Contribution short abstract

Can we identify cancerous dynamics in the genesis and evolution of capitalism? This presentation revisits and expands the “cancer hypothesis” advanced by John McMurtry (1999) and Joel Kovel (2002), examining both the hypothesis and its broader implications from a sociometabolic perspective.

Contribution long abstract

This presentation revisits and expands the “cancer hypothesis” suggested by John McMurtry in The Cancer Stage of Capitalism (1999) and Joel Kovel in The Enemy of Nature (2002), situating it within a historical analysis of the genesis and evolution of capitalist social metabolisms. The oncological hypothesis posits that capitalism’s compulsive orientation toward unlimited growth displays dynamics analogous to malignant processes within the Earth system. Assessing this proposition requires a shift from the exclusive study of material and energy flows toward an examination of the socio-cellular forms that organise and propel the reproduction of capital. From this standpoint, the concept of social metabolism is shown to require expansion through a “social physiology” capable of analysing the cooperative, proliferative, and differentiating cellular forms characteristic of each historical configuration of metabolism. This perspective not only clarifies the pathogenic character of capitalist growth but also deepens key elements of Marx’s metabolic theory as reconstructed by Kohei Saito (2017), particularly the need to analyse how forms of social cooperation become historically reconfigured under capitalist metabolic domination. In doing so, it offers a more precise account of how capitalist accumulation transforms the cooperative tissues that sustain collective life, generating systemic dysfunctions at planetary scale.