Listening to the Silence of the Earth - Why Capital Appropriates from Nature, Capitalism, 19th Century

Listening to the Silence of the Earth - Why Capital Appropriates from Nature, Capitalism, 19th Century
Marx saw that capitalism's destruction of nature is not an accident, but an inevitability inherent in its structure. Capital aims at the self-propagation of profit and treats both labor and nature as means to produce value. Exchange value takes precedence over use value, and nature becomes a storehouse of raw materials in endless supply. In the first volume of his Capital, he wrote that "capital wastes both the health of the workers and the fertility of the earth," showing that the plundering of nature and the exploitation of labor have the same root. Marx further called the phenomenon of the breakdown of the material circulation between man and nature a "metabolic rupture. The industrial revolution of the nineteenth century led to an increasing concentration in cities, and while food and resources were siphoned off to the cities, nutrients were not returned to the earth, making it impossible for the soil to regenerate. Inspired by the work of the chemist Liebig, he saw this
cyclical destruction as a breakdown of social metabolism. Examples such as the pollution of the Thames and the importation of nitrous stone symbolize capitalism's pursuit of profit beyond the limits of nature. For Marx, the deprivation of nature was the internal movement of capital itself.