Capitalism's War on Nature.

• Author: Burke, R.
• Position: Book review

The Ecological Rift: Capitalism's War on the Earth, by John Bellamy Foster, Brett Clark, and Richard York, Monthly Review Press, 2010, ISBN 978-1-58367-218-1, $17.95.

The Ecological Rift is a collection of essays previously published in the independent socialist magazine Monthly Review. These articles were extensively re-written for the book itself. The authors provide a brilliant critique of capitalism as an inherently ecologically destructive system which is incapable of attaining environmental sustainability. Their work is undermined, however, by arguments for a philosophical materialism whose relevance to environmental issues is questionable. These excesses can be excused if taken in the spirit of Paul Sweezy's preface to Monopoly Capital as "an essay, not a treatise" with no pretense to comprehensiveness. The value of the Ecological Rift lies in the way it calls attention to the class basis of our ecological predicament.

The book's title is derived from Marx's writings about the effect of capitalist agriculture on the soil. By providing food for growing industrial urban areas, Marx pointed out, a metabolic rift had been opened up whereby essential nutrients and fiber were no longer being returned to the soil. Thus the soil was being depleted while these materials were ending up in cities as waste, causing pollution.

In the first section, "Capitalism and Unsustainable Development," Bellamy, Clark, and York develop this rather organicist concept of a metabolic rift as the basis for a Marxist ecology. They point to a number of planetary Boundaries, the crossing of which endangers the environment necessary for human life. Three of these boundaries have already been crossed: climate change, the nitrogen cycle (due to its removal from the atmosphere for fertilizers), and biodiversity loss. This damage, they demonstrate, is the work of the capitalist world system. This destructiveness is structural and not accidental.

The reason for this is capitalism's pursuit of the endless accumulation of monetary wealth and productive growth. Capitalism could not exist without these. By its own logic, the capitalist system is driven to cross these planetary boundaries, thus imperiling the survival of the human race. Capitalism has no concept of "enough," and any serious attempt to preserve the environment calls for its replacement by a socialist, steady state economy.

A particularly interesting aspect of their work is the authors' defense of the labor...