Body, Nature and Capital: Uses and Implications of the Concept of Metabolism by Marx

Abstract

The physiological concept of metabolism, used especially by the human sciences, will play a central role in the critique of Marx's political economy by deepening his understanding of the immanent determinations of capital, as it digests, moved by an excessive "compulsion", living matter (earth and human bodily strength) to transform it into value and surplus-value and the catastrophic damage that is excreted in this process. In this perspective, we intend to analyze in the Grundrisse of 1857-1858 at least five distinct movements expressed by the concept of metabolism: A) The processes of nature in the autonomy of their cycles; B) The vital process of interaction between the human body and the earth; C) The functioning of the social form historically derived from capital, from and on the body-earth interaction; D) The transformation processes that occur in the substance of value through exchanges between Commodity and Money; E) The consumption necessary for the reproduction of the different parts that make up the organism of capital in the production process. A sixth use of the term appears in Book I of Capital in the Marxian diagnosis of metabolic failure by identifying how the metabolism of capital operates, and can only operate, causing a failure in the human-nature metabolism. The theoretical and practical implications of this analysis lead us to think about the need to create a new socioeconomic form of production and reproduction that enables a healthy metabolism with nature around us and within us, a non-pathological future social body.