Anti-Capitalist Chronicles: Metabolic vs. Independent Relations

this is David Harvey and you're listening to the anti-capitalist Chronicles a podcast that looks at capitalism through a Marxist lens this podcast is made possible by democracy at work in the last session I was talking about relations that existed between elements within a social system between technology relations to Nature mental conceptions of the world social relations administrative structures production and the like um but I ended by kind of saying that um the nature of the relations uh needs to be understood uh in terms of Marx's dialectical thinking which even for some marxists is a bit of a stretch so I wanted to concentrate just a little bit on an idea that comes out particularly in terms of a study of the relation to nature which right now is in the Forefront of a lot of our interests I think politically and as well as uh uh socially and what Marx does is to suggest that the relation to Nature is something that he calls a metabolic relation and I want to spend a little time talking about the distinction between a metabolic relation and an independent causal relation because the metabolic relation requires a very specific kind of approach very different from this idea of their independent Billet balls of knowledge and so on which collide with each other and the metabolic relation is something which is very very special and is very important to understand in fact what Marx does is to suggest that the relation to Nature in the labor process under capital is is basically a metabolic relation Now by a metabolic relation he means a kind of relation in which the existence of one part is contingent entirely upon the existence of another part the example I would use here would be something like uh say uh uh a b uh and uh all the work uh the B uh does in pollination uh you can't have have uh bees without pollination and you can't have pollination without bees there are in fact some other ways in which you can pollinate but pollination is basically done by B so the B and pollination are if you like contingent on each other and the existence of one depends on the existence of the other take away the pollination and all the bees collapse uh take away the bees and all pollination collapses with all sorts of disasters around the world which is why so many people are worried about the declining bee populations in some parts of the world which has a lot to do with the use of pesticides so that uh uh I I a metabolic relation then is of that sort and and therefore it requires a very careful analysis and and and while there is difference there because clearly a b is different from pollination uh that the existence of the two is is becomes becomes absolutely uh comes part and parcel of each other now this is uh significant in in in the sense that um if a hurricane comes down it comes along and knocks down a house then the hurricane is not necessary to the existence of the house and the house is not necessary to the existence of the hurricane in other words you have two independent forces or two independent Elements which Collide at some moment and well a lot of analysis of what we do is the Collision of those independent elements but when we get a metabolic relation this metabolic relation starts to become very very powerful and very very different and it dances to different rules than those which come out of the independent Collision of independent forces which you can also find so this is what a topic which I think is worth exploring just a little bit um because there is also a sense in which at some point or rather an independent relation can become a metabolic relation in other words it's not as if some relations out there are inherently metabolic and some out there independent uh inherently independent that's not the case independent relations can at some point or other get embedded in such a way as to become metabolic and when they become metabolic the rules of their engagement changes drastically now the the simple answer to the uh example of this would be the following now somebody has a headache or is feeling very badly and and and takes a painkiller uh and yeah they they they they don't feel good next day either so I take a painkiller a day a day this is in independent relations this type of person is feeling sick there's painkillers over there there's no thing puts them together and says that they're a metabolic relation but you can see quickly that at a certain point uh there will be opioid Addiction in which case there starts to be a metabolic relation emerging out of the independent relation those painkillers and there's somebody with a pain independent but then after a while it became habitual and that therefore the the they became part and past of each other that the the addicts could not exist without the opioid and of course the production of opioids depended very much on the existence of addiction in which case we find the all of this business going on of the pharmaceutical companies actually peddling and creating this uh addictive relation which was had had therefore a a a a metabolic form now to break in metabolic relation is very very different from the question of breaking an independent relation with an independent why don't you just cut off whatever is a negative and that's it with a metabolic relation you cut off the opioid and you know the the person can you know freak out and die and all the rest of it so so so it's not so so you need a completely different approach you have to find some way of managing uh the dialectical relation the metabolic relation has to be managed very carefully and so to extract somebody from that metabolic kind of state and and allow for uh the resumption of an independent form of relation in which somebody if they are really feeling got pain from cancer or something like that they will be able to have access to an opioid Bill to deal with it so that is what is done here now what this has to do with the theory of capital is this that when Capital starts off it starts off as something that is totally independent it's it's somebody has some money and they kind of go out in the marketplace and they hire some laborers and they got some means of production and they they they they make something and they make something for a week and then they sell it and then they go home and they they forget all about it this is independent relation okay but then what happens is at a certain point somebody goes into the market and buys means a production and labor power and and creates a commodity and and and and monetizes that commodity so and gets gets a profit and says okay well I think I want to go through this again and get some more profit because you know more profit is more wealth and power and so after a bit uh and as Marx kind of says the definition of capital is that point at which not when you first take money and go off and buy it for things but when there is a need and and an urge if you like an addiction if you like put it that way of actually taking the Surplus value which you created uh through the production process and the profit which you gained and reinserting it back in so that you start to get the circulation of capital and the result is the circulation of capital is crystallizes out as a metabolic relation now what this does historically is this it says that all kinds of things were going on in society uh and and people were producing things and there was some wage labor and there was like commodity trades and things like that and so on it was all going on but that capital is about about value in motion and it's about it's about the circulation of capital and that circulation process is self-replicating that is it becomes a metabolic relation and there's a metabolic relation with nature because the labor process is about taking labor and and and putting that labor to work to transform use values which exist in nature into something which is a commodity which is then going to be useful and going to be sold to onto some uh some other person