earth is decisive in order to understand the specificity of the capitalist mode of production.41
Modern workers lose any guarantee of physical existence, and their activity becomes estranged, controlled and dominated by alien forces. Propertylessness, precariousness, alienation, and exploitation are tightly connected. It is true that exploitation existed for the serfs, and they had to provide the lord with surplus labor and surplus products. However, contrasting this with the situation of modern workers, Marx argues that the labor of serfs still possessed an “intimate side,” because, thanks to the connection with the earth serfs maintained autonomy in the production process and their material life was secured. Ironically, this is a particular result of the negation of their personality in feudal society, which transforms them into a mere part of the objective means of production. In this regard, Marx without doubt recognizes a positive side of the feudal mode of production.
The regulation of the autonomous power of capital can take various forms, such as “craft, guild, corporation, etc., within which labor still has a seemingly social significance, still the significance of the real community, and has not yet reached the stage of indifference to its content, of complete being-for-itself, i.e., of abstraction from all other being, and hence has not yet become liberated capital.”42 Within a craft, guild, and corporation there no longer exists the direct unity between humans and land, but there is still a stable connection of the producers with their means of production thanks to the intersubjective coordination of the entire production, which hinders the full penetration of the power of capital. The complete dissolution of the tie between the workers and their objective means of production for the first time prepares “free” labor, in a “double sense,” and thus the impersonal, reified dominance by “liberated capital.”
Modern laborers, on the contrary, lose any direct connection to the land. On the one hand, they are free from personal dominance. On the other hand, they are also free from the means of production and thus can no longer relate to nature as their own “inorganic body.” The original unity with the land disappeared with the collapse of precapitalist personal domination. Its result is alienation from nature, activity, species-being, and other people—or simply said, modern alienation arising from the total annihilation of the “intimate side” of production. When the land becomes a commodity, the relationship between humans and land is radically modified and reorganized for the sake of producing capitalist wealth. After the universalization of commodity production over the entire society, the whole of production is not primarily directed to the satisfaction of concrete personal needs, but to the valorization of capital alone. Following the new rationality of production, the capitalist does not simply let the workers conduct their job as they please; rather, in accordance with his “filthy self-interest,” he actively transforms the entire production process in such a way that human activity is fully subjected to a reified dominance, without consideration of autonomy of work and material security.43
In societies where the logic of commodity production becomes dominant, the modern form of alienation takes up a fully different shape in comparison with precapitalist estrangement. Since the reified dominance of capital is not dependent upon legitimatization through personal history and honor, “liberated capital” ignores all kinds of “ties of respect, allegiance, and duty” and even the concrete material life of individual workers. Capital is simply indifferent even if those workers are dying as long as “the race of laborers” does not die out.44 The concrete content of labor is fully abstracted for capital. Capital only counts the wages of labor as mere “costs” in addition to costs for maintaining other instruments. In other words, there is no significant difference between wages for workers and oil for wheels. According to the new social relations, capitalists act with self-interest and avarice. However, this is not a mere moral corruption, but a result of following the new rationality under competition for more profit. This is because “it is essential that in this competition landed property, in the form of capital, manifests its dominion over both the working class and the proprietors themselves who are either being ruined or raised by the laws governing the movement of capital.”45
Marx thus points to a great historical transformation of the human-nature relationship underlying the estrangement of modern labor, as a result of which the activity of workers can no longer function as the subjective realization of the free and conscious capability of human beings in and with nature. Human beings are reduced to “wage laborers” who are dependent on capital for the sake of their own physical lives; and accordingly, their entire activity is minimized into “wage labor.” Though humans as wage laborers can only survive in relation to alien capital, this relationship between capital and labor is “an indifferent, external and accidental relationship to each other” because liberated capital is not interested in workers and their concrete lives.46
Therefore, the circular argument that Tummers and Feuerlicht find in the first manuscript in terms of the specific historical condition of modern alienated labor does not exist. This is because in the section on “ground rent” in the same notebook Marx discusses the specificity of the capitalist mode of production and alienation in comparison to the feudal mode. For Marx, the cause of modern estrangement is quite clear, and his argument is consistent.47 Though Marx in his private notebook, never intended for publication, did not repeat every single point in a reader-friendly manner, a careful analysis of the notebook, with attention paid to his excerpts from Engels’s Outline, demonstrates that private property as the dominion of reified relations of commodity and money emerges out of a loss of the original unity between producers and their objective conditions of production.
If one does not take the section on ground rent into account, one faces a risk of an even greater misunderstanding. Without correctly understanding the fundamental cause of alienation, it is not possible to recognize Marx’s vision of transcending it. Only if one comprehends the estrangement in capitalist society as a dissolution of humans’ original unity with the earth does it becomes evident that Marx’s communist project consistently aims at a conscious rehabilitation of the unity between humans and nature.
This idea builds the core of “humanism = naturalism,” as Marx was already aware of the task of realizing free individuality in the future society, using the concept of “association”:
Association, applied to land, shares the economic advantage of large-scale landed property, and first brings to realization the original tendency inherent in [land] division, namely, equality. In the same way association also reestablishes, now on a rational basis, no longer mediated by serfdom, overlordship and the silly mysticism of property, the intimate [gemüthliche] ties of man with the earth, since the earth ceases to be an object of huckstering, and through free labor and free enjoyment becomes, once more, a true personal property of man.48
Speaking of the practical task of association, Marx comes back to the earlier discussion and emphatically demands the reconstruction of “the intimate ties of man with the earth,” now on a higher level after its destruction in capitalism. In contrast to the feudal society and its monopoly of lands, the conscious construction of the unity between humans and nature must be free of any personal and political subjugation and dominion, and association must realize free intersubjective relationships through the social appropriation of the means of production and products by the direct producers. Consequently, this totally new mode of production makes a “rational” relationship to the land possible on a social scale, which is radically different from its ruthless “huckstering” in capitalism. The entire social activity of production and its products thus does not confront the producers as alien objects, but thanks to the higher unity with the earth as “a true personal property of man,” serves to make possible the “free labor and free enjoyment” of all producers. Marx’s vision of the future society is without doubt fully consistent with his critique of modern alienated labor.
It is in this economic sense that Marx in 1844 insists that establishment of the absolute unity of humanity and nature is the central task of communism:
Communism
