Today, there are robust discussions on the ecological crisis that pivot around the Anthropocene as a new geological age. Since the entire surface of our planet is now covered by traces of human economic activities, there apparently exists no pristine ‘nature’ that remains untouched by humans. Bill McKibben’s claim about the ‘end of nature’ (McKibben 1989) has become quite compelling 30 years after it was first pronounced, but the full-blown impact of climate change beyond any human control signifies the ultimate failure of the modern Promethean dream of absolute domination over nature. The catastrophic situation created by this failure recalls Engels’s warning about the ‘revenge’ of nature as well as Max Horkheimer’s discussion of the ‘revolt of nature’ in Eclipse of Reason (Horkheimer [1947] 2005: 86).

The ‘revenge’ and ‘revolt’ of nature seem to redistribute the agency, creating a new ontological situation, in which the passive ‘things’ in nature appear to acquire agency against humans. This appearance of the total remaking of nature as well as the new agency of things is the reason why both Noel Castree’s ‘production of nature’ and Bruno Latour’s ‘actor–network theory’ (ANT) are gaining increasing popularity in recent debates over political ecology. While Castree (2005) denies the existence of a nature independent of human beings, Latour (1993) rejects the modern dualist conception of subject and object, redistributing agency to things as ‘actants’. Their ideas are certainly quite different, but they share a common belief in the superiority of ontological monism over dualism in the face of the hybridity of the social and the natural that they think of as characteristic of the Anthropocene.

In this context, the Marxian concept of ‘metabolism’ (Stoffwechsel) as the theoretical foundation for Marxian ecology has been the target of harsh criticism. Especially, its central concept of ‘metabolic rift’ has been accused of ‘epistemic rift’ (Schneider and McMichael 2010: 467) due to its ‘Cartesian dualism’ of ‘Nature’ and ‘Society’ as two fully separate and independent entities. There are accordingly various attempts even among Marxists – particularly by Jason W. Moore (2015) – to replace this dualist treatment of capitalist development with a post-Cartesian one for a better understanding of the current ecological crisis.