Mud Epistemology: Gender, Metabolism, and Marx’s Unfinished Revolution

In February 1881, a letter from Geneva reached Marx’s London desk with an urgent question that had been dividing the Russian revolutionary movement. The young revolutionary in exile Vera Zasulich asked the aging author of Capital: Was it indeed historically necessary for Russia’s peasant commune—the obshchina—to be abolished and for the country to pass through all phases of capitalist development, as Marx’s self-proclaimed Russian disciples insisted? Or could the commune develop directly into socialism without traversing capitalism’s centuries-long path?1 Zasulich’s timing was serendipitous. In the preceding few years, Marx had turned his attention toward communal forms of social organization that persisted at capitalism’s margins. The mud of the rural communes—literal and metaphorical—would come to haunt Marx’s final years, demanding an engagement with those subjects his earlier work had condemned to history’s dustbin.

Portrait of Vera Zasulich.

Marx’s ethnological and anthropological notebooks, unpublished for nearly a century, reveal an obsessive tracing of kinship systems, matrilineal societies, and collective property arrangements that preceded or eluded capital’s logic.2 While European socialists debated industrial strategy, and Engels and comrades waited for the second volume of Capital, Marx turned to Algeria’s collective agricultural villages, India’s village communities, and Indigenous arrangements across the Americas, tracing actually existing alternatives in the Russian mir, the Iroquois longhouse councils, the Algerian djemaa. Could these communal forms contain revolutionary potential equal to any worker’s uprising in Manchester or Berlin? What if Marx understood—with an uncomfortable clarity—precisely what Zasulich’s question required him to confront? He didn’t dash off a quick reply, but rather drafted four separate responses, twenty-five pages of tortured reasoning. When he finally managed to pen a response to Zasulich, it was cautious, noncommittal, drastically pared down to 350 words that offered compromise: perhaps capitalist evolutionary development’s “necessity” applied only to Western Europe. Perhaps—and here the hesitation was palpable—the commune might indeed serve as “the fulcrum for social regeneration in Russia.”3

Perhaps later life, grief, and illness create their own urgency, the pressing awareness that time is limited, that certain questions can’t be deferred indefinitely. Perhaps Zasulich’s question achieved its paralyzing force precisely because it wasn’t just one question but the condensation point of many questions. The Russian commune she asked about wasn’t simply an archaic social form; it was simultaneously the agrarian question of communal land management, the woman question of gendered agricultural labor, the colonial question of non-European development, the ecological question of metabolic arrangements, and the temporal question of nonlinear historical possibilities.

Perhaps, in asking whether the commune could bypass capitalism, Zasulich was unknowingly asking Marx to confront capital’s entire constitutive outside—those zones of life and labor that political economy had to exclude in order to establish its categories, yet which remained paradoxically essential to capital’s operation. This might explain why Marx couldn’t simply answer yes or no.

Meanwhile, beyond Marx’s personal struggles, the historical conjuncture provided further material pressures that forced theoretical reconsiderations. The Paris Commune, which Marx praised as the political form “at last discovered” for working-class emancipation, had drawn its participants from industrial workers, artisans, women, political refugees, and exiles.4 His intensifying correspondence with Russian revolutionaries, particularly following the 1861 emancipation of the serfs, suggests new theoretical openings. At this very moment, colonial rebellions were erupting across the world: the Indian Uprising had shaken the British Empire, the Morant Bay rebellion challenged Jamaica’s plantation order, and African resistance movements contested European expansion. Marx, who spent nine hours daily at the British Museum Reading Room where newspapers from across the world were available, almost certainly encountered coverage of these struggles. The Times of London, which dominated imperial news production and served as the primary source that other papers would reprint, provided extensive—if thoroughly propagandistic—reporting on colonial affairs.

A barricade on Place Blanche during Bloody Week, Paris, May 1871. License: CC0.

However, Marx’s notebooks reveal frustratingly little direct engagement with these contemporary struggles as political events. What appears instead are the same societies filtered through colonial anthropology’s deadening lens. Was Marx, in his patient extraction of details from these imperial texts, developing a method of reading against the grain—searching them for what they inadvertently preserved about noncapitalist ways of life?

