Capitalism and the Metabolic Rift—a 152-page special issue

MONTHLY REVIEW

MONTHLY
REVIEW
VOL. 70
NO. 3

J U LY - A U G U S T
2018
A N I N D E P E N D E N T S O C I A L I S T M A G A Z I N E

The
No Empires, No Dust Bowls
Hannah Holleman

Cesspools, Sewage & Social Murder

Robbery
Ian Angus

Metabolic Rift & the Microbiome

Michael Friedman

Land–Sea Ecological Rifts

of
B re tt C l a r k & St e fa n o B . Lo n g o

Marx, Value & Nature

J o h n B e l l a m y Fo st e r

On English Farming and Sewers

Nature
Justus von Liebig

1862 Preface to Agricultural Chemistry

Justus von Liebig

Introduction by John Bellamy Foster & Brett Clark

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JULY–AUGUST 2018 MONTHLY REVIEW VOL. 70  NO. 3
An Independent Socialist Magazine Founded in 1949 by Leo Huberman & Paul M. Sweezy
John Bellamy Foster, Editor Brett ◊ Clark, Associate Editor
Colin Vanderburg, Assistant Editor Martin Paddio, Business Manager Malcolm Thorndike
◊ ◊

Nicholson, Circulation R. Jamil Jonna, Associate Editor for Communications & Production
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Former Editors: Harry Magdoff (1969–2006) ◊ Ellen Meiksins Wood (1997–2000) ◊ Robert W. McChesney (2000–2004)

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INTRODUCTION The Robbery of Nature: Capitalism and the Metabolic Rift

John Bellamy Foster and Brett Clark1
No Empires, No Dust Bowls: Ecological Disasters and the Lessons of History
Hannah Holleman22
Cesspools, Sewage, and Social Murder: Environmental Crisis and Metabolic Rift
in Nineteenth-Century London
Ian Angus32
Metabolic Rift and the Human Microbiome
Michael Friedman70
Land–Sea Ecological Rifts: A Metabolic Analysis of Nutrient Loading
Brett Clark and Stefano B. Longo106
Marx, Value, and Nature
John Bellamy Foster122
DOCUMENTS On English Farming and Sewers
Justus von Liebig138
1862 Preface to Agricultural Chemistry
Justus von Liebig146
Cover illustration by Freepik, http://freepik.com.

Notes from the Editors

The prefigurative moment in the broad tradition of thought known as ecoso-
cialism can be traced back to the 1960s and ’70s, in the work of such thinkers as
K. William Kapp, Barry Commoner, Virginia Brodine, Murray Bookchin, Shigeto
Tsuru, Rudolf Bahro, Raymond Williams, Paul M. Sweezy, Herbert Marcuse,
Howard Parsons, Charles H. Anderson, and István Mészáros. These writers saw the
relation between Marxism and ecology as relatively unproblematic, and drew di-
rectly on Karl Marx, Frederick Engels, and Marxism in general to develop their eco-
logical critiques of capitalist society. (A related development occurred in late Soviet
thought, as scholars including E. K. Federov, Ivan T. Frolov, and I. P. Gerasimov
made a significant attempt to return to Marx’s ecological ideas.)
This changed dramatically from the late 1970s through the 1990s, with the emer-
gence of a hybrid “red–green” approach to what then came to be known as “ecoso-
cialist” thought. This mode of analysis, which has included such important figures
as Ted Benton, André Gorz, James O’Connor, Joel Kovel, the early Michael Löwy,
and the early Ariel Salleh, highlighted what they perceived as the ecological flaws
of Marxism, including those of the classical theories of Marx and Engels. Although
often playing an important critical role, such thinkers tended to graft Green theory
DOI: 10.14452/MR-070-03-2018-07_0 (continued on inside back cover)
archive.monthlyreview.org
DOI: 10.14452/MR-070-03-2018-07_1 INTRODUCTION

The Robbery of Nature

Capitalism and the Metabolic Rift
JOHN BELLAMY FOSTER and BRETT CLARK

The chapter on “Machinery and Large-Scale Industry” in the first vol-

ume of Karl Marx’s Capital closes with this statement: “All progress in cap-
italist agriculture is a progress in the art, not only of robbing the worker,
but of robbing the soil…. Capitalist production, therefore, only develops
the techniques and the degree of combination of the social process of
production by simultaneously undermining the original sources of all
wealth—the soil and the worker.” “Robbing the worker” referred to the
theory of exploitation, which entailed the expropriation of the worker’s
surplus labor by the capitalist. But what did Marx mean by “robbing the
soil”? Here robbery was connected to his theory of the metabolic rift aris-
ing from the expropriation of the earth. As he stated earlier in the same
paragraph, “capitalist production…disturbs the metabolic interaction
between man and the earth, i.e. it prevents the return to the soil of its
constituent elements consumed by man in the form of food and clothing;
hence it hinders the operation of the eternal natural condition for the
lasting fertility of the soil.”1
The same basic logic was present in the other famous passage on the
metabolic rift, at the end of the chapter on “The Genesis of Capitalist
Ground Rent” in the third volume of Capital. There Marx referred to “the
squandering of the vitality of the soil” by large-scale capitalist enterprise,
generating “an irreparable rift in the interdependent process of social
metabolism, a metabolism prescribed by the natural laws of life itself.”2
In both instances, Marx’s notion of the robbery of the soil is intrinsi-
cally connected to the rift in the metabolism between human beings and
the earth. To get at the complexities of his metabolic rift theory, it is
therefore useful to look separately at the issues of the robbery and the rift,
seeing these as separate moments in a single development. This is best
done by examining how Marx’s ecological critique in this area emerged
in relation to the prior critique of industrial agriculture provided by the
celebrated German chemist Justus von Liebig. Of particular importance
in this context is Liebig’s notion of the “robbery system” (Raubsystem) or
John Bellamy Foster is the editor of MR and a professor of sociology at the University
of Oregon. Brett Clark is the associate editor of MR and an associate professor of soci-
ology at the University of Utah.

1
2 M ONTHLY RE V IE W / J uly – A u g ust 2018

“robbery economy” (Raubwirthschaft), which he associated with British

high farming.3
For Marx, as for Liebig, this robbery was not of course confined simply
to external nature, since humans as corporeal beings were themselves
part of nature.4 The expropriation of nature in capitalist society thus had
its counterpart, in Marx’s analysis, in the expropriation of human bodily
existence. The robbery and the rift in nature’s metabolism was also a rob-
bery and a rift in the human metabolism. This was visible in the many
forms of bonded labor, in the conditions of social reproduction in the
patriarchal household, and in the destructive physical impacts and the
loss of the vital powers of individual human beings.

Li ebig: I n d u s t r i a l A g ri c u l t u re a nd t he A lie nation of the S oil

Beginning in the late 1850s and early 1860s, Liebig, who had long ad-
vocated the use of scientific methods in agriculture, began to argue that
British high farming’s systematic “alienating [of] the crops” of the fields
was irrational from a long-term perspective, since it ultimately despoiled
the earth of its nutrients. “A farmer,” he declared, “may sell and perma-
nently alienate all that portion of the produce of his farm which has been
supplied by the atmosphere [but not the constituents of the soil]—a field
from which something is permanently taken away, cannot possibly in-
crease or even continue equal in productive power.” He stressed that “the
axiom thus enunciated is simply a natural law.”5
The “natural law” at issue here was what Liebig called the “law of com-
pensation” or law of replacement (Gesetz des Ersatzes), whereby nutrients
removed from the soil had to be restored.6 This was in turn based on
the recognition of the metabolic interaction (Stoffwechsel) governing the
exchanges of matter and energy between life forms and their environ-
ments. Metabolism was a fundamental concept of natural science, and
Liebig was one of its nineteenth-century pioneers.7 In essence, it raised
the question of the material interchanges and processes governing the
complex interrelations between organic and inorganic nature.
“All plants, without exception,” Liebig wrote, “exhaust the soil, each
of them in its own way, of the conditions for their reproduction.” To sell
the food and fiber to populations in cities hundreds and thousands of
miles from the land prevented the return of these essential nutrients to
the soil, resulting in a system of “spoliation.” Attempts to compensate
for this—for example, through Britain’s massive imports of guano from
Peru, and bones from the battlefields and catacombs of Europe—were
temporary and makeshift solutions, almost inherently insufficient, that
plundered other countries of their earthly resources.8
I ntroduction 3

Liebig’s emphasis in the late 1850s and early 1860s on the alienation
and robbery of the soil can be seen as a product of developments that
began in the 1840s and that extended to the time that Marx was writing
Capital in the 1860s. Responding to the deterioration of soil conditions
and the commercial demands for higher agricultural productivity—what
historians have called the Second Agricultural Revolution—English
farmers in 1841 began importing massive amounts of guano from Peru.9
Meanwhile, the Irish potato famine, beginning in 1845, led to the ab-
olition of the Corn Laws in England, allowing for the importation of
cheaper grain and forcing new, competitive market conditions, which in
turn gave rise to what Marx called a “new regime” of the international
food system.10 This period saw the development of “high farming” or
intensive agriculture in England (itself symbolized by the importation
of guano, bones, oil cakes, and other natural fertilizers), and the shift
to an increasingly meat-based agricultural system grounded in agricul-
tural practices such as the famous Norfolk rotation, establishing a mixed
animal-crop system.11 In this context, concerns were raised about the loss
of soil nutrients to the land from new, intensive forms of agriculture and
the waste of nutrients in human sewage resulting from massive food
and fiber imports to the cities.12 In Germany and other parts of Europe,
there were growing worries among agronomists and soil scientists about
England’s voracious importation of bones from the Continent. The en-
tire period of the Second Agricultural Revolution was thus one of crisis
and transformation in the socioecological metabolism of British soil cul-
tivation, associated with the Industrial Revolution.
To underscore the enormity of the crisis of soil ecology, Liebig made a
point of attacking entrenched notions propounded by some agricultur-
alists and the classical political-economist David Ricardo that the “pow-
er of the soil” on any given plot of land was “indestructible” and hence
“inexhaustible.”13 The development of modern chemistry had discred-
ited such views. Plant growth, Liebig contended, depended on “eight
substances” (today we know this to be eighteen; sixteen of which, ex-
cluding carbon and oxygen, are chemical elements plants derive from
the soil and not the atmosphere)—all of which had to be replenished
for the soil to remain fertile.14 Of these, the nutrients needed in the
largest quantities were nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium. Liebig’s
famous “law of the minimum,” moreover, indicated that there was a
complex balance of soil nutrients such that, to enhance the productiv-
ity of the soil in a given area, it was necessary to supply the nutrient in
which the soil was most deficient, to the point at which that nutrient
was once again in proportion with the next-most deficient soil mineral.
4 M ONTHLY RE V IE W / J uly – A u g ust 2018

Growth rates were determined by the most limited factor. Soil “exhaus-
tion” meant that the mineral composition of the earth had been so com-
promised that nutrients needed to be massively imported by “the hand
of man” from outside the farm. “In this sense,” Liebig declared, “most
of our cultivated fields are exhausted,” requiring massive infusions of
chemical nutrients from outside.15
Liebig was not alone from the 1850s through the 1870s in addressing
the issue of the destructive relation to the soil. Other major natural sci-
entists, agronomists, and political economists raised the same questions,
including George Waring, Henry Carey, James F. W. Johnston, Carl Fraas,
and Wilhelm George Friedrich Roscher—all of whom (except Waring)
Marx studied closely.16 It was Liebig, however, who advanced the most
critical and global concerns with respect to large-scale industrial agricul-
ture. In doing so, he focused in particular on the extraordinary ascent of
the guano trade as a measure of the extent of the European soil crisis.
By far the richest deposits of guano were to be found on the Chincha
Islands off the coast of Peru, where it was the product of cormorants, boo-
bies, and pelicans feeding since time immemorial on huge shoals of fish in
the coastal currents and depositing their excrement in what became moun-
tains of natural fertilizer. Peruvian guano was rich in nitrogen, ammonia,
phosphates, and alkaline salts. Historian Gregory Cushman writes that “all
told, from 1840 to 1879, Peru exported an estimated 12.7 million metric tons
of guano from its islands,” the great bulk of it destined for British fields.17
Between 1841 and 1855, according to Liebig, “upwards of 1,500,000 met-
ric tons” of Peruvian guano had been imported into Great Britain, and
two million tons into Europe as a whole. This was enough, based on the
figures for Europe in this period, to produce an additional 200 million
cwts (or hundredweights—an imperial hundredweight is 112 pounds) of
grain more than would have been produced without the guano. This was
“sufficient to feed perfectly 26 ¾ million human beings [more than the
population of England, Wales, and Scotland at that time] for one year.”
Liebig indicated that “one cwt. of guano was, in terms of the effective
mineral constituents it contained, the equivalent of 25-80 cwt. of wheat.”18
A sense of the deficiency in English agricultural fields in relation to
their full productivity could thus be found in the immense quantity of
guano imported at great cost and applied to the fields—as well in the
importation of bones (bonemeal), nitrates, oil cakes, and other fertilizers
and feeding stuffs for farm animals. Reflecting on this situation, Liebig
charged that if England were to continue with its high farming system—
a high-input, high-output, capital-intensive form of large-scale industrial
agriculture—it would so despoil the soil and become so dependent on
I ntroduction 5

increasing inputs that it would need quantities of guano “of about the
extent of the English coal fields.” No wonder that “British and American
ships have searched through all the seas, and there is no small island, no
coast, which has escaped their enquiries after guano.”19
All this reinforced Liebig’s argument that the much-vaunted industrial
agriculture of British high farming was simply a more intensive, modern
“robbery system” undermining the conditions of reproduction for future
generations. To be sure, this was a more “refined” form of robbery, where
“robbery improves the art of robbery.” But the resulting impoverishment
was the same. Indeed, the system’s new techniques often effected an
even more thoroughgoing impoverishment of the constituents of the
soil. Rather than a “mark of progress,” under these circumstances, an in-
crease in crop production was likely a sign of long-term regression—the
more so if examined on a global scale.20 The English importation of bones
from the Continent to be used as fertilizer, and its effect on the growth
of individuals, could be seen in the greater height of British military con-
scripts relative to their Continental counterparts. “Great Britain,” Liebig
declared, “robs all countries of the conditions of their fertility; she has
already ransacked the battle-fields of Leipzig, Waterloo, and the Crimea
for bones, and consumed the accumulated skeletons of many generations
in the Sicilian catacombs…. We may say to the world that she hangs like
a vampire on the neck of Europe, and seeks out its hearts-blood, without
any necessity and without permanent benefit to herself.”21
Such a modern robbery culture, based on the total alienation of the
soil, was the antithesis of a rational agriculture rooted in the application
of science. Liebig did not hesitate to point out the structural reasons for
this contradiction. As he wrote in the conclusion to the introduction to
the 1862 edition of his Agricultural Chemistry, the entire rapacious system
associated with industrial agriculture could be attributed to “the folly
and ignorance...which private property interposes” in the way of the “re-
covery” of the constituents of the soil. The natural law of compensation
was being violated by a production system which knew no bounds, oper-
ating as if “the Earth is inexhaustible in its gifts.”22 Moreover, attempts to
compensate for the loss of soil nutrients by using only particular fertil-
izers might yield still more irrational results in the form of an “excess of
nutritive substances,” as opposed to “rational husbandry.”23

M a r x : Th e Robbery o f Nat u re a nd t he Me tabolic Rift

Marx’s conception of the robbery or expropriation of nature was nec-
essarily much broader than that of Liebig, though the latter’s natural-
scientific researches had a decisive impact on Marx’s thought. Marx
6 M ONTHLY RE V IE W / J uly – A u g ust 2018

emerged as a materialist thinker in his early twenties through a long and

intense struggle with the Hegelian system of German idealism, in which
his doctoral dissertation on Epicurus’s ancient materialist philosophy of
nature played a central role (together with his encounter with the work
of Ludwig Feuerbach). Epicurean materialism, which exerted a powerful
influence on the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century, would
remain a crucial reference point in Marx’s critical outlook, even as he de-
veloped his own historical-materialist approach.24 As a thinker concerned
centrally with the human relation to the earth through production, his
analysis already displayed, in the early 1840s, a broad ecological outlook,
though his sharper critique of the environmental contradictions of capi-
talist development was only developed in his mature works. Still, already
in the 1840s, he addressed such issues as the expropriation and alienation
of the land; the division between town and country; the pollution of air,
water, and food in the cities; and the corporeal reality of humanity, since
human beings remained inherently “a part of nature,” albeit increasingly
alienated from their natural environments.25
By the 1850s, due to the influence of his close friend Roland Daniels—
physician, natural scientist, communist organizer, and author of
Mikrokosmos (which Marx read and commented on, but which, due to
Daniels’s premature death was not published until late in the twenti-
eth century)—Marx took up the concept of metabolism, integrating it
into his system.26 No doubt he also drew upon Liebig. During this pe-
riod, he introduced the concept of “social metabolism,” representing the
real material relation between nature and humanity formed by the labor
and production process.27 The “social metabolic process,” he wrote, con-
stituted “the real exchange of commodities,” including the productive
exchange with nature, encompassing both matter and form, “use-value
and...exchange-value.” The labor process itself was defined as the “eter-
nal natural necessity which mediates the metabolism between man and
nature, and therefore human life itself.”28
Marx’s analysis of the social metabolism was thus never conceptually
divorced from what he called the “universal metabolism of nature”—of
which the human social metabolism was simply a part.29 His entire dia-
lectical framework rested on what would today be called an ecological
(or socioecological) systems theory, connecting the materialist concep-
tion of history to that of nature—and requiring continuing study not
only of changing developments in human history, but also in natural
history (which in Marx’s work took the form of extensive inquiries into
geology, agronomy, chemistry, physics, biology, physiology, mathemat-
ics, and more).30
I ntroduction 7

While writing Capital in the late 1850s and 1860s, Marx famously paused
twice, not only to absorb Charles Darwin’s evolutionary theory and its
implications for the human relation to the environment, but also to
study Liebig’s analysis of the more intensive robbery system characteriz-
ing modern agriculture. In taking up Liebig’s critique, he was to develop
this more fully than Liebig had, forging a dynamic theory of the alienated
social metabolism based on the exploitation of human labor. For Marx
it was clear that socioecological contradictions were embedded in the
process of capital accumulation in historical ways that went far beyond
Liebig’s natural-scientific perspective.31 The result was a much deeper and
richer sense of the structural imperatives underlying the expropriation
of nature in the modern system of commodity production, informed by
developments in natural science while also connecting these processes to
the inner contradictions of capitalism as a historical social system.
To understand Marx’s ecological critique, it is necessary to recognize
that the contradiction between natural-material use values and econom-
ic exchange values lay at the core of his entire system. Inspired by G.
W. F. Hegel’s contradiction between matter and form, Marx’s critique
of the capitalist political economy rested in large part on the contradic-
tion between metabolic interchange and the economic value form of
commodities. The circuit of exchange value ultimately depended on the
production and exchange of commodities embodying natural-material
use values. “The chemical process, regulated by labor,” Marx wrote, “has
everywhere consisted of an exchange of (natural) equivalents,” whose
violation meant the expropriation of nature, with disastrous conse-
quences.32 The capitalist valorization process could thus never free itself
from the conditions of “metabolic interaction [Stoffwechsel] between man
and nature.”33 All attempts to do so, as in industrial agriculture or the
exploitation of labor power, generated a metabolic rift, a crisis of social-
metabolic reproduction.
Marx’s concern with the break in social-metabolic reproduction of capi-
talism was undoubtedly deeply affected by the growing public discussions
in the 1850s, during the Second Agricultural Revolution, of soil nutrients,
the impact of the guano trade, and the enormous waste of human sewage.
These developments all derived from the growth of English high farming,
and what Marx called the “new regime” of international food production
following the abolition of the Corn Laws. He stressed in the Grundrisse
how “self-sustaining agriculture” had broken down and been replaced
by an industrial agriculture that required “machinery, chemical fertilizer
acquired through exchange, seeds from different countries; etc.,” while
guano was being imported from Peru in exchange for the export of other
8 M ONTHLY RE V IE W / J uly – A u g ust 2018

products.34 In the new regime of food production, 25 percent of the wheat

consumed in Britain in the mid-1850s was imported. Meanwhile, “large
tracts of arable land in Britain” were being transformed into pasture. The
derangement of the British food trade in the period, including competi-
tive price instability, which interfered with securing the necessary for-
eign supplies, was such as to make “even an abundant harvest, under the
new regime, [appear] relatively defective.”35
These concerns regarding the contradictions of capitalist agriculture
and its material impacts were further heightened by Marx’s reading of the
1862 edition of Liebig’s Agricultural Chemistry, especially its long incendiary
introduction, on which Marx took extensive notes in 1865–66, while strug-
gling to complete the first edition of Capital. “One of Liebig’s immortal
merits,” Marx declared in Capital, was “to have developed from the point
of view of natural science, the negative, i.e. destructive side of modern
agriculture.” Nevertheless, he followed this immediately by pointing out
that Liebig’s work contained the most egregious errors wherever its au-
thor ventured beyond the laws of natural science to comment on the laws
of political economy.36 Only by integrating these new natural-scientific de-
velopments with the critique of capital would it be possible to understand
the wider implications for the human-nature metabolism. Thus, in Capital,
Marx argued that “all progress in increasing the fertility of the soil for a
given time is a progress towards ruining the more long-lasting sources of
that fertility,” and that “the more a country proceeds from large-scale in-
dustry as the background of its development, as in the case of the United
States, the more rapid is this process of destruction.”37 Here he empha-
sized that capital accumulation through its rapacious expropriation of
nature inevitably promoted ecological destruction. Hence, in his Economic
Manuscript of 1864–65, he expressly raised the question of “the declining
productivity of the soil when successive capital investments are made.”38
At the heart of the contradiction was the reality that the human me-
tabolism with nature under capitalism was mediated by value. Thus “the
cultivation of particular crops depends on fluctuations in market prices
and the constant changes in cultivation with these price fluctuations.”
This reflects the fact that “the entire spirit of capitalist production, which
is oriented toward the most immediate monetary profit—stands in con-
tradiction to agriculture, which has to concern itself with the whole
gamut of permanent conditions of life required by the chain of human
generations.”39 Writing in Theories of Surplus Value, Marx observed that
even manure, plain muck, has become merchandise, not to speak of bone-
meal, guano, potash, etc. That the [natural] elements of production are
I ntroduction 9

estimated in terms of money is not merely due to the formal change in

production [as compared with pre-capitalist forms of agriculture]. New ma-
terials are introduced into the soil and its old ones are sold for reasons of
production…. The seed trade has risen in importance to the extent to which
the importance of seed rotation has been recognised.40

Yet the mediation of value, the high inputs and high outputs required
by capitalist agriculture, long-distance trade, and the pressures on the
soil all pointed to the intensification and long-term instability of the ag-
ricultural metabolism.
Marx argued that more intensive forms of agriculture, even as they
produced a record harvest, could so deplete the soil that famine followed,
requiring years for the soil to recover.41 Ireland, he noted, was even forced
to “export its manure” across the sea to England in a dramatic instance
of ecological imperialism.42 In the East Indies, “English-style capitalist
farming…only managed to spoil indigenous agriculture and to swell the
number and intensity of famines.” This was part of a colonial “bleeding
process, with a vengeance!”43
The deeper significance of Marx’s analysis became clear as he developed
the implications already present in his concept of social metabolism, in
order to conceptualize the systemic nature of the ecological contradic-
tions of capitalism. Hence, in Capital, he brought the natural-material
or ecological side of his social-metabolic reproduction to the fore in an
attempt to understand the wider ramifications of the capitalist robbery
system and its disruptive, indeed destructive, impact on natural systems.
It was in this context that he raised the critical issue of the “irreparable
rift in the interdependent process of social metabolism.”44 By “irreparable
rift,” he did not of course mean that a restoration of a rational and sus-
tainable metabolism between human beings and the earth was impos-
sible—indeed he was to define the need for socialism ultimately in these
terms.45 Nevertheless, the destructive aspects of capitalism’s alienated
metabolic relation to the earth were not to be denied.
Here Marx’s deep understanding of Epicurean materialism is evi-
dent. Central to his materialist ontology was the Epicurean conception
of mortality, to which he often made reference.46 Thus, in The Poverty of
Philosophy, he referred to “mors immortalis” (“death the immortal”)—an al-
lusion to Lucretius’s “immortal death has taken away mortal life.”47 Both
in Epicurean materialism and in Marx’s own philosophy, this referred to
the transitoriness of things as the only permanent material reality.
Thus, in evoking the enormity of capitalism’s destructive impact on the
“metabolism prescribed by the natural laws of life itself,” nothing would
have been more characteristic for Marx than to recall Lucretius’s epic
10 M ONTHLY RE V IE W / J uly – A u g ust 2018

poem De Rerum Natura. In Thomas Charles Baring’s classic 1884 transla-

tion, we read: “A property is that which ne’er can cut itself adrift; / Nor
can be sundered anyhow, without a fatal rift.”48
It is quite conceivable that Marx, confronted with capitalism’s growing
ecological contradictions, turned back to Epicurus (and Lucretius) to call
up the notion of a “fatal rift” (or “irreparable rift”), reflecting the dis-
ruption and destruction of nature’s properties and processes. In this per-
spective, capitalism, by robbing the elements of reproduction on which
future generations depended, undermined not only external nature, but
also the basis of human life itself.

The Co r p o rea l Ri ft
The metabolic rift generated by capitalism is not confined to the alien-
ated relation to external nature, but affects the human metabolism itself,
the bodily existence of human beings—a phenomenon that we can call
the corporeal rift. This is related to what socialist ecofeminist Ariel Salleh
has called “metabolic value,” that is, struggles around social reproduction
focused on the household and the reproduction of humans themselves,
as both physical and social beings.49 It is also connected to what Howard
Waitzkin called “the second sickness”—the social-epidemiological effects
of capitalist development.50
A key component of Epicurean materialism, one that distinguished it
from later Cartesian dualism, was the fundamentally corporeal nature
of human beings, who are part of and dependent on nature. As Norman
Wentworth DeWitt explained, “to Epicurus body and soul are alike corpo-
real; they are coterminous.”51 Following this approach, Marx consistently
integrated his materialist conception of history with the materialist con-
ception of nature, as developed within modern science, while also incor-
porating physiological developments. Human beings, like other animals,
have specific bodily needs essential to their survival, such as hydration,
sufficient calories, sleep, and clean air. Marx argued that in meeting these
physiological imperatives, human beings actively make history, trans-
form the world, and produce a social metabolism interconnected with
the universal metabolism.52 Yet while humans can make history, there
are real constraints on this potential, given the limits associated with
“inherited socio-cultural conditions,” the corporeal structure related to
evolutionary descent, and the biophysical characteristics and processes
of the Earth System.53 With these considerations in mind, Marx offered a
rich historical examination of the numerous ways that the capital system
degraded, undermined, or disrupted the corporeal metabolism, thwart-
ing human social development.
I ntroduction 11

During the long transition from mercantilism to industrial capitalism,

the expropriation of nature also involved the extreme expropriation of
human bodily existence. Marx wrote that “this history,” which involves
the outright seizure of title to property from immediate producers, “is
written in the annals of mankind in letters of blood and fire.”54 Peasants
were forcibly removed from the countryside when the customary rights
associated with land tenure were abolished. British soldiers carried out
evictions by burning villages, as well as individuals who refused to leave.
Bourgeois property laws helped steal the land, ushering in a revolution-
ary transformation, whereby the human population was progressively re-
moved from access to the means of subsistence. As a result, landowners
“conquered the field of capitalist agriculture, incorporated the soil into
capital, and created for the urban industries the necessary supplies of
free and rightless proletarians,” who had to sell their labor-power to earn
wages to purchase the means of subsistence.55 This is a relationship of
force and deprivation, because, as Marx remarked, “if the workers could
live on air, it would not be possible to buy them at any price.”56
With colonial expansion and European settlement of distant lands, the
violation of corporeal existence took the form of the expropriation asso-
ciated with the genocide against the indigenous peoples of the Americas
and the enslavement of Africans.57 Violence and coercion were integral
components of the bonded labor system: confinement, flogging, beating,
and rape were commonplace. In this living nightmare, slaves were beasts
of burden, regularly deprived of the conditions that allowed for adequate
sustenance. Escaped slaves were hunted, tortured, and killed, so long as
there was a steady supply of more bonded workers.58
With the demise of slavery, the British devised the infamous “coolie”
trade. Large numbers of Chinese bonded workers were forced to dig in
the guano islands off the coast of Peru, to provide the fertilizer to spread
on English fields. As one contemporary English observer described the
conditions of these workers:
I can state that their lot in these dreary spots is a most unhappy one. Besides
being worked almost to death, they have neither sufficient food nor pass-
ably wholesome water. Their rations consist of two pounds of rice and about
half a pound of meat. This is generally served out to them between ten and
eleven in the morning, by which time they have got through six hours’
work. Each man is compelled to clear from four to five tons of guano a day.
During the last quarter of 1875, it is reported that there were 355 Chinamen
employed at Pabellon de Pica alone, of whom no less than 98 were in the
hospital. The general sickness is swelled legs, caused, it is supposed, by
drinking condensed water not sufficiently cooled, and by a lack of vegetable
diet. The features of this disease are not unlike those of scurvy or purpura.
12 M ONTHLY RE V IE W / J uly – A u g ust 2018

The bodily metabolism of these workers was thus being sacrificed to

obtain the guano to compensate for the impaired soil metabolism on
English fields. The suicide rate of the Chinese bonded workers digging
the guano was so high that, as a U.S. consul to Peru noted in 1870, guards
had to be placed “around the shores of the Guano Islands, where they
are employed, to prevent them [the Coolies] from committing suicide by
drowning, to which end the Coolie rushes in his moments of despair.”59
Throughout their critique of capital, Marx and Engels exhaustively as-
sessed the system’s effects on corporeal conditions. They were horrified
by the extent to which it failed to meet bodily needs, resulting in disease,
suffering, and shortened lives. Marx stressed that capitalist production
“squanders human beings, living labor, more readily than does any other
mode of production, squandering not only flesh and blood, but nerves
and brain as well.”60 This tension and contradiction exists at the heart of
the capital system, whose “purpose is not the satisfaction of needs but
the production of profit.”61
Drawing on first-hand experience, field work, and official reports and
studies, Marx and Engels detailed changes in corporeal existence. In 1839,
when Engels was nineteen years old, he wrote a vivid description in his
“Letters from Wuppertal” of corporeal and ecological conditions in his
birthplace, Barmen, Germany, then the most industrialized city in the
region. He observed that the river was red due to pollution from cotton
factories using “Turkey red” as a dye. He linked many of the city’s prob-
lems, such as the lack of a “vigorous life” and degraded health, to work-
ing conditions, both in factories and at home. “Work in low rooms where
people breathe in more coal fumes and dust than oxygen—and in the
majority of cases beginning already at the age of six—is bound to deprive
them of all strength and joy in lives,” he wrote. “The weavers, who have
individual looms in their homes, sit bent over them from morning till
night, and desiccate their spinal marrow in front of a hot stove.”62
For The Condition of the Working Class in England, his pioneering study in
urban sociology and environmental injustice, Engels, accompanied by his
partner Mary Burns, went door to door conducting interviews and col-
lected official medical and public health reports, documenting and analyz-
ing the social and ecological conditions in Manchester, whose dominance
in spinning and weaving cotton had made it the center of the Industrial
Revolution. The city was ominous, due to the black smoke that blocked out
the sun. Charles Dickens described this ceaseless smoke pollution as “black
vomit, blasting all things living or inanimate, shutting out the face of day,
and closing in on all these horrors with a dense dark cloud.”63 Engels de-
tailed how the conditions within factories further robbed workers of their
I ntroduction 13

health, “The atmosphere of the factories is, as a rule, at once damp and
warm, unusually warmer than is necessary, and, when the ventilation is
not very good, impure, heavy, deficient in oxygen, filled with dust and the
smell of the machine oil, which almost everywhere smears the floor, sinks
into it, and becomes rancid.”64 These workers spent long hours, day after
day, tending to machines. As a result, they were physically exhausted, yet
only slept a couple hours a day, preventing rest and restoration of their
bodies and making them more susceptible to diseases.
Engels documented how specific types of work contributed to distinct
corporeal problems.65 Working in mills caused curvatures in the spine
and bowing of leg bones. Women suffered pelvis deformities. Winders
suffered from eye problems, such as diminished eyesight, cataracts, and,
in time, blindness. Dressmakers were confined in small rooms with “al-
most total exclusion from fresh air,” breathing in “foul air.” These girls
also experienced skeletal deformities at a young age, and their growth
was stunted. Exposure to dust, toxins, and air contaminants was a ma-
jor problem. Workers in the combing rooms of spinning mills breathed
in “fibrous dust,” causing “chest affections,” such as asthma, constant
coughing, and difficulty breathing. These health problems also resulted
in a loss of sleep.66 Metal workers laboring at grinders inhaled sharp met-
al particles, often developing Grinder’s asthma, which included short-
ness of breath, spitting blood, and coughing fits. The conditions were
worse for those who worked with a dry stone versus a wet stone; the aver-
age life span was thirty-five years for the former and forty-five years for
the latter.67 Workers bleaching textiles were exposed to chlorine. Potters
who dipped the wares were exposed to lead and arsenic. Their clothing
was contaminated with these dangerous materials, to which their family
members at home were thus also exposed. These workers in particular
experienced stomach and intestine disorders, epilepsy, and paralysis.68
Using medical reports, Engels considered how miners, which included
adults and children, were exposed to “the inhalation of an atmosphere
containing little oxygen, and mixed with dust and the smoke of blasting
powder, such as prevails in the mines, [which] seriously affects the lungs,
disturbs the action of the heart, and diminishes the activity of the diges-
tive organs.” He noted that these miners developed “black spittle” disease
when their lungs were saturated with coal particles, causing intense pain,
headaches, and difficulty breathing.69
All these ailments and conditions disrupt corporeal existence, disturb
metabolic bodily processes, and shorten workers’ lives. Engels illuminated
corporeal class differences, as machine operators looked decades older than
their wealthy counterparts.70 The bodies of workers were simply worn out
14 M ONTHLY RE V IE W / J uly – A u g ust 2018

due to the conditions of work. Reflecting on the consequences of factory

conditions and their effects on the human metabolism, Marx wrote that
Every sense organ is injured by the artificially high temperatures, by the
dust-laden atmosphere, by the deafening noise, not to mention the danger
to life and limb among machines which are so closely crowded together, a
danger which, with the regularity of the seasons, produces its list of those
killed and wounded in the industrial battlefield. The economical use of the
social means of production, matured and forced as in a hothouse by the
factory system, is turned in the hands of capital into systematic robbery of
what is necessary for the life of the worker while he is at work, i.e. space,
light, air, and protection against the dangerous or the unhealthy concomi-
tants of the production process, not to mention the theft of appliances for
the comfort of the worker.71

Technological innovations, which could improve working conditions,

were only employed if they reduced labor costs and increased produc-
tion—or when there was enough social pressure that forced protec-
tion and regulation.72 As Marx pointed out, “the decisive factor is not
the health of the worker, but the ease with which the product may be
constructed…which is on the one hand a source of growing profit for
the capitalist [and] on the other hand the cause of a squandering of the
worker’s life and health.”73
In addition to documenting how working conditions robbed workers
of their health and shortened their lives, Marx analyzed extensively the
ways that the system of capital affected the nutritional intake and cor-
poreal constitution of workers. This issue is especially important, given
that nutrients provide energy and support vital bodily functions. Thus, an
insufficient supply causes an array of corporeal problems. On this front,
two of the major concerns for Marx included adequate quantity of food/
calorie consumption and health risks associated with food adulteration.
Drawing on official reports regarding public health in the United
Kingdom, such as those by John Simon, Marx considered how class and
gender influenced calorie intake. He noted that agricultural families
had diets deficient in protein and carbohydrates. “Insufficiency of food”
among these families “fell as a rule chiefly on the women and children.”
Adult industrial workers consumed around nine pounds of bread each
week, constituting almost their entire diet. Needlewomen consumed the
least, at just under eight pounds, while shoemakers ate the most, at elev-
en-and-a-half pounds. In general, as far as consumption of butter, meat,
sugar, and milk, “the worst-nourished categories were the needlewomen,
silk-weavers and kid-glovers”—all jobs predominantly occupied by wom-
en.74 Historian Anthony Wohl stresses that at the time of these studies,
I ntroduction 15

individuals performed very physically demanding labor and had to walk

long distances to work. Thus, the caloric intake for the average working-
class family was not sufficient. They ate few fresh green vegetables and
drank little liquid, water or otherwise. As a result, they received minimal
protein and were deficient in vitamins A and D. Families with children
too young to work suffered even greater food insufficiencies.75
“The intimate connection between the pangs of hunger suffered by
the most industrious layers of the working class,” Marx explained, “and
the extravagant consumption, coarse or refined, of the rich, from which
capitalist accumulation is the basis, is only uncovered when the eco-
nomic laws are known.”76 Capitalists attempted to “reduce the worker’s
individual consumption [as far as the means of subsistence] to the neces-
sary minimum,” except in special cases, such as in the mines in South
America. Quoting Liebig, Marx noted that these mine owners force work-
ers to consume bread and beans, given “that the men cannot work so
hard [carrying almost 200 pounds of metals up 450 feet] on bread” alone.77
Using this documentation, Marx and Engels highlighted how the capi-
tal system disrupted corporeal metabolic processes due to insufficient
or inadequate food, leading to various illnesses, ailments, and starvation
diseases. In particular, Engels detailed how working-class children were
very vulnerable to rickets and scrofula due to poor-quality food and inad-
equate nutrition.78 In working-class neighborhoods, sewage ran through
the streets and no clean water was available. When food prices increased,
families reduced their daily rations. All these conditions made them
more susceptible to contagious diseases and illnesses, such as during the
regular cholera epidemics of the period.
To make matters worse, the adulteration of food, drink, and medicine
were common practice. The working poor consumed dark bread rather
than the white loaves prepared for the wealthy. The former was made
with alum, sand, and bone earth, often with feces and cockroaches
baked into it.79 Other common adulterations included adding mercury
to pepper; white lead to tea; dirt and red lead to cocoa; clay and sand
to medicinal opium; copper in gin, bread, and butter; chalk in milk;
and strychnine to beer. Regular consumption of these items resulted
in chronic gastritis and food poisoning, which was sometimes fatal.80
Many of the pigments used to color food were poisonous and would ac-
cumulate in workers’ bodies.
Marx remained concerned about corporeal issues throughout his life.
In “A Workers’ Inquiry,” a questionnaire he devised by Marx in 1880 at the
request of La Revue socialiste that asked French workers to share details and
stories of their labor conditions, he listed a hundred specific questions,
16 M ONTHLY RE V IE W / J uly – A u g ust 2018

many of which addressed bodily matters. In particular, he requested in-

formation related to the sizes of work rooms, including details regarding
ventilation and temperature; muscle strain; exposure to industrial efflu-
via and specific diseases related to the work; safety standards and actions
in case of accidents; specific bodily dangers and health related to work;
whether or not children were working at the site; duration of shifts; time
it took to travel to and from work; prices of lodging and food, including
types of food consumed; how many years workers average within specific
trades; and “the general physical, intellectual, and moral conditions of
life of the working men and women employed” in the trade.81
Just as the profit-driven capital system disrupts natural processes and
cycles, it creates corporeal rifts, undermining general health, the bodi-
ly metabolism, and longevity. It violates an array of “biological needs
whose satisfaction is an absolute prerequisite of human existence.”82
The satisfaction of basic bodily needs is central to humans’ capacity to
make history. Joseph Fracchia argues that Marx’s materialist focus on
bodily questions
enabled him to decipher the exploitative character of capitalism and to
expose the corporeal depths of capitalist immiseration. In this way, he
wielded human corporeal organization as a limited, but effective norma-
tive measure for social critique and as an attribute of freedom: labor prac-
tices which deform the body and atrophy its dexterities are indicators of
exploitation [and expropriation], while those that enhance its capacities
and cultivate its dexterities are emancipatory.83

Marx and Engels sought to uproot the capital system “which, vampire-
like, lives only by sucking living labor, and lives the more, the more labor it
sucks.”84 None of this was inherent in the human condition, nor had the hu-
man body been so systematically and intensively exploited before; capitalist
methods were designed to carry corporeal exploitation, i.e., expropriation
of bodily powers, to its maximum. Nothing could be more at odds with the
ancient Epicurean materialists, who rejected the pursuit of wealth at the
cost of the human being. As Lucretius writes in the opening paragraph of
Book II of De Rerum Natura: “Therefore we see that our corporeal life / Needs
little, altogether, and only such, / As takes the pain away” (II, 20).85
For Marx and Engels, a society of associated producers—i.e., socialism—is
founded on mending this corporeal rift, along with the rift in the metabo-
lism between society and nature in general, to establish a sustainable path
for human social development, and to overcome needless pain and suffer-
ing. It is necessary, as Salleh has argued, to develop a society that moves
beyond capitalist commodity value to one that emphasizes “metabolic val-
ue,” encompassing the entirety of social and environmental needs.86
I ntroduction 17

Th e Co n d it io ns o f Rep ro d uc t i o n o f Nature and Humanity

For Marx, “it is not the unity of living and active humanity with the
natural, inorganic conditions of their metabolic exchange with nature,
and hence their appropriation of nature, which requires explanation or is
the result of a historical process, but rather the separation between these
inorganic conditions of human existence and this active existence, a sep-
aration which is completely posited only in the relation of wage labor
and capital.”87 Likewise, we can say that it is not the universal metabolism of
nature (or even the human-social metabolism) that requires explanation,
but rather the metabolic rift, the active estrangement of this universal/
social metabolism with nature.
Human beings in Marx’s conception were “corporeal” beings, consti-
tuting a “specific part of nature”—the “self-mediating beings” of nature.88
With the development of class society, this crucial self-mediating charac-
teristic that distinguishes human species-being, takes an alienated form.
The expropriation of nature on behalf of the capitalist class becomes the
basis for the further expropriation and exploitation of humanity and na-
ture, in a vicious circle leading ultimately to a rupture in the metabolism
of nature and society, including corporeal existence.
In the most important revelation to come out of Marx’s doctoral thesis
on ancient materialism, he wrote: “It was only with Epicurus that appear-
ance is grasped as appearance, i.e. as an alienation of the essence which gives
practical proof of its reality through such an alienation.”89 For Marx, the alienat-
ed social metabolism between humanity and nature provided the “practi-
cal proof” of the possibility of a new, more organic system of social meta-
bolic reproduction, to be organized by the freely associated producers.
Stripping away the alienation and destruction, it was possible to perceive
the potential for more egalitarian, collective, and sustainable relations. In
such a higher society, “socialized man, the associated producers, [would]
govern the human metabolism of nature in a rational way...accomplish-
ing it with the least expenditure of energy and in conditions most worthy
and appropriate for their human nature.”90
Should we see Marx’s theory of metabolic rift as ecological by today’s
standards? Some have argued not. Sven-Eric Liedman, in his ambitious
and in many ways enlightening 2018 biography A World to Win: The Life
and Works of Karl Marx, insists that Marx cannot be considered “an eco-
logically conscious person in the modern sense.” True, he notes, “Marx
found support in Liebig for his thesis that over the longer term capitalism
was devastating in all aspects.” But Marx, Liedman tells us, “also imag-
ined that the society that would replace capitalism could also restore
the balance between humanity and nature in agriculture.” Hence “the
18 M ONTHLY RE V IE W / J uly – A u g ust 2018

pessimistic conclusions that Marx…drew from Liebig’s book” were “not

unconditional. In another society, agriculture would not drain nature of its
resources, just as industry would not devastate the air, water, and soil….
The ‘irreparable break’ he spoke about is thus only irreparable in a capi-
talist society.”91
By Liedman’s yardstick, then, it is precisely because Marx offered a con-
ception of a future society beyond capitalism, directed to sustainable hu-
man development, in which the associated producers would rationally
regulate the metabolism between nature and society, that his views can
be said to have fallen short of those who can be considered “ecologically
conscious person[s] in the modern sense.” The implication is that mod-
ern Green thinkers, by definition, see ecological devastation as “uncondi-
tional” and hence wholly insurmountable, and are inherently pessimistic
and apocalyptic, conceiving of no way forward for humanity—at least if
this requires a break with the existing social order. This is no doubt an
accurate description of the views of most mainstream environmentalists
today, who categorically refuse to consider any solution that involves go-
ing beyond capitalist relations of production. For Marx, in contrast, it
was essential to treat nature, as the Epicureans had, as “my friend,” chal-
lenging the entire system of the alienation of nature and society.92 If the
classical historical-materialist ecological critique little resembles today’s
contemporary mainstream ecology, this is hardly because Marx’s critique
is somehow antiquated. Rather it is Marx’s critique that has emerged in
recent years as the theoretical and practical point of departure for the
most advanced planetary movement of the twenty-first century: ecoso-
cialism. In our time, the famous words of the “Internationale” take on
new meaning: “The earth shall rise on new foundations / We have been
naught, we shall be all.”

