Marx’s Theory of Metabolic Rift

John Bellamy Foster is possibly the best known and most influential author of what has been called the “second ecosocialist generation”, which would have started with the publication of his Marx’s Ecology (2000) and Paul Burkett’s Marx and Nature (1999), outstanding works in the positive recovery of the legacy of Marx and Engels at the end of the 20th century and beginning of the 21st century in an ecological key. Editor of the emblematic socialist magazine Monthly Review, his contribution to the theory of the “metabolic rift” – which recovers an expression from volume 3 of Marx’s Capital regarding the irreparable alienation between society and nature derived from capitalist production – was anticipated in different works prior to the aforementioned book. In the article that we invite you to read, Marx’s Theory of Metabolic Rift, published a year before Marx’s Ecology, he synthesized the essence of this contribution of great impact within the ecomarxist theory.