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The "Temporal Rift" and the Temporalities of the Capitalist Social Metabolism

September 2024
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University of Santiago de Compostela

This paper advances a reading of the social metabolism as a dynamic orchestration of heterogeneous rhythms, encompassing those intrinsic to human bodies and other natural processes, and those of relations mediating both. Contrary to pre-capitalist societies, as the collective mediation of the social metabolism adopts a capitalist form, it becomes autonomised from its conditions of existence, and a "tempo-ral rift" emerges, with two distinct dimensions: the rhythmic conditions of regeneration of human bodies and natural processes, as well as the terms of occurrence of non-subsumed practices, become subordinated to capital's reproductive needs, thus compromising the reproduction of all Earthly life.

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A Radical Journal

of Geography

The “Temporal Rift”and the

Temporalities of the Capitalist

Social Metabolism

Pedro M. Rey-Ara

ujo

Institute of Galician Studies and Development (IDEGA), University of Santiago de Compostela,

A Coru~

na, Spain, pedrom.rey.araujo@usc.es

Abstract: This paper advances a reading of the social metabolism as a dynamic

orchestration of heterogeneous rhythms, encompassing those intrinsic to human bodies

and other natural processes, and those of relations mediating both. Contrary to

pre-capitalist societies, as the collective mediation of the social metabolism adopts a

capitalist form, it becomes autonomised from its conditions of existence, and a “tempo-

ral rift”emerges, with two distinct dimensions: the rhythmic conditions of regeneration

of human bodies and natural processes, as well as the terms of occurrence of

non-subsumed practices, become subordinated to capital’s reproductive needs, thus

compromising the reproduction of all Earthly life.

Resumen: Este art



ıculo introduce una lectura del metabolismo social como una articu-

laci

on din

amica de ritmos heterog

eneos, que abarca tanto aquellos ritmos intr



ınsecos a

los cuerpos humanos y otros procesos naturales, como a los de las relaciones sociales

que median entre ambos. A diferencia de las sociedades precapitalistas, conforme la

mediaci

on colectiva del metabolismo social adopta una forma capitalista, 

esta se auton-

omiza de sus condiciones de existencia de forma que emerge una “fractura temporal”,

con dos dimensiones diferenciadas: las condiciones r



ıtmicas de regeneraci

on de los cuer-

pos humanos y los restantes procesos naturales, as



ıcomo las condiciones de realizaci

de las pr

acticas no subsumidas, quedan subordinados a las necesidades reproductivas

del capital, comprometiendo as



ıla reproducci

on de toda la vida terrestre.

Keywords: social metabolism, value-form, metabolic rift, time, Marx

Introduction

The “metabolic rift”approach has emerged as one of the most fertile methods in

the ﬁeld of environmental geography to illuminate capital’s destructive effects

upon its human, social, and natural substrata (Foster 2000; Foster et al. 2010).

However, the inherently temporal dimension of the social metabolism has

received very scant attention in the literature thus far (e.g. Auerbach and

Clark 2018). Recently, Saito (2022) has introduced the notion of “temporal rift”,

namely, “a rift between nature’s time and capital’s time”, as one chief dimension

of the metabolic rift. While that represents a very welcome development in that

regard, the concept has not been developed any further, unfortunately. This con-

tribution aims at ﬁlling both gaps.

Antipode Vol. 0 No. 0 2024 ISSN 0066-4812, pp. 1–21 doi: 10.1111/anti.13082

Ó2024 The Author(s). Antipode published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd on behalf of Antipode Foundation Ltd.

This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs License, which

permits use and distribution in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, the use is non-commercial and no

modiﬁcations or adaptations are made.

Whereas reﬂections on time and capitalism are generally conﬁned to abstract

linear time categories, this contribution accepts the late Lefebvre’s(2004:3) invita-

tion to “to found a science ... [of] the analysis of rhythms”by advancing a read-

ing of the social metabolism as a dynamic constellation of heterogeneous

rhythms, complemented with a “value-form”reading of social reproduction, the

social metabolism’s necessarily collective mediation (Carson 2023;Mau2023;

Rey-Ara

ujo 2024). Such temporal reading of the social metabolism offers an inno-

vative account of capital’s harmful effects upon both its biological and natural

conditions of existence, and the myriad processes and activities that remain not

subsumed by it.

Two distinct dimensions of the “temporal rift”are identiﬁed. On the one hand,

the rhythmic conditions of regeneration of human bodies and natural processes,

the two poles of the social metabolism, are disregarded by capital and made to

conform to the latter’s own reproductive requirements. On the other hand, the

collective mediation of the social metabolism is itself internally fractured. While

myriad activities partaking of it are not subsumed by capital, the latter dominates

the terms of their occurrence by forcing them to comply with capital’s own

demands.

The article is organised as follows. The next two sections introduce the notion

of social metabolism and show that its three core elements may be conceptua-

lised as complex aggregates of heterogenous rhythms, orchestrated together by

the ensemble of social relations. The fourth section details the terms of precapital-

ist social reproduction in Western Europe, and its implication for the social metab-

olism’s overall temporalities. The ﬁfth section details the capitalist “form”of social

reproduction adopted by the collective mediation of the social metabolism,

whose autonomisation from coexisting temporalities is examined in the sixth sec-

tion, giving rise to a “temporal rift”, scrutinised in the seventh section. The ﬁnal

section concludes.

The Social Metabolism

The most basic precondition of social life is its need to reproduce itself. Human

beings’biological constitution imposes a series of needs, such as enjoying a mini-

mum amount of sleep, caloric intake, and hydration; securing protection from

external threats; or keeping body temperatures within certain ranges, whose

satisfaction are inescapable requirements for human life to be reproduced

(Fracchia 2005; Starosta 2022). Nonetheless, the fact that absolute limits exist,

beyond which human life cannot be successfully reproduced, does not mean that

these limits can be precisely stated. Human bodies show a marked level of both

individual ﬂexibility and social heterogeneity.

The reproduction of human existence, like that of any other organism, requires

a continuous intercourse with non-human nature, working upon it to produce

objects liable to satisfy their species-speciﬁc needs, and discarding the waste

resulting from both their productive endeavours and their bodies’energy metabo-

lism. What sets humans apart from the rest of living beings is the fact that such

interaction with the external world takes place not instinctively but through

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conscious and purposeful acts, through which they confront and alter their

nature-imposed conditions of existence (Saito 2017): “Labour, then, as the crea-

tor of use-values, as useful labour, is a condition of human existence which is

independent of all forms of society; it is an eternal natural necessity which medi-

ates the metabolism between man and nature, and therefore human life itself”

(Marx 1976a:133).

Marx employed the term “metabolism”(Stoffwechsel ) to refer to this incessant

and dynamic interchange of matter and energy between human beings and their

environment, mediated by conscious labour acts (Foster 2000; Foster et al. 2010).

While humans have the capacity to affect and undermine the reproductive condi-

tions of their natural environment, they are nonetheless unavoidably subject to

natural laws and biophysical processes and properties (Bergamo 2023; Clark and

Foster 2010; Malm 2018). The continuous intercourse between humans and

nature is mediated by labour, such is the ultimate transhistorical condition of

human life. Moreover, the provision for those needs is a necessarily collective

enterprise. There can be no individual reproduction without social reproduction

(Starosta 2022). Some social arrangement needs to be in place that orchestrates

the ongoing instatement of collective labour practices to secure social reproduc-

tion, both on a day-to-day basis and inter-generationally.