N ot e s
1. Karl Marx, Capital, vol. 1 (London:
Penguin, 1976), 637–38. On how Marx
saw the exploitation process as revealing
the expropriation of the surplus labor of
the worker within production, which was
concealed by equal exchange relations
within circulation, see Capital, vol. 1,
728–29; Karl Marx and Fredrick Engels,
Collected Works, vol. 33 (New York: Inter-
national Publishers, 1991), 301, and vol.
34 (New York: International Publishers,
1994), 134; Karl Marx, Texts on Method
(Oxford: Blackwell, 1975), 186–87.
2.  Karl Marx, Capital, vol. 3 (London: Pen-
guin, 1981), 949–50. In his recent biog-
raphy of Marx, Sven-Eric Liedman writes
that “in his treatment, Engels made rear-
rangements in the text and moved the ex-
pression ‘irreparable break’ to a later con-
text, where the reader gets the impression
that it is the transition from small-scale
to large-scale agriculture that creates the
growing gap.” This is incorrect, however:
Engels moved not only this passage but
the whole section (some two pages of
discussion) on the transition from small-
scale to large-scale agriculture, to the end
to form a conclusion, preserving intact
Marx’s argument—and thus not creating
any false impression, as Liedman con-
tends. Sven-Eric Liedman, A World to Win
(London; Verso, 2018), 479; Karl Marx,
Economic Manuscript of 1864–1865 (Bos-
ton: Brill, 2016), 797–98, 882–83.
3. See Justus von Liebig, “1862 Pref-
ace to Agricultural Chemistry,” Monthly
Review 70, no. 3 (July–August 2018):
146–50; William H. Brock, Justus von Li-
ebig (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1997), 177–78.
4.  On Marx’s corporeal materialism, see
Joseph Fracchia, “Organisms and Objec�-
tifications: A Historical-Materialist Inquiry
into the ‘Human and Animal,’” Monthly
Review 68, no 10 (March 2017): 1–16;
John Fox, Marx, the Body, and Human Na-
ture (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015).
5. Justus von Liebig, Letters on Mod-
ern Agriculture (London: Walton and
Maberly, 1859), 175–77, The Natural
Laws of Husbandry (New York: Appleton,
I ntroduction 19
1863), 177–78. The quoted sentence
from Letters on Modern Industry was
Liebig’s restatement of a proposition by
the practical farmer Albrecht Brecht: “A
farmer can afford to sell and permanently
alienate only that portion of the produce
of his farm which has been supplied by
the atmosphere—a field from which noth-
ing is abstracted can only increase, not
decrease in productive power.”
6. Liebig Letters on Modern Agriculture,
179, 254–55; The Natural Laws of Hus-
bandry, 233; Kohei Saito, Karl Marx’s
Ecosocialism (New York: Monthly Review
Press, 2017), 154.
7. Saito, Karl Marx’s Ecosocialism, 68–70;
John Bellamy Foster, Marx’s Ecology
(New York: Monthly Review Press, 2000),
159–61.
8. Liebig, Letters on Modern Agriculture,
175–77, 220, 230; Justus von Liebig,
Introduction to Agricultural Chemistry,
seventh ed. (1862), translated by Lady
Gilbert, archives, Rothamsted Research,
Hertfordshire, United Kingdom (here-
after Liebig, Einleitung; page numbers
refer to Gilbert translation), 72, 80–85.
Although Liedman claims that “most”
of Liebig’s readers saw him as simply a
proponent of industrial progress through
the use of fertilizers, and only a “minor-
ity” interpreted him otherwise, this is
too simple a depiction of the intellectual
climate of the time. It is true that Liebig’s
most severe indictment of British high
farming, in his introduction to the 1862
edition of his Agricultural Chemistry,
was never published in English, as it was
considered too incendiary. But especially
after the publication of his Letters on
Modern Agriculture, Liebig’s criticism of
the wasting of soil nutrients and its rela-
tion to the sewage in the towns was wide-
ly debated, for example in the London
Times. His analysis was taken up by many
leading thinkers of the time, extending to
political economy in the works of Henry
Carey in the United States and Wilhelm
Roscher in Germany. The importance of
his critical analysis in the era’s debates
over the political economy of agriculture
can hardly be overstated, and was not, as
Liedman suggests, a particular obsession
on Marx’s part. See Liedman, A World
to Win, 478–79; Foster, Marx’s Ecology,
147–63; Saito, Karl Marx’s Ecosocialism,
75–78, 183–86, 221–26.
9.  F. M. L. Thompson, “The Second Ag-
ricultural Revolution, 1815–1880,” Eco-
nomic History Review 21, no. 1 (1968):
62–77.
10. Karl Marx, Dispatches for the New
York Tribune (London: Penguin, 2007),
169; John Bellamy Foster, “Marx as a
Food Theorist,” Monthly Review 68, no. 7
(December 2016): 12–14.
11.  See Foster, “Marx as a Food Theorist,”
10-11.
12.  On Liebig and the sewage contro-
versy, see Ian Angus, “Cesspools, Sew-
age, and Social Murder: Ecological Crisis
and Metabolic Rift in Nineteenth-Century
London,” Monthly Review 70, no. 3 (July–
August 2018): 33–69.
13. Liebig, Letters on Modern Agri-
culture, 137–38, 147, 161; Cultivator:
Journal for the Farm and Garden 8, third
series (1860): 22; David Ricardo, Prin-
ciples of Political Economy and Taxation
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1951), 67.
14. Liebig, Letters on Modern Agricul-
ture, 28; Fred Magdoff and Harold van
Es, Building Soils for Better Crops (Burl-
ington: Sustainable Agricultural Publica-
tions, 2000), 149; John Bellamy Foster
and Paul Burkett, Marx and the Earth (Chi-
cago: Haymarket, 2016), 29. It is worth
emphasizing, following Magdoff and van
Es, that the vitality of the soil is best seen
in terms of the soil organic matter in all
its numerous aspects, including a diver-
sity of microorganisms such as bacteria,
viruses, fungi, protozoa, and of plant
roots, insects, and earthworms, while
constituting the home of larger animals
as well. The living portion represents 15
percent of the overall soil organic matter.
Soil organic matter also includes organic
material at various levels of decomposi-
tion. Although the nutrient cycle is at the
center of soil metabolism, of which Li-
ebig was the leading nineteenth-century
analyst, it would be a mistake to reduce
the vitality of the soil simply to the ques-
tion of nutrients or soil chemistry alone.
Magdoff and van Es, Building Soils, 9–10.
15. Liebig, The Natural Laws of Hus-
bandry, 180, 210. Although known as
Liebig’s Law of the Minimum, it was first
advanced by Liebig’s contemporary, the
German soil scientist Philipp Carl Spren-
gel. See R. R. van der Ploeg, W. Böhm,
and M. B. Kirkham, “On the Origin of the
Theory of Mineral Nutrition of Plants and
the Law of the Minimum,” Soil Science
Society of America Journal 63 (1999):
1055–62.
16. Foster, Marx’s Ecology, 149–63;
Saito, Karl Marx’s Ecosocialism.
17.  Gregory T. Cushman, Guano and the
Opening of the Pacific World (Cambridge:
University of Cambridge Press, 2013),
45, 170–73.
18. Liebig, Einleitung, 76–78, and Letters
on Modern Agriculture, 219–22, 269–70;
Census of England and Wales for the Year
1861, vol. 3., General Report, 5. Liebig’s
figures for the import of guano greatly
exceed those presented in a table by
Thompson in his classic article. Never-
theless, Liebig’s data is in line with the
numbers presented in the work of more
recent historians who have examined
official records. See C. Alexander G. de
Secada, “Arms, Guano, and Shipping,”
Business History Review 59, no. 4 (1985):
597–621; Brett Clark and John Bellamy
Foster, “Guano,” in Alf Hornborg, Brett
Clark, and Kenneth Hermele, ed., Ecology
and Power (London: Routledge, 2012),
75; F. M. L. Thompson, “The Second Ag-
ricultural Revolution,” 75.
19. Liebig, Einleitung, 79–81.
20. Liebig, Einleitung, 79, 94, and Letters
of Modern Industry, 183, 188; Saito, Karl
Marx’s Ecosocialism, 202.
21. Liebig, Einleitung, 85; Brock, Justus
von Liebig, 178.
22. Liebig, Einleitung, 96, 101.
23. Liebig, The Natural Law of Husband-
ry, 233.
24.  See Foster, Marx’s Ecology, 39–65.
25. Karl Marx, Early Writings (London:
Penguin, 1974), 318–19, 323–28, 348–
50, 359–60, 389–91.
26. Saito, Karl Marx’s Ecosocialism,
72–78; Roland Daniels, Mikrokosmos
(Frankfurt am Main: Lang, 1988).
27.  Karl Marx, Grundrisse (London: Pen-
guin, 1973), 158; Karl Marx, A Contribu-
tion to a Critique of Political Economy
(Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1970),
51–52.
28. Marx, Contribution to a Critique of
Political Economy, 86; Capital, vol. 1, 133.
29. Marx, Grundrisse, 271, 489, Marx
and Engels, Collected Works, vol. 30 (New
York: International Publishers, 1988),
54–66; John Bellamy Foster, “Marx and
the Rift in the Universal Metabolism
of Nature,” Monthly Review 65, no. 7
(2013): 1–19.
30. See Fred Magdoff and Chris Wil-
liams, Creating an Ecological Society
(New York: Monthly Review Press, 2017),
76, 217.
31.  Marx contended that Liebig used the
word “labor” in a quite “different sense
from that adopted by political economy,”
thereby confusing his analysis. For Li-
ebig’s approach to labor, which he con-
flated with the “labor” of organisms in
general, see Justus von Liebig, Familiar
Letters on Chemistry (London: Taylor,
Walton, and Maberly, 1851), 468–69.
32. Marx, Grundrisse, 360–61, and Texts
on Method, 190–91; Georg Wilhelm
Friedrich Hegel, Science of Logic (New
York: Humanity, 1969), 450–56; Saito,
Karl Marx’s Ecosocialism, 75–76.
33. Marx, Capital, vol. 1, 290.
34. Marx, Grundrisse, 527.
35.  Mette Ejrnæs, Karl Gunnar Persson,
and Søren Rich, “Feeding the British,”
Economic History Review 61, no. S1
(2008): 140–71; Marx, Dispatches for the
New York Tribune, 169; Foster, “Marx as a
Food Theorist,” 12–13.
36. Marx, Capital, vol. 1, 638–39.
37. Marx, Capital, vol. 1, 638.
38. Marx, Economic Manuscript of
1864–65, 882.
20 M ONTHLY
39. Marx, Capital, vol. 3, 754.
40.  Karl Marx, Theories of Surplus Value,
Part Two (Moscow: Progress Publishers,
1968), 24.
41.  Marx and Engels, Collected Works,
vol. 46, 62.
42. Karl Marx and Frederick Engels,
Ireland and the Irish Question (Moscow:
Progress Publishers, 1971), 120–42; Karl
Marx, On the First International (New
York: McGraw Hill, 1973), 90; Marx,
Capital, vol. 1, 860. Eamonn Slater has
brilliantly shown that Marx’s argument
on the robbery of the soil and the result-
ing metabolic rift had its counterpart in
Ireland, where cultivators were actively
prevented from replenishing the soil.
Eamonn Slater, “Marx on the Coloniza-
tion of Irish Soil,” Social Science Institute,
Maynooth University, MUSSI Working
Paper Series, no. 3 (January 2018): 4, 10.
43.  Karl Marx, “Drafts of a Reply to Vera
Zasulich,” in Teodor Shanin, ed., Late Marx
and the Russian Road (New York: Monthly
Review Press, 1983), 121; Marx and En-
gels, Collected Works, vol. 46 (New York:
International Publishers, 1992), 63–64.
44. Marx, Capital, vol. 3, 949.
45.  Paul Burkett, “Marx’s Vision of Sus�-
tainable Human Development,” Monthly
Review 57, no. 5 (2005): 34–62; John
Bellamy Foster, “The Meaning of Work in
a Sustainable Society,” Monthly Review
69, no. 4 (2017): 1–14; John Bellamy
Foster, The Ecological Revolution (New
York: Monthly Review Press 2008);
John Bellamy Foster, Brett Clark, and
Richard York, The Ecological Rift (New
York: Monthly Review Press, 2010); Fred
Magdoff, “Ecological Civilization,” Month-
ly Review 62, no. 8 (2011): 1– 25.
46. Foster, Marx’s Ecology, 36, 225.
47. Karl Marx, The Poverty of Philoso-
phy (New York: International Publishers,
1963), 110, 228; Lucretius, On the Nature
of the Universe, trans. Ronald Melville (Ox-
ford: Oxford University Press), 93 (III, 869).
48. Lucretius, The Scheme of Epicurus
(De Rerum Natura), trans. Thomas Charles
Baring, (London: Kegan Paul, Trench,
1884), 21 (I: 450–52). Other translations
from Lucretius convey the same idea in
slightly different and less colorful lan-
guage. W. E. Leonard’s translation reads:
“A property is that which not at all / Can
be disjoined and severed from anything
/ Without a final dissolution”; Melville:
“A property is something that cannot
be separated / Or removed from a thing
without destroying it”; Cyril Bailey: “That
is a property which can in no way case
be sundered or separated without the
fatal disunion of the thing.” Lucretius, On
the Nature of Things, translated by W. E.
Leonard (New York: Dutton, 1921), 18;
Lucretius, On the Nature of the Universe,
RE V IE W / J uly – A u g ust
trans. Melville, 16; Lucretius, Lucretius on
the Nature of Things, translated by Cyril
Bailey (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1910), 41–42.
49.  Ariel Salleh, “From Metabolic Rift to
‘Metabolic Value,’” Organization & Envi-
ronment 23, no. 2 (2010): 205–19; Ariel
Salleh, ed., Eco-Sufficiency and Global
Justice (London: Pluto, 2009).
50.  Howard Waitzkin, The Second Sick-
ness (Boston: Rowman and Littlefield,
2000).
51.  Norman Wentworth DeWitt, Epicurus
and His Philosophy (Minneapolis: Uni-
versity of Minnesota Press, 1954), 133.
52.  Karl Marx, Early Writings (New York:
McGraw Hill, 1964), 207; Foster, “Marx
and the Rift in the Universal Metabolism
of Nature”; Fracchia, “Organisms and Ob-
jectifications.”
53. Joseph Fracchia, “Beyond the Hu-
man–Nature Debate: Human Corporeal
Organisation as the ‘First Fact’ of Histori-
cal Materialism,” Historical Materialism
13, no. 1 (2005): 43.
54. Marx, Capital, vol. 1, 875.
55. Marx, Capital, vol. 1, 891–95.
56. Marx, Capital, vol. 1, 748.
57. Marx, Capital, vol. 1, 915; also see
Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, An Indigenous
Peoples’ History of the United States
(Boston: Beacon, 2014); John Bellamy
Foster and Brett Clark, “The Expropriation
of Nature,” Monthly Review 69, no. 10
(2018): 1–27.
58.  Edward E. Baptist, The Half Has Never
Been Told (New York: Basic, 2016); Sven
Beckert, Empire of Cotton (New York: Vin-
tage, 2014).
59. Watt Stewart, Chinese Bondage in
Peru: A History of the Chinese Coolie in
Peru: 1849–1874 (Westport, CT: Green-
wood, 1951), 96–98; see also Brett Clark,
Daniel Auerbach, and Karen Xuan Zhang,
“The Du Bois Nexus: Intersectionality,
Political Economy, and Environmental
Injustice in the Peruvian Guano Trade in
the 1800s,” Environmental Sociology 4,
no. 1 (2018): 54–66.
60. Marx, Capital, vol. 3, 182.
61. Marx, Capital, vol. 3, 365.
62.  Marx and Engels, Collected Works,
vol. 2 (New York: International Publish-
ers, 1975), 7-9.
63. John Green, A Revolutionary Life
(London: Artery, 2008), 70; Steven Mar-
cus, Engels, Manchester, and the Working
Class (New York: Norton, 1985), 98–99;
Roy Whitfield, “The Double Life of Fried-
rich Engels,” Manchester Region History
Review (Spring/Summer 1988): 13–19;
Charles Dickens, The Old Curiosity Shop
(New York: Dutton, 1908), 327.
64.  Marx and Engels, Collected Works,
2018
vol. 4, 447–48.
65.  See Waitzkin, The Second Sickness,
67–70.
66.  Marx and Engels, Collected Works,
vol. 4 (New York: International Publish-
ers, 1975), 448–54, 498–99.
67.  Marx and Engels, Collected Works,
vol. 4, 492–94.
68.  Marx and Engels, Collected Works,
vol. 4, 495–96.
69.  Marx and Engels, Collected Works,
vol. 4, 531–35.
70.  Marx and Engels, Collected Works,
vol. 4, 450.
71. Marx, Capital, vol. 1, 552–53.
72. Marx, Capital, vol. 3, 181–85.
73. Marx, Capital, vol. 3, 185.
74. Marx, Capital, vol. 1, 809–11.
75. Anthony Wohl, Endangered Lives
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press,
1983), 50–52.
76. Marx, Capital, vol. 1, 811.
77. Marx, Capital, vol. 1, 718.
78.  Marx and Engels, Collected Works,
vol. 4.
79. Marx, Capital, vol. 1, 359–61.
80. Wohl, Endangered Lives, 52–53.
81.  Marx, “A Workers’ Inquiry,” available
at http://marxists.org; Asad Haider and
Salar Mohandesi, “Workers’ Inquiry: A
Genealogy,” Viewpoint 3, September 27,
2013, http://
82. Fracchia, “Beyond the Human–Na-
ture Debate,” 50.
83. Fracchia, “Beyond the Human–Na-
ture Debate,” 57.
84. Marx, Capital, vol. 1, 342.
85. Lucretius, On the Nature of Things,
trans. Leonard, 45.
86. Salleh, ed., Eco-Sufficiency and
Global Justice, 24–25, 306. For Salleh,
metabolic value constitutes a larger cat-
egory of socioecological value, extending
beyond use value.
87. Marx, Grundrisse, 489.
88. Marx, Early Writings, 61, 328, 389;
István Mészáros, Marx’s Theory of Alien-
ation (London: Merlin, 1970), 82, 100–
01, 163–65; Marx and Engels, Collected
Works, vol. 3 (New York: International
Publishers, 1975), 7.
89.  Marx and Engels, Collected Works,
vol. 1 (New York: International Publish-
ers, 1975), 64; translation according to
Mészáros, Marx’s Theory of Alienation,
351.
90. Marx, Capital, vol. 3, 959.
91. Liedman, A World to Win, 479–80.
92. Marx and Engels, Collected Works
vol. 5 (New York: International Publish-
ers, 1975), 141–42.
 n e w fr o m MONTHL Y RE V IE W PRE SS

The Russians Are

Coming, Again
The First Cold War as Tragedy, the Second as Farce

Jeremy Kuzmarov
and John Marciano

The first Cold War was a global

tragedy, resulting in millions of
deaths and a destructive arms
race that diverted money from
social spending and nearly led to
nuclear annihilation. The New
Cold War is playing out as farce
—and a dangerous one at that.
The Russians Are Coming, Again
is a red flag to restore our
historical consciousness about
U.S.–Russian relations, and a
reminder that to deny history is
to risk repeating past follies.

“An excellent and well-researched effort to remind liberal America of

how awful the Cold War was and how it was based on a cynical
exaggeration of a largely fictional ‘Russian threat.’ Their warning
against creating a new Cold War is well worth considering.”
—DAVID N. GIBBS, University of Arizona; author, First Do No
Harm: Humanitarian Intervention and the Destruction of Yugoslavia

“A rich read about a brutal history.”

—MICHAEL PARENTI, author, The Face of Imperialism

240 pp | $19 pbk | order at 212-691-2555 or monthlyreview.org

MONTHLY REVIEW PRESS

134 West 29th Street, Suite 706
New York, NY 10001
 archive.monthlyreview.org
DOI: 10.14452/MR-070-03-2018-07_2

No Empires, No Dust Bowls

Ecological Disasters and the Lessons of History
HANNAH HOLLEMAN

Today we are living in a new Dust Bowl era, defined by egregious lev-
els of inhumanity and profound shifts taking place in the earth’s land,
climate, and water systems. Like the 1930s Dust Bowl, contemporary
ecological crises are associated with high levels of racialized social in-
equality, imperial expropriation, social dislocation, and fascistic politics.
Accordingly, scholars and scientists are now studying the 1930s disaster
as an analogue to our current period, as they seek to understand the dan-
gers posed by climate change, land degradation, and freshwater scarcity.
They are studying agricultural technology and practice, government poli-
cies, and migration patterns—and they are warning us to be prepared.
However, by treating the 1930s Dust Bowl as merely the outcome of
poor policy, a regional phenomenon isolated from broader social issues,
a case study in New Deal administration, or a purely climatological di-
saster, most of these analyses miss the crucial lessons from this period,
which connect it to the present not as an analogue, but an antecedent.
An honest and historically informed look at the present situation reveals
the imperial system of capitalism as the primary driver of “dust-bowlifi-
cation,” then and now. The racialized division of nature and humanity at
the heart of this system cannot be transcended without transcending the
system itself. No sustainable agricultural or social policy stands a chance
against the overwhelming destructiveness of the existing social order.
However, a major barrier to an environmental politics that takes his-
tory seriously is the persistent segregation of the environmental move-
ment and the prevailing belief among mainstream environmentalists,
especially in wealthy countries, that a reformed capitalism can solve the
problems outlined above. Likely because they themselves are unlikely to
bear the costs of these crises, too many environmentalists and policy-
makers have failed to face the violence and injustice behind the ecologi-
cal devastation now dispassionately reported by organizations such as
the United Nations, World Bank, and many environmental NGOs.
Some continue to hope that the same political and economic elites who
led us into the new Dust Bowl era will somehow lead us out, placing
Hannah Holleman is an assistant professor of sociology at Amherst College and the
author of Dust Bowls of Empire, forthcoming from Yale University Press.

22
D ust B owls 23

historically unfounded hope in international climate agreements and

voluntary efforts by industry and individuals. They are effectively join-
ing forces with the defenders of capital’s bottom line rather than those
on the frontlines of capitalism’s catastrophes, who are fighting for a
different world altogether. In the meantime, land and water grabs, the
documented increase in violence against earth and water protectors, re-
newed attacks on indigenous sovereignty and environmental protection,
the persistence of slavery and human trafficking, and an unprecedented
number of refugees illustrate that at the systemic level, capitalism shows
no signs of putting people and the planet ahead of profit.1
It is my hope that activists will take to heart the lessons of the 1930s
Dust Bowl, briefly sketched below, and stop repeating the devastating
mistakes of self-identified progressives and environmentalists of previ-
ous eras who promoted or made peace, however uneasy, with the racial-
ized, imperial class system organized around production for profit. Not
only because ecological justice demands it, but because the alternative—
expecting capitalists or a reformed capitalism to save us—just will not
work. We have more than a hundred years of historical experience since
the idea of “greening” capitalism was proposed—from the first global
dust bowl to today—as proof.

Pre c o n d it io n s o f t he Fi rs t Gl o ba l Dus t Bow l

In the 1830s, the U.S. government under President Andrew Jackson has-
tened the violent removal of indigenous peoples from their lands, espe-
cially in the southeast of the country, to Indian Territory. To make way
for the expansion of a plantation economy based on slave labor and white
supremacy, the government promised indigenous nations land and life
in the area “as long as the grass grows or the water runs, in peace and
plenty.” Jackson, Donald Trump’s favorite president, wrote, “there your
white brothers will not trouble you; they will have no claim to land.”2
However, as history teaches us, no such Trail of Tears can ever lead to
“peace and plenty.” Rather, Northern industrialists and Southern planters
joined forces to demand further white territorial expansion, including, in
the latter half of the nineteenth century, the lands promised and held in
Indian Territory by tribes removed from the southeast by Jackson’s army.
The accelerated expropriation of native lands for white settlement was
the precondition for the expansion of cash crop agriculture and resource
extraction across the continent. This expansion led to ecological devasta-
tion and human misery on a vast scale and set the stage for the socioeco-
logical disaster on the southern plains that a few decades later would be
known as the Dust Bowl.
24 M ONTHLY RE V IE W / J uly – A u g ust 2018

Historian Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz writes that “at the end of the Civil
War the US Army hardly missed a beat before the war ‘to win the West’
began in full force. As a far more advanced killing machine and with
seasoned troops, the army began the slaughter of people, buffalo, and
the land itself, destroying natural tall grasses of the Plains and planting
short grasses for cattle, eventually leading to the loss of topsoil four de-
cades later.”3 Northeastern elites like Massachusetts senator Henry Dawes
promoted the privatization and allotment of remaining tribal lands held
in common in the 1880s to make way for white settlement and promote
the interests of private capital, especially railroads, manufacturers seek-
ing cheap raw materials (like cotton), extractive industries, bankers, and
land speculators.
Westward expansion in this period was part of the renewed seizure of
indigenous land underway around the world. The new imperialism that
took off in the wake of the U.S. Civil War and abolition of slavery encom-
passed wars of conquest waged by colonial powers for the expansion of
white territorial control, as well as the removal of indigenous peoples
from their lands to make way for white settlement. Anglo-European and
U.S. imperial regimes learned from one another, shared expertise, and de-
veloped a trans-imperial approach to the administrative challenges asso-
ciated, from their perspective, with taking up “the white man’s burden”
on a global scale. As a result, their policies of land theft—including the
privatization and expropriation of indigenous lands held in common—
looked similar, whether employed in French Algeria under Napoleon III
and then the Third Republic, or the Cape Colony under Cecil Rhodes, or
Indian Territory in what would become the state of Oklahoma.4
Harry Magdoff explains that by the start of the First World War, “as
a consequence of this new expansion and conquest on top of that of
preceding centuries, the colonial powers, their colonies, and their for-
mer colonies extended over approximately 85 percent of the earth’s
surface.”5 This is the period in which the United States seized Hawai’i,
Alaska, Puerto Rico, Guam, American Samoa, the Marshall Islands, and
the Northern Mariana Islands, and waged a war of atrocity against the
Philippine Republic.6 The gospel of colonial expansion, which W. E. B. Du
Bois identified as the “new religion of whiteness,” taught its followers
that “whiteness is the ownership of the earth forever and ever, Amen!”7
The new imperialism was thus underwritten by “the doctrine of the di-
vine right of white people to steal.”8
One result of this phase of capitalist globalization was the racialized
division of nature and humanity on a world scale, resulting in what histo-
rian David Anderson has called the “first global environmental problem,”
D ust B owls 25

described in the 1930s as another “white man’s burden.”9 This was a mas-
sive soil erosion crisis associated with colonial land use changes, espe-
cially the expansion of cash crop agriculture and deforestation, and the
integration of the first global agriculture and food regime.

D u s t B o w ls o f E mp i re
As scholars of racial capitalism, colonialism, and white settler colonial-
ism have shown, capitalist development depends on a racialized division
of humanity. This process is mirrored in the racialized division of nature.
Brett Clark and John Bellamy Foster explain that the division of nature
under capitalism is central to the system’s ecological rifts:
Capital accumulation requires the continual expansion of the division of
nature as well as the division of labor. The division of nature is no lon-
ger, however, a social division of nature, in which the earth’s different
landscapes and species are utilized by human beings within a context that
maintains the reproduction of nature itself. Instead, it is a detailed/alien-
ated division of nature that breaks the circle of natural processes, creating
ecological rifts. Nature is remade in such a way as to promote a single end:
the accumulation of capital, irrespective of the lessons of rational science
and conditions of sustainability.10

The racialization of the division of nature was part and parcel of the
new imperialism. Lands and people were identified as the natural prop-
erty of white men, and modes of land tenure that differed from capi-
talist property relations (likewise identified with whiteness), as well as
the people practicing them, were treated as backward and exploitable or
expropriatable.
At the heart of every major ecological crisis of capitalism has been the
idea that (white) property owners, businessmen, and policy-makers can
do with the land as they please in the name of profit, and assume access
to land and resources further afield once they have destroyed the areas
where they started. In the United States this attitude was summed up by
Teddy Roosevelt, who remarked that in the view of the American settler,
“when he exhausted the soil of his farm, he felt that his son could go
West and take up another…. When the soil-wash from the farmer’s field
choked the neighboring river, the only thought was to use the railway
rather than the boats to move produce and supplies.”11
By the 1930s, colonial soil scientists described the massive soil erosion
problem then plaguing colonies and frontier regions around the world,
including the U.S. Southern plains, as the result of the imperial “rape of
the earth” of preceding decades.12 This ecological crisis, predicated on
the attempted domination and decimation of entire cultures, involved
26 M ONTHLY RE V IE W / J uly – A u g ust 2018

a then-unprecedented level of destruction and erosion of the living soil

complex upon which practically all terrestrial life depends. Lush and
lovely prairies, woodlands, pampas, and forests were shorn of their pro-
tective layer and the landscape scraped bare to make way for the desolate
monoculture of capitalist agriculture.
By the end of the 1930s, tens of thousands of people had been displaced
on the U.S. Southern plains and elsewhere, after decades of so many lives
being mutilated or sacrificed on the altars of profit and white supremacy.13
One U.S. official called the Dust Bowl “the most spectacular mass sacrifice
to strictly commercial mores in the history of mankind.”14 This disaster
developed in spite of decades of warnings about the growing problem
of soil erosion and broader land degradation across the colonial world,
as well as its impact on communities losing their livelihoods. There was
already a large body of knowledge about how to prevent erosion, as well
as shared expertise across colonial contexts about how to remediate it,
adequate technology, and many conservation-oriented elites working to
address the growing ecological crises of the new imperialism. However,
as with the ineffectual climate conferences held in recent decades by the
United Nations, world leaders in the 1930s could not ultimately prevent
or resolve the crisis of soil erosion because of their commitment to main-
taining the global social and economic status quo—the racialized class
system in which we still live. Like dust-bowlification today, the ultimate
source of the crisis was social, not technological, and thus required so-
cial change to address. Prominent British colonial soil scientists Graham
Vernon Jacks and Robert Orr Whyte, authors of The Rape of the Earth, rec-
ognized even then that this refusal to disturb the status quo would make
it impossible to truly address the global crisis of soil erosion:
Where land-utilization practices are firmly established and have become
the basis of the country’s economy, the adoption of a new land-utilization
programme conforming to the limits imposed by the natural environment,
may well involve a social and political revolution.
Therein lies the supreme difficulty of applying effective erosion con-
trol. We now know fairly precisely what agricultural, pastoral, forest and
engineering principles must be adopted to stop the earth from rotting
away beneath our feet, but we cannot, or dare not, apply them forthwith
on a scale commensurate with the gravity of the situation.15

While in the United States New Deal agricultural programs addressed

some of the technical problems of agriculture, and met some of the needs
of down-and-out white settlers—the Tom Joads depicted in Steinbeck’s
The Grapes of Wrath—the broader social conditions that allow for such de-
struction have remained in place. This is why, as I argue and illustrate in
D ust B owls 27

great detail in my forthcoming book, we now face even worse ecological

crises than in the 1930s—a new global Dust Bowl.16

Th e N e w G lo ba l Dus t Bo wl
At the heart of the new Dust Bowl are land degradation, climate
change, and freshwater scarcity. It is the result of increasingly extreme
expropriation—in both scale and technique—of the land, of the planet’s
hydrocarbon deposits, and of freshwater systems. Industrial agriculture
has contributed significantly to each of these problems, as “heavy [fos-
sil-fueled] tilling, multiple harvests and abundant use of agrochemicals
have increased yields at the expense of long-term sustainability.”17 These
practices have masked the effects of land degradation, especially in its
most destructive form, the loss of soil to erosion. Because of the ongoing
mining of the soil for profit, the earth has lost a third of its arable land
to erosion and pollution since the 1970s. Plant and soil biologist Duncan
Cameron has warned that “you think of the dust bowl of the 1930s in
North America and then you realize we are moving towards that situa-
tion if we don’t do something.”18
While soil erosion receives little attention in the media—perhaps be-
cause, as one scientist said, “soil isn’t sexy”—the problems caused by cli-
mate change are more widely covered.19 The earth’s warming climate is
driving a shift in the global hydrological or water cycle that is essentially
making wet places wetter and dry places drier—with awful ecological
and social consequences. NASA’s Earth Observatory cites the alteration of
the hydrological cycle as one of “the most serious Earth science and envi-
ronmental policy issues confronting society.”20 According to World Bank
economist Richard Damania, “when we look at any of the major impacts
of climate change, they one way or another come through water…. So
it will be no exaggeration to claim that climate change is really in fact
about hydrological change.”21
At the same time, freshwater resources are being degraded by pollu-
tion and over-tapped by unsustainable agricultural practices, which, in
conjunction with climate change and inadequate infrastructure serving
poorer areas, is reducing the availability of freshwater to life-threatening
levels. A 2016 study published in Science Advances indicated that already,
“about 66% [of the global population] (4.0 billion people) lives under se-
vere water scarcity…at least 1 month of the year…. The number of people
facing severe water scarcity for at least 4 to 6 months per year is 1.8 to 2.9
billion…. Half a billion people face severe water scarcity all year round.”22
Scientists working at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory at
Columbia University and NOAA predict that in arid regions such as the
28 M ONTHLY RE V IE W / J uly – A u g ust 2018

U.S. Southwest, “the levels of aridity seen in the 1950s multiyear drought,
or the 1930s Dust Bowl, [will] become the new climatology by mid-century:
a perpetual drought.” The possibility of “perpetual drought” raises again
the terrible specter of the Dust Bowl, but this time with no obvious way
back, given the “locked-in” nature of climate change.23
Such warnings by scientists indicate the severity of both current and
expected crises, given that the Dust Bowl is considered by many as one of
the more extreme humanmade ecological and social disasters in history.
However, we now confront the reality, given the trends explained above,
that dust-bowlification is an increasingly likely and ordinary threat in
the face of climate change.24 That what is happening today is a direct
continuation of the colonial past is illustrated in part by the great social
distance between those making decisions and those most affected—and
by the fact that one group of people may forcibly impose such destruc-
tion on others. As a recent report by Tamra Gilbertson for the Indigenous
Environmental Network and Climate Justice Alliance stated:
Communities especially impacted include the frontline communities of
peoples living directly alongside fossil-fuel pollution and extraction over-
whelmingly: Indigenous Peoples (IPs), Black, Latino, Asian and Pacific
Islander communities, working class, poor and peasant communities in
the United States, Canada and around the world. These peoples are forced
to sacrifice their lives, livelihoods and health for the sake of projects to
extract and burn fossil fuels and dump the resulting toxic waste and…
have been facing the reality of the climate crisis for decades. In climate dis-
ruption and extreme weather events, these communities and indigenous
tribal nations are hit first and [worst].25

However, there is no serious New Deal on the horizon for the poor
and non-white world most impacted by socioecological crises in the new
Dust Bowl era.26 Rather, international environmental politics, as repre-
sented by the most recent climate negotiations, have hung much of the
world out to dry—or drown. Moreover, the very people suffering most
under current conditions and forced to seek safety away from home are
also scapegoated viciously by political and economic elites oozing racist
anti-immigrant and anti-refugee sentiment across Europe, Britain, North
America, and beyond.

N o E m p ire s , N o Dus t Bo wl s
A key lesson from all of this is that when we talk about ecological crises
like climate change, biodiversity loss, water pollution and scarcity, and
soil degradation, we are necessarily talking about systemic social prob-
lems with long and brutal histories under capitalist development. When
D ust B owls 29

scientists describe the increase of Dust Bowl-like conditions under cli-

mate change, they signal a particular kind of violent ecological and social
change. The projected crises have violent consequences. But equally vio-
lent are the social forces, historical developments, policies, and practices
that produce such massive socioecological crises in the first place.
Mainstream environmentalism, which first developed in the colonial
context, has often instead ignored the historical origins of current crises.
Failure to address this history allows too many environmentalists and
policy-makers “to safely put aside present responsibility for continued
harm done by that past and questions of reparations, restitution, and
reordering society.”27
Rather than adjusting to injustice, a tendency toward accommodation
in the face of oppression that Martin Luther King Jr. and others warned
against, we must meet the imperial system of capital head on, in all its
manifestations. Collective resistance against police brutality, immigrant-
bashing, toxic forms of masculinity and heteronormativity, prisons, at-
tacks on indigenous sovereignty, military aggression and bombing of de-
fenseless communities, and the segregation of the global environmental
movement are essential if environmentalism is to have any relevance in
the struggle to build a better world and avoid the catastrophic deepening
of the global ecological rift. At the heart of the matter is that allowing the
accumulation of injustice to continue makes inevitable what Foster calls
the “accumulation of catastrophe.”28 Environmental justice demands
solidarity with those on the frontlines rather than those defending the
bottom line of capital. We do not need a “greener” version of such barba-
rism. Peace with the system means no peace for the planet.

No t e s
1.  Maria Cristina Rulli, Antonio Saviori,
and Paolo D’Odorico, “Global Land and
Water Grabbing,” Proceedings of the
National Academy of Sciences 110, no.
3 (2013): 892–97; Jampel Dell’Angelo,
Maria Cristina Rulli, and Paolo D’Odorico,
“The Global Water Grabbing Syndrome,”
Ecological Economics 143 (2018):
276–85; Cyril Mychalejko, “Land Grabs
Soar, Worsen Land Conflicts and Cli-
mate Change: Report,” Telesur, June 14,
2016; May Bulman, “Human Trafficking
and Slavery Affecting ‘Every Large Town
and City in UK,’” Independent, August
10, 2017; Gwyneth Rees, “Human
Trafficking: Modern-Day Slaves 'Within
Plain Sight,’” BBC Wales News, February
25, 2018; Jonathan Watts and John
Vidal, “Environmental Defenders Being
Killed in Record Numbers Globally, New
Research Reveals,” Guardian, July 13,
2017.
2. 
Zach Schonfeld, “Understanding
Donald Trump’s Weird Obsession With
Andrew Jackson,” Newsweek, January 5,
2017.
3.  Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, An Indigenous
People’s History of the United States (Bos-
ton: Beacon, 2014), 144.
4.  R. J. Thompson and B. M. Nicholls,
“The Glen Grey Act: Forgotten Dimen-
sions in an Old Theme,” South African
Journal of Economic History 8, no. 2
(1993): 58–70.
5.  Harry Magdoff, Imperialism: From the
Colonial Age to the Present (New York:
Monthly Review Press, 1978), 35.
6. Dunbar-Ortiz, An Indigenous People’s
History of the United States, 163.
7.  W. E. B. Du Bois, “The Souls of White
Folk,” [1920], Monthly Review 55, no. 6
(2003): 44–58, 45–46.
8.  Du Bois, “The Souls of White Folk,” 55.
9. David Anderson, “Depression, Dust
Bowl, Demography, and Drought: The
Colonial State and Soil Conservation in
East Africa during the 1930’s,” African
Affairs 83, no. 332 (July 1984): 321–43,
327; Graham Vernon Jacks and Robert
Orr Whyte, The Rape of the Earth: A World
Survey of Soil Erosion (London: Faber and
Faber, 1939), 249.
10.  Brett Clark and John Bellamy Foster,
“Marx’s Ecology in the 21st Century,”
World Review of Political Economy 1, no.
1 (2010): 142–56, 152; John Bellamy
Foster referred earlier to the “division of
nature” as the “the disconnection of natu-
ral processes from each other and their
extreme simplification…an inherent
tendency of capitalist development” (The
Vulnerable Planet [New York: Monthly
Review Press, 1999], 121).
30 M ONTHLY RE V IE W / J uly – A u g ust 2018

11. Theodore Roosevelt, “Opening Ad-
dress by the President,” Proceedings of
a Conference of Governors (Washington,
D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office,
1909), 9. Conference of Governors on the
Conservation of Natural Resources held
in Washington, D.C., May 13–15, 1908.
12. Jacks and White, The Rape of the
Earth, 1939.
13. “Dust and Drought,” Smithsonian
American Art Museum, http://american-
experience.si.edu.
14. Russell Lord, “Progress of Soil
Conservation in the United States,” Geo-
graphical Journal 105, nos. 5–6 (1945):
159–66, 162.
15.  Jacks and Whyte, The Rape of the
Earth, 38.
16. Hannah Holleman, Dust Bowls of
Empire: Imperialism, Environmental Poli-
tics, and the Injustice of “Green Capital-
ism” (Yale University Press, forthcoming).
17.  Jonathan Watts, “Third of Earth's Soil
Is Acutely Degraded due to Agriculture,”
Guardian, September 12, 2017.
18. Oliver Milman, “Earth Has Lost a
Third of Arable Land in Past 40 Years,
Scientists Say,” Guardian, December 2,
2015.
19.  John Crawford, “What If the World’s
Soil Runs Out?” interview by World Eco� -
nomic Forum, Time, December 14, 2012.
20.  Steve Graham, Claire Parkinson, and
Mous Chahine, “The Water Cycle and Cli�-
mate Change,” NASA Earth Observatory,
October 1, 2010, http://earthobservatory.
nasa.gov.
21.  Chris Mooney, “World Bank: The Way
Climate Change Is Really Going to Hurt
Us Is through Water,” Washington Post,
May 3, 2016.
22.  Mesfin M. Mekonnen and Arjen Y.
Hoekstra, “Four Billion People Facing
Severe Water Scarcity,” Science Advances
2, no. 2 (2016).
23.  Richard Seager, “An Imminent Transi�
- and Worst,” Catalyst 14 (2015): 8–11, 22.
tion to a More Arid Climate in Southwest-
ern North America,” Lamont-Doherty Earth
Observatory, Earth Institute, Columbia
University, http://ocp.ldeo.columbia.edu;
Richard Seager et al., “Model Projections
of an Imminent Transition to a More Arid
Climate in Southwestern North America,”
Science 316, no. 5828 (2007): 1181–84.
24.  Joseph Romm, “Desertification: The
Next Dust Bowl,” Nature 478 (2011):
450–51, 450; Joe Romm, “My Nature
Piece on Dust-Bowlification and the
Grave Threat It Poses to Food Security,”
ThinkProgress, May 24, 2012, https://
thinkprogress.org.
25. Tamra Gilbertson, Carbon Pricing:
A Critical Perspective for Community
Resistance, vol. 1 (Bemidji, MN: Indig-
enous Environmental Network/Climate
Justice Alliance, 2017), 12.
26.  Chris Mooney, “World Bank: The Way
Climate Change Is Really Going to Hurt
Us Is through Water”; Somina Sengupta,
“Hotter, Drier, Hungrier: How Global
Warming Punishes the World’s Poorest,”
New York Times, March 12, 2018; Pamela
Worth, “Where Climate Change Hits First
27. Dunbar-Ortiz, An Indigenous Peo-
ples’ History of the United States, 5.
28. 
and the Accumulation of Catastrophe,”
Monthly Review 63, no. 7 (December
2011): 1–17.

MONTHLY REVIEW Fifty Years Ago

Harry Braverman, Director of Monthly Review Press, was in Paris during
the height of the May student uprising. His eye-witness account of those
exciting days appeared in the Nation of June 3. He speaks of touring the Paris
bookstores “where the most prominently displayed volumes are those which,
over the past few years have surely had a great deal to do with the creation
of the mood that burst out in the streets: Guevara, Castro, and Camilo
Torres; Jalée and Nizan; Trotsky and Mao; Marcuse and C. Wright Mills. And
Marx everywhere...” Readers will note that this list includes three MR Press
authors: Guevara (Guerrilla Warfare and Reminiscences of the Cuban Revolutionary
War), Pierre Jalée (Pillage of the Third World), and Paul Nizan (Aden, Arabie). Let us
hope that they are doing their part in creating the similar mood that prevails
among the advanced students of this country!
—Leo Huberman and Paul M. Sweezy,
“Notes from the Editors,” July–August 1968
 new from MONTHLY REVIEW PRESS

“Eric Holt-Giménez is a national and

international treasure. He should be
read even—or especially—by people
who aren’t foodies.”
—SUSAN GEORGE
author, How the Other Half Dies:
The Real Reasons for World Hunger

A FOODIE’S GUIDE
TO CAPITALISM
Understanding the Political
Economy of What We Eat

Eric Holt-Giménez
foreword by Marion Nestle

280 pp | $25 | paperback

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political. Stephanie Urdang’s strength
and decency and narrative gifts shine
throughout this powerful memoir.”
A MEMOIR

—WILLIAM FINNEGAN
New Yorker staff writer and Pulitzer MAPPING MY
Prize-winning author, Barbarian Days WAY HOME
Activism, Nostalgia, and the
Activis

MAPPING MY WAY HOME

Downfall of Ap
Apartheid South Africa

Activism, Nostalgia, and the STEPHANIE J. URDANG

Downfall of Apartheid South Africa

Stephanie J. Urdang

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MONTHLY REVIEW PRESS

134 West 29th Street, Suite 706
New York, NY 10001
 archive.monthlyreview.org
DOI: 10.14452/MR-070-03-2018-07_3

Cesspools, Sewage,
and Social Murder
Environmental Crisis and Metabolic Rift in
Nineteenth-Century London
IAN ANGUS

A great city is the most mighty of dung-makers.

Victor Hugo, Les Misérables

All living things ingest matter from their environment, use solar en-
ergy to process it, and excrete the waste products of those metabolic pro-
cesses into that same environment.1 Over hundreds of millions of years,
coevolution has produced an extraordinary range of complex cycles, in
which every species’ excretions are nourishment for others.
Human beings are fully embedded in these life cycles. We inhale oxy-
gen and exhale carbon dioxide; plants do the reverse. We eat plants and
metabolize their components into materials we can’t live without, and
plants metabolize the leftover chemicals that we excrete.
The links between our excrement and our food have been fundamental
to human survival as long as our species has existed. In hunter-gatherer
and nomadic societies, human excrement nourished wild plants. The
Book of Deuteronomy instructed the Israelites, “when you relieve your-
self, dig a hole and cover up your excrement,” a measure that reduced
disease and recycled waste. In settled agricultural societies, the excre-
ment of humans and other animals helped maintain soil fertility and
crop yields. In early capitalist towns, many townspeople had plots of land
or kept animals, so using excrement continued to be part of everyday
life. As towns grew, so did urban-rural manure trade. Historian Leona J.
Skelton has shown that “dunghills were an immoveable fact of life for
pre-industrial urban dwellers” because excrement was valuable:
Throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, many urban inhabit-
ants across Britain took responsibility for their own manure and removed
it out of town themselves to apply to their own arable land, sold it directly
to a local farmer or arranged for it to be removed and sold by a middle

Ian Angus edits the website Climate and Capitalism and is the author, most recently,
of A Redder Shade of Green: Intersections of Science and Socialism (Monthly Review Press, 2017).

32
L ondon ' s M etabolic R ift 33

man. Inhabitants were careful to heap solid rubbish and manure separate-
ly because the latter was a valuable fertilizer.2

As towns grew larger, circular trading arrangements developed: the

boats and barges that carried grain and vegetables to London’s markets
returned laden with manure purchased at Dung Wharf. An urban worker
with a cart, buckets, and some assistants could make a steady income by
emptying cesspools for a fee and selling the “night soil” to nearby farms
or to one of the 60 or more “night yards” located in the heart of the
city. The trade was so important to agriculture that a law passed in the
eighteenth century, and still in force in the 1870s, exempted wagons of
manure from paying tolls on turnpike roads.3
Although some urban-rural manure trade continued until the early
twentieth century, it declined sharply after 1815. It became less attractive
to buyers and sellers because large cities produced far more excrement
than nearby farmers could use, leaving the middlemen with unsaleable
surpluses; because the increasing distances between cities and farms
drove up transport times and costs; and because the growing popularity
of flush toilets in the homes of the rich diluted the night soil and often
sluiced it directly into city sewers.
Still, farms needed fertilizer, so those developments alone would not have
made a qualitative difference. The decisive change was the introduction of
new fertilizers that were more compact, more consistent, easier to use, and
above all more effective, at least in the short-term, than traditional manures.
In 1832, the Scottish politician and agricultural writer Sir John Sinclair
described “the use of bones as manure” as “perhaps the most important
discovery, connected with the cultivation of the soil, that has been made
in the course of a great number of years.” In his account, a Yorkshire
experimenter discovered the “astonishing effects” of adding ground-up
bones to the soil in 1766, but the practice didn’t become widespread until
the 1820s.4 Some farmers made their own bonemeal, but many bought it
from manufacturers who scoured European battlefields for the bodies of
horses and men, and shipped tons of bones to England for grinding.
Bonemeal was supplemented in the 1840s by superphosphate, a pat-
ented fertilizer made by treating phosphate-rich rocks with sulphuric
acid. These rocks, inaccurately named “coprolites,” were discovered in the
1830s in Suffolk, and were mined in that area until the end of the century.5
Also in the 1840s, seabird excrement (guano) from dry islands off Peru
began to be imported in huge quantities. Though expensive, it proved to
be the best fertilizer of all, because it contained twenty to thirty times as
much nitrogen as farmyard manure. Even a light application of guano
boosted fertility quickly and significantly increased production.
34 M ONTHLY RE V IE W / J uly – A u g ust 2018

In 1855, the president of the Central Farmers’ Club wrote, “Never was
there a time when farmers more readily and more rapidly adopted real
improvements…the chemists and the guano merchants have beaten, and
will beat, night-soil out of the market in every shape.”6 In 1846, the City
of London had been able to charge contractors £5,000 for the right to
collect dung from streets and houses; but five years later the City had to
pay contractors £4,900 to do the same thing.7 The market for urban excre-
ment had collapsed.
The rapid adoption of artificial and imported fertilizers was part of what
was called High Farming—“high” meaning “excellent.” It reflected the
fact that by 1840 most farmers were producing “for consumers in distant
markets, separated from them by a growing army of middlemen, dealers
and processors of food; production was for exchange in the market, rather
than for use or subsistence.”8 As a result, “farmers not only desired, but
were required by the sanctions of the market, to extract more from the
soil in each successive cycle of production, on pain of economic failure.”9
Expanded outputs required expanded inputs, a treadmill of agricultural
production from which there was no escape in a capitalist economy.
The chemist Justus von Liebig, who revolutionized scientific under-
standing of plant nutrition, saw the replacement of human manure by
imported bones and guano as a dangerous waste of natural wealth that
made English farmers dependent on expensive imports. “I am firmly of
the opinion,” he wrote, “that if England wishes to remain an agricultural
country she must use as manure the nightsoil and similar residues pro-
duced in large cities.”10
Karl Marx, who admired Liebig’s chemistry but had a far better under-
standing of social and economic conditions, viewed the shift away from
human manure as an important example of capitalist society’s alienation
from the natural world on which human life depends. By concentrating
population in cities, he wrote, capitalism causes an “irreparable rift in the
interdependent process of social metabolism, a metabolism prescribed by
the natural laws of life itself.”11
Marx’s analysis of the nineteenth-century changes in British agricul-
ture provides the theoretical starting point for what is now known as
metabolic rift theory, which is increasingly used by radical ecologists in
analyzing modern environmental crises.
This article considers an aspect of the metabolic rift that has not been
much discussed in modern ecosocialist analysis: the environmental crisis
that the accumulation of human excrement caused in cities, particularly
in London. Marx and Engels several times criticized “the senseless waste-
fulness which robs the Thames of its purity,” but said little more about
L ondon ' s M etabolic R ift 35

it, probably because no one who read journals or newspapers at the time
could have been unaware of London’s excrement problem.12
As we will see, a large body of public opinion favored healing the rift
by using urban excrement for agriculture, but all efforts to do that were
unsuccessful. The solution that was finally adopted, one of the largest
engineering projects the world had seen until then, only shifted the
crisis out of sight. London’s solution was copied by most major cities
in Europe and the Americas, setting the stage for even greater crises in
our time.

