Independent relations can at some point or other get embedded in such a way as to become metabolic,
and when they become metabolic, the rules of their engagement changes drastically, Now the simple
example of this would be the following. Somebody has a headache or is feeling very badly, and
takes a painkiller. And they don't feel good [the] next day either so they take a painkiller a day.
This is an independent relation. This person is feeling sick. There's painkillers over there.
There's nothing that puts them together and says that they're of a metabolic relation. But you
can see quickly that at a certain point, there will be opioid addiction, inn which case there
starts to be a metabolic relation emerging out of the independent relation. There's painkillers,
and there's somebody with a pain: independent. But then after a while, it became habitual
and therefore, they became part and parcel of each other. The addict could not exist without
the opioid, and of course, the production of opioids depended very much on the existence of
addiction. In which case, we find the all of this business going on of the pharmaceutical
companies actually peddling and creating this addictive relation. When capital starts off,
it starts off as something that is totally independent. It's: somebody has some money,
and they go out in the marketplace. And they hire some laborers, and they got some means
of production. And they make something, and they make something for a week. And then they sell it,
and then they go home and they forget all about it. This is independent relation, okay?
But then what happens is, at a certain point, somebody goes into the market and buys means of
production and labor power and creates a commodity and and monetizes that commodity and gets a profit
and says 'Okay, well I think I want to go through this again and get some more profit."
Because you know, more profit is more wealth and power. And so after a bit and as Marx says,
the definition of capital is that point at which- not when you first take money and go off and buy
it for things, but when there is a need and an urge if you like, an addiction if you like (put
it that way) of actually taking the surplus value which you created through the production process
and the profit which you gained and reinserting it back in. So that, you start to get the circulation
of capital, and the result is the circulation of capital crystallizes out as a metabolic relation.
Now, what this does historically is this. It says that all kinds of things were going on in
society. And people were producing things, and there was some wage labor. And there was the
commodity trades and things like that and so on. It was all going on. But capital is about about
value in motion, and it's about is about the circulation of capital. And that circulation
process is self-replicating. That is, it becomes a metabolic relation. And there's a metabolic
relation with nature because the labor process is about taking labor and putting that labor to work
to transform use-values which exist in nature into something which is a commodity which is then going
to be useful and going to be sold to some other person. So this is the world which we start to see
emerging. Marx really talks about pre-capitalism as a process emerging out of independent relations
and the gradual construction of a metabolic relation, which is very analogous to the addiction
that we talked about opioids. And therefore, the capitalist is now engaged in such a way that they
cannot do anything other than take their profit and bring it back in and start to create even
more value, more surplus value. So, you start to get into what Marx called the spiral form as
opposed to simply the circulation process. If we want to think about the conversion of a capitalist
system into a socialist system, then we've got to be able to intervene in the metabolic relation.
We've got to find a way of breaking apart a lot of that metabolic connectivity, and we've got to
think about ways of perhaps rendering independent certain elements within the construction process.
And that is one of the features of Marx's theory is about: how to take the pieces, break them from
their metabolic connection, and start to actually then create an alternative world in which we would
still continue to actually think about the relationality between the different elements.