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, in the process of this creation, the working class and the whole society undergo.”69 In accordance with the cause of estrangement, Marx proposed the same necessity for the conscious rehabilitation of the original unity between humans and nature through “association”: “The alien property of the capitalist in this labor can only be abolished by converting his property into the property of the non-individual in its independent singularity, hence of the associated, social individual.”70
In contrast to Althusser’s interpretation that simply dismisses Marx’s texts before 1845, one finds important insights in his Paris Notebooks of 1844 that fundamentally characterize Marx’s lifelong project of critique of political economy. His formulation is, however, not at all the final one, but a personal sketch without an intent to publish it. Thus the humanist interpretation of The Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts turns out to be one-sided, because though Marx preserved a certain economic insight attained in 1844, he also quickly gave up his philosophical conception of alienation, which he borrowed from Feuerbach and Moses Hess. The fact that Marx abandoned Feuerbach’s anthropological philosophy was of significance with regard to his ecology as well because his new critique of philosophy in Theses on Feuerbach and The German Ideology prepared the theoretical basis for a more adequate understanding of the historical modifications of the relationship between humanity and nature. Why did Marx have to abandon his earlier Feuerbachian schema, while he kept his economic insight? How did Marx reconceptualize the relationship between humans and nature?
LEAVING PHILOSOPHY
The German Ideology, together with Theses on Feuerbach, documents the moment when Marx decisively distanced himself from philosophy and began to move forward to the non-philosophic conception of the unity between humanity and nature. His evaluation of Feuerbach rapidly changed during this time, and he came to realize that Feuerbach’s avoidance of any practical engagement with the socialist movement was an inevitable consequence of his abstract philosophy, which aimed at educating the masses with the truth about species-being. As a result, Marx rejected not only Hegel’s idealism but also Feuerbach’s materialism, which claimed to have revealed the truth hidden under the estranged mystification by means of “sensibility.” In this divergence from Feuerbach’s philosophy, one can find a crucial development for Marx’s entire theory. Although his critique of bourgeois society in 1844 still opposed Feuerbachian concepts such as “love,” “sensibility,” “species-being,” etc., to an estranged reality, in order to describe historical progress as a process of reappropriating the human essence, the primacy of praxis in The German Ideology aims at the analysis of concrete social relations themselves, relations that structure the inverted consciousness and behaviors of individuals trapped within them.
One should be careful, however, not to confuse Marx’s rejection of philosophical questioning with an “epistemological break” from an old paradigm. As shown above, the central economic insight of 1844 remains without doubt in the late Marx as well. It is