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Rifts and Shifts: Getting to the Root of Environmental Crises

Article  in  Monthly review (New York, N.Y.: 1949) · November 2008

DOI: 10.14452/MR-060-06-2008-10_2

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Rifts and Shifts
Getting to the Root of Environmental Crises

BRETT CLARK AND RICHARD YORK

Humans depend on functioning ecosystems to sustain themselves, and

their actions affect those same ecosystems. As a result, there is a necessary
“metabolic interaction” between humans and the earth, which influences
both natural and social history. Increasingly, the state of nature is being de-
fined by the operations of the capitalist system, as anthropogenic forces are
altering the global environment on a scale that is unprecedented. The global
climate is rapidly changing due to the burning of fossil fuels and deforesta-
tion. No area of the world’s ocean is unaffected by human influence, as the
accumulation of carbon, fertilizer runoff, and overfishing undermine biodi-
versity and the natural services that it provides. The Millennium Ecosystem
Assessment documents how over two-thirds of the world’s ecosystems are
overexploited and polluted. Environmental problems are increasingly inter-
related. James Hansen, the leading climatologist in the United States, warns
that we are dangerously close to pushing the planet past its tipping point,
setting off cascading environmental problems that will radically alter the
conditions of nature.1
Although the ecological crisis has captured public attention, the dominant
economic forces are attempting to seize the moment by assuring us that
capital, technology, and the market can be employed so as to ward off any
threats without a major transformation of society. For example, numerous
technological solutions are proposed to remedy global climate change, in-
cluding agrofuels, nuclear energy, and new coal plants that will capture and
sequester carbon underground. The ecological crisis is thus presented as a
technical problem that can be fixed within the current system, through better
ingenuity, technological innovation, and the magic of the market. In this view,
the economy will be increasingly dematerialized, reducing demands placed
on nature.2 The market will ensure that new avenues of capital accumulation
are created in the very process of dealing with environmental challenges.
Yet, this line of thought ignores the root causes of the ecological crisis. The
social metabolic order of capitalism is inherently anti-ecological, since it
systematically subordinates nature in its pursuit of endless accumulation and
Brett Clark is assistant professor of sociology at North Carolina State University. Richard
York is coeditor of Organization & Environment and associate professor of sociology at the Uni-
versity of Oregon. They are coauthors with John Bellamy Foster of Critique of Intelligent Design:
Materialism versus Creationism from Antiquity to the Present (Monthly Review Press, 2008).
13
14 M O N T H LY R E V I E W / N O V E M B E R 2 0 0 8

production on ever larger scales. Technical fixes to socio-ecological problems

typically have unintended consequences and fail to address the root of the
problems: the political-economic order. Rather than acknowledging metabolic
rifts, natural limits, and/or ecological contradictions, capital seeks to play a
shell game with the environmental problems it generates, moving them
around rather than addressing the root causes.
One obvious way capital shifts around ecological problems is through
simple geographic displacement—once resources are depleted in one region,
capitalists search far and wide to seize control of resources in other parts of
the world, whether by military force or markets. One of the drivers of
colonialism was clearly the demand for more natural resources in rapidly
industrializing European nations.
However, expanding the area under the control of global capitalism is only
one of the ways in which capitalists shift ecological problems around. There
is a qualitative dimension as well, whereby one environmental crisis is
“solved” (typically only in the short term) by changing the type of production
process and generating a different crisis, such as how the shift from the use
of wood to plastic in the manufacturing of many consumer goods replaced the
problems associated with wood extraction with those associated with plastics
production and disposal.
Thus, one problem is transformed into another—a shift in the type of rift.
We illustrate these issues here by focusing on the soil crisis Marx identified
in his time, which continues to the present, and our contemporary energy and
climate crisis.
The Expanding Social Metabolic Order of Capital and Ecological Crisis

