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Contribution short abstract

Social metabolism research often analyze labour from a transhistorical perspective leading to "promethean" explanations of ecological transitions. In contrast, I link social metabolism to capital-labour relations, showing how this symbiotic relation mediates economies overproduction tendencies.

Contribution long abstract

Although early social-metabolism research engaged more directly with labour, the field has increasingly shifted toward material-flow accounting, including efforts to harmonize international measurements and analyse long-term global trends. In doing so, the relationship between labour and social metabolism–understood in its transhistorical sense as the transformation of energy to meet human needs–has not been sufficiently theorized in its specific capitalist form. As a result, explanations of material use tend to emphasize the role of productive forces, such as electrification, tertiarisation and global value chains.

I argue that observed patterns of material stocks and flows can reflect a combination of production forces, but are fundamentally underpinned by social relations, particularly the evolution of the wage-labour nexus. Building on Mészáros’ notion of social metabolism and ecological revisions of Regulation Theory, I contend that the wage-labour nexus–through the organization of productive, reproductive, and unproductive work, and the distribution of power between capital and labour–mediates the exchange of materials between society and nature. Its role in generating economic surplus depends on metabolic constraints but also shapes state and corporate strategies to absorb this surplus, leading to specific material use outcomes.

This symbiotic interaction gives rise to socioecological “fixes,” where the organisation of work and power distribution complement the sociometabolic regime. This was the case during Fordism, when productivity-based increases in family wages complemented an extensive sociometabolic regime. During Neoliberalism, we see larger constraints at the point of extraction and higher resource efficiency which complements precariousness, austerity, and shifts in the global division of labour.