Metabolic politics

Abstract

Work is at the centre of the social metabolism with nature. This means that industrial relations (IR) are always also environmental politics. This article reviews core contributions to IR literature, showing that they do not systematically address this role of nature and separate the politics of work from their ecological basis. Drawing on historical case studies of the processing of three core products of capitalist modernity (fossil fuels, meat and concrete), the article presents the heuristic of metabolic politics in which nonhuman nature is conceptualised as an autonomous force in IR rather than a mere context of it. This approach allows analysis to systematically take into account the effects of IR on nonhuman nature as well as nature’s own shaping of IR. Such an interdisciplinary approach is necessary to understand the entanglement of IR with climate change and the broader ecological crisis.