A metabolic relationship involves regulatory processes that govern the in-

terchange of materials. Marx noted that natural systems, such as the nutrient
cycle, had their own metabolism, which operated independently of and in
relation to human society, allowing for their regeneration and/or continuance.
He employed, as John Bellamy Foster explains, the concept of social metabo-
lism to refer to “the complex, dynamic interchange between human beings
and nature” of matter and energy, which recognized how both “nature-im-
posed conditions” and human actions transform this process. Each mode of
production creates a particular social metabolic order that determines the
interchange between society and nature. Such interactions influence the on-
going reproduction of society and ecosystems.3
István Mészáros explains that a fundamental change in the social metabo-
lism took place with the onset of capitalism, as a new social metabolic order
came to dominate the material interchange between society and nature.
R I F T S A N D S H I F T S 15

Capitalism imposes a particular form of “productive interchange of human

beings with nature,” given that its very logic of operation is a “‘totalizing’
framework of control into which everything else, including human beings,
must be fitted, and prove thereby their ‘productive viability,’ or perish if they
fail to do so.” Capitalists pursue their own interests to maximize profit, above
and beyond any other interests, subsuming all natural and social relation-
ships to the drive to accumulate capital. Natural cycles and processes are
subjected to the whims of the economic cycle, given that “the only modality
of time which is directly meaningful to capital is necessary labor time and its
operational corollaries, as required for securing and safeguarding the condi-
tions of profit-oriented time-accountancy and thereby the realization of capital on
an extended scale.” The competition of capital produces an “ultimately uncon-
trollable mode of social metabolic control” running roughshod over the regulatory
processes that govern the complex relationships of interchange within natural
systems and cycles.4
Paul Sweezy explained that the capitalist economic system “is one that
never stands still, one that is forever changing, adopting new and discarding
old methods of production and distribution, opening up new territories,
subjecting to its purposes societies too weak to protect themselves.” Thus,
the tendency of capital is to violate the natural conditions that ensure na-
ture’s vitality, undermining the base on which ecological and human sustain-
ability depends. In part, this is because capital freely appropriates nature
and its bounty—it is “purely a matter of utility.” The exploitation of nature
and labor serve “as a means to the paramount ends of profit-making and still
more capital accumulation.” Hence, the expansion and intensification of the
social metabolic order of capital generates rifts in natural cycles and process,
forcing a series of shifts on the part of capital, as it expands environmental
degradation.5
Marx and the Metabolic Rift in Soil Nutrients

The issue of capitalism’s destructive metabolic relation to nature was

raised by Marx in the nineteenth century. The German chemist, Justus von
Liebig, in the 1850s and ’60s, employed the concept of metabolism in his
studies of soil nutrients. He explained that British agriculture, with its
intensive methods of cultivation to increase yields for the market, operated
as a system of robbery, destroying the vitality of the soil. Liebig detailed how
the soil required specific nutrients—nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium—
to maintain its ability to produce crops. As crops grew they took up these
nutrients. In earlier societies, the produce of nature was often recycled back
to the land, fertilizing it. But the concentration of land ownership, which
16 M O N T H LY R E V I E W / N O V E M B E R 2 0 0 8

involved the depopulation of rural areas, and the increasing division between
town and country, changed this process. Food and fiber were shipped from
the countryside to distant markets. In this, the nutrients of the soil were
transferred from the country to the city where they accumulated as waste
and contributed to the pollution of the cities, rather than being returned to
the soil. This caused a rupture in the nutrient cycle.
Marx, who was influenced by Liebig’s work, recognized that soil fertility
and the conditions of nature were bound to the historical development of
social relations. Through his studies of soil science, Marx gained insights in
regard to the nutrient cycle and how soil exhaustion was caused. On this
basis he provided a materialist critique of modern agriculture, describing
how capitalist operations inevitably produced a metabolic rift, as the basic
processes of natural reproduction were undermined, preventing the return
to the soil of the necessary nutrients.6
The transfer and loss of nutrients was tied to the accumulation process.
Marx described how capital creates a rupture in the “metabolic interaction”
between humans and the earth, one that is only intensified by large-scale
agriculture, long-distance trade, and massive urban growth. With these de-
velopments, the nutrient cycle was interrupted and the soil continually im-
poverished. He explained that the drive for the accumulation of capital “re-
duces the agricultural population to an ever decreasing minimum and con-
fronts it with an ever growing industrial population crammed together in
large towns; in this way it produces conditions that provoke an irreparable
rift in the interdependent process of social metabolism, a metabolism pre-
scribed by the natural laws of life itself. The result of this is a squandering
of the vitality of the soil, which is carried by trade far beyond the bounds of
a single country.”7
The development of capitalism, whether through colonialism, imperial-
ism, or market forces, expanded the metabolic rift to the global level, as
distant regions across the oceans were brought into production to serve the
interests of capitalists in core nations. While incorporating distant lands
into the global economy—a form of geographical displacement—helped re-
lieve some of the demands placed on agricultural production in core nations,
it did not serve as a remedy to the metabolic rift. The systematic expansion
of production on a larger scale subjected more of the natural world to the
dictates of capital. The consequence of this, as Marx noted, is that “it dis-
turbs the metabolic interaction between man and the earth, i.e. it prevents
the return to the soil of its constituent elements consumed by man in the
form of food and clothing; hence it hinders the operation of the eternal natu-
ral condition for the lasting fertility of the soil.”8
R I F T S A N D S H I F T S 17

