ABSTRACT
This chapter looks at Marx and machines. In some ways, the most remarkable passages of Marx lie in the marginalia of his writings and in that of Engels. The chapter examines specifically Marx's notebooks from the winter of 1857-1858 collectively known as the Grundrisse. Within this work there is a 'fragment' on machines but also the development of a concept of 'metabolism' which has become central to new thinking about ecology, specifically in the social theory of John Bellamy Foster and his collaborators. The chapter extends that thinking about 'metabolic rifts' between humanity and nature in new directions. The Marxist understanding of nature rests upon a series of suppositions- that it is possible to separate nature and the social, that nature can be produced socially, that the human and its technics are separate but in co-evolution.
