fee on wells, the measured riches of the nation would be increased at the expense of the growing thirst of the population.
This last example has gained an additional actuality today, when the privatization of water is on the neoliberal agenda: the owners of water‑supply companies get richer while the mass of those who need water gets poorer. The underlying logic of this paradox is clear: for something to count on the market, it has to have value, and value is an attribute of only those objects that are scarce – if they are freely and abundantly available, they cannot be sold and have no value. The most precious wealth of a society consists precisely of objects that are freely available, like water or air, but they do not count as values that make you rich. If water is easily available, nobody gets rich from it; if its supply is controlled by private companies, those who own these companies get rich, so in a technical sense of wealth as embodied in values, there is more wealth in society, since freely available water doesn’t count as wealth.
One should nonetheless be careful not to ignore the libidinal logic that sustains this irrationality: the role of envy and comparative advantage. If a resource like water or air is commonly available as a free gift of nature, it doesn’t count as wealth – it only counts as such when it differentiates me (who owns or controls it) from others, when it gives me a superiority over them. In other words, wealth counts as wealth only if there are those who are not wealthy. We encounter here a properly Hegelian paradox formulated already by Epicurus: “Poverty, if measured by the natural end, is great wealth; but wealth, if not limited, is great poverty.” If water is freely available, we are all equally poor on account of our great wealth; if only some people possess and control water, their excessive (unlimited) wealth means the poverty of others.