Rifts, Shifts, and the Soil Crisis

The metabolic rift in the nutrient cycle and degradation of the soil has-
tened the concentration of agricultural production among a small number of
proprietors who adopted ever more intensive methods of production to fur-
ther expand and enhance production. The logic of capital and competition
drives “bourgeois production out of its old course and...compels capital to
intensify the productive forces of labour.” It gives “capital no rest,” Marx
noted, “and continually whispers in its ear: ‘Go on! Go on!’”9 This sets off a
series of rifts and shifts, whereby metabolic rifts are continually created and
addressed (typically only after reaching crisis proportions) by shifting the
type of rift generated. To the myopic observer, capitalism may appear at any
one moment to be addressing some environmental problems, since it does on
occasion mitigate a crisis. However, a more far-sighted observer will recog-
nize that new crises spring up where old ones are supposedly cut down. This
is unavoidable given that capital is propelled constantly to expand.
One of the consequences of the metabolic rift and declining soil fertility in
core nations in the 1800s was the development of an international guano/ni-
trate trade. The guano (bird droppings) from islands off the coast of Peru
with large seabird colonies had high concentrations of phosphate and nitro-
gen. At the time, guano was recognized as one of the best fertilizers, both
enriching the soil and increasing the yield. This new fertilizer sparked an
international scramble to claim islands that had guano deposits. Millions of
tons of guano were dug up by imported Chinese “coolies” in Peru under con-
ditions worse than slave labor and exported to the United States and
European nations. The necessity to import fertilizer reflected a crisis in capi-
talist agriculture, but it did not mend the metabolic rift. In fact, it directed a
natural resource that had been used for centuries to enrich the soils of Peru
to the global market, rapidly diminishing the reserves on the islands. The
nitrate trade pitted Peru and Bolivia against Chile in the War of the Pacific, a
war encouraged and supported by nitrate investors in Britain. It was a war
between poor countries struggling to control nitrate fields that were used to
meet the fertilizer demands of core nations. Nonetheless, the metabolic rift
in regard to soil degradation continued to plague core capitalist nations. It
was only when Fritz Haber, a German chemist and nationalist, devised a
process—just before the First World War—for fixing nitrogen from the air
that a radical shift took place in agriculture, as artificial nitrogen fertilizer
was produced in large quantities and applied to soils to sustain yields.10
The social metabolic order of capital undermined the natural cycles and
processes that allow for the regeneration and use of soil nutrients. Various
geological and technological shifts were introduced in order to maintain pro-
18 M O N T H LY R E V I E W / N O V E M B E R 2 0 0 8

duction, but they created new rifts, while typically not alleviating old ones.
Increasingly, industrial processes were incorporated into agricultural prac-
tices, intensifying the social metabolism of society. As a result, agriculture
became increasingly dependent upon industrial operations (e.g., the indus-
trial fixation of nitrogen) and materials in order to continue. Even in his day,
Marx recognized the transformations taking place in agriculture and noted:
Agriculture no longer finds the natural conditions of its own production with-
in itself, naturally, arisen, spontaneous, and ready to hand, but these exist as
an independent industry separate from it—and, with this separateness the
whole complex set of interconnections in which this industry exists is drawn
into the sphere of the conditions of agricultural production.11

