Following the Second World War, the scale and rate of human disruption of the planetary system dramatically increased, contributing to what is now called the “Great Acceleration” in the modern ecological crisis (Angus 2016; Hamilton and Grinevald 2015; Steffen et al. 2015; Waters et al. 2016). In response, a global environmental movement protested the proliferation of pollution, the intensification of demands placed on natural resources, the degradation of ecosystems and the risks associated with atomic and nuclear weapons. In the 1960s and 1970s, the environmental movement gained traction, demanding fundamental changes in society.
During this period, many critical assessments presented analyses that detailed how social processes, especially capitalist economic growth, contributed to environmental problems. Rachel Carson (1962) provided an in-depth account of the dangers and deaths associated with the bioaccumulation of pesticides throughout the food web. She insisted that the principal causes of ecological degradation were “the gods of profit and production” (Carson 1998, 210). Her assessment of the ecological circumstances led her to conclude that corporate enterprise “worships the gods of speed and quantity, and of the quick and easy profit, and out of this idolatry monstrous evils have arisen” (Carson 1998, 194). Barry Commoner (1967; 1971) examined the environmental and health hazards associated with radioactive fallout and chemical pollution. He proposed that the capitalist productive system, especially following the Second World War, given the expansion of synthetic chemicals, had contributed to a fundamental break in the human relationship with the planet, accelerating the degradation of ecological conditions. Club of Rome analysts, utilizing a series of statistical models assessing the relationship between population growth, economic development and availability of natural resources, warned that there are distinct natural limits to social systems, which if surpassed would exceed Earth’s carrying capacity and cause serious ecological deterioration and harmful human impacts (Meadows et al. 1972). Murray Bookchin detailed a broad range of environmental concerns, including soil degradation, urban decay, food contamination, and air, water and land pollution. He warned of an “environmental breakdown” that “stems not merely from greed but from a market-oriented system in which everything is reduced to a commodity, in which everyone is reduced to a mere buyer or seller, and in which every economic dynamic centers on capital accumulation. Hence the prevailing society is inherently antiecological” (Bookchin 1974, xxxiii). These classic studies contributed to an awareness of ecological limits and problems, while raising critical questions regarding unfettered economic growth.
Furthermore, there has been a revival of Marxian scholarship related to ecological thought within most disciplines, addressing such issues as the domination of nature, natural limits, the dialectical relationship between humans and nature, green politics, sustainable development and productivism (see Benton 1989; Gareau 2008; Gorz 1983; 1994; Hughes 2000; Kovel 2002; Leiss 1974; Schmidt 1970; Vlachou 2005). In what follows, we outline three distinct, yet overlapping, approaches in ecological Marxism. We limit our discussion to these political-economic perspectives—namely the treadmill of production, the second contradiction of capitalism and metabolic analysis—because of their assessments of the dynamics of capitalism in relation to the biophysical world and their influential role in the advance of ecological Marxism.
Influenced by Karl Marx and writing during the Second World War, Karl Polanyi—in The Great Transformation (first published in 1944)—describes how the emergence of market-based societies transformed social and ecological relationships. He indicates that prior to the rise of capitalism, economic systems of production and consumption were embedded within the institutions and cultural practices of societies as well as the larger ecological complex. Labor and distributional activities had previously been more likely influenced by principles of behavior, including householding, reciprocity and redistribution, that tended to increase social cohesion and solidarity. In other words, societies through various social norms and customs regulated economic activities, directing them to serve particular ends, such as human needs. As a result, “the economic system is run on non-economic motives ... as a mere function of social organization,” which helps keep most impulses to gain in check (Polanyi 1957, 49, 74–5).
