Marx's Theory of Metabolism in the Age of Global Ecological Crisis
The Neglect of Marx's Ecological Interest
For a long time, Marx's interest in ecological issues was neglected, even among Marxist scholars.
Marx's socialism was characterized as 'Promethean,' advocating for the domination of nature, a view reinforced by environmental catastrophes in the USSR (e.g., Aral Sea collapse, Chernobyl).
This led to antagonism between the Red (Marxists) and the Green (environmentalists) in the 20th century.
However, the collapse of 'actually existing socialism' and the rise of neoliberal globalization led to further ecological degradation.
The ineffectiveness of market-based solutions renewed interest in Marxian economics.
The decline of orthodox Marxism allowed for theoretical discussions without political constraints, leading to the rediscovery of Marx's ecology.
Istvan Mészáros's Theory of Social Metabolism
Istvan Mészáros's theory of 'social metabolism' paved the way for rediscovering Marx's ecology.
By investigating Mészáros’s theory of metabolism, mainly developed in Beyond Capital and The Necessity of Social Control, Marx’s ecological theory of ‘metabolic rift’ can be more firmly founded upon his critique of political economy
Clarification of Mészáros's theory helps classify the three dimensions of 'metabolic rift' in Marx's Capital.
Correspondingly, there are three dimensions of shifting the ecological rift, which is why capital proves so elastic and resilient in the face of economic and ecological crises
'Metabolic shifts' never solve the deep contradictions of capitalist accumulation but create new crises, intensifying contradictions on a wider scale.
Rosa Luxemburg's application of 'metabolism' to global unequal exchange in The Accumulation of Capital highlights the problematic reception of Marx's theory, leading to its neglect.
The Suppression of Marx's Idea of Ecosocialism
Since the 1970s, Marx was accused of a naïve 'Promethean attitude,' glorifying human conquest of nature.
Critics argued that Marx's productivist view ignored natural limits and praised the free manipulation of nature.
They questioned Marx's assumption that the development of productive forces under capitalism would provide a material basis for human emancipation.
Environmental degradation under actually existing socialism fueled criticism against Marx's 'productivist' view.
Fredric Jameson points to ‘Marx’s own passionate commitment to a streamlined technological future’
Axel Honneth criticizes the limitation of Marxism in that one of the inherent ideas of Marxism is ‘technological determinism’ that supposes the linear progress of productive forces for the sake of ‘domination of nature’
Nancy Fraser argues that Marx's thought fails to systematically address gender, ecology, and political power as structuring principles in capitalist societies.
Sven-Eric Liedman concludes that Marx was not an 'ecologically conscious person in the modern sense.'
The Rediscovery of Marx's Ecological Critique
A significant development in Marxian scholarship is the rediscovery of Marx's ecological critique of capitalism, initiated by Paul Burkett and John Bellamy Foster, among others.
These scholars demonstrated that a Marxian approach is useful for understanding the ecological crisis as a result of systemic contradictions of capitalism.
Foster and Burkett show that Marx was an 'ecologically conscious person in the modern sense.'
Analyzing Marx's research in natural sciences and his reception of Justus von Liebig's theory of the robbery system of agriculture (Raubbau), they revealed the importance of Marx's theory of 'metabolism' ().
Foster explicates that Marx regarded 'metabolic rifts' under capitalism as an inevitable consequence of the distortion in the relationship between humans and nature.
Marx highlighted the need for a qualitative transformation in social production to repair the chasm in the universal metabolism of nature.
Marx's vision of post-capitalist society is reinterpreted as 'ecosocialism.'
The concept of 'metabolism' became a 'conceptual star,' offering hope for overcoming the antagonism between Red and Green.
The Unfinished Character of Marx's Critique
The neglect of Marx's ecology is attributed to the unfinished character of his critique of political economy.
Marx did not publish volumes II and III of Capital during his lifetime, and Marxist scholars accepted Engels's edition as definitive.
Marx intensively studied the natural sciences in his later years, leaving behind notebooks related to environmental issues.
These notebooks, documenting Marx's ecological insights, remained neglected until recently.
David Riazanov, founder of the Marx-Engels Institute, dismissed the importance of Marx's later engagement with the natural sciences.
Some ecosocialists argue that Marxian ecology extrapolates ecological insights from brief excursions in texts addressing other subjects.