Marx explained that the expansion of capitalist industrialized operations

increased the scale of exploitation and environmental degradation, subjecting
nature to the rapacious logic of capital:

Large-scale industry and industrially pursued large-scale agriculture have the

same effect. If they are originally distinguished by the fact that the former lays
waste and ruins labour-power and thus the natural power of man, whereas the
latter does the same to the natural power of the soil, they link up in the later
course of development, since the industrial system applied to agriculture also
enervates the workers there, while industry and trade for their part provide
agriculture with the means of exhausting the soil.12

Technology is not neutral, given that it embodies capitalist relations,

whether it is to facilitate the division of labor or to increase production
through the exploitation of labor and nature. Technological innovations serve
as an additional means to enlarge and expand the social metabolic order of
capital. In regard to capitalist agriculture, Marx explicated:
All progress in capitalist agriculture is a progress in the art, not only of robbing
the worker, but of robbing the soil; all progress in increasing the fertility of the
soil for a given time is a progress towards ruining the more long-lasting sourc-
es of that fertility....Capitalist production, therefore, only develops the tech-
niques and the degree of combination of the social process of production by
simultaneously undermining the original sources of all wealth—the soil and the
worker.13

Chemical processes and inputs were initiated in agriculture to duplicate,

replace, and/or reproduce natural operations and what they produce.
Synthetic fertilizer was widely introduced to sustain and increase agricultural
R I F T S A N D S H I F T S 19

production, but it did not resolve the metabolic rift in the nutrient cycle. Karl
Kautsky, drawing upon the work of Marx and Liebig, explained that artificial
fertilizers
allow the reduction in soil fertility to be avoided, but the necessity of using
them in larger and larger amounts simply adds a further burden to agriculture—
not one unavoidably imposed on nature, but a direct result of current social
organization. By overcoming the antithesis between town and country...the
materials removed from the soil would be able to flow back in full.
Supplementary fertilisers would then, at most, have the task of enriching the
soil, not staving off its impoverishment. Advances in cultivation would signify
an increase in the amount of soluble nutrients in the soil without the need to
add artificial fertilisers.14

Kautsky identified the creation of a fertilizer treadmill, whereby a con-

tinuous supply of artificial fertilizer was needed to produce high yields on
land that was exhausted. Natural conditions, depleted soils, forced capital to
shift its operations in order to continue production. Rather than solving the
problem, this shift and the ones that followed created additional environ-
mental problems, escalating the magnitude of the ecological crisis.
Food production has increased through expanding agricultural production
to less fertile land—depleting the nutrients in these areas—and through the
incorporation of large quantities of oil in the agricultural process, used in the
synthesis of chemical fertilizers and pesticides, contributing to global climate
change as well as a myriad of other environmental problems. Modern agricul-
ture has become the art of turning oil into food.15 Constant inputs are needed
simply to sustain this operation, given the depletion of the soil. Genetically
modified crops are developed in order to grow in arid, depleted soils, with
the help of artificial fertilizer. Each step is an attempt to overcome barriers
for the sake of accumulation, regardless of the ecological implications.
The incorporation of the “technological fix” of artificial nitrogen fertilizer
has created additional ecological rifts and other environmental problems. The
production of synthetic fertilizer produces airborne nitrogen compounds that
increase global warming. Nitrogen runoff overloads marine ecosystems with
excess nutrients, which compromise natural processes that generally remove
nutrients from the waterways. The increased concentration of nutrients
within the water causes eutrophication. This leads to oxygen-poor water and
the formation of hypoxic zones—otherwise known as “dead zones” because
crabs and fishes suffocate within these areas.
Hence, the shifting logic of ecological destruction spreads rifts throughout
the system. The drive to increase agricultural production, the separation of
20 M O N T H LY R E V I E W / N O V E M B E R 2 0 0 8

town and country, and the loss of soil nutrients produce a metabolic rift in
the soil nutrient cycle. In an attempt to overcome natural limits, capital en-
gages in a series of shifts to sustain production, importing natural fertilizers
and producing artificial fertilizer. As a result, the social metabolism is inten-
sified, as more of nature is subjected to the demands of capital, and addi-
tional ecological problems are created.
Energy and Climate Crisis