The advent and expansion of capitalism progressively changed human and ecological relationships. Polanyi, similar to Marx, explains that under a capitalist market economy social life becomes subordinated to the requirements of the economic realm. He indicates that “all transactions are turned into money transactions”—in order to meet the needs of capital (Polanyi 1957, 44, 132; see also Marx 1976). The new self-regulated economy becomes “disembedded” from social, cultural and ecological relations, which had previously regulated and constrained its operations. The capitalist economy imposes a novel order, or system of operation, because “a market economy can exist only in a market society.” It expands and intensifies the commodification process. All aspects of the social and natural world—“the substance of society”—are subordinated “to the laws of the market” (Polanyi 1957, 49, 74–5). Rather than an emphasis on the exchange of qualities, social production and consumption activities are geared toward an exchange of quantities. Polanyi (1957, 165) explains that during the transformation toward capitalist social relations “it was necessary to liquidate organic society.” This “divorcedness of a separate economic motive,” which is unique to capitalism, and therefore relatively new in human history, became commonplace (Polanyi 1957, 54). In this, production is primarily geared to endless gain, rather than determined by social needs and use. This “boundless and limitless” production deepens alienation and increases the overall pressures placed on the biophysical world (Polanyi 1957, 57).
Paul Sweezy, reflecting upon the unique character of the capital system and its consequences, explains:
It is this obsession with capital accumulation that distinguishes capitalism from the simple system for satisfying human needs [as] it is portrayed ... in mainstream economic theory. And a system driven by capital accumulation 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. Caught up in this process of restless innovation and expansion, the system rides roughshod over even its own beneficiaries if they get in its way or fall by the roadside. As far as the natural environment is concerned, capitalism perceives it not as something to be cherished and enjoyed but as a means to the paramount ends of profit-making and still more capital accumulation.
(Sweezy 2004, 92)
Capitalism is a dynamic system, premised on endless accumulation. As a grow-or-die system, capitalist development must expand exchange value, which is seen purely as a quantitative measure (Burkett 1999; Mészáros 1995). Qualitative relations, such as the conditions of life, are not a primary part of capitalist accounting. Marx famously explained this in terms of his M-C-M′ formula. Capital is understood as the “continuous transformation of capital-as-money into capital-as-commodities, followed by a retransformation of capital-as-commodities into capital-as-more-money” (Heilbroner 1985, 36). It is exchange value, which knows only quantitative increase—not use value, which relates to the qualitative aspects of production—which drives the system (Burkett 1999; Foster et al. 2010; Kovel 2002). Thus capital constantly metamorphosizes into more capital, which includes surplus value, or profits, the generation of which is “the absolute law of this mode of production” (Marx 1976, 769). This foundational tendency towards expansion pushes the economic system onward, increasing the scale and breadth of its impacts upon the biophysical world (Foster 2000; Li 2009; Marx 1976).
The treadmill of production is a political-economic perspective that was developed to better understand why environmental degradation had increased so quickly following the Second World War. Allan Schnaiberg (1980), the original developer of the treadmill of production approach, was influenced by the work of Marxist political economists such as Charles Anderson, Paul Baran, Harry Braverman, Harry Magdoff, James O’Connor, and Paul Sweezy, as well as scholars such as John Kenneth Galbraith and Gabriel Kolko.
Schnaiberg (1980) emphasized that the growth imperative of capitalism generates a type of path dependency that creates an “enduring conflict” with the environment (see also Schnaiberg and Gould 1994). He contended that “the basic social force driving the treadmill is the inherent nature of competition and concentration of capital” (Schnaiberg 1980, 230). Capitalists constantly strive to increase profits, which are reinvested and employed to support technological innovation and commodity development to enlarge and intensify production. Accumulation takes precedence and drives a cycle of growth that necessitates ever-greater production (Schnaiberg 1980). Newer technologies generally displace workers, decreasing labor costs, while also increasing the overall efficiency of commodity production. Governments—dependent on taxes—often act on behalf of capital to further “national development” and/or ensure “social security.” The development project, through the Marshall Plan and the Bretton Woods system that followed the Second World War, helped expand the global capitalist economy, increasing access to mineral and energy resources in the global South and creating new markets.
