Key Arguments

• After describing the disrupted metabolism, Marx writes: 'But by destroying the circum stances surrounding that metabolism, which originated in a merely natural and spontaneous fashion, it compels its systematic restoration as a regulative law of social production.'
• He adds that this restoration must occur 'in a form adequate to the full development of the human race,' indicating that a higher, conscious regulation of the human–nature relation is historically necessitated by capitalist destruction of the old form.

Source Quotes

Thus it destroys at the same time the physical health of the urban worker, and the intellectual life of the rural worker. But by destroying the circum stances surrounding that metabolism, which originated in a merely natural and spontaneous fashion, it compels its systematic restoration as a regulative law of social production, and in a form adequate to the full development of the human race. In agriculture, as in manufacture, the capitalist transformation of the process of production also appears as a martyrology for the producer; the instrument of labour appears as a means of enslaving, exploiting and impoverishing the worker; the social combination of labour processes appears as an organized suppression of his individual vitality, freedom and autonomy.

Key Concepts

• by destroying the circum stances surrounding that metabolism, which originated in a merely natural and spontaneous fashion, it compels its systematic restoration as a regulative law of social production
• in a form adequate to the full development of the human race

Context

Immediately following his diagnosis of ecological and human damage, Marx articulates a dialectical claim: capitalism’s disruption forces a future society to consciously regulate the human–nature metabolism.