The development of energy production technologies provides one of the

best examples of rifts and shifts, as technological fixes to energy problems
create new ecological crises in the attempt to alleviate old ones. Biomass,
particularly wood, has, of course, been one of the primary energy sources
humans have depended on throughout their history. The development of
more energy intensive processes, such as the smelting of metals, was, there-
fore, connected with greater pressure on forests, as trees were fed to the fires.
By the time the Industrial Revolution began to emerge in Europe, vast regions
of the continent had already been deforested, particularly in areas close to
major sites of production, and much of this deforestation was driven by the
demand for fuel. As industrialization advanced, new sources of power were
desired to fuel the machines that allowed for production to take place on a
growing scale. Whole forests could be devoured at an unprecedented rate,
making wood ever more scarce. The tension between the desire of the capital-
ist owners of the new industrial technologies for expanding the accumulation
of capital and the biophysical limits of Earth were apparent from the start of
the Industrial Revolution. However, capitalists did not concern themselves
with the internal contradictions of capitalism, except insofar as they were
barriers to be transcended. Thus, efforts to achieve what we would today call
sustainability were not even considered by the elite. Rather, coal (and subse-
quently other fossil fuels) quickly became the standard fuel of industry, tem-
porarily sidestepping the fuelwood crisis (although forests continued to fall
due to the many demands placed on them) but laying the foundations for our
current global climate change crisis by dramatically increasing the emission
of carbon dioxide.16
The pattern has remained similar to how it was in the early years of the
Industrial Revolution. Oil was quickly added to coal as a fuel source and a
variety of other energy sources were increasingly exploited. Among these was
hydropower, the generation of which requires damming rivers, and thus de-
stroying aquatic ecosystems. For example, the expansion of hydropower over
the twentieth century in the U.S. Pacific Northwest was the primary force
leading to the widespread depletion and extinction of salmon runs. Nuclear
R I F T S A N D S H I F T S 21

power was, of course, the most controversial addition to the power mix.
Despite initial claims that it would provide clean, unlimited power that
would be too cheap to meter, it proved to be an expensive, risky power source
that produced long-lived highly radioactive waste for which safe long-term
storage sites have been nearly impossible to develop.
Now, in the twenty-first century, with global climate change finally being
recognized by the elite as a serious problem, the proposed solutions are, as
we would expect, to shift the problem from one form of energy to a new form
of energy. Nuclear power, despite its drop in popularity toward the end of the
last century, due to high costs and widespread public opposition, is now very
much back on the agenda, with new promises of how the new nuclear plants
are safer—never mind the issue of radioactive waste. We are also regaled with
promises of agrofuels, ironically bringing us back to the pre-coal energy crisis.
Recent scientific reports note that growing crops for agrofuel to feed cars may
actually increase the carbon emitted into the atmosphere.17 But even this ig-
nores the fact that the production of agrofuel would be based on unsustain-
able agricultural practices that demand massive inputs of fertilizers and
would only further the depletion of soil nutrients, bringing us back to the
metabolic rift that Marx originally addressed.
Two recent examples of technical approaches to mitigating climate change
are particularly illustrative of how technological optimism distracts us from
the political-economic sources of our environmental problems. Nobel laureate
Paul Crutzen, who admirably played a central role in identifying and analyzing
human-generated ozone depletion in the stratosphere, recently argued that
climate change can be avoided by injecting sulfur particles into the strato-
sphere to increase the albedo of the Earth, and thus reflect more of the sun’s
energy back into space, which would counter the warming stemming from
rising concentrations of greenhouse gases. Although no doubt offered sin-
cerely and out of desperation stemming from the failure of those in power
adequately to address the mounting climate crisis, the technical framing of the
climate change issue makes it easy for political and business leaders to avoid
addressing greenhouse gas emissions, since they can claim that technical fixes
make it unnecessary to take action to preserve forests and curtail the burning
of fossil fuels. Engineering the atmosphere on this scale is likely to have many
far-reaching consequences (acid rain being only the most obvious), many of
which have not been anticipated.
In a similar vein, well-known physicist Freeman Dyson recently suggested
that we can avoid global climate change by replacing one-quarter of the
world’s forests with genetically engineered carbon-eating trees. The eco-
logical consequences of such an action would likely be extraordinary.
22 M O N T H LY R E V I E W / N O V E M B E R 2 0 0 8

