Human beings are part of nature. We depend on the earth for food, water, air, energy, shelter and every material used in production, and through labor we transform nature to meet human needs. Every society transforms nature in some way. The question is how production is organized, who controls it and for what purpose.
Capitalism produces for profit
Under capitalism, production is organized for profit. Land, forests, water, minerals, oil and gas become sources of private wealth, and companies compete to extract, produce and sell as much as they profitably can. A capitalist whose costs run higher than competitors’ loses out and can be driven out of business. That competitive pressure pushes capital toward endless expansion.
This creates a basic conflict between what is profitable for capital and what is necessary to sustain human life and the natural systems on which it depends.
A company can make money while poisoning a river. An oil corporation can profit from fossil fuels while the carbon released into the atmosphere heats the planet. A mining company can leave behind poisoned water and ruined land while the ore is sold somewhere else. A factory can cut costs by dumping pollution on the surrounding community.
The profits belong to the owners; the damage is dumped on everyone else. Capital treats nature as a free gift. It pays nothing for the fertility of the soil, the clean air or the stable climate it uses up. Capitalism has no built-in ecological limit on accumulation. As long as more land, energy and natural resources can be turned into profit, competition pushes capital to exploit them.
Capitalism robs the soil and the worker
Marx saw this problem long before climate change became a global crisis. He started from a simple fact: through labor, human beings carry on a constant exchange with nature. We take food, fiber and materials from the earth. In a lasting system, what is taken from the soil goes back to it.
Capitalism breaks that cycle. As capitalist farming drove people off the land and into the cities, food and fiber were shipped hundreds and thousands of miles away. The nutrients they carried never went back to the fields. They ended up as sewage fouling the rivers of the cities, while the soil in the countryside wore out. Marxists call this break the metabolic rift.
Marx put it plainly: “All progress in capitalistic agriculture is a progress in the art, not only of robbing the laborer, but of robbing the soil.” The same system that wears out the worker wears out the earth.
Capital answered the rift by moving it. In the 1800s, Britain scoured the globe for fertilizer — bones from the battlefields of Europe, and guano dug from islands off Peru by bonded Chinese laborers worked nearly to death. Under British rule, Ireland’s grain and cattle were shipped across the sea to feed Britain, taking the fertility of Irish soil with them, even as a million Irish people died in the Great Hunger of 1845–1852. Synthetic fertilizer later took the place of guano. The rift was papered over, and it is still open.
The food system runs on the same robbery
Today’s agribusiness carries the rift around the world. A handful of giant monopolies control seed, fertilizer, processing and the supermarket chains. Fossil fuels go into every step, from the natural gas burned to make nitrogen fertilizer to the trucks, ships and planes that carry food thousands of miles. Fertilizer washes off the fields into rivers and seas, leaving dead zones where fish cannot live.
Small farmers are driven off the land around the world while food is shipped wherever labor is cheapest. Fish caught off Norway is sent to China to be filleted, then shipped back to Norway for sale.
The world produces enough food for everyone, yet hundreds of millions of people go hungry. Food is grown to be sold at a profit, and those who cannot pay go without.
The damage is not shared equally
Environmental destruction does not fall evenly on everyone.
Polluting industries, refineries, mines, waste sites and other environmental hazards are disproportionately concentrated in working-class communities and communities of oppressed peoples. Indigenous nations have repeatedly seen their lands and waters threatened by mining, pipelines, dams and other projects imposed in the interests of capital.
The same inequality exists between nations. Imperialist powers grew wealthy through centuries of colonial conquest, resource extraction and industrial development, consuming enormous quantities of energy and raw materials while much of the destruction was imposed on oppressed nations.
Capital continues to reach across the world for oil, minerals, forests, farmland and other resources. Political and military power is used to protect that access and the profits connected to it.
The environmental struggle therefore cannot be separated from struggles against racism, colonialism, national oppression and imperialism.
Capital makes the decisions
The contradiction has grown enormously since Marx’s time. Capitalism has developed productive forces capable of transforming the entire planet. Coal, oil and gas powered industry, transportation, agriculture and modern cities. The same development created giant energy corporations, banks and other financial interests whose profits are tied to fossil fuels, while imperialist states built military power partly around securing access to oil, gas and other strategic resources.
