The research leading to the writing of Marx’s Ecology began in the mid-1990s in response to a request for an article on “Erde” (Earth) for volume 3 (Ebene-Extremisis) of the Historisch-Kritisches Wörterbuch des Marxismus, edited by Wolfgang Fritz Haug at the Free University of Berlin.1 I was asked at that time to provide an account of how the classical political economists up through Karl Marx had approached the question of the earth or soil. My original background was in political economy. But in the late 1980s and ’90s I had turned to the study of the global ecological crisis, leading to the publication of my book The Vulnerable Planet in 1994, along with a number of articles on Marx and ecology.2 Yet, while I was familiar at the time with the classical rent theory in the work of Adam Smith, Thomas Robert Malthus, David Ricardo, and Marx, and knew of Justus von Liebig’s influence on Marx with respect to the analysis of the nineteenth-century soil crisis, I had never systematically examined the underlying ecological assumptions of classical political economy with respect to the earth/soil. Nor to my knowledge had anyone else. I therefore set out to explore the question in depth. The result of this investigation was the recovery of Marx’s far-reaching ecological argument. Thus, it was in the Historisch-Kritisches Wörterbuch des Marxismus that I was to offer the first systematic elaboration of Marx’s conception of the rift in the metabolism between humanity and the soil. From there, I went on to write my article “Marx’s Theory of Metabolic Rift” in the American Journal of Sociology in 1999, which laid out the wider implications of Marx’s theory of ecological crisis, followed by the publication of Marx’s Ecology in 2000.3
The recovery of Marx’s metabolic rift theory raised entirely new questions. How was it that Marx had developed such an incisive ecological crisis theory based in the natural science of his day, surpassing that of all others in the understanding of what he termed the “social metabolism” connecting humanity and the earth as a whole? The obvious answer was that this could be traced to his overall materialist outlook. But what exactly did that materialism entail? In Western Marxism it was commonly contended that materialism in Marx’s thought had primarily to do with the means of production and could be understood exclusively in terms of economic relations, divorced from both natural-scientific conceptions and philosophical materialism. Yet, Marx’s ecological analysis was clearly materialist in the much broader sense of adhering to a materialist conception of nature, underpinning his materialist conception of history. Hence, the only way to understand the development of Marx’s ecological thought, I concluded, was to examine the origins and development of his materialism, starting with his doctoral thesis on Epicurus’s philosophy of nature. Moreover, such an inquiry could not be carried out by simply exploring his work in isolation, but also had to be seen in terms of the historical evolution of materialism in general as it had developed up through the nineteenth century. It was this argument, then, that formed the basis of Marx’s Ecology as a whole.
However, it was not the overall analysis of Marx’s Ecology with respect to materialism and nature, but rather Chapter 5 on the metabolic rift theory, that first caught people’s imaginations and dominated in the initial reception of the book, leading almost immediately to new, far-reaching theoretical developments. The real breakthrough here occurred in 2005 with the publication by Brett Clark and Richard York of “Carbon Metabolism: Global Capitalism, Climate Change, and the Biospheric Rift” in Theory and Society.4 They demonstrated that Marx’s theory of the metabolic rift provided the basis for understanding capitalism’s disruption of the Earth System’s carbon metabolism, generating the climate-change emergency. In 2010, a decade after the publication of Marx’s Ecology, I wrote The Ecological Rift, together with Clark and York, linking metabolic rift theory to the emergence of the Anthropocene and the Earth System crisis. A decade still further on, in 2020, I completed, along with Clark, The Robbery of Nature, connecting the metabolic rift to capitalism’s expropriation of humanity and the earth.5
Although metabolic rift theory was to occupy a central place in the contemporary ecosocialist critique, the broader questions with respect to materialism and nature raised in Marx’s Ecology were to engender still further investigations into the ecological bases of historical materialism, expanding the overall range of analysis. A common criticism leveled at Marx’s Ecology was that Marx’s environmental critique had no discernible influence on subsequent socialist and ecological thinkers, making it of little historical significance. In the epilogue to Marx’s Ecology, it was explained why any such criticism would be incorrect, based on what was already then known of the work of later socialist ecological thinkers. But it took twenty years of research before I was able in 2020 to address this question fully in The Return of Nature. There I demonstrated the ways in which socialist ecological analyses focusing on the metabolism of humanity and nature and the dialectics of nature, and rooted in the work of Marx and Frederick Engels, had been central to the development of both ecological science and the modern ecological critique. The wider implications of this for environmental theory and practice are brought out in my 2024 book The Dialectics of Ecology.6
Although many critical issues remain to be explored, and crucial debates naturally persist within ecosocialism, there is no longer any question about the depth of Marx’s metabolic critique, its influence on the development of ecology, or its centrality in terms of the philosophy of praxis in our day.
—John Bellamy Foster
Eugene, Oregon
September 25, 2023
Notes
- ↩ John Bellamy Foster, “Erde,” in Historisch-Kritisches Wörterbuch des Marxismus, Band 3 (Ebene-Extremismus) (Berlin: Argument-Verlag, 1997), 669–710. English translation in Historical Materialism 15, no. 3 (January 2007): 255–62.
- ↩ John Bellamy Foster, The Vulnerable Planet (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1994).
- ↩ John Bellamy Foster, “Marx’s Theory of Metabolic Rift,” American Journal of Sociology 105, no. 2 (September 1999): 366–405.
- ↩ Brett Clark and Richard York, “Carbon Metabolism: Global Capitalism, Climate Change, and the Biospheric Rift,” Theory and Society 34, no. 4 (2005): 391–428.
- ↩ John Bellamy Foster, Brett Clark, and Richard York, The Ecological Rift (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2010); John Bellamy Foster and Brett Clark, The Robbery of Nature (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2020).
- ↩ John Bellamy Foster, The Return of Nature (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2020); The Dialectics of Ecology (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2024).
Comments are closed.