For quite a long time, Marx’s interest in ecological issues was neglected even among serious Marxist scholars. Marx’s socialism was said to be characterized by a ‘Promethean’ (pro-technological, anti-ecological) advocacy for the domination of nature. Marxists, on the one hand, reinforced this impression by negatively reacting to environmentalism, which they believed to be inherently anti-working class and only functioning as an ideology of the upper middle class. On the other hand, the environmental catastrophe in the USSR – most notably represented by the ecological collapse of the Aral Sea and the Chernobyl disaster – reinforced the conviction among environmentalists that socialism cannot establish a sustainable society. As a consequence, there emerged a long-standing antagonism between the Red and the Green in the second half of the 20th century.

The situation is changing in the 21st century. No matter how devastating actually existing socialism was to the environment, its collapse and the triumph of capitalism has only contributed to further ecological degradation under neoliberal globalization in the last few decades. The ineffectiveness of conventional market-based solutions to ecological issues resulted in a renewed interest in more heterodox approaches including Marxian economics (Burkett 2006). At the same time, the collapse of the USSR and the declining influence of the past dogmas of orthodox Marxism ‘open up an intellectual horizon and a field of reflection, where theoretical and conceptual issues could be discussed without being foreclosed by party-line polemics or divisive political loyalties’ (Therborn 2009: 90). This situation both within and without Marxism led to the ‘rediscovery’ of Marx’s ecology in the last two decades (I).

It was Istvan Mészáros’s theory of ‘social metabolism’ that paved the solid path to this rediscovery. By investigating Mészáros’s theory of metabolism, mainly developed in Beyond Capital and The Necessity of Social Control, Marx’s ecological theory of ‘metabolic rift’ can be more firmly founded upon his critique of political economy (II). This clarification helps classify the three different dimensions of ‘metabolic rift’ in Marx’s Capital (III). Correspondingly, there are three dimensions of shifting the ecological rift, which is why capital proves so elastic and resilient in the face of economic and ecological crises. However, these ‘metabolic shifts’ never solve the deep contradictions of capitalist accumulation. Rather, they only create new crises, intensifying the contradictions on a wider scale (IV).