In his critique of political economy, Karl Marx aims to reveal the intricacies of capital as a process of social metabolism (Capital 198). His approach—defining key terms in the language of the classical political economists, probing the limits of these definitions, and finally re-defining them as formal concepts—relies on the detailed analysis of a particular lexicon that centers around a unifying keyword: value. This project approaches the keyword of value through a literary technique often utilized by Marx himself—that of the scientific analogy—which reveals a nascent intuition to utilize the natural sciences to elucidate complex social phenomena. By taking Marx’s inclination to its contemporary conclusion, this project will re-reading of Marx’s critique through the lens of 21st century biochemical knowledge—analyzing Marx’s social metabolism via the natural sciences to better understand the latent potential of his chemical analogies. How can value be better understood from a contemporary biochemical perspective, and further, can a biochemical re-reading of Capital reveal Marx’s theory as scientifically beyond his time?