Ce s s p o o ls , S ewers , a nd Ti d es
In 1801, more than 10 percent of the population of England and Wales,
just over a million people, lived in Greater London.13 As a biological neces-
sity, every one of them excreted, on average, four ounces of feces and a
quart of urine every day, in a city that had no infrastructure to deal with
it. The few sewers that existed, many of them just open ditches, were sup-
posed to be for rainwater only, although as early as 1801 the agricultural
writer James Anderson wrote that “an immense quantity of filth is daily
carried to the Thames, in its passage to which it subjects the people in the
lower part of the city to the most offensive effluvia.”14 Over the next forty
years, a million more people moved to London. They and their excrement
helped to make London the most crowded and worst smelling city in
Europe. In 1847, physician Hector Gavin wrote:
It is impossible to read the accounts contained in the Reports of the
Commissioners of the Health of Towns, of the filthy and horrible state in
which the houses and streets in the poorer localities are represented to exist,
without being struck with amazement,—that in a town, professing to be the
centre of civilization, and the mightiest in the world,—such abominations
as everywhere present themselves should be allowed to exist even for a day.
There are thousands and thousands of houses without drains, and mul-
titudes of streets without sewers. In many parts of St. George’s-in-the-East
there is no drainage, and the kitchens, in some places, after heavy rains are
stated to be several inches under water; which, when it recedes, leaves an
accumulation of filth and dirt of the worst description.15

Every middle-class or wealthy home had a cesspool—typically a large

pit, brick-lined and covered, in the cellar or yard.16 Often no mortar was
used, so liquids oozed between the bricks into the surrounding soil. Once
or twice a year, when the pit was full, you could pay “night-men” to dig
out the accumulated filth and cart it away. Or, if your house was big
enough, you could just dig another. In the 1840s, Queen Victoria’s prin-
cipal residence, Windsor Castle, had fifty-three overflowing cesspools in
36 M ONTHLY RE V IE W / J uly – A u g ust 2018

its cellars, and sanitary conditions under Buckingham Palace were so bad
that the government suppressed the inspector’s report.
The queen’s living areas were far from the smells of the cesspools, and
there were undoubtedly servants whose jobs included adding lime or
lye to reduce unpleasantness. It was different for the poor. As London’s
population grew, slum landlords rented individual rooms in large houses
to entire families, so that many people shared cesspools that were never
emptied—the tenants couldn’t afford it, and the landlord didn’t care. Even
worse were backstreet courts and “rookeries,” where small dwellings, each
occupied by several families, shared a single privy over an open pit. Gavin
described such a neighborhood in the eastern parish of Bethnal Green in
1848 (bear in mind that “soil” was a Victorian euphemism for feces):
The generality of the privies in this parish are full, and most offensive,
great numbers are overflowing. The cesspools attached are, in the major-
ity of instances, in no better condition. Many of the privies are wooden
sheds erected over holes from which a surface hollow conducts off the
fluid refuse to some other part of the ground. Many are most dilapidated,
and some are dangerous to make use of. In numerous instances the soil has
infiltrated the walls, percolated through them, and spread itself over the
surface of the neighbouring yard; the soil has likewise percolated through
the walls, and into the houses, and in some instances, the floors have been
saturated, and have been rendered very quagmires of filth; the flooring,
in such cases, has become rotten. In numerous instances, the inhabitants
have piled either in their yards, or in their houses, or in the alleys fronting
the houses, collections of dust and cinders, to conceal from the eye the soil
which has oozed from neighbouring privies or cesspools.17

Flush toilets had existed since the 1600s, but they weren’t much used
until the early 1800s, when an improved version patented by Joseph
Bramah became popular with the rich. The additional water filled cess-
pools faster, and often caused them to overflow, so many homeowners
and builders illegally connected household drains to public sewers that
were supposed to carry only rainwater. After 1815, most of the metropolis’s
sewer commissions legalized the practice, charging a steep connection
fee. That policy change seems to have been a turning point for Thames
pollution: during the 1820s, salmon and most other fish disappeared, and
hundreds of fishermen lost their livelihoods. Live eels imported from the
Netherlands died when put into buckets of Thames water.
The Thames, it is important to note, is a tidal river. Four times a day,
the stream changes direction, flowing inland at high tide and returning
eastward hours later. Effluent from city sewers wasn’t swept out to sea,
it churned back and forth with the tides. In 1828, a witness whose office
overlooked the Thames told a Royal Commission that he frequently saw
L ondon ' s M etabolic R ift 37

the bodies of dogs in the river, floating upstream and down for ten or
twelve days.
In 1827, after journalist John Wright showed that the water for sev-
en thousand homes in Westminster came from an intake pump three
yards from the outlet of a major sewer, the government launched a
Royal Commission “to Inquire into the State of the Supply of Water in
the Metropolis.” One of the invited witnesses, civil engineer James Mills,
made what today seems a rather obvious statement. Admitting that he
was no water analyst, he went on:
A slender portion of common sense however authorizes me to affirm, that
a stream which receives daily the evacuations of a million of human be-
ings, of many thousand animals, with all the filth and refuse of the various
manufactories, which of necessity must be carried on in one of the most
populous cities of Europe, cannot require to be analyzed, except by a luna-
tic, to determine whether it ought to be pumped up as a beverage for the
inhabitants of the Metropolis of the British government.18

While finding that “the quality of the Water…has suffered a general de-
terioration within the past ten or twelve years,” the Commissioners’ main
conclusion was the remarkable understatement that water piped from
the Thames “cannot…be pronounced entirely free from the suspicion of
general insalubrity.” They recommended that the water companies ob-
tain water from cleaner sources, and that there should be “some effective
superintendence and control.”19 In fact, it was decades before steps were
taken to clean up the water supply and the Thames. During those decades
the city and the river got much worse. The political elite didn’t act until
they felt personally threatened by gross levels of pollution.

S o c ia l M u rd er
“From the 1820s,” writes historian Royston Lambert, “the towns of
England began to kill off their inhabitants at an increasing pace”:
The crude general death-rate…rose from 21.1 per 1,000 in 1811–20 to 23.4
in 1831–40; the average of the five large towns Birmingham, Bristol, Leeds,
Liverpool and Manchester soared from 20.69 in 1831 to 30.8 in 1841.… Cruel
overcrowding and malnutrition gave respiratory and other forms of tuber-
culosis a grotesque predominance among the fatal infections, and enabled
typhus to take a steady annual toll. Infant diseases, product of dirt, igno-
rance, bad-feeding, and overcrowding, swept one in two of all children
born in towns out of life before the age of five.20

For the tens of thousands who migrated from rural areas to London in
search of work every year, the most immediate result was a sharp decline
in life expectancy. In the 1840s, the average age at death in rural Surrey
38 M ONTHLY RE V IE W / J uly – A u g ust 2018

was forty-five; in London it was thirty-seven. Such averages concealed ex-

treme geographical and class differences: in St. Giles parish, the average
life expectancy at birth was forty years, but for the poor it was seventeen.21
Lives shortened by poverty, hard working conditions, and malnutrition
were further abbreviated by infectious diseases and epidemics. Multiple
waves of deadly diseases swept Britain: influenza and cholera from 1831
to 1833; influenza, typhus, smallpox, and scarlet fever from 1836 to 1842;
typhus, typhoid, and cholera from 1846 to 1849; and cholera again in 1853
and 1866.22
Tuberculosis was the most common cause of death, but the most feared
was cholera, which had been endemic for centuries in India, near the
Bay of Bengal. What seems to have been a new and more virulent strain
emerged there in 1817, and travelled with British colonial armies and mer-
chant ships to Europe in the 1820s: it killed tens of thousands of people in
Britain and Ireland in four epidemics between 1832 and 1866.
We now know that cholera is most often transmitted in water that con-
tains feces from an infected person, so dumping excrement into the Thames
created ideal conditions for the bacterium Vibrio cholera to grow and spread.
In the nineteenth century, the disease was both mysterious and frighten-
ing, because its cause was unknown and its effects were so devastating:
violent stomach pains, vomiting, diarrhea, dehydration, sunken eyes, and
purple skin. Half of victims died, usually within a day or two of the first
symptom. While there were some victims among the well-off, it was, as Dr.
William Gairdner wrote of the 1832 outbreak, “impossible to overlook the
fact that the poor fell in thousands under the fatal breath of pestilence,
while the middle and higher classes were comparatively exempt.”23
In 1844, Frederick Engels wrote that “English society daily and hourly
commits what the working-men’s organs, with perfect correctness, char-
acterize as social murder.… It has placed the workers under conditions in
which they can neither retain health nor live long…[and] it undermines
the vital force of these workers gradually, little by little, and so hurries
them to the grave before their time.”24 Anyone who thinks that Engels
was not an objective witness should compare his judgement to that of the
influential Whig journal the Edinburgh Review:
Out of every two persons who die in the east of London, one perishes from
preventable causes. From twenty to thirty thousand of the labouring popu-
lation of London are killed every year by causes which, if we chose, we
might expel by a current of water. Though we do not take these persons
out of their houses and murder them, we do the same thing in effect,—we
neglect them in their poisonous homes, and leave them there to a linger-
ing but a certain death.25
L ondon ' s M etabolic R ift 39

E d w in C h a d w i c k a nd Sa n i t at i o n
In the 1840s, writes Stephen Marcus, the English middle class was
“abruptly disturbed by the realization that millions of English men, women
and children were virtually living in shit. The immediate question seems
to have been whether they weren’t drowning in it.”26 The 1840s witnessed
a veritable flood of articles, pamphlets, and books on working-class living
conditions. Titles such as Unhealthiness of Towns, Why Are Towns Unhealthy?,
Unhealthiness of London, and Letters on the Unhealthy Condition of Lower Class of
Dwellings shocked and titillated middle-class readers, few of whom had ever
thought about, let alone visited, the people and neighborhoods involved.
Engels’s The Condition of the Working Class in England was the most insight-
ful work in this genre, but since it was published only in German it had
little effect in England at the time.27 The book that most influenced mid-
dle-class opinion was Edwin Chadwick’s 1842 report The Sanitary Condition
of the Labouring Population, described by one reviewer as an “astonishing re-
port” that, “showed such a state of degradation and wretchedness among
the poor of many of the towns and districts, as was not suspected by those
who only saw these classes in the streets. Sickness was found not only to
be more prevalent, but much more fatal, and life was shown of shorter
duration among the poor than among the prosperous classes.”28
Thirty thousand copies of The Sanitary Condition were sold, more than
many popular novels and far more than any previous government pub-
lication. It was accepted as the authoritative account of “the chief re-
movable circumstances affecting the health of the poorer classes of the
population.”29 And, most important for this discussion, it initiated two
decades of public debate and experimentation on the possibility of using
urban sewage for agriculture.
Chadwick was a professional bureaucrat who, like his mentor, utilitarian
philosopher Jeremy Bentham, had a fondness for elaborate, centrally man-
aged schemes to smooth out the rough spots in free-market capitalism. His
most successful and widely detested scheme was the 1834 Poor Law, which
forced applicants for relief to live in prison-like “workhouses” where fami-
lies were separated, meals were sparse, and tedious hard labor was man-
datory. The goal was to make relief substantially less attractive than the
worst job outside, on the theory that there was no such thing as unemploy-
ment, just unwilling workers. As Dickens wrote in Oliver Twist, the Poor Law
Commissioners “established the rule, that all poor people should have the
alternative (for they would compel nobody, not they) of being starved by a
gradual process in the house, or by a quick one out of it.”30
The Poor Law was supposed to reduce taxes by cutting the number of
people on relief, but in fact the ranks of “eligible paupers” soared during
40 M ONTHLY RE V IE W / J uly – A u g ust 2018

the epidemics of influenza and typhus in 1838, and rose further in the
severe economic depression of 1839–43. In late 1841, one in ten adults in
England, and one in five in industrial Lancashire, qualified for poor relief.
From 1839 to 1843, the number of people receiving relief rose from 1.1
million to 1.5 million. Such figures undermined the very basis of the Poor
Law: the workhouse couldn’t be less attractive than outside work if there
was no outside work to be had.
At the same time, the working class was challenging the oligarchic po-
litical system that subjected working people to the dictates of property
owners. In May 1842, over 3 million people signed a petition supporting
the Peoples Charter for democratic rights, and that summer, strikes and
political riots swept large parts of the country. The ruling class and its
supporters were terrified by what social critic Thomas Carlyle called the
Condition-of-England question: “Chartism means the bitter discontent
grown fierce and mad, the wrong condition therefore or the wrong dis-
position, of the Working Classes of England.”31
Chadwick’s 1842 report was a response to the condition-of-England
question, but, as historian Philip Harling writes, it “was hardly a work of
humanitarian empathy. It was riddled with middle class value-judgements
about the putative moral turpitude of slum-dwellers, and it advocated
public health partly as a practical means of protecting the established
political order against plebeian violence.”32 Although it was published at a
time “marked by perhaps a greater incidence of unemployment, destitu-
tion, and social protest than any other in the nineteenth century,” such
matters were scarcely mentioned.33 Christopher Hamlin describes it as
“an ideological manifesto, not an empirical survey of conditions affecting
health. Far from representing any kind of radicalism it was thoroughly
conservative in seeking to solve a problem through minimal changes
maximally acceptable to established interests.”34
Chadwick had carefully selected his witnesses and organized their evi-
dence to support his belief that ill health and high death rates among the
poor weren’t caused by working conditions or overcrowding or diet or pov-
erty. His key message was that illness wasn’t caused by destitution; desti-
tution was caused by illness, and illness was caused by miasma, the foul
air emitted by rotting organic matter. The report was carefully edited “to
point to one particular, namely, atmospheric impurity…as the main cause
of the ravages of epidemic, endemic, and contagious diseases among the
community.”35 He made the same point more bluntly in testimony before a
Parliamentary committee in 1846: “All smell is, if it be intense, immediate
acute disease; and eventually we may say that, by depressing the system and
rendering it susceptible to the action of other causes, all smell is disease.”36
L ondon ' s M etabolic R ift 41

Th e A rt e r ia l-Ven o us P l a n
As a disciple of Bentham, Chadwick couldn’t just criticize the lack of
sanitation in England’s cities. Benthamism required plans for improve-
ment, and Chadwick definitely had one, which he set out in general
terms in 1842 and in great detail in the following years. To reduce mias-
ma, all cesspools and privies had to be eliminated. Every dwelling should
have a water closet and be connected to two new pipe systems—one to
deliver clean water from the country, the other to take excrement and
other waste away to the country, in a steady flow of water. In Chadwick’s
elaborate scheme, steam engines would pump sewage to farms outside
the city, where networks of subsoil pipes would distribute it to irrigate
and fertilize crops. Deeper pipes would capture excess water and direct it
through cleansing filter beds to the nearest river, lake, or sea. Chadwick
described his scheme as arterial-venous, with arteries bringing clean water
to the city, veins taking dirty water back to the country, and steam pumps
standing in for the heart. Best of all, the arterial-venous system would pay
for itself, by reducing the number of people on relief, by charging each
home for water, and above all, by selling sewage as fertilizer.37
Chadwick’s only evidence that sewage might be profitable was in
Edinburgh, where sewage had for years been dumped in the fast-flowing
burns (streams) that flowed through the city to the North Sea, streams
that came to be called foul burns. Beginning about 1800, farmers had
irrigated and fertilized some 350 acres of land east of Holyrood Castle,
by diverting water from the Craigentinny foul burn. The Sanitary Report
quoted an anonymous expert who claimed that enriching the land with
sewage had increased its value by 50 percent or more. Despite Chadwick’s
belief that smells caused disease, he didn’t mention that the description
he quoted came from a reply to an 1840 Police Commission complaint
that the “offensive smells” of the Craigentinny Meadows endangered the
health of the people of Edinburgh.38
In any event, 350 acres where farmers were taking a portion of
Edinburgh’s sewage without paying for it scarcely constituted a market
test for selling all of London’s sewage. Would it work for other types of soil
or other crops? Could it be scaled up for the metropolis, which had twenty
times Edinburgh’s population? Would farmers pay? Would the operation
be viable if they had to? Such questions were not asked or answered by
Chadwick or by the many subsequent writers who claimed Craigentinny
as conclusive proof of the commercial value of sewage as fertilizer.
The other authority Chadwick claimed in support of his plan was
Liebig, but in the passage that Chadwick cited, Liebig was actually quot-
ing another chemist, Jean-Baptiste Boussingault, about the amounts of
42 M ONTHLY RE V IE W / J uly – A u g ust 2018

plant nutrients in human excrement—he said nothing about whether

they could be economically recovered from sewage water.39 Seven years
later, Chadwick revealed to a much smaller audience that in 1842 he had
asked Liebig’s opinion of his plan, and “learned in reply that he was un-
favourably impressed with the practice of applying manures in their liq-
uid form.”40 Chadwick, who thought he knew more about illness than
doctors, and more about sewer design than engineers, evidently also be-
lieved that he knew more about fertilizer than the man he himself called
“the greatest living authority on agricultural chemistry.”41
When the national government didn’t immediately accept his plan,
Chadwick and some associates formed a Towns Improvement Company
“to supply water to towns; to effect their drainage and cleansing and to
apply their refuse to agricultural production; to supply gas, and carry out
any connected or similar improvements, of towns either in the British
Empire or abroad, where adequate interest and security can be given for
the capital invested.”42 But despite a promised 6.5 percent return, inves-
tors showed no interest, and no towns signed up. The company also failed
in an attempt to sell sewage as fertilizer directly to farmers from a canal
barge equipped with pumps and hoses.43
While his specific plan never materialized, Chadwick’s Sanitary Report
won wide support for four ideas: that disease was caused by the smell
of rotting organic material; that public health could only be improved
by removing excrement from cities; that major improvements to sewers
and drainage were required to achieve that; and that the cost of those
improvements could be offset, if not entirely covered, by selling sew-
age as fertilizer. The debate Chadwick triggered on those issues shaped
London’s politics for years, and the outcome continues to cause severe
environmental problems in our time.

The I n d u s t r ia l Revo l ut i o n ’s Fi rs t E nvi ro nme ntal Mov e me nt

No one knew the real causes of disease—the existence and effects of
bacteria weren’t even suspected—but many medical theorists doubted
the miasma theory, and few would have agreed that malnutrition and
poverty were not causes of ill health. Nevertheless Chadwick, a relent-
less self-promoter who had the ear of those in power, drowned out
contrary views, and his opinion became official doctrine. As medical
historian Margaret Pelling writes, “that the correlation between smell
and disease became an article of popular faith was a triumph of sani-
tary propaganda.”44 A simplistic miasma theory had the particular advan-
tage, for the political and economic elite, that it excluded fundamental
social problems as causes of working-class discontent and unrest. It also
L ondon ' s M etabolic R ift 43

countered commerce-disrupting calls for quarantines, because if disease

was caused by bad air, then the victims weren’t contagious.
Chadwick convinced middle-class reformers that what the poor really
needed wasn’t votes or higher wages or better food—it was better sewers.
Charles Dickens, for example, came to believe that “nothing effectual
can be done for the elevation of the poor in England, until their dwelling
places are made decent and wholesome. I have always been convinced
that this Reform must precede all other Social Reforms.”45
While Chadwick responded to government dithering by trying to
build a water and drainage corporation under his control, other reform-
ers focused on mobilizing middle-class opinion. The Health of Towns
Association (HTA), founded in London in December 1844, at “a meeting
which was most numerously attended, in spite of the severity of the
weather,”46 was described as
an association…for the purpose of diffusing among the people the infor-
mation obtained by recent inquiries, as to the physical and moral evils that
result from the present defective sewerage, drainage, supply of water, air
and light, and construction of dwelling-houses; and also for the purpose of
assisting the legislature to carry into practical operation any effectual and
general measures of relief, by preparing the public mind for the change.47
In Britain at that time, about 9 percent of adults (all male) had the
right to vote, and the HTA was created by members of that enfranchised
minority. Its officers were a bishop, an earl, a surgeon, and an evangeli-
cal minister. Its governing committee included ministers, Members of
Parliament, doctors, surgeons, attorneys, and members of the nobility,
and they directed their message to people like themselves.
When it did try to speak to the lower classes, the HTA was either urg-
ing them to sign petitions, or—in the guise of the Metropolitan Working
Classes’ Association for Improving the Public Health—distributing self-
help pamphlets that were condescending to the point of insult. The pam-
phlet Bathing and Personal Cleanliness, for example, complained that “the
poor and, and in common with them a large number of the working
class, are accustomed to think that their narrow circumstances are a suf-
ficient excuse for their dirty habits.”48 Such statements, like the slogan
they printed on the cover of each tract—“We can be useful no longer than we
are well”—reveal how disconnected the reformers were from the people
they claimed to be helping.49 They certainly wanted no contact with actu-
al working-class militants. A correspondent complained to Chadwick that
in Glasgow, “some noisy, brawling, turbulent Chartists had got mixed up
with the agitation,” and that “their way of doing business had disgusted
the more discreet.”50
44 M ONTHLY RE V IE W / J uly – A u g ust 2018

The principal organizer and spokesman for the HTA was Thomas
Southwood Smith, a prominent physician and humanitarian who
worked in several of London’s charity hospitals. He was the medical
theorist from whom Chadwick learned the miasma theory, and he had
played an important role in the preparation of the 1842 Sanitary Report.
Chadwick depended on him for guidance on medical matters, but was
deeply jealous of his personal popularity, and was outraged when any-
one suggested that Southwood Smith’s contribution to sanitary reform
might equal his own.
The terms “environmental” and “non-governmental organization”
didn’t exist in the 1840s, but the HTA can justly be described as the
world’s first environmental NGO. From 1844 through 1849, directly and
through more than a dozen local affiliates, it organized public meetings,
sent speakers to other organizations, commissioned studies and reports,
distributed pamphlets, wrote letters to the press, and lobbied Members
of Parliament for sanitary legislation. In 1847 and 1848, it published a
monthly Journal of Public Health, and it conducted an influential review
of sanitary conditions, concluding that out of sixty-nine towns surveyed,
fifty-one were “bad” or “very bad.” Parliamentary supporters of sanitary
reform regularly used HTA materials to support their arguments, while
opponents like the ultra-Tory David Urquhart condemned their ideas as
“mawkish philanthropy” and “undisguised corruption” that only aimed
to create “an immense number of new situations and offices which were
to be in the gift of the Government.”51
No one could doubt that reformers like the deeply religious Smith were
sincerely concerned about the health of the poor, but their most effec-
tive arguments addressed the bourgeoisie’s self-interest, not mawkish
philanthropy. An 1847 statement from the HTA, for example, stressed
the danger to the middle class and rich if poor neighborhoods were not
cleaned up:
Although the sickness and mortality from these causes press with particu-
lar severity on the poorer classes yet the wealthy are by no means exempt
from similar suffering; that there is no boundary within which it is pos-
sible to confine the visitations of malaria, and no moment when it may not
pass beyond its usual haunts; that it sometimes introduces fever and other
painful and mortal diseases into the mansion as well as into the hovel.52
If disease was transmitted by airborne miasma, then, as Charles Dickens
warned, the wind could carry it to the most exclusive districts: “The air
from Gin Lane will be carried, when the wind is Easterly, into May Fair,
and…if you once have a vigorous pestilence raging furiously in St Giles,
no mortal list of lady patronesses can keep it out of Almack’s.”53
L ondon ' s M etabolic R ift 45

The Edinburgh Review agreed: “The higher and the middle classes have,
besides the obligation of plain justice, a great and palpable interest in
making sacrifices for the purification of their degraded neighbours.... We
cannot separate ourselves from uncleanness and misery by mere walls
and lanes, and remain safe.”54
The country’s most widely read newspaper, the Times, said the same:
“Grosvenor-square must care for Bermondsey; Belgravia can no longer
think slightingly of Bethnal-green…. The filthy spots we have named, if
they be allowed to generate and spread abroad their noisome miasmata,
under favourable atmospheric influences, may gradually infect other
quarters of the town which but for their evil neighbourhood would have
escaped scot-free.”55
As Engels later wrote, the English sanitary movement of the 1840s was
ultimately rooted in self-interest and fear:
Capitalist rule cannot allow itself the pleasure of generating epidemic dis-
eases among the working class with impunity; the consequences fall back
on it and the angel of death rages in the ranks of the capitalists as ruth-
lessly as in the ranks of the workers.…[so] the philanthropic bourgeois be-
came inflamed with a noble spirit of competition in their solicitude for the
health of their workers. Societies were founded, books were written, pro-
posals drawn up, laws debated and passed, in order to stop up the sources
of the ever-recurring epidemics. The housing conditions of the workers
were investigated and attempts made to remedy the most crying evils. In
England particularly, where the largest number of big towns existed and
where the bourgeoisie itself was, therefore, running the greatest risk, ex-
tensive activity began.56

C h o le ra Pro vo kes A c t i o n

The middle-class voters mobilized by the HTA pressed the government

to act, but initially the politicians felt no urgency: several draft bills were
introduced, but none came to a vote. The turning point was a typhus epi-
demic that killed 30,000 people in 1847, followed by the news that cholera
had returned to Eastern Europe, and was moving westward just as it had
in 1831. Chadwick, who had just been appointed co-chair of another dis-
cuss-and-delay Royal Commission on Health in the Metropolis, took the
opportunity to sound an alarm. Barely two months after it was formed,
the commission issued a report that recommended Chadwick’s sanitary
program, but with a new emphasis: these measures were now presented
as the only way to save Britain from the most feared of diseases, cholera.
While some new sewers had been built since the 1832 cholera epidem-
ic, the commission said, they were badly designed and the water flow
was insufficient to clear their contents: as a result, “they not only do
46 M ONTHLY RE V IE W / J uly – A u g ust 2018

not accomplish any sanitary purpose, but, on the contrary, act as extend-
ed cesspools.”57 That, together with the continued lack of sanitation in
London, meant that “the causes of epidemic disease continue to operate
in the metropolis with unabated and even with increased force at the
present time; and the reasonable inference to be deduced from this fact
is, that were cholera to re-visit it at the present time, with the existing
predisposition to epidemic disease, it would come at a period peculiarly
favourable to its extension.”58
The rich would not be exempt: “if the Asiatic cholera should again ap-
pear amongst us, no district would be secure from its ravages, and al-
though those in which the system of sewerage and cleansing is the worst
would be most liable, the nidus [beginning point] so afforded would be a
source of peril to all classes.”59
The solution was Chadwick’s sanitary program:
There is but one safeguard against this malady, as against other diseases of
the same class. That safeguard consists in sanitary arrangements; and sani-
tary arrangements to be efficient must be such as will secure the purity
of the atmosphere, particularly by the immediate and complete removal
of all filth and refuse, and that not only from the principal squares and
thoroughfares, but also from the streets, courts, and alleys of the lowest
portion of the population. But this requires a general and proper system of
street and house drainage, and a supply of water sufficient for keeping the
drains and sewers clean, for surface cleansing, and for domestic use. Were
the arrangements and the administration for cleansing thus complete, we
might still not be able to obtain an absolute exemption from the visitation
of cholera, but we should have done what might and must be done to de-
prive it, should it come, of the means of support and strength.60

In response to Chadwick’s report and the approach of cholera, the

Whig government quickly passed laws that restructured English sani-
tary administration. The Public Health Act permitted towns to under-
take sanitary measures without parliamentary approval, and created a
General Board of Health (GBH) to assist them, while the Metropolitan
Commission of Sewers Act (MCS) created a single body to manage sewers
in greater London, except those in the politically untouchable City.
“That appalling pest, the cholera, was making a steady, systematic,
and rapid progress towards the shores of England,” said the govern-
ment spokesman in the House Lords, urging rapid approval of the Public
Health Act. “It was their interest, as it was their manifest duty, to pro-
mote as much as possible the progress of the only conceivable measure
which could give a check to that dreadful scourge of humanity.… He did
not wish to create any unnecessary alarm—quite the contrary; but it was
right that our true position should be properly understood.”61
L ondon ' s M etabolic R ift 47

Many reformers complained that the measures were not just inade-
quate, they were a betrayal of the goals of the Health of Towns campaign.
London surgeon William Simpson, wrote in the HTA’s journal that what
was being proposed was “not a Public Health Act…a total and lamentable
failure, so far as the progress of the science and art of preventing disease
is concerned…. a perfect Caliban…one of the most melancholy proofs of
the slow progress of mankind in perceiving and acknowledging the most
obvious and important truths.”62
Despite such criticisms, leading reformers quickly joined the new sani-
tary administration. The GBH hired Southwood Smith as Chief Medical
Officer and Journal of Public Health editor Hector Gavin as a medical inspec-
tor. The HTA’s secretary, Henry Austin, became secretary and later Chief
Inspector of the GBH. Declaring that “our principles have been…practi-
cally acknowledged to be correct, and have been universally adopted,”63
the now-leaderless HTA faded away.64
Chadwick received the biggest plums of all: he became the only paid
member, and thus de facto director, of both the GBH and the MCS. That
combination seemed to give him all he power he had long sought, to
implement his sanitation and health program, but that proved to be an
illusion.
The GBH, with a limited budget and no enforcement powers, was tooth-
less: Chadwick wrote sanitary regulations that local authorities refused to
implement, and reports that the government ignored, until he was forced
to retire in 1854. His time at the MCS was even shorter: paralyzed by ac-
rimonious disputes between Chadwick and a minority who had been on
the previous district commissions, the MCS accomplished so little that
after 18 months the government dissolved it and appointed another, ex-
cluding Chadwick.

‘ N o Filt h in the Sewers , A l l i n t he Ri v e r ’

One successful project that Chadwick did initiate at the MCS probably
made the cholera epidemic worse, and it definitely expanded Thames
pollution to crisis proportions.
As London grew, the metabolic rift grew as well: farms needed ever more
imported and manufactured fertilizer to maintain soil fertility, while ur-
ban accumulations of human and animal excrement grew ever larger and
noxious. Some new arrivals moved into large homes with water closets
and connections to sewers, but most had to accept tiny rooms that shared
outdoor privies over open pits, if they had sanitary facilities at all.
The working-class population of London grew, but the number of work-
ing-class homes did not—indeed, many small houses and tenements were
48 M ONTHLY RE V IE W / J uly – A u g ust 2018

destroyed to make room for new thoroughfares, railway lines, and expen-
sive townhomes. The contractors who built fashionable Oxford Street be-
tween 1841 and 1845, for example, evicted some 5,000 people in the largely
Irish St. Giles district, and erected a twenty-foot-high hoarding to block the
poor from view. Immediately behind that wall, on Church Lane, 27 houses
that had been home to 655 people in 1841 were occupied by 1,095 people
in 1847.65 Observers who visited Church Lane in December 1847 reported:
The back yards are 5 or 6 ft. square, with broken pavement, and most of
them have accumulations of filth and night soil, and the drainage from
them (which is superficial) runs through the passage of the houses into
the street.… These yards are, in most instances, without privies, and in the
few cases where they do exist, they are in a most dilapidated condition….
Church Lane has not any sewer; the sewer of George Street sends off into
Church Lane a ramification at right angles, which terminates within a few
feet opposite the door of No. 1, Church Lane, and the landlady complains,
that this trunk periodically chokes up, and inundates her cellar.66

In 1848 Hector Gavin reported that in another poor parish, Bethnal

Green, “a great number of the courts and alleys are altogether unpro-
vided with house-drains, or where they do exist, they are mere surface-
drains [open ditches] and they are nearly always choked up.” On some
streets that had new sewers, landlords refused to bear the cost of install-
ing and maintaining connections to them.67
While the excrement of hundreds of thousands more working people
was added to the privies and cesspits of London’s poorest neighborhoods,
the upper and middle classes were increasingly flushing theirs away. The
Building Act of 1844 required every new house to have a drain connected
to a sewer, if there was one nearby—in twenty-five years, such drains
had gone from prohibited, to permitted, to mandatory. Also in 1844, a
contractor who specialized in upscale homes, Thomas Cubitt, told a Royal
Commission that this had been his practice for some years: “I scarcely
build any house, however small, without having a water-closet attached
to it, and not a common privy.”68
Chadwick had long criticized the design of London’s sewers, pointing
out that a significant percentage of the sewage, rather than flowing to
the Thames, accumulated in stagnant ponds and heaps in the sewers
themselves. These buildups, he argued, produced miasma that rose into
the streets and backed up through drains into houses, causing disease. To
reduce the danger of cholera, the Chadwick-controlled MCS hired work-
ers to clear out the filth. To some degree this was done in traditional
fashion, with shovels and buckets, but where possible a new technique
was applied: the water flow was dammed and then quickly released,
L ondon ' s M etabolic R ift 49

flushing accumulated sewage out of the sewer and into the Thames. The
Commission reported in September 1848 that 163 miles of the worst sew-
ers had been flushed.69
The immediate effect of this program, which was supported by both fac-
tions on the Commission, was a radical increase in the amount of sewage
in the river. What’s worse, since most sewer outlets were below the high
water level, the sewage had to be flushed at low tide, so it festered on the
banks until the tide returned and mixed it thoroughly into the river, the
city’s primary source of drinking water. Doing this during a cholera epi-
demic could only contribute to spreading the disease—and, in fact, in 1849,
after a year of sewer flushing, what had been a mild epidemic in London
exploded, killing over 14,000 people in a few months. The Pharmaceutical
Journal spoke more truth than it knew when it bitterly joked that cholera
victims may have been drinking “Chadwick’s entire,” “a beverage con-
sisting of liquid guano, flushed into the Thames, and pumped up by the
Lambeth water-works ‘properly diluted’ for the use of the inhabitants.”70
The connection between water and cholera was not known, but the
state of the river was plain for all to smell. Parishes on the south side
of the river petitioned to have flushing stopped, at least until cooler
weather, but the Commission declined, arguing that sewage in the river
was less dangerous to health than sewage under homes. In September
1849, Chadwick reported that inspectors had discovered a huge buildup
under a tenement in Westminster, near an exclusive boys school. They
emptied and filled in the cesspools, and installed water closets, restoring
the inhabitants to good health. “From beneath that one block of houses
between 400 and 500 loads of decomposing matter had been removed.”71
The Times, which was highly critical of the lack of action on improving
the entire sewer system, mocked Chadwick’s report:
Does he really consider it so great a triumph to have cleansed an Augean
stable in Westminster of 450 cartloads of refuse and corruption?...
What has Mr. Chadwick done with his 450 cartloads of filth? Has he
sent them to fertilize the fields of Kent or Essex?—or, if not available for
such purposes, has he taken care that at least they shall not contaminate
the atmosphere in the neighbouring districts? No; he has sent them into
the river, that the whole metropolis may share his favours, and that the
poison which is ejected from Westminster may circulate with freedom
throughout Lambeth and Southwark.
In all that Mr. Chadwick has done he has simply relieved one locality at
the expense of others.72

Chadwick’s policy, the Times editors charged, was “no filth in the sew-
ers,—all in the river!”73
50 M ONTHLY RE V IE W / J uly – A u g ust 2018

Shortly after that was published, the MCS was dissolved and recon-
structed without Chadwick, but the new regime apparently agreed with
his view that dumping sewage into the Thames was a lesser evil than
leaving it in cesspools and sewers. Through the 1850s, the MCS employed
teams of men who, for a modest fee, would pump out cesspools, and
transfer the contents to the river.74 At the same time, home and build-
ing owners were encouraged to fill in cesspools and install water-closets,
which had become more affordable. According to Joseph Bazalgette, chief
engineer for London’s sewers, “within a period of about six years, thirty
thousand cesspools were abolished.”75
The transition to water closets—a true technological revolution—can
be seen in two statistics. Between 1850 and 1856, the number of London
houses with running water increased from 270,581 to 328,561. And in the
same period, the average usage per house rose from 160 to 246 gallons
per day. As the statistician who calculated those figures wrote, the in-
crease in water use was not an unmixed blessing: “while the increasing
abundance of water has necessarily added to the comfort and health of
the people, by enabling them to have baths and other conveniences easily
and cheaply, it has at the same time tended to encourage city and house
impurities being improperly carried away, and that too in a manner cal-
culated rather to transfer than to abolish nuisance.”76
Many houses, especially in the poorest neighborhoods, still had no run-
ning water, but those that did were using much more, and the increased
water flow was carrying dirt and excrement into sewers and the Thames.
After ten years of sewer flushing and cesspool removal, the Lancet de-
scribed the state of London’s river:
The concentrated refuse of some millions of people are daily poured into
the Thames in the immediate vicinity of their habitations. This refuse con-
sists of waste and effete material of all kinds, including solid excrements
and urine, compounded of a variety of noxious and hurtful substances.
Again, this refuse, bad and offensive as it is originally, is not poured at once
and directly into the Thames, but is first discharged into the sewers, where
it accumulates, festering and rotting, and by its decomposition gives rise to
the generation of various additional hurtful or poisonous compounds; and
it is in this foul state that it is conveyed to the river, where, mingled with
water, it undergoes further corruption….
To such an extent has the river been polluted with sewage this year,
that the water for miles, from Chelsea in the one direction, to Blackwall
in the other, has become almost black, and has, in fact, presented the ap-
pearance of sewage itself, so that, without the least exaggeration, the river
may be said to be transformed into one vast uncovered sewer, reeking with
noxious and pestiferous abominations.77
L ondon ' s M etabolic R ift 51

After a boat ride on the Thames in July 1855, the famed physicist Michael
Faraday described the experience in a widely reprinted letter to the Times:
The water, he said, was “an opaque, pale-brown fluid…. The smell was
very bad, and common to the whole of the water; it was the same as that
which now comes from the gullyholes [sewer grates] in the street.” The
river had become “a fermenting sewer,” he wrote, warning that “if we ne-
glect this subject, we cannot expect to do so with impunity; nor ought we
to be surprised if, ere many years are over, a hot season gives us sad proof
of the folly of our carelessness.”78 Three years later, a hot season gave the
proof Faraday predicted.

‘A St in k R is e n t o t he Hei g ht o f a n Hi s toric Ev e nt ’
When the MCS was dissolved and reformed in 1849, the balance of its
membership shifted away from local politicians and reformers toward
engineers who viewed sewage as a technical problem, rather than one
of health or social justice. But anyone who expected them to act more
expeditiously than the Chadwick-dominated MCS was soon disillusioned.
For six years, the engineers debated and discussed possible ways of di-
verting sewage from the Thames. The government dissolved and recon-
stituted the commission four more times, before replacing it entirely in
December 1855 with a new Metropolitan Board of Works (MBW), which
was elected by the various local governments in London. Although it was
given an explicit mandate to get the sewage out of London, its endless
discussions and debates quickly earned it the derisive label Metropolitan
Board of Words.
When the commissioners did propose specific measures, they were sty-
mied by politicians: everyone agreed that something had to be done, but
property owners and their representatives in Parliament didn’t want the
business disruptions that large-scale construction would entail, nor did they
want to pay the cost. The Commissions could not raise money without gov-
ernment approval, and not even the return of cholera in 1853–54 loosened
the political purse strings. While the rich still feared the disease, most of the
11,000 Londoners who died in that outbreak lived in poor districts on the
south bank, so the rich, most of whom lived north of the river, did not feel
directly threatened. As the Lancet said, failure to clean up the Thames wasn’t
a result of lack of money, but of grossly misplaced priorities: “Millions and
tens of millions are provided readily enough, too readily, for the dire pur-
poses of war, but an outlay for sanitary purposes, for the sake of prolonging,
in place of destroying, the health and lives of our fellow creatures, is always
begrudged.”79 “The English poor,” Marcus writes, had “the privilege of being
the first group whose humanity was cost-accounted.”80
52 M ONTHLY RE V IE W / J uly – A u g ust 2018

By the beginning of 1858, efforts to design a new sewer system were

at a stalemate. The government had two proposals in hand—a £2.5 mil-
lion plan from the MBW, prepared by chief engineer Joseph Bazalgette,
and a £5.5 million plan prepared by outside engineers that the govern-
ment had retained to critique the MBW plan. The banks wouldn’t finance
either version without government guarantees that politicians did not
want to give. Then fate intervened, in the form of unexpected weather,
and England’s rulers once again confirmed Engels’s judgment that they
would only improve sanitation when their own health was at risk.
June 1858 was the hottest month in living memory. Temperatures of
90°F (32°C) and higher combined with low rainfall to turn the normally
unpleasant smell of the Thames into a sickening stench. People who lived
or worked near the river complained of nausea, vomiting, and fainting.
The queen cut short a river cruise after 10 minutes. Westminster’s law
courts stopped hearing cases. Barges spread over 200 tons of deodorizing
chemicals a day on the river banks near sewer outlets, with little effect.
Parliament itself was disrupted, and committee meetings had to be can-
celled because it was too hot to have the windows closed, and too disgust-
ing to leave them open. The engineer responsible for ventilation in the
Parliament buildings had cloths soaked in lime-chloride hung by windows
on the river side, but warned that he could not protect the health of MPs.
William Budd, the physician whose research proved that typhoid was
waterborne, described the smell as unprecedented: “For the first time in
the history of man, the sewage of nearly two millions of people had been
brought to seethe and ferment under a burning sun, in one vast open
cloaca lying in their midst. The result we all know. Stench so foul, we may
well believe, had never before ascended to pollute this lower air. Never
before, at least, had a stink risen to the height of an historic event.”81
For people who believed that all smell was disease, this was a frightening
event—a powerful miasma that threatened new epidemics. Newspapers
and magazines were filled with articles on the possible deadly effects of
the Great Stink. The Saturday Review, reminding readers of Parliament’s
years-long failure to deal with the polluted Thames, sarcastically suggest-
ed that if parliamentarians contracted diarrhea or typhus, they might be
spurred to action: “The Thames will be purified; and if it is at the cost
of the health and lives of the official guardians of the public safety, they
will have only themselves to thank for the neglect which Parliamentary
neglect entails. If Parliament can only be made to interfere by its own
decimation we must make up our minds to the dreadful sacrifice.”82
Disease did not produce action, but fear of disease did. On July 15,
the government leader in the House of Commons, Benjamin Disraeli,
L ondon ' s M etabolic R ift 53

declared that the Thames had become “a Stygian pool, reeking with inef-
fable and intolerable horrors.” “The public health is at stake; almost all
living things that existed in the waters of the Thames have disappeared
or been destroyed; a very natural fear has arisen that living beings upon
its banks may share the same fate; there is a pervading apprehension of
pestilence in this great city.”83
Disraeli introduced a bill that allowed the MBW to proceed without fur-
ther government approval, and to borrow up to £3 million, guaranteed
by the government, to build new sewers as it saw fit. Described by an op-
position MP as “forced upon the Government by a panic rather than with
dignity,” the new law was rushed through both houses of Parliament and
given final approval in just 18 days.84

S h ift in g S e wa g e Do wn s t rea m
The London Main Drainage project was supposed to be completed in five
years and cost £3 million. It actually took three times as long and cost more
than twice as much, the equivalent of about £360 million today. There had
never before been a construction project so large and complex. Thousands
of workers, many working far below the most densely inhabited parts of
the city, built three brick-lined tunnels north of the river and two on the
south. The Victoria, Albert, and Chelsea embankments—54 acres of new
land—were built to enclose the sewers that were built beneath the river bed
on either side. Their vertical granite-faced walls replaced low muddy banks,
forcing the narrowed river to flow faster, scouring the bottom, and moving
sewage from upstream more quickly through London.
The new main drainage system opened in stages between 1864 and 1874:
when it was done, over ninety million gallons of sewage a day was rerouted
from London’s existing sewers into eighty-two miles of massive intercept-
ing sewers, and carried, by a combination of gravity and steam-pumps, to
huge reservoirs on either side of the river, just east of the metropolis. Twice
a day, just after high tide, the reservoirs were emptied into the Thames.
In 2003, a BBC series identified Bazagette’s sewers as one of the “Seven
Wonders of the Industrial World.” In purely physical terms that may be
true, but with all due respect for the ingenuity and hard work involved,
in the end all the system did was move London’s sewage a few miles
downstream. As historian Michelle Allen says, “the Embankment and
main drainage merely altered the patterns of environmental disorder,
rather than removing them altogether.” 85 Or, as an observer said at the
time, the new sewers were “merely putting off the evil day a little longer,
or rather destroying the salubrity of one neighbourhood for the benefit
of those who can afford to pay for individual advantages.”86
54 M ONTHLY RE V IE W / J uly – A u g ust 2018

The new sewers reduced pollution in central and western London, at

the expense of the city’s fast-growing East End. Less than a decade after
the intercepting sewers were completed, it was reported that “some 30
miles of the River Thames is now as bad, if not physiologically worse, than
that which was observed in the cholera years of 1848–49, and in 1855–56,
when the Thames was no better than a foul stinking ditch.”87 The chair of
yet another Royal Commission wrote that “the river was in such a state as
to be a disgrace and a scandal to the Metropolis and civilization.”88
A petition signed by 13,000 people complained of sickening odors and
accumulations of excrement near the new outfalls, complaints that the
MBW dismissed as “if not totally unfounded, greatly exaggerated.”89 The
Times commented wryly that the board “has nostrils constituted on pecu-
liar principles…. It pours daily 96,000,000 gallons of crude sewage into the
near reaches of the Thames, and pretends to think bad smells and putrid
shoals are the simple phantasms of morbid fancy or malicious prejudice.”90
When the MBW was finally ordered to act, it simply relocated the prob-
lem again. Beginning in 1887, the company used chemicals to separate
liquids from solids—the liquids went into the Thames, while 3,000 tons
of sludge a day was loaded onto barges and dumped fifteen miles off-
shore. That “out of sight, out of mind” practice continued for more than
a century, until 1997, when European Union rules against dumping at sea
forced London to build incinerators.

Pro t o -E c o lo gy
In the 1840s and 1850s, the campaign for sanitary reform promoted
what might be called proto-ecological ideas, ecological thinking before
the concept existed. Most common was the view that humanity was
breaking the circle of life by not returning its excrement to the soil.
Southwood Smith claimed that discarding refuse violated “great laws of
nature…a due conformity with which would bring us health, plenty, and
happiness.” Chemist Lyon Playfair declared “a recognized principle of ag-
riculture, that the excreta of those animals which subsist on a certain
kind of food form the manure best adapted to the production of the same
food; and hence the refuse of a town is the best productive manure for
the food of the residents of that town.”91
Henry Austin, Chief Inspector of the GBH (and Charles Dickens’s broth-
er-in-law), noted that many towns had eliminated cesspools and taken no
further steps, “but Nature’s laws allow no such halting. The mere removal
of the decomposing mass is but a shifting of the mischief. The great cycle
of life, decay and reproduction must be completed, and so long as the ele-
ments of reproduction are not employed for good, they will work for evil.”92
L ondon ' s M etabolic R ift 55

Journalist Henry Mayhew was particularly eloquent in his best-selling

book London Labour and the London Poor:
In Nature everything moves in a circle—perpetually changing, and yet ever
returning to the point whence it started.… As animals live on vegetables,
even so is the refuse of the animal the vegetable’s food.… That which we
excrete as pollution to our system, they secrete as nourishment to theirs.
Plants are not only Nature’s scavengers but Nature’s purifiers…. That which
supports respiration in us produces putrefaction in them. What our lungs
throw off, their lungs absorb—what our bodies reject, their roots imbibe….
In every well-regulated State, therefore, an effective and rapid means
for carrying off the ordure of the people to a locality where it may be fruit-
ful instead of destructive, becomes a most important consideration. Both
the health and the wealth of the nation depend upon it.… We are now be-
ginning to understand this. Up to the present time we have only thought of
removing our refuse—the idea of using it never entered our minds. It was
not until science taught us the dependence of one order of creation upon
another, that we began to see that what appeared worse than worthless to
us was Nature’s capital—wealth set aside for future production.93

A leading trade magazine, the Builder, was more concise: “Food makes
the muck-heap, and the muck-heap makes the food.”94
Another proto-ecological argument warned that farming should not be
dependent on guano and imported bonemeal, because the supply would
eventually be exhausted—that English farmers were relying on a non-re-
newable resource. Liebig wrote to the Times in 1859: “In relation to guano,
I have been assured that in 20 or 25 years, if its use should increase in even
the same proportion as hitherto, there will not remain in South America
enough to freight a ship. We will, however, suppose its supply and that of
bones to continue for fifty years, or even longer—then what will be the
condition of England when the supply of guano and bones is exhausted?”95
Such ecological sentiments coexisted with a conviction that capitalist
markets would always achieve the most desirable results. Thus, just as in
today’s vast literature promoting market solutions to environmental cri-
ses, much of the discussion of sewage in Victorian England consisted of at-
tempts to prove that London’s sewage could and should be sold at a profit.