However, the new Marx-Engels-Gesamtausgabe (MEGA) publishes materials documenting Marx's development of his ecological critique.
The MEGA substantiates claims that Marx's theory of metabolism is the central pillar of his ecosocialist critique of capitalism.
The Rediscovery of Marxian Ecology
István Mészáros made a great contribution to properly comprehending Marx’s concept of metabolism as the foundation of his political economy
Mészáros discussed environmental issues under capitalism already in the 1970s.
The foregrounding of Marx’s ecology in Beyond Capital (Mészáros 1995) should be seen as the culmination of Mészáros’s long-standing engagement with Marx’s concept of metabolism.
Mészáros began the first Deutscher Prize Memorial Lecture by referring to Isaac Deutscher’s warning about the prospect of nuclear war that ‘threatens our biological existence’ (Deutscher 1967: 110).
Mészáros extended Deutscher’s warning to another contemporary existential crisis for the ‘whole of mankind’ – that is, ecological destruction under capitalism.
Mészáros formulated the ecologically destructive nature of capitalist development as the 'basic contradiction' of capitalism.
*[\text{The] basic contradiction of the capitalist system of control is that it cannot separate ‘advance’ from destruction, nor ‘progress’ from waste – however catastrophic the results. The more it unlocks the powers of productivity, the more it must unleash the powers of destruction; and the more it extends the volume of production, the more it must bury everything under mountains of suffocating waste. (Mészáros [1972] 2014: 49–50)Mészáros explicitly differentiated himself from the orthodox Marxism of his time, which was characterized by a naïve endorsement of the development of productive forces under capitalism as a progressive drive in human history.
He warned that the wasteful and destructive system of production for the sake of endless capital accumulation would not bring about human emancipation but inevitably undermine the material conditions for the prosperity of society in the long run.
Since the earth is finite, it is obvious that there are absolute biophysical limits to capital accumulation.
Despite knowing this, capital is incapable of limiting itself. On the contrary, capital constantly attempts to overcome these limits only to increase its own destructiveness against society and nature.
Hence arises the ‘necessity of social control’ to put an end to the wasteful and destructive tendency of capitalist development for the sake of human survival and preservation of the natural environment.
Such social planning of production is, however, incompatible with the basic logic of capitalist production.
Mészáros thus demanded a qualitatively different organization of social production by freely associated producers.
capital cannot recognize absolute limits, a ‘conscious recognition of the existing barriers’ as the condition of the universal development of the individual is a revolutionary act.
This anti-Promethean insight into the limit to growth marks an important step to the fusion of environmentalism and socialism.
'Beyond Capital' elaborates on this concept of metabolism much more systematically.
Mészáros focused on Marx’s concept of ‘social metabolism’ in order to analyse the capitalist mode of production as a historically unique way of (re)organizing the transhistorical metabolic interaction between humans and nature on an unprecedented scale.
He intentionally highlighted the concept as an anti-thesis to the narrow focus of traditional Marxism on the theory of surplus value as a disclosure of the exploitation of the working class by the capitalist. Instead Mészáros intended to expand the theoretical scope of a critique of capitalism outside factories.
Mészáros, following this insight of Marx, advocated for a much more holistic and integral approach to the historical dynamics of social production and reproduction under capitalism.
Marx's Concept of Metabolism
The concept of metabolism is essential for Marx's Capital.
Marx defined 'labour' in relation to the metabolism between humans and nature.
*Labour is, first of all, a process between man and nature, a process by which man, through his own actions, mediates, regulates and controls the metabolism between himself and nature' (Capital I: 283).This metabolic process is, first of all, a natural-ecological process, which is common to any historical stage, because humans cannot live without working upon nature through labour.
This also means that humans cannot produce ex nihilo but always ex materia
Marx highlighted that both labour and nature play essential roles in the labour process: ‘Labour is therefore not the only source of material wealth, i.e. of the use-values it produces. As William Petty says, labour is the father of material wealth, the earth is its mother’ (Capital I: 134)
Mészáros (1995: 138), this unceasing interaction constitutes the ‘primary’ level of the universal metabolic process between humans and nature, ‘without which humanity could not possibly survive even in the most ideal form of society’.
On a more concrete level, the exact ways humans carry out their metabolism with the external environment differ significantly depending on the given objective natural condition such as climate, location, and availability and accessibility of resources and energy.
