Moreover, the significance of the MEGA project goes beyond such clarification of Marx’s ideas in relation to those of Engels. The fourth section of the new complete works will publish Marx’s excerpts, memos, and comments in his personal notebooks. These materials are of great importance for the current project. Insofar as Marx was unable to elaborate on what he published during his life, and his major work Capital remains unfinished, his notebook excerpts become all the more important. These excerpts are often the only source that allows us to trace Marx’s theoretical development after 1868, as he did not publish much after the publication of volume 1 of Capital. Interestingly, during the last fifteen years of his life Marx produced one-third of his notebooks. Moreover, half of these deal with natural sciences, such as biology, chemistry, botany, geology, and mineralogy, whose scope is astonishingly wide.23 Yet despite exhaustive efforts, Marx was not able to integrate most of his last research on natural science into his critique of political economy, so the importance of this work remained neglected for more than a century. However, carefully looking at these notebooks in relation to Capital, they turn out to be a valuable original source that allows scholars to see Marx’s ecology as a fundamental part of his critique of political economy. I argue that Marx would have more strongly emphasized the problem of ecological crisis as the central contradiction of the capitalist mode of production had he been able to complete volumes 2 and 3 of Capital.24
It is regrettable that Marxist scholars have neglected and marginalized Marx’s notebooks for such a long time. This was the case from the beginning when David Riazanov (1870–1938), the prominent Marxist philologist and the director of the Marx-Engels Institute in Moscow, made decisions about the publication plan for the older Marx-Engels-Gesamtausgabe (MEGA1). He certainly recognized that “roughly 250 excerpt notebooks that have been preserved … certainly constitute a very important source for the study of Marxism in general and for the critical account of Marx’s individual works in particular.”25 Despite this statement, his plan was only a partial publication of Marx’s notebooks without an independent section for excerpts. In other words, Riazanov did not see much value in the notebooks; he actually believed that most of them were “mere” copies taken out of books and articles and thus could only be useful for “Marx biographers.”26
Riazanov’s decision on the partial publication of the notebooks was criticized in 1930 by Benedikt Kautsky, who maintained that “excerpts from excerpts would serve no purpose.”27 Furthermore, Paul Weller, a colleague of Riazanov in the Marx-Engels Institute and another extremely talented MEGA editor, later suggested creating an additional independent section of the MEGA1, in fifteen volumes, for Marx and Engels’s study notebooks. This suggestion was unfortunately not realized due to the terror of Stalinism and the disruption of the first MEGA project. Riazanov was arrested in 1937 and executed the next year, and Paul Weller, who survived the great terror and even finished editing the Grundrisse, died in war soon after the opening up of the battles of the Eastern Front. Much later, Weller’s insight that Marx’s notebooks precisely document his research process proved right, so the editorial board of the second MEGA project decided to follow his suggestion for the complete publication of the excerpts of Marx and Engels, now in 32 volumes.
Thus, Hans-Peter Harstick, who edited Marx’s ethnological notebooks in the 1970s, was correct when he emphasized the importance of the fourth section of the MEGA during a conference in March 1992 in Aix-en-Provence: “The group of sources consisting of excerpts, bibliographical notes, and marginal comments constitutes a material basis of the intellectual world and works of Marx and Engels, and for the research and editiorial work of Marx and Engels it is the key that opens the door to the intellectual workshop of both authors and thus offers access to the historical context of Marx and Engels’s time during the editors’ congenial reconstruction.”28 Every researcher who previously dealt with the MEGA would agree with Harstick’s statement. Martin Hundt, another MEGA editor, noted that the fourth section is “most interesting” because notebooks with changes in original sentence order, abbreviations, and marginal lines offer a number of hints as to what Marx was interested in, and what he was trying to criticize or to learn.29 However, if there is a weakness in current Marxian study twenty years after Harstick’s remarks, it is the continuing marginalization of Marx’s notebooks.30 It is a matter of urgency to change this situation, in order to demonstrate to the public the priceless importance of continuing the MEGA project.31
Through the reconstruction of Marx’s working process documented in his natural science notebooks, it will now be possible to see how ecology constantly gained a greater significance in his project. Along the way, he quite consciously abandoned his earlier optimistic evaluation of the emancipatory potential of capitalism. As already noted, Marx’s historical materialism has been repeatedly criticized for its naïve technocratic assumptions. A careful reading of his notebooks, however, reveals that Marx actually did not dream up a utopian vision of the socialist future based on the infinite increase of productive forces and the free manipulation of nature. On the contrary, he seriously recognized natural limits, treating the complex, intense relationship between capital and nature as a central contradiction of capitalism. In fact, he eagerly read various natural scientific books during the preparation of ground rent theory in Capital, most notably Justus von Liebig’s Agricultural Chemistry, which provided him with a new scientific foundation for his critique of Ricardo’s “law of diminishing returns.” In Capital Marx thus came to demand the conscious and sustainable regulation of the metabolism between humans and nature as the essential task of socialism, which I discuss in chapter 4.
In this context, it is essential to emphasize that Marx’s notebooks need to be analyzed in close connection with the formation of his critique of political economy rather than as a grandiose materialist project of explaining the universe. In other words, the notebooks’ meaning cannot be reduced to his search for a scientific worldview. Earlier literature often claims that through new discoveries in natural sciences Marx followed the classical tradition of the philosophy of nature by Hegel and Schelling, trying to figure out the universal laws that materialistically explain all phenomena within the totality of the world.32 In contrast, I inspect Marx’s research on natural science independent of any totalizing worldview but examine it in close relation to his unfinished project of political economy.33 For the sake of fulfilling this task, Marx’s ecology is even more important because it is in his ecological critique of capitalism that he employed new discoveries of natural sciences to analyze the destructive modifications of the material world by the reified logic of capital.
As I discuss in chapter 5, Marx’s reception of Liebig’s theory in 1865–66 led him consciously to abandon any reductionistic Promethean model of social development and to establish a critical theory that converges with his vision of sustainable human development. In comparison with the London Notebooks in the 1850s, in which Marx’s optimism rather neglected the problem of soil exhaustion under modern agriculture, 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