The constant pursuit of profit and expansion of capitalist commodity production has direct implications related to natural resource extraction, pollution generation and overall environmental conditions. “For ecosystems, each level of resource extraction became commodified into new profits and new investments, which led to still more rapid increases in demand for ecosystem elements” (Gould et al. 2004, 297). As a result, capitalist growth requires an ever-increasing expansion of resources (i.e., matter and energy) to meet its insatiable appetite. The consequences of this growth manifest in a general disorganization of the environment, via withdrawals and additions (Schnaiberg 1980). Withdrawals refer to extracting and consuming natural resources, such as fossil fuels, trees, nutrients and minerals. Additions include the production of wastes that are not readily incorporated and/or broken down within ecosystems. These additions can include synthetic chemicals, the accumulation of nutrients in waterways and the increasing concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. The main point of the analysis is that increasing requirements are placed on the Earth system, using matter and energy and depositing wastes, to support commodity production. Each expansion in the production process raises the demands, increasingly at a scale and rate that can exceed the ecosystem’s regenerative capacity (Burkett 1999; Foster et al. 2010; Schnaiberg 1980).
K. William Kapp (1971, 231) explains that capitalism is necessarily “an economy of unpaid costs.” In other words, the capitalist economic system generates an array of negative externalities—these are social and environmental costs associated with production, such as water pollution, that are displaced onto other parties (generally the public) and the natural world (see also Anderson 1976). These costs are regarded as external to market transactions. As a result, capitalist enterprises are able to increase their profit margins.
This trend has only become more pronounced as more energy-intensive materials, such as plastics and synthetic chemicals, are incorporated into manufacturing, generating widespread waste and pollution that producers externalize (Schnaiberg and Gould 1994; Pellow 2007). To make matters worse, as Thorstein Veblen (1964) as well as Paul Baran and Paul Sweezy (1966) explained, the rise of monopoly capital contributed to the creation of modern marketing, in order to create consumers for the commodities produced, further reproducing and expanding capitalism. The packaging industry, which is linked to marketing, is the third largest industry in the world after food and energy (Foster and Clark 2012; Moore 2011). This industry produces items that are almost immediately discarded upon purchase. Treadmill scholars conclude that such a society, dominated by the growth imperative of capitalism, is running endlessly, faster and faster, expending energy and resources and producing pollution and wastes at an accelerating pace.
The second contradiction of capitalism perspective also recognizes that capitalism is a growth-dependent economic system, predicated on constant expansion. James O’Connor, the principal proponent of this approach, focuses primarily on the inherent crises of the capitalist system. His earlier work on the fiscal crisis of the state and accumulation crises in general influenced Schnaiberg’s conception of the treadmill of production (O’Connor 1973; 1984). With the second contradiction of capital, O’Connor (1998) incorporates environmental conditions into an analysis of economic crisis.
Similar to treadmill of production scholars, O’Connor (1998) argues that capitalism systematically degrades and exploits the natural environment and labor. As part of its historic development, it creates patterns of polarization and uneven development. Through imperial and colonial relationships, resources such as food and other resources were funneled from the global South to the global North, enhancing the accumulation process in the latter and the immiseration of the peoples in the former. Over time, O’Connor (1998, 189) argues, the position of the South became more complicated, as many nations in the periphery “remained raw material suppliers, some became profitable markets for the cores’ surplus manufactured good, and all of them became more or less important outlets for surplus capital in the North.” In some cases, capital from the North combined “advanced technology” with low-wage labor in the South in order to expand profits. One of the consequences of this pattern of uneven development is that “the worst human ecological disasters as a rule occur in the South,” where pollution is geographically concentrated. Here global capital exploits natural resources, concentrates wastes and externalizes social and environmental costs to vulnerable populations, deepening inequalities throughout the world (see also Guha and Martinez-Alier 1997; Wall 2005).
