nature, earth, as his inorganic body; he himself is not only the organic body, but also the subject of this inorganic nature.”56 Marx calls this unity within the production process where both the subjective and objective sides of production are tightly combined “the natural unity of labor with its material presuppositions.”57 Alienation and impoverishment in the bourgeois society are, on the contrary, the products of this “absolute divorce, separation of property, i.e. of the objective conditions of labor from living labor capacity.” Marx continues to argue that it is
absolute separation between property and labor, between living labor capacity and the conditions of its realization, between objectified and living labor, between value and value-creating activity—hence also the alien quality of the content of labor for the worker himself—this divorce now likewise appears as a product of labor itself, as objectification of its own moments.… The worker emerges not only not richer, but emerges rather poorer from the process than he entered. For not only has he produced the conditions of necessary labor as conditions belonging to capital; but also the value-creating possibility, the valorization which lies as a possibility within him, now likewise exists as surplus value, surplus product, in a word as capital, as master over living labor capacity, as value endowed with its own might and will, confronting him in his abstract, objectless, purely subjective poverty.58
Even though Marx does not use the term “alienation” in this passage, the theoretical continuity since 1844 is quite obvious. The “objectless” and “purely subjective” condition of modern workers cannot allow them to realize their own labor capacity because they do not possess the necessary objective conditions for it. The realization of labor capacity is only possible when they as voluntary and independent owners of a commodity—that is, labor power—sell it on the market only to be subjugated to the alien dominance of capital. Without control over the material foundation of his or her own life, the “free” worker always remains a “virtual pauper.”59 From the alien character of labor activity, which is inevitably caused by the estrangement of the worker’s subjective capacity in the production process organized by capital, the alien character of the objective world is also produced because labor can only produce products of its own realization as an alien reality. The producers cannot appropriate the product of labor; under a reified dominion, their own activity only realizes itself as a subjugating alien power. This process of de-realization and impoverishment, together with accumulation of capital, produces a constantly growing alien world beyond human control.
In the Grundrisse, Marx again contrasts this modern situation with pre-bourgeois society: “In the relations of slavery and serfdom this separation does not take place,” because labor in the form of the slave or that of the serf “is classified as an inorganic condition of production along with other natural beings such as cattle, as an accessory of the earth.”60 Furthermore, Marx argues that in the “pre-bourgeois relation of the individual to the objective conditions of labor” an individual can appear as a “working subject.”61 It is precisely in this form of the subjectivity of the pre-bourgeois working subject that Fukutomi found the potentiality for the free development of individuality of laboring serfs as direct producers.62 Even if the serfs remained subjugated to personal dominance and their existence was reduced to the objective condition of production itself, they nonetheless maintained a certain independence and freedom of activity in the production process, thanks to the unity with the earth, and accordingly, they could appropriate the fruits of labor for themselves in the form of small-scale operations. Here existed the material basis for the “free development of individuality” as it flourished during the transition to capitalist landed property when producers actually got emancipated from personal dominion in the aftermath of the collapse of feudalism.
Marx calls this period after the downfall of the feudal system “a golden age for labor in the process of becoming emancipated,” as exemplified by the yeomanry in England in the fourteenth and first half of the fifteenth century.63 Marx also writes about it in Capital:
The private property of the worker in his means of production is the foundation of small-scale industry, and small-scale industry is a necessary condition for the development of social production and of the free individuality of the worker himself.… But it [this mode of production] flourishes, unleashes the whole of its energy, attains its adequate classical form, only where the worker is the free proprietor of the conditions of his labor, and sets them in motion himself: where the peasant owns the land he cultivates, or the artisan owns the tool with which he is an accomplished performer.64
The development of “the free individuality of the worker” is an expression that Marx usually uses in the context of a future society established among the associated producers, but as an exception he uses it to characterize precapitalist small-scale family agriculture, where the worker can behave as “the free proprietor of the conditions of his labor,” even if it is still a limited premodern form. This freedom of labor became possible because, after the dissolution of the relationship of personal dependence, the workers can freely relate to the earth as their own means of production. Consequently, the relation of humans to nature flourished as a free one in which the direct producer could now enjoy the “intimate” aspect of the earlier production, but without a landlord. Thus, in opposition to a popular critique that Marx’s optimistic vision of technological development undervalues small-scale family agriculture, Marx explains why this type of production could more than adequately sustain farm families, even if after the introduction of the capitalist mode of production into English agriculture it had to decline because it is “unfitted to develop labor as social labor and the productive power of social labor. Hence the necessity for the separation, for the rupture, for the antithesis of labor and property.”65
Insofar as the objective condition of one’s physical existence is still present in feudal society—thanks to the intimate connection with the land—the universal commodification of laboring capacity cannot penetrate the entire society. Therefore, the reified dominion of capital first needs to secure the dissociation of the original unity between humans and the earth and replace it with a relationship of capital and wage labor. As a result of the separation of land, means of production, and subsistence manifested in the history of enclosure, the producers of small-scale operations in the countryside are now sent to the large cities as “doubly free” proletariats, not just freed from personal dominance but also freed from the conditions of production and reproduction. Without objective capacity for production, modern “free and rightless (vögelfrei)” workers are compelled to estrange their own living labor capacity and to work under the alien commands of capital for the sake of attaining a minimal amount of means of subsistence.66 Marx calls this deprivation of all objective possibility of production the “absolute poverty” of modern workers:
Labor separated from all means and objects of labor, from its entire objectivity. This living labor, existing as an abstraction from these moments of its actual reality (also, not-value); this complete denudation, purely subjective existence of labor, stripped of all objectivity. Labor as absolute poverty: poverty not as shortage, but as total exclusion of objective wealth.67
No matter how much salary workers attain, it does not allow them to escape this absolute poverty. The total exclusion of objective wealth remains the essential characterization of the worker’s situation under the capitalist mode of production, and alienation of nature is the fundamental cause.
Throughout the process of the development of his critique of political economy, Marx never gave up his 1844 insight in terms of the original unity of humans and nature. From the beginning, Marx comprehended the historical negation of a certain relationship between humans and nature as a central characteristic of the capitalist mode of production, and its negation as a positive rehabilitation of the original unity on a higher level—“the negation of the negation”—is, as before, the essential task of the future society.68 Thus Marx wrote: “The original unity can be reestablished only on the material foundation which capital creates and by means of the revolutions which,