Could this convergence—the Paris Commune’s unexpected form, the Russian debates, the worldwide evidence of noncapitalist persistence and anti-colonial resistance—have been pushing Marx toward a fundamental reconsideration of his entire project? The question remains necessarily open: Marx died two years after Zasulich’s letter, leaving only fragments scattered across unpublished notebooks—tantalizing glimpses of insights he would never fully develop. Working from these fragments and the revelatory Zasulich correspondence, I propose three interconnected theoretical interventions toward a decolonial feminist historical materialist epistemology—one that moves beyond contemporary metabolic rift debates by grounding itself in precisely those sites and subjects Marx turned to at the end.

First, I argue that the gendered division of labor constitutes the ur-separation, the originary split that provided capitalism’s template for treating regenerative work as nature’s free gift. The systematic devaluation of women’s reproductive and metabolic labor established the conceptual and material infrastructure through which capitalism would subsequently organize all metabolic relations—applying the same extractive logic to soils, forests, rivers, and colonies. Gender relations do not simply mediate our exchange with nature; they constitute the concrete infrastructure through which all metabolic relations operate under capitalism. This prioritization of gender doesn’t diminish the violence of enclosure or the brutality of racial categorization; rather, it explains their operational logic.

Second, Marx’s late anthropological investigations do not mark a retreat from revolutionary theory but rather demonstrate a concretization of what the young Marx had already glimpsed: that Gattungswesen (species-being)5 was never an abstract universal but was always constituted through social and metabolic praxis. The early Marx understood being human as defined by corporeal, earthbound labor rather than metaphysical contemplation. Our species-being emerges from concrete modes of production, concrete social relations, concrete forms of property. What the ethnological notebooks reveal is how this anthropologically nonuniversal human—a concept I propose here—takes form through historically specific, gendered metabolic practices of social-ecological reproduction—anticipating what Sylvia Wynter would later theorize as “being human as praxis.”6

Third, these late notes point toward a revolutionary subject that Marx didn’t live to fully theorize: those whose specific historical practices of social-ecological reproduction challenged capital’s separations. Marx’s anthropological notes don’t romanticize peasant communes or Indigenous societies; he documented internal hierarchies, patriarchal structures, and ecological failures alongside collective practices. What makes these notebooks relevant today, perhaps beyond Marx’s own concerns at the time, are the particular organizational forms that maintained different metabolic arrangements through commoning: Russian communes with rotational land use, Iroquois councils where decisions about production were collectively determined, Algerian villages managing water systems through djemaa assemblies. These weren’t inherently revolutionary subjects but rather sites where alternative practices of commoning persisted—practices that included reactionary defenses of tradition as often as radical experimentation. Their revolutionary potential lay not in essential identities or metabolic proximity but in the concrete ways these arrangements demonstrated that capitalism’s organization of nature wasn’t inevitable. This includes not just those directly engaged in subsistence production but all who participate in reproducing social life through diverse livelihoods, practices of commoning, and forms of conviviality. The question isn’t who stands closest to authentic metabolic processes, but which practices, in their historical specificity, open possibilities for organizing social-ecological relations beyond capital’s violent abstractions.

Understanding metabolic resistance as already-existing practice—neither vanished past nor deferred future—demands a properly political theory of metabolism. I call this “mud epistemology”: an anthropologically nonuniversal human praxis that emerges where social and ecological processes interpenetrate without synthesis. It is knowledge production through the concrete practice of working with materials in transition—neither solid nor liquid, neither nature nor culture—where the specificity of the relation between particular communities and particular ecologies generates ways of being human that cannot be universalized. This praxis persists in the zones where capitalism’s categorical separations require constant violence to maintain, precisely because the knowledge emerging from these material practices demonstrates that other modes of organizing social-ecological reproduction remain possible. Mud epistemology is thus both a method and a politics: a way of thinking from the specific material conditions where different human praxes refuse abstraction into Man or Nature. Mud has historically embodied what fascist and colonial imaginaries most feared: dissolved boundaries, horizontal seepage threatening vertical power, the liquefaction of the autonomous self into indeterminate matter. Mud epistemology recognizes that knowledge itself emerges interstitially—occupying gaps between things. In our current moment of planetary metabolic breakdown, the contradictions Marx glimpsed have cascaded into climate collapse, mass extinction, and biogeochemical disruption. The planetary muddification now underway—permafrost melting into bog, coastlines dissolving, previously stable ground giving way to flux, rising seas encroaching inland, monsoons creating new floodplains—returns us to precisely those material conditions that shaped Marx’s late theoretical turn. What Marx glimpsed but couldn’t complete has become urgent: revolutionary transformation will emerge not from solid ground but from patient work with unstable substrates.

