Metabolic Rift

Metabolic rift is a term developed by John Bellamy Foster and other theorists to refer to Karl Marx’s understanding of ecological disruption under capitalism. While Marx never employed the term itself in his writings, he did write of an "irreparable rift in the interdependent process of social metabolism" created by the rise of capitalism, and developed a systematic critique of capitalism's relation to soil fertility. The metabolic rift is characterized in two very different ways by historical materialists. For Foster, the rift occurs between social systems and non-human natural systems. For Jason W. Moore, the distinction between social and natural systems is empirically false and theoretically arbitrary; following a different reading of Marx, Moore views metabolisms as relations of human and extra-human natures. In this view, capitalism's metabolic rift unfolds through the town-country division of labor, itself a "bundle" of relations between humans and the rest of nature. While Foster sees the metabolic rift as chiefly a consequence of capitalist development, Moore sees it as constitutive of the endless accumulation of capital. The two perspectives, although rooted in historical materialism, produce widely divergent views of what makes ecological crisis and how it relates to capital accumulation.

The concept of a metabolic rift, according to Foster, is the development of Marx’s earlier work in the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts on species-being and the relationship between humans and nature. Metabolism is Marx’s "mature analysis of the alienation of nature," and presents "a more solid—and scientific—way in which to depict the complex, dynamic interchange between human beings and nature, resulting from human labor."

As opposed to those who have attributed to Marx a disregard for nature and responsibility for the environmental problems of the Soviet Union and other purportedly communist states, Foster sees in the theory of metabolic rift evidence of Marx’s ecological perspective. The theory of metabolic rift "enable to develop a critique of environmental degradation that anticipated much of present-day ecological thought," including questions of sustainability.