In order to avoid this negative evaluation of Marx’s intellectual legacy, in this book I will demonstrate that Marx’s ecological critique possesses a systematic character and constitutes an essential moment within the totality of his project of Capital. Ecology does not simply exist in Marx’s thought—my thesis is a stronger one. I maintain that it not possible to comprehend the full scope of his critique of political economy if one ignores its ecological dimension. In order to ground this statement, I will explore Marx’s theory of “value” and “reification” (Versachlichung), because these key categories reveal that Marx actually deals with the whole of nature, the “material” world, as a place of resistance against capital, where the contradictions of capitalism are manifested most clearly. In this sense, Marx’s ecology not only constitutes an immanent element for his economic system and for his emancipatory vision of socialism, it also provides us with one of the most helpful methodological scaffolds for investigating the ecological crises as the central contradiction of the current historical system of social production and reproduction. The “precious heritage” of Marx’s theory can only be appreciated completely with his ecology.
To be sure, it is important to admit that Marx was in the beginning not necessarily “ecological” but sometimes appeared to be “productivist.” Only after a long, arduous process of developing the sophistication of his own political economy, during which time he earnestly studied various fields of the natural sciences, did Marx become fully conscious of the need to deal with the problem of environmental disaster as a limitation imposed upon the valorization process of capital.
Yet it is vital to recognize that a key ecological motive is already present in Marx’s notebooks of 1844 (known as Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844). In chapter 1, I show that Marx in 1844 is already dealing with the relationship between humanity and nature as the central theme of his famous theory of alienation. Marx sees the reason for the emergence of modern alienated life in a radical dissolution of the original unity between humans and nature. In other words, capitalism is fundamentally characterized by alienation of nature and a distorted relationship between humans and nature. Accordingly, he envisions the emancipatory idea of “humanism = naturalism” as a project of reestablishing the unity between humanity and nature against capitalist alienation.
However, Marx in The German Ideology discerns the inadequacy of his earlier project, which simply opposes a philosophical “idea” against the alienated reality. As a result of distancing himself from Ludwig Feuerbach’s philosophical schema, Marx comes to examine the relationship between humans and nature using the physiological concept of “metabolism” to criticize the degradation of the natural environment as a manifestation of the contradictions of capitalism. In chapter 2, I trace the formation of the concept of metabolism in Marx’s theory. Marx used it for the first time in his neglected London Notebooks and elaborated on it even more in the Grundrisse and Capital. The concept of metabolism allowed him not only to comprehend the transhistorical universal natural conditions of human production but also to investigate their radical historical transformations under the development of the modern system of production and the growth of forces of production. In other words, Marx examined how the historically specific dynamics of capitalist production, mediated by reified economic categories, constitute particular ways of human social praxis toward nature—namely the harnessing of nature to the needs of maximum capital accumulation—and how various disharmonies and discrepancies in nature must emerge out of this capitalist deformation of the universal metabolism of nature. Marx’s seminal contribution in the field of ecology lies in his detailed examination of the relationship between humans and nature in capitalism.
To describe the unecological character of the specific modern relationship of humans to their environment, I provide in chapter 3 a systematic reconstruction of Marx’s ecology through his theory of “reification” as developed in Capital. I focus on the “material” (stofflich) dimensions of the world as essential components of his critique of political economy, which is often underestimated in earlier discussions on Capital. Marx’s Capital systematically develops the pure formal categories of the capitalist mode of production, such as “commodity,” “value,” and “capital,” revealing the specific character of capitalistically constituted social relations of production, which operate as economic forces independent of human control. In this sense, in Germany, the “new reading of Marx” (neue Marx-Lektüre), first initiated by Helmut Reichelt and Hans-Georg Backhaus—and now put forward with more depth and rigor by Michael Heinrich, Ingo Elbe, and Werner Bonefeld—has convincingly reinterpreted Marx’s critique of classical political economy as a critique of the fetishistic (that is, ahistorical) understanding of economic categories, which identifies the appearance of capitalist society with the universal and transhistorical economic laws of nature.20 Marx, in contrast, comprehends those economic categories as “specific social forms” and reveals the underlying social relations that bestow an objective validity of this inverted world where economic things dominate human beings.21 Marx’s critique cannot be reduced to a simple categorical reconstruction of the historically constituted totality of capitalist society, however, because such an approach cannot adequately explain why he so intensively studied natural sciences. In fact, the “new reading of Marx” remains silent on this issue.
In contrast, I stress in this book that Marx’s practical and critical method of materialism actually goes beyond this type of “form” analysis and deals with the interrelation between economic forms and the concrete material world, which is closely related to the ecological dimensions. Insofar as Marx’s analysis regards the destruction of nature under capitalism as a manifestation of the discrepancy arising from the capitalist formal transformation of nature, it becomes possible, after examining formal economic categories in close relation to the physical and material dimensions of nature, to systematically reveal Marx’s critique of capitalism. Thus I argue that “material” (Stoff) is a central category in Marx’s critical project. This is not a minor point. If the systematic character of Marx’s ecology in Capital is not correctly understood, his remarks about nature and its destruction under capitalism only appears sporadic and deviating, without offering a comprehensive critique of today’s environmental destruction under capitalism. However, if it is possible to correctly conceive the role of “material” in its relation to economic “forms,” Marx’s ecology turns out not only to be an immanent component of his system but also a useful methodological foundation for analyzing the current global ecological crisis.
In this context, it is important to add that, even if I intend to present a systematic interpretation of Marx’s ecology against the first-stage ecosocialists, Marx was not able to complete his own system of political economy during his lifetime. Volumes two and three of Capital were edited by Frederick Engels after Marx’s death and published in 1885 and 1894, respectively. As Marx’s system remained unfinished, its full reconstruction is an important task, which might be an impossible endeavor. Nonetheless, this implies that every attempt at a reconstruction might inevitably be in vain and unproductive. In recent years the historical and critically complete edition of Marx and Engels’s works continues to publish a large number of new materials that remain unknown even more than one hundred years after Marx’s death. They contain highly informative passages that document his long efforts to complete his own project of Capital. Notably, all of eight original manuscripts for volume 2 of Capital are published in the second section of the MEGA2 in 2012, so that now instead of reading a mixture of manuscripts put together by Engels we can more clearly see how Marx’s theory of capital circulation developed until the last moment of his life.