Karl Marx’ Ecology: Historicity of Social Metabolism

The purpose of this article is to attempt a conceptual reconstruction of Marx’s ecological doctrine of the historicity of social metabolism. Based on the texts of Karl Marx and the works of other authors, using the methods of textual analysis, contextualization, extrapolation and dialectical historicization, the article reconstructs in the very first approximation the dynamics of three historical forms of social metabolism – pre-capitalist, capitalist and post-capitalist. It is shown how in each of these three forms, due to changes in the production and labor energy metabolism between humanity and nature, unique social and ecological formations (totalities, universes) are gradually formed. In the pre-capitalist formation as a whole, there were forms of social metabolism mediated by traditional methods of production, in which simple reproduction is aimed at creating consumer values and natural exchange, which ensured the lack of motivation for large-scale technological and resource pressure on nature and, accordingly, the preservation of relative ecological balance and metabolic equilibrium. In the capitalist formation, there are forms of social metabolism mediated by expanded industrial reproduction, included in the system of private ownership of the means of production, mass wage labor, total commodity-money market relations and the production of exchange values for the purpose of unlimited valorization of capital. Such a system determines the growth of anti–ecological resource and technological exploitation of nature, the desire to “conquer nature”, understood as an “inexhaustible storehouse”, which leads to metabolic gaps – systemic contradictions between the universal metabolism of nature and the productivist-Promethean logic of capitalist social metabolism. Metabolic gaps (for example, between man and nature, city and village, production and consumption, market and biological cycles) lead capitalism to ecological imbalances in all spheres of the social universe. In the future post-capitalist formation, according to Marx, emerge will be forms of social metabolism mediated by nature-saving methods of production; reorientation from the exchange economy to the consumer economy and the transition from expanded reproduction to its sustainable forms; convergence of the city and the countryside; elimination of unnatural needs and practices of their satisfaction; increasing the importance of reproductive and restorative forms of activity; sustainable development and orientation to future generations. The relevance of the study lies in the fact that the identified mechanisms of changes in past and present forms of social metabolism, which constitute the immanent historicity of the socio-ecological universe, allow not only to predict the ecometabolic features of the post-capitalist future, but also to contribute to a gradual practical movement towards this future. Key words: ecology of K. Marx, social metabolism, historicity, social formations, capitalism, post-capitalism, praxis, metabolic rift, ecological imbalance, sustainable reproduction.