Within his analysis of the global capitalist system, O’Connor (1998, 176) notes that “the first contradiction of capitalism is internal to the system; it has nothing to do with the conditions [which include natural conditions] of production.” It is characterized by capital overproduction, originating out of the class struggle and the overexploitation of labor, where capital extracts added surplus by restraining labor’s wages and introducing new technologies to displace labor. As a result, capital expands its production of commodities, but there is not enough money among the laboring population to consume the goods. This contradiction, it is argued, confronts capital on the demand side.
The second contradiction of capitalism, according to O’Connor, produces an economic crisis due to the underproduction of capital, which involves the degradation of the external conditions of production. The conditions of capital include the personal world of laborers insofar as they are able to reproduce their capacity to work, natural conditions, and public institutions and infrastructure that aid in the operations of society. In the endless pursuit of growth, O’Connor (1998, 165) argues, capital impairs and destroys “rather than reproducing [its] own conditions.” Natural conditions, on which capital depends for raw materials, are degraded. The health of workers is diminished. An expanding economic system that plunders the environment “self-destructively” undermines the natural conditions on which it depends and produces natural barriers to further expansion, negatively affecting profitability (Kovel 2002, 39–40; O’Connor 1998, 177). As a result, it is argued, capital confronts increasing production costs to its operations, given the degeneration of natural conditions. The worsening environmental conditions are seen as a spark to ignite the environmental movements (in which class does not figure as a primary force—rather these are seen in terms of “new social movements”), which will help usher in transformations to the economic system.
Proponents of metabolic analysis returned to Marx to draw upon the ecological foundations of classical historical materialism to develop a unified socio-ecological critique. In particular, Paul Burkett (1999) and John Bellamy Foster (1999; 2000) forged a groundbreaking analysis, combined with insights from the larger political-economy tradition, regarding Marx’s ecology. This approach elaborated Marx’s triadic scheme of “the universal metabolism of nature,” the “social metabolism” and the metabolic rift (see also Foster and Clark 2016).
Burkett (1999) revealed the “ecological value-form analysis” that is present within Marx’s work, whereby a distinction is made between wealth (which for Marx includes nature as well as labor) and value (which is based on labor alone). Marx outlined the one-sidedness of value-form in capitalism. Classical political economists viewed nature as a “free gift” to capital. Thus capitalist accounting does not take into account the contributions of nature, allowing for the systemic “robbing” of nature, the invisibility of natural limits and externalization of costs to society and nature. At the center of Marx’s critique of capitalism is the contradiction between wealth and value. For him, nature constitutes, along with labor, one of the two sources of all wealth. For capital, nature is not part of the value calculus, so the endless drive to accumulation results in a destructive tendency to override natural limits (Burkett 1999; Marx 1967, 745).
Marx embedded socioeconomic systems in the larger biophysical world and explicitly studied the interchange of matter and energy between the environment and society (Foster 2000; Foster and Burkett 2016). Following scientific debates and discoveries, Marx incorporated the concept of metabolism into his critique of political economy, explaining that he employed the word to denote “the ‘natural’ process of production as the material exchange [Stoffwechsel] between man and nature” (Marx 1975, 209; see also Marx and Engels 1975, 553). He detailed how there is a necessary “metabolic interaction” between humans and the earth and that labor serves as “a process between man and nature, a process by which man, through his own actions, mediates, regulates and controls the metabolism between himself and nature” (Marx 1976, 283). At the same time, capitalism is recognized as a historically specific regime of accumulation that drives the growth imperative. In this, it is a distinct social-metabolic order that operates in accord with its own logic, defining what Marx saw as the social metabolism (Mészáros 1995).
Marx contended that the social metabolism operates within the “universal metabolism of nature,” which stands for the broader biophysical world with its specific cycles and processes that produce and regenerate ecological conditions (Foster 2013, 8; Marx and Engels 1988, 54–66). Under capitalist commodity production, this relationship takes on such an alienated form that it generates ecological crises, manifesting as a “rift” in the socio-ecological metabolism between society and nature. With this conception, Marx avoided subordinating nature to society, or vice versa, allowing him to elude “the pitfalls of both absolute idealism and mechanistic science” (Foster 2013, 8). His metabolic analysis recognizes that humans and the rest of nature are in constant interaction, resulting in reciprocal influences, consequences and dependencies.