‘ B r igh t a n d Gl i tt eri ng Hea p s o f So vere igns’

Disraeli’s 1848 sewer commission bill aimed “to effect a more perfect
system of sewerage and drainage within the limits of this act, and to
construct and alter the sewers and drains therein and into and through
the city of London, for the purpose of collecting the sewage and drainage, and
converting the same into manure, and to dispose thereof” (emphasis added).
During the debate, Liberal MP Francis Conyngham “protested against the
56 M ONTHLY RE V IE W / J uly – A u g ust 2018

wasteful and extravagant system of throwing away what had been justly
called a ‘mine of wealth.’”96
No one questioned that sewage could and should be used as fertilizer,
that returning human excrement to the land wasn’t just the right thing
to do, it was the profitable thing to do. That wasn’t just the opinion of
reformers and journalists—it was government policy. An observer might
easily have concluded that the metabolic rift was about to be closed, us-
ing capitalist methods.
And yet, although sales of guano and superphosphate continued to
grow, all attempts to sell sewage manure failed. Frustrated sanitary re-
formers and entrepreneurs blamed the customers. As Samuel Sydney of
the Central Farmers Club complained, “year after year…the non-agricul-
tural public are informed that the waste of valuable town sewage is only
owing to the stupidity of farmers,” despite the fact that farmers were
clearly interested in “real agricultural improvement,” as shown by the
sales of “other portable manures of proven value.” 97
Proven is the key word. By the mid-nineteenth century, most working
farmers in Britain were tenants who had to make enough surplus over costs
to pay the rent and feed their families, and pay for next year’s seed and fer-
tilizer. Margins were thin and getting thinner. Guano and superphosphate
and barnyard manure were known quantities, fertilizers that did the job
and fit into processes and procedures they knew well. The promoters of
sewage manure, few of whom seemed to know much about practical farm-
ing, wanted to sell farmers products that simply didn’t work—either pre-
cipitated solids with no nutrients, or immense volumes of liquid requiring
a complete change in the way they farmed, with no certain result.
So it’s not surprising that, as a critic pointed out in 1854, that “each
scheme, after a short flare up, expires, leaving behind an abominable
smell at the works, and a lawyer’s and engineer’s bill at the offices.”98
Most of the schemes were based on estimates of the market value of
the fertilizing chemicals in sewage that were little better than guesses.
For example, when Lyon Playfair translated the first edition of Liebig’s
Agricultural Chemistry into English in 1840, he added a footnote simply as-
serting, without evidence, that “the value of the manure thus lost amounts
annually to several millions of pounds sterling.”99 Wealthy inventor and
high farming enthusiast Joseph Mechi was more dramatic but less con-
crete: “If the money value of the contents of our sewers could be shown to
the British farmer in bright and glittering heaps of sovereigns, he would
grasp at the enormous wealth, and make great efforts to achieve it.”100
Others offered pages of detailed calculations, producing a very wide
range of estimates of the “manurial value” of the components of sewage.
L ondon ' s M etabolic R ift 57

As Henry Austin of the GBH wrote, what those articles actually revealed
was not the monetary value of sewage, but “how inadequate are the pres-
ent means for arriving at any general conclusion of the actual value of
sewage waters as manure.”101
One of the most detailed of these studies was conducted by John
Lawes, founder of the leading agricultural research institution in Britain,
Rothamsted Experimental Station. In 1855, he published detailed statis-
tics on the chemical composition of the urine and feces of men, women,
and children in a variety of locations and occupations, and from that cal-
culated the amount of nutrients that must be in sewage. His conclusion:
“the intrinsic value of the sewage of London considered in this merely
chemical point of view is therefore enormous.” He estimated that a ma-
nure containing the nutrient components of London’s sewage could sell
for £15 a ton, a total of £774,525 a year.
But, critically, he qualified his conclusion by saying that would only
be true, “supposing it were possible, which it certainly is not, to separate
the constituents from sewage.”102 The problem, as Lawes and others
pointed out, was that most of the nutrients in human excrement are
in the urine, which, along with the small portion of nutrients in feces,
was quickly diluted in the huge quantities of water used to flush toilets
and to carry waste through the sewers, and further diluted by rainwa-
ter. John Thomas Way, Consulting Chemist to the Royal Agricultural
Society, estimated that the solid matter in London’s sewage was mixed
with 1,400 times its weight of water. “Here is the great difficulty of the
subject, and one which so many people seem to forget. We have not to
deal with ordinary excrementitious matter, but with that matter dif-
fused through an enormous bulk of water…. If it be desired to separate
by filtration the insoluble matter of the sewage, we have to filter neatly
3000 tons (more than half a million gallons) to obtain from it one ton of
dry manuring matter.”103
In a report for the GBH, Henry Austin explained that this was an insu-
perable problem for manure-making projects.
Chemical research has not yet arrived at any satisfactory method of eco-
nomically arresting from solution the fertilizing ingredients in sewage,
while the analyses of solid sewage manures, manufactured under various
patents, show, that although for the most part possessing a certain low
value, they do not justify the high prices at which they have been offered
to the public; nor does there appear to be evidence of any agricultural re-
sults derived from their use, which will support such a view of their value.104

At a public meeting to discuss Lawes’s paper, Way, who is now con-

sidered the founder of soil chemistry, summarized the near-unanimous
58 M ONTHLY RE V IE W / J uly – A u g ust 2018

view of scientists who had studied the issue. “He said unhesitatingly that
any existing plan for the production of solid manure from sewage water
would be a failure.”105 Nevertheless, as a report published in 1876 wryly
commented, “it would appear that to learn the lesson that money cannot
be made out of sewage-sludge is very difficult”—as evidence, the authors
listed 417 sewage-related patents filed between 1855 and 1875.106
As historian Daniel Schneider writes of the thirty-odd sewage-manure
companies formed in this period, “they were all based on patented pro-
cesses, they all promised large profits, and they all went bankrupt. In fact,
the shares in sewage became notorious as speculative bubbles, and sew-
age company share offerings were widely seen as frauds and swindles.”107

Sew a ge Fa r m in g
The other approach, applying sewage directly to farmland, seemed to
have more potential. Edinburgh’s Craigentinny Meadows were constantly
cited as proof that it could be done profitably.
A major problem with sewage farming as a general solution to urban
sewage disposal was that sewage flowed day and night, 365 days a year.
Few existing farms, if any, needed irrigation and fertilizing on that scale,
and very few crops other than fodder grass could survive the constant
flood produced by a city of any size, especially where the soil was mostly
clay, as it was around London.
Still, the MBW had a mandate to see that the sewage was used as ma-
nure, so in 1860 it called for tenders. It received eight responses, which
were quickly narrowed down to one, from the Metropolis Sewage and
Essex Reclamation Company. Its founders, William Napier and William
Poole, proposed to build a retaining wall to reclaim some 30,000 acres
of tideland in the Maplin Sands, on the Essex coast. A forty-four-mile
long, nine-foot diameter conduit would then carry all the sewage from
the north side of the Thames, to irrigate and fertilize the new land.
In return for a fifty-year exclusive contract, they promised millions of
pounds in yearly profits—investors would be guaranteed 7.5 percent, and
the Board of Works would get half of the rest. Having only one credible
plan in hand, the MBW signed a contract, subject to the Company getting
Parliamentary approval for the land reclamation.
When Parliament considered the plan, there were loud objections from
the City of London, which thought the MBW should seek better offers. In
its support, the City published letters from Liebig, who argued that the
Maplin Sands plan would not work—it was “like a soap bubble, glistening
with bright colours, but inside hollow and empty.” He predicted that “every
penny invested in that frivolous undertaking would irretrievably be lost.”108
L ondon ' s M etabolic R ift 59

Parliament did approve the plan, but the company proved unable to
raise the £3 million it needed to build the culvert and the retaining walls.
It did some initial construction on the conduit, and set up a small demon-
stration farm to show that sewage-soaked sand could indeed grow crops,
but by 1870 it had ceased operations and forfeited the £25,000 bond it
had posted to get the contract. It was noted at the time that this was the
only money that London’s taxpayers ever received for their supposedly
valuable sewage.
Napier and Poole blamed the banking crisis of 1866 for their inability
to raise funds, and that may be true, although it’s just as likely that inves-
tors were unwilling to risk money on yet another dicey sewage scheme.
In 1876, John Chalmers Morton, manager of the company’s demonstra-
tion farm and editor of the influential Agricultural Gazette, commented on
“how ludicrously experience hitherto has almost everywhere upset the
anticipations of the sanguine sewage agriculturist.… Nowhere has the
Edinburgh experience been realised.”109 If it had been built, the Maplin
Sands project might have filtered pollutants out of London’s sewage, but
there was little chance that it could have covered its capital costs, and
even less that it could have produced the 20 percent annual profit that
Napier and Poole predicted.
Between about 1850 and 1880, a handful of wealthy landowners exper-
imented with sewage-farming, but few lasted long. More significantly,
about eighty towns acquired land suitable for filtering sewage through
sandy or rocky soil, and then tried to recoup their costs by farming that
land. None of those projects came close to breaking even, and most were
eventually abandoned or converted into farm-free sewage filtration op-
erations. That experience was summed up in a single sentence in 1907, in
a legal and policy manual written for local governments: “Although many
different methods of sewage disposal have been tried, up to the present
no process has been introduced which combines the speedy clearance
and profitable utilisation of the injurious matter.”110

S e wa ge I s N ot N i g ht So i l
What the promoters of sewage-manure didn’t understand, although
some scientists did, is that sewage is not night soil. The many calcula-
tions of the supposed manurial-value of London sewage seemed to as-
sume that the sewers carried only urine, feces, and water, that there was
no other matter of any consequence, and that being diluted and swept
through miles of pipes and tunnels made no substantial change to the
potential fertilizer. But as Henry Austin advised the GBH in 1857, in the
sewers excrement was mixed with a great variety of noxious materials.
60 M ONTHLY RE V IE W / J uly – A u g ust 2018

“The sewage of towns consists of the solid and liquid excrements of the
population, the ingredients of soap, the refuse from kitchens, the drain-
ings and washings from markets, stables, cow-houses, pigstyes, slaugh-
ter-houses, etc., the refuse drainage from many factories and trading es-
tablishments, the washings of streets and other open surfaces.”111
In 1890, there were estimated to be 300,000 working horses pulling
carts, carriages, and omnibuses in London: their dung covered many
streets, and most of it ended up in the sewers.
Over time, more manufacturers added industrial waste to the mix, and
sewer managers added potent chemicals to reduce the smell. In 1893,
the prominent physician and sanitarian George Vivian Poore said these
additions made sewage into “a practical nuisance which no sane farmer
would take as a gift.”
The composition of sewage as it flows from towns is so doubtful, and
must be so variable, that no sensible man would let it run over his farm.
Chemicals and antiseptics are very abundant at the present day, and they
are very largely used to lessen the dangers which are inherent in our pres-
ent system of sanitation. Antiseptics, however, which stop the growth of
putrefactive microbes, also check the growth of nitrifying organisms, and
are deadly poison to plants. All town sewage is liable to contain dangerous
chemicals which must render the “manurial value” a very minus quantity.112

In his history of sewage treatment, Daniel Schneider draws an impor-

tant conclusion: “By combining waste with the water used to convey it
through the sewer system, Victorian sanitary reformers created a new
problem: sewage. Sewage was a new and distinct substance from the
wastes that emptied into privy vaults and cesspools.”113
In 1863, biochemist Johann Thudichum argued that the Parliamentary
committee that reported on agricultural uses of sewage ought instead to
have asked why excrement was being put into the sewers at all.
The attempt to deal with the matter in question perished in the use of the
word “sewage,” just as the material which it was desired to preserve per-
ished in the complex mixture called sewage. Sewage was assumed to be an
unalterable entity, a decree of fate, from the very moment that those who
proposed to deal with it lost sight of its real nature, as a foolish and short-
sighted manufacture of man…. As sewage contains nothing that is valu-
able for agriculture or any other human purpose beyond the excrements
of men and animals, the inquiry of the Commons should properly have
been into the best mode of utilising human excrements for the purposes
indicated in the resolution.114

Another chemist, Charles Glassford, wrote that “if the excreta of towns
and cities is ever to be economized, and turned to the purposes for which
L ondon ' s M etabolic R ift 61

it is so admirably and naturally adapted, it must never enter the sewers,

it must never become sewage.”115 James Bannehr, a promoter of compost-
ing toilets, argued that “the whole system of the hydraulic disposal of the
excreta of town populations is nothing else than an ingenious method
of polluting enormous quantities of water.”116 Physician and chemist C.
Meymott Tidy, in his comprehensive review of methods of sewage treat-
ment, concluded that “dilution of water is the best-known method of
rendering practically useless whatever is valuable in sewage.”117
Liebig too blamed England’s water-based disposal systems for the de-
struction of night soil. In 1843 he told Prime Minister Robert Peel that “The
causes of the exhaustion of the soil, is to be sought in the customs & habits
of townspeople, viz., in the construction of water closets which do not
admit of a collection and distribution of the liquid & solid excrements.”118
He repeated that charge several times over the next two decades, includ-
ing in the influential seventh (1862) edition Agricultural Chemistry, where he
argued that “the introduction of water-closets into most parts of England
results in the irrecoverable loss of the materials capable of producing food
for three and a half million people every year.”119 Eventually this failure to
recycle nutrients would permanently damage British agriculture.
Other countries could avoid England’s fate, he argued, if all the farmers
in each area were to form “a society for the establishment of reservoirs
where the excreta of men and animals might be collected, and converted
into a portable form…for transport by the society’s own officials.” For
this plan to succeed, “government and the police authorities should take
measures to insure the proper construction of latrines and sewers in
towns, to guard against the waste of the night soil, etc.”120 His great fear,
which was soon realized, was that London’s approach would become the
model for waste removal everywhere.

W id e n in g t h e Ri ft
Most capitalist responses to environmental problems are after-the-fact
technological fixes that address symptoms rather than causes. The prob-
lems are not solved, but moved in space or time, transferred elsewhere
or to future generations, where they create new problems. Often that
involves “end of pipe” solutions, like continuing to produce toxic exhaust
gases and installing catalytic converters to capture them, and plans for
burying greenhouse gases instead of phasing out fossil fuels. Cover up the
mess takes precedence over don’t make a mess.
The London Main Drainage system was figuratively and literally an
end-of-pipe solution to an environmental crisis, possibly the first one
ever. Instead of addressing the causes of unprecedented accumulations of
62 M ONTHLY RE V IE W / J uly – A u g ust 2018

excrement in London, politicians and engineers chose to spend millions

of pounds—hundreds of millions in today’s money—to build pipes to car-
ry it away. What happened at the end of the pipes was a minor concern,
once the smell was gone. Healing the metabolic rift by reducing farm-
ers’ dependence on guano was no part of the Board of Works’ agenda: if
money could be made selling sewage, that was a bonus, but otherwise,
dumping it in the river was perfectly acceptable.
Similarly, the sewage farms that other towns established were attempts
to offset treatment costs, not to repair the broken food and nutrient cycle.
Nor, despite the promises made in the 1840s, did the main drainage
project improve the living conditions of working people. Indeed, for most
London workers, those conditions deteriorated in the second half of the
century: while self-satisfied reformers looked the other way, massive
construction projects, including many related to the sewers, destroyed
working-class neighborhoods to build upper-class homes, expensive bou-
levards, and office buildings. Tenants had no choice but to move to more
crowded dwellings where sanitary conditions were often worse than be-
fore. Many slum landlords removed privies completely, rather than pay
for water closets and sewer connections.
The Bitter Cry of Outcast London was written by a Congregationalist minis-
ter in 1883, but its description of working-class dwellings in the east end
could have been published forty years earlier:
To get into them you have to penetrate courts reeking with poisonous and
malodorous gases arising from accumulations of sewage and refuse scat-
tered in all directions and often flowing beneath your feet; courts, many of
them which the sun never penetrates, which are never visited by a breath
of fresh air, and which rarely know the virtues of a drop of cleansing water.
You have to ascend rotten staircases, which threaten to give way beneath
every step, and which, in some places, have already broken down, leaving
gaps that imperil the limbs and lives of the unwary. You have to grope your
way along dark and filthy passages swarming with vermin. Then, if you are
not driven back by the intolerable stench, you may gain admittance to the
dens in which these thousands of beings who belong, as much as you, to
the race for whom Christ died, herd together.121
A Fabian Society pamphlet published eleven years later said much the
same: “In many a narrow court, where the poorest people dwell, the dust-
bins are not emptied for months at a time, the water-closets are allowed
to remain out of order, the drains smell, and all manner of filth pollutes
the air.… All this neglect by the Vestry may save money, but it means
discomfort and misery and disease to the poor.”122
In István Mészáros’s words, the “super-institutions of ecological over-
sight,” often prove to be only “ministries for the protection of middle-class
L ondon ' s M etabolic R ift 63

amenities.”123 That was certainly true of the sanitary agencies established

in England in the 1840s and 1850s. They eliminated inconvenient and
hard-to-manage cesspools, and reduced London’s smell to tolerable lev-
els, at least in posh west end neighborhoods—but better living standards
for working people were dropped from the agenda.
So too was the promise of affordable fertilizer for farmers. Every day,
for the next 150 years, sewage containing endless amounts of potential
plant nutrients was dumped into the Thames and the North Sea.
By the end of the nineteenth century, most cities in Britain, Europe, the
United States, and Canada had built sewer systems similar to London’s,
flushing human excrement through sewer networks to central locations,
where it was dumped into lakes, rivers, or oceans, almost always with no
filtering or other treatment. There were exceptions—Berlin, for example,
operated sewage farms that covered more area than the city itself, until
after the Second World War—but most adopted London’s move-it-and-
dump-it approach, justified by the claim that the solution to pollution
is dilution. Water closets connected to city-wide sewer networks became
the very definition of sanitation.
The subsequent evolution of waste management in the capitalist world
has effectively been constrained by decisions made in London between 1840
and 1870. When it became clear that diluted sewage was still toxic, more
technology was added at the end of the pipe, expanding the model instead
of rethinking it. The historical irony runs deep: systems that were built
at immense cost to eliminate unmanageable accumulations of potential
fertilizer are now adding new technology, at immense cost, to transform
unmanageable accumulations of sewage sludge into potential fertilizer.

To wn a n d Co unt ry
“Capitalist commodity production,” writes Andreas Malm, “has a spa-
tial logic of centralization”:
The basic receptacle is, of course, the factory, but it immediately points
beyond itself, towards a place for the “conglomeration” of all manner of
inputs not under one roof, but within the town where mills, warehouses,
banks, stock exchanges, machine workshops, wholesale traders and, not
the least, houses for hands are crowded together. Macro-receptacle and
magnet for means of production, the town receives the influx of “free”
workers, the amassing of proletarians the flip side of the haemorrhaging
of the countryside.124

The birthplace of this spatial logic was Britain, where the rise of indus-
trial capitalism and hypergrowth of cities went hand in hand. In 1851,
when the environmental crisis described here was nearing its peak, the
64 M ONTHLY RE V IE W / J uly – A u g ust 2018

census revealed that England was the only country in the world in which
more than half of the population was urban—and over a third of the
urban population lived in London. So it is not surprising that the environ-
mental impact of irrational urbanization was felt first and most intense-
ly in the Metropolis. The system’s deepest contradictions were exposed
when the shit hit the Thames.
London’s sewers were built in response to problems caused by uncon-
trolled urban growth, and yet, as Dr. Poore wrote in 1893, they accelerated
growth and overcrowding by eliminating the need for curtilage (open
space) between houses and buildings.
Water-carried sewage encourages overcrowding because it enables us to
build houses with no outlet except a hole for the sewage to run through.
The growth of London must be a source of alarm to sanitarians, and it is
impossible not to admit that our system of sewers has been a most im-
portant factor in its production. Look at Charing Cross, where a street of
gigantic clubs and hotels has arisen, each without curtilage of any kind,
and where a handsome profit has been made by setting the first law of
sanitation at defiance. You will find the same thing to a greater or less
extent throughout the Metropolitan area.125

Poore, who viewed such overcrowding as a major threat to public

health, argued that sewer expansion should be stopped, and that all new
buildings should be required to include sufficient open space to absorb
all the waste created in them, as fertilizer. His proposals won no support
from governments dominated by landlords and builders, for whom any
limitation on building size was a limitation on profits.
Unlike today’s ecomodernists, Marx and Engels did not view huge cities
as cause for celebration. On the contrary, for them, “the abolition of the
contradictions between town and country is one of the first conditions
of communal life.”126 In the Communist Manifesto, they called for “gradu-
al abolition of all the distinction between town and country by a more
equable distribution of the populace over the country” as one of the first
“despotic inroads on the rights of property” that a workers’ government
should implement.127
In Capital, Marx wrote that by collecting the population in great centers,
capitalism “disturbs the metabolic interaction between man and the earth,
i.e. it prevents the return to the soil of its constituent elements consumed
by man in the form of food and clothing; hence it hinders the operation
of the eternal natural condition for the lasting fertility of the soil.”128 And
in The Housing Question Engels wrote that “only the existence of towns, and
in particular the big towns,” prevents implementation of Liebig’s “first de-
mand…that man should give back to the land what he receives from it.”129
L ondon ' s M etabolic R ift 65

Most importantly for the present discussion, in Anti-Dühring, which he

wrote and Marx approved, Engels explicitly linked the irrational growth
of cities under capitalism with the environmental crisis caused by accu-
mulation of excrement:
Abolition of the antithesis between town and country is not merely pos-
sible. It has become a direct necessity of industrial production itself, just
as it has become a necessity of agricultural production and, besides, of
public health. The present poisoning of the air, water and land can be put
an end to only by the fusion of town and country; and only such fusion
will change the situation of the masses now languishing in the towns, and
enable their excrement to be used for the production of plants instead of
for the production of disease.

Engels went on: “It is true that in the huge towns civilization has be-
queathed us a heritage which it will take much time and trouble to get
rid of. But it must and will be got rid of, however protracted a process it
may be.”130

A G lo b a l Ro bbery Sys t em
Liebig described European and North American agriculture, which took
nutrients from the ground but didn’t return them, as a Raubsystem—a
“robbery system.” Marx echoed and extended that idea, describing “all
progress in capitalistic agriculture…[as] progress in the art, not only of
robbing the laborer, but of robbing the soil.”131 This was true not just
within Britain, but in Britain’s relations with its colonies: “For a century
and a half England has indirectly exported the soil of Ireland, without
even allowing its cultivators the means for replacing the constituents of
the exhausted soil.”132
In our time the international robbery system has achieved a scope and
scale that Marx and Engels could not have imagined. Supermarkets and
food processing plants in the global North are crammed with agricultural
products flown in from southern countries, where entire economies have
been restructured to support soil-destroying industrial monocultures that
produce for distant metropolises.
In 2005, a century and a half after it happened in England, the plan-
et became majority-urban. Tens of millions of people, driven from the
land in a new age of brutal enclosures, now live in conditions that recall
Engels’s descriptions of London and Manchester. According to the United
Nations, 2.9 billion people live without toilets or latrines, and most of the
sewer systems that do exist dump untreated sewer into rivers and lakes.
Inevitably, waterborne diseases, including cholera and diarrhea, are now
the number one cause of death worldwide.
66 M ONTHLY RE V IE W / J uly – A u g ust 2018

Engels’s accusation of social murder has never been more appropriate

and damning. As Mike Davis shows in Planet of the Slums, this is not just
a repeat performance: “the scale and velocity of Third World urbaniza-
tion…utterly dwarfs that of Victorian Europe. London in 1910 was seven
times larger than it had been in 1800, but Dhaka, Kinshasa, and Lagos
today are each approximately forty times larger than they were in 1950.”133
The crisis is too great to be displaced or hidden by intercepting sewers
and slum clearances, and today’s ruling elites show even less interest in
real systemic solutions than their Victorian forebears.
The metabolic rift and environmental crisis that shook London and oth-
er cities in the nineteenth century have re-emerged as global disasters.
The centuries-old divides between people and soil, between town and
country, between global North and South, have become deadly metabolic
chasms, and there is no reason to believe that those rifts will be healed,
so long as capitalism survives.

N ot e s
1.  A few species, living in deep oceans
or deep in the earth’s crust, use energy
sources other than solar.
2.  Leona J. Skelton, Sanitation in Urban
Britain, 1560–1700 (Oxford: Routledge,
2015), 44.
3.  The Law Journal Reports, vol. 39
(London: Ince, 1870) 72. The decision
reported here said that the exemption
applied to all manure, manufactured or
imported.
4.  John Sinclair, The Code of Agriculture
(London: Sherwood, 1832), 141.
5. Early geologists thought the phos-
phate rocks were fossilized dinosaur
dung, which they were not, but the name
“coprolites” stuck. (Thanks to Mark Woods
of the British Geological Survey for ex-
plaining this.)
6. Samuel Sidney, “Remarks on Mr.
Edwin Chadwick’s Views on Indian Irriga-
tion,” Journal of the Society of the Arts,
May 25, 1855, 499.
7. Henry Mayhew, London Labour and
the London Poor, vol. 2 (London: Cass,
1851), 167.
8. Mark Overton, Agricultural Revolu-
tion in England: The Transformation
of the Agrarian Economy 1500–1850
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press
1996), 195.
9.  John Bellamy Foster, “Marx as a Food
Theorist,” Monthly Review 68, no. 7 (De-
cember 2016): 18.
10.  Quoted in William H. Brock, Justus
von Liebig: The Chemical Gatekeeper
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1997), 256. Justus Liebig became Justus
von Liebig in 1846, when the king of Ba-
varia made him a baron.
11.  Karl Marx, Capital, vol. 1 (London:
Penguin, 1976), 637–38; Karl Marx,
Capital, vol. 3 (London: Penguin, 1981),
949–50.
12.  Karl Marx, “Herr Vogt,” in Karl Marx
and Frederick Engels, Collected Works
[Collected Works], vol. 17 (New York: In-
ternational Publishers, 1981), 243.
13.  London did not exist as a political en-
tity. The City of London, the square mile
roughly corresponding to the medieval
walled city, jealously guarded its autono-
my. The rest of what we now call London
comprised some 39 separately governed
parishes and districts, and was usually
referred to as “the metropolis.”
14.  James Anderson, A Calm Investiga-
tion of the Circumstances that Have Led
to the Present Scarcity of Grain in Britain,
second ed., (London: Cumming, 1801),
76.
15.  Hector Gavin, Unhealthiness of Lon-
don and the Necessity of Remedial Mea-
sures (London: Churchill, 1847), 21.
16.  I use the term “middle class” as the
Victorians did, meaning people who were
above tradesmen and working people in
the social hierarchy, but below the very
wealthy and the aristocracy. It included
most capitalists, and professionals such
as lawyers, doctors, and the clergy.
17. Hector Gavin, Sanitary Ramblings:
Being Sketches and Illustrations, of Beth-
nal Green, A Type of the Condition of the
Metropolis and Other Large Towns (Lon-
don: Churchill, 1848), 79.
18. “Report of the Commissioners ap-
pointed by His Majesty to Inquire into
the State of the Water Supply in the Me-
tropolis, April 21, 1828,” Parliamentary
Papers: 1780–1849, vol. 9 (London: Her
Majesty’s Stationery Office), 62.
19.  Ibid., 9, 11, 12.
20. Royston Lambert, Sir John Simon,
1816–1904, and English Social Admin-
istration (London: Macgibbon and Kee,
1963), 59.
21.  Hector Gavin, Unhealthiness of Lon-
don, 13.
22.  Bruce Haley, The Healthy Body and
Victorian Culture (Cambridge, MA: Har-
vard University Press, 1978), 6.
23.  W. T. Gairdner, Public Health in Rela-
tion to Air and Water (Edinburgh: Edmon-
ston and Douglas, 1862), 16
24. Frederick Engels, The Condition of
the Working Class in England (London:
Penguin Books, 2009), 127.
25.  “Supply of Water to the Metropolis,”
Edinburgh Review 91, no. 184 (1850):
385–86.
26.  Steven Marcus, Engels, Manchester,
and the Working Class (New York: Ran-
dom House. 1975), 184.
27.  An English translation was not pub-
lished until 1887.
28.  Edward Jarvis, “Reviews,” American
Journal of the Medical Sciences 15, no.
30 (1848): 420.
29. Edwin Chadwick, Report on The
Sanitary Condition of the Labouring
Population of Great Britain (Edinburgh:
Edinburgh University Press, 1965), 75.
L ondon ' s M etabolic
30. Charles Dickens, Oliver Twist, (Ox-
ford: Clarendon, 1966), 10.
31. Thomas Carlyle, “Chartism,” in Se-
lected Writings (Harmondsworth: Pen-
guin, 1971), 151.
32. Philip Harling, The Modern British
State: An Historical Introduction (Cam-
bridge: Polity, 2001), 100.
33.  M. W. Flinn, “Introduction,” in Chad-
wick, Sanitary Condition, 1.
34. Christopher Hamlin, Public Health
and Social Justice in the Age of Chadwick:
Britain, 1800–1854 (Cambridge: Cam-
bridge University Press: 1998), 187.
35. Chadwick, Sanitary Condition, 79.
36.  Quoted in S. E. Finer, The Life and
Times of Sir Edwin Chadwick (London:
Methuen, 1952), 298.
37.  Chadwick was not the first to argue
for selling sewage to the country. In the
1830s, an artist named John Martin
proposed diverting London’s sewage
into reservoirs near the Regents’ and
Grand Surrey Canals, and then shipping
it to farms around the metropolis. As
he had no engineering or agricultural
knowledge, and no capital, his plan went
nowhere.
38.  The commission’s complaint failed,
because although no one denied that
there was a stench, they could not show
that any disease had resulted. Chadwick
did not mention that, either.
39. Chadwick, Sanitary Condition, 122n.
40. Edwin Chadwick, Sewer Manure:
Statement…Prepared for the Consider-
ation of the Committee of Works (London:
Reynell and Weight, 1849), 20.
41. Chadwick, Sanitary Condition, 121.
42.  Anthony Brundage, England’s ‘Prus-
sian Minister’: Edwin Chadwick and the
Politics of Government Growth, 1832–
1854 (State College, PA: Pennsylvania
State University Press, 1988), 104.
43. For fuller accounts of the Towns
Improvement Company, see R. A. Lewis,
Edwin Chadwick and the Public Health
Movement, (London: Longmans Green,
1952), chapter 5; and Brundage, Eng-
land’s ‘Prussian Minister’, chapter 6.
44.  Margaret Pelling, Cholera, Fever and
English Medicine, 1825–1865 (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1978), 60.
45. Charles Dickens. “Preface to the
Cheap Edition (1851),” Oliver Twist, 382.
46.  Marquess of Normanby, ”Health of
Towns,” House of Lords Debates, February
14, 1845.
47.  Abstract of the Proceedings of the
Public Meeting Held at Exeter Hall,
December 11, 1844 (London: Knight,
1844), 3.
48. The Metropolitan Working Classes’
Association for Improving the Public
Health, Bathing and Cleanliness (London:
R ift 67
Churchill, 1847), 9.
49. The Working Classes’ Association
had the same officers and patrons as its
middle-class parent association. I have
found no evidence that it actually existed
as an independent organization.
50.  Beggs to Chadwick, April 11, 1846,
quoted in Lewis, Edwin Chadwick and the
Public Health Movement, 113.
51.  Quoted in Michael Levin, The Condi-
tion of England Question (London: Mac-
millan, 1998), 21
52.  Lord Ashley, “Health of Towns Asso-
ciation,” Howitt’s Journal 17 (1847): 238.
Note that “malaria” meant “bad air,” not
the tropical disease.
53. Charles Dickens, The Speeches of
Charles Dickens, 1841–1870 (London:
Chatto and Windus, 1884), 127. St. Giles
was one of London’s worst slums. Al-
mack’s was an exclusive social club in St.
James, governed by a group of high soci-
ety women called the Lady Patronesses.
54. “Sanitary Reform,” Edinburgh Re-
view 91, no. 181 (1850): 216.
55. “The Report of the Registrar Gen-
eral,” Times, November 1, 1848.
56. Frederick Engels, “The Housing
Question,” in Collected Works, vol. 23
(New York: International Publishers,
1988), 337–38.
57.  Metropolitan Sanitary Commission,
First Report of the Commissioners…for
the Improvement of the Health of the
Metropolis (London: Clowes, 1848), 21.
58.  Metropolitan Sanitary Commission,
First Report, 26.
59.  Metropolitan Sanitary Commission,
First Report, 28.
60.  Metropolitan Sanitary Commission,
First Report, 33-4.
61. Lord Brougham, “Health of Towns
Bill,” House of Lords, July 7, 1848, in Han-
sard’s Parliamentary Debates, third series,
vol. C (London: Woodfall, 1848), 231.
62.  William Simpson, A Digest of Several
Reports on Sanitary Reforms (London:
Renshaw, 1849) 5 (reprinted from the
Journal of Public Health, January 1849).
63.  Quoted in Robert G. Paterson, “The
Health of Towns Association in Great Brit-
ain 1844–1849,” Bulletin of the History of
Medicine 22, no. 4 (1948): 394.
64.  Some former members of the HTA
formed a Metropolitan Sanitary Associa-
tion in London in 1849, but it does not
seem to have been very active, and disap-
peared within a few years.
65. Horace Mann, “Statement of the
Mortality Prevailing in Church Lane dur-
ing the Last Ten Years,” Quarterly Journal
of the Statistical Society of London 11, no.
1 (1848): 19.
66.  “Report of a Committee of the Coun-
cil of the Statistical Society of London,”
Quarterly Journal of the Statistical Society
of London 11, no. 1 (1848): 2, 17.
67. Gavin, Sanitary Ramblings, 75–76.
68.  First Report of the Commissioners for
Inquiring into the State of Large Towns
and Populous Districts, vol. 2 (London:
Clowes, 1844).
69.  Lee Jackson, Dirty Old London: The
Victorian Fight Against Filth (New Haven:
Yale University Press, 2015), 85.
70.  “The Cholera,” Pharmaceutical Jour-
nal, October 1, 1849, 152.
71.  “Metropolitan Commission of Sew-
ers,” Times, September 21, 1849.
72.  Times, September 21, 1849.
73.  Times, October 7, 1848.
74. Jackson, Dirty Old London, 84.
75. Joseph Bazalgette, “On the Main
Drainage of London,” March 14, 1865,
Newton’s London Journal of Arts, new
series, vol. 21, no. 125 (1865): 288.
76.  John Strang, “On the Water Supply
to Great Towns: Its Extent, Cost, Uses, and
Abuses,” Journal of the Statistical Society
of London 22, no. 2 (1859): 249.
77.  Analytical Sanitary Commission,
“Report upon the Present Condition of
the Thames,” Lancet 75, no. 1819 (1858):
43–45.
78.  Times, July 14, 1855.
79.  Analytical Sanitary Commission, “Re-
port upon the Present Condition of the
Thames,” 43.
80.  Steven Marcus, Engels, Manchester,
and the Working Class (New York: Ran-
dom House, 1975), 17.
81.  William Budd, “Typhoid or Intestinal
Fever: The Pythogenic Theory,” British
Medical Journal 2, no. 44 (1861): 485.
82.  “The Silver Thames,” Saturday Review
5, no. 137 (1858): 631.
83. Chancellor of the Exchequer, “Me-
tropolis Local Management Act Amend-
ment Bill,” Hansard’s Parliamentary De-
bates, July 15, 1858.
84.  Viscount Ebrington, “Metropolis Lo-
cal Management Bill,” Hansard’s Parlia-
mentary Debates, July 24, 1858.
85.  Michelle Allen, Cleansing the City:
Sanitary Geographies in Victorian Lon-
don (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press,
2008), 82.
86.  E. Haughton, “On the Application of
Sewage in Agriculture,” Natural History
Review and Quarterly Journal of Science
6, no. 4 (1859): 1.
87.  “The State of the Thames,” Pall Mall
Gazette, December 21, 1881.
88.  Copy or Extracts of Correspon-
dence…as to the Pollution of the River
Thames (London: House of Commons,
1884), 61.
89.  Copy or Extracts of Correspondence,
13.
68 M ONTHLY
90.  Times, December 12, 1884.
91. Both quoted in Hamlin, Public
Health and Social Justice, 239.
92.  Henry Austin, Report on the Means of
Deodorizing and Utilizing the Sewage of
Towns (London: General Board of Health,
1857), 3.
93.  Henry Mayhew, London Labour and
the London Poor, vol. 2 (London: Griffin,
Bohn, 1851), 160.
94.  The Builder, December 4, 1875,
quoted in Halliday, The Great Stink of
London, 110.
95.  Times, December 23, 1859, 6.
96. Mr. Conington, “Metropolis Local
Management Bill,” Hansard’s Parliamen-
tary Debates, July 24, 1858.
97.  S. S. [Samuel Sydney], “Sewage Ma-
nure,” Journal of the Society of the Arts 2,
No. 101 (1854): 805.
98.  S. S., “Sewage Manure,” 805.
99.  Justus Liebig, Organic Chemistry in
Its Application to Agriculture and Physi-
ology, second ed. (London: Taylor and
Walton, 1842), 194n.
100.  J. J. Mechi, “On the Sewerage of
Towns as It Affects British Agriculture,”
in J. J. Mechi, How to Farm Profitably: or,
The Sayings and Doings of Mr. Alderman
Mechi, second ed., (London: Routledge,
1860), 348.
101.  Henry Austin, Report on the Means
of Deodorizing and Utilizing the Sewage
of Towns, 15.
102. J. B. Lawes, “On the Sewage of
London.” Journal of the Society of the
Arts, March 9, 1855. 263-277. Emphasis
added.
103.  J. Thomas Way, “On the Use of Town
Sewage as Manure.” Journal of the Royal
Agricultural Society of England, Vol. 15
(1854). 147.
104.  Henry Austin, Report on the Means
of Deodorizing and Utilizing the Sewage
of Towns (London: Eyre and Spottis-
RE V IE W / J uly – A u g ust
woode, 1857), 87
105.  “Discussion on the Sewage of Lon-
don,” Journal of the Royal Agricultural
Society of England 15 (1854): 313.
106.  Report of a Committee Appointed
by the President of the Local Government
Board to Inquire into the Several Modes
of Treating Town Sewage (London: Her
Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1876), lx.
107. Daniel Schneider, Hybrid Nature:
Sewage Treatment and the Contradictions
of the Industrial Ecosystem (Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press, 2011), 130.
108.  Baron [Justus] Liebig, Letters on the
Subject of the Utilization of the Metropoli-
tan Sewage, Addressed to the Lord Mayor
of London (London: City, 1865), 41.
109. John Chalmers Morton. “Half-a-
dozen English Sewage Farms,” Journal of
the Royal Agricultural Society of England
12 (1876): 433.
110. Albert E. Lauder, The Municipal
Manual: A Description of the Constitution
and Functions of Urban Local Authorities
(London: King, 1907), 46.
111. Austin, Report on the Means of
Deodorizing and Utilizing the Sewage of
Towns, 7.
112.  George Vivian Poore, Essays on Ru-
ral Hygiene (London: Longmans, Green,
1893), 104.
113. Schneider, Hybrid Nature, xxi.
114. J. L. W. Thudichum, “On an Im-
proved Method of Collecting Excremen-
tious Matter,” Journal of the Society of the
Arts 11, no. 547 (1863): 440.
115.  Charles F. O. Glassford, London Sew-
age Shall It Be Wasted? Or Economised?
(London: Wilson, 1858), 14.
116.  Quoted in Michelle Allen, Cleans-
ing the City, 38.
117.  C. Meymott Tidy, The Treatment of
Sewage (New York: Van Nostrand, 1887),
223.
118. Liebig to Peel, March 14, 1843.
2018
Thanks to Imperial College London for
providing a copy of this letter and for
permission to quote it. The ICL catalogue
describes it as a letter from Liebig to Lyon
Playfair, copied to Peel, but from internal
evidence it is clearly a copy that Playfair
made of a letter from Liebig to Peel.
119.  Quoted in Kohei Saito, Karl Marx’s
Ecosocialism (New York: Monthly Review
Press, 2017), 198.
120.  Justus on Liebig, Letters on Mod-
ern Agriculture (New York: Wiley, 1859),
216–17.
121.  Anonymous [Andrew Mearns], The
Bitter Cry of Outcast London (London:
Clarke, 1883), 7–8.
122.  The London Vestries: What They Are
and What They Do, Fabian Tract No. 60
(London: Fabian Society, 1894), 8.
123. István Mészáros, The Necessity of
Social Control (New York: Monthly Review
Press, 2015), 29.
124.  Andreas Malm, Fossil Capital: The
Rise of Steam Power and the Roots of
Global Warming (London: Verso, 2016),
299.
125. Poore, Essays on Rural Hygiene, 75.
126. Karl Marx and Frederick Engels,
“The German Ideology,” Collected Works,
vol. 5 (New York: International Publish-
ers, 1975), 64.
127. Karl Marx and Frederick Engels,
“The Communist Manifesto,” Collected
Works, vol. 6 (New York: International
Publishers, 1976), 505.
128. Marx, Capital, vol. 1, 637.
129. Engels, “The Housing Question,”
384.
130. Engels, “Anti-Dühring,” Collected
Works, vol. 25 (New York: International
Publishers, 1987), 282.
131. Marx, Capital, vol. 1, 638.
132. Marx, Capital, vol. 1, 860n.
133.  Mike Davis, Planet of Slums (Lon-
don: Verso, 2006), 2.
 new from MON THLY REV IE W P RE SS

The Apocalypse of Settler Colonialism

The l pocalypse
The Rootsl of Slavery, White Supremacy, and Capitalism in
i

of Settler
Seventeenth-Century North America and the Caribbean
Colonialsm
by Gerald Horne

The l l pocalypse
T H E A P O LC A LY P S E

ntury. His careful attention to

Gerald Horne digs deep into Europe’s
i

of Settler
and imperial political dynamics disrupt

colonization of Africa and the New

ory of the emergence of whiteness,
ks to Horne, what Marx once called
onger such a secret.”
Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination

Colonialsm
s alliances among Europeans and
ntly choose racial animus over
ish to comprehend how the past
World, when, from Columbus’s
arrival until the Civil War, some 13
how best to plot an alternate
e; author, Seeking the Beloved
OF

million Africans and 5 million Native

d . . . reveals the roots of our present
S E T T L E R C O LO N I A L I S M

clarity unrivaled by anything previously

A Little Matter of Genocide The Roots of Slavery,

Americans were forced to build and

ity and the persistence of settler
racial capitalism today. . . . a must-
ical roots of race oppression in the
White Supremacy, and
sor and Chair, Department of African-
Capitalism
GERALDin Seventeenth-
HORNE
cultivate a society extolling “liberty
; author, We Will Shoot Back
t of the seventeenth-century world in
er worlds of increasingly racialized map_vert2_AAA.indd 1 Century North America 3/9/2017 7:52:52 AM

and justice for all.” Horne provides an

DIGER , University of Kansas; author,

t-read for all who propose to change

and the Caribbean

intensively researched, harrowing

ORTIZ , author, An Indigenous Peoples’

entury apocalypse brings together the

ous peoples for reparations. He shows

account of an era of apocalyptic loss

| HORNE

oe of settler-colonial domination.”
n, Bothell; author, Captive Nation:
Era

Moores Professor of African

ston. A prolific scholar, he has
cluding Confronting Black Jacobins
and misery that likely has no parallel
ess.
GERALDGERALD HORNEHORNE in human history. This is an essential
book, one that will not allow history
“One of the great historians of our time.”
K
MONTHLY
REVIEW —CORNEL WEST
PRESS map_vert2_AAA.indd 1 3/9/2017 7:49:46 AM

12/19/2017 2:56:04 PM
to be told by the victors.
“Gerald Horne returns to the scene of the crimes that birthed the modern world. With
cinematic flair, he delivers a fresh interpretation of the seventeenth century.”
—ROBIN D. G. KELLEY, author, Freedom Dreams:
The Black Radical Imagination
“Essential reading for those who wish to comprehend how the past led to the violence of
the present order, and how best to plot an alternate trajectory.”
—JOY JAMES, author, Seeking the Beloved Community:
A Feminist Race Reader
“This is history as it should be done. Acutely perceptive and solidly documented, lucidly
presented and uncompromising in its conclusions.”
—WARD CHURCHILL, author, A Little Matter of Genocide
“A must-read for all wishing to understand the roots of race oppression in the U.S. today.”
—AKINYELE UMOJA, author, We Will Shoot Back

256 pp | $25 pbk | order at 212-691-2555 or monthlyreview.org

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 archive.monthlyreview.org
DOI: 10.14452/MR-070-03-2018-07_4

Metabolic Rift and the

Human Microbiome
MICHAEL FRIEDMAN

Metabolic rift theory has been applied to understanding various instanc-

es of our society’s disruption of ecological processes. Capitalism, with its
ever-expanding production to realize profits on an ever-growing market
has created innumerable rifts between natural and social “metabolic”
processes. Both as an analytical approach and a metaphor, metabolic rift
theory also sheds light on the forms of disruption of human microbial
ecosystems, with consequences for human health. Human microbiota,
comprised of the microorganisms living on and in humans, has been
shown to be essential for a growing list of physiological, metabolic, and
developmental processes, as well as to mediate between environmental
and physiological processes. Alterations of microbial biodiversity that re-
sult in disruption of microbial ecosystem functions (collectively referred
to as dysbioses), have been associated with many noncommunicable and
autoimmune conditions that are increasingly prevalent in industrialized
and developing nations. Major factors favoring these dysbioses include
diets high in processed foods and extensive antibiotic exposures.
These factors cannot be divorced from the practices of respective in-
dustries that see profits and capital accumulation as their primary goals.
These goals favor production that is divorced from ecological networks
and respond to a reductionist paradigm that conceives of complex pro-
cesses in terms of simplified causal chains. Capitalist production re-
sults in cascades of unforeseeable consequences, which must then be
met by magic-bullet solutions, setting the stage for further undesirable
consequences. While practical health measures arising from emerging
knowledge of the microbiome are important, they do not address the
underlying cause of the disruptions that cause dysbioses. We can expect
to continue to see disruptions of the microbiome until we are able to re-
conceptualize and transform our engagement with ecosystems large and
small, and with the assistance they provide to humankind.
“Metabolic rift” is the concept popularized by environmental sociolo-
gist John Bellamy Foster, following Marx and others, to describe the dis-
ruption of ecological processes and the tendency to sever the connection
Michael Friedman teaches biology in Antigua and Barbuda and is a member of
Science for the People.

70
H uman M icrobiome 71

between ecological and social realms.1 Foster attributes the metabolic rift
to the intrinsic dynamic of capitalist production, with its private owner-
ship of the means of production, drive for profits, ever-expanding mar-
kets, and continuous growth. Marx employed this idea to describe the
effects of capitalist agriculture on the degradation of soil fertility. Foster
and his co-thinkers have employed the concept in analyses of climate
change, biodiversity, agriculture, fisheries, and many other aspects of hu-
man interaction with our biosphere.2
There is perhaps no more appropriate use of this concept than in ref-
erence to the microbial ecosystems of which we are a part, and which
are part of us—the human microbiota, organisms living on and inside
of humans—and the disruptive impact the prevailing mode of produc-
tion and consumption has had on them, with serious consequences for
our health.

O u r O w n E c os ys t em
Over the past decade and a half, advances in DNA sequencing technol-
ogy and bioinformatics, as well as theoretical advances in other areas of
science, particularly ecology, have favored paradigm-shifting research on
what is popularly called the human microbiome. In the literature, “mi-
crobiota” is generally used to denote the totality of microbial communi-
ties inhabiting different body regions, and includes bacteria and viruses,
as well as eukaryotes (organisms with nuclei), such as fungi and amoe-
bas. The microbiome refers to the collective genomes of these organisms.
Biologists are now able to sample the genomes of entire microbial com-
munities, particularly those living on and in us, allowing us to identify
many thousands of new microorganisms, which had previously been un-
known largely because they did not grow on culture dishes.3
Based on this research, together with subsequent progress in identifying
key genes and their products, as well as metabolic pathways and metabolic
byproducts, researchers have identified a host of vital functions and net-
works involving these microbial communities and their hosts. Informed by
ecology, investigators of human microbiota realized that they were looking
at entire ecosystems, of which we are but one (albeit crucial) species.4
Our body ecosystems are integrated by a high degree of mutual de-
pendency, the result of millions of years of coevolution. For example, a
primary function of maternal milk, beyond infant nourishment, is the
formation and development of the immune system of infants. Breast
milk contains a vast, species-specific array of relatively small bioactive
carbohydrates (human milk oligosaccharides), indigestible to human ba-
bies but accessible to bacterial enzymes. A single variety of bacterium
72 M ONTHLY RE V IE W / J uly – A u g ust 2018

called Bifidobacterium longum infantis has coevolved with Homo sapiens from
related bacteria in our primate ancestors.5 This bacterium contains all the
enzymes necessary to process these carbohydrates.6 It is a critical early
colonizer of the human gut, and is involved in various aspects of infant
nutrition and organ system development.7
There are approximately as many microbial as human cells in our bod-
ies.8 Our gut microbiomes alone consist of up to a hundred times more
distinct genes than those possessed by our own cells and perform a host of
metabolic functions of which our cells are incapable.9 Several distinct mi-
crobial ecosystems cohabit our bodies. These are characteristically found
in our oral cavity, respiratory, gastrointestinal and vaginal tracts, and our
skin. The largest, most complex and best-studied microbial communi-
ties form the gut microbiome. This comprises some 39 trillion bacterial
cells (and large numbers of other organisms).10 Many of these microscopic
symbionts, living in a mutually beneficial relationship with humans, are
integrated with our body systems through intricate food webs. Some bac-
teria consume the metabolic products of other bacteria, and so on down
the chain, finally producing small molecules that have important effects
on human physiology.11 Some bacteria and their cell components engage
more directly with our cells, while others engage in forms of competi-
tion, predation, and other interactions with other microbes.12 Some bi-
ologists conceive of our microbiota as a hitherto unrecognized organ or
organs fulfilling important physiological functions and networking with
other organ systems, while many microbial ecologists propose that we
are not “individuals,” but collective organisms comprised of the person
(mammal) and its entire microbiome. Many other species are also collec-
tive organisms, termed holobionts, tightly bound by evolution ever since
the earliest eukaryotic cells arose from fusions of independent prokary-
otes (non-nucleated cells, such as bacteria).13
Accustomed to seeing microbes as deadly enemies subject to a “war on
disease,” scientists and health professionals have begun rethinking the mi-
crobiota as essential components of our health, and indeed our develop-
ment and evolution. Many disease states are being reconceived as the result
of disruptions of normal ecological states caused by changes in microbio-
logical diversity in the same way that alterations or loss of biodiversity can
give rise to susceptibility to invasion, decreased community productivity
and ability to adapt to change, and loss of other ecological functions and
services.14 Just as monocrop farming systems favor proliferation of pests,
facilitated by evolved resistance to pesticides, changes in gut biodiversity
as a result of antibiotic use seems to favor invasion by pathogens, such as
the often deadly gastrointestinal pathogen Clostridium difficile.15
H uman M icrobiome 73

Like other ecosystems, our microbial ecosystems develop from coloni-

zation through a series of successions, with each stage contingent on pre-
vious ones. And like forest ecosystems, for example, disruption of early
stages can have far-reaching consequences for the host and ecosystem.16 If
a cleared field is subject to ongoing disturbance, normal stages of succes-
sion will not occur. Instead, the field will be colonized by an assortment
of opportunistic species. Something similar happens when the natural
process of colonization and normal successional stages of microbiota are
disrupted.17 Studies have confirmed that successional states of babies’ mi-
crobiota can be retarded and loss of function can occur following distur-
bance at early stages.18
Some evidence suggests that our bodies are initially colonized in utero
via the placenta and amniotic fluid.19 Most studies confirm that the major
surge of colonization occurs at childbirth, as the baby passes through its
mother’s birth canal. This initial microbiota comes from the mother’s va-
gina.20 Another major microbial succession develops through breast-feed-
ing, with colonizers like B. infantis possibly introduced through the milk
and/or proliferating from populations already present pre- or post-partum
on the basis of milk carbohydrates.21 These initial successions are critical
to our future health. They are involved in the formation and development
of a number of body systems.22 Initial, healthy microbial communities are
not established in cases of pre-term births, caesarian sections, or formula
feeding. Normally, our microbiota assume an adult configuration by about
five years of age, although they continue developing through adolescence.
While there are certain taxonomic commonalities at given successional
stages at given body sites among different individuals, individual hosts
vary greatly in terms of microbial species. Yet core sets of major taxo-
nomic groupings and metabolic functions seem to be conserved across
individuals at given body sites, absent disruption. As is the case with mac-
ro-ecosystems, healthy microbial communities possess a high degree of
functional redundancy: various, even unrelated, bacteria fulfill the same
functions, and fill the same metabolic “niches” in different individuals.23
This functional redundancy is facilitated by horizontal gene transfer from
one organism to another (unfortunately, including pathogenic genes) as
well as by convergent evolution.24 And such redundancy enables micro-
bial communities to restore or retain metabolic functionality following
disturbances, ecological properties known as resilience and resistance.
But it is not infallible in the face of systematic ecological disturbance and
biodiversity loss, which can compound across generations, which is what
we seem to be experiencing at both macro and micro levels in our indus-
trialized and industrializing societies.25
74 M ONTHLY RE V IE W / J uly – A u g ust 2018

Mi c ro b io t a -P h ys i o l o g i c a l In t era c t i o ns
The human microbiota engages in interactions with all body systems in
which both the body and microbiota benefit (a “mutualistic” relationship),
often as critical modulators of developmental, metabolic, and physiologi-
cal functions, including roles in the formation of the vascular system, for-
mation of bone tissue, and brain and neural development and modulation.26
The most important roles of microbial interaction involve development
and modulation of the immune system. Recent microbiome research
has reframed our understanding of the very role of the immune system
from a defensive bastion to a gardener, cultivating a healthy microbiota.27
Symbiotic microbes, especially in the gut, are thought to play crucial roles
in mediating the body’s critical inflammatory response. Inflammation is
vital for coping with pathogens and antigens; its dysfunction is impli-
cated in a host of chronic metabolic and autoimmune diseases epidemic
in modern societies. One set of mechanisms involves bacterial regulation
of the balance between immune system cell types.28 This mediation may
be carried out by way of various products of bacterial metabolism, such as
short-chained fatty acids. The equilibrium between pro- and anti-inflam-
matory immune functions may be disrupted by various environmental
inputs, including diet and antibiotics, via alterations to the microbiota.
In turn, changes and breakdowns in microbial communities have been
linked to several chronic and pathogenic disease states, such as allergies,
asthma, and inflammatory bowel disease.29 Symbiotic microbes also play
more direct roles in blocking pathogen colonization, by outcompeting or
destroying them.30
Interactions between the microbiota and the digestive system are
among the earliest and best known. Beyond producing human nutrients
through vitamin synthesis and breakdown of complex carbohydrates, gut
microbiota play a mediating role in carbohydrate and lipid uptake, stor-
age, and metabolism. They do this through metabolic products and secre-
tions that allow them to interact with the intestinal lining, adipose cells
in body fat deposits, and cells in the liver, including cells which produce
the “hunger hormones,” leptin and ghrelin.31 They also play a critical role
in the development of the child’s intestinal lining and mucosa, including
growth of the finger-like villi vital for nutrient absorption, and the intes-
tinal vascular tissue.32
The gut microbiota is also believed to play a role in nervous system de-
velopment and function. According to Stephen M. Collins and others, var-
ious mouse studies indicate that the microbiota affects “the development
of neuronal circuitry that is relevant to a broad spectrum of activities,
including anxiety­-like behavior, motor control, memory and learning.”33
H uman M icrobiome 75

Bacteria mediate a series of pathways known as the “gut-brain axis.”

