Contribution short abstract

Social metabolism research often neglects labour, leading to limited or promethean explanations of ecological transitions. In contrast, I link social metabolism to wage–labour nexus, showing how this symbiotic relation mediates society’s produciton-absorption nexus and thus socioeconomic viability.

Contribution long abstract

Although early social-metabolism scholarship engaged with questions of labour, the field has increasingly shifted toward material-flow accounting, including major efforts to harmonize measurements internationally and to analyse global flows. However, human labour - understood in its simplest form as the use of energy to satisfy human needs - has not been systematically related to the concept of social metabolism. In some cases, long-term studies of material flows link sociometabolic transitions to factors such as new energy carriers, structural changes, globalization, regulatory modes, and economic systems. However, these explanations remain at a superficial level, as most studies focus in quantitatively describing material flows without connections to socioecological and political economy theories of historical dynamics. As a result, the links between political-economic processes and sociometabolic regimes remain underexplored.

In turn, I survey socioecological theories and find four factors explaining sociometabolic change mainly focusing on technical aspects of production instead of labour relations: resource-efficient technological change, tertiarization, internationalisation, and market saturation. While material stocks and flows can reflect these factors, I argue that they are embedded in capitalist social relations, particularly in the historical evolution of wage labour. Building on Mészáros' (1995) notion of social metabolism and in line with ecological revisions of Regulation Theory, I contend that the wage–labour nexus - seen through the organization of (re)productive work and (pre)distributive labour institutions - mediates the continuous exchange of materials between society’s productive structures and its environment. In developing this framework, I contribute to social metabolism research by foregrounding its political-economic dimensions.