Social Metabolism
Pedro L. Lomas
Social metabolism is the process by which societies use matter and energy from the environment as the material basis for their reproduction.
Etymologically, the word metabolism derives from the Greek μεταβολή (metabole), meaning change, and the suffix -ισμός (-ismos), which relates to the ideas of doctrine and school, but also to those of system or movement. It is a concept that originates in the field of Biology and is used to refer to all the physical-chemical processes that take place in living beings, providing the energy and molecules necessary for their development. The idea of metabolism is therefore not of recent origin, appearing in medical writings from Ancient China and in those of renowned physicians of the medieval Muslim world (Ibn Sina, Ibn Nafis, etc.), although it was not until the beginning of the 20th century that it became widely used in the field of Social Metabolism. The concept of metabolism began to gain wider dissemination in the 19th century, in its modern form linked to discoveries about the chemistry of the human body. From this initial conception, it also expanded to the smallest level of the cell and the largest level of ecosystem metabolism.
On a social level, Marx is often credited with being the one who, based on his readings of various natural scientists (Liebig and Darwin, among others), in his work Das Capital (Marx, 2000), proposed the interrelation between human beings and nature, mediated by labor, in terms of metabolism (Stoffweschel). Several lines of inquiry emerged from this concept of Marx.
On the one hand, there is the view that Capital is a particular historical form of reproduction of social metabolism, which was theorized by István Mészáros, a disciple of the Hungarian Marxist György Lukács (Mészáros, 1995).
On the other hand, and not without considerable controversy, several authors within the field of ecosocialism addressed the presence or absence of environmental issues in Marxist reasoning. In this regard, in the first wave of the 1980s (Ted Benton, André Gorz, and James O’Connor, for example), they sought to complement classical Marxism with ecological aspects, which they argued it lacked. Of particular interest was the theorization of a second contradiction within capitalism, between the classic dichotomy of relations/forces of production and the material conditions of production themselves (O’Connor, 1998). On this line, the second wave of ecosocialism, beginning in the late 1990s (Paul Burkett, Brett Clark, and John Bellamy Foster, for example), draws on Marx’s more or less implicit arguments about nature and humanity, centred around the concept of the metabolic gap. According to this concept, capitalist agricultural production and the division between rural and urban areas create a gap or rupture between humanity and nature (Bellamy Foster, 1999) (See Naturalism).
In contrast to this Marxist school, and based on the assumption that it lacked genuine ecological foundations and that its supposedly productivist presuppositions were largely incompatible with them, Martínez Alier and Schlüpmann (1991), from other ideological perspectives, compile the work of various authors from the late 19th and early 20th centuries. XX (Podolinski, Ostwald, Soddy, and Geddes, among others), who would open a whole line of critique of a conventional economic model that ignored the biophysical foundations of Economics (understood in terms of metabolism) which, in turn, could act as limits to economic growth (K. Boulding, N. Georgescu-Roegen, H.E. Daly, etc.) in the field of sustainability. Their arguments would constitute some of the antecedents of modern Ecological Economics.
Also in other areas of the social sciences such as Sociology, History, Anthropology, and Demography, the concept of social metabolism began to gain popularity as a grouping of diverse phenomena of social mobility or change (socio-ecological transitions, metabolic transitions, etc.) more or less abrupt, under the concept of metabolic regimes (Fischer-Kowalski and Haberl, 2007; González de Molina and Toledo, 2014).
Well into the 20th century, two proposals began to generate more concrete analyses of metabolism at different scales. While there was the approach related to urban metabolism, which conceived of cities as a kind of organism that processes matter and energy to guarantee its way of life (Kennedy et al. 2011); there was also the line of inquiry opened by what is known as Industrial Metabolism and Industrial Ecology, which sought to demonstrate the changes in the processing of matter and energy due to industrialization, as well as its influence on environmental alteration (Ayres, 1989; Clift and Druckman, 2016).
Although many approaches address social metabolism, two major schools have emerged to try to translate the aforementioned theoretical frameworks into practice through quantification (Gerber and Scheidel, 2018).
First, inspired by many of the social science authors mentioned earlier, is the Vienna School of Social Metabolism, based at the Institute of Social Ecology of the Vienna University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences (Austria). This school, centred around sociologist Marina Fischer-Kowalski, aims to complement traditional monetary indicators with biophysical indicators derived from the study of matter and energy flows and stocks at different scales (nations, regions, cities, etc.) and through various applications (Haberl et al., 2019). To this end, it has developed the so-called Analysis of Matter and Energy Flows (MEFA), similar to the conventional economic analysis of stock-flows entering or leaving a given system.
Inspired by these fields of knowledge, but also by scientific discussions within the areas of non-equilibrium thermodynamics, complex systems theory, systems ecology, and bioeconomics (sensu Georgescu-Roegen), among others, the other school is centred at the Institute of Environmental Science and Technology (ICTA) of the Autonomous University of Barcelona (UAB), around the Italian engineer and biologist Mario Giampietro and the Japanese engineer and economist Kozo Mayumi, from the University of Tokushima (Japan). The so-called Barcelona School of Social Metabolism is structured around a more complex view of metabolism, understood as a set of functions expressed by any self-organizing complex system capable of using material and energy inputs and releasing waste into the environment for its reproduction, according to the information stored within that system (Giampietro et al., 2014). To this end, they have developed the Integrated Assessment of Ecosystem and Society Metabolism (MuSIASEM) (Giampietro et al., 2014). Unlike the Vienna School, the association between metabolism and reproduction of the analyzed system (society, for example) involves the use of a flow-funds model (Georgescu-Roegen, 1971) within the field of sustainability. The funds (e.g., biomass, land for a specific activity, labor time for a certain activity, population, etc.) are those aspects of the system that must be reproduced (they remain constant throughout the metabolic process). On the other hand, the changing elements, the flows, are those necessary for the reproduction of the funds (e.g., water, energy, money, etc.). Thus, not all flow configurations allow for the maintenance of the funds and, therefore, the (social) desirability, (economic) viability, and (environmental) sustainability of the system under analysis.
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