Metabolic Rift

Formation of the concept

It was John Bellamy Foster, not Marx, who coined the term 'metabolic rift'. Starting with his book Marx's Ecology: Materialism and Nature, Foster argues that Marx theorized a rupture in the metabolic interaction between humanity and the rest of nature, emanating from capitalist agricultural production and the growing division between town and country. The starting point lies in Marx's early work in the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts on species-being and the human-nature relationship. Foster renders Marx's own formulation as the "irreparable rift in the interdependent process of social metabolism, a metabolism prescribed by the natural laws of life itself", and treats the metabolic-rift theory as a theory of ecological crisis, an insurmountable contradiction of capitalist commodity production.

Historical background

Marx's writings on metabolism developed during England's "second" agricultural revolution (1815–1880), characterized by the development of soil chemistry and growing use of chemical fertilizer. Soil exhaustion became a key concern, and demand for fertilizer drove bone and guano importation, including the raiding of Napoleonic battlefields and catacombs and the Guano Islands Act (1856) in the United States.

Foster argues Marx's theory drew on agricultural chemistry unknown to Ricardo and Malthus. German chemist Justus von Liebig's Organic Chemistry in Its Applications to Agriculture and Physiology (1840) gave the first convincing explanation of the role of soil nutrients in plant growth, and in 1842 Liebig extended the term metabolism (Stoffwechsel) from bodily material exchanges to the biochemical processes of natural systems. On nutrient cycling, Liebig held that if all solid and fluid excrements of town inhabitants could be collected and returned to the farmers, soil productivity could be maintained almost unimpaired for ages. Liebig's critical introduction to the 1862 edition of his Agricultural Chemistry had a major influence on Marx, who had studied Liebig since the 1850s.

Marx rooted his social-ecological metabolism in Liebig's analysis but connected it to the labor process. Throughout history humans appropriated nature through labor, so society's metabolism with nature is "a universal and perpetual condition"; fertility is not a natural quality of the soil but bound up with the social relations of the time. Capital Volume 1 states that capitalist production collects the population in great centres, disturbing the metabolic interaction between man and the earth and preventing the return to the soil of its constituent elements consumed as food and clothing. Thus "all progress in capitalist agriculture is a progress in the art, not only of robbing the worker, but of robbing the soil", simultaneously undermining the original sources of all wealth, the soil and the worker. With capitalist expansion, cities looked further afield for resource and waste flows; nutrients went to cities while human and animal waste did not return to the land, producing a one-way movement, a "robbing of the soil". Marx thereby linked the crisis of pollution in cities with the crisis of soil depletion, holding that the rift resulted from the antagonistic separation of town and country.

Distinctions and debates

The central contribution of the metabolic-rift perspective is to locate socio-ecological contradictions as internal to the development of capitalism. Later socialists expanded on Marx's ideas: Nikolai Bukharin in Historical Materialism (1921), and Karl Kautsky in The Agrarian Question (1899), which developed questions of the exploitation of the countryside by the town and the "fertilizer treadmill". James O'Connor saw capitalist undervaluing of nature as leading to economic crisis, his "second contradiction of capitalism".

Foster and Jason W. Moore diverge sharply. For Moore the distinction between social and natural systems is empirically false and theoretically arbitrary, and he views metabolisms as relations of human and extra-human natures. Nine months after Foster's 1999 article appeared, Moore argued the origins of the metabolic rift lay not in the 19th century but in the rise of capitalism during the "long" 16th century, and that there were not one but many metabolic rifts. As carbon dioxide released by capitalist production increased, the theory of a "carbon rift" emerged (Clark and York). Left critics of Foster's reading charge that the metabolic-rift perspective falls prey to a "Cartesian binary" separating nature and society and thus violates dialectical analysis, and that the rift concept is "non-reflexive" in denying the dialectical reciprocity of the biophysical environment.

Foster argues in a 2013 article that Marx employed the concept of the "universal metabolism of nature" to account for the wider natural realm within which society emerged and exists: production mediated between human existence and this universal metabolism, while society and production remained internal to and dependent on a larger earthly metabolism that preceded human life. Marx did not argue that a sustainable relation to the Earth was an automatic result of the transition to socialism; he held there was a need for planning and measures addressing the division of labor and population between town and country and for restoration and improvement of the soil.

The concept's scope has expanded beyond its original focus on soil fertility and the critique of capitalist agriculture: Clausen and Clark extended it to marine ecology, Moore to broader global environmental crises, and Fischer-Kowalski traced the application of the biological concept of metabolism to social systems.

Examples

Metabolic-rift analysis has been used to analyze capitalist contradictions across planetary boundaries, the carbon metabolism, soil depletion, fertilizer production, the ocean metabolism, fisheries exploitation, deforestation, hydrological cycles, mountaintop removal, livestock management, agro-fuels, global land grabs, and the town-country contradiction. Marx himself stressed the global character of the rift, arguing that "for a century and a half England has indirectly exported the soil of Ireland without even allowing its cultivators the means for replacing the constituents of the exhausted soil". In city-planning circles a "new eco-urbanism" seeks to internalize energy, water, food and waste flows through "closed-loop systems"; critics note such efforts take place under actually existing neoliberalization, so healing metabolic rifts requires both social and ecological transformations.