This axis involves biochemical cross-talk between the dense complex of
neurons associated with the gastrointestinal tract, the vagus nerve, the
neuro-endocrine and immune systems, and the brain.34 It is a two-way su-
perhighway, which not only affects digestive and immune functions, in-
cluding secretion of pro-inflammatory substances, but also affects mood
and behavior. The Hypothalamus-Pituitary-Adrenal axis (HPA), which
regulates the stress response, is one component of this “gut-brain axis.” A
number of gut microbes are known to enhance or suppress the release of
stress hormones by the HPA axis.35
In addition, the microbiota can interact via other mechanisms with
various regions of the brain, including the emotion-regulating limbic
system, possibly through products formed by the workings of cells (me-
tabolites), such as lactic acid, or through secretion of known neurotrans-
mitters, such as acetylcholine or GABA.36 Microbial metabolites and cell
products also impinge on the vagus nerve and enteric nervous system.37
Microbiota-induced changes in immune system function can also affect
neurological function through pro- or anti-inflammatory mechanisms.38
Shifts in bacterial communities may factor into a number of mental dis-
orders, including depression, autism, and schizophrenia.39
Our bacterial communities are important modulators of our energy
metabolism, operating through various mechanisms, such as direct inter-
actions with intestinal cells or stimulation of neuroendocrine or inflam-
matory pathways. Distinct microbial communities can either facilitate
energy uptake and storage as fat, or efficient use of energy sources by
muscle and other cells. Thus, different microbial communities are associ-
ated with types of obesity and overweight, as well as the suite of disorders
related to the metabolic syndrome. In particular, some microbial suites
are thought to favor insulin resistance, a pivotal condition of metabolic
syndrome, associated with type 2 diabetes and cardiovascular disease,
during which both serum insulin and glucose levels increase, as muscle
and other cells cease taking up glucose in response to the insulin. Early
studies showed that transfer of microbial communities from overweight
humans to germ-free mice fed lean diets can induce obesity and fat stor-
age in the mice. In contrast, germ-free mice fed high-sugar and high-fat
diets showed resistance to obesity. Moreover, in both humans and mice,
gastric bypass surgery (RYGB) shifts microbiota from obesity-associated
states to lean-associated states. What is more, when these gastric bypass
microbiota are introduced into germ-free mice, they show reductions
of serum triglycerides and body weight. As Kristina B. Martinez and col-
leagues explained, “taken together these data suggest that the microbiota
76 M ONTHLY RE V IE W / J uly – A u g ust 2018

following RYGB in humans and mouse models elicits a direct functional

impact on host energy balance, resulting in restoration of metabolic ho-
meostasis and resistance to diet-induced obesity.”40

Mi c ro b io t a D is rup t i o n a nd Di s ea s e
In macro-ecosystems, persistent disturbance can compound and lead to
state changes in the ecosystem, shifts in species and populations of organ-
isms and ecosystem functions.41 Biodiversity decline can lead to the loss of
ecosystem functions and services, such as productivity, nutrient cycling,
resilience, and resistance to invasion.42 This is why monocrop farming is
particularly prone to pests, for example. Ecosystem functions constitute
the “metabolism” of a community. The loss of ecosystem functions and
services is due to the loss of both redundant and complementary functions
of organisms.43 For example, pesticide use can result in loss of beneficial
predatory insects and pollinators or nitrogen-fixing symbiotic bacteria.
Just as is the case in macro-ecosystems, the microbiota shows a degree of
resilience in the face of stressors. However, dramatic or persistent stress-
ors can induce changes from healthy community composition and func-
tionality to degraded communities (dysbiotic states), or can even cause
the collapse of the microbial communities.44 Moreover, previously adap-
tive states might be rendered maladaptive under altered environmental
conditions.45 These appear to be occurring at present, particularly in in-
dustrialized societies, but increasingly in developing nations. Residents
of industrialized societies show reduced microbial biodiversity compared
to members of agrarian or hunter-gatherer societies, as well as a shift to
bacterial communities with enhanced energy storage functions—produc-
tion of metabolites that favor inflammation and other manifestations of a
rift between symbiont-host relationships.46 At the same time, global soci-
eties are in the throes of an epidemic of non-communicable, chronic, and
autoimmune diseases that have been linked to the “western lifestyle.”
Moreover, these diseases show a socioeconomic gradient.47 Industrializing
societies increasingly present these same dysbiotic states, while continu-
ing to manifest other dysbioses associated with malnutrition.48
Two related theories, both supported by experimental and epidemiolog-
ical data, may help explain these observations. The better-known of the
two, the “hygiene hypothesis,” affirms that lack of childhood exposure
to microbes limits normal development of the immune system and leads
to susceptibility to allergic and autoimmune conditions.49 The second,
known as the “disappearing microbiome” (or more generally, biodiver-
sity) hypothesis, links social and environmental factors such as diet, ram-
pant antibiotic use, and current medical practice to the loss of microbial
H uman M icrobiome 77

biodiversity and ecosystem functionality.50 One recent study demonstrat-

ed that a diet low in fiber and high in fat and protein produced a decline
in gut microbial diversity that compounded across generations.51 Nor
could these losses be corrected simply by restoring high-fiber diets to ex-
perimental subjects, indicating that some deficiencies were permanent,
barring benefits from transplants of microbiota.52
Microbial community disruptions have been associated with a grow-
ing number of both pathogenic and non-communicable illnesses. These
include metabolic syndrome (discussed above), as well as Irritable Bowel
Syndrome, Inflammatory Bowel Disease, necrotizing colitis, asthma,
Kwashiorkor, Parkinson’s Disease, allergies, various types of cancer,
Autism Spectrum Disorder, multiple sclerosis, chronic depression, der-
matitis, periodontal disease, and candidiasis, among others.53

E n v iro n m e n t al Imp a c t s o n Mi c ro bi o t a
Many factors shape the development and functioning of the human mi-
crobiome. However, two seem to play inordinately important roles in shap-
ing community composition and inducing dysbioses: host nutrition and
exposure to antimicrobials and other pharmaceutical compounds.

D ie t
Diet and dietary change are thought to have the single greatest impact
on our gut and possibly all other microbiota, as a result of both nutrient
availability and the effect of what we consume on local environmental
conditions, such as pH, secretion of bile, and so on. Studies on the coevo-
lution of mammals and intestinal microbial communities have shown
that characteristic microbiotas are associated with herbivorous, carnivo-
rous, or omnivorous hosts, independent of host taxonomic group. And
humans favoring herbivorous or carnivorous diets possess microbiota
similar to other mammals that rely on these diets.54
Gut communities differ strongly between individuals who consume diets
high in simple sugars, animal fats, and processed foods—i.e., the “Western
diet” or “industrialized diet,” and consumers of diets rich in vegetable
fiber and other complex carbohydrates, sources of vegetable protein and
fish.55 People consuming diets rich in fiber have greater diversity of gut
microorganisms, reflected in greater diversity of genes and functions of
microorganisms.56 Such diets favor a preponderance of types of organisms
(taxa) and functions associated with production of a number of benefi-
cial metabolites and favorable interactions with our immune and other
systems.57 Diets rich in certain fats and simple sugars, in contrast, are as-
sociated with diminished diversity at various levels, seem to favor taxa
78 M ONTHLY RE V IE W / J uly – A u g ust 2018

that support greater energy extraction and storage functions, and tend to
produce a number of harmful metabolites that favor inflammation.58
Short-term dietary variations can produce alterations to the microbiota.
Generally, a healthy, resilient microbial community can rebound from
such disturbance. Consecutive short-term changes and long-term dietary
shifts can have profound, continuing, even permanent impact on the mi-
crobiota.59 Studies directly comparing diets provided over different dura-
tions indicate that long-term consumption of the Western-type diet fa-
vors distinct microbiota types with functions associated with detrimental
health outcomes.60
Marit Zinöcker and Inge Lindseth argue that “the Western diet promotes
inflammation that arises from both structural and behavioral changes in
the resident microbiome. The environment created in the gut by ultra-pro-
cessed foods, a hallmark of the Western diet, is an evolutionarily unique
selection ground for microbes that can promote diverse forms of inflam-
matory disease.”61 They then point to a large number of studies linking
food additives—including emulsifiers and artificial sweeteners, low fiber
content, high fat and sugar content, and chemical byproducts of food pro-
cessing—to both shifts in bacterial communities and inflammation.
High-fat diets and specific fat types have been linked to alterations of
the microbiota and various metabolic markers. Research by Lawrence
David and colleagues demonstrated that shifting from a diet rich in veg-
etable fiber to one based on animal fats produced a dramatic change
in human gut community structure and functionality, with a decrease
in beneficial classes of bacteria and bacterial metabolites and concom-
itant increases in detrimental bacteria and gene products.62 A similar
study on mice also pointed to the overwhelming impact of high-sugar/
high-fat (saturated animal fat) diet on microbiota.63 Studies comparing
omega-6 polyunsaturated (vegetable) fats with animal-based saturated
fats, and omega-3 rich polyunsaturated fish oils, showed different bacte-
rial groupings and functions in the experimental mice, which, in turn,
correlated with physiological changes in the animals. The first was as-
sociated with inflammation of fat tissue, the second with factors lead-
ing to colitis, and the third with reduced adipose-related inflammation.64
Another study indicated that diets rich in omega-3 polyunsaturated fatty
acids favored enhanced neurobehavioral development in mice “closely
associated with comprehensive alterations in gut microbiota composi-
tion” and other factors.65 Recent research also demonstrated bacterially
mediated reduction of metabolic syndrome in mice given omega-3 fatty
acids, and provided a possible mechanism for this in microbially medi-
ated anti-inflammatory signaling.66
H uman M icrobiome 79

Simple sugar consumption is implicated in both microbial community al-

terations and metabolic syndrome. Work in Yael Nobel’s laboratory showed
that simulated soft drink sugar combinations significantly altered the gut
microbiome in infant and juvenile rats, favoring some groups associated
with type 2 diabetes and reducing groups associated with beneficial bacte-
rial metabolites.67 Another study found that a diet enriched with fructose
induced symptoms of metabolic syndrome in rats, including insulin resis-
tance, elevated plasma lipid levels, glucose intolerance, and inflammation.68
When the animals given this high-fructose diet were treated with antibi-
otics, microbial community composition shifted and metabolic syndrome
markers disappeared. This suggests a mediating role for these groups in
fructose-induced metabolic syndrome. Research by Fang Liu and her labora-
tory found that a seaweed-derived antioxidant reduced obesity, metabolic
syndrome, and inflammation in mice on high-fat and sucrose diets, and
tracked these ameliorative effects to alterations in the gut microbiota.69
In a review of existing research, Benoit Chassaing and colleagues at-
tributed a dominant role in the proliferation of inflammatory metabolic
syndrome disorders to the loss of fiber from our diets, noting that it is
“the macronutrient whose levels have changed most” since the 1950s.70
A recent investigation by a member of Chaissaing’s lab found that the
soluble fiber inulin suppressed metabolic syndrome in mice given high-
fat diets, and delineated the mechanism involved, which was disruption
of the gut microbiota by the high-fat diet, consequent loss of a protective
layer in the small intestine, and infiltration of the intestinal lining by
bacteria, producing systemic inflammation.71 The inulin restored the mi-
crobes and protective layer.
The global population confronts a nutritional dichotomy. While indus-
trialized nations appear to suffer from epidemics of obesity and associ-
ated disorders, a large portion of the world’s population faces malnutri-
tion and hunger. Both manifestations are associated with alterations to
the microbiota.
While malnutrition is unequivocally due to insufficient uptake of nutri-
ents, it can alter the microbiota, which, in turn, may mediate a number
of malnutrition-related conditions or further hinder nutrient absorption.
Several studies have shown that malnutrition reduces and restructures
microbial diversity, and has a particular impact on bacterial communi-
ties during the postnatal period.72 In turn, this altered microbiota has
been found to have a causal role in conditions like Kwashiorkor, a type
of protein deficiency associated with severe malnutrition.73 A series of
studies conducted in Bangladesh, Malawi, and several other countries,
based on clinical data as well as mouse and pig models, found that both
80 M ONTHLY RE V IE W / J uly – A u g ust 2018

diet and microbiota influence growth in body mass and height, affect
the ability to metabolize various nutrients, and influence susceptibility
to pathogens in infants.74 One key element in this equation is the familiar
presence in maternal milk of human milk oligosaccharides. Researchers
in Malawi and Bangladesh found low levels of these human milk oligosac-
charides in breast milk of mothers with severely stunted six-month-old
children as compared with healthy children.75
Researchers transferred fecal microbiota from growth-stunted children
and normal children to germ-free mice and piglets. These studies showed
that severe malnutrition hinders normal microbial community succes-
sions, producing immature gut microbiota with respect to the age of the
child. This, in turn, was associated with reduced growth rates in children.76
In another set of studies, germ-free mice were given microbiota from
either healthy or stunted human infants and then mixed together. Mice
are coprophagous, meaning that gut bacteria are shared through inges-
tion of feces. The age-normal microbes spread to the mice with immature
microbiota, ameliorating the growth-stunting effect, as compared with
control mice that were just given the immature microbiota. Researchers
examined the mechanisms involved in these effects and found that the
gut organisms can modulate the response to growth hormone.77
Finally, researchers used targeted antibodies to identify pathogenic
strains of bacteria from severely malnourished children that weakened
the intestinal lining, permitting infection and producing inflammation.
These pathogens, normally inhibited by a healthy microbiota, could be
temporarily blocked by transplanted microbiota from healthy hosts.78
In summary, diet plays a profound role in shaping human microbial
communities. At the same time, our “industrial diet,” with its emphasis
on cheap, processed foods consisting of low fiber, high salt, fat, sugar,
and chemical additive ingredients, has increasingly been associated with
a host of chronic and non-communicable conditions epidemic in indus-
trialized countries and increasingly sweeping developing countries. And
of course the apparent opposite of this surfeit of cheap, industrial food—
the absolute lack of nutrients endemic to many regions of the world—
also produces pathological health issues. Numerous studies indicate that
these dual forms of malnutrition disrupt the gut microbiota. And consid-
erable evidence is accumulating, particular in the case of the “Western
diet,” that this disruption is playing a causal role in that epidemic.

A n t ib io t ic s
Antibiotics are not human inventions, but have instead always been part
of the microbial biochemical repertoire, produced by microorganisms not
H uman M icrobiome 81

only to defeat competitors, but as a means of intercellular communica-

tion. Antibiotics have also undoubtedly been of enormous benefit to hu-
man health, principally for those who have had access to them. However,
their market-driven proliferation has led to persistent exposures far be-
yond those normally experienced by microorganisms. Broad-spectrum
antibiotics in particular have been favored, precisely due to their abil-
ity to control a broad range of pathogens, but these have had especially
pronounced effects as both disruptors of microbiota and stimulators of
antibiotic resistance.
Overuse of antibiotics on humans and farm animals has given rise,
through natural selection, to antibiotic resistant pathogens, and then
“superbugs,” bacteria that are resistant to several, or even all currently
used antibiotics. And genes that confer resistance—together with other
factors that enhance pathogenicity—are transferred, even between dif-
ferent bacterial species via horizontal gene transfer, converting normally
minor members of the microbiota into opportunistic killers.
Martin Blaser, a leading authority in microbiome research and origi-
nator of the disappearing microbiome hypothesis, considers antibiotic
use to be a “four-edged blade.”79 The first two blades are the benefits to
individual and community health. The third edge is the long-predicted
problem of antibiotic resistance, and the fourth is the damage antibiot-
ics inflict on individual (and community) health through impact on the
microbiota. There are many important elements to this impact.
First, although there are differences in the specific effects of different
antibiotic types, in general, these drugs have been shown to alter micro-
bial communities and their functional capabilities. In a survey of antibi-
otic impacts on microbiota, sixty-eight antibiotics affected abundance of
forty-two major bacterial genera, some only impacting one or a few taxa,
while others affected up to thirty-two genera.80 The main phyla affected
include the principal phyla in the human microbiome: the Bacteroidetes,
Firmicutes, Actinobacteria, and Proteobacteria. These include many im-
portant symbionts. In fact, several of the genera associated with important
positive health-related functions are among the most antibiotic-sensitive
types of microbes.81 Change or loss of community metabolic attributes
due to antibiotic treatment can be drastic and persistent, and may result
from the loss of only a few keystone taxa. Treatment by different antibi-
otics and combinations can result in changes in the relative abundance
of bacterial metabolites in fecal samples by up to 87 percent, producing
imbalances in many bioactive compounds.82 A long-term study of Finnish
school children showed that administration of commonly prescribed
antibiotics produced extensive losses and sharp changes in microbial
82 M ONTHLY RE V IE W / J uly – A u g ust 2018

taxonomic and functional composition, and correlated increases in some

chronic health issues.83 The authors concluded that a major class of com-
monly prescribed antibiotics “may have undesired effects on the develop-
ing microbiota of children, which may compromise the development of a
healthy immune system and metabolism.”
Second, many studies point to impacts of both short- and long-term
administration, of both sub-therapeutic and therapeutic exposures, on
our microbial ecosystems. Clinical and laboratory studies link persistent
antibiotic use with enduring or permanent diversity loss, including loss
of keystone taxa critical for the microbial ecosystem and human health.
As a result, antibiotics may represent a major causal factor behind the
“disappearing microbiome” hypothesis.84
Third, antibiotic usage also correlates with human physiological chang-
es and a growing number of communicable and non-communicable
pathologies. Studies on mice have provided evidence of causal links be-
tween antibiotic usage, alterations to the microbiota and pathologies.85
Health practitioners and researchers have long known about the phe-
nomenon of anemia in patients given certain antibiotics. A recent mouse
study showed that red blood-cell formation in the bone marrow is medi-
ated by gut microbes via interactions with the intestinal immune system,
which, in turn signals stem-cell differentiation in the marrow. Antibiotics
suppress this “cross-talk” by depleting the gut microbiota.86
Fourth, as with nutrition and other factors influencing the microbiome,
antibiotics appear to exercise their most profound impact during the criti-
cal developmental window during early life stages. Asthma, types 1 and 2
diabetes, obesity, celiac disease, allergies, and inflammatory bowel disease
are all linked to antibiotic use via dysbioses in young children. A large
cohort study of more than 28,000 mother-child pairs in Denmark found
that antibiotic administration during the child’s first six months of life
was associated with heightened risk of overweight at seven years of age.87
Fifth, not only does antibiotic treatment reduce biodiversity and alter
community composition, but it has been shown to enhance transfer of
antibiotic resistance genes between bacteria by several mechanisms. The
human gut has been compared to a bioreactor, with billions of bacte-
ria in close proximity. This means that bacteria favored with antibiotic
resistance can readily transfer the respective genes to other bacteria.
Antibiotics have also been shown to increase expression of bacterial
genes involved in horizontal gene transfer and virus-mediated transfers
of bacterial genes.
The impact of antibiotics commonly used in treatment of gastrointes-
tinal infections is illustrative. Antibiotic administration as prophylaxis
H uman M icrobiome 83

following gastrointestinal tract surgery reduces symbiotic microbes, par-

ticularly species that hold Clostridium difficile in check, resulting in loss of
colonization resistance and serious infections.88 Treatment of C. difficile
infections with vancomycin, the drug of choice, also eliminates normal
microbiota and favors the spread of antibiotic-resistant pathogens.89 In
particular, treatment with streptomycin or vancomycin leads to infection
by Salmonella strains, due to loss of immune system-modulating and/or
colonization-blocking species, as well as by stimulating intestinal cells to
produce a food source that gives the Salmonella a competitive advantage
over other bacteria.90

S o c ia l D e t e r mi n a nt s o f Mi c ro bi o t a
Public health researchers have long known of the close relationship
between social conditions and inequities and health outcomes. A large
body of public health literature documents causal relationships between
noncommunicable diseases—such as types 1 and 2 diabetes, cardiovascu-
lar disease, colon cancer, breast cancer, and asthma—and socioeconomic
status, race, and gender. Other studies have shown how social conditions
facilitate the spread and virulence of pathogens, often to the disadvan-
tage of those who are most powerless. More recently, researchers have
implicated the loss of microbial diversity and dysbiotic states in many of
these diseases. Keisha Findley and her colleagues proposed a mechanistic
model involving the immune system for the interaction between social
environment, microbiome, and many chronic conditions:
The host immune system is extremely sensitive to changes in the envi-
ronment and the microbiome. Consequently, perturbations of any kind
may result in an aberrant immune response and increased susceptibility
to chronic disease. We speculate that a bidirectional interaction exists
between the microbiome and psychosocial indicators, and both change
in response to the health status of the individual. We recognize that the
microbiome may possibly change in response to the immune system, and
conversely, the immune system may respond to changes in the microbi-
ome. Furthermore, the same bidirectional relationship observed between
the microbiome and psychosocial indicators exists between overall health
status and psycho-social indicators.91

In the past few years, scientists have begun exploring the impact of so-
cial and economic conditions and the consequences of inequity on the
microbiome itself. The relationship should not be surprising, given the
impact of factors such as diet, medical practices, or environmental expo-
sures on the microbiota. Tao Ding and Patrick Schloss observed distinct
bacterial communities in vaginal and colonic sites in women depending
84 M ONTHLY RE V IE W / J uly – A u g ust 2018

on educational level, a common surrogate for socioeconomic status.92

Ricardo de Mello and associates found greater proportions of Lactobacillus
and Bifidobacterium—both associated with beneficial health impacts—in
fecal samples of Brazilian children from wealthy backgrounds, compared
to children from favelas.93 And they noted the association between these
microbes and the Body Mass Index of the children. Another study found a
positive correlation between gut biodiversity and neighborhood socioeco-
nomic status.94 A recent study established that the vaginal microbiota of
white women as compared with African American women is dominated by
Lactobacillus species, which establish a more acidic pH, favorable to vaginal
health, a possible consequence of dietary factors.95 African Americans also
have much higher rates of colorectal cancer than whites. A study by Goyal
and colleagues examined the relationship between dysbiosis and colorectal
cancers in African Americans.96 They observed that African Americans with
colon cancer show lower levels of butyrate than other racial groups. This
compound is a beneficial metabolic product of bacteria associated with
high-fiber, low-fat diets. In addition, microbiota have been found to diverge
markedly between residents of industrialized and developing nations, ur-
ban and rural populations, and between adult and elderly populations.97
Among the latter, it has been shown that gut microbiota is more diverse
and healthier among elderly living in communities than in residential fa-
cilities.98 To what degree many of these microbial differences respond to
socioeconomic conditions or covariates or even genetics, or whether they
cause or reflect health conditions has not yet been established.

Cap it a lis m a n d Mi c ro - E c o l o g i c a l Di s t urbance

Why would we consider this pattern of disruption of the microbiota
and consequent dysbioses to be a manifestation of dynamics intrinsic to
the capitalist mode of production and consumption, rather than excesses
related to more general tendencies of the “human condition” or more spe-
cific and unrelated tendencies of modernity (say, urbanization)? It is worth
noting that a burgeoning literature, borne of the looming planetary eco-
logical crises—including climate change, biodiversity loss, introduction
of toxic and carcinogenic materials into the biosphere, and disruption of
biogeochemical cycling—has increasingly drawn out the connection be-
tween these transgressions of planetary ecological boundaries and capital-
ist production, particularly the inherent tendencies to unending and ever-
expanding capital accumulation and its corollary, rampant consumerism.
The major environmental influences on the human microbiome all exem-
plify the tendency of capitalist production and consumption to disrupt
ecosystems and attenuate or destroy ecosystem functions and services.
H uman M icrobiome 85

Th e Fo o d I n d us t ry
As mentioned previously, the so-called Western diet has been implicat-
ed in a growing number of chronic, noncommunicable diseases (NCDs)
associated with modern industrialized societies. In fact, most public
health experts express concern about the soaring incidence rates of such
conditions as obesity, coronary heart disease, hypertension, stroke, di-
abetes, certain types of cancer, asthma, chronic hepatic diseases, and
chronic renal diseases in developed countries over the past decades.
However, these NCDs have now reached epidemic proportions in devel-
oping countries as well, with 80 percent of NCD-related deaths now oc-
curring in the lower and middle-income countries, and with two-thirds
of global deaths due to NCDs.99
The Western diet is perhaps better characterized as the “industrial
diet,” as Anthony Winson calls it in his book of that title, which develops
a detailed analysis of the role of the food industry in our nutritional crisis
and epidemic of NCDs.100 Winson shows how the proliferation of this un-
healthy diet is largely the result of investment and marketing decisions
made over the past century by key players in the food industry in the
global North, particularly in the United States. These trends have extend-
ed to developing countries over the past four decades of neoliberal eco-
nomics and globalization. As we have shown previously, the microbiome
is a crucial mediator between diet and health, with dysbioses implicated
in a growing number of these diseases.
The industrial diet is dominated by highly processed, nutritionally
stripped and degraded foods, containing excessive amounts of unhealthy
fats, refined sugars and simple starch, salt, and various other additives.
This diet represents a dramatic departure from the nutritional compo-
nents that humans consumed during the better part of our history as a
species, which shaped our biological evolution and that of our coevolved
microbiota. Various lines of research indicate that we are adapted to
an omnivorous diet consisting of significant portions of vegetable fi-
ber derived from roots, leaves and shoots, various types of animal pro-
tein obtained by foraging, hunting, fishing, or scavenging, and various
seeds, nuts, and fruits, as seasonally available. The modern Western diet
upends these proportions, adding foodstuffs and nutrients that were
scarce or unavailable to our ancestors, while drastically reducing fiber
and vitamin-rich fruits and vegetables.101 Nutritionist Loren Cordain and
her coauthors note that “although dairy products, cereals, refined sug-
ars, refined vegetable oils, and alcohol make up 72.1 percent of the total
daily energy consumed by all people in the United States, these types of
foods would have contributed little or none of the energy in the typical
86 M ONTHLY RE V IE W / J uly – A u g ust 2018

preagricultural hominin diet.”102 Furthermore, combinations of those

products make up the overwhelming majority of confected, processed
foods in the industrial diet.
According to Winson, this diet was largely birthed in the United States
in the nineteenth century, when specific conditions of territorial expan-
sion, agriculture, economic development, and processing technology fa-
vored the industrialization of food production and processing.103 Through
the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, it expanded throughout the
global North. Production of refined white flour, made possible with the
invention and proliferation of roller-milling, was an early example of this
tendency. Mass cultivation of hard spring wheat in the expanding U.S.
agricultural frontier was coupled with the new roller-milling and sifting
technology to feed a growing market for flour. Contrary to the older stone-
milling methods, roller-milling strips the wheat grain of the nutrient and
fiber-containing germ and bran, and leaves only the starchy endosperm,
which may be further processed through various bleaching methods. The
white flour produced in this way can be stored and transported longer
and further, but is nutritionally worthless except as a source of calories.104
The transition from free-range, grass-fed beef to feedlot production, an-
other early example, was the result of declining availability of open range
lands, the development of feed grain (corn, sorghum, and barley) produc-
tion, as well as the integration of meat-packing and grain trusts. Feedlot
husbandry using increasingly cheap corn allowed the rancher to produce
the favored “marbled beef” and to speed up cattle growth from four to
five years with grass-feeding to some sixteen months under the feedlot
system.105 Turnover time was subsequently shortened further through the
use of selective breeding, hormones, and antibiotics. Today, livestock pro-
duction, sometimes referred to as an Industrial Livestock Operation, is
carried out as an enormous factory process, highly monopolized and in-
tegrated with other agricultural and processing industries. Corn-fed beef,
raised under conditions of inactivity and extreme overcrowding, has a
quantitatively and qualitatively different fat content from free-range
beef, including far greater overall proportions of fat and skewed propor-
tions of saturated and unsaturated fats, containing distorted proportions
of omega-6 and omega-3 fatty acids.106
During the same latter half of the nineteenth century, advances in
industrial techniques and transportation allowed producers of refined
cane sugar to begin to mass market that product, particularly in England,
where consumption rose from some 18 pounds per year per capita in 1840
to 90 pounds by the turn of the century, while the United States followed
a similar pattern.107
H uman M icrobiome 87

Further technological advances followed favoring processing, storage,

and preservations of produce and livestock products. Industrial food pro-
duction soon expanded into canned goods, soft-drinks, breakfast cereals,
a proliferation of snacks, desserts, and confections, and then the various
categories of fabricated, processed, adulterated, and simplified foods that
dominate our diets today. Winson explained the profit-driven dynamic of
these processed foods:
Generally, more highly processed foodstuffs—goods with more “value
added”—have more attractive rates of return for retailers and processors.
Foodstuffs that have undergone little or no transformation—for example,
table potatoes, fluid milk, eggs, flour, and tomato paste, referred to in the
food business as “commodity” products—typically have rather thin profit
margins, and indeed some, like fluid milk, are often sold below cost by
supermarkets as loss leaders primarily to attract customers to the store.
On the other hand, products that have been created out of inexpensive,
and often subsidized, raw commodities such as sugar, potatoes, wheat, and
corn, with some processing and the addition of inexpensive chemical addi-
tives to create “value added,” can be processed into very profitable branded
commodities. Their success in the market will depend heavily on expen-
sive advertising, however, and market control.108

Winson characterized processed food commodities bereft of natural nu-

trients and fiber, and loaded with fat, sweeteners, and salt, as “pseudo
foods.”109 He describes three processes that underlie the nutritional degra-
dation of the Western diet: simplification and homogenization of whole
food items, such as flour or fruits and vegetables; speedup of turnover
time of capital invested in food production, as occurs in livestock produc-
tion; and production of processed food commodities loaded with “macro-
adulterants”—sweeteners, salt, and fats—as well as other additives. Like
the adulteration of old, macro-adulteration aims to lower production costs
of food commodities. However, these macro-adulterants are also employed
to increase consumption of products through appealing appearance, taste,
or smell, and by stimulating hard-wired behavioral responses and creating
cravings for the food items containing them. And food manufacturers em-
ploy these products knowing their detrimental impact on human health.110
The massive expansion of the industrial diet was facilitated by the equal-
ly prodigious expansion of mass marketing techniques and product place-
ment by an oligopolistic food industry.111 Branding and name recognition
played early and important roles in the expansion of the “industrial diet,”
and were key to the success of such well-known early products as Kellogg’s
corn flakes and Coca-Cola soft drink. In 2006, alone, the nine top processed
food vendors invested over $9 billion in advertising in the United States,
the vast majority of which promoted pseudo-foods.112
88 M ONTHLY RE V IE W / J uly – A u g ust 2018

In the latter part of the twentieth century, supermarkets and fast-food

chains, together with chain restaurant establishments and convenience
stores, emerged and grew explosively to become the primary purveyors
of the industrial diet. The top ten U.S. supermarkets, controlling 80 per-
cent of supermarket grocery sales, realized over $400 billion in sales in
2006. In a survey of shelf space in supermarkets, Winson found that
The average linear footage devoted to pseudo foods ranged from 26 to 37
percent of the total of linear footage devoted to edible goods in the stores
we surveyed. For the twelve stores sampled in our study, the average pro-
portion of pseudo foods of all foods measured was 31 percent. Pseudo foods
are more likely to be found on the shelves that constitute the central area
of each store, where they range from 35 to 44 percent of all edible prod-
ucts. This, of course, is the part of most supermarket food environments
where entire aisles are devoted to bulk candies and chocolates, to cookie
displays, and to soft drinks and high-fat and high-sodium potato- and corn
chip products.113

In his analysis, Winson calculated that some 70 percent of shelf space

in convenience stores is dedicated to pseudo foods.114
Turning to fast-food chains, the same author cited a study that noted that
their menu offerings “typically contain approximately 1,100 calories per 100
grams, whereas the average British diet is estimated to contain 670 calories
per 100 grams. The caloric load of the fast-food meal, moreover, is noted to
be twice the energy density of a healthy diet (considered to be 525 calories
per 100 grams).”115 Another study cited assessed the excessive amounts of
salt, trans and total fats, and sugar in popular fast-food combo meals.116
During the last quarter of the twentieth century, prompted by tighten-
ing markets in the developed countries and lured by cheap labor and land
in developing markets in the global South, the global food giants began
outsourcing production, and marketing their products on a massive scale
to the developing world, facilitated by neoliberal financial policies and
trade agreements. Consequently, foreign direct investment (FDI) by major
food corporations in the global South has rapidly expanded. In particular,
Initial entry into markets focuses on packaged and highly processed foods
that are marketed as exotic, convenient, and modern. Such investment has
become so successful that food processing now has the highest amount of
FDI compared to other parts of the food system. Most astonishing is the
fact that FDI in the global processed foods market is more important than
FDI in global trade. This fact is extremely important because it reiterates
just how much market power is involved within the global food industry—
particularly the sector that markets the most unhealthy, nutrient-poor
food. Such extensive investment by transnational Big Food companies has
H uman M icrobiome 89

created food systems that are increasingly influenced by external forces,

rather than forces within the domestic country.117

FDI in food production and sales in developing countries has increased ac-
cess to and promotion of unhealthy processed foods, fostered the spread of
global supermarket, fast-food, and restaurant chains, facilitated penetration
of the market and displacement of local food items by pseudo-foods, and
increased control over local food systems by transnational corporations.118
Consequently, FDI has favored the substitution of nutrient-rich local
produce and diets with industrial diets poor in nutrients and rich in fat,
sugar, and salt. In addition to affecting consumers, FDI has led to severe
impacts on local producers who cannot compete with the technological
advantages and economies of scale of large corporations, and who are
thus displaced from agricultural or food preparation activities, and driv-
en into rural or urban poverty. As Winson explained, “The long-standing
unity of production and consumption characterizing peasant produc-
tion in most parts of the world for millennia is being broken today on
a phenomenal scale.”119 The overall effect has been to adversely impact
nutritional status and give rise to the duality of rising chronic metabolic
disorders side-by-side with starvation, both symptoms of malnutrition.
Various writers discuss the impact of urbanization on the adoption of
the Western diet. Urbanization is “not, of course, some natural process
but is itself in large part the product of the expropriation of masses of ru-
ral smallholders in country after country.”120 More than 54 percent of the
global population currently lives in cities, and this is expected to grow to
66 percent by 2050, with the bulk of this growth occurring in Asia and
Africa.121 Urban expansion paves the way for dietary change, in conjunc-
tion with other aspects of the neoliberal program, in a number of ways.
The rural-urban migration deprives migrants of access to agricultural pro-
duction, as does the increase in lands occupied by big investors. It throws
masses of people—and increasingly, women—into the low-wage urban la-
bor force (or unemployment), thus imposing both financial and time con-
straints on household food preparation. It brings these masses into con-
tact with cheap processed foods, and particularly, fast- and street-foods,
and immerses them in an increasingly market-driven culture favoring
these items.122 For example, in Tanzania, low-middle-income groups de-
rive 70 percent of their caloric intake from street foods.123
Winson elaborates on the ways these changes paved the way for super-
market and fast-food chain expansion into developing country markets:
Recent research has documented the unprecedented pace by which the su-
permarket form of retail food selling is transforming Latin America, Asia,
90 M ONTHLY RE V IE W / J uly – A u g ust 2018

and Africa. A series of changes in the structures of economies in these re-

gions have opened up new opportunities for the supermarket retail form.
Among the most important of these changes are rapid urbanization; ex-
pansion of the middle class and with it a rise in disposable incomes for this
segment of the population and the ability to purchase refrigerators; sig-
nificant increases in female labor force participation; and the rapid growth
of car culture and access to public transport.124

While such expansion is uneven in the global South, in Latin America

both supermarkets and convenience stores have expanded as much in ten
years as they have in five decades in the United States, to the point where
supermarkets control up to 80 percent of retail food sales in Brazil and close
to 60 percent in Argentina, Mexico, and Panama. While local entrepreneurs
may have launched the first supermarkets, this sector is increasingly domi-
nated by transnational chains, with some 70 to 80 percent of Latin American
supermarket chains in the hands of the top five global firms.125
In the developed countries, supermarkets have responded, to some de-
gree, to increasing public nutritional awareness and healthy food move-
ments, with a greater diversity of healthier food items, at least for certain
social classes. But in the developing world, “supermarkets have another
role here from a nutritional standpoint: introducing large numbers of peo-
ple among the newly emergent middle classes to ready-to-eat breakfast ce-
reals, processed cake mixes, reconstituted and artificially sweetened fruit
juices, industrial baked goods, processed meats, and other goods of the in-
dustrial food system with which they may have only passing familiarity.”126
Similarly, fast-food chains have rapidly spread into the expanding urban
markets in the global South. By 2008, McDonald’s, the largest global fast-
food chain, “could boast that it had a thousand restaurants in China alone,
and over thirty thousand restaurants worldwide.”127 Of the Yum! Brands
megafirm, which includes KFC, Pizza Hut, and Taco Bell, Winson writes:
Worldwide sales for this transnational were in the $30 billion range in
2007. This rival firm has itself a strong global presence, with restaurants in
over a hundred countries by 2005. Indeed, it opened 780 restaurants in that
year alone, boasting a total of an astounding 34,000 restaurants around the
globe by 2005, outnumbering McDonald’s in number of restaurant units….
Yum! Brands is especially strong in rapidly colonizing the world’s fastest
growing markets in the global South, with China being its priority tar-
get…. Yum! Brands reported 22 percent annual growth in its China busi-
ness in 2005, along with franchise business sales growing 10 percent in
the Caribbean and Latin America, 17 percent in the Middle East and North
Africa, and 20 percent in South Africa.128

A massive public health, nutritionist, and food justice literature con-

firms that in both developed and developing nations, class and other
H uman M icrobiome 91

social relations between dominant and subaltern groups determine diet

and nutrition.129 Numerous studies have also documented the relationship
between socioeconomic status, access to nutritional foods, and chronic
metabolic disease states, in addition to the classical diseases of malnu-
trition, although some controversies rage over the modalities through
which forms of oppression play out in diet and NCDs.130 And it is increas-
ingly apparent that disruption of our microbial ecosystems via the nor-
mal functioning of capitalist production and marketing is a critical link
in these relationships, just as it has shown itself to be in macro realms.
Moreover, the micro- and macro-ecological domains are inseparably in-
terconnected, as Rob Wallace shows in his book Big Farms Make Big Flu.131

B ig P h a r m a
There are two major pathways through which antibiotics gain access
to our microbiota. First, there is the rampant use of antibiotics in health
care. The second is the even more profligate use of antibiotics as growth
stimulants and prophylactics in the livestock industry. While the latter
use is of great importance for the proliferation of antibiotic resistance in
bacteria, the former has a greater known impact on the human microbi-
ota, and so I will focus on human antibiotic use. However, it is worth not-
ing that, globally, twice the amount of antibiotics are used for livestock as
in human health applications.132 Antibiotic residues have been found in
animal products for human consumption, including meat, milk, farmed
and wild fish, and honey, in many cases above allowable limits, and these
have the potential to disrupt human microbiota, as has been shown in
studies of subtherapeutic doses.133
The pharmaceutical sector is the world’s most profitable, alongside bank-
ing. The ten largest pharmaceutical corporations made a combined profit of
$90 billion in 2013, for a net profit of 19 percent.134 In 2009, global antibiotic
sales were worth $42 billion, equivalent to 5 percent of the pharmaceutical
market.135 This figure rose to $43.55 billion in 2012, and is expected to grow
to $45.09 billion by 2019.136 And, although antibiotics are cheaper than other
pharmaceuticals, a report by the Center for Disease Dynamics, Economics
and Policy observes that “antibiotics are still very profitable. In 2004, they
were the third highest earning drug class behind central nervous system
and cardiovascular drugs, bringing in $26 billion to $45 billion per year….
Despite shorter courses, many more people take antibiotics than they do
other types of drug, and antibiotics can even become ‘blockbusters.’”137
However, while antibiotic sales have continued to increase, the major
drug companies have halted research and development on new classes
of antibiotics needed to combat emergent antibiotic resistant bacteria,
92 M ONTHLY RE V IE W / J uly – A u g ust 2018

citing low returns on investments and tight regulatory requirements for

bringing antibiotics to the market.138
As old patents lapsed, the major drug firms outsourced or contracted
much of antibiotic production to generic manufacturers in countries
with relatively low sale prices and low costs of production for existing
antibiotics, particularly China and India.139 As one indicator, by 2010, ge-
neric antibiotics represented over 80 percent of global prescriptions.140
India currently hosts a major part of the world’s production of bulk
drugs, while China produces the major share of active pharmaceutical
ingredients used in global antibiotic manufacture, supplying much of
India’s bulk drug production.141 Major health care and pharmaceutical
corporations and pharmacy chains then work up or simply market the
final products.142 Discussing the shift to generic antibiotic use in both
human and veterinary medicine, Pierre-Louis Toutain and Alain Bosquet-
Melou noted that, “competition between generics and also between ge-
nerics and branded antibiotics (usually forced to lower their prices in
order to remain competitive against the cheaper generic versions) leads
to more aggressive promotion for the use of antibiotics both in human
and veterinary medicine.”143 In turn, according to these authors, the in-
undation of these markets with cheap generic antimicrobials has led to
increased consumption.
Today, antimicrobials are the most frequently prescribed drugs in the
pharmaceutical arsenal. Per capita human consumption of antibiotics re-
mains highest in industrialized countries. India, China, and the United
States were the largest overall consumers in 2010, with total use at 12.9 x
109, 10 x 109, and 6.8 x 109 standard units, respectively.144 Global antibiotic
consumption increased by an estimated 36 percent between 2000 and
2010, to over 63,000 tons.145 Approximately three-quarters of the increase
in global consumption was in the BRICS countries of Brazil, Russia, India,
China, and South Africa.146 In the United States alone, antibiotics were
prescribed at a rate of 842 courses per 1,000 people in 2011, for a total
of 262 million courses.147 However, although global antibiotic use is in-
creasing, it should be noted that there is a global disparity in antibiotic
consumption, with much of the population of the global South denied
access to necessary antibiotics, where “no access and delays in access to
antibiotics kill more people than antibiotic resistance.”148
According to the Center for Disease Dynamics, Economics and Policy
report, “from 20 to 50 percent of total [human] antibiotic use is estimated
to be inappropriate,” which is defined as “the use of antibiotics when no
health benefit is possible” and “the suboptimal use of antibiotics for re-
sponsive conditions.”149 The report noted that in U.S. hospitals surveyed,
H uman M icrobiome 93

“broad-spectrum antimicrobial therapy was commonly prescribed to in-

patients even when clinical signs of infection were not present, and this
treatment was not de-escalated or discontinued even when cultures did
not show evidence of bacterial infection.”150
What has led to the massive overuse of antibiotics that is driving both
the scourge of antibiotic resistance and disruptions of the human micro-
biota? Over-prescription and irrational consumption are aspects of the
market-driven health care model that dominates in almost all parts of
the globe. Under the prevailing form of health care, most countries have
come to place a heavy focus on clinical medicine, and particularly sec-
ondary and tertiary care, rather than upstream prevention, that is, by
addressing aspects such as the environmental and social determinants
of health. “Taken together, the evidence indicates that prescribing medi-
cines has become a dominant, if not the dominant, form of health care
in western societies and its role in middle-income countries is growing
rapidly,” writes medical sociologist Joan Busfield.151
Our market-based health care model has long been dominated by the
pharmaceutical industry. According to Busfield, direct marketing and
promotion of their products represent important mechanisms employed
by the pharmaceutical industry to drive that market.152 In the major in-
dustrialized nations, marketing expenditures represent roughly twice
the amount as research and development expenditures.153 Medical soci-
ologist John Abraham observed that, in the 10 years prior to 2005, British
pharmaceutical companies cut research personnel by 2 percent, while
marketing staff grew by 59 percent.154
Through promotional activities directed at consumers and providers,
the pharmaceutical industry has encouraged consumers to expect phar-
macological answers to health problems and to demand medications
from providers.155 Further, according to Abraham, pharmaceutical com-
panies encourage “collaborative” or “active” consumerism, including
through funding for patient organizations.156 In addition, he notes that
“consumerism has an ideological dimension, namely the discursive ap-
propriation of the health needs of patients as the demands of consumers
in a market…such discourse is distinct from patients’ actions and needs,
and may not even be derived from them.”157 He further observed that “the
‘expert patient’ discourse needs to be put in the context of the interests
of those planning to provide the ‘information’ intended to construct ‘pa-
tient expertise,’ namely a profit-seeking industry with a record of pro-
moting its products with misleading information to doctors.”158
For their part, physicians are targeted by promotional literature through
the mail, in journals, and via other venues. They receive visits by business
94 M ONTHLY RE V IE W / J uly – A u g ust 2018

representatives and are invited to industry-sponsored conferences. Various

studies indicate that these promotional efforts pay off in recommenda-
tions and prescriptions by physicians.159 Physicians are funded to partici-
pate in product development or invited to promote specific products at
symposia.160 Medical practice, together with patient demands, facilitates
excessive pharmaceutical dissemination, as physicians are prompted to
prescribe medications in order to show efficacy even in absence of need.161
In addition, in a number of countries, including China and India (where
prescriptions are not required), drug companies offer financial incentives
to doctors to push their products, particularly antibiotics.162
The processes known as “medicalization” or “pharmaceuticalization”
are deeply imbricated in our medical model.163 The terms signify slightly
different aspects of the social construction and delimitation of what con-
stitute medical issues, which then become amenable to the proper medi-
cation, or even the extension of drug therapy outside of the domain of
clinical medicine.164 According to Busfield, the drug companies are the
“active drivers” in this process.165 Contrary to the pharmaceutical indus-
try’s portrayal of its efforts “to support medicine’s therapeutic endeav-
ors,” Busfield stated, “the evidence indicates that the industry plays an
active role in shaping those endeavors.”166
Medicalization received its initial impetus as a result of the postwar
expansion of consumerism. Elizabeth Siegel Watkins observes that “as-
pects of postwar culture fostered an appetite for prescription drugs: spe-
cifically, a fascination with technological solutions.”167 As she explains,
“consumers eagerly adopted new drugs in much the same way that they
adopted TV dinners and cake mixes.” In the postwar years, industry, gov-
ernment, and the media pointed to Alexander Fleming’s discovery of
penicillin and Jonas Salk’s polio vaccine as heralding final victory in the
war on infectious disease.168 The pharmaceutical industry then proceeded
to pump out antibiotics, proclaiming their low cost and safety. All of this
was in spite of the warning Fleming issued about the danger of antibiotic
resistance at his Nobel Prize award ceremony in 1945.
The processes of pharmaceuticalization and medicalization gained fur-
ther momentum with the deregulation, commodification, and privatiza-
tion of the neoliberal era. According to Jill Fisher, “neoliberalism extends
the commodification of health in new ways; under its governing logic,
consumption is not only a right but also an obligation if one wants health
care at all.”169 She noted that
Patients as consumers have embraced the neoliberal logics of health care
so that they too see illness in reductionist terms and seek pharmaceuticals
H uman M icrobiome 95

as targeted magic bullets. This orientation toward health and medicine has
been referred to as the pharmaceuticalization of health care, in which the
conditions of health and illness are ever more cast in terms of products
that can be purchased by health-engaged consumers. A medical system
that revolves around pharmaceuticals contributes to a culture of medical
neoliberalism. It ties together the commodification of health care with
the fragmentation of the body where illness is treated in terms of discrete
systems for which there are tailored products.170

