The making and survival of capitalist conservation depends upon the creation and maintenance of contradictory class relations based on alienated labour. The literature has, however, often ignored this aspect. Looking at capital as a contradictory class relation and through the study of a tourism-oriented protected area and three reforestation payment for ecosystem service projects in Senegal, this article shows how capital’s instrumentalisation of conservation requires a constant adaption to workers’ struggles against alienation. In the case here analysed, this adaptation manifests in the avoidance, silencing and appropriation of workers’ mobilisations against forest privatisation and labour exploitation. This resistance to workers’ disalienation reinforces not only capitalist class relations but also state, neo-colonial and white people’s power.