Karl Marx's Ecosocialism

Capital, Nature, and the Unfinished Critique of Political Economy

Kohei Saito

• Verlag: Monthly Review Press
• Jahr: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781583676424
• Thema: Politics & International Relations
• Thema: Communism, Post-Communism & Socialism

Reveals the ideal of a sustainable ecosocialist world in Marx’s writings Karl Marx, author of what is perhaps the world’s most resounding and significant critique of bourgeois political economy, has frequently been described as a “Promethean.” According to critics, Marx held an inherent belief in the necessity of humans to dominate the natural world, in order to end material want and create a new world of fulfillment and abundance—a world where nature is mastered, not by anarchic capitalism, but by a planned socialist economy. Understandably, this perspective has come under sharp attack, not only from mainstream environmentalists but also from ecosocialists, many of whom reject Marx outright. Kohei Saito’s Karl Marx’s Ecosocialism lays waste to accusations of Marx’s ecological shortcomings. Delving into Karl Marx’s central works, as well as his natural scientific notebooks—published only recently and still being translated—Saito also builds on the works of scholars such as John Bellamy Foster and Paul Burkett, to argue that Karl Marx actually saw the environmental crisis embedded in capitalism. “It is not possible to comprehend the full scope of [Marx’s] critique of political economy,” Saito writes, “if one ignores its ecological dimension.” Saito’s book is crucial today, as we face unprecedented ecological catastrophes—crises that cannot be adequately addressed without a sound theoretical framework. Karl Marx’s Ecosocialism shows us that Marx has given us more than we once thought, that we can now come closer to finishing Marx’s critique, and to building a sustainable ecosocialist world.

Part I

Ecology and Economy

1

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 as a completed “work.” However, this position is no longer acceptable after Jürgen Rojahn’s careful philological examination showed in a convincing manner that the bundle of texts called The Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts do not constitute an independent work; that is, they are not a coherent and systematic treatise. Instead, they are a part of his study notes, similar to those in the Paris Notebooks. These texts were spontaneously written down as part of a process that included making excerpts (Exzerpte), without any intent of publishing them. As Rojahn argues:

To summarize: Marx’s Manuscripts of 1844 must not be seen as a distinct entity, isolated from his notebooks of that period. Their various parts do not form a properly thought out “work,” based on preceding studies, but rather, reflect different stages of the development of his ideas, which proceeding at a rapid pace at that time, was fueled by continued reading. Marx made his exzerpte but at the same time, also wrote down his thoughts. He did that alternately in his notebooks and his manuscripts. Only the ensemble of these notes, seen as a sequence of exzerpte, comments, summaries, reflections, and further exzerpte, gives an adequate idea of how his views developed.⁶

Thus, since the text today known as The Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts was written spontaneously in the very process of copying down excerpts from his readings, it does not include any final formulation of Marx’s thought, and Marx would never have imagined that his notes would cause such heated debates after his death because he wrote his notebooks only for private use. In this sense, humanists exaggerate the theoretical significance of these “study notes.” Humanists are not able to admit this philological fact, clinging to the idea that these notes are “manuscripts” for an independent work. The priority they give to The Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts tends to neglect Marx’s later economic texts, in which the theory of alienation loses its central role. And even if they refer to them, they often do so in a superficial manner, merely looking at terms such as “alien” and “alienation” as claims for the continuity of Marx’s thought.⁷ If the concept of “alienated labor” is overestimated as a normative theory, such an approach contradicts Marx’s non-philosophic position after The German Ideology, which rejects any opposition of a philosophic idea against the alienated reality.⁸

In contrast, the “scientific” interpretation represented by Althusser also neglects the unique critical aspect of Marx’s theory in the notebooks of 1844 by overemphasizing the break without recognizing any value in them. It is true that Marx’s Young Hegelian approach is problematic, and he later abandoned it. Still, it does not automatically follow that there is no continuity at all in Marx’s theory before and after 1845 and that one can simply ignore the Paris Notebooks. Such an interpretation too hastily reduces the richness of Marx’s critique to the Young Hegelian philosophy and cannot trace the formation of Marx’s thought because it misses the true beginning point of his critique of political economy. In his analysis of alienation of 1844, there already exists a central theme of his critique of capitalism, that is, the separation and unity between humanity and nature. This is why, in contrast to the earlier philosophic discussions, it is necessary to conduct a systematic examination of the development of Marx’s concept of nature in relation to his political economy. Instead of treating only The Economic Philosophic Manuscripts, we need to take the Paris Notebooks as a whole into account in order to know what kind of theory emerged in 1844.