While the forms the social metabolism can adopt are indeed multiple, all of

them are ultimately grounded upon humans’need to reproduce themselves as

well as their natural environment. “Human corporeal organisation opens up an

immense space of possibility founded upon a necessity: a metabolism must be

established, but its social form is never simply given”(Mau 2023:101). Despite its

inherently open nature, the social relations mediating the social metabolism must

satisfy two core requirements.

Firstly, insofar as any society has at its disposal, by deﬁnition, a limited amount

of available labour resources, a division of labour is a necessary condition for the

successful reproduction of any society (Otani 2018; Sasaki 2021): “The sum total

of all available labours in one society is ﬁnite without exception because its mem-

bers can only work for a certain amount of time in a year. This is simply a physio-

logical fact”(Saito 2017:105). Hence, “in all situations, the labour-time it costs to

produce the means of subsistence must necessarily concern mankind”

(Marx 1976a:164). From the inherent heterogeneity of the social needs to be sat-

isﬁed it follows that the ensemble of concrete labours through which use-values

will be produced will be equally heterogeneous. A failure to distribute labour

resources in adequate proportion to the various needs to be satisﬁed will inexora-

bly hazard society’s reproduction (Kuruma 2017).

Secondly, a mode of distribution that distributes the products of labour among

individual producers is equally required. Otherwise, in case some producers failed

to get their share of society’s total product, their individual reproduction would

be imperilled and, in some cases, the reproduction of society as a whole could be

compromised (Sasaki 2021). In sum, a division of labour and a distribution of its

products, those are the two unavoidable requirements every set of social relations

mediating the metabolism between humans and their environment must neces-

sarily articulate.

The “Temporal Rift”3

Ó2024 The Author(s). Antipode published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd on behalf of Antipode Foundation Ltd.

The Rhythms of the Social Metabolism

An ensemble of human bodies, manifold natural processes, and social relations

mediating both—those are the constitutive elements of the social metabolism,

irrespective of its form. The social relations instantiating a division of labour and a

distribution of its products introduce a dynamic, historically variable element

within the social metabolism. The temporalities of the overall social metabolism,

therefore, result from the interplay between those intrinsic to its two constitutive

poles and those springing from the speciﬁcally social arrangements through

which the collective, open-ended mediation of the social metabolism is

instantiated.

Whereas both human bodies and their natural environment have rhythmic con-

ditions of existence and reproduction, the respect of which constitutes a neces-

sary condition of possibility of human life in the abstract, both poles of the social

metabolism show a signiﬁcant degree of “elasticity”: their rhythmic conditions of

reproduction can be thwarted beyond the point that would ensure a “healthy”

reproduction (e.g. humans being deprived of sleep or worked to exhaustion, or

the nutrients of agricultural land failing to be fully replenished), without that

compromising, at least for a time, their own continued existence. However, “[the

elasticity of labour power and natural power is] not without objective limits. Once

these limits are surpassed, elasticity is lost entirely, like an overstretched spring”

(Saito 2018:199). Therefore, whereas social relations introduce an element of con-

tingent historical variation within the social metabolism, it is nonetheless a trans-

historical condition of existence of all forms of life that their intrinsic rhythmic

limits must be respected. Otherwise, their very reproduction would be at stake.

The Body

The physical materiality of the human body must be the starting point of any

analysis concerned with social reproduction (Bruff 2011). All living beings are

inherently rhythmic entities, ranging from neuronal oscillations, through heartbeat

and breathing rhythms, to circadian, reproductive, and the even wider rhythms

of physical growth and decay (Adam 1995). Humans are no exception in this

regard. Not only may they be conceptualised as bundles of different rhythmic

processes, the satisfaction of their bodily needs does also have an inherently

rhythmic character. From sleeping to nurturing, the human body’s storage capac-

ity is limited, so that their satisfaction must be renewed periodically, with a rate of

recurrence dictated by human’s“corporeal organisation”(Fracchia 2005). “Needs

may be remarkably elastic, they may vary enormously through time and across

space, but our bodies can never get used to certain types of privation and expo-

sure”(Orzeck 2007:511).

The most pervasive natural rhythm to which human beings are subjected to is

the daily alternation of day and night. Springing from the Earth’s rotation around

itself approximately every 24 hours, it is the prime regulator of nature’s rhythmic-

ity. Most paradigmatically, such rhythm is incorporated into humans’own corpo-

real constitutions through their intrinsic sleep predispositions. Humans, like all

other mammals, experience a recurrent cycle of sleep and wakefulness every 24

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hours, whose various and multi-faceted functions include providing much-needed

physical and cell restoration, supporting memory consolidation and storage, and

helping process the emotional impact of the sociocultural environment (Lockley

and Foster 2012; Walker 2018). Two separate factors foreground the daily recur-

rence of sleep, one linear and one cyclical. On the one hand, sheer sleep pressure,

positively related to continued wakefulness, and manifested in the production of

adenosine. On the other hand, the daily cycle of melatonin production, which

regulates the timing of sleep by inducing the body to fall sleep in tune with envi-

ronmental daylight levels. “Sleep has probably evolved as a species-speciﬁc

response to a 24-hour world in which light, temperature, and food availability

change dramatically”(Foster and Kreitzman 2017:84).

The production of melatonin, though, is not the only biological process to fol-

low a circadian rhythm (i.e. to recur approximately every 24 hours). These rhythms

are generated by a clock internal to each individual’s organism, located in the

area of the brain termed the suprachiasmatic nuclei (Foster 2022). Circadian

rhythms are autonomous (i.e. they free-run under constant environmental condi-

tions) and daily synchronised to the external environment by help of environmen-

tal signals (zeitgebers), the most important of which is daylight

(Roenneberg 2012:148). From body temperature, through stomach and liver

activity, to the glucose metabolism, the range of biological processes partaking of

the human metabolism which follow a circadian rhythm is markedly wide-

ranging. In sum, circadian rhythms are an integral element of the inherently

rhythmical structure that constitutes human beings’“corporeal organisation”.

Nature

Bodily rhythms cannot be abstracted from those of their environment. “This body

symphony, however, is not played in isolation. It is performed in synchrony with

all the Earth’s other symphonies”(Adam 1990:73). The Earth’s rotation around

itself approximately every 24 hours (23 hours, 56 minutes, and 4 seconds, to be

precise) generates the daily alternation between day and night, whose associated

variations of light and temperature levels all life is attuned to.

Sunlight as radiant energy is the source of life; and the movement of our earth and its

moon in relation to the sun constitutes the basis for nature’s rhythmic character. In

this dual capacity as the provider of energy and rhythmicity the sun inﬂuences the

cyclical nature of life. (Adam 1990:72)

Moreover, the Earth’s rotation around the Sun every 365.25 days, together with

its tilt of 23.4°away from its orbital axis around the Sun, generates predictable

climactic variation over the year, seasonal variations being the more intense, in

terms of daylight length and environmental temperature, the more distant from

the Equator a given location ﬁnds itself (Foster and Kreitzman 2009). The seasonal

variation of daylight and temperature and, by extension, of food availability, dom-

inates the lives of most non-equatorial species (Foster and Roenneberg 2008).