The social metabolism under capitalism materializes in a manner unlike previous socio-ecological systems. The practical activities of life are shaped by the expansion and accumulation of capital. As Sweezy (2004, 86–93) explained, in their “pursuit of profit … capitalists are driven to accumulate ever more capital, and this becomes both their subjective goal and the motor force of the entire economic system.” The demands of capital are imposed on nature, increasing the burdens placed on ecological systems and the production of wastes.
Marx demonstrated this social-metabolic analysis in his assessment of the transformations associated with changes in agricultural production. Studying the work of his contemporary scientists, he noted that the soil required nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium to maintain its ability to produce crops, since plants take up these nutrients as they grow. The enclosure movement and the concentration of land that accompanied the rise of capitalism resulted in a division between town and country, causing the urban population to grow. Intensive industrial agricultural techniques were introduced to increase profits from crop production. This form of agriculture produced more food on less land, and urban centers expanded. Food and fiber were shipped to distant markets, transferring the nutrients of the soil from the country to the city (as well as from the global South to the global North). After being consumed, the nutrients in these goods accumulated as waste, rather than being returned to the countryside to enrich the land. Marx (1976, 637) explained that this type of production “disturbs the metabolic interaction between man and the earth,” causing a rift in the soil nutrient cycle that undermines “the operation of the eternal natural condition for the lasting fertility of the soil.” Here, the social metabolism of capital violated the universal metabolism associated with the soil nutrient cycle (also conceived as a law of restitution), undermining the conditions that supported human society.
Metabolic scholars illuminate how the transfer of energy and nutrients is tied to the accumulation process and increasingly takes place at the national and international level, as the bounty of the countryside and distant lands has been transferred to urban centers of the global North. Industrial capitalist agricultural practices that increase the yield of food and fiber tend to exacerbate the metabolic rift in the nutrient cycle, squandering the riches of the soil. For example, in the 1800s, massive quantities of guano were shipped from Peru to the global North to enrich depleted soils (Clark and Foster 2009; Foster 2000). Eventually artificial fertilizers were developed and used for this purpose. But given the town and country divide and the drive to accumulate capital, the metabolic rift in the nutrient cycle persists (Magdoff 2011; Mancus 2007).
In The Political Economy of Global Warming, Del Weston (2014, 66) contends that the “metabolic rift is at the crux of Marx’s ecological critique of capitalism, denoting the disjuncture between social systems and the rest of nature.” Metabolic scholars have examined how the social metabolism of capitalism as a global system has created specific environmental problems in the modern era by transgressing the universal metabolism of nature. For example, capitalist growth has been dependent on burning massive quantities of coal, natural gas and oil (Clark and York 2005; Foster and Clark 2012). This process has resulted in breaking the solar income budget, releasing enormous quantities of carbon that had been sequestered. At the same time, consequent growth-driven ecological degradation (e.g., deforestation) substantially reduces carbon sinks, further contributing to the accumulation of atmospheric carbon dioxide, resulting in a carbon rift that exacerbates human-caused climate change. As the growth imperative of capitalism intensifies the social metabolism without any regard for natural limits, socio-ecological rifts are created within specific natural cycles and systems. Even in overlooked realms, such as marine systems, the social metabolism of capitalism is altering ecosystem dynamics and life cycles. For instance, capital accumulation processes have been demonstrated to play a primary role in the structure and function of the fishing industry on a global scale. Capitalist economic forces have led to fish being harvested at a rate faster than they can reproduce and, at times, to the collapse of fisheries (Longo 2010; Longo et al. 2015).
