his notebooks of 1865–66 vividly demonstrate that various scientists and economists such as Justus von Liebig, James F. W. Johnston, and Léonce de Lavergne helped him develop a more sophisticated critique of modern agriculture. As a result, Marx started to analyze the contradictions of capitalist production as a global disturbance of natural and social metabolism. Marx’s critique of Ricardo, especially as seen in the “Ireland question,” most plainly shows that his usage of natural sciences was not simply restricted to the theory of ground rent but was also meant to prepare a foundation for his analysis of ecological imperialism.
Yet Marx did not absolutize Liebig’s Agricultural Chemistry for his critique of capitalism, despite the obvious importance of Liebig’s theory of metabolism. In chapter 6, I give an account of why Marx in 1868—that is, right after the publication of the first volume of Capital in 1867—chose to study further natural science books, doing so even more intensively. Notably, he read a number of books at this time that were highly critical of Liebig’s theory of soil exhaustion. After a while, Marx relativized his evaluation of Liebig’s theory and even more passionately argued for the necessity for a post-capitalist society to realize a rational intercourse with nature. The important figure in this context is a German agronomist, Carl Fraas, who was critical of Leibig. In Fraas’s historical research, Marx even found an “unconscious socialist tendency.” Even if Marx was not able to integrate his new evaluation for Fraas fully into Capital, his excerpts from Fraas document why the natural sciences acquired increasing meaning for his economic project. In this sense, the year 1868 marks the beginning of a new period for his critique of political economy, with much wider scope than before. Unfortunately, this made the completion of his critique extremely difficult.
In spite of its unfinished state, Marx’s political economy allows us to understand the ecological crisis as a contradiction of capitalism, because it describes the immanent dynamics of the capitalist system, according to which the unbounded drive of capital for valorization erodes its own material conditions and eventually confronts it with the limits of nature. Here it is important to understand that to refer to the limits of nature does not mean that nature would automatically exert its “revenge” on capitalism and put an end to the regime of capital. On the contrary, it is actually possible for capitalism to profit from the ruthless extraction of natural wealth indefinitely, destroying the natural environment to the point that a large part of the earth becomes unsuitable for human occupation.34 In Marx’s theory of metabolism, nature nonetheless possesses an important position for resistance against capital, because capital cannot arbitrarily subsume nature for the sake of its maximum valorization. Indeed, by attempting to subsume nature, capital cannot help but destroy, on an expanding scale, the fundamental material conditions for free human development. Marx found in this irrational destruction of the environment and the relevant experience of alienation created by capital a chance for building a new revolutionary subjectivity that consciously demands a radical transformation of the mode of production so as to realize free and sustainable human development. In this sense, Marx’s ecology is neither deterministic nor apocalyptic. Rather, his theory of metabolism emphasizes the strategic importance of restraining the reified power of capital and transforming the relationship between humans and nature so as to ensure a more sustainable social metabolism. Here exists the nodal point between the “red” and “green” project in the twenty-first century, about which Marx’s theory still has a lot to offer.
Part I
Ecology and Economy
Alienation of Nature as the Emergence of the Modern
After marrying Jenny von Westphalen and moving to Paris in the autumn of 1843, Marx started to intensively study political economy for the first time. During this research process, he made a series of notebooks that contain excerpts and notes, which today are usually referred to as the Paris Notebooks. Marx was at that time not able to read in English and had to use French translations of major works of political economy by Adam Smith and David Ricardo. He was aware that he still had much to study in the discipline of political economy, so he did not publish any part of these notebooks during his lifetime and kept them for personal reference.1 Famously, one part of these notebooks, written between May and August 1844, was published in the twentieth century as The Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts, a misnomer as they were not manuscripts. This text became controversial after some Marxists became enamored with it. These self-styled Marxist humanists found an entirely different philosophy in the young Marx than that found in his economic analysis in Capital and used it against the party dogma of Soviet dialectical materialism.2 Their attempt to rescue the young Marx from the terror of Stalinism was to some extent successful and humanism became a trend within Marxist discourse, but without doubt the humanist interpretation was closely tied to a particular historical-political situation, and it subordinated Marx’s intention to their own interests. Today after the collapse of “really existing socialism,” it is necessary to analyze the Paris Notebooks from a more neutral perspective, with recent philological evidence, so that one can contextualize Marx’s notebooks in the development of his theory instead of imposing arbitrary political interests upon them.
Surely it would be futile and a contradiction of Marx’s intention if one were to try to discover a fully developed version of his ecology in his notebooks of 1844. However, these notebooks undeniably contain Marx’s early recognition of the strategic importance of reestablishing a conscious “unity” between humans and nature as a central task of communist society. If Marx was later able to conceptualize environmental destruction as an immanent contradiction of capitalism, his ecological critique in Capital partially originates from his earlier insight into the modern disunion of the human-nature relationship. This is the case even if his later theorization required many years during which he went through an enormous amount of economic, historical, and natural science books and developed his own system of political economy, one much more sophisticated than that of 1844. The young Marx formulated the unity between humanity and nature in the future society as the idea of fully developed “humanism = naturalism,” a conception that Marx retained even after various later modifications of his own theory.
Focusing upon the theme “humanism = naturalism” in this chapter, I will reconstruct the importance of the Paris Notebooks from the standpoint of Marx’s economic critique, in contrast to the earlier debates between “humanist” and “scientific” Marxists about the philosophical concept of “alienation.” According to Marx, the fundamental cause of alienation under capitalist production lies in the specific modern relation of the producers to their objective conditions of production. After the historical dissolution of the original unity between humans and the earth, the producers can only relate to the conditions of production as an alien property. Marx’s claim that the dissolution of the original unity constitutes the paradigm of modern society marks a decisive difference from the standpoint of most economists, who take the existing social relation for granted, as a given.
However, Marx was then still very much influenced by Ludwig Feuerbach’s philosophy. As a result, he tended to connect his historical analysis with an abstract and ahistorical “human essence,” and further, his critical understanding of the capitalist mode of production was not very profound. Nevertheless, Marx soon came to notice the theoretical limitations of Feuerbach’s philosophy of essence and succeeded in fully rejecting its abstract critique of alienation in his Theses on Feuerbach and The German Ideology and thereby establishing in 1845 a theoretical basis for his later research in natural science.
“ALIENATION” AS PHILOSOPHICAL CATEGORY?
The popular Marxist concept of “alienation” and