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In the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, the young Marx articulated a fundamental insight: humans exist through constant material exchange with nature, which constitutes our extended body.7 This early recognition of metabolic interdependence would undergo theoretical development over the next decades. By the time he was composing the Grundrisse (1857–58), Marx had reframed the question: what required explanation was not humanity’s unity with nature but the historical process of separation from “the natural, inorganic conditions of their Stoffwechsel [metabolism].”8 This analytical shift—from assuming unity to interrogating separation—prepared the ground for his mature critique in Capital (1867), where he wrote that “all progress in capitalist agriculture is a progress in the art, not only of robbing the worker, but of robbing the soil.”9 This attention to the human-nature nexus gained scientific precision through his engagement with agricultural chemistry, particularly Justus von Liebig’s Organic Chemistry in its Application to Agriculture and Physiology (1840) and Carl Fraas’s Climate and the Plant World Over Time (1847), among others. While this scientific framework had its limitations—various insights by Liebig were later refuted, including by Liebig himself as chemistry advanced—it provided Marx with key concepts. Liebig’s law of the minimum—that plant growth is constrained by the scarcest essential nutrient rather than the total amount of resources—offered Marx a material basis for understanding capitalism’s metabolic contradictions. The industrial food system, Liebig demonstrated, operated as a “robbery system” (Raubbau): nutrients extracted from rural soils were transported to cities as agricultural commodities but never returned to replenish the land, instead accumulating as urban waste and pollution.10 This one-way transfer created a widening rift in the material exchange cycle between human society and natural systems. Fraas’s historical analysis deepened Marx’s understanding by showing the temporal dimensions of this disruption, documenting how ancient civilizations from Mesopotamia to Greece had triggered desertification and climate change through deforestation and intensive cultivation. In his letters to Engels (March 1868), Marx said that Fraas’s work showed that “cultivation—when it proceeds in natural growth and is not consciously controlled … leaves deserts behind it.”11

Members of La Vía Campesina.

These ecological dimensions of Marx’s work gained new prominence through John Bellamy Foster’s systematic reconstruction of the “metabolic rift” concept in 1999, which positioned ecology as central rather than peripheral to historical materialism.12 Foster argued that Marx developed a systematic theory: capitalism doesn’t simply exploit nature but fundamentally disrupts the cyclical processes through which social and ecological systems reproduce themselves. The metabolic rift framework has since expanded far beyond the original analysis to illuminate capitalism’s disruption of planetary ecological systems. Its adoption in environmental humanities reveals the hunger for frameworks that can articulate capitalism’s ecological contradictions. The Anthropocene and metabolic rift offer contrasting political visions: while the Anthropocene hypothesis legitimizes techno-managerial solutions, the metabolic rift framework consistently emphasizes capitalism as the driver of ecological crisis, documenting colonial extractivism, center-periphery exploitation, and class-based environmental injustices.

The tension, however, lies elsewhere: while metabolic rift theory meticulously documents differentiated human exploitation—enslaved Africans, colonized peoples, peasants, workers—it tends to posit a universal metabolism that capitalism disrupts. This raises a crucial question: What does it mean to recognize historical distinctions in exploitation while maintaining the concept of a singular metabolic relation between humanity and nature? While metabolic rift correctly identifies capitalism as the agent of ecological disruption rather than an abstract Anthropos, it still posits “the human” as a coherent category that has been severed from “nature.” This assumes a universal human subject who once existed in proper metabolic relation with nature and must now repair that breach. But which human? Whose metabolism?

The problem isn’t simply that capitalism disrupted “the” human-nature metabolism; it’s that capitalism created the very fiction of a universal Human through violent processes of differentiation. As Wynter demonstrates, the overrepresentation of European Man as the human as such required the production of not-quite-humans and nonhumans whose different metabolic practices could be designated as primitive, backwards, or natural. The metabolic rift didn’t happen to a preexisting universal humanity; rather, the production of “the Human” and “Nature” as separate categories was itself the rift. Mud epistemology emerges from recognizing that there was never one metabolism to be rifted, never one Human to be alienated from Nature. There are only different historically constituted practices of world-making, some of which—those designated as properly Human—required the violent severance from and domination over both nature and those humans deemed too close to it.

