ABSTRACT

Capitalist economies are structured around two fundamental contradictions. The first lies within the social relations of capital, and the second in the ‘metabolic rift’ between capital accumulation and nature. While the adverse effects of the first do create systemic existential crises, capital and its political representatives have discovered ways of temporarily containing them and creating new space for enhanced accumulation. In contrast, the risks emanating from the second contradiction, located in the disjuncture between capital’s need for compound economic growth and the capacity of the planetary ecosystem as a source of material inputs and a sink for inevitable unwanted by-products, cannot be so contained. As such, the second contradiction represents an immanent existential threat to the capitalist mode of production and the societies in which it is, to varying degrees, embedded, of which the most pressing contemporary expression is enhanced global warming.

摘要

资本主义经济是围绕两个基本矛盾构成的。第一个是资本的社会关系，第二个是资本积累与自然之间的“代谢裂痕”。尽管前者的不利影响确实造成了系统性的生存危机，但首都及其政治代表已经发现了暂时遏制危机并为加强积累创造新空间的方式。相比之下，第二个矛盾所产生的风险就不能如此遏制，这是资本对复合经济增长的需求与行星生态系统作为物质投入的来源以及不可避免的有害副产品汇的能力之间的分离。因此，