ken hanly wrote: >Metabolic Rift. Is that Gaia with Gas from too much hog manure? No doubt >the stink will drift over to some obscure >journal such as Capitalism Socialism, Nature. > > No, it is Karl Marx's concept. Let me try this one more time:
V. 3 of Capital, "The Transformation of Surplus Profit into Ground-Rent": "Small-scale landownership presupposes that the overwhelming majority of the population is agricultural and that isolated labour predominates over social; wealth and the development of reproduction, therefore, both in its material and intellectual aspects, is ruled out under these circumstances, and with this also the conditions for a rational agriculture. On the other hand, large landed property reduces the agricultural population to an ever decreasing minimum and confronts it with an every growing industrial population crammed together in large towns; in this way it produces conditions that provoke an IRREPARABLE RIFT in the INTERDEPENDENT PROCESS of SOCIAL METABOLISM, METABOLISM prescribed by the natural laws of life itself. The result of this is a squandering of the vitality of the soil, which is carried by trade far beyond the bounds of a single country." Furthermore, you won't find anything about this in James O'Connor's journal. He has his own interpretation of the environmental crisis that has many useful insights but is not really engaged with what Marx wrote or how to extend it. This is very much the baliwick of John Bellamy Foster, whose scholarship on Marx's ecology is unequaled in my opinion. -- Louis Proyect www.marxmail.org