First of all, it is helpful to have a general understanding of Marx’s theory of alienation or estrangement in his Paris Notebooks. According to the standard interpretation, there are four types of alienation, starting with Marx pointing out the reality under the system of private property, where “labor’s realization” appears as a “loss of realization” and the “objectification” of labor appears as “loss of the object.”⁹ The product of labor, in which workers objectify their own activity, appears not as their own product. It neither satisfies their needs nor confirms their creative abilities. On the contrary, it appears as an alien object to workers, as a power independent of the producers: “The more the worker spends himself, the more powerful the alien world of objects which he creates over and against himself, the poorer he himself—his inner world—becomes, the less belongs to him as his own. It is the same in religion. The more man puts into God, the less he retains in himself. The worker puts his life into the object; but now his life no longer belongs to him but to the object. Hence, the greater this activity, the more the worker lacks objects.”¹⁰ Apparently, Marx applies Feuerbach’s critique of alienation in religion to the sphere of political economy to problematize the paradoxical situation in capitalism that an act of appropriation appears as a loss of the object. One cannot appropriate the sensuous world through a teleological act of laboring, but rather the external world of things dominates and impoverishes producers. It gets lost precisely through the act of production.

From this first type of estrangement of the sensuous external world, Marx deduces the second alienation of labor. If the product of laborers appears as alienated, it is, says Marx, because the activities of producers do not belong to themselves, but to someone else, resulting in the loss of self. In other words, the act of production is not a voluntary activity of objectification of one’s own free subjectivity, but “forced labor”:

In his work, therefore, he does not affirm himself but denies himself, does not feel content but unhappy, does not develop freely his physical and mental energy but mortifies his body and ruins his mind.… His labor is therefore not voluntary, but coerced; it is forced labor. It is therefore not the satisfaction of a need; it is merely a means to satisfy needs external to it.¹¹

As a result of reducing labor to a mere “means” of their own subsistence, there is no room for producers to realize their own free self-affirmation through labor. The content of free human activity is now limited to animal functions such as eating, drinking, and procreating, and therefore the main objective of workers becomes the maintenance of physical subsistence. Yet even the realization of this hope is not guaranteed for them under alienated labor, when they are constantly exposed to poverty and sickness. Marx problematizes the modern inversion of the free and conscious human activity of labor into the act of dehumanization.

From these first two types of alienation Marx then infers the third form of alienation: “In estranging from man (1) nature, and (2) himself, his own active functions, his life activity, estranged labor estranges the species from man.”¹² Here Marx takes Feuerbach’s concept and argues that even if individuals are finite beings, humanity as such is universal and infinite as a “species-being.”¹³ Marx sees the essential manifestation of the universality of human species-being in its unique free and conscious act of production. In laboring, the producers can reflect upon a given situation and actively realize their own subjective ideas in the objective world by freely modifying the latter. In this sense, humans are a “universal” being and differentiate themselves from other animals. According to Marx, while animals remain trapped in a given particular situation and can only work and consume in a certain manner—though we know now that this is not quite true—humans can teleologically relate to nature as their “inorganic” body and modify its current forms in accordance with their own needs, inventing new technologies and creating a wholly new environment.¹⁴ Furthermore, Marx argues that human labor is also a “free” activity because it is not always directed to the satisfaction of immediate physical needs for the sake of a bare subsistence. Humans can also produce something fully independent from their physical needs. For example, one can produce an artistic object “in accordance with the laws of beauty” and attain self-confirmation and pleasure in this act.¹⁵ Marx bemoans the fact that alienation negates this creative activity, which is nothing but a manifestation of human species-being, since labor is now subordinated to mere individual purposes as a means to sustaining one’s existence: “Estranged labor reverses this relationship, so that it is just because man is a conscious being that he makes his life activity, his essential being, a mere means to his existence.”¹⁶ The universal dimension of human labor gets lost as its functions are instrumentalized to increase the wealth of others.

Finally, Marx adds the fourth form of alienation: “An immediate consequence of the fact that man is estranged from the product of his labor, from his life activity, from his species-being is the estrangement of man from man.”¹⁷ If individuals have to strive desperately for their physical existence, their intersubjective social cooperation and communication becomes extremely prob...