From the communist perspective, the capitalist world is split by metabolic rifts. In addition to being unsustainable on a planet with a relatively finite number of atoms, accumulative, exploitative, and extractive practices generate pathological inequality. Rifts emerge everywhere—between cities that throw away imported nutrients and rural areas that have to deal with their shit; between humans and the other animals we instrumentalize; between core countries and the periphery, mined for cheap minerals and cheap labor. “If production systems result in waste products that threaten biological reproduction and social problems that weaken the social whole, an ecological and social crisis occurs,” writes the ecofeminist thinker Carolyn Merchant. “A contradiction opens between production and reproduction.”3 The earth’s systems—including but not limited to its human systems—are superexploited and can no longer sustain themselves. (This was apparent in 1996, when Merchant published her argument, but the ravine is deeper now.) She calls for an alternative ethic of “earthcare,” one based on healing the rifts between humans and the rest of our world so that we might rejoin it as partners. And if humanity could shake off capitalism like water off a dog’s back, we could adopt a more earthcareful social metabolism without communists having to beat anyone to death with sticks, so to speak. Let us pretend for a moment that this is the case.