*No matter to what degree this natural substratum might (indeed must) be modified by ongoing human productive development, in the course the historical creation of “new needs” and the corresponding extension of the conditions of their satisfaction, ultimately it always remains firmly circumscribed by nature itself ’ (Mészáros 2012: 246).Kate Soper (1995: 132) argues that ‘those material structures and processes that are independent of human activity (in the sense that they are not a humanly created product), and whose forces and causal powers are the necessary conditions of every human practice, and determine the possible forms it can take’.
Humans can reflect upon their own interaction with it. They can design tools to produce more efficiently, improve the quality of products, discover new materials and even invent totally new objects according to their needs.
The plasticity of nature does not negate its characteristic as a natural substratum of labour. If humans ignore the natural substratum, such violation of natural law causes multiple ecological contradictions such as pollution, resource scarcity and exhaustion.
The uniqueness of his economic analysis is rather his recognition that labour is always carried out under a certain set of social relations.
Social Mediation of Human Metabolism
Mészáros summarizes this point as the necessity of the social mediation of human metabolism with nature
Out of this imperative, a social structure emerges in the course of human history that is mediated by communication, cooperation, norms, institutions and law.
Metabolism between humans and nature is, seen from this perspective, simultaneously a socio-historical process whose concrete forms significantly vary according to the structural relationships that exist in different times and places.
They constitute what Mészáros calls the ‘second order mediations of historically specific social reproductive systems’ (Mészáros 1995: 139–40).
The primary goal of capitalist production is the valorization of capital above anything else. Capitalism is driven by the insatiable desire for profit-making and constantly increases the productive capacity.
With the domination of this logic of capital for the sake of maximal valorization and the limitless expansion of capital, historically specific second-order mediation emerges by developing the world market, technologies, transportation and credit system, and artificial appetites.
Every one of the primary forms [of metabolism between humans and nature] is altered almost beyond recognition, so as to suit the self- expansionary needs of a fetishistic and alienating system of social metabolic control which must subordinate absolutely everything to the imperative of capital-accumulation.
Here one should note that it is characterized not only by the estrangement of labour but also by the ‘alienation of nature’ (Mészáros 1970: 110–11).
Mészáros remained convinced that capital’s organization of social metabolism, with its second-order mediations, is incompatible with transhistorical material characteristics of metabolism between humans and nature on the primary level, leading to its degradation and ultimate destruction in the long run.
Absolute Limits of Nature
Mészáros used the expression ‘absolute limit’ of nature, which capital cannot overcome.
It exists independently of capital, but capital cannot recognize the non-identity of nature and constantly aims to relativize the absolute in its attempt to become the absolute by totalizing the regime of capital.
However, the subjugation of the natural cycle that exists prior to and independently of the formation of the capitalist cycle ultimately disrupts and destroys the universal metabolism of nature.
Today capital is no longer productive, but rather destructive and threatens human existence.* This is the moment when the ‘limits of capital’ become discernible: *Capital’s limits can no longer be conceptualized as merely the material obstacles to a greater increase in productivity and social wealth, and thus as a brake on development, but as the direct challenge to the very survival of mankind. And in another sense, the limits of capital can turn against it as the overpowering controller of the social metabolism … when capital is no longer able to secure, by whatever means, the conditions of its destructive self-reproduction and thereby causes the breakdown of the overall social metabolism. *(Mészáros 2014: 599)
Mészáros differentiated himself from orthodox Marxists in explicitly acknowledging that the robbery inherent in the capitalist development of productive forces does not bring about progress leading to socialism.
Mészáros was presumably inspired by Lukács’s theory of metabolism and his Hegelian discussion of the ‘identity of identity and non-identity’ (see Chapter 4).
Dimensions of Metabolic Rift
Mészáros’s legacy of the theory of metabolism was later taken up by John Bellamy Foster (2000) and Paul Burkett (1999), who have carefully examined Marx’s own usage of the concept of metabolism in various texts and developed the key concept of ‘metabolic rift’.
The capitalist way of organizing human interactions with their ecosystems inevitably creates a great chasm in these processes and threatens both human and non-human beings.
There are various attempts to analyse these rifts in terms of marine ecology (Stephano Longo), climate change (Naomi Klein, Brett Clark, Richard York, Del Weston), the disruption of the nitrogen cycle (Philip Mancus) and soil erosion (Hannah Holleman).
