Tag Archives | metabolic rift

Ian Angus discusses the scientific developments that led Marx to develop metabolic rift theory in the 1800s, and a new generation to rediscover it the 21st century.

Marx and Engels were witnesses to and keen analysts of the environmental problems inherent in nineteenth-century capitalism. They wrote about the depletion of coal reserves, the destruction of forests, and, especially, about diminishing soil fertility, which Foster recognizes was the most pressing issue of the day.

rs21 member Greg Peakin explains the concept of metabolic rift, and why it is an important tool for climate organising today.

“The expropriation of the mass of the people from the soil forms the basis of the capitalist mode of production.” (Karl Marx)

“All progress in capitalist agriculture is a progress in the art, not only of robbing the worker, but of robbing the soil.” (Karl Marx)

Karl Marx’s analysis of capitalism provides the key to understanding the environmental catastrophe we’re witnessing, and to gaining a clearer picture of what’s needed to repair our damaged relationship with the Earth.

One Marxist line of inquiry into environmental problems has outshone all others in creativity and productivity: the theory of the metabolic rift.

Beginning a series on the role of fishing in the birth and spread of capitalism, and the role of capitalism in today’s mass extinction of ocean life.

The development in 1909, by the German chemists Fritz Haber and Carl Bosch of a technique for taking Nitrogen out of the atmosphere to produce ammonia (NH3) allowed for the production of synthetic fertilisers (and explosives) on an industrial scale.

Despite our assumed position as Earth’s dominant species, we have seen our society effectively shut down by a virus. Friedrich Engels’s caution against hubris, written over a century and half ago, seems particularly apt.

No person is an island. It takes a village. Circle of Life. We are stardust. Seven generations. These truisms reference connections between people and what we owe each other. Appealing to chaos theory, an action, no matter how small, dominoes around the world.