Karl Marx’s Ecosocialism. Kohei Saito
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and excretion as they breathe, eat, and excrete. However, Marx argues that human beings are decisively different from other animals due to their unique productive activity, that is, labor. Labor enables a “conscious” and “purposive” interaction with the external sensuous world, one that allows humans to transform nature “freely,” even if the dependence on nature and its laws remains insofar as humans cannot produce their means of production and subsistence ex nihilo.
Though incessant metabolism between humans and nature penetrates the entirety of human history, an eternal necessity that cannot be abolished, Marx emphasizes that the concrete performance of human labor takes up various economic “forms” in every stage of social development, and, accordingly, the content of the transhistorical metabolism between humans and nature varies significantly. The way alienated labor in the modern industrial society mediates this metabolic interaction of humans with their environment is not the same as how this occurred in precapitalist societies. What is the difference? Why does the capitalist revolution of production, with its rapid development of machines and technology, distort the metabolic interaction more than ever before, so that it now threatens the existence of human civilization and the entire ecosystem with desertification, global warming, species extinction, destruction of ozone layers, and nuclear disasters? As Marx argues, the problem cannot be simply reduced to the inevitable consequences of the rapid quantitative development of productive forces in the twentieth century. His critique provides an insight into the qualitative differences between the capitalist mode of production and that of all other preceding societies. Marx shows that the modern crisis of the ecosystem is a manifestation of the immanent contradiction of capitalism, which necessarily results from the specifically capitalist way of organizing social and natural metabolisms. In this sense, Marx’s ecological critique of capitalism still possesses contemporary theoretical relevance, because—in spite of copious stereotypical critiques of Marx’s Prometheanism—his analysis of the emancipation of productive forces in capitalism comprehends the basic structure and dynamics of modern bourgeois society as an unsustainable system of production. What is more, he does not idealize modern efforts to absolutely master nature. It thus offers a methodological foundation for a critique of today’s ecological problems as specifically capitalist ones.
Thus the concept of metabolic interaction between humans and nature is the vital link to understanding Marx’s ecological exploration of capitalism. Nevertheless, the concept was often totally neglected or subordinated to his analysis of specifically capitalist social relations, and even if it was discussed, its meaning was not correctly understood. In this situation, it is helpful to contextualize the concept of metabolism within the natural scientific discourse in the nineteenth century to avoid confusion in terms of its multiple meanings in Marx’s critique of political economy. In opposition to a dominant misinterpretation represented by Alfred Schmidt and Amy Wendling in particular, the following discussion shows not only that Marx’s concept of metabolism has nothing to do with “natural scientific materialists” such as Jacob Moleschott, Karl Vogt, and Ludwig Büchner, but also that it possesses a theoretical independence from the works of Justus von Liebig, who significantly contributed to the development of this physiological concept. I also show that it is possible to comprehend Marx’s unique methodological approach, which is characterized by the concepts of “form” and “material.”
NATURE AS THE MATERIAL OF ALL WEALTH
A common criticism of Marx is that he “absolutizes human labor in his analysis of capitalism” and thus has “systematically excluded the value-creating nature” from it.2 As explained in chapter 1, and as other Marxists also point out, Marx in 1844 clearly treated nature as an essential element in the realization of labor.3 Even at the time, when he argued that external nature functions in every process of production as the “inorganic body” of human, Marx did not mean the arbitrary robbery or manipulation of nature by human with an aid of technology, but instead emphasized the role of nature as the essential component of every production: “Man lives on nature” because “the worker can create nothing without nature, without the sensuous external world.” Nature is, said Marx, “the material on which his labor is realized, in which it is active, from which and by means of which it produces.”4 Thus the whole of nature must not be treated as an object isolated from human production, and humans are also “a part of nature.” Marx used the physiological analogy and argued that the relationship between humans and nature as mediated by labor comprises a unity, in which humans can only produce something by combining the organic and inorganic body: “Nature is man’s inorganic body—nature, that is, insofar as it is not itself human body.… Nature is his body, with which he must remain in continuous interchange if he is not to die. That man’s physical and spiritual life is linked to nature means simply that nature is linked to itself, for man is a part of nature.”5 Thus humans cannot transcend nature; they realize a unity with it, mediated by labor.
This mediating activity of labor is a unique human activity, and it is through this labor that humans differentiate themselves from other animals, in that humans through labor can “purposefully” and “freely” produce in and with nature and transform their environment in accordance with their will. In contrast to the instinctive activity of animals, which is limited by a given environment and by their unreflected physical needs, humans are able to go beyond this and teleologically modify the sensuous world. The young Marx argued that the act of objectification through human labor cannot be reduced to a mere process of satisfying unmediated physical needs, which is only the case with modern alienated labor. He claimed that the universal freedom particular to humans becomes manifest as a historical process of the humanization of nature and the naturalization of humanity.
However, the interactive relationship between humans and nature undergoes a significant transformation due to the dissolution of their original unity. As a result, unity transforms itself into the opposite of what it should be, that is, a loss of freedom, dehumanization, and enslavement to the product of one’s own labor. “In estranging nature from man,” it is no longer possible to produce anything without the inorganic body. Thus the first and fundamental alienation in modern society is not arbitrarily defined by Marx as alienation from nature. It is the separation from the objective conditions of production that brings about the decisive change in the way humans relate to the earth. Marx dealt with various negative effects on workers as a consequence of their alienation from nature, such as serious impoverishment and the loss of meaning in life. Despite this original insight, his early analysis in the Paris Notebooks did not contain any noteworthy ecological critique of capitalism. Marx in the following years began to gradually close this theoretical blind spot.
Marx in his later economic works still maintained this insight of 1844, even as his research on political economy and other disciplines greatly deepened and developed it. In the Grundrisse Marx points to the same “separation” of the producers from nature as a decisive step toward the emergence of modern bourgeois society, but in the paragraph below, Marx illustrates the same phenomena with a physiological concept and no longer with Feuerbach’s terminology. Marx now defines the “separation” as cutting off the natural objective conditions for humans’ “metabolic interaction with nature”:
It is not the unity of living and active humanity with the natural, inorganic conditions of their metabolic interaction with nature, and hence their appropriation of nature, which requires explanation or is the result of a historic process, but rather the separation between these inorganic conditions of human existence and this active existence, a separation which is completely posited only in the relation of wage labor and capital.6
It is true that Marx continues to regard the central characteristics of capitalist production as the disruption of the incessant interaction between humans and nature after the labor process is subsumed under capital. Yet it is noteworthy that Marx now characterizes the “separation between these inorganic conditions of human existence and this active existence” as the obstruction of humans’ access to their “natural, inorganic conditions of their metabolic interaction with nature.” Of course, the “metabolic interaction” does not get completely interrupted insofar as humans still need to interact with nature in order to live. The interactive