The concept of "metabolism" for Marx, and Marxists, has been the subject of intense discussion in recent years. A quarter of a century ago John Bellamy Foster wrote a fundamental text Marx's Ecology which drew out the ecological core of Marx's though and popularised the concept of "metabolic rift". In the years since, metabolic rift theory has become a tool eagerly used by revolutionaries to understand the relationship between capitalism and nature and how to change it. But it has also been critiqued by some on the Marxist left and by more people on the right.
Ian Angus has been a prominent figure in these discussions through his online journal Climate and Capitalism and this, his latest book, is a study of "Metabolic Rift" and a reassertion of key concepts. But Angus goes much further than restating the arguments. He notes that
Marx could not have known how broad, deep, high and complex the metabolism was. Scientists in his time were just beginning to study the metabolic processes that make life possible at every level, from cells to the entire planet, and even today vast parts are not well understood. But he grasped the essence of the matter, and his insights provide a basic framework for understanding what is happening to the Earth System at all levels today.
So Angus' book sets itself the task of firstly explaining the "metabolic" framework and then using it to explain what is happening to the Earth System today. It is a huge task, and while Angus doesn't claim to write a full analysis of what is going wrong, he offers both a general approach and specific examples that explain the interlocked environmental crises we are facing.
In writing this book Angus stands in a long, if neglected or forgotten, tradition of key Marxist figures engaging with science to understand history and the world. Marx's metabolic approach was mostly forgotten after his death, but not by all. In a key chapter he looks at the work of three Marxists - Bebel, Kautsky and Bukharin - to demonstrate how they each, in different ways approached social and scientific questions in a similar way to Marx. I am particularly glad that Angus devotes some time to Kautsky's work The Agrarian Question, which was described by Lenin as "the most important even in present day economic literature". It is a book that ought to be more widely read for those trying to understand precisely while capitalist agriculture is so destructive.
But I was taken by Angus' account of an earlier work by August Bebel. Bebel's 1879 book Woman and Socialism was one of the most widely read popular expositions of socialist ideas. It was also a book that explored ecological issues. Bebel wrote that capitalist agriculture is "soil vandalism" and it "cripples the land and decreases the crops". He also bemoaned environmental destruction including "the senseless ravaging of forests, for the sake of profit".
Angus explains that the books like these "disproves the canard that socialists of the late 1800s and early 1900s did not know or care about the universal metaolism of nature or the environmental destruction caused by rifts in that metabolism". That said he acknowledges that there was a loss of this knowledge and it is being rediscovered. But this "does not mean that everyone understands the funamental concepts". Crucially, "a common misunderstanding in articles on metabolic rift... is treating it as a metaphor rather than as a description of real global circumstances".
The bulk of the book then is an attempt to explain these core concepts. Angus does this by firstly explaining the metabolic processes that are key to the Earth's systems. Some of these are ancient. Angus' explores how life evolved and how it required chemicals that arose out of key cyclical processes that are built into the planet's geological systems and climate.
Perhaps the most impressive chapters however are those that show how the Earth's metabolic processes are being broken by capitalism. Two of these chapters are essential reading - on the breaking of the carbon cycle (which is driving climate change) and the disruption of the nitrogen cycle. The latter a rarely mentioned crisis that is causing serious problems. Industrial agriculture is pumping nitrogen into Earth's systems faster than any natural process can break it down. The "glut" is breaking a cycle that has exised for "hundreds of millions of years" which saw:
Constant recycling of reactive nitrogen in multiple forms, "a metabolism prescibed by the natural laws of life itself," enabled plant and animal life to thrive almost everywhere on the planet.
But:
Planetary boundaries research confirms that the current level of industrial nitrogen "cannot continue without significantly eroding the resilience of major components of Earth-System functioning".
To fix this, Angus concludes, requires taking control of the valves and "expropriating" the factories. He says:
However it is achieved, social control of nitrogen production must ensure a radical reduction of nitrogen use. That will require balancing the need to prevent ecological damage aganst the need to produce sufficient food, not just withing a country, but globally. It may one day be possible to feed the world without synthetic fertiliser and other chemicals, but undoing the damage that capitalism has caused won't be easy or quick.
The Nitrogen cycle chapter demonstrates very well the great strength of Angus' book, which is the way that Marxism must engage with science to develop strategies that can offer solutions to environmental crises. This is explicitly explored in the final chapters when Angus shows how scientists often come close to recognising that the environmental crises we face are systemic ones, but seldom draw revolutionary conclusions. He warns, however, that what science shows is that the changes needed are urgent, but will also take "decades". Day two of the "revolution" will not see ecological equilibrium restored. But it will open up a space where workers, scientists and activists can find a way forward - at the same time as having access to the wealth and power they need to deal with immediate issues. This, as Angus says, is not about "reordering capitalism" but building a new society in tune with the natural world. Nonetheless the first revolutionary stage is necessary, and I was struck by a pertinent quote that Angus uses from the great ecological socialist William Morris that I had not read before. Morris said:
The first real victory of the Social Revolution will be the establishment not indeed of a complete system of communism in a day, which is absurd, but of a revolutionary adminstration whose definite and conscious aim will be to prepare and further, in all available ways, human life for such a system.
Looking at the world around us the catastrophe threatens on multiple fronts: imperialist war, genocide, economic stagflation and environmental disaster. In Metabolic Rifts Ian Angus reminds us that there is a deep tradition of revolutionary politics closely engaged with scientific research, that offers an understanding of the chaos around us. It also offers us a strategy to change it. I urge readers to read it.
Related Reviews
Angus - A Redder Shade of Green: Intersections of Science and Socialism
Angus - The War Against the Commons: Dispossession and Resistance in the Making of Capitalism
Angus - Facing the Anthropocene: Fossil Capitalism and the crisis of the Earth System
Angus & Butler - Too Many People? Population, Immigration & the Environmental Crisis
Saito - Karl Marx's Ecosocialism: Capital, Nature & the Unfinished Critique of Political Economy
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