Opinion | From Kapital to COVID, it’s clear: Unlimited growth is bad for earth

We need to replace consumerism with “quality of life, human solidarity, and ecological sensibility”.

Much has happened in the interval that separates us from James Watson, who, by inventing the steam engine in 1784 formally marked the beginning of the Industrial Revolution and the world’s first fossil-fuel economy. If the Anthropocene epoch had begun by now, the revolution heightened its fervour, anticipating the emergence of modern human society.

In the early 20th century, the Russian geoscientist Vladimir Vernadsky had the foresight in his books to define the “anthropogenic era”, but in a rather celebratory tone. Vernadsky was a product of his times but also wore an exaggerated technological optimism – a key characteristic of Soviet Marxism – and likely believed in the ultimate triumph of the “Soviet man” over nature.

Today, a new generation of thinkers are highlighting strands of ecological thought in Karl Marx’s work that their predecessors had set aside. On the rift between ecological stability and the capitalist growth, Marx draws on the pioneering research of the German chemist Justus von Liebig to discuss the process by which capitalism tends to deplete soil fertility in Das Kapital:

“Capitalist production, by collecting the population in great centers, and causing an ever-increasing preponderance of town population, on the one hand concentrates the historical motive power of society; on the other hand, it disturbs the circulation of matter between man and the soil, i.e., it prevents the return to the soil of its elements consumed by man in the form of food and clothing; it therefore violates the conditions necessary to lasting fertility of the soil.”

The soil depletion crisis reflects Marx’s fundamental conception of the ‘metabolic rift’. To quote the sociologist John Bellamy Foster, the metabolic rift “concerns the interplay between the degradation of the environment and human development in ways not accounted for in standard economic metrics like GDP”.

The ecological concerns in Marx’s writing were motivated principally by an environmental problem that ravaged Europe and North America in the mid-19th century, the result of intensive farming and rapid urbanisation leading to the depletion of soil nutrients. Reminiscent of India’s current agricultural crisis due to the migration of labour, mid-18th century Europe saw an exodus of people to cities, drawn there by the promises of industrialisation, throwing up the twin problems of massive sewage build-up in urban centres and nutrient depletion in the soil in the countryside. As Marx wrote (vol. 3):

“Excretions of consumption are of the greatest importance for agriculture. So far as their utilization is concerned, there is an enormous waste of them in the capitalist economy. In London, for instance, they find no better use for the excretion of four and a half million human beings than to contaminate the Thames with it at heavy expense.”