Abstract

We discuss the relevance, validity and necessity of the Marxist analysis at the level of relations of production between society and nature. For these purposes, we investigate the concept of metabolism present in book III of Karl Marx’s Capital, taken up and updated by John Bellamy Foster with his “metabolic breakdown theory”. Its definition is presented and discussed considering perspectives stemming mainly from Geography, Sociology and Political Ecology. Emphasis is placed on the spatio-temporal problematization of the gap that becomes a fracture, to later be the basis for analysis of Chilean contemporaneity, in which gap and metabolic fracture are related to second-nature production processes and planetary urbanization