Relatedly, the Moon’s orbiting around the Earth every 29.53 days, and its

The “Temporal Rift”5

Ó2024 The Author(s). Antipode published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd on behalf of Antipode Foundation Ltd.

gravitational interaction with the Earth and the Sun, gives rise, in interplay with

other forces, to tidal rhythms (Foster 2022).

These multiple cosmological and geophysical rhythms underlie the complex

rhythmicity of biophysical systems, themselves complex assemblages of myriad

temporalities, with non-synchronous patterns of growth and decay, and involving

different paces, cycles, and tempos, whose integration helps maintain biological

integrity (Auerbach and Clark 2018). From the ups and downs of hydrological

cycles through recurring tidal patterns to the accumulation and melting of ice

and snow; from the very long timespans involved in the sedimentation of fossil

fuels to the much shorter ones pertaining to the nutrient cycle of the soil; nature’s

polyrhythmic pulse results from the interplay among myriad different rhythms,

themselves of different provenance. “The ‘natural’environment is thus a temporal

realm of orchestrated rhythms of varying speeds and intensities as well as tempo-

rally constituted uniqueness”(Adam 1995:128).

The rhythmic temporalities of inanimate natural processes and cycles them-

selves enable and constrain those of living organisms. From old-growth forests to

harvesting and agricultural practices, from cattle raising to bird migration pat-

terns, from species-speciﬁc reproductive periods to their rest and activity alterna-

tions, the living world manifests irreducibly complex temporalities, with multiple

beats and intensities, whose ecological integration enables the individual repro-

duction of its constitutive parts. Out of the totality of animate and inanimate pro-

cesses partaking of biophysical systems there emerge over-arching rhythmicities

to which themselves are subjected to, synchronised, and affected by.

The Social Relations

The temporalities of the social metabolism, therefore, result from the interplay

among those inherent to its constitutive poles (namely, the ensemble of human

bodies present at a given spatiotemporal location, and their natural nonhuman

environment), and those speciﬁc to the ensemble of collective labour practices

mediating both to provide a heterogeneous set of use-values satisfying the vast

array of social reproductive needs. The social relations articulating the ensemble

of collective labour practices, in its mediating role of the social metabolism

between human beings and nature, must nonetheless respect the temporal repro-

ductive requirements of the social metabolism’s two poles if their mediating role

is to be reproduced (Akashi 2016). “The interaction between human society and

nature is a never-ending dance, which always presents a challenge”(Foster

et al. 2010:272).

Such ensemble of concrete labour practices is articulated by social relations

imbued with meaning and signiﬁcation. Following Bruff (2011,2013), although

the forms these social relations may adopt are a priori inﬁnite, they must invari-

ably be founded upon the transhistorical need to satisfy social reproductive

requirements relative to the biophysical conditions of human existence, symboli-

cally codifying this necessity to comply with both bodily and natural

rhythmicities.

6Antipode

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It is thus a transhistorical condition of all forms of life that their activity rhythms

need to be attuned to those implicit in their biological constitution as well as

those springing from their environment. Otherwise, their own reproduction would

be compromised. Inasmuch as the conditions for agricultural production, as well

as general environmental conditions of temperature and visibility, vary throughout

the year, yearly rhythms (in non-equatorial locations) are an unavoidable feature

of social life. Also, daily variations in temperature and visibility conditions, coupled

with the circadian rhythmicity inscribed in human beings’biological constitution,

above all grounded upon sleeping needs, make daily rhythmicities an equally

everlasting feature of social life. Lastly, every known culture to date has employed

a social periodicity longer than the day and shorter than the months, of purely

social origin and totally unrelated to any underlying cosmological process (Zeru-

vabel 1985). The seven-day week, springing from the Judeo-Christian tradition,

and which has gained absolute hegemony worldwide, is but just one historical

form among many. Whereas the speciﬁc periodicity involved seems to be a mat-

ter of historical contingency, some intermediate temporal scale seems necessary

for matters of social coordination and temporal orientation. To conclude, over

these daily, weekly, and yearly temporal scales, socio-natural rhythms are cultur-

ally codiﬁed in such a way they imprint their own relatively autonomous rhyth-

micity, in the guise of festivities, dates of relevance, or collective rituals (Vihalemm

and Harro-Loit 2019).

In sum, if the social relations mediating the social metabolism are an integral

component of the latter, which is in turn historically under-determined and hence

subject to qualitative variation, the temporalities of the overall social metabolism

ﬁnd their ultimate source of dynamism in the speciﬁc way the society-wide

ensemble of labour practices is articulated. It is, therefore, the social form adopted

by collective labour practices, that is, the social regulation of how labour is allo-

cated, on the one hand, and how its rewards are to be distributed, on the other,

that constitutes the most determining factor in determining the speciﬁc temporal-

ities of the social metabolism between human beings and nature (Blumen-

feld 2023; Haug 2018).

The Temporalities of Western European Feudal

Societies

In order to ascertain the historical speciﬁcity of the capitalist “form”of social

reproduction, and its associated effects on the overall temporalities of the social

metabolism, it is instructive to compare them with those characteristic of the

(eminently agrarian, sedentary, and tributary) social formations of Western Euro-

pean feudalism. These societies shared certain common traits regarding the form

in which their social reproduction was secured, and by extension, the form

adopted by their social metabolic process. The radical caesura introduced by the

emergence of capitalism in human history can best be gauged by comparing it

with what was customary in the former’s immediate pre-history (Brenner 1976;

Wood 2002).

The “Temporal Rift”7

Ó2024 The Author(s). Antipode published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd on behalf of Antipode Foundation Ltd.

Pre-Capitalist Social Reproduction in Western Europe

In Western European feudal societies, the “double freedom”of the direct pro-

ducers which Marx ironically posited as consubstantial to capitalism was a rarity.

Rather, in these eminently agricultural economies, peasants had direct access to

their means of subsistence virtually everywhere (Brenner 2007). However, contrary

to Saito’s(2017:50) portrayal of an “original unity between humans and nature”

as a deﬁning feature of pre-capitalist societies, these were characterised by very

stable institutional arrangements and property relations which guaranteed the

sheer physical reproduction of labourers, who in turn enjoyed a great deal of

autonomy when conducting their respective production processes (Burkett 1999).

In these societies, producers were linked together through direct relations of

personal domination and dependence (Heinrich 2012), making productive activi-

ties simultaneously economic and political (Wood 1995). Social reproduction’s

two core requirements, the allocation of the available temporal resources a society

had at its disposal and the social distribution of the ensemble of use-values result-

ing from the former, were directly mediated by social relations of direct personal

interdependence and/or hierarchical dependence. Insofar as the set of social

needs to which use-value production had to respond to were determined before-

hand, individual acts of production partaking of social reproduction immediately

acquired social recognition; that is, they were validated as contributing directly to

the overall reproduction of society.