so this is the this is the the world which we start to see emerging so that that Marx really talks about uh pre-capitalism as a process emerging out of independent relations and the gradual construction of a metabolic relation which is very analogous to the addiction uh that we talked about opioids and therefore the capitalist is now engaged in such a way that they cannot do anything other than take their profit and bring it back in and start to create even more value more Surplus value so you start to get into what Mark's called the spiral form as opposed to Simply the circulation process and the spiral form is the result of this kind of addiction if you like of capital and the construction of this metabolic relation now this is where the theory of Economics starts to look very very different because now you're going to say that capital goes through these different moments it goes through the moment of of uh assembly of the of the raw materials it goes to the moment of production it then goes through the moment of actually uh the selling of the commodity and it goes through the moment of uh realization of value it goes through the moment of consumption and it goes through the moment of distribution in other words what Marx does is to look at the way in which the classical political economists looked at an economy and they started to identify production distribution exchange realization uh yeah and and the like all of those moments within the circulation process which were part of the totality we talked about the totality of capital so the totality gets created in a certain kind of way and the relations within the totality are metabolic relations not independent relations now Bourgeois economics typically regards all of these Notions like production consumption exchange distribution and so on as as actually independent in fact just a production and it uses a positivist framework to look at the way in which these elements interact and and then therefore it is actually missing the main point which is that these these elements do not relate to each other as independent uh and and they relate to each other as a metabolic relation so that this idea of a distinction between a metabolic relation and an independent relation is terribly important an independent relation can work through positivism empiricism and and standard scientific methods and on the other hand the the metabolic relation cannot be handled that way the metabolic relation needs a different mode of analysis it needs a relationality understanding how it is that uh the the the the the the the the value which is Incorporated in the means of production gets replicated in the commodity which then gets realized in the market which then circulates back in and therefore it is a self-expanding system so I would want to argue that Marx's historical materialism is about analyzing a totality and analyzing a totality with the idea that all of the elements in that totality are bound together in terms of a metabolic relation and so it marks a certain point talks about the metabolic relation to Nature as being significant but at a certain point he also talks about social metabolism which is the way that the metabolic structure of capital works now as I argued in the opioid case the the the the the ability to to get out of uh addiction is is something which is entirely different from Simply you know cutting off the The Independent Source by ceasingly opioid production for example it's entirely different from that and therefore we need a different technique a different entirely dealing with in the same way the the opioid addiction had to be dealt with in a different way um a non-independent way so we have to look at the non-independent way in which capital works and it's therefore the formula when we talk about capital in motion we're talking about Capital moving through these different moments and as it moves through these moments these moments actually uh are predicated on a metabolic relation with other moments in other words you can't have in in this system Marxist system you cannot have an analysis of production that does not actually incorporate and I say incorporate rather than relate to incorporate uh consumption and does not incorporate realization and does not incorporate exchange so that for Marx the the act of production is already predicated upon an act of realization and an act to sale in the market and and an act of reinvestment so that the circular process is is is is locked together through this idea of a metabolic relation and so that metabolic relations start to become Central to the way in which Mark sets up his political economy now this is something which you know conventional economists which wouldn't know what to do with them they really don't know what to do with contradictions and they don't know what to do with dialectics and all the rest of it but Marx is is really trying to create an alternative uh set of mental conceptions if you will which are going to actually reflect uh the way in which uh the elements within the totality of capital work together and become part and parcel of each other and actually construct the metabolic relation now that then means that at a certain point if we want to think about the conversion of a capitalist system into a socialist system then you've got to be able to intervene in the metabolic relation we've got to find a way of of breaking apart a lot of that metabolic connectivity and we've got to think about ways of perhaps rendering independent certain elements are within the construction process and that is what one of the features of Marx's theory is about is to how to take the pieces break them from the metabolic connection and start to actually then create an alternative World in which we would still continue to actually think about the relationality between the different elements of the sort that we were talking about last week the elements of Technology the elements of mental conceptions the the elements of uh administrative structure and so on which to me right now is a critical problem because as I argued last week I think one of the biggest barriers to actually even a conventional economic change which is going to be able to deal with some of the problems of uh of of of of climate change the one of the big biggest barriers is is the interstate system and the way it's constructed and and the coercive laws of competition between uh States and between power blocks that those that's one of the biggest things uh and then of course there's the politics of daily life and the politics of social relations and the politics of Technologies in relation to Nature and all of those kinds of things that we need to to rethink uh a lot of our approach uh to to to all of that so this is uh just one of the ways in which we if we shift from this uh kind of a totality idea with different elements within the totality but then we start to think about the nature of the relations operating within the totality which are not simply causal structures and or even feedback structures they're they're they're actually metabolic relations and metabolic relations have a different have a special quality that needs a special kind of handling and the thinking in terms of the metabolic relation uh becomes rather critical both politically but also in terms of looking backwards and trying to explain how do we got to our current situation thank you for joining me today you've been listening to David Harvey's anti-capitalist Chronicles a democracy at work production a special thank you to the wonderful patreon Community for supporting this project [Music]

Channel: Democracy At Work

Views: 3,623

Keywords: Richard Wolff, democracy, work, labor, economy, economics, inequality, justice, capitalism, capital, socialism, wealth, income, wages, poverty, yt:cc=on, David Harvey, Marx, Marxism, metabolic relations, production, distribution, consumption, exchange, Bourgeois economics, independent relations

Id: h9yHe6Oz7EQ

Length: 18min 7sec (1087 seconds)

Published: Thu Oct 20 2022