Por Seth Sandronsky
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| Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair |
With a planetary heat wave causing wildfires to ravage Europe and the western U.S., as droughts pummel the African continent and Latin America, and glaciers collapse in the Himalayas, humanity is at-risk of runaway climate chaos like never before. There’s a history here of how our environment arrived at this breaking point. On that note, author Ian Angus unpacks the ecology, history, polity and science of the worsening ecological crisis in Metabolic Rifts: Capitalism’s Assault on the Earth System (Monthly Review Press, 2026).
Angus’ perspective is historical and material. That is, he centers human relations with nature and each other. To this end, he fleshes out Marx’s theory of the metabolic rift that capitalism creates, e.g., misuse of nature for reasons of capital accumulation based on market competition and class oppression. The burning of fossil fuels is one of the driving forces, but there are others that Angus covers, not the least of which is the reliance of modern agriculture on toxic chemicals.
Metabolic Rifts features four parts and 16 chapters. There are also three appendices at the end of the book. Metabolic Rifts follows on the author’s previous Monthly Review Press books Facing the Anthropocene: Fossil Capitalism and the Crisis of the Earth System (2016) and A Redder Shade of Green: Intersections of Science and Socialism (2017).
A leading figure in Marx’s agrarian analysis was Justus von Liebig, an agricultural scientist. His work on the loss of fertility in the English soil as capitalism emerged from feudalism, forcing peasants off the land into urban areas, details the harmful damage done to the metabolism between Earth and people. Part one of Angus’ book, the “Discovery and Rediscovery of Metabolic Rift,” in part fleshes out the related theoretical work of August Bebel, Karl Kautsky and Nikolai Bukharin, on the causes and consequences of capitalist agriculture, an eco-socialist analysis that John Bellamy Foster, author, Monthly Review editor and professor emeritus at the University of Oregon has broadened in books such as The Return of Nature: Socialism and Ecology (2020).
Part two explains the natural science of the biosphere’s six revolutions. It’s an amazing story. Talk about expanding one’s consciousness to the world around us.
There’s a glut of carbon and nitrogen driving harm to the Earth, Angus details in part three. He explains the science of these gluts in accessible prose. In ways small and large, the book is a scientific primer for non-specialists.
Angus further explicates how planetary science blends with Marxist political economy. The approach sheds light, for instance, on the environmental impacts of a “grow or die” capitalist logic. Extreme social maldistribution of income and wealth is connected with extreme weather events due to degradation of the Earth System. The economy is part of—not apart from—the polity on a finite planet.
We can’t grow our way out of the environmental catastrophe emerging worldwide. Political officials such as U.S. Treasury Secretary Bessent might hold economic growth out as a solution to, say, the interlocking domestic and foreign policy quagmires the Trump administration is worsening. However, that’s a false promise of fixing what’s broken in the political economy on a finite planet.
The final part four, the book’s shortest, unpacks points of departure for actions to address the planetary emergency of the ecology and therefore society. Building a mass movement for the environment is key. I agree and venture that readers of Metabolic Rifts will concur, though the politics of achieving a post-capitalist future are hazy at best now. Bellamy Foster writes about an emerging global environmental proletariat.
One of the three appendices at the end of Angus’ book fleshes out the Anthropocene epoch of our modern time on Earth. It is a new geologic era, following the Holocene epoch. The Anthropocene is the epoch of human-caused actions that are disrupting the Earth System upon which all living things depend.
Corporations with the legal status of living human beings are the powerful actors here. Think of Big Oil, for starters. Big Oil’s scientists knew the harmful effects of burning fossil fuels decades ago, as sustained corporate campaigns to hide such facts succeeded in stalling policies and politics to stop and reverse the ecological damage.
Angus dedicates his book to Paul Burkett, an ecological economist, and Will Steffen, an Earth Systems scientist, both of whom influenced the author and passed away during the writing of Metabolic Rifts.
Seth Sandronsky is a Sacramento journalist and member of the freelancers unit of the Pacific Media Workers Guild. Email sethsandronsky@gmail.com
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