Both of these so-called solutions avoid addressing the dynamics of an eco-

nomic system that is largely structured around burning fossil fuels, that must
constantly renew itself on a larger scale, and that runs roughshod over nature.
Often techno-solutions are proposed in a manner that suggests they are com-
pletely removed from the world as it operates. The irony is that such nar-
rowly conceived “solutions” would only serve as a means to prop up the very
forces driving ecological degradation, allowing those forces to continue to
operate, as they create additional ecological rifts.18
Conclusion: Toward a New Social Metabolic Order

The pursuit of profit is the immediate pulse of capitalism, as it reproduces

itself on an ever-larger scale. A capitalist economic system cannot function
under conditions that require accounting for the reproduction of nature,
which may include time scales of a hundred years or more, not to mention
maintaining the particular, integrated natural cycles that help sustain living
conditions. The social metabolic order of capital is characterized by rifts and
shifts, as it freely appropriates nature and attempts to overcome, even if only
temporarily, whatever natural and social barriers its confronts. In this, Marx
noted, capital turns to problems with “the land only after its influence has
exhausted it and after it has devastated its natural qualities.” And at this
point, it only makes shifts or proposes technological fixes to address the
pressing concern, without addressing the fundamental crisis, the force driv-
ing the ecological crisis—capitalism itself. Mészáros warns: “In the absence
of miraculous solutions, capital’s arbitrarily self-asserting attitude to the ob-
jective determinations of causality and time in the end inevitably brings a
bitter harvest, at the expense of humanity [and nature itself].”
The global reach of capital is creating a planetary ecological crisis. A
fundamental structural crisis cannot be remedied within the operations of the
system. Marx explained that the future could be ruined and shortened as a
result of a social metabolism that exhausted the conditions of life. Capital
shows no signs of slowing down, given its rapacious character. The current
ecological crisis has been in the making for a long time and the most serious
effects of continuing with business as usual will not fall on present but rather
future generations. But, as James Hansen warns, the time that we have to
respond and change the forces driving the ecological crisis is getting shorter
and shorter. Each delay in taking decisive action compounds the problem and
makes the necessary intervention that much larger.
Capitalism is incapable of regulating its social metabolism with nature in
an environmentally sustainable manner. Its very operations violate the laws of
restitution and metabolic restoration. The constant drive to renew the capital
accumulation process intensifies its destructive social metabolism, imposing
R I F T S A N D S H I F T S 23

the needs of capital on nature, regardless of the consequences to natural sys-

tems. Capitalism continues to play out the same failed strategy again and
again. The solution to each environmental problem generates new environ-
mental problems (while often not curtailing the old ones). One crisis follows
another, in an endless succession of failure, stemming from the internal con-
tradictions of the system. If we are to solve our environmental crises, we need
to go to the root of the problem: the social relation of capital itself, given that
this social metabolic order undermines “the vital conditions of existence.”19
Resolving the ecological crisis thus requires in the end a complete break
with the logic of capital and the social metabolic order it creates, which does
not mean that we cannot take beneficial actions within the present system—
although these will necessarily go against the internal logic of the system. Marx
proposed that a society of associated producers served as the basis for poten-
tially bringing the social metabolism in line with the natural metabolism, in
order to sustain the inalienable condition for the existence and reproduction
of the chain of human generations. Given that human society must always
interact with nature, concerns regarding the social metabolism are a constant,
regardless of the society. But a mode of production in which associated pro-
ducers can regulate their exchange with nature in accordance with natural
limits and laws, while retaining the regenerative properties of natural pro-
cesses and cycles, is fundamental to an environmentally sustainable social
order.
As Engels stressed: “freedom does not consist in the dream of indepen-
dence from natural laws, but in the knowledge of these laws.” In fact, “real
human freedom” requires living “an existence in harmony with the laws of
nature that have become known.”20
There are a multitude of environmental problems, each with its own dy-
namics (although increasingly interrelated), causing the ecosystems on which
lives depend to collapse. We confront an ecological crisis at the global level
generated by particular social forces. Rather than perpetuating a social meta-
bolic order that generates metabolic rifts and ecological crises, merely at-
tempting to shift the problems around, we need to transcend this system, to
create a social metabolism that allows for nature to replenish and restore it-
self within time scales relevant to its continued reproduction.
Notes
1. James Hansen, “Tipping Point,” in E. Fearn and K. H. Redford, ed., State of the World 2008
(Washington, D.C.: Island Press, 2008), 7–8.
2. Arthur P. J. Mol, Globalization and Environmental Reform (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2001); Charles
Leadbeater, The Weightless Society (New York: Texere, 2000).
3. John Bellamy Foster, Marx’s Ecology (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2000), 158; Karl Marx,
 24 M O N T H LY R E V I E W / N O V E M B E R 2 0 0 8

