Metabolic rift

Organizations: Metabolic rift is a theory of ecological crisis tendencies under the capitalist mode of production that sociologist John Bellamy Foster ascribes to Karl Marx.

[1]: 949  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.

Foster argues the theory develops from Marx's earlier work in the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts on species-being and the relationship between humans and nature.

The theory of metabolic rift "enable[ed] [Marx] to develop a critique of environmental degradation that anticipated much of present-day ecological thought",[2]: 142  including questions of sustainability as well as the limits of agricultural production using concentrated animal feeding operations.

[2]: 151 [3]: 377 [4] Foster argues that Marx's theory drew heavily on contemporary advances in agricultural chemistry unknown to earlier classical economists such as Ricardo and Malthus.

From the standpoint of nutrient cycling, the socio-economic relationship between rural and urban areas was self-evidently contradictory, hindering the possibility of sustainability: If it were practicable to collect, with the least loss, all the solid and fluid excrements of the inhabitants of the town, and return to each farmer the portion arising from produce originally supplied by him to the town, the productiveness of the land might be maintained almost unimpaired for ages to come, and the existing store of mineral elements in every fertile field would be amply sufficient for the wants of increasing populations.

[2]: 239 Contemporary eco-socialist theorists aside from Foster have also explored these directions, including James O'Connor, who sees capitalist undervaluing of nature as leading to economic crisis, what he refers to as the second contradiction of capitalism.

[10] Moore's perspective, although also rooted in historical materialism, produces a widely divergent view from that of Foster and others about what makes ecological crisis and how it relates to capital accumulation.

Moore consequently focuses attention on the grand movements of primitive accumulation, colonialism, and the globalization of town-country relations that characterized early modern capitalism.

Early urban centers were bioregionally defined, and had relatively light "footprints," recycling city nightsoils back into the surrounding areas.

[14]: 637–638 The concept of metabolic rift captures "the material estrangement of human beings within capitalist society from the natural conditions which formed the basis for their existence.

For example, Clausen and Clark have extended the use of metabolic rift to marine ecology,[16] while Moore uses the concept to discuss the broader concerns of global environmental crises and the viability of capitalism itself.

David Harvey points out that much of the environmental movement has held (and in some areas continues to hold) a profound anti-urban sentiment, seeing cities as "the highpoint of plundering and pollution of all that is good and holy on planet earth.

Hodson and Marvin discuss a "new eco-urbanism" that seeks to integrate environment and infrastructure, "bundling" architecture, ecology and technology in order to "internalize" energy, water, food, waste and other material flows.

[19] This takes place within actually existing conditions of neoliberalization, suggesting that healing metabolic rifts will be a process that requires both social and ecological transformations.