Jason W. Moore’s “world-ecology” perspective importantly extends and critiques metabolic rift theory by arguing that capitalism doesn’t act upon nature but develops through it—as “a way of organizing nature.”13 Moore challenges what he calls “Green Arithmetic” (Society plus Nature equals Crisis), contending that even metabolic rift theory remains trapped within a Cartesian binary that treats nature and society as ontologically separate entities that subsequently interact.14

Ariel Salleh’s concept of “metabolic value” is a further development that introduces a feminist dimension to this debate. Through her seminal Ecofeminism as Politics (first published in 1997, revised in 2017) and her 2010 article “From Metabolic Rift to ‘Metabolic Value,’” Salleh identified a third form of value that operates outside traditional Marxist categories.15 Unlike use value and exchange value—both economic measures—metabolic value captures the regenerative labor that sustains life yet remains invisible in conventional economic accounting. This theoretical innovation recognizes how women’s reproductive work, Indigenous land practices, and subsistence farming create value not through commodity production but through maintaining the cyclical processes that keep both society and nature functioning. Sidestepping the question of whether care work produces new value or simply maintains what already exists, Salleh proposes that subsistence labor and care work operate according to entirely different logics because they function through gift economies and reciprocal relationships rather than market exchange.

While Moore’s reconceptualization helpfully dissolves the nature-society divide, and Salleh’s “metabolic value” reveals the hidden subsidy of reproductive labor, neither gives much attention to how gender constitutes the material infrastructure through which capitalism first organized metabolic relations. The rift that Marx diagnosed in Capital was not capitalism’s originary rupture but a derivative one. When Marx and Engels observed in The German Ideology that “the first division of labor is that between man and woman for the propagation of children,” they glimpsed—without fully attending to—the architectural principle of capitalism’s entire metabolic infrastructure.16

The industrial revolution transformed preexisting patriarchal labor divisions into new gendered spheres—public-private, production-reproduction—that differed fundamentally from precapitalist patriarchal arrangements. This transformation involved a triple operation: treating regenerative processes as biological functions rather than skilled labor; extracting value from these processes while denying their value-producing character; and invisibilizing the labor required to reproduce social life—what Maria Mies calls “housewifization.”17 While capitalism developed through primitive accumulation, colonial extraction, and wage labor, it relied on this new configuration of gendered spheres to subsidize accumulation. The specific form of the domestic sphere under industrial capitalism—separated from sites of waged production in ways unknown to precapitalist societies—provided a template for devaluing all regenerative work.

As Leopoldina Fortunati demonstrates, this operates structurally: “The man/woman relationship is not a relationship between individuals, even if it is represented as such. It is a relation of production between women and capital mediated by men.”18 The gendered division of labor became the point-zero premise of capital’s violent “organization of nature,” to use Moore’s term.

Members of a Women’s Protection Unit in a greenhouse used for cooperative ecological farming, Rojava. License: CC BY 2.0.

Marx’s ethnological notebooks, viewed from this perspective, could be seen as an attempt to understand how different societies’ gender arrangements produced fundamentally different metabolic relations—and thus different possibilities for organizing human-nature metabolism. In his reading of ethnographic studies by Morgan, Kovalevsky, and Maine, Marx documented societies where gender relations structured social metabolism. The Iroquois councils, where women and men made decisions together on all questions, represented sophisticated arrangements where those managing reproductive processes controlled social governance.

In 1884, the year following Marx’s death, Engels published The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State: In Connection to Lewis H. Morgan’s Research, based on the synthesis of Marx’s notes and Engels’s own reading of Morgan’s evolutionary anthropology.19 Yet Engels’s interpretation diverged significantly from what Marx had actually written. Where Marx saw complex, nonlinear possibilities in these alternative gender arrangements, Engels forced them into a rigid evolutionary framework. He treated women’s subordination as a “world historic defeat” that nonetheless marked humanity’s “great historical advance” toward civilization—inadvertently justifying patriarchy as historical necessity.

Raya Dunayevskaya was one of the first scholars to systematically study Marx’s ethnological notebooks, and emphasized already in the 1980s how Marx noted elements in Morgan’s text that pointed to women’s autonomy and power in pre–class-based societies. Dunayevskaya writes that

Marx, in copying quotes about both the Iroquois women and the Greek women, draws the sharpest contrast between the power of the Iroquois women and the degradation of the Greek women in civilization; Engels, on the other hand, while acknowledging the “supreme power” of the Iroquois women, spends a great deal more time describing the gradation of the development of the monogamous family, which he calls “a great historical advance” even as he notes that this was also the beginning of slavery and private property.20