The transhistorical ‘labour process’ receives a new form as a ‘valorization process’ under capitalism, and its biophysical processes of metabolism between humans and nature are thoroughly transformed and reorganized for the sake of capital’s valorization.
Under the primacy of the logic of capital’s valorization, not only the functioning of nature but also various aspects of concrete labour in the labour process are forcefully abstracted and subordinated to the primacy of (surplus-)value.
With its ever-expanding and accelerating scale of economy, capital brings about spatiotemporal transformations on an unprecedented level.
According to Marx, metabolic rift appears in three different levels and forms.
First and most fundamentally, metabolic rift is the material disruption of cyclical processes in natural metabolism under the regime of capital. Marx’s favourite example is the exhaustion of the soil by modern agriculture.
it hinders the operation of the eternal natural condition for the lasting fertility of the soil. Thus it destroys at the same time the physical health of the urban worker, and the intellectual life of the rural worker…; all progress in increasing the fertility of the soil for a given time is a progress towards ruining the more long-lasting sources of that fertility.… Capitalist production, therefore, only develops the techniques and the degree of combination of the social process of production by simultaneously undermining the original sources of all wealth – the soil and the worker. (Capital I: 637)
The second dimension of metabolic rift is the spatial rift.
This antagonistic spatial relationship between town and country – it can be called ‘spatial rift’ – is founded upon a violent process of so-called primitive accumulation accompanied by depeasantization and massive urban growth of the working-class population concentrated in large cities.
Historical Transition to Fossil Fuel
Rivers water if abundant and free.
Malm rejects this myth, arguing that it does not apply to the eclipse of free and abundant water-power and its replacement by the steam engine dependent on the massive use of costly coal.
As Malm explains, the use of fossil fuels did not start as a new substituent cheap energy resource but rather as fossil capital. The natural characteristics of coal, in contrast to water, as a transportable energy source that was suitable to monopoly ownership, proved to possess a unique social significance for the development of capitalist production.
Thanks to coal, capital was able to overcome these physical constraints, leaving the areas near the rivers where workers were more resistant, since labour power was relatively scarce.
Temporal Rift
The third dimension of metabolic rift is the temporal rift. As is obvious from the slow formation of soil nutrients and fossil fuels and the accelerating circulation of capital, there emerges a rift between nature’s time and capital’s time.
When nature cannot catch up with the accelerating speed of capital, there arises a grave discrepancy between two kinds of time that are particular to nature and capital.
Through technological media such as telecommunication, railways and airplanes, there occurs ‘time–space compression’ that aims to annihilate spatial and temporal distance by speeding up in favour of a shorter circuit of capital (Harvey 1990).
Three Dimensions of Metabolic Shift
The contradiction of capitalist accumulation is that increases in the social productivity are accompanied by a decrease in natural productivity due to robbery
The exploration of the earth and the invention of new technologies cannot repair the rift. The rift remains ‘irreparable’ in capitalism. This is because capital attempts to overcome rifts without recognizing its own absolute limits, which it cannot do. Instead, it simply attempts to relativize the absolute. This is what Marx meant when he wrote ‘every limit appears a barrier to overcome’ (Grundrisse: 408).
The exploration of the earth and the invention of new technologies cannot repair the rift.
‘Metabolic shift’ is a typical reaction of capital to the economic and ecological crisis it causes
Technological Shift
Although Liebig warned about the collapse of European civilization due to robbery agriculture in the 19th century, his prediction apparently did not come true.
This is largely thanks to Fritz Haber and Carl Bosch, who invented the so-called Haber-Bosch process in 1906 that enabled the industrial mass production of ammonia () by fixing nitrogen from the air, and thus of chemical fertilizer to maintain soil fertility.
The production of uses a massive amount of natural gas as a source of hydrogen (H).
In short, metabolic shift creates externalities with the aid of new technologies.
Peasants and farmers become more and more dependent upon commodities such as seeds, fertilizers and pesticides provided by giant agribusiness companies.
Spatial Shift
The is spatial shift, which expands the antagonism of the city and the countryside to a global scale in favour of the Global North.
This spatial shift helped a gradual decoupling of agricultural production from nutrient cycles within a given territory.