In these societies, the extraction of surplus-labour from the direct producers

prominently relied upon extra-economic coercion, ranging from physical threats

to the overt exertion of violence. On the one hand, peasant families were dispos-

sessed of their surpluses beyond what their reproduction required by the sheer

deployment of force. On the other hand, ruling classes employed those surpluses

either to fund their sumptuary consumption, or to improve their means of coer-

cion. Insofar as both peasants and lords had their ongoing reproduction guaran-

teed, none were submitted to abstract pressures obliging them to continually

improve their means of production, and hence neither set of actors had strong

incentives neither to specialise nor to innovate (Brenner 1976). For the direct pro-

ducers, specialising did offer potential rewards, but most importantly also

increased their exposure to forces beyond their control, thus heightening the risk

of starvation. Orienting their production to the market, their own reproduction

not being at risk, was hardly in their interest. Landlords, if in need to increase the

recourses at their disposal, would rather increase the physical exertion of

labourers, or enhance their coercive means of surplus extraction, instead of invest-

ing in labour-productivity improvements (Brenner 1977).

Markets did exist but, whenever they were present, they constituted merely an

opportunity to trade surpluses beyond the satisfaction of basic reproductive needs

and not an unavoidable imperative to secure one’s sheer subsistence (Wood 2002).

By extension, insofar as the producers’survival was generally guaranteed at the

outset, competitive pressures at the point of production were mostly inexistent,

and compulsions to improve productivity were notably scarce. Technological

improvements did occur, but they were more often than not one-off events, not

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self-sustaining phenomena (Brenner 2007). These societies, therefore, were mark-

edly stable over the long run.

Pre-Capitalist Temporalities in Western Europe

In Western European feudal societies, the social form of labour speciﬁc to them

enabled and prescribed widespread compliance with the temporal reproductive

requirements of the natural bases of use-value production. Their eminently agrar-

ian character contributed to turn natural rhythms into the chief pacemaker of

their overall social life. On the one hand, the interplay between cosmic and natu-

ral rhythms confers to agricultural production its inherently seasonal character.

On the other, peasant production, invariably oriented towards guaranteeing sub-

sistence, typically relied on diversiﬁcation to reduce uncertainty, thus giving rise

to a multiplicity of agricultural rhythms partaking of the same plot. Lacking tech-

nological means that would have enabled their emancipation from the regenera-

tive cycles of nature, social rhythms were imbricated in a constellation of natural

ones, ranging from the unpredictability of the weather, or the regular daily and

seasonal variation terms of both temperature and visibility, to the reproductive

cycles of their living nonhuman conditions, and the regenerative needs of their

environment.

As long as the human production of food remained seasonal ... and as long as the pri-

mary producers of food retained control over the means not just of production but

reproduction, the system remained one of contextual, embedded, interdependent

growth cycles. (Adam 1998:132).

Following Thompson’s(1967) seminal account of capitalist time-consciousness,

pre-capitalist societies were “task-oriented”insofar as “both work and time are

intrinsic to the conduct of life itself, and cannot be separated or abstracted from

it”(Ingold 1995:7). Productive activities were indissociably embedded in, and

articulated by, social relations. No sharp distinction between work and life could

be held. The multiple tasks involved in securing social reproduction were qualita-

tively different, and each had their own intrinsic temporal characteristics, ulti-

mately linked to the speciﬁcity of the natural processes involved. Absent an

external temporal compulsion, the processual dimension of the multiple tasks to

be performed was dictated, in the last instance, by the rhythms of nature. Social

rhythms were heavily constrained by natural ones and, simultaneously, the “social

form”of labour characteristic of these societies did not prescribe any external

temporal compulsion to defy them systematically.

Insofar as the ensemble of collective labour practices mediating the social

metabolism were generally subordinated to the rhythms of nature, labour pat-

terns were markedly irregular and discontinuous. The rhythms and cycles of

nature dictated in the last instance the distribution of work throughout the day

and the year, whereas the concrete temporalities of use-value production resulted

from the speciﬁc nature of the task at hand, relative to its intrinsic objectives and

inherent temporal determination, as much as from the rhythms imposed by the

cycles of nature upon collective labour:

The “Temporal Rift”9

Ó2024 The Author(s). Antipode published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd on behalf of Antipode Foundation Ltd.

Prior to capital ... the timing and tempo of the labor process are determined by

requirements internal to it, not externally imposed. [The concrete temporality of col-

lective labor is constituted] by ﬂuctuation in rhythms and speeds of labor attending on

the seasons and weather shifts, which decides when the time for various tasks is ripe.

(Malm 2016:304)

In sum, in these societies, the cycles of nature reigned supreme, and human circa-

dian behaviour was strongly attuned to natural cycles (at least, for the vast major-

ity of direct producers), as daylight remained the main entraining factor of

human circadian rhythms. Absent technological means such as electric light and

artiﬁcial heating, the effect of day/night alternations on human circadian biology

had its correlate in its capacity to entrain overall social life. Emancipation from

daily rhythms was neither a possibility in most pre-capitalist societies, as the tech-

nological means available prevented them from superseding the daily cycles in

terms of both temperature and visibility, nor, crucially, was such emancipation

prescribed by the social form of labour, as the determination of social productive

activity by a ﬁnite set of social needs prevented it from being systematically

extended into the domains of the night. Sleep rhythms have been shown to have

strongly aligned with the dark period, in contradistinction to industrial societies,

where sleep time generally extends beyond sunrise (Casiraghi and de la Igle-

sia 2022; Yetish et al. 2015). Nighttime was, in short, eminently a time for rest

and sleep.

Capitalist Social Reproduction

The emergence of capitalism in the 16

century marked a historical caesura, and

inaugurated a novel way to orchestrate the social mediation of the social metabo-

lism that accords to markets a historically unprecedented role (Brenner 1976;

Wood 2002). Inasmuch as the social relations mediating the social metabolism

are the dynamic source of the latter’s historically changing conﬁgurations, its

overall temporalities could not but change accordingly.

What ultimately deﬁnes capitalist societies is neither the existence of markets,

nor wage-labour, nor even capital, but a comprehensive state of dispossession, a

radical split between individuals and the very conditions that make their ongoing

reproduction possible, such as land or the means of labour (Mau 2023). Individ-

uals are thus left with only one property left, their capacity to produce use-values,

their labour-power, which they are forced to sell in exchange for a wage, by

means of which to acquire the means necessary for their reproduction, in the

form of commodities. In capitalism, while workers remain producing for their own

subsistence, only through a detour can they access the products of their labour

(Kuruma 2017).

The owners of the means of production do not produce use-values to satisfy

any speciﬁc social need but, rather, in the expectation of securing a monetary

proﬁt in exchange, which, if the exchange of equivalents is to be respected, can

only originate in forcing workers to work for longer than it takes them to produce

for their own subsistence. As the split between individuals and their means of

10 Antipode

Ó2024 The Author(s). Antipode published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd on behalf of Antipode Foundation Ltd.

reproduction becomes comprehensive, a greater proportion of the manifold

use-values needed for social reproduction are produced as commodities and, by

extension, a greater share of the ensemble of concrete labours collectively mediat-

ing the social metabolism adopts the form of wage-labour and is thus subsumed

by capital.

What, then, does the capitalist mediation of the social metabolism consist of?