This illuminates why Marx’s correspondence with Zasulich contained such catalytic potential. The Russian commune, like the other earth communities documented in Marx’s notebooks, maintained metabolic and property relations that resisted the very separation his early work had identified as capitalism’s defining feature—the same dynamic Silvia Federici would later examine in Caliban and the Witch.21

Curiously, Marx was adamant that North American Indigenous communities had “incomparably greater vitality than the Semitic, Greek, Roman and a fortiori the modern capitalist societies.”22 Rather than an exoticization, one could also read this as indicative of an epistemological rupture because Marx acknowledges that other social systems might be more generative for political subjectivation than those found in so-called “advanced” societies. Reading this along with his struggle to respond to Zasulich reveals how what Marx identified as “superior” corresponds to these societies’ maintenance of reciprocal metabolic and political relations with their ecological contexts. Or, to invoke Cedric Robinson, socialism need not begin with or depend on the existence of capitalism.23

Echoing and expanding Dunayevskaya’s pioneering reading that recognized how Marx in his late notes reconnected with his early humanism, I want to read Marx’s late turn toward anthropology not as an incidental or whimsical detour from his historical-materialist investigation but as essential to resolving modernity’s metabolic contradictions. While capitalism is undoubtedly a totalizing force, in order to consider human-nature relationships in a differentiated way adequate for the age of climate breakdown we must first rethink the very notion(s) of “human-nature” as being anthropologically nonuniversal.24 Wynter’s formulation of “being human as praxis” provides the theoretical framework for understanding what Marx was approaching but couldn’t fully articulate. For Wynter, the human is not a biological given but an ongoing enactment; we perform ourselves into being through historically specific “genres” of humanness. Her critique of “Man”—the Western bourgeois subject who overrepresents itself as the human as such—reveals how capitalism doesn’t simply organize human societies but institutes a particular genre of being human: one defined through possessive individualism, linear temporality, and, we could add, separation from nature. What Wynter calls the “sociogenic principle” demonstrates that humans uniquely auto-institute themselves through symbolic-material practices that are simultaneously cultural and biological, discursive and metabolic. The communities Marx studied in his ethnological notebooks were different praxes of being human, each producing distinct metabolic relations with their ecological contexts. Their gendered divisions of labor didn’t merely organize work differently; they enacted fundamentally different modes of human existence. When Marx noted these communities’ “incomparably greater vitality,” he was recognizing what Wynter would later theorize: that the Western genre of Man, despite its claims to universality and evolutionary superiority, represents only one possible—and particularly destructive—mode of being human. This is why the defense of communal land rights is not just resistance to dispossession but the maintenance of alternative human praxes.

While much socialist ecological analysis proceeds from seemingly neutral categories of “humanity” and “nature” as transhistorical givens,25 Marx’s late notes suggest that diverse communities around the world, despite their heterogeneous cosmologies and sociocultural arrangements, were already partaking in the same revolutionary struggle against the onslaught of the metabolic rift of capitalism’s totalization. Moreover, what remains absent from most metabolic rift scholarship is the recognition that Marx’s ethnological studies coincided with an actual struggle: the communities he studied from the work of anthropologists were simultaneously fighting a planetary war over metabolic relations.

While Marx sat in the British Museum reading Morgan’s Ancient Society, taking notes on Indigenous communal forms, Iroquois democracy, and communal land tenure, the US military was conducting its final campaigns against Apache resistance. Geronimo’s band—defending the metabolic arrangements Marx was studying—engaged in guerrilla warfare against industrial capitalism’s territorial expansion. In 1880, while Marx copied passages about Indigenous women’s political authority, the Canadian government crushed the Northwest Rebellion, destroying Métis communal land practices. That same year, British forces intensified the frontier wars against Aboriginal Australians who were defending songline territories. The Mapuche’s malón raids (1870s–80s), the Mahdist uprising in Sudan (1881–99), the ongoing Māori resistance in New Zealand—these were wars over metabolic sovereignty: the right of communities to maintain their own cycles of social-ecological reproduction against capital’s linear extraction.

In fact, perhaps what Marx called the “actuality of indigenous peoples” was not a belated discovery of alternative social forms but an encounter with contemporaneous active struggles in a planetary war over metabolic relations—an insurgency that continues today in every pipeline blockade, seed-saving network, land occupation, and defense of communal and ancestral land. Had Marx lived to fully develop the theoretical implications of his Ethnological Notebooks and connect them to the concurrent worldwide resistance to colonial capitalist land grabs while confronting the letter sent by the young female revolutionary from the muddy periphery of capital, the revolutionary subject of Marxism might have been radically reconceptualized.

