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 “estrangement” found in The Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts certainly documents the young Marx’s brilliant insight into the negative characteristics of modern capitalist production. However, this concept was also an object of never-ending heated debates in the twentieth century. On the one hand, Marxist humanists argued that Marx always held on to the theory of alienated labor to criticize the central contradiction of capitalism and to envision human emancipation in post-capitalism.3 On the other hand, Louis Althusser famously pointed to a radical “epistemological break” in Marx’s theory, maintaining that Marx after The German Ideology completely abandoned his earlier anthropological and Hegelian scheme of 1844 and moved to a totally different “scientific” problematic.4 Althusser notably criticized the delusions of humanists who fetishized The Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts and embraced Marx’s Young Hegelian conception of alienation as an adequate foundation for historical materialism. The “epistemological break” was observed in the fact that alienation no longer played any important theoretical role after 1845. The endless debates between two entirely different interpretations served to deepen various dimensions of the concept of alienation, but at the same time a certain theoretical one-sidedness existed due to the heavily philosophic discussions of Marx’s texts.5
A presupposition was taken for granted in this philosophic debate. Whether one advocated the continuity of or a break in Marx’s theory, both interpretations regarded the text