Marx, metabolism, and the Malibu Fires

It is not the unity of living and active humanity with the natural, inorganic conditions of their metabolic exchange with nature, and hence their appropriation of nature which requires explanation or is the result of a historic process, but rather the separation between these inorganic conditions of human existence and this active existence, a separation which is completely posited only in the relation of wage labour and capital. 1In his introduction to 'Design and the Building Site' , that Sergio Ferro offered at the Industries of Architecture conference, 2014, he opened with the above quote from the Grundrisse.He did so to situate his thesis on 'separated design'the removal of design from the building site, made possible by the figure of the architects -within a broader separation of labour and power from its means of production.Ferro's thesis is mainly concerned with human relations of production; with architecture as a means to dominate and subordinate labour.His choice of quote, though, allows us to extend this concept of separated design to the question of how architecture, under capital, might be seen as a way to separate us from, and to subordinate nonhuman 'nature' .The same passage has been important for a number of recent scholars -Paul Burkett, John Bellamy Foster, Jason W. Moorewho have sought to ask whether insight Marx, metabolism, and the Malibu Fires