But Marx died leaving these implications unrealized. For over a century, Marxism developed largely without this encounter with its own limits—until the planetary scale of metabolic crisis made such encounters unavoidable. However, adding “nature” to historical materialism will not do. Instead, the crisis of our time demands that we learn to be interrupted by forces that exceed the dialectical frame. Mud epistemology attempts to think from this interruption—from the places where dialectical reason meets its limit in the irreducible alterity of metabolic processes. This means that a decolonial feminist historical materialist epistemology must practice what Gayatri Spivak calls “planetary thinking.”26 The planetary differs fundamentally from globalization’s homogenizing logic. Where the globe is a human-imposed gridding of space that enables capital circulation and governance, the planet is an anterior alterity—a “species of alterity” that precedes and exceeds human systems of meaning. Yet this anterior alterity must be distinguished from the ontological flattening performed by new materialism and object-oriented ontology, which in their fetishization of distributed agency reproduce capital’s own disavowal of its constitutive violence. Planetary thinking requires accepting that humans, in all their differentiated positions, are not the primary agents of planetary existence but rather planetary subjects who inhabit a world where geological, atmospheric, and biological processes operate according to temporalities and logics irreducible to human dialectics. In this way, planetary thinking maintains the asymmetry of planetary forces without effacing the particular violence of capitalist subsumption. It means acknowledging, without mystification, that metabolic processes—from soil microbiomes to ocean currents, from forest succession to nitrogen cycles—are not simply the “natural” background to human history but active agents shaping social possibilities. Specific Indigenous practices—such as Potawatomi relations with rivers or Andean communities’ relationships with mountains—demonstrate epistemologies that recognize human consciousness and political possibility as constituted through relationships with planetary forces. Social and planetary processes interpenetrate without synthesis.

This interpenetration without synthesis is what mud epistemology grasps. Think about what mud actually is: soil and water mixed together, but not dissolved into each other. You can still feel the grit of individual particles even though they’re suspended in water. This is how we must understand the metabolic. When soil erosion follows deforestation for plantations, geological processes and economic exploitation entangle yet remain irreducible to one another. When climate change displaces communities, geological forces and colonial history are mixed but still distinct. Mud keeps things mixed but not dissolved. The specific violence of colonialism and capitalism doesn’t disappear when we think about planetary forces; it stays suspended in the mix, like grit you can still feel. We can’t extract human oppression from ecological processes, but we also can’t let it dissolve into vague talk about “nature” or “vibrant matter.” This is what distinguishes mud epistemology from both dialectical resolution and ontological flattening: understanding climate change requires holding together tectonic time and colonial time, carbon cycles and capitalism, without pretending they’re the same or that we can fully separate them. Yet knowing how these forces interpenetrate is not enough; we need practices that can navigate this muddy terrain without seeking false clarity or purity.  

Robin Wall Kimmerer’s work on gift economies provides the epistemological bridge between planetary thinking and revolutionary praxis. In Braiding Sweetgrass, she demonstrates how the Potawatomi concept of the Honorable Harvest—taking only what is given, using everything you take, being grateful, giving back to the earth, minimizing harm, never taking the first or last—constitutes both ecological practice and revolutionary epistemology.27 The gift, as Kimmerer explains, creates relationship rather than alienation. When maple sap runs, it is understood as the tree’s gift requiring reciprocal care (pruning, protection, ceremony). This gift logic operates precisely in mud’s zones of indeterminacy: gifts flow where boundaries are permeable, where the distinction between giver and receiver dissolves into ongoing cycles of reciprocity. Crucially, Kimmerer shows how this isn’t metaphorical but material; mycorrhizal networks literally operate on gift economies, with fungi trading minerals for carbohydrates in relationships that can’t be reduced to market exchange. The “wood wide web” of forest communication and nutrient sharing demonstrates that nature itself operates through communist principles—from each according to ability, to each according to need.