Climate change is the best known of the rifts capital has opened in the earth’s systems, but it is one of several. Capital is also upsetting the nitrogen and phosphorus cycles, souring the oceans, draining fresh water and driving species to extinction at a pace not seen since the age of the dinosaurs ended.
Climate change is therefore not simply the result of individuals making bad choices.
Workers do not plan how electricity will be generated, how cities are built, whether public transportation exists, what corporations manufacture or where investment goes. Those decisions are made by capitalist owners, banks and governments operating within a system driven by profit, accumulation and competition.
Individual choices can matter, but they cannot overcome decisions built into the organization of production itself.
Reform cannot stop accumulation
Nor can the ecological crisis be solved simply by asking corporations to behave responsibly.
Environmental laws and mass struggles can force real changes — cleaner air and water, restrictions on toxic chemicals, protection of forests, safer workplaces and investment in renewable energy. These gains save lives and are worth fighting for.
But every reform runs into the same limitation: capital must continue accumulating.
Greater efficiency can mean more destruction. A company may learn to use less energy or fewer materials to make each commodity, then use the savings to expand production and sell still more.
The real issue is how much is produced, why it is produced and whether society needs it.
Production is social, control is private
Under capitalism, land, forests, minerals, water and energy enter business calculations mainly as property, commodities and costs.
But nature does not follow the boundaries of private property.
Pollution released in one place can travel thousands of miles. Rivers cross borders. Oceans and the atmosphere belong to no corporation. Carbon dioxide remains in the atmosphere long after the commodity whose production released it has been sold.
The ecological crisis exposes a contradiction running through capitalism itself: production is social, but ownership remains private.
Millions of people collectively produce society’s wealth, yet the major decisions about what is produced, where, how and for what purpose remain in the hands of competing owners. No one plans production for society as a whole.
Socialism makes another relationship possible
With the major means of production under social ownership, society can consciously decide what needs to be produced, how much, where and by what methods. Planning can weigh human need and the long-term protection of land, water, climate and ecosystems instead of subordinating those needs to private profit. It can learn from the small farmers and Indigenous nations who kept the soil fertile for thousands of years.
Under socialism, environmental problems still have to be solved.
Bad decisions can still be made. Scientific knowledge can be incomplete. Protecting the environment requires democratic participation, scientific planning and the active involvement of the people whose lives and work are affected.
But social ownership removes the compulsion to organize production around private profit and capitalist competition. It makes possible the conscious social planning that capitalism cannot provide.
Marx wrote that in a higher form of society, “private ownership of the globe by single individuals will appear quite as absurd as private ownership of one man by another.” No society, he added, not even all of humanity together, owns the earth. We hold it in trust and must hand it down to the generations that follow in better condition than we found it.
Humanity has developed enormous scientific knowledge and productive power. Those capacities can be used to meet human needs while protecting the natural conditions on which human life depends.
The obstacle is not humanity itself.
It is a system that puts endless accumulation above the conditions of life.
Additional reading
“What Every Environmentalist Needs to Know about Capitalism: A Citizen’s Guide to Capitalism and the Environment” — by Fred Magdoff and John Bellamy Foster (2011). An accessible Marxist explanation of why the drive for profit and endless accumulation puts capitalism into conflict with the ecological limits of the planet.
“The Robbery of Nature: Capitalism and the Ecological Rift” — by John Bellamy Foster and Brett Clark (2020). How capitalism robs both the worker and the earth — Marx’s metabolic rift traced from the guano trade and colonial Ireland to today’s agribusiness and climate emergency.
“Capital,” Volume I, Chapter 15: Machinery and Modern Industry — by Karl Marx (1867). Section 10, “Modern Industry and Agriculture,” is Marx’s discussion of how capitalist agriculture undermines both the worker and the lasting fertility of the soil.
“The Part Played by Labour in the Transition from Ape to Man” — by Frederick Engels (1876). Engels explains that human beings are part of nature and warns that apparent victories over nature can produce consequences that rebound against society.
“Facing the Anthropocene: Fossil Capitalism and the Crisis of the Earth System” — by Ian Angus (2016). Connects modern climate science with the historical development of fossil capitalism and the planetary ecological crisis.