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 as the positive transcendence of private property as human self-estrangement, and therefore as the real appropriation of the human essence by and for man; communism therefore as the complete return of man to himself as a social (i.e., human) being—a return accomplished consciously and embracing the entire wealth of previous development. This communism, as fully developed naturalism equals humanism, and as fully developed humanism equals naturalism; it is the genuine resolution of the conflict between man and nature and between man and man—the true resolution of the strife between existence and essence, between objectification and self-confirmation, between freedom and necessity, between the individual and the species.49
Marx depicts the historical movement toward the transcendence of self-alienation and the loss of object under the system of private property as a process of the true reconciliation of humanity and nature. As a condition for its realization, he points to the necessity of a radical transformation of the existing mode of production and the abolition of private property. The “society” to come is nothing but a collective and conscious organization and regulation of the relationship between humans and nature: “Thus society is the complete unity of man with nature—the true resurrection of nature—the accomplished naturalism of man and the accomplished humanism of nature.”50 The unity between the organic and inorganic body of humans can only be realized through a fully conscious and rational regulation of their interaction with nature. Marx’s critique of alienation of 1844 regards the “rational” reorganization of the relationship between humans and nature as essential, and thus he envisions the idea of communism as the accomplished “humanism = naturalism.” This is a beginning, even if it is only a beginning, of Marx’s economic and ecological critique of capitalism.
THE CONTINUITY OF A THEORY
Marx did not significantly alter his original, fundamental insight of 1844, in terms of the unity of humans and nature, until Capital. In a consistent manner, he criticized in his Poverty of Philosophy of 1847 the modern commodification and huckstering of the land as separation of humans from nature: “Rent, instead of binding man to nature, has merely bound the exploitation of the land to competition.”51
Another more notable paragraph is in The Original Text [Urtext] of a Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy of 1858, where Marx, employing the same terminology, refers to the dissolution of the unity between humans and nature as the essential condition of modern society:
The