ABSTRACT
From the late 1990s on, metabolic rift scholarship has helped establish a rich tradition within ecological Marxism. By returning to Marx to address earthly questions, it has excavated the ecological foundations of classical historical materialism. It has detailed how Marx’s materialist conception of history was inseparably bound to his materialist conception of nature, forming a dialectical unity. It has identified, assessed, and developed the ecological analysis found within the work of Marx, exploring how this open, dialectical, materialist approach informed and was integrated into the scientific analyses and social critiques that followed. It has demonstrated how Marx’s political-economic and ecological critiques of capitalism are unified, revealing how ecological relations and concerns are part and parcel of any discussions of expropriation, value analysis, accumulation, colonialism, imperialism, labour, alienation, history, human needs, and socialism. This scholarship has provided an extensive examination of Marx’s metabolic analysis of the material exchanges between human society and nature, detailing his triadic metabolic scheme consisting of the “universal metabolism of nature,” the “social metabolism,” and the “metabolic rift.” It has illuminated how capitalism creates an alienated social metabolism, which produces ecological rifts by transgressing natural limits and fatally disrupting ecosystems.