In the United States, European Union, and United Kingdom, govern-

ment regulatory agencies have favored the interests of the pharmaceuti-
cal industry and facilitated market development and pharmaceuticaliza-
tion, despite their ostensible mandate to regulate the industry on behalf
of public health. Simon J. Williams and colleagues cited various studies
showing “corporate bias and privileged access” of the pharmaceutical in-
dustry to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and its British counter-
part, the Medicine and Health Care Products Regulatory Agency.171 The
results include deregulation of pharmaceuticals, relaxation of safety stan-
dards and review requirements, and reduction of review times on patent-
able drugs.172 In addition, Western regulatory agencies have undertaken
joint initiatives, such as the International Conference on Harmonisation,
which seek to standardize regulatory frameworks to accommodate de-
velopment of markets and outsourcing of research and development and
production to developing countries.173
Of particular relevance to the overuse of antibiotics, Abraham described
the drivers and significance of pharmaceuticalization:
increased pharmaceuticalization is not fuelled primarily by growth in
pharmaceutical provision to meet, and advance, health needs. Rather the
sociological factors of consumerism, deregulatory state policies, industry’s
commercial priorities and product promotion, and medicalization have
been expanding pharmaceuticalization in ways that are largely outside
such provision. It may be that marketing does not necessarily create false
needs…but it may create false claims and expectations about the capacity
of pharmaceuticals to meet those needs. Moreover, the ideological appro-
priation of patients’ needs as consumer preferences in a market means
that public health requirements, which are poorly expressed in marketing
processes such as antibiotic development and protection from drug injury,
are inappropriately neglected by an industry supposed to advance health.174
Medicalization and pharmaceuticalization have directly and indirectly
favored the excessive and irrational use of antibiotics. The use of antibi-
otics as growth stimulants in animal feed, or their prescription for viral
diseases or even as placebos, represent clear instances of pharmaceutical-
ization. Furthermore, these processes have forged a social-psychological
framework that encourages profligate consumption of antibiotics. Within
96 M ONTHLY RE V IE W / J uly – A u g ust 2018

that framework, the industry’s expanded and outsourced production of

cheap and easily accessible generics, aggressive marketing to both con-
sumers and providers, and control over pharmaceutical research and its
dissemination have driven antibiotic overuse and wasteful consumption.
Our current medical model relies on the much-touted “miracles of
modern medicine,” on magic-bullet cures for diseases. In this sense, capi-
talist medicine follows the pattern evident in capitalist agriculture, capi-
talist energy production, and indeed, the capitalist mode of production
in general, of disaggregating complex ecosystems to tease out market-
able, profitable commodities, and then offering magic-bullet solutions
to the environmental problems such production engenders. Infectious
diseases are not merely products of pathogens but of social and ecologi-
cal disturbance, including those at the level of microbial ecosystems. Our
form of economic development has disrupted these ecosystems at both
macro and micro levels. Antibiotics are necessary, but cannot substitute
for a more ecologically integral approach to human health. In turn, such
magic bullets, themselves, are disconnected from ecological or biologi-
cal contexts and offered without integral consideration of consequences,
producing further disruptions, for which new magic bullets are devised.
The proliferation of antibiotic-resistant bacteria and the now desperate
search for new antibiotics, or the epidemic of potentially dysbiosis-in-
duced noncommunicable diseases and the booming literature on pre- and
probiotics to address them, are both further expressions of the failure of
the current medical paradigm.
This reductionist model is expressed as “war on pathogens.” This war,
with its exclusive focus on “bad microbes” and therapeutic agents aimed
narrowly at exterminating them, was initiated by Louis Pasteur, Robert
Koch, and others at the turn of the century. It pushed aside the equally
robust microbial ecosystem narratives traced out by biologists such as
Theodor Escherich, Arthur Isaac Kendall, and Elie Metchnikoff. Kendall
offered the view that the gut was the “perfect incubator” for innumerable
mutualistic bacteria, some of which might even defend their hosts against
pathogens. Even Pasteur believed that many gut bacteria were beneficial.175

Con c lu s io n
The antibiotic resistance crisis and the Western diet problem have
been on the public health radar for some time. But the potential phar-
maceutical and industrial food effects on the microbiome have received
little attention. While a few authors have addressed the public health
implications of microbiome research and dysbiosis, they have not been
taken up in any systematic way.176 Nevertheless, there are far-reaching
H uman M icrobiome 97

conceptual and practical implications of these phenomena for human

health and ecology.
For the most part, the microbiome as a health-related phenomenon has
been approached within the framework of the prevailing pharmaceutical
industry-driven medical model, in yet another example of medicalization.
Almost every journal article dealing with microbiota and dysbiosis notes
the potential for the pharmaceutical industry to develop probiotics or pre-
biotics, or standardized microbial assemblages for transplant, or genetically
modified symbionts to enhance gut function or block pathogens, or other
marketable therapies derived from deeper knowledge of the microbiome.177
All of these therapies, in themselves, are of potential benefit to human
health. However, if history is any guide, in the hands of the for-profit
pharmaceutical industry, the market will guide their development and
production and their full benefits will either be economically inaccessible
to the majority of our populations, or they will fail to garner the invest-
ment interest of the major research firms. However, this approach fails
to address the underlying reasons for dysbiosis. To address those causes
requires major social and economic shifts, which, if climate change is any
indication, are not achievable within our current social order.
In the first place, dysbiosis must be dealt with ecologically, recognizing
that our own bodies are ecosystems, integrated at ever larger scales with
our biosphere. Concretely, this means that our “ecosystem functions and
services”—principally our health—depend on specific qualitative and
quantitative states of biodiversity; that is types, functions and numbers
of, and interrelations between, microbiota. Altered environmental fac-
tors—social and economic—can tip these states into dysfunctionality.
Our food is the major environmental influence on microbiota health.
Under the impetus of the market, diet has radically changed in industri-
alized nations and is rapidly changing in industrializing nations. Instead
of the ancestral diets that our species and our microbial communities
coevolved to assimilate, we now consume highly processed diets bereft
of sufficient fiber and complex plant carbohydrates, and overwhelmingly
rich in fats, salt, and simple sugars. These changes have favored alteration
or disruption of the microbiota that coevolved as mediators for a host of
metabolic and physiological functions. These alterations and disruptions
do not represent “adaptations” to new dietary regimes, but rather literal
metabolic rifts with negative consequences for our health. Thus, a radical
reorganization of our food production, supply, and promotion, as well as
our nutritional education, is in order.
Neither our dominant agricultural system nor the food industry is geared
toward producing an appropriate balance of diverse and nutritional items
98 M ONTHLY RE V IE W / J uly – A u g ust 2018

that are affordable to all. Agriculture focuses primarily on producing

competitively marketable, profitable commodities for the food process-
ing industry and the consumer, with a concomitant loss of diversity and
nutritional value. Beyond producing commodities that fail to fulfill nutri-
tional needs, our current large-scale capitalist agriculture is ecologically
unsustainable and relies on inputs that are also destructive of human and
ecosystem health. Therefore, production decisions should not be left in
the hands of agribusinesses, but should be socialized and placed in the
hands of councils of associated farmers, agricultural workers, and the gen-
eral public. Production itself should be assumed by small farmers, worker
cooperatives, or publicly owned farms, according to crops, geography, lo-
cal tradition, and needed economies of scale. Production of agricultural
inputs, as well—such as fertilizers and pesticides—should be taken out
of the hands of the agrochemical conglomerates and placed under the
control of accountable public entities. Their use can be minimized and in
many cases eliminated if farming is approached ecologically, to improve
field and soil habitat that promotes healthy soils, the presence of benefi-
cial organisms, leading to healthy plants and animals.
The food industry has geared its production to dysbiosis-inducing, food
commodities, larded with addictive salts, fats, and sugars. Class and race
play a role in the investment decisions of the food industry, whereby
nutritionally poor foods, whose detrimental impact is mediated by the
microbiota, are disproportionately marketed to low-income and margin-
alized populations. Meanwhile, better-off groups, while still subject to
unhealthy market items, have access to a greater variety of healthy di-
etary choices. A healthy diet must be seen as a human right, and dietary
recommendations must begin to take into account impact on the micro-
biome. Food processing and distribution must be under the control of the
public (community) while food production decisions are made by associ-
ated production workers using ecological principles, in accordance with
nutritional frameworks that provide for our integral needs.
As for the pharmaceutical industry, we have presently reached the ab-
surd contradiction in which mass production of antibiotics by the drug
corporations, together with the consumerism they engendered, has pro-
duced a crisis of antibiotic resistant bacteria and disruption of human and
other microbial ecosystems. Yet, citing low rates of profit, they refuse to
develop new antibiotics that can cope with the onslaught of multiple resis-
tant bacterial strains. Industry proposals to undertake research represent
little more than efforts to extort relaxation of safety and testing regulations
and subsidies from taxpayers.178 In contrast, the pharmaceutical and health
product giants continue to reap profits through outsourced production of
H uman M icrobiome 99

present generation antibiotics in generic or branded form. As long as a

profit is to be made, they will continue to expand production and drive a
market based largely on excessive and irrational antibiotic use. Together
with the obscene costs of many vital pharmaceuticals, this bespeaks the
need to socialize the pharmaceutical industry and subject it to a national
plan to produce necessary medications at prices accessible to all, by placing
it under the democratic control of its workforce, health professionals and
consumers, and by subjecting its research and ledgers to public scrutiny.
As amply shown in the foregoing discussion, the human microbiota is
a critical mediator between social determinants and physiological states
and health outcomes. Access to adequate nutrition, income, education,
health services, and reliable sanitary infrastructure, as well as exposure
to environmental hazards, reflecting existing social power relations, all
shape the microbiota. These power relations—social class, race, and gen-
der—loom in the background as upstream environmental modulators of
dysbiotic states. Insofar as the field of public health has long recognized
that oppression and exploitation are causal to health disparity and poor
health outcomes, and strives for their elimination, the human microbi-
ome provides further compelling evidence of negative health impacts
and motivation to struggle to abolish racism and sexism, and the exploit-
ative relationship between capital and the majority of our populations.
Social, economic, and health inequity, like the ability of capital to prof-
it at public expense, rely on the power of the state, whether through tax
policy, laws and regulatory regimes, financial subsidies and incentives,
or trade policy. Recent studies provide additional evidence in support of
an increasingly widespread public perception of corporate domination
of government, and the latter’s divorce from public needs. It is reason-
able to ask how economic and social policy might be structured by cri-
teria of human health, life quality, and ecological sustainability, instead
of market share and profitability. How might society as a whole demo-
cratically decide and plan how to invest its productive resources to best
serve those needs? What types of public control are needed to assure
that regulatory agencies are free of corporate interests, accountable and
transparent? And how might research and development of drugs, foods,
and other necessary goods and services also be removed from corporate
control and rendered subject to public scrutiny? How might our institu-
tions be changed or what kinds of institutions must be forged to pursue
the elimination of power differentials in society, particularly those inher-
ing to oppressive relationships between groups, and exploitation of the
majority by a minority, all of which produce adverse health outcomes
and ecological disruption?
100 M ONTHLY
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 n e w fr o m MONTHL Y RE V IE W PRE SS

TRUMP IN THE
WHITE HOUSE
Tragedy and Farce
John Bellamy Foster
“Should be read by all…goes
beneath the surface, demanding
that we follow, asking for more
radical change than merely the
removal of Trump.”
—VIJAY PRASHAD
author, The Poorer Nations
152 pages | pbk $14.95

KARL MARX’S
ECOSOCIALISM
Capital, Nature, and the
Unfinished Critique of
Political Economy
Kohei Saito
“Brings a major new source into
the debate: Marx’s notebooks on
ecology. The result is timely, given
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Land–Sea Ecological Rifts

A Metabolic Analysis of Nutrient Loading
BRETT CLARK and STEFANO B. LONGO

Covering approximately 70 percent of the Earth’s surface, the World

Ocean is “the largest ecosystem.”1 Today all areas of the ocean are affected
by multiple anthropogenic effects—such as overfishing, pollution, and
emission of greenhouse gases, causing warming seas as well as ocean acid-
ification—and over 40 percent of the ocean is strongly affected by human
actions. Furthermore, the magnitude of these impacts and the speed of
the changes are far greater than previously understood.2 Biologist Judith
S. Weis explains that “the most widespread and serious type of [marine]
pollution worldwide is eutrophication due to excess nutrients.”3 The pro-
duction and use of fertilizers, sewage/waste from humans and farm ani-
mals, combustion of fossil fuels, and storm water have all contributed to
dramatic increases in the quantity of nutrients in waterways and oceans.
Research in 2008 indicated that there were over 400 “dead zones,” areas of
low oxygen, mostly near the mouths of rivers.4 Nutrient overloading thus
presents a major challenge to maintaining healthy aquatic ecosystems.
Nutrients are a basic source of nourishment that all organisms need to
survive. Plants require at least eighteen elements to grow normally; of
these, nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium are called macronutrients,
because they are needed in larger quantities. While all essential nutrients
exist in the biosphere, these three are the ones most commonly known to
be deficient in commercial agricultural production systems. Beginning in
the early twentieth century with the Haber-Bosch process, atmospheric
nitrogen was converted into ammonia to create synthetic nitrogen fer-
tilizer. The fixation of nitrogen, an energy-intensive process, made the
nutrient far more widely available for use in agriculture. This in turn
dramatically changed production systems, which no longer depended
on legumes and manures to biologically supply nitrogen for other crops
such as wheat, corn, and most vegetables.
In the modern era, particularly since the Second World War, the in-
creased production and use of fertilizers served to greatly expand food

Brett Clark is the associate editor of MR and an associate professor of sociology at the
University of Utah. Stefano B. Longo is an associate professor of sociology at North
Carolina State University. They are the authors, with Rebecca Clausen, of The Tragedy of
the Commodity: Oceans, Fisheries, and Aquaculture (Rutgers University Press, 2015).

106
N utrient L oadin g 107

production and availability. Major macronutrients are routinely applied

to soils in order to maintain and increase the growth of plant life on
farms, as well as private and public landscapes such as golf courses, nurs-
eries, parks, and residences. They are used to produce fruits, vegetables,
and fibers for human and non-human consumption, expand areas of rec-
reation, and beautify communities. However, like many aspects of mod-
ern production, given the larger social dynamics and determinants that
shape socioecological relationships, these technological and economic
developments have generated serious negative—often unforeseen—con-
sequences. The wide expansion and increasing rates of nitrogen and
phosphorus application have caused severe damage to aquatic systems in
particular. Rivers, streams, lakes, bays (estuaries), and ocean systems have
been inundated with nutrient runoff, which has had far-reaching effects.
Here we examine the socioecological relationships and processes asso-
ciated with the transfer of nutrients from terrestrial to marine systems.
We employ a metabolic analysis to highlight the interchange of matter
and energy within and between socioecological systems. In particular, we
show how capitalist agrifood production contributes to distinct environ-
mental problems, creating a metabolic rift in the soil nutrient cycle. We
emphasize how the failure to mend nutrient cycles in agrifood systems
has led to approaches that produce additional ruptures, such as those
associated with nutrient overloading in marine systems. This analysis re-
veals the ways that the social relations of capitalist agriculture tend to
produce interconnected ecological problems, such as those in terrestrial
and aquatic systems. Further, we contend that these processes undermine
the basic conditions of life on a wide-ranging scale. It is important to rec-
ognize that nutrient pollution of groundwater as well as surface waters
has been a major concern since the rise of modern capitalist agriculture
and the development of the global food regime.5 The failure to address
the metabolic rupture in the soil nutrient cycle and the contradictions of
capital are central to contemporary land-sea ecological rifts.

M a r x ’s M at e ri a l i s m a nd t he Met a bo l i c Rift
Karl Marx’s materialist conception of history was undergirded by his
materialist conception of nature. In his studies, he merged social philoso-
phy, political economy, and physical science. This approach allowed Marx
to conduct a scientific investigation of history and to analyze the socio-
ecological processes fundamental to life in a manner that transcended
idealism, spiritualism, and teleology. In his commitment to “the earthly
family,” Marx developed a sophisticated metabolic analysis.6 Drawing
upon the natural scientists of his day, he noted that there is a “universal
108 M ONTHLY RE V IE W / J uly – A u g ust 2018

metabolism of nature,” which consists of specific cycles and processes

within the broader biophysical world that support life. All human beings
and societies exist within the earthly metabolism, depend on it, and in-
teract with it. Through their productive lives and activities, he explained,
humans create a social metabolism between themselves and the rest of
nature, which requires the interchange of matter and energy.7
The emergence and ongoing development of capitalism has involved a
dialectical process of expropriation and exploitation, which gave rise to
a distinct social metabolic order. Colonialism and the enclosure move-
ment resulted in the expropriation of common property and resources,
instituted new conditions of production, and imposed alienated human
relations with broader nature.8 As a system predicated on the constant
pursuit of endless accumulation, capital progressively impresses its logic
on the world, including basic elements of life, such as food production
and consumption. Under this system, land and labor are primarily di-
rected toward profit production, rather than meeting human needs.9
Drawing on detailed studies by agricultural chemists and agronomists
of his era, Marx developed a rich metabolic assessment of capitalist ag-
riculture, recognizing that soil fertility was influenced by the historical
development of socioecological relations. Following Justus von Liebig, he
noted that soil required specific levels of nutrients to retain its potential
to produce good yields of crops. These crops absorb nutrients as they grow.
To maintain the fertility of the soil, the nutrients must be returned to
the land—Liebig’s “law of compensation.”10 Marx explained that the en-
closure movement, the division between town and country that emerged
with the social dynamics associated with new property rights, the drive to
maximize production, and the application of industrial agricultural tech-
niques reorganized the social metabolism, particularly in relation to the
soil nutrient cycle. For example, food and fiber were increasingly shipped
to distant markets in cities. The nutrients within these products frequent-
ly ended up as waste, rather than being recycled back to the land. Marx
pointed out that this “disturbs the metabolic interaction between man
and the earth,” causing a rift in the nutrient cycle that disrupts “the opera-
tion of the eternal natural condition for the lasting fertility of the soil.”11
In the third volume of Capital, Marx discussed how capitalist agri-
cultural production generated a vast amount of waste associated with
food and fiber consumption: “We have both the excrement produced by
man’s natural metabolism and the form in which useful articles survive
after use has been made of them…. The natural human waste products,
remains of clothing in the form of rags, etc. are the refuse of consump-
tion. The latter are of the greatest importance for agriculture. But there
N utrient L oadin g 109

is a colossal wastage in the capitalist economy in proportion to their

actual use.” He connected the metabolic rift in the soil nutrient cycle to
the land and sea, pointing out that “in London, for example, they can do
nothing better with the excrement produced by 4½ million people than
pollute the Thames with it, at monstrous expense.”12 Also taking note
of the failure to recycle soil nutrients, Frederick Engels remarked that
“in London alone a greater quantity of manure than is produced by the
whole kingdom of Saxony is poured away every day into the sea with an
expenditure of enormous sums.”13 In Paris, as in other European cities,
the sewage system at the time carried the nutrients in human refuse
directly to the river.14
The metabolic rift in the soil nutrient cycle resulted in the impover-
ishment of rural lands and the accumulation of pollution in cities and
bodies of water. In working-class neighborhoods and districts in British
cities, mounting excrement and stagnant cesspools were common. These
conditions contributed to the debates regarding the “Sewage Question,”
on how to address ecological problems and urban sanitation concerns,
including improving health and addressing potential disease epidemics.15
At the same time, there was much attention given to the need to replen-
ish the fields with these nutrients. For example, in Les Misérables, Victor
Hugo condemned the flushing of human waste into rivers, emphasizing
that these nutrients were instrumental to sustaining life in general. He
wrote: “They [i.e., manures] are the meadow in flower, the green grass,
wild thyme, thyme and sage, they are game, they are cattle, they are the
satisfied bellows of great oxen in the evening, they are perfumed hay,
they are golden wheat, they are the bread on your table, they are the
warm blood in veins, they are health, they are joy, they are life.”16
In Familiar Letters, Liebig underscored the connections and challenges
associated with effectively recycling these necessary nutrients:
In the large towns of England the produce of English and foreign agricul-
ture is largely consumed; elements of the soil indispensable to plants do
not return to the fields,—contrivances resulting from the manners and
customs of the English people, and peculiar to them, render it difficult,
perhaps impossible, to collect the enormous quantity of phosphates [and
nitrogen as well as other nutrients] which are daily, as solid and liquid
excrements, carried into the river.17

Elaborate engineering proposals were devised to collect, treat, and

transport urban wastes. Many of these plans included establishing a sys-
tem that would recover nutrients and transfer this organic fertilizer back
to the countryside. Nevertheless, major obstacles included the physical
organization of social life associated with the separation of town and
110 M ONTHLY RE V IE W / J uly – A u g ust 2018

country, and the unprofitability of these operations. It was determined

that it was much cheaper and faster to dispose of the “sewage into the
sea,” whereby, it was also suggested, nutrients “would still be recycled,
only through commercial fisheries rather than through agriculture.”18
Regardless of whether excrement was left to be amassed in cesspools or
flushed to rivers and the sea, it resulted in the squandering of the earth’s
wealth and created a metabolic rift.
In 1858, Punch published a satirical poem, “Mechi the Mourner,” la-
menting the impoverishment of the soil and the loss of these nutrients.
Though written from the vantage point of John Joseph Mechi, a wealthy
British investor and farmer interested in agricultural improvements (in-
cluding returning manure to the land), the poem nevertheless captured
many of the concerns of the day:
The musing Mechi stood upon a turbid river’s bank;
A fat soil might that stream have made, but was not fit to drink:
The willows sighed in concert with the melancholy swain,
Whilst thus, impressed with chemic lore, he sang a mournful strain.

The phosphates they are going, they are going to the sea,
Oh, if I had them on my land, how happy I should be!
Those wasteful waves are bearing them to Ocean’s barren breast,
Those phosphates, my poor acres that so richly might have drest.

Oh watery waste!—but if thou wert a watery waste alone,

I should not grieve for riches to the raging billows thrown;
I should not wildly wring my hands and beat my brow and weep,
To see all that wealth go to swell the treasures of the deep.

Ammonia, sweetest—as thou art of all things flowing there,

Thou from those waves art flying off to scent the thankless air;
How gladly would I see thee to a proper acid wed,
And, light one, then my fallow fields should form thy bridal bed.

Ye matters odoriferous, all born of Mother Earth,

Alas! ye never will return to her who gave ye birth;
A barren mother she will be, and cease at length to teem,
Because unthinking citizens have cast you on their stream.

I know we must dispose of you, and in such wise dispose,

That you shall not too forcibly affect the tender nose.
But oh! our aqueous system has not proved a water-cure,
And ah! while we had cesspools, we had you, we had manure.19

As nutrients were being washed to sea, the rift in the soil nutrient cy-
cle continued to spur attempts to find affordable means to enrich soil.
N utrient L oadin g 111

For example, bones from European battlefields and the Sicilian cata-
combs were collected, ground up, and dispersed across agricultural land.
Between 1840 and 1880, millions of tons of guano and nitrates from Peru
and Chile were sold in Britain and other countries in the global North.
During these decades, Peruvian guano was the most prized fertilizer, giv-
en the concentration of nutrients and its ability to enrich fields.20
Under the social metabolic order of capital, with its relentless drive to
produce profits and alienated forms of mediation, the metabolic rift in
the soil nutrient cycle has remained a persistent problem. The Haber-
Bosch process, the Green Revolution, and the modern global agrifood sys-
tem have only deepened these socioecological contradictions, amplifying
the scope and scale of ecological rifts. In an attempt to weaken revolu-
tionary movements and increase global capital accumulation, in the mid-
twentieth century, the Green Revolution was promoted throughout the
world as a technological fix to increase crop yields by further industrial-
izing food production. As part of the technical package, high-yield variet-
ies of cereal crops were developed and promoted.21 These crops required
massive inputs of fertilizers and pesticides. Seed, fertilizer, and chemical
companies, given their monopoly position, greatly boosted their profits.
Further, Green Revolution agricultural inputs created greater opportuni-
ties for commodification, while naturally derived inputs, such as those in
the form of manure or compost, could be accessed through non-market
methods.22 Given the increasing concentration and specialization within
the modern agrifood sector, and the progressive separation of animal and
plant production within industrial agriculture, the use of and reliance on
commodified commercial fertilizers characterizes contemporary agricul-
tural developments.23
The intensification of capitalist agriculture has resulted in a dramat-
ic increase in global fertilizer production. In 1950, less than 10 million
metric tons of nitrogen fertilizer were produced worldwide. By 1990, the
amount was approximately 80 million metric tons, a rate of increase that
far outpaced population growth. The Food and Agriculture Organization
of the United Nations expects that over 200 million metric tons will be
produced in 2018.24 As a result, humans now introduce more fixed nitro-
gen into the Earth System than do natural sources, considerably influenc-
ing the nitrogen cycle. Environmental scientist Vaclav Smil notes that
“this level of interference [in the nitrogen cycle] is unequaled in any other
global biogeochemical cycle.”25 While the structure and organization of
capitalist agriculture depletes soil nutrients, requiring constant fertilizer
inputs, in the contemporary period, there is also an overapplication of
fertilizer. It is estimated that only 18 percent of applied nitrogen fertilizer
112 M ONTHLY RE V IE W / J uly – A u g ust 2018

is taken up by commercial crops. The rest is absorbed in the soil (some

of which may be used later by plants), makes its way into groundwater,
streams, and rivers, and enters the atmosphere.26 These dynamics result
in ecological rifts on land and at sea.

Ecological Rifts in Aquatic Systems from Nutrient Overloading

“Nutrient loading” refers to the quantity of nutrients that enter ecosys-
tems during a specified period. While these nutrients typically exist within
these ecosystems and are, in fact, essential for life, high concentrations of
nutrients due to overloading become pollutants, radically altering dynam-
ics and conditions in water systems. The major chemical compounds that
are of concern in most water bodies are nitrates and phosphates. Generally,
phosphates are a greater concern in fresh water systems and nitrates in
marine systems, but both contribute significantly to ecosystem changes
when they enter in substantial quantities and at a relatively fast pace.
The main sources of nutrients entering aquatic ecosystems are terres-
trial activities, including runoff of fertilizers from agricultural produc-
tion, urban runoff from public and domestic fertilizer uses (such as on
golf courses or for home lawn maintenance), sewage (from direct discards
and overflow), storm water, animal manure, and fossil fuel combustion.
These nutrients promote plant growth on land and in aquatic ecosystems.
They are interchanged between species and the larger ecosystems. The
specific conditions vary according to the characteristics of the species,
the biophysical world, and the socioecological relationships associated
with the social and universal metabolisms.
At the base of aquatic food webs are primary producers, such as phy-
toplankton, that generate energy and organic materials, such as sugars,
through photosynthetic processes. Although not technically plants, al-
gae are photosynthetic organisms. By producing oxygen and serving as a
source of food for various species, from molluscs to marine mammals, al-
gae are central to life support systems on Earth. Like plants, algal growth
is elevated with increased levels of nutrients such as nitrates and phos-
phates, and can enhance overall productivity within the food web.
Nutrient overloading contributes to the “overstimulation of algal growth
[which] can severely degrade water quality and threaten human health and
living resources.”27 The range, size, and consequences of the ecological im-
pacts associated with nutrient overloading are quite severe. Weis writes that
“nutrient enrichment due to excessive amounts of [nitrogen] is the primary
cause of impaired coastal waterways worldwide.”28 Additionally, ongoing
anthropogenic global environmental change generally exacerbates these
conditions in aquatic ecosystems. For example, additional precipitation
N utrient L oadin g 113

can increase runoff from agricultural fields, which will promote further
growth of primary producers, creating several serious ecological problems
and rifts.29 Thus, social activities have direct and indirect effects on the con-
ditions and processes associated with nutrient loading in aquatic systems.
A central consequence of the nutrient overloading of aquatic ecosys-
tems is eutrophication, causing an increased production of organic mat-
ter. Small increases in primary production in aquatic ecosystems may
have little effect on the overall ecological conditions. However, when
algal growth exceeds the typical historical range for an ecosystem, it re-
duces the levels of dissolved oxygen, which can create hypoxia (low oxy-
gen levels) or even anoxia (absence of oxygen), elevating the mortality
of aquatic organisms. The size of these algal blooms, under these condi-
tions, surpasses the capacity of other species to feed upon the algae and
incorporate nutrients and energy into the larger biotic community. As al-
gal blooms die, they decompose, consuming available dissolved oxygen.30
When this aquatic rift is severe, the levels of oxygen in the surround-
ing waters decrease to concentrations that are deficient for supporting
the development of healthy organisms that inhabit these ecosystems.
Nutrient overloading is widespread. In an assessment of estuaries in the
United States, Suzanne B. Bricker and her colleagues examined ninety-
nine estuary systems and found that all exhibited some level of effects
from eutrophication. They concluded that 78 percent of the estuaries had
“eutrophic conditions rated ‘moderate’ to ‘high.’”31
Extreme levels of algal blooms and decomposition can produce “dead
zones” within parts of large lakes and the ocean, decimating aquatic life
as the conditions of the ecosystem are compromised. The rapid growth of
dead zones is a very recent phenomenon. While such severe hypoxic and
anoxic conditions can be associated with natural upwellings, the expan-
sion of these dead zones around the world has become prevalent follow-
ing the Second World War, coinciding with the massive escalation in the
production of nitrogen fertilizer and other anthropogenic drivers of envi-
ronmental change. Since that time, dead zones have been increasing ex-
ponentially. As stated, over 400 dead zones have been identified around
the world.32 The expansion of these zones harms some of the most bio-
logically productive regions within the Earth System.
One of the largest dead zones is located where the Mississippi River
enters the Gulf of Mexico, just off the coasts of Louisiana and Texas.
Depending on ecological conditions and levels of nutrient overload-
ing, this dead zone varies in size. In 2017, it reached its largest dimen-
sions, measuring over 8,700 square miles (approximately the size of New
Jersey).33 The Mississippi River drains 40 percent of the landmass of the
114 M ONTHLY RE V IE W / J uly – A u g ust 2018

contiguous United States, which includes some of its most productive

agricultural land in the Corn Belt. The agricultural ecosystems of these
former prairies in the Mississippi River watershed have been greatly sim-
plified, as the land has been devoted primarily to growing two crops—
corn and soybeans. If a more complex rotation of crops were grown, less
nitrogen would leave the land. But instead, a “leaky” system has been
imposed, exacerbating nutrient problems. When corn does not follow “a
multi-year productive legume crop such as alfalfa,” it quickly creates a de-
ficiency in nitrogen. As a result, an abundant supply of nitrogen fertilizer
is applied to corn fields. At harvest, elevated levels of nitrates are pres-
ent. Fred Magdoff explains that “nitrate pollution of water is common in
regions where this system is used because nitrate…is not well retained
in soils—themselves negatively charged—and leaches easily into ground-
water and tile drains, finding its way into ditches, streams, and rivers.”34
Following the winter snow and spring rains, the Mississippi River trans-
ports nutrient-rich waters to the Gulf.35
Evidence indicates that hypoxic conditions “began to appear around
the turn of the last century and became more severe since the 1950s as
the nitrate flux from the river to the Gulf of Mexico tripled.”36 At the end
of the twentieth century, the U.S. Geological Survey estimated that of the
approximately eleven million metric tons of nitrogen annually reaching
the mouth of the Mississippi, over nine million metric tons were the re-
sult of agricultural fertilizers and farm animal manure.37 The social meta-
bolic processes associated with the modern system of terrestrial agrifood
production have transformed nutrient loading processes in marine eco-
systems, which in turn have strained other aspects of the food system,
particularly seafood production.
Such dynamics and conditions are becoming ever more common, de-
spite variations in the combination of factors that contribute to dead
zones. In marine waters off the coast of countries in Africa, Asia, and
Latin America, nutrient overloading is also significantly influenced by
industrial waste and wastewater. In the Chesapeake Bay, along with run-
off—much of it from chicken manure accumulating on the numerous
nearby factory farms—atmospheric contributions of fixed nitrogen from
the combustion of fossil fuels are also an important factor. During the lat-
ter half of the twentieth century, hypoxic conditions in the Chesapeake
Bay increased at “an accelerated rate,” with significant growth since the
1980s.38 Research examining the historical conditions in the Chesapeake
challenge common, simplistic claims of typical or normal variation, in-
dicating that “suggestions that current levels of hypoxia and anoxia are
a natural feature of Chesapeake Bay are demonstrably false.”39 It is thus
N utrient L oadin g 115

demonstrably clear that the growing number and size of dead zones is
a modern phenomenon, linked to the social metabolic order of capital.
Nutrient overloading, especially as it relates to eutrophication dead
zones, is causing an ecological rift that ruptures life cycles and weakens
the conditions that promote reproduction of aquatic species. Low oxygen
areas associated with dead zones decrease biodiversity. Organisms unable
to move out of a dead zone region are stressed due to the oxygen poor
conditions, which impede growth and development and reduce reproduc-
tive success. Dead zones have severe effects on benthic communities—
bottom-dwelling marine organisms—such as crustaceans and molluscs,
especially those with limited mobility. In many dead zones, mortality of
benthic organisms is high, and fish that are able to move quickly leave
the zone, creating an environment with little to no multicellular life.
As hypoxic zones expand in size, they limit the available habitat for
organisms that need oxygen-rich waters to sustain their individual me-
tabolism, and may increase their susceptibility to predation, particularly
in early stages of development. For example, large predators such as tuna
and marlin require environments with high levels of dissolved oxygen.
Thus dead zones can increase exposure of these species, as their habitat
is diminished, to fishing operations. In some cases, crabs have migrated
to shallow, warm waters, trying to escape oxygen-depleted waters, only to
be captured by humans, ecstatic to obtain this desired seafood.40
These consequences ripple throughout the food web and ecosystems,
creating a series of socioecological concerns. As Robert J. Díaz and col-
leagues explain:
The most pronounced effect of dead zones is the disruption of energy flows
in unwelcome ways away from upper trophic levels [i.e., high levels in the
food chain]. In the absence of upper trophic levels (mostly mobile fauna
that fled), energy that previously was used to sustain complex food webs is
diverted to lower trophic levels (microbes). This energy shunt to microbes
leads to reduced trophic complexity and ecosystem services that would
otherwise be capable of supporting a higher biodiversity and production
of valued top predators. A conservative global estimate of biomass lost to
coastal dead zones annually is over 9,000,000 metric tons wet weight of or-
ganisms. This is a lot of potential food for higher trophic levels, including
humans, basically eaten by microbes.41

Thus the universal metabolism of nature is greatly affected in a man-

ner that reduces its potential to maintain a broad array of life, and tends
toward simplified conditions.
Nutrient overloading also contributes to the growth of what are often
called “harmful algal blooms.” Large algal blooms can become so dense
116 M ONTHLY RE V IE W / J uly – A u g ust 2018

that they choke life in these ecosystems by limiting exposure to light,

which harms aquatic plants, such as seagrasses, that provide important
nurseries or sources of food for other organisms. As mentioned above,
blooms can cause hypoxia and kill fish and other aquatic life, but algae
can also become lodged in gills and cause suffocation.42 Harmful algal
blooms are often associated with “red tides,” so called as some appear
as massive red-colored ocean currents. A number of microalgae produce
small amounts of toxins that in typical conditions do not cause signifi-
cant harm to ocean or terrestrial life. However, these large red tides can
concentrate toxins to a level that can kill marine organisms and affect
humans. Large fish kills have been associated with harmful algal blooms.
Deaths of sea-birds and mammals—including manatees, sea lions, and dol-
phins—have all been linked to these harmful algal blooms. Humans are
affected through the consumption of fish and shellfish that have been
tainted with toxics produced from these blooms, or by breathing aerosol
from wave activity, which can result in illness, and in some cases death.43
Like dead zones, the frequency, duration, and intensity of harmful al-
gal blooms have increased in recent decades. Toxin-producing microalgae
that were nonexistent or rare before 1950 have become common in the
coastal waters of every continent except Antarctica.44 While this is in part
due to the introduction of new species by humans into territories where
they were previously absent (invasive species), these changes are driven
in large part by growth in nutrient overloading into coastal waters, as
well as climate change and other major ecosystem transformations.
All the consequences caused by nutrient overloading are exacerbated
by other aspects of anthropogenic environmental change. Ecological
rifts, such as those associated with overfishing, ocean acidification, and
climate change, are generating major ecosystem changes that are magni-
fying these effects in marine environments.45 Increasing ocean tempera-
tures associated with climate change “will promote the intensification
and redistribution of…HABs [harmful algal blooms], around the world.”46
Additionally, anthropogenic activities have caused oxygen content in
global marine systems to decline since the middle of the twentieth cen-
tury, leading Denise Breitburg and her colleagues to argue that “ocean
deoxygenation ranks among the most important changes occurring in
marine ecosystems.”47 They indicate that nutrient overloading and cli-
mate change are the leading drivers of this ecosystem change.
A variety of social, physical, and biological processes associated with cli-
mate change act synergistically with eutrophication to exacerbate hypoxia,
and therefore influence the number and scale of dead zones. These chang-
es include lower solubility of oxygen in water, water column stratification,
N utrient L oadin g 117

the increased sensitivity of estuaries to climate warming due to their

shallowness, increased metabolic activity and rates of primary produc-
tion, changes in the food web, sea level rise, and others. Given all these
changes, the “oxygen-minimum zones in the open ocean have expanded
several million square kilometers” since the mid-twentieth century.48 It is
likely that the multiple complex effects of climate change on aquatic eco-
systems enhanced the growth of dead zones over recent decades, and will
further them “as climate change has made coastal areas more susceptible
to hypoxia.”49 Throughout the twenty-first century, emerging precipitation
patterns due to climate change are expected to increase eutrophication
processes, even if the amount of nitrogen fertilizer used in agriculture is
decreased, especially in the United States, India, and China.50
Further compounding concerns, eutrophication has been linked with
ocean acidification, sometimes referred to as the other “CO2 problem.”51
Recent research examines the relationship between lowered dissolved
oxygen and lowered pH, as the decomposition of organic matter associ-
ated with eutrophication not only consumes oxygen, but releases carbon
dioxide.52 Anthropogenic eutrophication “could increase the susceptibility
of coastal waters to ocean acidification.”53 The process would culminate in
circumstances where organisms will be exposed to increased temperatures,
lower oxygen, and lower pH (along with a variety of other factors), a deadly
combination for many species, especially shell-forming benthic organisms.54
Overfishing of species that feed on algae also contributes to the degraded
conditions in aquatic ecosystems. Organisms often referred to as filter feed-
ers consume primary producers. These species—including molluscs, crus-
taceans, fish, and marine mammals—are often central links in the food
chain, as many are eaten by larger predatory species. Marine areas like
Chesapeake Bay, for instance, have seen a dramatic reduction in important
filter feeders such as oysters and menhaden in recent history. As discussed,
Chesapeake Bay has been dramatically affected by nutrient overloading
from numerous terrestrial activities. At the same time, it has been losing
significant numbers of organisms that consume algae. Together these fac-
tors have contributed to the deteriorated conditions in a bay that until 1975
“produced more seafood per acre than any body of water on Earth.”55
The anthropogenic drivers of environmental change, which are gener-
ating numerous ecological rifts in the conditions of life, are intimately
linked to the social metabolic order of capital. This social metabolism pur-
sues capital accumulation at any cost, shaping human social processes that
are having broad effects on numerous terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems.
In its basic operations, it has created metabolic rifts in the soil nutrient
cycle, which are then increasingly producing ruptures in marine systems.
118 M ONTHLY RE V IE W / J uly – A u g ust 2018

R i ft s o n L a n d a nd at Sea
Despite playing a major role in human history and helping regulate the
Earth System, marine ecosystems receive little attention from the public.
This is beginning to change with a proliferation of research focused on
eutrophication, ocean acidification, plastic pollution, coral die-offs, and
overfishing. Modern ecological problems in marine systems do not begin
or end at sea. They are linked to specific social and historical processes,
associated with the social metabolic order of capital.
Marx’s analysis made clear that capitalist development produces a
particular social metabolism that progressively transgresses against the
universal metabolism of nature, generating ecological rifts. He explained
that “fertility is not so natural a quality as might be thought; it is closely
bound up with the social relations of the time.”56 He detailed how cap-
italist agriculture robbed the soil of its nutrients, violating the law of
compensation, inhibiting its restoration. He noted how the nutrients in
human waste accumulated as pollution in cities and in waterways. In de-
veloping this analysis, he recognized the broad interconnections of socio-
ecological systems and established a metabolic approach for considering
ongoing developments of the capital system.
The transformation of nutrients that foster life into concentrations of
waste and pollution has been ongoing for centuries. Capitalist agricul-
ture has created a distinct metabolic rift, which remains ever present.
Attempting to address this rift, synthetic fertilizers have been developed
and the mining of nutrients, such as phosphate for fertilizer, has advanced
in a constant effort to maintain and expand agricultural production. These
changes created additional ecological contradictions, as the nutrient prob-
lem was extended to fresh water and marine systems. A seemingly nev-
er-ending supply of nitrogen fertilizer is made available by transforming
fossil fuels and N2 in the atmosphere into fixed forms of nitrogen. Its ap-
plication in fields, on lawns, and throughout cities has created new chal-
lenges associated with nutrient overloading in aquatic systems.
The scale and scope of nutrient overloading, combined with other an-
thropogenic environmental changes, imperil the longstanding ecological
conditions that have characterized marine systems during the Holocene.
Capitalism’s social metabolism is altering the energy and nutrient sys-
tems in marine ecosystems in a manner that is, for example, transforming
the trophic-level (food web) productivity of these systems. Additionally,
the complex synergistic interactions between nutrient overloading, cli-
mate change, overfishing, and ocean acidification indicate that the avail-
ability of higher trophic level species will likely continue to decline.57
The consequences of the social metabolism of capitalism are evident in
N utrient L oadin g 119

the ecological rifts now manifesting in the ocean. Eutrophication and

associated dead zones and harmful algal blooms are undermining the
conditions that supported the reproduction of marine life. Though seem-
ingly separate from terrestrial systems, marine ecosystems are intimate-
ly bound to the former, and provide essential life support to the Earth
System as a whole. Thus, in biophysical and social terms, these land-sea
processes should be analyzed jointly.58
When examining the ecosystem transformations in the modern era,
we must identify the fundamental role that social organization plays in
structuring human activity. For example, a system of agrifood production
shaped by capitalist development is primarily geared toward accumula-
tion of capital, which has a broad array of socioecological outcomes. It
has been well understood for centuries that the metabolic rift in the soil
nutrient cycle is endemic to capitalist agrifood production. Yet efforts to
confront the problem have only exacerbated ecological crises on land and
at sea. Further, numerous other ecological rifts have emerged, such as in
the carbon cycle, leading to climate change and ocean acidification as well
as less healthy soil as organic matter is converted to carbon dioxide—all of
which interact to create additional, and often unforeseen, consequences.
A major contradiction within the social metabolic order of capital, as
discussed here, is the way that life-supporting nutrients are principally
employed to serve the interests of capital and its representatives, rather
than broader human needs. Thus, with the continuing degradation of nu-
merous ecosystems and the growing ecological crisis, it is becoming ever
clearer that a reorganization of social life is necessary to address these
dangerous, even existential, challenges. As István Mészáros explained,
“capitalist structures and mechanisms of social control are being seri-
ously interfered with by pressures arising from elementary imperatives
of mere survival.” This is a social system where the “function of social
control [has] been alienated from the social body and transferred into
capital.”59 An alternative form and structure of social organization and
social control is required, which prioritizes human needs, well-being, and
dignity while operating sustainably within the everlasting conditions of
the universal metabolism of nature. Only then can we truly address the
challenges of our ecological crisis.