However, properly acknowledging these alternative metabolic epistemologies seems to remain a challenge, even for ecological Marxism. Kohei Saito, for instance, argues that by synthesizing Marx’s engagement with political economy, ecology, and precapitalist societies, “a new and surprising possibility of interpreting Marx’s letter to Zasulich emerges: Marx ultimately became a degrowth communist.”28 For sure, this reading of Marx’s intellectual journey beyond productivism and Eurocentrism marks a significant theoretical advance—one that challenges orthodox narratives of historical inevitability and opens space for alternative developmental pathways. But tragically, the political epistemology remains the same—namely treating the knowledge of what I call “the oikos of the earth” as supplementary rather than transformative.29 Even as Saito articulates Marx’s emerging ecological consciousness, a normalization of gender, the human, and the assumed capacity of political subjectivation persists. What’s needed isn’t just Marxism that “includes” the unique perspectives of women, or the actuality of Indigenous people, but something that emerges from a deeper engagement with the modes of knowing and the modes of situated and historical human praxis that can fundamentally shape a political epistemology that offers a glimpse of hope. What if the Ethnological Notebooks signal not only an “epistemic rift” but a reorientation towards a differently conceptualized political subject capable of confronting the violence of the capitalist Anthropocene?

Thannal Natural Homes is a Natural Building Awareness Group, founded by natural building architect Biju Bhaskar and his wife Sindhu Bhaskar in 2011.

The danger lies in how we theorize this subject without reproducing the very naturalized categories that capitalism deploys—a trap that caught even those who sought to valorize women’s metabolic labor. When ecofeminists of the 1970s proclaimed women’s special connection to nature through their bodily cycles and nurturing roles, they inadvertently reinforced the patriarchal logic they sought to challenge. As Donna Haraway warned, celebrating women’s “closeness to nature” accepts the terms of a rigged game. Capitalism didn’t discover a preexisting similarity between women and nature; it actively created this similarity by subjecting both to the same extractive logic. So the task isn’t to rescue women from nature or nature from feminization, but to abolish the hierarchical distinction that renders both as mere hidden metabolic background. When I invoke women’s work in rice paddies or kitchen gardens, I point towards how patriarchal capitalism assigns certain metabolic labors to women, then naturalizes this assignment as biological destiny—not towards any innate feminine connection to earth.

This anti-essentialism explains why mud, rather than soil, serves here as the guiding metaphor: mud’s definitional instability refuses the fixed categories essentialism requires. Indeed, if soil once provided the stable ground for both cultivation and knowledge production, our contemporary moment requires thinking with and through mud—that liminal state between solid and liquid that characterizes both our planetary condition and the necessary flexibility of revolutionary thought.

The struggle is therefore not to repair the metabolic rift but to maintain the zones of viscosity where such divisions cannot solidify—zones that peasant movements know intimately. La Via Campesina’s “popular peasant feminism” emerges precisely from such muddy ground.30 The knowledge of when to flood, when to drain, and how to read the subtle changes in soil consistency exists only in the relationship between specific communities and specific ecologies. Mud-knowledge travels through networks that confound property regimes.

This contemporary metabolic resistance brings to mind what Wynter identifies as the plot-plantation dichotomy that structured colonial resistance. While enslaved African persons were forced into the plantation’s totalizing market logic, they simultaneously created what Wynter calls a “dual economic structure” through their provision plots—small gardens that operated according to entirely different metabolic relations. “For African peasants transplanted to the plot,” Wynter observes, “the land remained the Earth” rather than commodity, maintaining “the structure of values that had been created by traditional societies of Africa.”31 These plots became, in her analysis, “the focus of resistance to the market system and market values,” sites where use value persisted against exchange value’s totalizing claims. The plot system wasn’t merely economic but epistemological; it maintained what Wynter calls “folk culture as cultural guerilla resistance to the plantation system.”

The metabolic resistance Wynter identifies in the plantation plot reverberates through contemporary movements of metabolic resistance, perhaps nowhere more vividly than in Chiapas, where for twenty years Indigenous corn varieties traveled globally, taking root in different soils, adapting to various moisture regimes, finding new grounds. When these seeds returned, they carried not just genetic adaptations but embedded knowledge—how volcanic ash affects germination, which consistency of mud signals optimal planting, how different communities solved problems of water retention or drainage. This knowledge cannot be patented because it exists only in the relationship between seeds, soil, and the hands that know when the ground is ready. Each seed is simultaneously a genetic resource and a library of mud-knowledge accumulated across continents.

