Ecological Marx and the Metabolic Rift
This work ofrecovery ofthe ecological themes in the work ofMarx and Engels is associated with a school of ecological socialism that draws directly on this interpretation of their legacy, developing the key concepts of ‘metabolism' and a postulated ‘metabolic rift' between capitalism and the cyclical processes underlying sustainable life (Burkett 1999; Foster 2000).
J. Bellamy Foster has been the most prolific writer in this tradition, using Marx's account of the disruption of the cycling of plant nutrients as a model. Drawing on modern scientific ecology, Foster generalizes the idea of metabolic (or ‘ecological') rifts from the specific cases of the nitrogen and phosphorus cycles to include the carbon and water cycles, and, through that, to include into a Marxian account a causal link between capitalism's metabolic rift with the rest of nature and each of the key components in our current ecological crisis. Of the nine planetary boundaries identified by Rockstrom et al. (2009) most are already being approached or already breached by the effects of economic expansion on a global scale. Three breaches are particularly emphasized - the disruption of the nitrogen cycle, climate change and biodiversity loss:Capitalism's social metabolism is increasingly in contradiction with the natural metabolism, producing various metabolic rifts and forms of ecological degradation that threaten to undermine ecosystems.
(Foster, Clark and York 2010: 406)
Foster, Clark, Angus, Magdoff and other writers in this tradition have continued in the first two decades of the twenty-first century to apply the ‘metabolic rift' perspective to a range of substantive socio-ecological problems (Magdoff, Foster and Buttel 2000; Foster 2009; Foster, Clark and York 2010; Empson 2014; Foster and Clark 2020). Their engagement with contemporary science and politics, too, has taken them beyond a rather exegetical defence of Marx into further developments in their perspective.
The depth of the capitalist transformation of the face of nature is confirmed in the new geological notion that the earth has entered a new epoch, the ‘Anthropocene': possibly the most ephemeral (Angus 2016)! Their engagement with contemporary science also saves this group of writers from the widespread and potentially disastrous tendency among many environmentalists to reduce our ecological crisis to the single existential threat of climate change. One-sided and technocratic approaches to this threat, as, for example, advocated by Bill Gates (2021), in abstraction from a deeper understanding of the socioeconomic drivers of a many-dimensional crisis in our relation to the rest of nature, are likely to intensify that crisis, rather than offer resolution. Mass tree-planting to sequester atmospheric carbon, without attention to the pre-existing habitats, runs the risk of undermining biodiversity, and, as I write, the Covid-19 pandemic is offering further confirmation of the need to recognize the interdependence of the different ecological threats confronting humans.