The capitalist form of social reproduction consists in manifold acts of individual

production, undertaken in isolation from each other, and thus lacking any sort of

coordination, which are only recognised as part of society’s total labour in the

(always uncertain) case that the commodities in which they had been embodied

are successfully sold in the market (Heinrich 2012; Rey-Ara

ujo 2024). While the

eventual satisfaction of some social need remains a necessary presupposition, their

only true motivation is to obtain a proﬁt in exchange. In case commodities are

effectively sold, the owner is rewarded with money, the general equivalent, by

means of which to acquire a proportional share of society’s total product.

In the absence of comprehensive coordination, the two core transhistorical

requirements of social reproduction, namely, a division of labour and a distribu-

tion of its products, are dynamically instantiated through the price movements

triggered by, and guiding, the incessant movement of value along its different

forms, which gravitate around socially-necessary labour time (Nagatani 2022;

Otani 2018). The commensuration of use-values as commodities, on the one

hand, and that of qualitatively heterogenous acts of labour, on the other, are thus

but one and the same process: “By equating their different products to each

other in exchange as values, they equate their different kinds of labour as human

labour. They do this without being aware of it”(Marx 1976a:166–167). The

reproduction of social life is thus mediated by the circulation of value, and hence

conditioned by and subordinated to the reproduction of the latter, whose ongo-

ing reproduction is a necessary outcome, as well as a necessary precondition, of

the reproduction of social life itself (Andueza 2021; Carson 2023). In short, social

life is not reproduced despite, nor behind, but precisely through capital

(Rey-Ara

ujo 2024).

Nevertheless, the ensemble of use-values produced as commodities is far from

exhaustive of the totality of use-values whose production securing ongoing social

reproduction requires and, by extension, only a share of the activities partaking of

the collective mediation of the social metabolism acquire the social form of wage-

labour. The social mediation of the social metabolism is, in this regard, internally

fractured. Myriad other activities remain articulated not through impersonal mar-

ket mechanisms but, rather, through direct personal relations (often, but not nec-

essarily, hierarchical) and are directly responsive to speciﬁc social needs

determined beforehand. Their relation to the world of social needs, and the cri-

teria they must meet to be socially recognised as contributing to society’s overall

reproduction, are thus starkly different. These activities, not subsumed by capital,

are immediately socially useful. They are not forced to undergo a detour through

the market to reach their destination. They do not need to be made commensu-

rable with other practices, and their temporalities remain strongly conditioned by

the qualitative speciﬁcity of the tasks at hand.

The “Temporal Rift”11

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Conversely, acts of production subsumed by capital are not tied to any speciﬁc

social need, and only through a detour can they be validated as part of society’s

total labour (Kuruma 2017). Privately undertaken, they are only sanctioned as

socially useful through the successful exchange of their products. If successfully

sold, the money received in return grants the producer access to an aliquot por-

tion of society’s overall production. Only through selling the products of their

labour can they count as part of total social labour (Belloﬁore and Riva 2015). In

the words of Heinrich (2012:50–51), “In exchange, the concrete acts of

expended labor count as a particular quantum of value-constituting abstract labor,

or are valid as a speciﬁc quantum of abstract labor, and therefore as an element

of the total labor of society”. The key question here, however, is how much do

they count for?

Concrete acts of labour, in their qualitative speciﬁcity, are not only inherently

heterogeneous, but also lack an immanent common metric to be measured

against. The acts of weaving, cooking, or teaching, in themselves, are not directly

commensurable, and hence comparable. To that purpose, their qualitative hetero-

geneity must be abstracted from, and the only dimension that remains suscepti-

ble of grounding their aggregation is the sheer duration of the “productive

expenditure of human brains, muscles, nerves, hands”involved in their undertak-

ing (Marx 1976a:134).

The time of labour exertion and the time that concerns capital are, however,

non-coincident. The time it takes to produce a given use-value, that which the

clock registers between the beginning and end of the activity, is a concrete time.

Concrete acts of labour have a concrete temporality. However, in the process of

validation as abstract labour, it is not the concrete time actually expended in

bringing the use-value into existence that counts for capital. Commodities, when

confronting themselves in the market, do not bear any trace of the actual time

that elapsed during their production. “Abstract labor cannot be measured in

terms of hours of labor: every hour of labor measured by a clock is an hour of a

particular concrete act of labor”(Heinrich 2012:50). In order to count as values,

concrete times must be translated into a shared abstract measure, a process

which is continuously undertaken in exchange (Tombazos 2013).

Which language are concrete times translated into? What is that “foreign lan-

guage”commodities use to speak among themselves, no trace of which can ever

be found in the physical world? What criteria is the translation of concrete labours

into abstract labour based upon? The substance of abstract labour, the common

measure all concrete acts of labour must refer to, is not the time actually

expended in production but an abstract, ever-ﬂuctuating, and strictly social stan-

dard that emerges from the totality of exchange relations: socially-necessary labour

time. It is a social norm with which all acts of use-value production intended for

exchange must comply if they are to count as social labour at all, a social stan-

dard unrelated to any intrinsic property of the concrete act of labour that gave

rise to it, beyond workers’individual control, and according to which they are to

be valued, and rewarded accordingly. “Value is an accounting category; capital is a

system of domination by math”(Best 2021:901).

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The transition from concrete to abstract labour is thus brought about through

a twofold reduction concomitant with the act of exchange: from their qualitative

speciﬁcity to sheer duration, and from concrete duration to socially-necessary

labour time:

The determination of the quantity of labour to be put into the production of use-

values, with a view to the satisfaction of social needs, is one thing; the representation

of the temporal duration of labour in the amount of value within the product of

labour is another thing entirely. They are two different representations of time.

(Tomba 2013:106)

Whenever concrete acts of labour are intended for exchange ab initio, value

bestows a speciﬁc social form upon them, subjecting them to an external tempo-

ral determination they are forced to comply with (Arthur 2013; Moraitis and Cop-

ley 2017). Their concrete temporality is not eradicated, but immanently

constrained to comply with an externally imposed standard.

Concrete labour takes place in time and has a concrete temporality. In order for this

labour to count as social labour, it has to manifest itself as valid value in exchange ...

Concrete labour time is compelled to occur within the time of its abstract measure. If

it does not, it is nothing, valueless. (Bonefeld 2010:267–268)

The intrinsic temporality of concrete acts of labour is coerced to occur within the

coordinates set by socially-necessary labour time. A temporal frame is thus

imposed onto concrete labour practices springing from the social form they are

forced to adopt once they are intended for exchange. Non-subsumed practices,

conversely, are free from such determination. They do not have to comply with

an externally imposed standard of productivity to prove themselves socially useful.

While the terms of their occurrence are not free from capital’sinﬂuence, their

meeting a social need, better or worse, is guaranteed from the outset.

Socially-necessary labour time standards, in short, simply do not apply.

