Metabolic Rift

Description

1. McKenzie Wark:

"Marx was reading the emerging soil science of his time, and took an interest in the way nitrogen and phosphorus compounds ended up being extracted from the soil in growing cereal crops, which fed an increasingly urban workforce, but where a lot of those soil nutrients ended up being peed down the drain rather than returning to the soil. He generalized that into a theory of metabolic rift, where some break occurs in the passage of some molecule or other through the modern capitalist economy. I would suggest that carbon compounds are, likewise, a subject of metabolic rift. Capitalism — the world-conquering economic system in which we live — runs on carbon extracted from the ground, but which ends up in the atmosphere and oceans. That’s a potentially disastrous metabolic rift." (https://www.inverse.com/article/22748-molecular-red-anthropocene-climate-change-mars-colony-capitalism-climate-change)

2. Becky Clausen on Ariel Salleh:

"Salleh presents a clear and consistent materialist argument, stating that the day-to-day experience of negotiating humanity-nature relations is a “standpoint grounded in labor—not for instance, an ideological or sociobiological argument about women being closer to nature or better than men.” This materialist foundation allows her to circumvent such essentialist ecofeminist arguments and offer an extension of Marx’s concept of metabolism. Salleh successfully describes how the social relations of subsistence can provide an alternative to metabolic rift.

Metabolic rift, as introduced by Marx and expanded by John Bellamy Foster, is created through capitalist exchange as biogeochemical cycles are severed and workers become disconnected from the natural cycles of production. By building off these theoretical developments in eco- Marxism, Salleh introduces the concept of metabolic fit for discussion and debate." (http://arielsalleh.info/published-work/books/Clausen_MR.pdf)