Contribution short abstract

Summary comments will be made on how the problem of external nature has motivated different metabolism concepts. Further, it will be considered how each usage addresses (or does not address) the limitlessness of capital's social metabolism.

Contribution long abstract

Metabolism is a plural concept. It has been deployed across a variety of disciplines to describe some aspect or other of 'our' relation to 'nature'--with both 'our' and 'nature' being terms problematized in the very deployment of the concept. Yet despite its plural meanings, the metabolism concept has thus consistently been used to address the problem of external nature. In political ecology, for instance, 'metabolism' is invoked to critique society-nature dualism: there is no society and (external) nature; there are only socionatures. In the concept's development within industrial ecology and eco-Marxism, on the other hand, external nature is treated as a necessary precondition for critical and normative judgment. In order to evaluate the ecological impact of industrial capitalism, in other words, it is necessary to at least analytically separate capital's social metabolism from human and non-human natures. While we ultimately sympathize more with this gesture toward external nature than the double internality (i.e., society-in-nature and nature-in-society) of political ecology's metabolism concept, we suggest further that a negative and planetary perspective on external nature is necessary to adequately address the crises inherent to the limitless drive of capital accumulation. Put another way, it is precisely because capital's social metabolism fails to reconstruct socionatural worlds into a smooth, homogenous globe that we are forced to confront the critical-materialist question of our being planetary.