The Ready-Made Garment Industry in Dhaka, Bangladesh, through the Lens of the Metabolic Rift

The ready-made garment (RMG) sector of Bangladesh employs over 4 million workers in more than 7,000 factories and contributes to ~80% of total export earnings (The Business Standard, 2024; Baumann‑Pauly, 2017). This massive industry has severe ecological and social costs: unplanned and rapid urbanization, internal migrations, worker exploitation and gender-based violence allude to deeper detrimental consequences of the industry. This research intends to explore the relevance of the concept of metabolic rift propounded by Karl Marx in the RMG industry of Bangladesh. The “metabolic rift” first appeared in Capital, Volume I (1867), where Marx argued that capitalist agriculture systematically disrupts the Stoffwechsel (metabolism) between human societies and the natural environment, as capital accumulation generates an “irreparable rift in the interdependent process of social metabolism” by depleting soil nutrients and concentrating human waste in cities, preventing their reintegration into agricultural cycles (1976 [1867]). Friedrich Engels (1976 [1883]) extended this critique, noting that human interventions in natural processes produced unforeseen consequences when ecological interdependencies were ignored. Consequently, contemporary scholars like John Foster and Brett Clark (2009), Vandana Shiva (1988), Ariel Salleh (1997; 2017), Kohei Saito (2020), Sharae Deckard (2024), Giovanna Di Chiro (2008) revealed the interconnection among gender, environment and labour, thereby linking it to climate change and biodiversity loss.