Production of nature, metabolic rift and colonialism

Abstract

The objective of this text is to reflect on the rift of the social metabolism in contemporary capitalist society, as a result of the totalization of capital. In its deployment, capitalism has required colonial and imperial relations of domination over various spaces and over nature. In this sense, the metabolic rift is presented as the split in the exchange of materials and energy between the social form and the natural form, producing the environmental crises. This moment of fracture has as its ideological foundation the separation of society and nature that took place from the 16th century. This process has implied a particular way of thinking about nature and of relating to it, which has justified, according to its own terms, its plundering, but at the same time, its production under the properly capitalist form. In its becoming, capitalism unfolds unevenly, and from its totalization it always requires an exteriority, that is, the production of hegemonic spaces, properly capitalist, and dependent spaces, in which capital does not determine the whole of relationships. In this sense, the process of colonial and later imperial domination will be central in its consolidation as a hegemonic system and as a central factor in the current planetary socio-ecological crisis.