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REDFLAG | 14 JUNE 2021 PUBLICATION OF SOCIALIST ALTERNATIVE REDFLAG.ORG.AU

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LONG READ

Mending the metabolic rift

MARXISM,

NATURE AND

SOCIETY

The key to this, for Marx, lay in an analysis
James Plested of what he called the “social relations of produc-
tion”—the way in which, in any society, people
come together and labour to produce the things
we need to survive. To the extent that there is a
arl Marx’s analysis of capitalism theory of human nature in Marx, it is this: our
provides the key to understanding essence is to labour collectively to shape the world
the environmental catastrophe we’re around us in a way that satisfies our needs.
witnessing, and to gaining a clearer For most of humanity’s 200-300,000-year
K picture of what’s needed to repair our history, we have maintained quite a balanced and
damaged relationship with the Earth. sustainable relationship to nature. In Australia,
Marx’s concern with environmental questions for example, Indigenous societies employed
grew from his understanding of how humanity is sophisticated land management techniques to
bound to the natural world by a thousand threads. maintain a healthy and productive landscape
“Man lives from nature”, he wrote in the 1844 for tens of thousands of years before the British
Manuscripts, “and he must maintain a continuing invasion of 1788.
dialogue with it if he is not to die. To say that man’s And although, wherever human societies have
physical and mental life is linked to nature simply emerged, there has been some impact on the
means that nature is linked to itself, for man is a natural environment in which they are situated, it
part of nature”. wasn’t really until a few hundred years ago that the
In the same passage, Marx describes nature as scale of the destruction began to become a signif-
humanity’s “inorganic body”. What he means by icant issue. As Marx put it in his notes for Capital,
this, is that when we’re thinking about the things which were later published as the Grundrisse:
comprised in our existence, we should include, “It isn’t the unity of living and active humanity
alongside our own bodies, all the objects of nature with the natural, inorganic conditions of their
to which we relate ourselves—those that sustain metabolic exchange with nature, and hence their
us in a directly physical, biological sense, and appropriation of nature, which requires explana-
those that nourish us mentally, such as objects of tion or is the result of a historic process, but rather
beauty and so on. the separation between these inorganic conditions
If we don’t have access to healthy food, fresh of human existence and this active existence, a
air and water and so on, our physical health will separation which is completely posited only in the
suffer as a result. And the lack of any capacity to relation of wage labour and capital.”
enjoy the beauty of nature—through our contact The term “metabolic rift” was coined by John
with it in either work or recreation—will affect Bellamy Foster in his book Marx’s Ecology: Mate-
our mental health. rialism and Nature, published in 2000, as a way of
Every individual must exist in a constant state of bringing together the various elements of Marx’s
interaction with nature to survive, but the particu- account of the rupture in relations between human
lar form this relationship takes can’t be understood society and the natural world under capitalism.
in abstraction from the kind of society in which we Although Marx didn’t talk directly about a
live. The task for Marx, then, became to explain how “metabolic rift”, he frequently used the German
and why human society had developed through the word Stoffwechsel, which translates as metabolism
course of history, and in particular to understand (literally “material exchange”). As today, the word
the destructive dynamics of the capitalist system in Marx’s time primarily was used in the context
that was rapidly emerging at the time. of biology and chemistry to describe the circula-