*Agriculture no longer finds the natural conditions of its own production within itself, naturally, arisen, spontaneous, and ready to hand, but these exist as an independent industry separate from it – and, with this separateness the whole complex set of interconnections in which this industry exists is drawn into the sphere of the conditions of agricultural production…. This pulling-away of the natural ground from the foundations of every industry, and this transfer of its conditions of production outside itself, into a general context – hence the transformation of what was previously superfluous into what is necessary, as a historically created necessity – is the tendency of capital. The general foundation of all industries comes to be general exchange itself, the world market, and hence the totality of the activities, intercourse, needs etc. of which it is made up. (Grundrisse: 527–8)In the course of capitalist development, what used to be considered ‘luxury’ – something not ‘naturally necessary’ (Grundrisse: 527) – becomes ‘necessary’.
This change of appetite occurs to the working class too. By externalizing the material conditions of production, the working class in the Global North came to exploit others in the Global South, and in this way, new luxuries are adopted by the working class. This is how the ‘imperial mode of living’ of the capitalist centres spreads all over the society (Brand and Wissen 2021).
Temporal Shift
The third dimension of metabolic shift is the temporal shift.
The discrepancy between nature’s time and capital’s time does not immediately bring about an ecological disaster because nature possesses ‘elasticity’. Its limits are not static but modifiable to a great extent (Akashi 2016)
As a results, future generations suffer from consequences for which they are not responsible. Marx characterized such an attitude inherent to capitalist development with the slogan ‘Après moi le déluge!’ (Capital I: 381).
Rosa Luxemburg's Theory of Metabolism
Rosa Luxemburg also develops concept of ‘metabolism’ in order to conceptualize this unequal relationship between capitalist centres and non-capitalist peripheries as the essential condition for capital accumulation.
The Marxian schema of expanded reproduction thus does not correspond to the conditions of accumulation, as long as this is able to proceed; it cannot be conjured up out of the fixed, reciprocal relationships and dependencies between the two great departments of social production … as formulated by the schema. Accumulation is not merely an internal relation between the branches of the capitalist economy – it is above all a relation between capital and its non capitalist milieu, in which each of the two great branches of production can partially go through the accumulation process under its own steam, independently of the other, although the movement of each intersects, and is intertwined, with the other at every turn. (Luxemburg [1913] 2015: 303)
*While it is true that capitalism lives from noncapitalist formations, it is more precise to say that it lives from their ruin; in other words, while this noncapitalist milieu is indispensable for capitalist accumulation, providing its fertile soil, accumulation in fact proceeds at the expense of this milieu, and is constantly devouring it. Historically speaking, the accumulation of capital is a process of metabolism occurring between capitalist and precapitalist modes of production. The accumulation of capital cannot proceed without these precapitalist modes of production, and yet accumulation consists in this regard precisely in the latter being gradually swallowed up and assimilated by capital. Accordingly, capital accumulation can no more exist without noncapitalist formations, than these are able to exist alongside it. It is only in the constant and progressive erosion of these noncapitalist formations that the very conditions of the existence of capital accumulation are given. (Luxemburg [1913] 2015: 302; emphasis added)The problem of such a violent process of accumulation is not just about value transfer through unequal exchange of value nor severe exploitation of workers
Capital is destined to expand, so it cannot tolerate any intrusion of regulation that hinders this tendency, but this only increases its own contradiction in the long run.
The Externalization Society
In a sense, the Anthropocene represents a situation where the externality as the precondition for capital accumulation has been exhausted.
Luxemburg intended to expand Marx’s theory of primitive accumulation, but she formulated her theory of metabolism against Marx, who she thought focused solely on Western capitalism.
The discovery of gold and silver in America, the extirpation, enslavement and entombment in mines of the indigenous population of that continent, the beginnings of the conquest and plunder of India, and the conversion of Africa into a preserve for the commercial hunting of black- skins, are all things which characterize the dawn of the era of capitalist production. These idyllic proceedings are the chief moments of primitive accumulation. (Capital I: 915)
*However, as discussed in Chapter 6 of this book, Marx after the publication of volume I of Capital in 1867 critically reflected upon this point, intensively studying pre-capitalist and non-Western societies. Consequently, Marx corrected his understanding of capitalism and learned to envision a path to communism in a fully different way after the 1870s.