Capitalism, contradictions, crises: pushing back the limits to capital or breaching the capacity of the planetary ecosystem?

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.