The intensification of the social metabolism demands more energy and raw materials, generating an array of ecological contradictions and rifts (Burkett 2006; Foster et al. 2010). Metabolic scholars, along with treadmill proponents, argue that technological innovation plays a crucial role in capitalist development as it helps rationalize the labor process and reduce costs via automation. New technologies often make energy and raw material usage more efficient, but this innovation does not necessarily lower the overall demands placed on the biophysical world. In fact, more efficient resource usage often increases aggregate consumption of that particular resource—creating a socioeconomic dynamic known as the Jevons paradox, named after the nineteenth-century economist William Stanley Jevons (Clark and Foster 2001; Jevons 1906; Polimeni et al. 2008). In The Coal Question, Jevons noted this paradoxical relationship, whereby increased consumption outstrips gains made in energy efficiency. He did not, however, provide a full explanation for why this occurred. Marxists in the metabolic tradition explain that efficient operations produce savings, which are used to expand investment in production and thereby promote increased production and consumption, and accordingly total energy consumed, raw materials used and carbon dioxide produced (Foster et al. 2010; York 2010). This dynamic has led to situation where the most efficient nations are often found to be largest consumers of natural resources (York et al. 2004). To understand why this paradox arises, it is necessary to consider how the growth imperative of capital and processes of accumulation influence these dynamics. The Jevons paradox is a product of capitalist social relations. Notably, it illustrates that purely technological means cannot solve ecological problems.
The constant drive to accumulate capital creates distinct socio-ecological rifts and crises. Burkett (1999) discusses two different conceptions of ecological crisis within Marx’s critique of capital. First, an environmental crisis of capital accumulation is caused by resource scarcity, which—as in O’Connor’s second contradiction thesis—can increase the costs of operation for individual capitalists and capital as a whole. Such events have periodically occurred, such as the British cotton crisis created by the Civil War in the United States. Second, and perhaps more significant, is an ecological crisis proper, whereby the accumulation process results in general degradation of the conditions of life. In this case, the deterioration is not necessarily registered by capital due to the externalization of costs. Global climate change, in many ways, is an example of this. In such a case, there are negligible feedback mechanisms from rising ecological costs to economic crisis that can be counted on to check capitalism’s destruction of the conditions that support life. To make matters worse, to the extent that a problem is recognized, capital’s tendency toward commodification drives the growth of new industries and/or markets that can profit from environmental destruction, such as waste management, aquaculture and carbon trading (Foster 2009; Foster et al. 2010; Longo et al. 2015).
As a dynamic system, capitalism confronts environmental obstacles—such as a shortage or exhaustion of particular resources—through a series of shifts and technological fixes to maintain its expansion. Here environmental constraints are addressed by incorporating new resources into the production process, changing the location of production or developing new technologies to increase efficiency. Rather than solving ecological rifts, such shifts generally create new cumulative problems, generating additional disruptions in the conditions of life, often on a larger scale (Foster et al. 2010). Today the drive to capital accumulation is disrupting the planetary metabolism at cumulatively higher levels, threatening irreversible, catastrophic impacts for countless species, including our own.
In this chapter, we briefly discussed how the rise and expansion of capitalism fundamentally transformed social and ecological relationships. We also outlined the general foci and arguments of three prominent political-economic perspectives—the treadmill of production, the second contradiction of capitalism, and metabolic analysis. Each of these approaches addresses specific dynamics within the capitalist system that contribute to various forms of environmental degradation. As is expected, aspects of the distinct perspectives are complementary and overlapping. Metabolic analysis, the most recent of the three, explicitly analyzes the interchange and interpenetration between society and nature. In many ways, social metabolic analysis can serve as a bridge between the natural and social sciences (Fischer-Kowalski 1998). Nevertheless, it is clear from all of these perspectives that the array of environmental problems, such as global climate change, the decline of freshwater and the loss biodiversity, are in part a consequence of the inherent drive of capital to increase accumulation. Each of these approaches contends that capitalism is an unsustainable socioeconomic system, generating widespread ecological degradation. Thus, systemic change is necessary to create a socioeconomic order premised on meeting human needs (instead of capital needs) while protecting the conditions that support life.
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