Metabolism in Capitalism: Metabolic Rift Debates

Abstract

In our contemporary context, capitalist mode of production has expanded itself almost entire corners of the earth both in economic and political planes and became a notion in which functions in a sense that knows no limits. This mode of production which functions on a global level is primarily an economic and therefore a political notion. This notion has positioned its own frontiers on to the limits of cycles of natural life and continues to effect these cycles in inconceivable manners. The subject of this thesis is being able to make sense of the political and economic outcomes of the relationship between capitalist mode of production and nature in the contemporary context. It will be touched upon the meanings of the concept of metabolism (stoffweschel) which was coined by chemist Justus von Liebig in the 19th Century and given its political and economic context by Marx in order to both be able to achieve this purpose and to set a contextual limit on the discussion.