Autonomisation of the Social Mediation

The ensemble of practices partaking of the collective mediation of the social

metabolism is thus internally differentiated regarding their social form. From their

differential relation to the world of social needs springs a different temporal deter-

mination. In this regard, the category of subsumption constitutes “the crucial log-

ical ﬁgure of capitalist relations”(Saenz de Sicilia 2022:609). Following

Marx (1976b), “formal subsumption”refers to those situations where formerly

non-market-mediated production adopts a capitalist form, so that labour-power is

commodiﬁed, and the conditions of labour become alienated from the direct pro-

ducer: “His objective conditions of labour (the means of production) and the subjec-

tive conditions of labour (the means of subsistence) confront him as capital, as the

monopoly of the buyer of his labour-power”(Marx 1976b:1026). Through merely

a change of property relations, “the process of production becomes the process

of capital itself”(Marx 1976b:1020). Subsumption becomes “real”once capital

rearranges the production process to further enhance surplus-value production,

The “Temporal Rift”13

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that is, once the “form”reverts back on the “content”, penetrating into it and

moulding it in its image, so that “aspeciﬁcally capitalist form of production comes

into being”(Marx 1976b:1024).

From the perspective of the speciﬁc temporalities of the capitalist metabolism,

the category of “formal subsumption”is key. Whereas only in the case of “real

subsumption”is the capitalist social form fully materialised, the temporal determi-

nants of the latter become already manifest with “formal subsumption”, through

which labour is “form-determined as a particular instance of capital”(Saenz de Sici-

lia 2022:616). This way, a decisive transformation occurs. No longer driven to sat-

isfy predetermined social needs, “the immediate purpose of production is to

produce as much surplus-value as possible, as soon as the exchange-value of the

product becomes the deciding factor”, thus arising a compulsion to increase

“production for production’s sake”(Marx 1976b:1037). Formal subsumption,

therefore, involves turning the labour process into a carrier of capital’s valorisation

process. Even if the material transformations are slight, “the social transformations

involved in formal subsumption are epochal”(Murray 2004:252).

Absent a reconﬁguration of the labour process, the only means at the capital-

ist’s disposal to maximise surplus-value production are the extension and intensiﬁ-

cation of production. The inherent boundlessness of value and its never-ending

thirst for further quantitative expansion impose an external temporal determina-

tion upon formally subsumed concrete labour practices. “The work may become

more intensive, its duration may be extended, it may become more continuous

or orderly under the eye of the interested capitalist”(Marx 1976b:1022). The

inherent temporal determinations of value are felt decisively at the level of con-

crete practices themselves:

What changes do occur are more of a quantitative than qualitative sort: the process

becomes more continuous and orderly,less wasteful in the use of means of production.

And, of course, there are those hallmarks of absolute surplus-value, lengthening and

intensifying the workday. (Murray 2004:256–257)

In sum, as soon as a concrete labour practice is subsumed under capital, it imme-

diately acquires an external temporal determination that fundamentally alters its

character. A constitutive uncertainty regarding whether they will be able to meet

some social need at all ensues, due to ever-ﬂuctuating productivity standards and

market conditions liable to be known only ex-post. At risk of resulting socially

worthless, acts of labour are no longer subordinated neither to speciﬁc social

needs nor to the reproductive requirements of their biological and natural condi-

tions. Instead, the opposite holds. Concrete practices subsumed by capital

become autonomised into a self-referential system of abstractions not directly

responsive neither to the realm of social needs, nor to the regenerative conditions

of the social metabolism’s two constitutive poles but, exclusively, to their own

self-expansion. “The appearance of self-expansion makes the accumulation of cap-

ital life-like ... Capital becomes animated as the subject of the process and

humanity becomes subject to the process of the accumulation of capital”

(Carson 2020).

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The ultimate singularity of subsumed practices resides not in their being more

essential from the perspective of social reproduction. Rather, it concerns exclu-

sively their social form and, by extension, the temporal determination they are

bestowed upon, from which an autonomisation of objectiﬁed social relations

ensues, which, “far from being under their control, in fact control them”

(Marx 1976a:168), because “these things contain their social relationships within

them”(Jappe 2022:569).

A Rhythmic Account of the “Temporal Rift”

As social reproduction adopts a capitalist form, social relations mediating the

social metabolism no longer conform to the reproductive requirements of the lat-

ter’s two constitutive poles. Rather, a real inversion ensues. The temporalities of

the two poles of the social metabolism are now forced to comply with capital’s

own reproductive requirements. The blind impulses of capital, rather than the

cycles of nature, are the main pacemakers in capitalist societies, from which a dis-

cordance of times within the social metabolism ensues. Nevertheless, while capi-

tal’s promethean ambitions would aim at fully doing away with the constraints

imposed by regenerative conditions of its conditions of existence, its intimate

dependence upon the latter can never be undone. There thus ensues a constant

clash between capital’s drive to expand valorisation time and to restrict circulation

time, on the one hand, and the multiple temporalities of capital’s natural, biologi-

cal, and sociocultural conditions of existence, on the other, resulting in a peren-

nial estrangement, rearticulation, and reconstitution of the speciﬁc temporalities

of its adjacent processes.

Saito (2022:27) advances the notion of “temporal rift”as one key dimension of

the metabolic rift caused by the capitalist form adopted by the collective media-

tion of the social metabolism, by which he refers to “a rift between nature’s time

and capital’s time”. While pointing in the right direction, Saito’s account of the

“temporal rift”needs nonetheless to be complexiﬁed. On the one hand, the refer-

ence to “nature’s time”needs to be further disentangled. Insofar as both poles of

the social metabolism (human bodies and non-human nature), have their own

intrinsic rhythmic conditions of reproduction and regeneration, the harming

effects caused by the capitalist mediation of the social metabolism on its

non-capitalist conditions of existence must be analytically differentiated. On the

other hand, beyond the effects of social relations upon that which they mediate,

the collective mediation of the social metabolism is itself internally fractured. In

this regard, capital’s rhythms or, rather, the social rhythms of practices subsumed

by capital, dominate the terms of occurrence of non-subsumed activities. Both

dimensions will be analysed in turn.

Whereas human bodies are themselves part of nature, they possess distinct

properties (Malm 2018). In this regard, the “temporal rift”can be understood as

the distortion of the two poles of the social metabolism’s own regenerative

rhythms to the point of risking their non-reproduction. On the one hand, human

beings’rhythmic constitution is constitutively threatened by capital’s limitless

thirst for surplus-value. Capital, by forcing the recalcitrant materiality of human

The “Temporal Rift”15

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bodies to comply with its own demands, disregards the regenerative conditions

of human bodies, thus violently abstracting from their essential vulnerability

(Andueza et al. 2021). Human’s manifold rhythmic processes, from the regular

necessity of sleep, hydration, or caloric intake to the processual nature of healing

processes, or the processes of growth and decay over the life course, are all under

threat by the social necessity to comply with capital’s demands (Slater and

Flaherty 2023).

Capital created a world in its image which is inimical to human bodies’regener-

ative conditions. The disruption of circadian rhythms, and the associated weaken-

ing of solar light entrainment, caused by 24/7 operations; constrained healing

times caused by the imperative to return to work after having contracted an ill-

ness or disease; the penalties incurred by gestating subjects, in terms of multifari-

ous labour market discriminations, when forced to take pregnancy or parental

leave; life expectancy being negatively affected by polluted environments and/or

intensiﬁed work efforts ... All these are but examples of labour markets’constitu-

tive hostility to human rhythmicities grounded upon their biological constitution.

