Metabolic policy

Robert Misik in conversation with Simon Schaupp

Metabolic policy
A great story of the interaction between production and nature.

Our entire life, work and existence is a sequence of destruction and appropriation and transformation of nature, and it is not enough to simply analyse things apart. Simon Schaupp thinks things through together and, as „Die Zeit“ wrote, you come out of this reading a different person than when you went in. The „Frankfurter Allgemeine“ wrote that this study was „captivating“.

If we want to understand the ecological crisis, we need to understand the world of work, says the author. It is through labour that societies carry out their metabolism with nature. For Simon Schaupp, labour policy is therefore always also environmental policy - or »metabolic policy«. Nature itself plays an active role in this: the further its utilisation is driven forward, the more drastically it affects the world of work.

The sociologist uses a number of historical examples to show how productive this perspective is: Without mosquitoes, neither the rise nor the decline of the plantation economy can be understood. The enforcement of trade unions was made possible, among other things, by the new levers of power that the material properties of coal gave the workers. And in early slaughterhouses, striking workers put pressure on the employers by bringing the newly introduced assembly lines to a standstill, so that the decaying animal carcasses soon piled up.

Moderation Robert Misik, Author and journalist

Simon Schaupp is a senior assistant at the Chair of Social Structure Analysis. His research focuses on the transformation of the world of work, digitalisation and the ecological crisis. He is currently also leading the research project "ecological stubbornness" at the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research. His award-winning dissertation „Technopolitics from Below“ was published by Matthes & Seitz Berlin in 2021. He is a member of the editorial board of the journal „Work, Employment and Society“. Simon Schaupp studied sociology, social sciences and law in Bielefeld and Vienna. From 2016-2018 he was a research associate at the Munich Centre for Technology in Society at the Technical University of Munich and in 2022/23 a visiting professor at KIT, Karlsruhe.