Paper short abstract:

This paper rethinks the concept of social metabolism, reaching towards connected and collective understandings of capabilities in times of multiple and connected planetary crises, drawing on ecofeminist and decolonial thought and theories of shared vulnerability and care.

Paper long abstract:

This paper rethinks the concept of social metabolism, reaching towards connected and collective understandings of capabilities in times of multiple and connected planetary crises, drawing on ecofeminist and decolonial thought and theories of shared vulnerability and care. It moves towards a more transdisciplinary and integral reading of social metabolism that engages social ecology through collective capabilities emerging from resistant and grassroots struggles. The paper’s rethinking of social metabolism is a central theoretical element of a larger work on ‘vital sociology’, re-theorizing social metabolism to encompass collective concerns with social reproduction, vital provisioning, and relational ethics.

Green Marxism and the Vienna School of materials flow analysis are two leading strands of thinking about social metabolism. I try to think with and beyond these two extant interpretations of the oikeios because they are over-universalizing and insufficiently account for unequal, colonial forms of environmentalism. In contrast, a decolonial emancipatory understanding draws on currents of anti-colonial and decolonial ecology and solidarity (Khader 2019; UNDP 2022;). A re-theorisation tries to overcome over-generalizing, thin and uncritical understandings of ‘society’, that treat ecological crises as undifferentiated ‘societal-level’ problems. This over-generalization of ‘society’ is unsatisfactorily answered by solutions to crises that rely on individual therapeutic learning, not redistribution or reparation for unjust harms, given that no country currently meets the basic needs of its residents at a level of resource use that can be sustainably extended to all people globally (Fanning et al 2020).

Wider collective capabilities for social and environmental justice may challenge the labels of decoloniality or feminisms (Salem and Icaza 2023), observing that a plurality and diversity of paths exist to respond to crises and bring communities towards justice, ecological health, or transformation. A revised conception of social metabolism therefore looks to community and activist networks to learn how a theory of social metabolism may gain new, and different life, especially in resistant contexts, by incorporating different understandings of cosmopolitics and the proposal for new, relational technologies and capabilities rooted in alternative ecological spaces.

Key sources:

Foster, JB (2000) Marx’s Ecology: Materialism and Nature. New York: Monthly Review Press

Khader, SJ (2019) Decolonizing Universalism: A Transnational Feminist Ethic. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Salem,S; Icaza, R (2023) “A world in which many worlds can fit:” On Knowledge Production and Multiplicity, Kohl Journal: A Journal for Body and Gender Research 9,1,

UNDP (United Nations Development Programme). 2022. 2022 Special Report on Human Security. New York.