The violence is double: it is violence done to the worker, constrained to work to

rhythms of labour that are more intense and with a less porous time; and it is violence

to human nature, because, if the machines have to be put to work for the greatest

amount of time possible, it generates indifference between day and night.

(Tomba 2013:146)

On the other hand, accumulation imperatives submit natural processes to analo-

gous pressures to comply with capital’s demands, thus compromising natural pro-

cesses’regenerative conditions and disrupting the ecological integration of

natural cycles that sustains earthly life (Foster et al. 2010). From the perspective

of capital valorisation, it is not only the time elapsed in production, but also circu-

lation time, that matters, the sum of which Marx (1978) refers to as “turnover

time”. Despite circulation being an essential moment within the circuit of capital,

it represents a loss for capital, as valorisation is momentarily interrupted. Inas-

much as reductions in circulation time increase the mass of surplus-value pro-

duced per unit of time, capital carries an in-built tendency to modify its outer

environment so as to accelerate circulation and thus reduce turnover time. Social

pressures to reduce “socially-necessary turnover time”thus ensue (Harvey 2001),

from which derives “the drive to compel all life-activity to work on the rhythms of

capital”(Moore 2015:231), compressing the reproduction times of manifold

natures so as to enable a further compression of turnover times. Natural pro-

cesses’reluctance to give in to demands to accelerate their regeneration is viewed

by capital as merely barriers to be overcome. An irresolvable contradiction

between capital’s reproductive requirements, and those of its natural conditions

of existence, thus emerges from the capitalist “form”of social reproduction itself

(Carson 2023).

The disruption of the nutrient cycles of agricultural soil with the expansion of

capitalist large-scale agriculture and long-term trade, analysed by Marx and Liebig

themselves, remains the classical example in this regard (Foster 2000). Neverthe-

less, other contemporary examples abound, such as the control of broiler

16 Antipode

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chicken’s lifecycle in capitalist farms, through selective breeding practices, to both

maximise the animal’s body size and accelerate their rates of growth. While these

practices increase the amount of meat to be sold, and the speed at which it is

available, they have deleterious effects on chickens, resulting in “animals who are

deformed, neurologically or cardiologically damaged, and generally unhealthy”

(Leder 2012:76). Similarly, the transformations of forest ecosystems promoted

prominently by the timber and lumber industries, resulted in the gradual disap-

pearance of old-growth forests, characterised by rich and complex internal biodi-

versity, and its substitution by widespread deforestation and the spread of

monocultural tree farms, leading to an overall loss of ecological biodiversity that

affects the carbon, nutrient, and hydrological cycles (Auerbach and Clark 2018).

Deforestation is, in turn, a major driver of anthropogenic climate change, since

cutting trees down not only releases carbon dioxide to the atmosphere, but also

removes a key source of CO

absorption (Rudel 2001). Rising concentration of

in the atmosphere, in turn, disrupts the carbon cycle in the biosphere, itself

a major driver of climate change, a process with potentially fatal consequences

for all earthly life (Clark and York 2005). Temporal rifts are multiple and inter-

locked.

Besides thwarting the regenerative capacities of the social metabolism’s two

constitutive poles, the “temporal rift”takes a second dimension insofar as the col-

lective mediation of the social metabolism is itself internally fractured. Acts of

labour subsumed by capital are far from exhaustive of the totality of activities

involved in social reproduction. Myriad others remain articulated through direct

personal relations. Such distinction does not denote different degrees of essential-

ity relative to systemic reproduction but, rather, a distinct temporal determination

springing from the different conditions they must meet to satisfy some

social need.

The situation of generalised dispossession that characterises capitalist societies

makes reproductive units structurally dependent on market exchange to secure

their ongoing reproduction (Moreno Zacar

es 2021; Wood 2002). As a result of

their need to secure money, the general equivalent, to have access to their means

of reproduction, demands springing from capitalist markets must take precedence

over competing ones. In consequence, the manifold other tasks and activities indi-

viduals may undertake, either those strictly related to their securing of their own

subsistence (e.g. domestic labour) or those that might respond to alternative

motivations (e.g. leisure activities) must be subordinated, in temporal terms, to

their involvement in capitalist markets. Social rhythms subsumed by capital thus

dominate co-existing rhythms, in the sense of forcing coexisting rhythms to com-

ply with capital’s own reproductive requirements, to move them, shift them,

reconﬁgure them, and accommodate them to better ﬁt capital’s context-speciﬁc

needs. Non-subsumed activities can rarely occur in a time of their own choosing

but, rather, in times left free by capitalist labour markets, and overdetermined by

the times of commodity circulation. The concrete temporalities of non-subsumed

practices are thus not erased nor cancelled, but moulded, displaced, fragmented,

accelerated, or compressed, being made subservient to capital’s insatiable thirst

for further surplus-value extraction.

The “Temporal Rift”17

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Final Remarks

This paper has offered a temporal reading of the social metabolism, foreground-

ing the inherently rhythmic character of its three core components: the ensemble

of human bodies, their natural environment, and the array of social relations

mediating them. Whereas in precapitalist societies social rhythms were subordi-

nated to natural ones, the opposite is true in capitalist societies. Labour practices

subsumed by capital, and hence intended ab initio for exchange, undergo an

external temporal determination springing from their social form. The collective

mediation of the social metabolism is thus autonomised into a system of abstrac-

tions not directly responsible to social needs nor to its non-capitalist conditions of

existence.

A“temporal rift”is thus created within the social metabolism, two distinct

dimensions of which have been identiﬁed. Firstly, all natural processes, human

and non-human alike, possess their own rhythmic conditions of regeneration,

which are disrupted by being made to comply with capital’s own reproductive

requirements. Secondly, since the collective mediation is itself internally fractured,

subsumed practices dominate non-subsumed practices by constraining the terms

of their occurrence to better ﬁt capital’s reproductive needs. Capital’s domination

of the myriad processes it mediates is thus comprehensive albeit internally

differentiated.

The “temporal rift”occasioned within the social metabolism by its being medi-

ated by capital can only be overcome by abolishing the capitalist form of social

reproduction and, by extension, the temporal determinations of labour practices

springing therein. Only through a collective and democratic determination of the

process of social reproduction mediating the social metabolism will the manifold

temporal discordances created by capital be overcome.

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Javier Moreno Zacar

es and Antipode’s three anonymous reviewers for

their comments on previous versions. All usual disclaimers apply. This work was supported

by the Xunta de Galicia, Spain, under the Postdoctoral Research Grant (Exp. ED481B-2021-

066).

Data Availability Statement

Data sharing not applicable to this article as no datasets were generated or analysed during

the current study.

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The “Temporal Rift”21

Ó2024 The Author(s). Antipode published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd on behalf of Antipode Foundation Ltd.

Replenishing Geographical Thinking on Depletion through and of Social Reproduction

Article

Nov 2024
ANTIPODE

This Symposium aims to replenish geographical thinking in relation to the depletion that is entailed through social reproduction labour, and the wider, structural depletion of social reproduction that is continuing apace in capitalist times. In this introduction, we trace the existing contours of how depletion through social reproduction has come to be conceptualised. Thereafter, we focus on four areas of development that the four spatially oriented papers of the Symposium probe at: first, on the links between harm and depletion; second, on depletion both through and of social reproduction; third, on the methods that are harnessed to examine depletion; and fourth, on the possibility and limits of appreciation and repair.

