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Knowledge is implicitly assumed to form an increasingly important, or even the dominant source of values for today’s knowledge based organizations. It is rare, however, to encounter writings questioning what is ‘value’, enquiring into its provenance, or examining its distribution amongst organization’s stakeholders. This chapter asks these very questions, focusing on Marx’s (1976) formulation of value theory. Divided into four parts, it begins by giving a basic overview of the labour theory of value, as developed by Marx in mid 19th century, industrialised England. The second part examines Roy Jacques’ (2000) critique of Marx, his rejection of the adequacy of ‘labour’ as a concept for analysing contemporary value production, and his call for a ‘knowledge theory of value’. The third section focuses on labour process theorist Paul Thompson (2005) and his challenge to the idea that labour and knowledge are fundamentally different. The fourth part extends this concern with ‘other’ forms of contemporary labour to a more global level by examining De Angelis’ (2006) and Retort’s (2005) suggestion that the global economy today is driven by acts of enclosure and ‘primitive accumulation.’

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Planting trees is widely regarded as a positive contribution to combating climate change and establishing a future-proof, green economy. Yet, there is mounting evidence from many tropical, sub-tropical and temperate regions of the world that tree plantations can have multiple negative economic, social and environmental impacts. These are not always accounted for by the private and public institutions who have heavily supported the forestry sector in recent decades. This ‘tropical provocation’ reports from a recent fieldtrip to the Wallmapu, the region the Mapuche Indigenous people call their ancestral homeland. There, I saw with my own eyes that the so-called green economy does not work for Mapuche communities, as they experience extreme water shortages, wildfires and other plundering from what they regard as their territory.