despite its self-claimed radicality avoids any practical engagement with the negative cosnequences of the modern system of production.
Against Feuerbach’s presupposition of an ahistorical nature, Marx argues that it is always necessary to deal with humans and nature in their concrete reciprocity. So he asks what kinds of social relations make nature undergo various modifications in an antagonistic and alienated manner, and he attempts to reconstruct the specific historical process of social production and reproduction. It is the task of his scientific investigation of history to reveal this point:
The first premise of all human history is, of course, the existence of living human individuals. Thus the first fact to be established is the physical organization of these individuals and their consequent relation to the rest of nature. Of course, we cannot here go either into the actual physical nature of man or into the natural conditions in which man finds himself—geological, oro-hydrographical, climatic and so on. All historical writing must set out from these natural bases and their modification in the course of history through the action of men.97
Humans must produce in order to live. Labor as an act of this production is inevitably conditioned by various natural and material factors. Under these conditions, humans also change their environment. According to Marx, any scientific investigation must pay attention to this historical transformation mediated by labor. In other words, Marx’s approach to the problem of the alienation of humans and nature after leaving the Young Hegelian philosophy changed fundamentally. He no longer opposes the alien dominion of capital to the philosophical idea of “humanism = naturalism” but asks why and how an antagonistic separation between humans and nature emerges and deepens under the capitalist mode of production.
This materialist orientation formulated in The German Ideology was only the beginning of a new period of research that lasted for the rest of Marx’s life. Marx’s intensive research in both political economy and the natural sciences in the following years represents nothing but the further development of his project to examine the historically specific mediation under capitalism of the transhistorically necessary act of production. In Marx’s examination of the relationship between humans and nature, the physiological concept of “metabolism” acquires a central role.
Metabolism of Political Economy
All living creatures must go through constant interaction with their environment if they are to live upon this planet. The totality of these incessant processes creates not a static but an open-ended dynamic process of nature. Before Ernst Haeckel called this economy of nature “oecology,” this organic whole that consists of plants, animals, and humans was often analyzed with a concept of “metabolism” (Stoffwechsel).1 This physiological concept became popular and in the nineteenth century was applied beyond its original meaning to philosophy and political economy to describe the transformations and interchanges among organic and inorganic substances through the process of production, consumption, and digestion on the level of both individuals and species.
This new concept in chemistry and physiology also stimulated Marx in the 1850s, and he was even prompted to give it a central role in his political economy, using it to comprehend the dynamic and interactive relationship between humans and nature mediated by labor. Like all other living creatures, humans are essentially conditioned by natural laws and subject to physiological cycles of production, consumption, and excretion as they breathe, eat, and excrete. However, Marx argues that human beings are decisively different from other animals due to their unique productive activity, that is, labor. Labor enables a “conscious” and “purposive” interaction with the external sensuous world, one that allows humans to transform nature “freely,” even if the dependence on nature and its laws remains insofar as humans cannot produce their means of production and subsistence ex nihilo.
Though incessant metabolism between humans and nature penetrates the entirety of human history, an eternal necessity that cannot be abolished, Marx emphasizes that the concrete performance of human labor takes up various economic “forms” in every stage of social development, and, accordingly, the content of the transhistorical metabolism between humans and nature varies significantly. The way alienated labor in the modern industrial society mediates this metabolic interaction of humans with their environment is not the same as how this occurred in precapitalist societies. What is the difference? Why does the capitalist revolution of production, with its rapid development of machines and technology, distort the metabolic interaction more than ever before, so that it now threatens the existence of human civilization and the entire ecosystem with desertification, global warming, species extinction, destruction of ozone layers, and nuclear disasters? As Marx argues, the problem cannot be simply reduced to the inevitable consequences of the rapid quantitative development of productive forces in the twentieth century. His critique provides an insight into the qualitative differences between the capitalist mode of production and that of all other preceding societies. Marx shows that the modern crisis of the ecosystem is a manifestation of the immanent contradiction of capitalism, which necessarily results from the specifically capitalist way of organizing social and natural metabolisms. In this sense, Marx’s ecological critique of capitalism still possesses contemporary theoretical relevance, because—in spite of copious stereotypical critiques of Marx’s Prometheanism—his analysis of the emancipation of productive forces in capitalism comprehends the basic structure and dynamics of modern bourgeois society as an unsustainable system of production. What is more, he does not idealize modern efforts to absolutely master nature. It thus offers a methodological foundation for a critique of today’s ecological problems as specifically capitalist ones.
Thus the concept of metabolic interaction between humans and nature is the vital link to understanding Marx’s ecological exploration of capitalism. Nevertheless, the concept was often totally neglected or subordinated to his analysis of specifically capitalist social relations, and even if it was discussed, its meaning was not correctly understood. In this situation, it is helpful to contextualize the concept of metabolism within the natural scientific discourse in the nineteenth century to avoid confusion in terms of its multiple meanings in Marx’s critique of political economy. In opposition to a dominant misinterpretation represented by Alfred Schmidt and Amy Wendling in particular, the following discussion shows not only that Marx’s concept of metabolism has nothing to do with “natural scientific materialists” such as Jacob Moleschott, Karl Vogt, and Ludwig Büchner, but also that it possesses a theoretical independence from the works of Justus von Liebig, who significantly contributed to the development of this physiological concept. I also show that it is possible to comprehend Marx’s unique methodological approach, which is characterized by the concepts of “form” and “material.”
NATURE AS THE MATERIAL OF ALL WEALTH
A common criticism of Marx is that he “absolutizes human labor in his analysis of capitalism” and thus has “systematically excluded the value-creating nature” from it.2 As explained in chapter 1, and as other Marxists also point out, Marx in 1844 clearly treated nature as an essential element in the realization of labor.3 Even at the time, when he argued that external nature functions in every process of production as the “inorganic body” of human, Marx did not mean the arbitrary robbery or manipulation of nature by human with an aid of technology, but instead emphasized the role of nature as the essential component of every production: “Man lives on nature” because “the worker can create nothing without nature, without the sensuous external world.” Nature is, said Marx, “the material on which his labor is realized, in which it is active, from which and by means of which it produces.”4 Thus the whole of nature must not be treated as an object isolated from human production, and humans
