Image by Anna McCauley
READ MAKE SHARE: The Social Metabolism Edition 6pm Wednesday 16 July at Watch this Space, Mparntwe, Alice Springs
Have you ever wondered how man came to eat his bread in the sweat of his brow? And why there are men for whom this is by no means essential?
The social metabolism is a concept devised by Marx to explain the uniquely social means by which human beings achieve their subsistence. Any one of us may go through our entire lives without directly producing what sustains us: a farmer in Albany may grow our wheat, which is milled in Fremantle to be baked into bread by Mel at The Bakery. Sure, some of us may supplement our subsistence with home grown greens, and some of us got more directly involved with meeting our carbohydrate needs by taking up baking during the pandemic, but these are all exceptions to the rule that under globalised, industrial capital, meeting our subsistence needs is an intensely distributed social effort.
This state of affairs is underpinned by unique properties of human labour: our ability to produce more than we need, underscored by our unique degree of reliance upon tools that augment our labour, an efficiency mutually reinforced by complex social infrastructure of production. These factors combine to produce an immense spectrum of possibility for the organisation of human society, but these social relations are fragile in equal measure.
Capitalism exploits this fragility by enclosing the array of tools and materials that perpetuate our lives into private property relations. By controlling access to these life sustaining tools and materials, capitalism controls us.
For this special Mparntwe edition of read make share, I invite you to consider the implications of our porous corporeal organisation. Enclosed in this drive, to which you will find the link here, is one key reading: Metabolic Domination, chapter 5 from Søren Mau’s Mute Compulsion, and a plethora of satellite readings and viewings.