Capital, vol. 1 (New York: Vintage, 1976), 637–38.

4. István Mészáros, Beyond Capital (New York: Monthly Press, 1995), 40–45, 170–71; István
Mészáros, “The Necessity of Planning,” Monthly Review 58, no. 5 (2006): 27–35.
5. Karl Marx, Grundrisse (New York: Penguin Books, 1993), 409–10; Paul Sweezy, “Capitalism and
the Environment,” Monthly Review 56, no. 5 (2004):86–93; Paul Burkett, Marx and Nature (New
York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999).
6. Justus von Liebig, Letters on Modern Agriculture (London: Walton & Maberly, 1859).
7. Karl Marx, Capital, vol. 3 (New York: Penguin Books, 1991), 949.
8. John Bellamy Foster and Brett Clark, “Ecological Imperialism,” in Leo Panitch and Colin Leys,
ed., Socialist Register 2004 (London: Merlin Press, 2003); Jason W. Moore, “The Modern World-System
as Environmental History?,” Theory and Society 32, no. 3 (2003): 307–77; Marx, Capital, vol. 1, 637.
9. Karl Marx, “Wage Labour and Capital,” in Robert Tucker, ed., The Marx-Engels Reader (New
York: W.W. Norton, 1978), 213.
10. Foster and Clark, “Ecological Imperialism”; Jimmy M. Skaggs, The Great Guano Rush (New York:
St. Martin’s Griffin, 1994).
11. Marx, Grundrisse, 527.
12. Marx, Capital, vol. 3, 950.
13. Marx, Capital, vol. 1, 638.
14. Karl Kautsky, The Agrarian Question (Winchester, MA: Swan, 1988), 215.
15. John Bellamy Foster and Fred Magdoff, “Liebig, Marx, and the Depletion of Soil Fertility,” in
Fred Magdoff, John Bellamy Foster, and Frederick Buttel, ed., Hungry For Profit (New York:
Monthly Review Press, 2000); Fred Magdoff, Les Lanyon, and Bill Liebhardt, “Nutrient
Cycling, Transformation and Flows,” Advances in Agronomy 60 (1997): 1–73; Philip Mancus,
“Nitrogen Fertilizer Dependency and its Contradictions,” Rural Sociology 72, no. 2 (2007):
269–88.
16. Vaclav Smil, Energy in World History (Boulder: Westview, 1994); Michael Williams, Deforesting the
Earth (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003); Brett Clark and Richard York, “Carbon
Metabolism,” Theory and Society 34, no. 4 (2005): 391–428.
17. See Joseph Fargione, et al., “Land Clearing and the Biofuel Carbon Debt,” Science 319 (2008):
1235–38; Timothy Searchinger, et al., “Use of U.S. Croplands for Biofuels Increase Greenhouse
Gases Through Emissions from Land-Use Change,” Science 319(2008): 1238–40; Fred Magdoff,
“The Political Economy and Ecology of Biofuels,” Monthly Review 60, no. 3 (2008): 34–50.
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136–38.


What we call land is an element of nature inextricably interwoven with man’s
institutions. To isolate it and form a market out of it was perhaps the weirdest of all
undertakings of our ancestors....To separate land from man and organize society in
such a way as to satisfy the requirements of a real-estate market was a vital part of
the utopian concept of a market economy.
—Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation (1944), 178.

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