One of the most remarkable aspects of Marxist scholarship in recent decades has been the recovery and development of Marx’s argument on social and ecological metabolism, which was crucial to his critique of political economy. Marx defined the labor process itself in metabolic terms. As he wrote in Capital: “Labour is… a process between man and nature, a process by which man… mediates, regulates and controls the metabolism between himself and nature.”1. Such a conception was two-sided. It captured both the social character of labor, associated with such metabolic reproduction, and its ecological character, requiring a continuing, dialectical relation to nature.
The centrality of the concept of metabolism in Marx’s thought has been recognized for a long time, though its full significance has rarely been grasped until recently. For example, in the 1920s, Lukacs emphasized the “metabolic interaction with nature” through labor as a key to Marx’s dialectic of nature and society. He did not, however, go any further.2 Present-day attention to this theme has developed mainly along two lines: (1) Lukacs’s younger colleague Istvan Meszaros’s analysis of capital as a historically specific system of social metabolic reproduction, and (2) the work of the present authors and others who have built on Marx’s notion of a “metabolic rift” in the relation between nature and society.3 These two strands of Marxist analysis of the nature-society metabolism are dialectically linked. Meszaros’s work has been primarily concerned with issues of social metabolic reproduction, but this has nonetheless generated some of the most penetrating and prescient analyses of the ecological problem. From the other direction, recent Marxist work on ecological metabolism has converged with the dialectic of social metabolic reproduction, as outlined in Meszaros’s Beyond Capital,4 in delimiting the conditions of a sustainable future society. Meszaros, in particular, emphasizes that the qualitative changes in the social order demanded by ecology are indispensable elements of a wider set of qualitative challenges – such as the necessity of social control and substantive equality – defining the struggle for a socialism for the twenty-first century.
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