The Rojava revolution demonstrates how this mud-knowledge can becomes revolutionary program. This knowledge is maintained through women’s councils and academies that treat environmental protection and women’s autonomy as inseparable projects. During the pandemic, when Chile’s ANAMURI (Asociación Nacional de Mujeres Rurales e Indígenas) shared seeds with urban popular organizations to establish emergency gardens in solidarity kitchens, they were transmitting metabolic knowledge. “Ruralizing the city,” as Francisca Pancha Rodríguez describes it, meant bringing mud into spaces capitalism imagined as permanently solid, permanently enclosed. The urban gardens that sprouted were demonstrations that property relations themselves become fluid when survival depends on collective metabolic practice. The soil beneath concrete, once exposed and irrigated, becomes mud—and with it emerges the possibility of different social relations.

For sure, ecology without class struggle is gardening. But the mud of the improvised vegetable garden can also be the point-zero for a material reclamation of the metabolic relations that capitalism has systematically enclosed, poisoned, and alienated from collective care and governance. In 2002, Mariarosa Dalla Costa declared:

So, for part of the 80s I went on migrating from room to room in the house of reproduction. Then finally I found the door that opened into the flower and vegetable garden: I realized the importance of the question of the land. That door was thrown open for me by the new actors I was looking for, the protagonists of indigenous rebellions, the farmers, fishermen, the people fighting against dams or deforestation, the women of the Global South (but luckily also more and more men and women of industrialized countries). They were all treating the issue of land as central. They were all fighting against its privatization and exploitation, and the destruction of its reproductive powers.32

The garden—that liminal space between the domestic interior and public exterior, between controlled cultivation and autonomous growth—becomes the site where reproductive labor reveals its true scope and significance for planetary metabolism. Dalla Costa elaborates:

These were the people I was looking for. They converged with my research and my feelings, moved me and gave me joy because they let me have a glimpse of a different world, starting from the ways in which life is produced and reproduced, the life of plants, animals and humans.33

What appears within capitalist logic as the circumscribed and devalued space of women’s work—the maintenance of bodies, the cultivation and preparation of food, the processing of waste into fertility—emerges in Dalla Costa’s formulation as the paradigmatic site for understanding planetary metabolic processes but also as a site of revolutionary transformation. The garden’s cycles of growth, harvest, decomposition, and renewal mirror the larger biogeochemical cycles upon which all planetary life depends and which have been so violently crushed by capital. The ZAD’s occupation of wetlands designated for an airport makes this resistance concrete.34 Defending 1,650 hectares of land against “development” meant defending mud against concrete—but more fundamentally, defending the organizational forms that land occupation propels. The violent eviction attempts are never just about land but about which metabolic relations will organize social life. As the ZAD defenders learned, revolutionary movements themselves must become like compost piles—sites where “everything is cross contaminating, nothing is pure,” where dairy farmers sit next to anti-speciesist vegans in assemblies, creating what they call an “ecology of struggle.”35

A barricade at the Notre-Dame-des-Landes ZAD. The banner reads: AGAINST THE AIRPORT AND ITS WORLD, 2012. License: CC BY-SA 4.0.

Together, Federici’s “molecular communism” (the creation of collective bonds through the direct commoning of material means of reproduction at the most intimate scales of daily life) and Dalla Costa’s garden politics (the regenerative cycles maintained in the garden) provide practical techniques and epistemological frameworks for addressing planetary metabolism through what Federici calls “the production of ourselves as a common subject.”36 Against ascendant techno-evolutionism that imagines human destiny as transcendence from earth to technosphere, we must articulate a revolutionary praxis that remains stubbornly committed to mud. Mud epistemology refuses both eco-fascist nostalgia for pure “blood and soil” and new materialist attributions of agency to matter itself. Instead, it insists on the historicity of material practices and recognizes that those whose hands work the mud already know what metabolic theory struggles to articulate: that “human” and “nature” were never nouns but verbs, naming different moments in ongoing processes of mutual transformation. While capitalism deploys both solidification and liquefaction—fixing categories to enable extraction while dissolving social bonds that resist commodification—mud epistemology tracks the specific practices that maintain different metabolic relations despite these twin operations of capital.

If there is an “ecological” Marx to be glimpsed in Marx’s late “ethnological notebooks,” it is only by way of a recognition that human praxis and “human as praxis,” in its most transformative sense, must incorporate the intimate, embodied knowledge of reproduction and regeneration. To move beyond the reductive cosmology of the Anthropocene requires an epistemic-political humility, a turn to mud, working with the damaged earth we have. This might be where the revolution begins, not on history’s grand stage but in the garden’s compost heap, where the distinction between death and renewal dissolves into fertile possibility. As the infrastructures of accumulation collapse under the weight of their own metabolic contradictions, the humble, patient work of regeneration continues.