The capitalist metabolism: an unachieved subsumption of life under the value-form

Abstract

This article views capitalism not only as a mode of production, but also as a mediation of the reproduction of life (human and non-human), following the concept of ‘social metabolism’ that Marx employs to analyze the interaction between the individuals composing a society and their natural environment. Insofar as the ‘value-form’ is the distinctive social relation of capitalism, it appears necessary to ask whether the metabolic process of reproduction can be fully subsumed under this form. Marx takes for granted the idea that the reproduction of labor-power consists only in the consumption of commodities resulting from abstract labor, thus omitting the appropriation of unpaid domestic work, mostly performed by women. Feminist criticism clarifies how capitalism always depends on some reproductive work being appropriated for the accumulation of surplus-value without being integrated in the value-form. Following Jason W. Moore, I attempt to indicate that the same logic is at work for the reproduction of non-human life under the capitalist value-form, thus contradicting the sustainable reproduction of its own natural conditions. These two limitations of the capitalist subsumption of life open a new space for an expanded critique of capitalism, which goes beyond the exploitation of waged work by reflecting upon the concerns of feminist and ecological struggles.

Keywords:

• Social metabolism
• value-form
• labor-power
• feminism
• ecology

Notes

1. The term ‘écoféminisme’ was first created by the French author Françoise d’Eaubonne in her book Le féminisme ou la mort published in 1970, and was later appropriated by American theorists (Merchant, 2005, p. 193).

2. ‘Insofar as the ecofeminist bases for ethics – interconnectedness, aliveness, women’s caring – are mediated by the metaphor’ women = nature they avoid the problem of the objectivity in the real world. Thus, if an ethics is to be based strictly on metaphors, it becomes wholly tenuous’ (Biehl, 1991, p. 24).

3. ‘What is at stake in this distinction is the interweaving of the social and the biological within Forms of life, more precisely the integration of Life forms in Forms of life’ (Laugier & Ferrarese, 2015, p. 8).

4. In the English edition of the Capital, the German word Stoffwechsel is vaguely translated by the words ‘social interchange’. Such a choice obliterates the chemical background of the original term. It seems more appropriate to translate literally by the word ‘metabolism’.

5. Marx himself employed the term of ‘reproduction’ in both meanings (Marx, 1996, pp. 181, 565). However, while a whole chapter of the Capital is dedicated to an analysis of reproduction of social relations of production, his concept of the reproduction of labor-power is largely undertheorized and still framed within an analysis of waged work. As will be shown in the next paragraphs, feminist theory criticizes and overcomes this limitation by a redefinition of reproduction as the result of a specific reproductive work: domestic labor.

6. By analyzing this value-form, Marx differs from the former political economy, which does not distinguish between concrete and abstract labor. Only the latter sets a quantitative equivalent for exchange.

7. According to Marx, the level of necessary human needs never corresponds to a simple biological essence, but always depends on historical and moral determinations (Marx, 1996, p. 181).

8. This theoretical position is illustrated by the work of Christine Delphy. After having insisted on the distinction between the capitalist exploitation of waged work and the patriarchal appropriation of domestic work, she recently departed from the Marxist theory of value on which the critique of exploitation is founded (Delphy, 2015).

9. Although Marx didn’t read Haeckel, who used the word ‘ecology’ for the first time to name the science of the relations of an organism to its environment, he was deeply influenced by his study of the organic chemistry of Justus von Liebig and the physical agriculture of Carl Fraas, who were both pioneers in the scientific analysis of an ecological crisis.

10. On this point, see Marx’ historical analysis of the high rate of mortality among the English working class, in the first 19th century: ‘What interests [capitalism] is purely and simply the maximum of labour power that can be set in motion in a working-day. It attains this end by shortening the extent of the labourer’s life, as a greedy farmer snatches increased produce from the soil by robbing it of its fertility [emphasis added]’ (Marx, 1996, p. 271).

11. Beside the overproduction crisis, that Marx interprets as the result of an internal economic contradiction, opposing the forces of production and the relations of production, he also considers the possibility of an ecological crisis. It has been theorized as a ‘second-contradiction’ (O’Connor, 2011) between the economical production and its own conditions: the reproduction of human life as labor power and the reproduction of non-human life as ecosystems.

12. Indeed, the counterpart to the partial integration of life within the capitalist social form is the massive annihilation of non-human forms of life, which has been characterized as the sixth extinction of species: ‘Extinction is both the immediate success and ultimate failure of the real subsumption of the earth by the capital’ (McBrien, 2016, p. 117).

13. ‘Women’s identification with the “natural” is not evidence of some timeless unchanging essence, but of the material exploitation of women’s work, often without reward.’ (Mellor, 1997, p. 189).