Social reproduction theory and the capitalist ‘form’ of social reproduction

Article

Full-text available

Oct 2023

Pedro M. Rey-Araujo

This paper critically interrogates the meaning attached to socialreproduction in the so-called Social Reproduction Theory [SRT]. WhileSRT represents an improvement over competing approaches to social reproduction along several dimensions, its understanding of social reproduction as referring exclusively to the ongoing reproduction oflabour-power does not fully capture the extent to which the reproduction of social life is mediated by the reproduction of capital.Instead of defining social reproduction in opposition to capitalistproduction, it is argued that their relation should be reformulated asone between a transhistorical content, namely, the need of any societyto reproduce itself through a division of labour that mediates itsmetabolic interaction with nature, and a historically specific form itadopted, as myriad uncoordinated acts of individual production linkedt ogether by the incessant circulation of capital along its different valueforms in search of self-expansion. Inasmuch as the reproduction ofsocial life thus requires the concomitant reproduction of capital’s abstract nexus as the key mediating link between human life and its condition, the reproduction of social life and that of capital need to be framed as two mutually co-mediated moments within overall capitalist social reproduction.

Immanent Externalities: The Reproduction of Life in Capital

Book

Apr 2023

Rebecca Carson

Pandemic Capitalism: Metabolic Rift, World-Ecology Crossing Dialectical Biology

Article

Mar 2023

Jacopo Nicola Bergamo

In this article, I contrast two of the main schools of thought within eco-Marxism, namely Metabolic Rift ( MR ) and World-Ecology ( WE ). These differ above all else in their accounts of the ontological status of society and nature. The Covid-19 pandemic constitutes a moment of concretisation of this long-standing debate, which is able to dissolve at least in part its issues. The article consists of four parts. I begin with a summary of the two schools of thought and their core stances, before proceeding to unpack their respective theoretical points of contention. I subsequently proceed to explore the conceptualisation of health according to the Marxist scientists Richard Levins and Richard Lewontin through the model of dialectical biology. In the third section, I unpack the conceptualisation of the Covid-19 pandemic by the epidemiologist Robert Wallace, before finally concluding with the contrasts of the two schools in the light of dialectical biology.

Sleep: A Very Short Introduction

Book

Mar 2012

Sleep: A Very Short Introduction addresses the biological and psychological aspects of sleep. What is sleep? Why do we need it? How much is enough? What is the impact of modern society on sleep? We spend about a third of our lives asleep. References to sleep abound in literature and art, sleep has been recognized as fundamental to the human condition. Over the past century, our knowledge of sleep has developed hugely. The impact of poor sleep on our quality of life is gaining recognition and the prevalence of sleep disorders in the population is increasing as we live ever stressful lives.

Marx on the Reciprocal Interconnections between the Soil and the Human Body: Ireland and Its Colonialised Metabolic Rifts

Article

Oct 2022

Marx’s writings on Ireland are widely known, but less appreciated is their centrality to the formation of his ecological thought. We show how Marx’s understanding of metabolic rift evolved in line with his writings on colonial Ireland, revealing a concept more holistic than the “classic” metabolic rift of the soil. We recover and extend this concept to the corporeal metabolic rift, showing how both are inherent in Marx’s various writings on Ireland. Whilst the rift of the soil concerns the extraction and consumption of organic soil constituents, the corporeal rift describes processes of depopulation, and their effects on demography and family formation. These “rifted” processes are interconnected such that depleted soil impacts on the health of those who consume food grown on those “rifted” soils. We argue that the presence of these rifts substantiates Ireland’s inability to sustain itself both economically and organically, which determined its persistent post‐Famine underdevelopment.

Sleep Under Preindustrial Conditions: What We Can Learn from It

Chapter

May 2022

Human sleep is regulated by light in two fundamental ways: The light-dark (LD) cycle entrains a circadian clock that in turn regulates sleep timing, and light per se can acutely inhibit sleep. Throughout evolution, these sleep regulatory systems became highly sensitive to the effects of light and they can be affected by the relatively low light intensities that are used indoors. Thus, postindustrial living conditions have created built environments that have isolated humans from the natural LD cycle and exposed them to an artificial one that can affect daily sleep timing. Studying indigenous communities that have differential access to electricity, as well as communities living in highly urbanized areas, we and others have shown that human access to artificial light has delayed the daily onset of sleep but has had a smaller effect on its offset, leading to an overall reduction in sleep duration that is pervasive in modern societies. In this chapter we discuss these studies, highlight their main findings, and point to their limitations.

Climate barbarism: Adapting to a wrong world

Article

Feb 2022

Jacob Blumenfeld

The reality of the law of value

Article

Dec 2021

Kiyoshi Nagatani

In the wake of Böhm-Bawerk’s criticism that Marx’s law of value runs contrary to empirical facts, Marxian economics has developed mainly in two different directions: one based on the simple commodity production and the other on the mathematical identity of value with prices of production (the transformation problem). The author agrees with neither, arguing that Marx intended to base the law of value on the production process of capital, as in Capital Volume 1, independently of Capital Volume 3. However, the notion of this process and the law of value have not been sufficiently explained in Volume 1. Marx presents the value of a commodity as socially necessary labour objectified in Chapter 1 on the commodity, and later applies this rule to capitalist commodity products in Chapter 7. Pointing out the defects of this method, this article relocates the presentation of the dual nature of labour to the Labour Process (Chapter 7, Section 1), and the proof of the substance of value or the law of value to the Valorization Process (Chapter 7, Section 2). The Labour Process plays a key role in Volume 1, but it contains a fatal flaw. Consequently, Section 2 ends up with insufficient explanation. By reconstructing the Labour Process and the Process of Creating Value and Surplus value, the author confirms the meaning and reality of the law of value in Chapter 7, Section 2.

Wages for Housework Redux: Social Reproduction and the Utopian Dialectic of the Value-form

Article

Jan 2021
Theor Event

Beverley Best

A New Introduction to Karl Marx: New Materialism, Critique of Political Economy, and the Concept of Metabolism

Book

Jan 2021

Ryuji Sasaki

This book provides a concise overview of Marx’s philosophy and political economy, tracing various changes of his theoretical views over time through his practical and theoretical engagements with contradictions of capitalism from the unique perspective of Japanese Marxism. While it offers an objective introduction to Marx’s critique of capitalism, Sasaki uniquely pays particular attention to the concept of “metabolism,” whose disruption under the capitalist mode of production causes exhaustion of labour-power as well as natural resources. Sasaki reconstructs Marx as a revolutionary thinker, whose devoted his entire life for the sake of establishing a more free and equal society beyond capitalism. Sasaki’s book shows that Marx’s passion for the socialist revolution in his last years is recorded in his late excerpt notebooks that become available through the Marx-Engels-Gesamtausgabe. Ryuji Sasaki is Associate Professor of Economics at Rikkyo University, Japan.

The "Temporal Rift" and the Temporalities of the Capitalist Social Metabolism

Abstract

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