Notes
1. Alex D. Rogers and Daniel D’a Laf-
foley, International Earth System Expert
Workshop on Ocean Stresses and Impacts
(Summary Report) (Oxford: International
Programme on the State of the Ocean,
2011), 5.
2.  Benjamin S. Halpern et al., “A Global
Map of Human Impact on Marine Eco-
systems,” Science 319 (2008): 948–52;
Rogers and Laffoley, International Earth
System Expert Workshop.
3. Judith S. Weis, Marine Pollution:
What Everyone Needs to Know (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2015), xvi.
4.  See Robert J. Díaz and Rutger Rosen-
berg, “Spreading Dead Zones and Conse-
quences for Marine Ecosystems,” Science
321 (2008): 926–29.
120 M ONTHLY
5.  F. M. L. Thompson, “The Second Ag-
ricultural Revolution, 1815–1880,” Eco-
nomic History Review 21, no. 1 (1968):
62–77; John Bellamy Foster, Marx’s
Ecology (New York: Monthly Review
Press, 2000); John Bellamy Foster, “Marx
as a Food Theorist,” Monthly Review 68,
no. 7 (December 2016): 1–22; Brett Clark
and John Bellamy Foster, “Ecological Im-
perialism and the Global Metabolic Rift,”
International Journal of Comparative So-
ciology 50, no. 3–4 (2009): 311–34.
6.  Karl Marx, “Theses on Feuerbach,” The
Marx-Engels Reader (New York: Norton,
1978), 144; Foster, Marx’s Ecology.
7.  Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Col-
lected Works, vol. 30 (New York: Inter-
national Publishers, 1975), 54–66; Karl
Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manu-
scripts of 1844 (New York: International
Publishers, 1964), 109; John Bellamy
Foster, “Marx and the Rift in the Universal
Metabolism of Nature,” Monthly Review
65, no. 7 (2013): 1–19; Stefano B. Longo,
Rebecca Clausen, and Brett Clark, The
Tragedy of the Commodity (New Bruns-
wick: Rutgers University Press, 2015).
8. Karl Marx, Capital, vol. 1 (London:
Penguin, 1976); John Bellamy Foster
and Brett Clark, “Marxism and the Dialec�-
tics of Ecology,” Monthly Review 68, no.
5 (October 2016): 1-17; John Bellamy
Foster and Brett Clark, “The Expropriation
of Nature,” Monthly Review 69, no. 10
(2018): 1-27; István Mészáros, Beyond
Capital (New York: Monthly Review Press,
1995).
9.  Paul Burkett, Marx and Nature (New
York: St. Martin’s, 1999); Martin Empson,
Land and Labour (London: Bookmarks,
2014); Michael A. Lebowitz, Build It
Now (New York: Monthly Review Press,
2006; Paul Sweezy, “Capitalism and the
Environment,” Monthly Review 56, no. 5
(October 2004): 86–93.
10.  Justus von Liebig, Letters on Modern
Agriculture (London: Walton and Ma-
berly, 1859), 179, 254–55; Justus von
Liebig, The Natural Laws of Husbandry
(New York: Appleton,1863), 233; Foster,
Marx’s Ecology.
11. Marx, Capital, vol. 1, 637.
12.  Karl Marx, Capital, vol. 3 (London:
Penguin, 1991), 195.
13. Frederick Engels, The Housing
Question (Moscow: Progress Publishers,
1971), 92.
14. Erland Mårald, “Everything Circu-
lates,” Environment and History 8 (2002):
65–84. In Paris, as the sewage system was
updated, fields were eventually set aside
so some of the effluent could be used to
irrigate the land, rather than disposed of
in the river. In the early twentieth century,
an industrial sewage treatment plant was
built to process urban waste.
15. Nicholas Goddard, “19th-Century
Recycling: The Victorians and the Agricul-
RE V IE W / J uly – A u g ust
tural Utilisation of Sewage,” History Today
31, no. 6 (1981): 32–36; Nicholas God-
dard, “‘A Mine of Wealth’? The Victorians
and the Agricultural Value of Sewage,”
Journal of Historical Geography 22, no. 3
(1996): 274–90; Nicholas Goddard, “Roy-
al Show and Agricultural Progress, 1839–
1989,” History Today 39, no. 7 (1989):
44–51; Christopher Hamlin, “Providence
and Putrefaction,” Victorian Studies 28
(1985): 381–411; Steven Johnson, The
Ghost Map (New York: Riverhead, 2006).
16. Victor Hugo, Les Misérables (New
York: Crowell, 1915), Part 5, 84.
17.  Justus von Liebig, Familiar Letters on
Chemisty in its Relations to Physiology,
Dietetics, Agriculture, Commerce, and
Political Economy, third ed. (London: Tay-
lor, Walton, and Maberley, 1851), 473.
In Letters on Modern Agriculture, Liebig
explained that all the fertilizers added
to the land were but “a drop when com-
pared to the sea of human excrements
carried by the rivers to the ocean” (Letters
on Modern Agriculture, 222).
18. Hamlin, “Providence and Putrefac-
tion,” 409; Peter Love, “The Sewage to
the Sea,” Builder 40 (1881): 290.
19. “Mechi the Mourner,” Punch 35
(1858): 75.
20. Gregory Cushman, Guano and the
Opening of the Pacific World (New York:
Cambridge University Press, 2013);
Foster, Marx’s Ecology; Clark and Foster,
“Ecological Imperialism and the Global
Metabolic Rift”; Mårald, “Everything Cir-
culates.”
21.  Vandana Shiva, The Violence of the
Green Revolution (London: Zed, 1991);
Tony Wies, The Global Food Economy
(London: Zed, 2007).
22.  Eric Holt-Giménez, A Foodie’s Guide
to Capitalism (New York: Monthly Review
Press, 2017).
23. John Bellamy Foster and Fred
Magdoff, “Liebig, Marx, and the Deple-
tion of Soil Fertility,” in Hungry for Profit,
edited by Fred Magdoff, John Bellamy
Foster, and Frederick H. Buttel (New York:
Monthly Review Press, 2000), 43-60;
Fred Magdoff, “Ecological Civilization,”
Monthly Review 62, no. 8 (January
2011): 1–25; Phillip Mancus, “Nitrogen
Fertilizer Dependency and its Contradic-
tions: A Theoretical Exploration of Social-
Ecological Metabolism,” Rural Sociology
72, no. 2 (2007): 269–88.
24.  Peter M. Vitousek et al., “Human Al-
ternation of the Global Nitrogen Cycle,”
Ecological Applications 7, no. 3 (1997):
737–50; “Fertilizer Use to Surpass 200
Million Tonnes in 2018,” Food and
Agriculture Organization of the United
Nations, February 16, 2015, http:// fao.
org.
25.  Vaclav Smil, Global Catastrophes and
Trends (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2008),
200.
2018
26. Weis, Marine Pollution, 20–21; V.
H. Smith, G. D. Tilman, and J. C. Nekola,
“Eutrophication: Impacts of Excess Nutri-
ent Inputs on Freshwater, Marine, and
Terrestrial Ecosystems,” Environmental
Pollution 100 (1999): 179–96.
27. Weis, Marine Pollution, 26.
28. Weis, Marine Pollution, 20–21.
29.  Eva Sinha, Anna M. Michalak, and V.
Balaji, “Eutrophication Will Increase Dur-
ing the 21st Century as a Result of Pre-
cipitation Changes,” Science 357 (2017):
405–08.
30. Weis, Marine Pollution, 26.
31.  Suzanne Bricker et al., “Effects of Nu-
trient Enrichment in the Nation’s Estuar-
ies: A Decade of Change,” Harmful Algae
8, no. 1 (2008): 21–32.
32. See Díaz and Rosenberg, “Spread-
ing Dead Zones and Consequences for
Marine Ecosystems”; Callum Roberts,
The Ocean of Life (New York: Pengiun,
2012), 120.
33. “Gulf of Mexico ‘Dead Zone’ Is the
Largest Ever Measured,” National Oceanic
and Atmospheric Adiminstration, August
2, 2017), http:// noaa.gov.
34.  Fred Magdoff, “A Rational Agriculture
Is Incompatible with Capitalism,” Month-
ly Review 66, no. 10 (March 2015): 6.
35. Roberts, The Ocean of Life, 121.
36. Nancy N. Rabalais, Robert Eugene
Turner, and William J. William Jr., “Gulf of
Mexico Hypoxia, A.K.A. ‘The Dead Zone,’”
Annual Review of Ecology and Systemat-
ics 33, no. 1 (2003): 235–63.
37.  Donald A. Goolsby, William A. Batta-
glin, and Richard P. Hooper, “Sources and
Transport of Nitrogen in the Mississippi
River Basin,” United States Geological
Survey (1997), http://co.water.usgs.gov.
38. James D. Hagy et al., “Hypoxia in
Chesapeake Bay, 1950–2001: Long-Term
Change in Relation to Nutrient Loading
and River Flow,” Estuaries 27 (2004):
634–58; Weis, Marine Pollution, 21–22.
39.  Hagy et al., “Hypoxia in Chesapeake
Bay,” 654.
40. Weis, Marine Pollution, 26–27.
41. Robert J. Díaz et al., “Dead Zone
Dilemma,” Marine Pollution Bulletin 58
(2009): 1767–68.
42.  Patricia M. Glibert et al., “The Global
Complex Phenomenon of Harmful Algal
Blooms,” Oceanography 18, no. 2 (2005):
135–47.
43.  Glibert et al., “The Global Complex
Phenomenon of Harmful Algal Blooms”;
Leanne J. Flewelling et al., “Brevetoxi-
cosis: Red Tides and Marine Mammal
Mortalities,” Nature 435 (2005): 755–56;
Christopher A. Scholin et al., “Mortality
of Sea Lions Along the Central California
Coast Linked to a Toxic Diatom Bloom,”
Nature 403 (2000):80–84; Roberts, The
Ocean of Life, 127–28.
 N utrient L oadin g 121

44.  Glibert et al., “The Global Complex
Phenomenon of Harmful Algal Blooms”;
Gustaaf M. Hallegraeff, “A Review of
Harmful Algal Blooms and Their Ap-
parent Global Increase,” Phycologia 32
(1993):79–99.
45. Stefano B. Longo and Brett Clark,
“An Ocean of Troubles: Advancing Ma-
rine Sociology,” Social Problems 63,
no. 4 (2016): 463–79; John Bellamy
Foster, Brett Clark, and Richard York, The
Ecological Rift (New York: Monthly Re-
view Press, 2010).
46.  Christopher J. Gobler et al., “Ocean
Warming Since 1982 Has Expanded the
Niche of Toxic Algal Blooms in the North
Atlantic and North Pacific Oceans,” Pro-
ceedings of the National Academy of Sci-
ences of the United States of America 114
(2017): 4975–80.
47.  Denise Breitburg et al., “Declining
Oxygen in the Global Ocean and Coastal
Waters,” Science 359 (2018).
48.  Breitburg et al., “Declining Oxygen
in the Global Ocean and Coastal Waters.”
49. Andrew H. Altieri and Keryn K. B.
Gedan, “Climate Change and Dead
Zones,” Global Change Biology 21(2015):
1395–406.
50.  Sinha, Michalak, and Balaji, “Eutro-
phication Will Increase During the 21st
Century.”
51.  Scott C. Doney et al., “Ocean Acidi-
fication: The Other CO2 Problem,” An-
nual Review of Marine Science 1 (2009):
169–92.
52.  Frank Melzner et al., “Future Ocean
Acidification Will Be Amplified by Hypox-
ia in Coastal Habitats,” Marine Biology
160 (2013): 1875–88.
53.  Wei-Jun Cai et al., “Acidification of
Subsurface Coastal Waters Enhanced by
Eutrophication,” Nature Geoscience 4
(2011): 766–70.
54. Ryan B. Wallace et al., “Coastal
Ocean Acidification: The Other Eutrophi-
cation Problem,” Estuarine, Coastal and
Shelf Science 148 (2014): 1–13.
55. H. Bruce Franklin, The Most Im-
portant Fish in the Sea: Menhaden and
America (Washington, D.C.: Island,
2007), 136.
56. Karl Marx, The Poverty of Philoso-
phy (New York: International Publishers,
1971), 162–63.
57. J. Keith Moore et al., “Sustained
Climate Warming Drives Declining Ma-
rine Biological Productivity,” Science 359
(2018): 1139–43.
58. Longo and Clark, “An Ocean of
Troubles.”
59. István Mészáros, The Necessity of
Social Control (New York: Monthly Review
Press, 2015), 31, 34.

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Marx, Value, and Nature

JOHN BELLAMY FOSTER

Raoul Peck’s 2017 film The Young Karl Marx opens with a quiet scene
of poor “peasant proletarians,” men, women, and children, dirty and in
rags, gathering dead wood in a forest. Suddenly they are attacked by a
troop of mounted police armed with clubs and swords. Some of the gath-
erers are killed; the rest are captured. The scene then cuts to Karl Marx,
age twenty-four, in the Cologne offices of the Rheinische Zeitung, where he
was editor, writing an article on “The Debates on the Law on the Theft
Wood.” He penned five installments under this title from October to
November 1842, and it was this more than anything else that brought the
Prussian censors down on the newspaper and its talented young editor
and writers.1 In the film, we see the young Marx and his associates debat-
ing the course that had led them to defy both the Prussian state and their
own liberal industrialist paymasters. Marx was intransigent; there was
no other possible path. As he later explained in his famous 1859 Preface to
a Critique of Political Economy, it was his attempt to address the expropria-
tion of the customary forest rights of the poor that first drove him to the
systematic study of political economy.2
The criminalization of forest usufruct was a major issue in Germany
at the time. In 1836, at least 150,000 of the 207,478 total prosecutions in
Prussia were for “wood pilfering” and related offenses. In the Rhineland,
the proportion was even higher. These prosecutions led to heavy fines
and imprisonment. In Baden in 1842, one in every four inhabitants had
been convicted of wood-stealing. Central to Marx’s argument was the ap-
plication of “the category of theft where it ought not to be applied”: not
only the gathering of dead wood, but also the gathering of dead leaves
and the picking of berries (a customary right accorded to children) were
declared to be theft, even though these were long-established forms of
traditional appropriation for the poor. The “customary right” of the poor
to the free appropriation of dead wood, Marx insisted, did not apply to
the live, “organic” tree or to “hewn timber”—which could be seen as
the property of the private owners—but only to what was already dead.
The forest usufruct of the poor was being turned “into a monopoly of the
rich,” through a process of expropriation by “money-grubbing petty trad-
ers…and Teutonic landed interest[s].” Marx in response referred to the
This article is a revised version of a talk given at Simon Fraser University in April 2018,
sponsored by the Vancouver Ecosocialists.

122
M ar x , V alue , and N ature 123

“elemental nature” of the forest system and, as historian Peter Linebaugh

indicates, rooted his argument in an appeal to “the bioecology of the for-
est” and the “complex society” that it supported, including the way that
the right of the poor to dead wood mirrored their more general impover-
ished position and relation to nature.3
Questions regarding the expropriation of land/nature and of human
beings never ceased to occupy Marx in his subsequent works, appearing
in his Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts and in his two great discus-
sions of “so-called primitive accumulation” in the Grundrisse and Capital.
In Peck’s film, the assault of the forest police on the poor is a recurring
nightmare, in which Marx sees himself running alongside the landless
rural workers as they are being chased down by the authorities.

Th e A p p ro p r iat i o n a nd E x p ro p ri at i o n of Nature
Marx’s crucial distinction between appropriation and expropriation,
around which his ecological as well as economic critique of capitalism
revolves, is evident in his response to Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, as dra-
matically portrayed in The Young Karl Marx. Proudhon is shown giving
a speech in which he makes his famous declaration that “property is
theft.”4 From the audience, Marx asks, “what kind of property, bourgeois
property?” Proudhon answers, “property in general.” Marx remarks that
this is “an abstraction.”5
For Marx, as he indicates in a later encounter with Proudhon in the
film, the latter’s statement is logically untenable, for if property in gen-
eral is defined as theft, and all proprietary claims are thus invalid, then
the question arises: what is theft? It was necessary, in Marx’s view, to
distinguish appropriation, or property in its many varied historical forms,
from expropriation, i.e., appropriation without an equivalent (in Marx’s
terms, also without exchange and without reciprocity).6 Classical politi-
cal theory, from John Locke to G. W. F. Hegel to Marx, locates the basis of
civil society and the state in appropriation—the active term for property or
the right to possession through labor.7
As Marx explained in The Poverty of Philosophy and in the Grundrisse, all
human society rests on free appropriation from nature, which is the ma-
terial basis of labor and production. This is another way of saying that all
society depends on property. There can be no human existence without
the appropriation of nature, without production, and without property in
some form. “All production is appropriation of nature on the part of an
individual within and through a specific form of society. In this sense it is
a tautology to say that property (appropriation) is a precondition of pro-
duction.” For Marx, to declare that “property is theft,” as Proudhon did,
124 M ONTHLY RE V IE W / J uly – A u g ust 2018

was therefore to skirt the fundamental issue—the development of vari-

ous forms of appropriation in human history from the communal to the
more extreme forms of private commodification.8 This approach allowed
Marx to develop a powerful critique of capitalist society that was both
economic and ecological.9 Proudhon’s conception left no way out for hu-
manity; since appropriation in some form was a universal basis of society
and life itself, to declare that property in general was theft, irrespective of
particular property forms, was a dead end for revolutionary movements.10
A parallel can be drawn here with Hegel’s notion of alienation as ob-
jectification, which in his philosophy could be transcended through the
unification of subject and object, but only in thought, i.e., in the abso-
lute knowledge of the Hegelian philosopher. For Marx, who rejected the
idealist solution, objectification was inherent in human existence, since
human beings were objective, sensuous, material beings, deriving their
sustenance from outside themselves. Hence it was not objectification, in
Marx’s view, but rather the “alienated mediation” intrinsic to capitalist
commodity production that was subject to transcendence, and this had to
be accomplished in material reality, not simply in thought.11 Similarly, hu-
man beings, as objective, material beings, could not be freed from the ap-
propriation from nature, i.e., from property in all its varied forms, which
was an objective condition of their existence. What was possible, however,
was the revolutionary liberation of humanity from the more alienated,
expropriative forms of the human social metabolism with nature.
These same issues have reemerged today in debates on the meaning
and method of what is broadly termed ecosocialism. For Raj Patel and
Jason W. Moore, in their A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things, “ap-
propriation” in general, as in Proudhon, is defined as “a kind of ongoing
theft.”12 Both here and in Moore’s earlier Capitalism in the Web of Life, the
focus is on the “appropriation of work” in all of its forms—by which he
meant “work” in the sense of physics (i.e., the measure of the energy
transfer that occurs when an external force is applied to an object and
moves it). In this naturalistic sense, we can speak of the “work” of a river
or oil well, in the same terms as that of a human being. Appropriation,
or property, conceived by Patel and Moore as the theft of “work,” is thus
universal and inescapable, associated with physical motion itself.13 Such
appropriation of external nature, Moore tells us, outweighs the exploita-
tion of labor in production.14
No one of course would doubt that the appropriation of nature under-
lies all human production. Human beings are objective, material beings;
as every child knows, we, like all other living beings, cannot exist without
free appropriation from nature. Indeed, all material human production,
M ar x , V alue , and N ature 125

as Marx stresses, is nothing but the change in form of what nature itself
creates.15 But to argue, as do Patel and Moore, that the human appropria-
tion of nature in general (that is, of its “work” or energy) is “a kind of
ongoing theft,” and that this is the core of the ecological crisis, implicitly
attributes the whole problem to the very existence of human beings—a
misanthropic position.
Such a perspective, common to most mainstream environmental
thought, necessarily distracts from the alienated mediation of the hu-
man-social metabolic relation to nature, and from capitalism’s specific
forms of expropriation of nature and their effects on ecosystems. In the
classical Marxian perspective, it is precisely because human history has
created a mode of production (capitalism) that alienates the metabolic
relations between human beings and nature, thereby creating a meta-
bolic rift and rupturing the conditions of ecological reproduction, that
we can hope to restore that essential metabolism—through a revolution-
ary overturning of the capitalist integument and the creation of a new,
coevolutionary material reality. This is Marx’s core ecological message.
In the classical historical materialist view, the free appropriation of
nature by humanity (the use of nature’s free gifts) is not to be condemned
out of hand as theft. Indeed, “actual labor,” for Marx, “is [nothing but] the
appropriation of nature for the satisfaction of human needs, the activity
through which the metabolism between man and nature is mediated.”16
Nor should the concern be primarily, as in bourgeois society, with the
mere “cheapness” of nature.17 Rather, it is the expropriation of nature
in the sense of the appropriation of land or resources without reciprocity
(maintenance of the “conditions of reproduction”) by capital that consti-
tutes theft in this sphere.18 In Marx’s view, this reflects the “law of ‘ex-
propriation’ not ‘appropriation’” underpinninng capitalism.19 It is associ-
ated in its environmental aspects with capitalism’s systematic violation
of what the nineteenth-century German chemist Justus von Liebig called
the natural-material “law of replenishment” (or “law of compensation”)
necessary for ecological reproduction.20
Capitalism’s destructive relation to the ecological realm depends on
this robbery of what Marx referred to as “the elemental powers of na-
ture”—robbery not in the sense that these elements are not “paid,” as
Moore says, but rather in the violation of the law of replenishment.21 Like
Erysichthon in Greek mythology, capital requires ever more rounds of
expropriation just to keep going, even to the point of eating everything
in existence—including, ultimately, itself.22 The dialectic of expropriation
and exploitation, leading in the end to exterminism, thus lies at the core
of the classical historical-materialist critique of capital. For Marx, it was
126 M ONTHLY RE V IE W / J uly – A u g ust 2018

not the appropriation of dead wood from the forest by peasant-proletari-

ans, but rather capital’s alienated expropriation of all wood (and all land)
to feed its insatiable drive for accumulation that constituted the essential
reality of the plundering of the material world: a “tragedy of the com-
modity,” not a tragedy of the commons.23
If the exploitation of labor is the force behind capitalist valorization
and accumulation, it follows that it cannot continue this contradictory
process on an ever-increasing scale without new rounds of creative de-
struction at the boundaries of the system—the expropriation of the nat-
ural environment, along with the expropriation of social reproductive
work, human communication, knowledge, and more.24 In Capital and in
his later writings, Marx pointed to attempts under capitalism to speed up
the turnover time in timber production by relying on faster-growing trees
and in meat production through the breeding of livestock, arguing that
this necessarily pressed against natural laws (and in the case of livestock,
promoted cruelty toward animals).25
For Marx, the metabolic rift—the alienated mediation between human-
ity and nature—was a product of the “robbing” or expropriation of the soil,
and thus of nature, thereby hindering “the operation of the eternal natural
condition for the lasting fertility of the soil.” This in turn demanded the
“systematic restoration” of this metabolism in a future society of associ-
ated producers capable of governing “the human metabolism with nature
in a rational way…accomplishing it with the least expenditure of energy,”
and developing most fully their individual and collective human powers.26

Val u e a n d N at ure
With the rise of ecosocialism, brought on by the planetary rift, ecologi-
cal critiques of the capitalist system have deepened and multiplied. But
as in any period of headlong theoretical advance, this has yielded starkly
different perspectives and positions, resulting in new debates over the
conception, scope, and purpose of Marx’s value critique. Left environ-
mentalists and political ecologists such as Stephen Bunker, Alf Hornborg,
Zehra Taşdemir Yaşin, and Giorgos Kallis have sought to jettison or de-
construct the labor theory of value altogether, arguing that nature in gen-
eral, energy, and individual species create value in the abstract, which
is not restricted to human labor—or that, in Hornborg’s case, economic
value is simply normative.27 Such analyses frequently come from theo-
rists working outside the field of critical political economy, who tend to
confuse concepts of energy use, use value, intrinsic value, and normative
value with the economic system of commodity value based on abstract
labor under capitalism.
M ar x , V alue , and N ature 127

In Marx’s critique of the historically specific capitalist valorization

process, value is the crystallization of socially necessary abstract labor—
“labour as the expenditure of labour power.”28 Essential to this critique is
the recognition that natural-material use values, while elemental to each
and every commodity and the basis of all real wealth, are excluded from
capitalism’s value generation calculus, insofar as no labor is incorporated
in their production. As Marx himself put it in the Grundrisse, “the purely
natural material in so far as no human labor is objectified in it…has no
[economic] value under capitalism.”29 This contradictory character of cap-
italist commodity production, manifested in the opposition between use
value and exchange value, places the narrow form of the capitalist value
calculus at loggerheads with real wealth, which has its sources in both
natural-material use values and concrete human labor.30
Since use value plays no direct role in the internal logic of valorization
under capitalism, this gives rise, in both classical and neoclassical eco-
nomics, to the notion of the “free gift of Nature to capital.”31 Capitalist
exploitation and accumulation, as Marx explains, ultimately depend on
capital’s usurping of nature’s gifts for itself, thereby monopolizing the
means of production and wealth in its entirety.32 This alienation of nature
has its counterpart in the alienation of labor—that is, in the emergence
of a class with no basis of existence except the sale of its own labor power.
Understood in this way, the historically constructed commodity value
form under capitalism is not one in which energy or bees directly par-
ticipate, but is instead a product of human social-class relations.33 To see
nature or energy, not just socially necessary abstract labor, as generating
commodity value would only serve to naturalize and universalize the cap-
italist value process, eliding its specific social and historical character and
its relation to the alienation and exploitation of labor. Even neoclassical
economics—along with the ecological economics of Nicholas Georgescu-
Roegen—attributes all value-added in the economy to labor or human
services, and none to nature or energy.34 Capitalism thus excludes nature,
(including the corporeal nature of human beings) from its value form—a
fundamental and in many ways fatal contradiction of the system.
In contrast to the frontal attacks on Marx’s value theory described
above, Moore’s subtler approach appears at first to conform to Marxian
value theory, attributing value to labor. But on closer examination, his
analysis effectively robs Marx’s own approach of all significance and un-
dermines any coherent ecological (or economic) critique of capitalism.
As Moore puts it, his “argument proceeds from a certain destabilization
of value as an ‘economic category.’”35 Unlike Marx’s critique of capital-
ist valorization, which recognizes that under capitalism all value is the
128 M ONTHLY RE V IE W / J uly – A u g ust 2018

crystallization of socially necessary labor, and which makes a hard and

fast distinction between value and wealth, Patel and Moore, in A History
of the World in Seven Cheap Things, seek to obliterate these distinctions alto-
gether. Hence they pronounce that “value is a specific crystallization of
‘the original sources of wealth’: human and extrahuman work.”36 Here
Marx is quoted against himself, presenting his famous definition of
wealth as the basis of a definition of value, thereby erasing an absolutely
crucial distinction separating Marx from bourgeois economics. Indeed,
the core of Marxian critique rests on the distinctions between use value
and exchange value and between wealth and value.
Likewise, in Capitalism in the Web of Life, Moore seeks to transform Marx’s
notion of the “law of value,” which focused on quid pro quo as the basis
of capitalist commodity exchange, into its opposite, in relation to the
“world ecology” as a whole.37 For Moore, the “law of value” centers on the
absence of a quid pro quo (in exchange terms) between capital and Cheap
Nature—an absence which then becomes the ultimate basis, in his “ex-
pansive value” analysis, of capitalist valorization—in total contradiction
to Marx’s own analysis.38 He thus contends that value in its all-encom-
passing expansive form (including non-labor value) derives primarily from
the appropriation of work/energy in general, of which the exploitation of
labor is simply an epiphenomenon.
Hence, for Moore, the secret of accumulation is “capitalism’s unified
logic of appropriating human and extra-human ‘work’ that is trans-
formed into value.” In this view, the capitalist world ecology/economy
and the entire human interaction with nature amount to the appropria-
tion of the “four cheaps”: labor-power, food, energy, and raw materials.39
Labor-power is thus presented as no more significant with respect to the
law of value than food, energy, and natural resources. (In his later work
with Patel, Moore expanded the framework from four to seven cheaps,
adding nature, work, money, lives, and care work and dropping labor-
power and raw materials.) This convoluted formulation, however, effec-
tively inhibits any coherent critique of capitalist value production, much
less any meaningful understanding of the ecological crises engendered by
the capitalist system.40
Moore’s argument regarding the four (or seven) cheaps is rooted in his
more elastic conception of what constitutes value under capitalism and
in civilization in general, with which he aims to present nothing less
than a “new law of value,” encompassing both labor exploitation and the
appropriation of physical nature/energy.41 “Laws of value,” he writes, are
phenomena “that shape and cohere a civilization.” They are the product
in large part of the appropriation of the physical “work,” i.e., energy of
M ar x , V alue , and N ature 129

the universe. Such “expansive value relations,” as he calls them, “lead a

double life,” extending beyond the labor process and value production
proper, as well as beyond the phenomenon of unpaid human labor, to in-
clude all the “extra-human work” involved in the capitalist world ecology.
These wider realms of “unpaid work/energy” associated with the “zone of
appropriation” far outweigh the exploitation of labor in the determina-
tion of the overall, expansive value dimensions of a given civilization.42
“The law of value,” Moore thus contends, “far from reducible to abstract
social labor, finds its necessary conditions of self-expansion through the
creation and subsequent appropriation of Cheap Nature,” i.e., appropria-
tion of the web of life in general.43 Again, we are left at a level of obscu-
rity equivalent to Proudhon’s “property is theft.” The “law of value” is
said to be based ultimately on the “appropriation of the unpaid ‘work of
nature’” (along with the unpaid labor of women in the household and
other forms of unpaid human labor). Both “the accumulated work/energy
of fossil fuel formation” and the exploitation of labor power in a factory
are “moments inscribed in the law of value.” The atmosphere is “put to
work” in absorbing greenhouse gases, for which it too is “unpaid,” thus
contributing to capitalist valorization.44
Here Moore’s expansive law of value, based on a “world of unpaid work”
in which the “law of value in capitalism is the law of Cheap Nature,” runs
into an unresolved problem, since such a conception is virtually without
bounds, encompassing not just the planetary environment but the en-
tire universe. As he is forced to admit, an entire “world of unpaid work”
in this sense simply “cannot be quantified.”45 Although he declares that
“value does not work unless most work is not valued,” this rests on a sim-
ple tautology, since the “work” referred to includes everything subject to
the laws of motion of physics, insofar as it relates in the last instance to
the economy—from subsistence agriculture to a beehive to a waterfall to
a radioactive isotope to a nuclear reaction.46 “Coal and oil,” he writes, “are
dramatic examples of this process of appropriating unpaid work.”47
It is this universal “unpaid” appropriation of the work/energy of the
earth, as an eternal condition of human existence, which Patel and Moore
describe as “ongoing theft,” leading in the end to ever more expensive
“cheaps.”48 Yet although capital may end up possessing natural powers
for which it does not pay, just as it does not pay for the worker’s ability to
think, only confusion can result from attempts to treat such appropria-
tion of nature’s capacity for work, in the sense of physics, as quantifiable
and somehow commensurate with economic value production in capital-
ist social relations.49 Nor does it help much to characterize a waterfall,
even one used to generate electricity, as “unpaid.”
130 M ONTHLY RE V IE W / J uly – A u g ust 2018

In Moore’s “new law of value,” all of material existence, whether paid

social labor, unpaid social labor, or the unpaid work/energy of the uni-
verse, matters largely to the extent that it is harnessed to the capitalist
valorization process. The work/energy carried out by the sun, and that
of the Earth System that over millions of years led to the formation of
coal and oil deposits—plus the physical work that coal and oil perform in
present-day production as low-entropy energy sources—all enter into the
determination of Moore’s expanded law of commodity value, which he
claims can account for the “transforming [of] nature’s work into the bour-
geoisie’s [economic] value.” Physics, ecology, and economy all get rolled
into one, erasing fundamental distinctions, crucial to Marx’s ecological
(and economic) critique. Indeed “the capital relation,” for Moore, “trans-
forms the work/energy of all nature into…value.”50
The viewpoints discussed above either deny the labor theory of value
under capitalism outright (as in Bunker, Hornborg, Yaşin, and Kallis), or
stretch it to the point of absurdity in search of “a single logic of wealth,
power, and nature” under capitalism (as in Moore). In contrast, it is argued
here that the metabolic relation between human beings and nature is an
alienated and contradictory one, driving a wedge between the antagonis-
tic laws of motion (and law of value) of capitalism and the Earth System.51
Ecological crises do not arise simply or even mainly because the world econ-
omy (or the world ecology) appropriates the work of external nature with-
out payment, nor because Cheap Nature is becoming Expensive Nature,
undermining capitalism’s bottom line. Properly understood, an ecological
crisis, or crisis of sustainable human development, cannot be quantified in
dollars and cents, or in terms of Cheap Nature, much less “unpaid nature.”
Rather, at the heart of today’s metabolic rift, as Marx argued, is the
logic of the alienated capitalist system of accumulation, in which all natu-
ral boundaries are treated as mere barriers to be surmounted, opening up
anthropogenic rifts in the fundamental biogeochemical cycles that con-
stitute the overall Earth System.52 Ecological crises proper are thus not
crises of economic value, but of the disruption and destruction of condi-
tions of ecological reproduction and human development at the expense
of future human generations and living species more generally.53 Viewed
in this way, the primary ecological contradiction resides in the expropria-
tion of nature as a free gift to capital, leading to “the squandering of the
powers of the earth.” This is what Marx meant when he said that the soil
was “robbed” of the conditions of its reproduction, thereby generating a
rift in the metabolism of humanity and the earth.54
It is not so much the appropriation of nature’s work/energy as an inher-
ent condition of human society and production, and indeed of life itself,
M ar x , V alue , and N ature 131

that we should be primarily concerned with—although the increase in

environmental throughput is central—so much as the ever-expanding
ecological rifts imposed on the Earth System by the antagonistic logic
of capital. Put differently, it is not the mere fact of the free appropria-
tion of physical work/energy by human beings (an objective condition of
existence) that is the chief source of our ecological contradictions, but
rather the rapacious expropriation of nature by capital and the metabolic
rift itself—i.e., the commodity system’s historically specific disruption
of the elemental conditions and biogeochemical cycles of natural repro-
duction on which human existence and that of countless other species
ultimately depend.

A ga in s t t h e Ex p ro p ri at i o n o f t he E a rt h
One of Marx’s most profound insights was that “productive forces”
under capitalism turned into “destructive forces.” The very “productiv-
ity of labor” under capitalism led to “progress here, regression there.”
He attributed this regression specifically to the degradation of “natural
conditions,” to “the exhaustion of forests, coal and iron mines, and so
on”—even extending to the negative effects of regional climate change.55
Beginning with his earliest works, he conceived of the expropriation and
alienation of land/nature as a necessary counterpart, even a prior condi-
tion, of the expropriation and alienation of the laborer. In the Economic
and Philosophical Manuscripts, he observed that capitalism, even more than
feudalism before it, was rooted in “the domination of the earth as of an
alienated power over man.”56 The expropriation and removal of human
beings from the natural conditions of production through the capitalist
seizure of the earth, created the alienated conditions for the exploitation
of workers. By the same token, private riches were everywhere enhanced
by the destruction of public wealth (the Lauderdale Paradox).57
“So-called primitive accumulation,” Marx went on to explain in Capital,
“means the expropriation of the immediate producers,” involving the
dual expropriation of the direct producers and of the earth.58 The imposi-
tion of these conditions (marked by the historic enclosures of the com-
mons), the growth of the proletariat, and the alienation of both labor and
land, produced the elemental destructiveness of the capitalist system. As
Max Weber observed during his trip to Indian Territory (today Oklahoma)
in 1905, “with almost lightning speed everything that stands in the way
of capitalist culture is being crushed.” Like Liebig and Marx before him,
Weber pointed to capitalist culture in this sense as a system of robbery,
Raubbau (or Raubsystem), that destroyed the earth and natural resources
along with any precapitalist economic formations standing in its way.59
132 M ONTHLY RE V IE W / J uly – A u g ust 2018

This Raubsystem, however, was not attributed to the notion that property
(appropriation) was theft, but to the specific historical forms of the capi-
talist expropriation of humanity and nature.
The expropriation of the earth has invariably been accompanied by
the expropriation of humans as corporeal beings, through innumerable
forms of labor bondage and servitude always present at the logical and
historical boundaries of the system, helping to make capitalism possible.
Such expropriation is always an essential part of the system, determining
its parameters. The system of capital, Marx famously remarked, “comes
dripping from head to toe, from every pore, with blood and dirt.”60 The
role of slavery, genocide, and every kind of human servitude, including
the vile robbing of the earth itself, was crucial both to capitalism’s origins
and to its continuing antagonistic reproduction. Today the gross exploita-
tion (or superexploitation) through the global labor arbitrage of the mass
of the workers in the global South is giving rise to a “planet of slums” and
imperialist warfare imposed on the periphery, along with the continued
expropriation of women’s unpaid labor.61
During what Eric Hobsbawm called “the Age of Capital”—the system’s
period of greatest vitality, coming out of the Industrial Revolution—it
was possible to focus mainly on capitalism’s progressive features, ab-
stracting somewhat from expropriation.62 Marx’s critique thus centered
not on expropriation as such, but on the exploitation of labor, and it was
on proletarianized labor in this sense that he placed his hopes of revo-
lutionary transition. Today, however, despite some remarkable techno-
logical developments—only partially attributable to the system—we are
seeing a breakdown of the main mechanisms of capitalist accumulation,
with all that is solid once again melting into air. Rates of exploitation are
so heightened today as to pose problems of surplus absorption associated
with the “overproduction of the means of production.”63 Hence, in the
neoliberal era, capitalism, in its attempt to surmount the material condi-
tions of its existence, has sought to bring all of reality within the logic of
valorization, via financialization—reflecting what Karl Polanyi called the
“utopian” conception of the market society.64
In this new age of global plunder and dispossession, the struggle has in-
creasingly shifted to profit upon expropriation, the seizing of all monetary
flows, assets, and individual property, wherever they exist. Land grabs are
a dominant factor in much of the global South.65 Carbon trading has been
introduced ostensibly to address climate change, but instead creating mar-
kets to profit upon it. The Earth System itself is being destroyed as a habit-
able place for humanity. Labor is being deconstructed, growing ever more
precarious and insecure. In these circumstances, Marx’s sardonic dictum,
M ar x , V alue , and N ature 133

“Accumulate, accumulate! That is Moses and the Prophets!” is more than

ever the goal of the system, even as all life as we know it is imperiled.66
To reduce the ecological problem of capital merely to a question of
Cheap Nature, as if it were all simply a matter of internalizing nature’s
contributions into the market—a view ideologically justified by various
theories of natural capital and ecological services—would be a grave mis-
take.67 Rather, at the root of the contemporary environmental emergency
is the sheer incompatibility of a system of capital accumulation with hu-
man existence and the Earth System. If capital has been immensely suc-
cessful at exploiting human labor, its resulting crises of overaccumulation
and surplus absorption now have as their counterpart the visible decon-
struction of the planet as a place of human habitation, as the oceans fill
with plastic and the atmosphere with carbon. The renewed thrust toward
the expropriation of the planet in these circumstances is not a sign of
capitalism’s vitality but its threatened dissolution.
The world ecological movement arose in what is now commonly called
the Anthropocene epoch in geological history, brought on by the Great
Acceleration—the period of a rapidly increasing anthropogenic rift in
biogeochemical cycles, usually dated to 1945 with the advent of the atom-
ic bomb, or to the early 1950s with the above-ground nuclear testing of
the hydrogen bomb and the resulting nuclear fallout.68 The answer to
the crisis of the Anthropocene, however, has to be far more revolution-
ary than that of the Green movement that arose in the 1960s, and which
sought simply to preserve the environment and combat pollution, while
hardly questioning the social system. Today it can no longer rationally be
denied that capitalist valorization is an inherently destructive process,
the enemy not only of the free, creative labor of human beings, but also
of the earth as a place of habitation for humanity and many other species.
Capitalism’s famed “creative destruction,” if allowed to continue, threat-
ens the annihilation of “the chain of human generations.”69
In this century, the battle against the expropriation of the earth must
unite with the fight against the expropriation of human beings, ulti-
mately challenging the dialectic of expropriation and exploitation, and
the entire “barbaric heart” of capital.70 The future lies with the develop-
ment of the twenty-first-century socialist/ecosocialist movement, to be
rooted in a diverse, all-inclusive environmental working class. What is
needed is the revolutionary reconstitution of the interdependent social
metabolism with nature, bringing it under the rational control of human
beings—aiming not only at ecological sustainability and the conservation
of energy, but also at the full development of human needs and powers
in and through society. Nothing else will do.
134 M ONTHLY
N ot e s
1.  Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Col-
lected Works, vol. 1 (New York: Interna-
tional Publishers, 1975), 224–63. On the
term “peasant proletariat,” see V. I. Lenin,
Collected Works, vol. 20 (Moscow: Prog-
ress Publishers, 1972), 132–35.
2.  Karl Marx, Contribution to a Critique
of Political Economy (Moscow: Progress
Publishers, 1970), 19–20.
3. Marx and Engels, Collected Works,
vol. 1, 225, 233–35; Peter Linebaugh,
Stop Thief! (Oakland: PM, 2014), 43–60;
T. C. Banfield, Industry of the Rhine, Se-
ries I (London: Knight, 1846), 111; John
Bellamy Foster, Marx’s Ecology (New York:
Monthly Review Press, 2000), 66–68;
David McLellan, Karl Marx (New York:
Harper and Row, 1973), 56.
4. Joseph-Pierre Proudhon, What Is
Property? (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni-
versity Press, 1993),13–16, 70. Marx first
referred to Proudhon in October 1842,
around the time he wrote the first install-
ment of his piece on the theft of wood.
Marx and Engels, Collected Works, vol. 1,
220. In The Holy Family Marx and Engels
argued that Proudhon’s critique of po-
litical economy in What Is Property? was
“the criticism of political economy from
the standpoint of political economy,”
that is, he took the bourgeois criterion of
the exchange of equivalents as the sole
basis of his critique. Marx and Engels,
Collected Works, vol. 4, 31–32; David Mc-
Nally, Against the Market (London: Verso,
1993), 141–45.
5. The encounter between Proudhon
and Marx in Peck’s film is of course
imaginary, but fits well enough with the
known facts. See J. Hampden Jackson,
Marx, Proudhon and European Social-
ism (London: English Universities Press,
1957), 50–70. The point on property in
general as an “abstraction” is taken from
Karl Marx, Grundrisse (London: Penguin,
1973), 85. Marx originally thought high-
ly of the critique of private property in
What Is Property?, but faulted Proudhon
for his lack of analysis of property forms.
Marx and Engels, Collected Works, vol.
4 (New York: International Publishers,
1975), 31–32.
6. On Marx’s distinction between ap-
propriation and expropriation, see John
Bellamy Foster and Brett Clark, “The Ex�-
propriation of Nature,” Monthly Review
69, no. 10 (2018): 1–27.
7.  C. B. Macpherson, The Political Theory
of Possessive Individualism (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1962), 194–62;
John Locke, Two Treatises on Govern-
ment (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1988), 297–301; G. W. F. Hegel,
The Philosophy of Right (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 952), 41–45. In Locke’s
case the bourgeois concept of appropria-
RE V IE W / J uly – A u g ust
tion was used to justify expropriation, as
from Native Americans, on the fallacious
grounds that they had not transformed
the land through their labor. Locke, an
investor in the Royal African Company,
also justified the physical expropriation
of human beings, in the case of the en-
slavement of Africans. See Barbara Arneil,
John Locke and America: The Defense
of English Colonialism (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1996), 168–200; Pe-
ter Olsen, “John Locke’s Liberty Was for
Whites Only,” New York Times, December
25, 1984.
8.  Karl Marx, The Poverty of Philosophy
(New York: International Publishers,
1963), Grundrisse, 87–88, 488–49. See
also Engels’s reference to “Proudhon’s
theft thesis” in Marx and Engels, Collect-
ed Works, vol. 6 (New York: International
Publishers, 1976), 260.
9. Karl Polanyi, Primitive, Archaic, and
Modern Economies (Boston: Beacon,
1968), 8–93, 106–07, 149–56.
10.  Marx and Engels, Collected Works,
vol. 1, 228.
11. Karl Marx, Early Writings (London:
Penguin, 1970), 389–92; Georg Lukács,
History and Class Consciousness (Lon-
don: Merlin, 1971), xxiii–xxiv; István
Mészáros, Marx’s Theory of Alienation
(London: Merlin, 1975); John Bellamy
Foster and Brett Clark, “Marxism and the
Dialectics of Ecology,” Monthly Review
68, no. 5 (October 2016): 1–17.
12.  Raj Patel and Jason W. Moore, A His-
tory of the World in Seven Cheap Things
(Berkeley: University of California Press,
2017), 81, 95. Elsewhere Moore defines
appropriation as the identification, chan-
neling, and securing of “unpaid work”
outside the commodity system and em-
bracing everything in nature that is “un-
paid.” But since nature is never “paid,”
this amounts in practice in his work to the
notion of the appropriation of extra-hu-
man work encompassing all physical forc-
es, i.e., appropriation in its very broadest
sense (even divorced from the classical
political-economic and philosophic sense
of appropriation as property).
13.  For a concise discussion of the rela-
tion of physics to capitalism and ecologi-
cal crisis, see Erald Kolasi, “The Physics of
Capitalism,” Monthly Review 70, no. 1
(May 2018): 29–43.
14. In The Condition of the Working
Class in England, Engels defined “work”
as “the expenditure of force.” See Marx
and Engels, Collected Works, vol. 4, 431.
Lancelot Hogben declared that Engels
later welcomed the new developments
in thermodynamics and the general the-
ory of work that arose in physics through
James Prescott Joule and others as, in
Hogben’s words, “the beginning of a
2018
new chapter in the history of knowledge.”
But no one could suggest that Marx and
Engels’s analysis confused the specificity
of human labor with “work” in the sense
of physics. Lancelot Hogben, Science for
the Citizen (New York: Knopf, 1938), 65;
Marx and Engels, Collected Works, vol.
25 (New York: International Publishers,
1987), 370, 505.
15.  Karl Marx, Capital, vol. 1 (London:
Penguin, 1976), 133–34.
16.  Marx and Engels, Collected Works,
vol. 30 (New York: International Publish-
ers, 1988), 40.
17.  Marx can only be ironic when ad-
dressing the demands for “Cheap Food”
by the bourgeois free traders of his time.
See Marx, The Poverty of Philosophy, 207.
18.  Paul Burkett, “Nature’s Free Gifts and
the Ecological Significance of Value,” Cap-
ital and Class 68 (1999): 89–110; Foster
and Clark, “The Expropriation of Nature.”
19.  Marx and Engels, Collected Works,
vol. 33, 301.
20.  Justus von Liebig, Letters on Modern
Agriculture (London: Walton and Ma-
berly, 1859), 254–55; Kohei Saito, Karl
Marx’s Ecosocialism (New York: Monthly
Review Press, 2017), 197. The law of com-
pensation, which related to replenish-
ment of renewable resources, should be
supplemented by Herman Daly’s broader
rules of sustainability: (1) Renewable re-
sources must be used no faster than they
regenerate; (2) Non-renewable resources
should be used no faster than renewable
substitutes can be put into place; (3) Pol-
lution and wastes should be emitted no
faster than they can be absorbed, recy-
cled, or made harmless. See the Sustain-
able Water Resources Roundtable, “What
Is Sustainability?” http://acwi.gov.
21.  Marx and Engels, Collected Works,
vol. 1, 234.
22. Ovid, Metamorphoses (New York:
Norton, 2004), 298; Richard Seaford,
Ancient Greece and Global Warming (Lon-
don: Classical Association, 2009).
23.  See Stefano B. Longo, Rebecca Clau-
sen, and Brett Clark, The Tragedy of the
Commodity (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers
University Press, 2015).
24.  On capitalism’s need for unlimited
environmental expansion, see John Bel-
lamy Foster, Brett Clark, and Richard York,
The Ecological Rift (New York: Monthly
Review Press, 2010), 207–11. Nancy Fra-
ser, “Behind Marx’s Hidden Abode: For
an Expanded Conception of Capitalism,”
New Left Review 86 (2014): 55–72, and
“Expropriation and Exploitation in Racial-
ized Capitalism,” Critical Historical Stud-
ies 3, no. 1 (2016): 163–78; Michael C.
Dawson, “Hidden in Plain Sight: A Note
on Legitimation Crises and the Racial
M ar x , V alue , and
Order,” Critical Historical Studies 3, no.
1 (2016): 143–61; John Bellamy Foster
and Brett Clark, “Women, Nature, and
Capital in the Industrial Revolution,”
Monthly Review 69, no. 8 (2018): 1–24.
25.  Karl Marx, Capital, vol. 2 (London:
Penguin, 1978), 321–22; John Bellamy
Foster, “Marx as a Food Theorist,” Monthly
Review 68, no. 7 (December 2016):
14–15.
26. Marx, Capital, vol. 1, 637–38; Capi-
tal, vol. 3 (London: Penguin, 1981), 959.
27.  See, for example, Stephen Bunker,
Underdeveloping the Amazon (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1985),
31–36, 44–45; Alf Hornborg, “Towards an
Ecological Theory of Unequal Exchange,”
Ecological Economics 25, no. 1 (1998):
130, and Global Ecology and Unequal Ex-
change (London: Routledge, 2011), 104;
Zehra Taşdemir Yaşin, “The Adventure of
Capital with Nature: From the Metabolic
Rift to the Value of Nature,” Journal of
Peasant Studies 44, no. 3 (2017): 391–
93; Giorgos Kallis and Erik Swyngedouw,
“Do Bees Produce Value?” Capitalism
Nature Socialism 28, no. 3 (2017): 1–15.
For critiques of such views, see Matthew
T. Huber, “Value, Nature, and Labor: A
Defense of Marx,” Capitalism Nature
Socialism 28, no. 1 (2017): 39–52, and
Paul Burkett, Marx and Nature (Chicago:
Haymarket, 2014).
28.  Karl Marx, Texts on Method (Oxford:
Basil Blackwell, 1975), 200.
29. Marx, Grundrisse, 366. In classical
political economy, rent, defined as a de-
duction from total surplus value, does
serve to give certain natural resources
exchange values, without these resources
in any way generating commodity value
as such—for the latter has its source exclu-
sively in abstract labor.
30.  Karl Marx, Critique of the Gotha Pro-
gramme (New York: International Pub-
lishers, 1938), 3–4.
31.  Marx and Engels, Collected Works,
vol. 37 (New York: International Publish-
ers, 1998), 732–33. The notion of the
“free gift of nature” to capital was not
invented by Marx but was axiomatic
in the work of all the classical political
economists, including Thomas Robert
Malthus and Adam Smith. It was left to
Marx, however, to give this concept a
critical reading by explaining that these
free gifts were monopolized by capital
in the context of the alienation of nature
and humanity.
32.  None of this of course means, for
example, that raw materials utilized in
production lack commodity value, in
Marx’s conception. They acquire value
as a result of the labor-power expended
in obtaining and processing them. Addi-
tionally, rent of land is a deduction from
total surplus value, which then enters
into the costs to industry. Still, it remains
N ature 135
true that while raw materials and other
natural-material use values employed
in production (as constant capital) have
value, they do not generate value, as does
socially necessary abstract labor. Further,
capital’s monopoly of the productive
powers provided by nature, viewed as a
“free gift of Nature to capital,” constitutes
the ultimate source of its class domina-
tion and its wider destructive tendencies.
Karl Marx, Theories of Surplus Value,
Part Two (Moscow: Progress Publishers,
1968), 45–46.
33.  See Foster and Burkett, Marx and the
Earth, 107–10.
34. For a critical description of how
standard capitalist economic accounting
fails to incorporate household and sub-
sistence labor (mainly by women) and
nature into value-added accounting, see
Marilyn Waring, Counting for Nothing
(Toronto: University of Toronto Press,
2009). On Georgescu-Roegen’s posi-
tion, see John Bellamy Foster and Paul
Burkett, Marx and the Earth (Chicago:
Haymarket, 2016), 135.
35.  Jason W. Moore, “The Capitalocene,
Part II: Abstract Social Nature and the
Limits to Capital” (June 2014): 29, http://
researchgate.net; accessed April 13,
2018.
36. Patel and Moore, A History of the
World in Seven Cheap Things, 101.
37.  As Paul Baran wrote: “The law of val-
ue [can be seen] as a set of propositions
describing the characteristic features of
the economic and social organization
of a particular epoch of history called
capitalism. This organization is character-
ized by the prevalence of the principle of
quid pro quo in economic (and not only
economic) relations among members of
society; by the production (and distribu-
tion) of goods and services as commodi-
ties; by their production and distribution
on the part of independent producers
with the help of hired labor for an anony-
mous market with the view to making
profit…. It is by the dominance of this
law of value that the capitalist order dif-
fers from all others: from antiquity in
which slavery dominated the conditions
of production and distribution; from
feudalism which system was based on a
comprehensive network of rights, duties
and traditions; from socialism in which
planning becomes the overriding prin-
ciple” (Paul A. Baran to Stanley Moore,
August 5, 1960, in Paul. A. Baran and
Paul M. Sweeezy, The Age of Monopoly
Capital [New York: Monthly Review Press,
2017], 253).
38. Moore, Capitalism in the Web of Life,
14, 191. The fact that much of nature or
the Earth System is necessarily outside
the value circuit of capital gives rise to
the Lauderdale Paradox, in which public
wealth (particularly the wealth of nature
outside the economy) is destroyed by
the enhancement of private riches in a
commodity exchange economy. Private
wealth depends on scarcity as one of its
conditions, and thus on the destruction
of nature’s abundance, such as ample
clean water, breathable air, and so on.
To try to incorporate both private riches
and public wealth in this sense within
the “law of value,” as in Moore’s analysis,
only confuses matters by eliding the con-
tradiction between capitalist commodity
production and the world of nature as a
whole—i.e., between the robber and the
robbed. See Foster, Clark, and York, The
Ecological Rift, 53–72.
39. Moore, Capitalism in the Web of Life,
14, 17.
40. Moore argues that capitalism pro-
duces (or “co-produces”) the natural
world, effectively placing the activities of
the physical universe and those of society
on the same plane. In contrast, as Marx
explains, the most that any form of social
production can accomplish is to change
the form in which biogeochemical pro-
cesses occur and shift them around,
often disrupting them and leading to
unforeseen and often dangerous conse-
quences. To speak of the anthropogenic
production of nature is thus to attribute
supranatural, godlike forces to human
society. Karl Marx, Letters to Kugelmann
(New York: International Publishers,
1934), 73; Marx, Capital, vol. 1, 133–34;
Foster, Marx’s Ecology; Brett Clark and
Richard York, “Rifts and Shifts: Getting
to the Root of Environmental Crises,”
Monthly Review 60, no. 6 (2008): 13–24.
41. Moore, Capitalism in the Web of Life,
69–70.
42.  Jason W. Moore, “Value in the Web
of Life, or, Why World History Matters to
Geography,” Dialogues in Human Geog-
raphy 7, no. 3 (2017): 327–28, Capitalism
in the Web of Life, 53–54, 65–66, 73, and
“The Rise of Cheap Labor,” in Moore, ed.,
Anthropocene or Capitalocene (Oakland:
PM, 2016), 98. The critique of Moore’s ex-
pansive value-related analysis here was
influenced by Kamran Nayeri, “Capitalism
in the Web of Life—A Critique,” Climate
and Capitalism, July 19, 2016, http://
climateandcapitalism.com; Jean Parker,
“Ecology and Value Theory,” International
Socialism 153 (2017); Ian Angus, “Do
Seven Cheap Things Explain the History
of Capitalism?” Climate and Capitalism,
January 10, 2018; Andreas Malm, The
Progress of this Storm (London: Verso,
2018), 178–96.
43. Moore, Capitalism in the Web of
Life, 67.
44. Moore, Capitalism in the Web of
Life, 101–02. By defining appropriation
as drawing on the “work” of nature in
general, while also claiming that appro-
priation as such is theft, Moore implicitly
categorizes all human property and pro-
duction as theft. Moreover, there is no ba-
136 M ONTHLY
sis here for distinguishing bourgeois ap-
propriation (property) from other forms
of appropriation (property), a distinction
that lay at the core of Marx’s own analysis.
45.  Moore is referring not only to hu-
man labor outside the formal economy
but, more importantly, to all the “work”
performed in the physical world of nature
as well. Moore, Capitalism in the Web of
Life, 95.
46. Moore, Capitalism in the Web of Life,
54. Hornborg has argued that “Moore’s
attempts to theorize the appropriation of
ecological framework yields a turgid and
obscure idiom,” which Hornborg blames
on “Marxian dogma.” But Moore’s ap-
proach does not reflect any inherent
shortcomings in Marxian theory, but rath-
er Moore’s own neglect of crucial theoret-
ical distinctions in the classical Marxian
mode. This can be seen most starkly in
his attempt to use a Marxian idiom, with-
out its necessary conceptual framework,
to develop a theory that erases distinc-
tions between bourgeois appropriation
and all other property forms (by relying
on the concept of appropriation in gen-
eral), and between human social labor
and the expenditure of work/energy in
the universe. None of this can be blamed
on Marx or Marxian theory. Alf Hornborg,
Global Magic (London: Palgrave Macmil-
lan, 2016), 169.
47. Moore, Capitalism in the Web of
Life, 71. To be clear, there can be no
doubt that capitalism depends on the
physical appropriation of nature gen-
erally, and in ever greater quantities.
Thus Moore writes of my own work that
“Foster’s insight was to posit capitalism
as an open-flow metabolism, one that
requires more and more Cheap Nature
just to stay in place.” Rather, the issue is
how this relates to value, accumulation,
expropriation, and ecological crisis under
capitalism. Moore, Capitalism in the Web
of Life, 84.
48. Patel and Moore, A History of the
World in Seven Cheap Things, 81, 95
49. Marx, Grundrisse, 357–58. For a
good discussion of some of these issues,
Of course nature is productive, it brings about the most wonderful
creations, of which the evolution of the species over billions of years supplies
the evidence…. In no case, however, is nature productive of value for its
creations are by nature not commodities. Labor, for its part, is productive
because in its operation it changes both itself and nature; and in capitalist
society it is also productive of value. Value is the social relation in which
isolated private labor is linked to aggregate labor, becoming social through
the division of labor.
RE V IE W / J uly – A u g ust
see Ali Douai, “Value Theory in Ecological
Economics,” Environmental Values 18
(2009): 257–84.
50. Moore, Capitalism in the Web of Life,
71, 101–02, “Value in the Web of Life,”
328, and “The Rise of Cheap Labor,” 89. It
should be noted that classical rent theory,
which was concerned with the incorpora-
tion of natural resources in the capitalist
economy and which was key to Marx’s
own economic analysis in this area, is
completely ignored in Capitalism in the
Web of Life. On the ecological aspects of
Marx’s rent theory, see Burkett, Marx and
Nature, 74–75, 90–103.
51.  Moore, “Value in the Web of Life,”
327, Capitalism in the Web of Life, 85,
137, 236. On Moore’s social monism, see
Moore, Capitalism in the Web of Life, 85.
For a critique, see John Bellamy Foster,
“Marxism in the Anthropocene: Dialecti-
cal Rifts on the Left,” International Critical
Thought 6, no. 3 (2016): 393–421; John
Bellamy Foster and Brett Clark, “Marx’s
Ecology and the Left,” Monthly Review
68, no. 2 (2016): 1–25.
52. On the dialectic of barriers and
boundaries, see Marx, Grundrisse, 334–
35, 409–10, 539; Foster, Clark, and York,
The Ecological Rift, 53–72, 284–86.
53. On the contradictions that arise
when ecological crisis is seen mainly as
a question of economic crisis brought on
by increased costs of natural resources,
and not in terms of the degradation of
nature itself, see John Bellamy Foster,
“Capitalism and Ecology: The Nature of
the Contradiction,” Monthly Review 54,
no. 4 (September 2002): 6–16.
54. Marx, Capital, vol. 1, 637–38, vol. 3
949.
55. Marx, Capital, vol. 3, 369; Marx and
Engels, Collected Works, vol. 5 (New York:
International Publishers, 1975), 52; John
Bellamy Foster, “Capitalism and the Ac�-
cumulation of Catastrophe,” Monthly Re-
view 63, no. 7 (December 2011): 1–17;
Saito, Karl Marx’s Ecosocialism, 239–55.
56. Marx, Early Writings, 318.
57.  Foster, Clark, and York, The Ecological
~
—Elmar Altvater, The Future of the Market
2018
Rift, 53–72.
58. Marx, Capital, vol. 1, 871, 927.
59. John Bellamy Foster and Hannah
Holleman, “Weber and the Environ-
ment,” American Journal of Sociology
117, no. 6 (2012): 1650–55.
60. Marx, Capital, vol. 1, 926.
61.  Sven Beckert, Empire of Cotton (New
York: Vintage, 2014); Fraser, “Behind
Marx’s Hidden Abode”; Fraser, “Expropri-
ation and Exploitation in Racialized Capi-
talism”; Dawson, “Hidden in Plain Sight”;
Foster and Clark, “The Expropriation of
Nature”; John Smith, Imperialism in the
Twenty-First Century (New York: Monthly
Review Press, 2016); Mike Davis, Planet
of the Slums (London: Verso, 2007).
62.  Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Capital
(New York: Vintage, 1996).
63. Paul M. Sweezy, “The Communist
Manifesto Today,” Monthly Review 50, no.
1 (May 1998): 8–10.
64.  Karl Polanyi, The Great Transforma-
tion (Boston: Beacon, 1944), 178.
65. Costas Lapavitsas, Profiting with-
out Producing (London: Verso, 2013),
141–46.
66. Marx, Capital, vol. 1, 742.
67.  Moore’s framework of Cheap Nature
relies heavily on the monetary estimates
of environmental services or ecosystem
services developed by neoclassical en-
vironmental economics. Moore, Capital-
ism in the Web of Life, 64. See also the
critique of natural-capital theory in John
Bellamy Foster, “The Ecological Tyranny of
the Bottom Line,” in Richard Hofrichter,
ed., Reclaiming the Environmental De-
bate (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000):
135–53.
68.  Ian Angus, Facing the Anthropocene
(New York: Monthly Review Press, 2016),
54–58; J. R. McNeill and Peter Engelke,
The Great Acceleration (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 2014), 184–90.
69.  Karl Marx, Capital, vol. 3 (London:
Penguin, 1981), 754.
70. Curtis White, The Barbaric Heart
(Sausalito: PoliPoint, 2009).
 n e w fr o m MONTHL Y RE V IE W P RE SS

