Metabolic Rift
물질대사 균열
A theory holding that capitalist production creates an irreparable rupture in the metabolic interaction between human society and nature. In Capital Volume 3, Marx analyzed how large-scale landed property and the town-country division severed the nutrient cycle of the soil, producing an 'irreparable rift in the interdependent process of social metabolism.' John Bellamy Foster systematized the concept in his 1999 article and in Marx's Ecology (2000), reconstructing it as the core of Marx's ecological critique. By showing how capital's logic of endless accumulation destroys the very conditions of nature's reproduction, the metabolic rift framework reveals environmental crisis as an immanent contradiction of the capitalist mode of production.
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Sources
- Wikipedia (EN) overview of the concept: origins in Marx's Capital, Foster's systematization, Liebig's soil chemistry, town-country division, and subsequent developments including carbon rift
- monthlyreview.org John Bellamy Foster, 'Marx and the Rift in the Universal Metabolism of Nature,' Monthly Review (Dec 2013): Foster's own account of the metabolic rift concept, its dialectical-materialist foundation, and the connection to Marx's labor theory of metabolism between society and nature
- johnbellamyfoster.org Foster, 'Marx's Theory of Metabolic Rift: Classical Foundations for Environmental Sociology,' American Journal of Sociology 105(2), 1999: the foundational article that coined and developed the term