Culture as Politics
Selected Writings of Christopher Caudwell

HEORY “An extraordinary shooting-star crossing England’s empirical night.”

Edited by David Margolies

—E. P. Thompson
e does justice to the richness of
whole new generation of readers
A RAYCHAUDHURI , School of

ortant British Marxist cultural

and lovingly edited by the greatest
C U LT U R E A S
ensable.”—EDITH HALL , Professor
London

ative British Marxist writer of the

POLITICS Considered by many to be the
most innovative British Marxist
duces Caudwell’s work through his

terest in how things worked—

nguage, and society. In the anti-fascist
SELECTED
m was a system that could not work
age. Self-educated from the age of 15, he
t cultural theory.
writer of the twentieth century,
Christopher Caudwell was killed
eronautic texts and crime fiction, he

WRITINGS OF
l reviews appeared of Illusion and
strikingly original study of poetry’s
organizing of emotion in society plays

in the Spanish Civil War at the

Material in this collection is drawn from

CHRISTOPHER
age of twenty-nine. Culture as
37) was the pen name of Christopher St.
nd thinker. He joined the Communist
grassroots activist, continuing his writing,
printed during his lifetime. In 1936,

Politics introduces Caudwell’s

gades in the anti-fascist struggle against

CAUDWELL
, February 12th 1937, during his first day

us of English at Goldsmiths, University of

work through his most

ics journal Red Letters, edited Writing the
iew,
ial

RK E D I T E D BY DAV I D M A R G O L I E S accessible and relevant writing.

2/5/2018 2:21:43 PM

“It is not difficult to see Caudwell as a phenomenon—as an

extraordinary shooting-star crossing England’s empirical night.”
—E. P. THOMPSON, historian and author,
The Making of the English Working Class

“The selection of writings presented here does justice to the richness

of Caudwell’s thought, and will introduce a whole new generation of
readers to this remarkable thinker.”
—ANINDYA RAYCHAUDHURI, University of St. Andrews

“A revealing set of texts by the most important British Marxist cultural

critic before World War II, meticulously and lovingly edited by the
greatest contemporary expert in the field. Indispensable.”
—EDITH HALL, King’s College London
184 pp | $25 pbk

MONTHLY REVIEW PRESS

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New York, NY 10001
 archive.monthlyreview.org
DOCUMENTS DOI: 10.14452/MR-070-03-2018-07_7

On English Farming and Sewers

JUSTUS VON LIEBIG

On November 7, 1859, the Times of London carried a letter from John Mechi, a
prominent advocate of scientific farming, warning of “the gradual but sure exhaus-
tion of the soil of Great Britain by our new sanitary arrangements, which permit the
excrements (really the food) of 15,000,000 people, who inhabit our towns and cities to
flow wastefully into our rivers.” This “suicidal practice,” he wrote, would inevitably
lead to “great calamities to our nation. Although by extensive purchases of guano,
bones, and feeding stuff, we are trying to mitigate the evil, we are warned by that
great man, Baron Liebig (the Sir Isaac Newton of agricultural science), that these
attempts are but as a drop compared with what we waste.”
Redirecting human excrement from sewers to the land, Mechi wrote, is “the only
profitable and available means of providing food for the people.” He appended (and
the Times published) long excerpts from Liebig’s 1856 book Letters on Modern
Agriculture making the same points and attributing the long survival of Chinese
civilization to its collection and use of human excrement as fertilizer.
The same issue of the Times carried an editorial leader complaining that the
Metropolitan Board of Works was procrastinating on London’s sewage problem: one
member, A. H. Layard, received particular criticism.
Mechi sent that issue of the Times to Liebig, who was then teaching in Munich.
Liebig’s substantial reply appeared in the December 23 issue, and was subsequent-
ly reprinted in other English newspapers and magazines. At the same time, the
American Consul in Munich, who had helped Liebig with the translation, sent copies
to the United States, where it was published by the New York Times, Scientific
American, and other publications, early in 1860.
Liebig’s letter was an important contribution to the public debate on the meta-
bolic rift that prevented urban waste from being returned to the soil. It reflected
Liebig’s mature views on the subject, which were soon to be presented at length in
the controversial seventh edition of his Agricultural Chemistry, a book that Marx
studied carefully while writing Capital.
To our knowledge, Justus von Liebig’s 1859 letter to the Times has not been repub-
lished since, so we are pleased to provide the full text here.
—Ian Angus

MUNICH, Thursday, Nov. 17, 1859.

DEAR SIR:
Your letter of the 7th of November to the Times, furnishes me an oc-
casion to express to you my sincere thanks for the views to which you
there give utterance, and which I have labored many years to impress. I
am sorry not to be able to say that my efforts have been attended with

138
F armin g and S ewers 139

any perceptible results, and I regard it as a fortunate event that a man

of so eminently practical a character as yourself has now for the first
time, in the interest of agriculture and the national welfare, taken up
the question of the “sewerage of towns” with warmth, and in language
adapted to produce conviction. It is my ardent wish that you may succeed
in awakening the English people to your own convictions; for in that case
the ways and means for setting aside the difficulties which stand in the
way of procuring manure from the “sewerage of towns” will certainly
be found, and a future generation will look upon those men who have
devoted their energies to the attainment of this end, as the greatest bene-
factors of their country.
The ground of my small success lies clearly in the fact, that the major-
ity of farmers do not know the extent to which their own interests are
concerned in this matter, and because the views and conceptions of most
men in regard to the circuit of life and the laws of the preservation of
our race, do not generally rise above those of C. FOURIER, the inventor
of the phalanstery. He proposed, as you know, to supply the wants of the
occupants of his phalanstery by means of eggs. He supposed it was only
necessary to procure a couple of hundred thousand hens, each of which
would lay thirty-six eggs a year, making as many millions of eggs, which,
sold in England, would produce an immense income. FOURIER knew very
-well that hens lay eggs, but he seemed not to know that in order to lay
an egg they must eat an amount of corn its equal in weight. And so most
men do not know that the fields, in order permanently to yield their har-
vests, must either contain, or else receive from the hands of man, certain
conditions which stand in the same relation to the products of the field
as the hen’s food does to the egg she lays. They think that diligent till-
age and good weather are sufficient to produce a harvest; they therefore
regard this question as one in which they are wholly unconcerned, and
look forward carelessly and with indifference to the future.
As physicians, who in the apparent signs of a young man’s blooming
health, discern the fatal worm which threatens to undermine his organic
frame, so in this case should those discerning men who are capable of com-
prehending the range of the question, raise earlier the voice of warning.
It is true that the diligent tillage of the fields, sunshine, and timely rain,
are the outward conditions, perceptible to all men, of good harvests, but
these are perfectly without effect upon the productiveness of the field, un-
less certain things not so easy of perception by the senses are present in
the soil, and these are the elements which serve for nourishment—for the
production of roots, leaves and seeds—and which are present in the soil
always in very small quantity in proportion to the mass of the soil itself.
140 M ONTHLY RE V IE W / J uly – A u g ust 2018

These elements are taken from the soil in the products of the field, in
the corn, or in the flesh of the animals nourished by these products, and
daily experience shows, that even the most fruitful field ceases after a
certain series of harvests to produce these crops.
A child can comprehend that, under these circumstances, a very produc-
tive field, in order to remain very productive, or even simply productive,
must have the elements which had been withdrawn in the harvests per-
fectly restored; that the aggregate of the conditions must remain, in order
to produce the aggregate results, and that a well, however deep it may be,
which receives no supply of water, must in the end become empty, if its
water is constantly pumped out. Our fields are like this well of water. For
centuries those elements which are indispensable to the reproduction of
the field crops, have been taken from the soil in those crops, and that, too,
without being restored. It has only recently been ascertained how small a
supply of these elements the soil really has. A beginning has been made
to restore to the fields the loss which they sustain through the annual
harvests, by introducing from external sources manures containing the
same elements. Only a very few of the better informed farmers perceive
the necessity of this restoration, and those of them who have the means
have zealously endeavored to increase the amount of these elements in
their fields; but by far the greater part of them know nothing of such res-
toration—they think that they may continue to take from the field as long
as there is anything left, and that it will be time enough to provide for this
necessity when it knocks at their doors. They do not of course know how
large their stock on hand is, nor are they aware that when the necessity
shows itself, there will then be no means to meet it. They know not that
what they have wasted is irretrievable.
The loss of these elements is brought about by the “sewerage system of
towns.” Of all the elements of the fields, which, in their products in the
shape of corn and meat, are carried into the cities and there consumed,
nothing, or as good as nothing, returns to the fields. It is clear that if
these elements were collected without loss, and every year restored to
the fields, they would then retain the power to furnish every year to the
cities the same quantity of corn and meat; and it is equally clear that if
the fields do not receive back these elements, agriculture must gradually
cease. In regard to the utility of the avails of the “sewerage of towns”
as manures, no agriculturist, and scarcely an intelligent man, has any
doubt; but as to their necessity, opinions are very various.
Many are of the opinion that corn, meat, and manures, are wares,
which, like other wares, can be purchased in the market; that with
the demand the price may perhaps rise; but this will also stimulate the
F armin g and S ewers 141

production, and that all turns upon having the means to purchase, and
so long as England has coal and iron she can exchange the products of
her industry for the corn, meat and manure which she has not. In this
respect I think it would be wise not to be too confident of the future, for
the time may perhaps come, even in half a century, that not one of those
countries upon whose excess England has hitherto drawn, will be able
to supply her with corn and that too, from the natural law, that what
is true of the smallest piece of ground is true also of a great country—it
ceases to produce corn if the conditions of the reproduction of the corn
which has been carried off are not restored to it. Nor, furthermore, is it
certain whether the corn-growing lands will always desire to exchange
their corn for the products of English industry, since they may no longer
need those products, or at least not in the ratio of England’s need of corn.
In the countries of Europe, and in the United States of North America,
great efforts are made to become in this respect independent of England,
as being in the end the only way of keeping up the corn prices in these
countries, so as to repay the labor of the people.
In the United States the population increases at a still greater ratio than
in other countries, while the corn production upon the land under culti-
vation has constantly fallen off.
History teaches that not one of all those countries which have pro-
duced corn for other lands have remained corn markets, and England has
contributed her full share towards rendering unproductive the best lands
of the United States, which have supplied her with corn, precisely as old
Rome robbed Sardinia, Sicily and the rich lands of the African coast of
their fertility.
Finally, it is impossible in civilized countries to raise the corn produc-
tion beyond a certain limit, and this limit has become so narrow that
our fields, are no longer capable of a higher yield without an increase of
their effective elements by the introduction of manures from abroad. By
means of the application of guano and bones, the farmer of most limited
capacity learns the real meaning of such increase; he learns that the pure
system of stall or home-made manures is a true and genuine robbing sys-
tem. In consequence of his restoring in the guano and bones but a small
portion of the very same elements of seeds and of fodder which had been
withdrawn from his fields by centuries of cultivation, their products are
wonderfully increased. Experiments instituted with special reference to
this end in six different parts of the Kingdom of Saxony, showed that each
hundred weight of guano put upon a field produced 150 lbs. of wheat,
400 lbs. of potatoes, and 280 lbs. of clover, more than was produced by
the same-sized piece of ground without guano, and from this it may be
142 M ONTHLY RE V IE W / J uly – A u g ust 2018

calculated how enormously the corn and flesh production of Europe has
been increased by the yearly importation of 100,000 tons, or 2,000,000
cwt. [hundredweight] of guano.
The effect of guano and bones should have taught the farmer the real
and only cause of the exhaustion of his fields; it should have brought
him to perceive in what a condition of fertility he might have preserved
his fields, if the elements of the guano which he has transported in the
shape of meat and products of his fields into the cities, were recovered
and brought into a form which would admit of their being restored every
year to his fields.
To an understanding of this, however, the farmer has not yet come;
for, as his forefathers believed that the soil of their fields was inexhaust-
ible, so the farmer of the present day believes that the introduction of
manures from abroad will have no end. It is much simpler, he thinks, to
buy guano and bones, than to collect their elements from the sewers of
cities, and if a lack of the former should ever arise, it will then be time-
enough to think of a resort to the latter. But of all the farmer’s erroneous
opinions, this is the most dangerous and fatal.
If it is perceived that no country can perpetually supply another with
corn, then must it be perceived that the importation of manures from an-
other country must cease still earlier, since their exportation diminishes
the production of corn and meat in that country in so rapid proportions
that this decrease in a very short time manifestly forbids the exporta-
tion of manures. If it is considered that a pound of bones contains in its
phosphoric acid the necessary condition for the production of 60 lbs. of
wheat; that if the English fields have become capable, by the importa-
tion of 1,000 tons of bones, of producing 200,000 bushels more of wheat
in a series of years than they would have produced without this supply,
then we can judge of the immense loss of fertility which the German
fields have sustained by the exportation of the many hundred thousand
tons of bones which have gone from Germany to England. It will be con-
ceived that if this exportation had continued, Germany would have been
brought to that point, that she could no longer have been able to supply
the demand of her own population for corn. In many parts of Germany,
from which formerly large quantities of bones were exported, it has al-
ready come to be the case, that these bones must, at a much higher price,
be bought back again in the form of guano, in order to attain to the pay-
ing crops of former time.
The exportation of bones for so many years from Germany was possible
only because the German farmers had less knowledge of the real nature
of their business than the English, believing as they did that practice
F armin g and S ewers 143

and science taught doctrines contradictory to each other, and were fun-
damentally different things, and that they must trust not in the laws of
nature, but in recipes. Things have now changed for the better, although
not to the extent to be desired, for the German farmers do not as yet
generally understand the value of the element of bones for preserving
the fertility of their fields, not to speak of the restoration of their former
fertility; for if they all understood this, still no one could have any more
bones; at all events, no more than those which he brings to market in his
grain and cattle.
The prices of bones have become so high in Germany as to forbid their
exportation, and if the question should be put to English commerce,
whence it furnishes the English farmer with this to him so indispensable
manure, the answer would produce astonishment, for this commerce has
so far robbed all the inhabited parts of the earth, that the manufacturer
of super-phosphate can only set his hopes upon the phosphate lime of the
mineral kingdom.
In relation to guano, I have been assured that in 20 or 25 years, if its
use should increase in even the same proportion as hitherto, there will
not remain in South America enough to freight a ship. We will, however,
suppose its supply and that of bones to continue for fifty years, or even
longer—then what will be the condition of England when the supply of
guano and bones is exhausted?
This is one of the easiest of all questions to answer. If the common
“sewerage system” is retained, then the imported manures, guano, and
bones, make their way into the sewers of the cities, which, like a bot-
tomless pit, have for centuries swallowed up the guano elements of the
English fields, and after a series of years the land will find itself precisely
in the condition it was in before the importation of guano and bones
commenced; and after England shall have robbed the cultivated lands of
Europe even to complete exhaustion, and taken from them the power
to furnish her longer with corn and manure, then she will not be richer
than before in the means of producing corn and wheat, but will, from
that time forth, become even poorer in these means.
By the importation of guano and bones the population has, however, in
consequence of the increased production of corn and meat, increased in
a greater ratio than would have been possible without this importation of
manures, and this population will make upon the rulers of the State their
natural demand for food.
If men do not deem it desirable that the balance between population
and the supply of food be restored by means of exterminating wars and
revolutions, (in which the want of food has always played a certain part,)
144 M ONTHLY RE V IE W / J uly – A u g ust 2018

or by means of wasting plagues, pestilence, and famine, or by emigra-

tions en masse, then should they reflect that the time has arrived for get-
ting a clear view in regard to the causes of the existence of the increase
of population. A very little reflection will lead to the conviction that the
relations of populations are governed by a great and comprehensive natu-
ral law, according to which the return, duration, increase or diminution
of a natural phenomenon depends upon the return, duration, increase, or
diminution of its conditions. This law governs the return of the harvest
upon our fields, the maintenance and increase of the population, and it
is easy to see that a violation of this natural law must exert upon all these
relations a pernicious influence, which can be set aside in no other way
than by the removal of its causes. If, then, it is known that certain exist-
ing relations work deleteriously upon the fields, if it can be foreseen that
their continuance must bring about the ruin of agriculture, if there is but
a single one of all the means which have hitherto resisted this deleteri-
ous influence and made it less sensibly felt, which can be safely relied
upon to secure a perpetual fertility to our fields, and it is certain that this
means, by a simple change and improvement of the existing deleterious
state of things, can be obtained, then it becomes us to think whether a
nation should not summon up all her intellectual and material resources
in order to preserve these fundamental conditions of her welfare.
It has been maintained that the recovering of the manure-elements out
of the sewers in the large cities is impracticable. I am not ignorant of the
difficulties which stand in its way—they are indeed very great; but if the
engineers would come to an understanding with the men of science in
relation to the two purposes—the removal of the contents of the sew-
ers, and the recovery of their valuable elements for agriculture—I do not
doubt that a good result would follow. Intelligence, in union with Capital,
represents a power in England which has rendered possible and practi-
cable things of much greater apparent difficulty. I look forward with deep
concern to the solution of the “sewerage question.” For if this question
is decided in Great Britain without regard to the wants of agriculture, we
can scarcely hope for anything better upon the continent.
Permit me to add still a few words in relation to the leading article of
the Times of the same date, in which the one side of this question is taken
up with great clearness, while the author of the article seems to have
views not quite correct in regard to its bearings as it presents itself to my
mind. The mistake into which he has fallen arises from his confounding
the condition of a State with that of its population.
In the natural sciences we know nothing of a State, of its might or
its feebleness. We know only of lands, their geological formation, their
F armin g and S ewers 145

climate and soil, and whether the soil contains the natural conditions
for the subsistence of man and beast. In places where these conditions
are abundantly present, and geological circumstances do not hinder their
intercourse, men cannot be exterminated. The most wasting war cannot
rob a land of the conditions which nature has given, nor can peace give
them to a land which wants them.
If Mr. LAYARD is disposed to answer the question put to him in the
article of the Times, he will doubtless say that the decay of the admi-
rable system of irrigation rendered the permanent maintenance of a
great population in Assyria and Mesopotamia impossible. Countries may
be fruitful, and become capable of sustaining a large population, when
certain resisting influences, which in their unimpeded working make the
cultivation of the soil impossible, are overcome by human intelligence;
or when a land has all the conditions of productiveness except one, and
then receives the one which it lacked. If Holland were without her dikes,
which must be kept up at great expense, she would produce neither corn
nor meat; the land would be uninhabitable. In a similar manner the in-
habitant of the African oasis protects his grainfields by dikes against the
storms of the desert, which cover his ground with a barren sand. I know
that the prophets of future evil have at all times been derided by their
own generation, but if history and natural law can furnish any ground
whatever for a just conclusion, then there is none which stands upon a
firmer basis than this: That if the British people do not take the pains
to secure the natural conditions of the permanent fertility of their land,
if they allow these conditions as hitherto to be squandered, their fields
will at no distant day cease to yield their returns of corn and meat. Every
man may picture to himself the state of things which will then gradually
arise; but it does not belong to the province of natural science to decide
the question whether the might and strength and independence of the
nation can be maintained when this state of things shall have arisen.

Believe me, dear Sir,

Very truly and respectfully yours,
JUSTUS VON LIEBIG.
 archive.monthlyreview.org
DOI: 10.14452/MR-070-03-2018-07_8

1862 Preface to Agricultural Chemistry

JUSTUS VON LIEBIG

In 1862, Justus von Liebig published the seventh edition of his Organic Chemistry
in its Application to Agriculture and Physiology, more commonly known as
Agricultural Chemistry. It was standard for Liebig’s work to be immediately trans-
lated into English. However, the first volume of the 1862 edition of Agricultural
Chemistry, particularly its long and incendiary introduction, included an extensive
critique of British high farming. Liebig’s English publisher, Walton, declared it “libel-
ous” and destroyed his copy. Hence, the complete work was never published in English.
However, in 1863, the second volume was translated by the Irish scientist John
Blyth as The Natural Laws of Husbandry and published by Appleton in New
York. That book included the preface to the 1862 edition, but in an abridged and
subdued form, with Liebig’s references to the “robbery economy” and “Rob-Culture”
(or “robbery culture”) missing or presented in Aesopian terms.
Nevertheless, an English translation of both Liebig’s preface and introduction had
been completed in January 1863 by Maria Gilbert, the wife of Joseph Henry Gilbert,
one of Britain’s leading agricultural chemists—a former pupil of Liebig, and direc-
tor of the agricultural experiment station at Rothamsted. Maria Gilbert’s transla-
tion, written in her elegant longhand, is held in the archives of the Rothamsted
Experiment Station (now Rothamsted Research). What follows is Maria Gilbert’s
complete translation of the 1862 preface, transcribed by André Toshio Villela
Iamamoto. Brackets indicate text introduced by the editors for clarity. We publish
it here with the permission of Liz Allsop, head librarian at Rothamsted Research,
who helped with various inquiries. Fred Magdoff also played a key role in making
this possible.
In the mid-nineteenth century, English agriculture was dominated by a system of
large landowners receiving prodigious rents from numerous tenant farmers, each
of whom usually worked less than fifty acres of land. Many of these tenants, while
incorporating forms of crop rotation, were practical farmers, working out of tradi-
tion or following earlier practical guides to English husbandry as handed down by
Sir Humphry Davy and others, and were reluctant to embrace scientific agricultural
chemistry as it had developed by the mid-nineteenth century. Nevertheless, more
and more agriculture was coming to be dominated by large landowners, who guid-
ed the operations. British agriculture was becoming increasingly intensive, import-
ing large amounts of fertilizer and emphasizing the maximum commercial output.
This system of high farming was, in Liebig’s terms, an advanced “robbery economy.”
All these concerns are thus reflected in his preface, designed to highlight the reasons
for the polemic in his introduction and much of the rest of the work.
Liebig had been writing of the robbery economy since the late 1850s, notably in his
Letters on Modern Agriculture (1859). Concerns over English-style commercial
and industrial agriculture and its extraction of fertilizer resources (bones, guano)

146
L iebi g ' s 1 8 6 2 P reface 147

from the rest of the world had increasingly come to dominate his thinking. As he
notes in the preface, he had been “reproached on many sides for describing modern
Agriculture as a system of Plunder/Robbery.” An example of such criticisms was the
New York magazine The Cultivator, which in its January 1860 issue sharply criti-
cized Liebig’s notion of a “robbery system,” declaring rather that “the soil is given
to man to use. The materials from which it is made exist certainly in inexhaustible
quantity, and for the most part the soil is inexhaustible.” It was in the face of such re-
sistance that Liebig placed renewed emphasis on the growing problem of the robbery
of the soil and the constant need for its replenishment through nutrient recycling.
This is now understood as one of the great early developments in modern ecology,
leading to the development of contemporary theories of soil metabolism.
—John Bellamy Foster

In the sixteen years which have elapsed since the publication of my

“Chemistry applied to Agriculture and Physiology” I have had abundant
opportunity of estimating the impediments which stand in the way of
scientific doctrines passing into the domain of practical Agriculture.
The reason of which is, especially, that no connexion was formed be-
tween Practice and Science.
Agriculturists have apparently had a common prejudice that less [intel-
lectual] cultivation may suffice for their industry than for any other, so
that reflection may endanger the practical ability of an Agriculturist if
he appropriates to himself what Science may have won for his improve-
ment and placed at his disposal; what they were able to comprehend was
considered as Theory, which as the exact opposite of Practice, was little
esteemed or not noticed. It was a fact that scientific doctrine or Theory
frequently brought only injury to the practical man as soon as he turned
his attention to it; what he attempted was often enough quite wrong:
he knew not that its right application did not depend on itself, and that
it had to be learnt in the same way as the dexterous management of a
complex instrument.
No one will consider it a matter of indifference whether the ideas which
influence a man and determine his actions are true or false.
By this want of all intelligence, Practice saw no means of improvement
in all the correct ideas which Science gave into her hand, in the elucida-
tion of the growth of Plants and of the share in it belonging to soil and air,
to tillage and manuring; while Agriculturists were unable to find out the
connexion between scientific teaching and the Phenomena which their
industry presented to them, they from their stand-point, arrived at the
conclusion that generally no connexion existed between the two.
The practical farmer allows himself to be guided by certain facts observed,
during a long period, in his neighbourhood, or, if he aspires to more general
148 M ONTHLY RE V IE W / J uly – A u g ust 2018

views, by certain authorities whose system of management is considered

a pattern. No words could prove this system, no scale exists to measure it.
What Thaer found to be good and useful upon his fields in Möglin, is
considered equally good and useful for all German fields, and the facts
ascertained by Lawes upon a quite small strip of field in Rothamsted, are
regarded as axioms for all English fields.
Under the dominion of Tradition and Faith in Authority the practical
man has renounced the power of rightly comprehending the facts which
come daily under his notice, and at length he is unable to discriminate
them from mere opinions. And so it has come to pass, that when Science
has doubted the Truth of her explanations they have affirmed that Science
has disputed the existence of facts. If the former says that it may be desir-
able to supply the deficiency of stable manure by its operative constitu-
ents, or that superphosphate of lime may be no specific manure for roots,
and Ammonia no specific manure for corn-plants, they have supposed
that Science has denied their efficacy.
About misunderstandings of this kind there has been a long warfare;
the practical man has not comprehended scientific conclusions and has
believed himself obliged to defend his traditional notions; his dispute
was not with scientific principles which he did not at all understand, but
was with his own mis-conceptions of them.
Before this quarrel is settled, and Agriculturists themselves become the
arbitrators in it, little real help can be expected from Science, and I much
doubt whether that time is yet come. However, I fix my hopes upon the
young generation, who start in Practice with an entirely different prepa-
ration from that of their fathers. As far as I am concerned, I have attained
that age when the elements of the dying body betray a certain longing to
begin a new career, when one thinks of setting his house in order, and
when one dare not keep back what one has still to say.
Since every experiment in Agriculture endures a year or more before its
full results are given, so there remains scarcely any prospect that I shall
live to see the results of my teaching. Under these circumstances the best
that I can do seems to be so to arrange them, that for the future it will
be impossible for those to misunderstand them, who take the trouble
to thoroughly acquaint themselves with them. From this point of view
must the polemical parts of my book be judged. For a long time I believed
that in Agriculture, as is customary in Science, it was sufficient to teach
Truth in order to diffuse it and not to trouble oneself about Error. At
length, however, I perceive that this has been a false way, and that the
altars of lies must be destroyed before Truth can obtain secure ground.
Everyone will concede to me the right of purifying my teaching from the
L iebi g ' s 1 8 6 2 P reface 149

defilements which, for so many years, have, without discernment, been

heaped upon it.
I have been reproached on many sides for describing modern Agriculture
as a system of Plunder/Robbery (Raubwirthschaft), and after the communi-
cations which many Farmers have made to me respecting their manage-
ment, my charge against such [individual farmers] cannot be maintained.
I have been assured that in North Germany, in the Kingdom of Saxony,
Hanover, Brunswick, etc., very many Farmers most carefully give very
much more to their fields, than they take from them, so that in their case
we cannot speak of a “Rob-Culture.” But taken as a whole, it is relatively
only the few who know how it is with their fields.
I have never yet met with a Farmer who had taken the trouble, as is
customary in other trades for satisfaction to one’s self, to keep a credit
and debit account for each of his fields in order to register what he gives
to and takes away from each.
It is an old inherited disease with Farmers for each to judge Agriculture
in the whole from his own narrow standpoint, and if one avoids doing
wrong, it is a sufficient proof to him that all do right.
The enormous exportation of bones from Germany is a matter-of-fact
proof how small, generally, is the number of Agriculturists who trouble
themselves about the requisite compensation of phosphates, and if only
one small manufactory in Bavaria (Henfeld) exports into Saxony about 1
½ million pounds of bones from the neighbourhood of Munich, it can
only be done by robbing the Bavarian land.
The great plunders the small, the learned the ignorant, and this will
always be.
But also the future history of the German beetroot sugar manufacture,
may perhaps still prove to many of our contemporaries that in many
parts of north Germany a mischievous robbery of the land is perpetrated.
By the application of Superphosphate of Lime and Guano very large
crops of roots for sugar have been obtained, and as this has continued
already for many years without diminishing Harvests, the root-planters
believe in their unintelligent minds that these good crops will always
be got, in the face of the fact that by this management the potass in
their field is always being withdrawn, and must at length be exhaust-
ed.1 Potass, they say, may be a much too costly a manure, and as, for its
price, they are able to purchase from three to four times more super-
phosphate and guano, they believe that by this addition they do better
for their land. Certainly they do not know how high the price of the
potass in the stable manure is with which they try to compensate for it
[the lost nutrient].
150 M ONTHLY RE V IE W / J uly – A u g ust 2018

Nothing can be more certain than that they deceive themselves in their
supposition and that in the molasses and refinery charcoal they export
the most important matter of sugar production and herewith their fields.2
They will find by experience, perhaps in ten years, as is incontestably the
case already in France and Bohemia, that by this method after a certain
time, not gradually but suddenly, the sugar contents of the roots from 11
and 10 percent, will sink down to 4 and 3 percent, and that superphos-
phate and guano will no longer be able to increase the produce of those
same fields which formerly yielded such large crops of sugar.
And thus, two generations hence, those countries in which sugar culture
is flourishing now according to this system, will be cited as instances of
what the foolishness of man could do in an industry which, according to
its nature, can continue for ever on the same land without exhausting it.
In England exactly similar practice has been followed. In all turnip fields
from which the roots have been taken without compensating (restoring)
the potass, an equal deterioration of their quality has resulted, and only
in those places where the roots have been fed off by sheep upon the field
itself, thus restoring the potass-contents, have the crops remained unal-
tered in quantity and quality.
In the first volume of this work the section contained in the earlier edi-
tions on “the chemistry of fermentation, decomposition and putrefaction”
has been excluded, not being immediately connected with Agriculture.
By the comprehensive and important works of Pasteur, Berthelot, H.
Schroeder and others, our knowledge of the processes of fermentation
and putrefaction has, since 1846, been very essentially enlarged, so that I
consider it suitable to devote a separate work to the subject, on which I
am now engaged.
Munich. Sept. 1862
N ot e s
1.  -
ash.”
2. Liz Allsopp notes: “Schlempkohle—a
by-product of sugarbeet refinery used for
the manufacture of potash. The sentence
is obscure (to me!) in the original Ger-
man and from the crossing out I assume
that Maria Gilbert found it a problem
too. I think the general meaning is that
the nutrients in these by-products are es-
sential for sugar production and that by
‘exporting’ them farmers risk reducing
the fertility of their fields.
 151
(continued from page 152)

thinkers who contended that nature itself creates commodity value under the capi-
talist system, and who faulted the labor theory of value (particularly the Marxian
version) for arguing otherwise. Altvater described this dominant view as a form
of commodity fetishism, which disguises the underlying contradictions between
capital and nature and between capital and labor—in effect concealing exactly
what Marx sought to uncover. For bourgeois economics, Altvater wrote, “nature is
only interesting as natural capital; human beings as human capital.”
Altvater’s views on the ecological contradictions of capitalism can also be seen in
an important review that he wrote for MR in January 2007 on Paul Burkett’s Marxism
and Ecological Economics. He ended his deeply thoughtful inquiry into Burkett’s book
with the pregnant question: “What are the forms of reappropriation of the alien-
ated and dispossessed spaces (and times) of peoples? The struggles for reappro-
priation are going on today, everywhere. There is an urgent need for theoretical
clarification.” As always, his work searched for the next question, thereby capturing
the historical specificity of our times and the changing needs of praxis.
Joel Kovel died on April 30, 2018, at age eighty-one. Born in Brooklyn in 1936, he
received his medical degree from Columbia University and went on to direct the
Albert Einstein Medical School in the Bronx from 1977 to 1983, serving as a profes-
sor until 1986. He taught at Bard College from 1988 to 2009. Always politically ac-
tive, he ran for the U.S. Senate in New York on the Green Party ticket in 1988 and
against Ralph Nader in the Green Party primary in 2000. In 2001, Kovel co-wrote
The Ecosocialist Manifesto with MR author Michael Löwy; two years later, he took
over as editor-in-chief of the journal Capitalism Nature Socialism following the retire-
ment of its founder, James O’Connor, a position that he held until 2012. In 2007, he
helped form the International Ecosocialist Network.
Kovel wrote several important books, including White Racism (1970), History and
Spirit (1991), and Overcoming Zionism (2007). His main ecosocialist work was The Enemy
of Nature (2007), in which he made his most important innovation through the rein-
troduction, based on Marx, of the concept of “usufruct,” the legal right to use the
property of another so long as it is not damaged—a concept he employed to move
toward collective property rights and the protection of nature. Kovel wrote almost
twenty articles for MR in the 1980s and ’90s. One of these, “The Enemy of Nature”
(February 1997), introduced some of the theses developed a decade later in his book
of the same title. In March 1997, he wrote a particularly insightful review for MR of
István Mészáros’s Beyond Capital. Near the end he declared, quite characteristically:
“As bizarre as it may sound, there is nothing stopping socialism but the absence of
a socialist spirit. The numbers are there, justice is there…but the spirit is missing.”
Kovel never ceased trying to instill such a “socialist spirit” in those around him
through the example of his own radicalism.
152
(continued from inside back cover)

~
One of the crucial intellectual developments of our time is the rapid growth
of inquiry into ecological Marxism in China, where vital debates are developing
on the course of “ecological civilization.” (See Zhihe Wang et al., “The Ecological
Civilizations Debate in China,” MR, November 2014; Andre Vltcheck, “China’s
Determined March Toward Ecological Civilization,” Investig’Action, May 16, 2018,
http://investigaction.net.) We recently obtained a copy of a new book, The Ecological
Crisis and the Logic of Capital by Chen Xueming (Brill, 2017), that will no doubt be
of interest to readers following these discussions. The book is divided into three
parts, each about 200 pages in length. The first two deal with “Western ecologi-
cal Marxism” (the preferred designation in China), with Part One focusing entirely
on the ideas of MR editor John Bellamy Foster, and Part Two on the work of other
ecosocialists/Western Marxists, including Marcuse, Gorz, O’Connor, Burkett, David
Pepper, Ben Agger, and William Leiss. Readers already familiar with Western eco-
socialism, however, will be most interested in Part Three, in which Chen develops
his own analysis of the wider implications of ecological Marxism, and especially the
section’s last three chapters, which deal directly with its implications for China.
~
MR readers will be interested to know that the users of the website Goodreads
have compiled a list of the 104 top books in the Critical Thinking category. In
second place is John Bellamy Foster, Brett Clark, and Richard York, The Ecological
Rift (Monthly Review Press, 2010). The top five books on the list are (1) Tim Butcher,
Blood River; (2) The Ecological Rift; (3) Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being;
(4) Naomi Klein, The Shock Doctrine; and (5) Victor E. Frankel, Man’s Search for Meaning.
For the complete list, visit http://goodreads.com.
~
After seventeen years as associate editor of MR, Michael D. Yates is stepping down
in order to focus his energies on Monthly Review Press, which has flourished in
recent years under his directorship. All of us at MR would like to offer our heartfelt
gratitude to Michael for helping make MR what it is today, while also contributing
to the magazine’s classic tradition of political-economic critique. We look forward
to continuing to work together at the press. Thank you, Michael!
In his place, beginning with this issue, Brett Clark, a member of MR editorial
committee for almost two decades (and himself a former director of the press), has
agreed to take on the role of associate editor of the magazine. Congratulations, Brett!
~
Two of the world’s leading ecosocialists, both MR authors, died recently.
Elmar Altvater died on May 1, 2018, at age seventy-nine. Born in Germany in 1938, he
first read Marx’s Capital at age twenty-three and was to emerge as one of the world’s
leading Marxist political economists. In 1971, he became a professor of political econ-
omy at the Otto Suhr Institute at the Free University of Berlin, a position he held until
his retirement in 2004. His most influential work on ecosocialism (and on the role of
money in capitalism) was The Future of the Market (1991). His final two books—not yet
translated into English—were Rediscovering Marx and Rediscovering Engels.
In a July 2017 article entitled “A Gap in Marx’s Work or the Ignorance of the
Reader?” (Marx 200, July 20, 2017, http://marx200.org), Altvater criticized left

(continued on page 151)

 Archive user name: mrjul password: b2c0
(continued from inside front cover)

onto Marxism (or sometimes Marxism onto Green theory), with the Green element
often predominant. The result was a centaur-like hybrid construction, whose two
parts were never fully integrated.
In the late 1990s, a new ecological Marxist strand within the ecosocialist tradi-
tion arose—partly in response to the earlier hybrid, red-green approach—which
returned to the foundations of classical historical materialism, chiefly inspired
by the recovery and renewal of Marx’s theory of metabolic rift. This mode of in-
quiry was advanced by such figures (in addition to the contributors to this issue)
as Elmar Altvater, Paul Burkett, Fred Magdoff, Richard York, Chris Williams, Del
Weston, Rebecca Clausen, Eamonn Slater, the later Löwy, the later Salleh, Andreas
Malm, and Kohei Saito. Many went on to further extend eco-Marxist analysis, using
the metabolic rift methodology to analyze a wide range of ecological issues, includ-
ing climate change, nutrient loading, deforestation, urbanization, animal abuse,
oceanic crises, and environmental justice.
In our view, ecosocialist praxis owes its recent rapid growth and its global im-
pact to the discussions and debates emanating from all three of these approaches,
notwithstanding their sometimes sharp differences. Nevertheless, this special is-
sue of MR is dedicated specifically to the further development of the ecological
critique embodied in Marx’s theory of metabolic rift—with which the magazine
has been closely associated—and hence to the continuing evolution of ecological
Marxism. All the articles in this issue thus explore the metabolic rift perspective
in various ways, using it to uncover the core socioecological contradictions of capi-
talism, as well as possible paths toward a new organic system of social metabolic
reproduction—one that will meet the needs of humanity as a whole while protect-
ing the earth and human generations to come.
In their introduction, John Bellamy Foster and Brett Clark describe the relation
between the “robbery of nature” and the metabolic rift, building on the ideas of
Justus von Liebig and Marx. Hannah Holleman examines the “dust-bowlification”
of the earth in the twenty-first century and its connections to the Dust Bowl of
the 1930s, seen as intrinsically related to questions of economic, social, and envi-
ronmental justice. Ian Angus examines how the nineteenth-century disruption of
the soil, as depicted in the analysis of Liebig, Marx, and their contemporaries, was
related to the crisis of pollution and the disposal of human waste in the new urban
industrial centers, including the question of the return of these wastes to the soil.
Michael Friedman shows how the concept of metabolic rift can illuminate the in-
terrelated social and ecological disruptions of the human microbiome. Brett Clark
and Stefano B. Longo study the land–sea rift associated with nutrient overloading
from nitrogen and phosphorous runoff, giving rise to numerous dead zones in the
ocean. Finally, John Bellamy Foster’s article “Marx, Value, and Nature” addresses
attempts by some left environmental thinkers to develop models that destabilize
the labor theory of value, extending the notion of the generation of (economic)
value to everything in the natural world, and thereby erasing the main contradic-
tions between the capitalist system and the Earth system.

(continued on page 152)

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 n e w fr om MON THL Y REVIE W PRE SS

MISEDUCATING FOR GERALD COLES

THE GLOBAL miseducating
ECONOMY global economy
the
How Corporate Power

for
Damages Education and
Subverts Students’ Futures
Gerald Coles
“A welcome blast of wisdom and
How Corporate Power
common sense. Teachers desperately Damages Education
need the context Coles provides to and Subverts
Students’
defend and transform our schools.” Futures
—BILL BIGELOW
Curriculum Editor, Rethinking Schools

256 pages | pbk $24

FROM COMMUNE
From COMMUNE to CAPITALISM |

f rom COMMUNE

to CAPITALISM
TO CAPITALISM
How China’s Peasants Lost
How China’s Peasants Lost Collective Collective Farming and
Gained Urban Poverty
Farming and Gained Urban Poverty

Zhun Xu
ZHUN XU
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successes and problems of
ZHUN XU

collective farming in China.”

—DAVID M. KOT
author, The Rise and Fall of
Neoliberal Capitalism

154 pages | pbk $25

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