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Metabolism of Political Economy

All living creatures must go through constant interaction with their environment if they are to live upon this planet. The totality of these incessant processes creates not a static but an open-ended dynamic process of nature. Before Ernst Haeckel called this economy of nature “oecology,” this organic whole that consists of plants, animals, and humans was often analyzed with a concept of “metabolism” (Stoffwechsel).¹ This physiological concept became popular and in the nineteenth century was applied beyond its original meaning to philosophy and political economy to describe the transformations and interchanges among organic and inorganic substances through the process of production, consumption, and digestion on the level of both individuals and species.

This new concept in chemistry and physiology also stimulated Marx in the 1850s, and he was even prompted to give it a central role in his political economy, using it to comprehend the dynamic and interactive relationship between humans and nature mediated by labor. Like all other living creatures, humans are essentially conditioned by natural laws and subject to physiological cycles of production, consumption, 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 process of material exchange between humans and nature in the labor process nonetheless takes a fully different shape from that of precapitalist society in that it can take place only on the basis of the radical separation posited “in the relation of labor and capital.” This specifically modern “separation”—which completely destroys the “original unity”—and its historical consequences in capitalist society are exactly what Marx regards as necessary for a scientific discipline of political economy to explain.

During the preparation of Capital, Marx intensively investigated this problem. He no longer propagated the realization of the philosophical idea of “humanism = naturalism” and instead tended more and more to describe the central task of the future society as the conscious regulation of this physiological metabolic exchange between humans and nature by the associated producers. This conceptual change is remarkable.

In this context, Michael Quante argues for the continuity of Marx’s philosophical conception of the relationship between humans and nature “even if Marx no longer describes it with anthropological and philosophical categories but with the natural scientific category of ‘metabolism.’”⁷ But then he criticizes both Marx’s “ambivalences” between philosophy and natural science and an “anti-philosophical trait” in Capital that is the result of this conceptual shift.⁸ However, Quante refrains from going into the new dimensions of Marx’s natural sciences in detail. Evidently his critique of Marx is grounded in his own interpretation, in which he hopes to rediscover the basic philosophical motives in the later economic works. The transition from a “philosophical” terminology to a “natural scientific” one is not a simple change of Marx’s personal preference, but reflects the development of his “materialist method” in The German Ideology as a guideline for understanding the historical transformations of the metabolism between humans and nature. In this sense, even if there is an “anti-philosophical trait” there are no “ambivalences” in his later works.

In contrast to the earlier philosophical scheme that simply imposes a utopian ideal on the estranged reality, Marx learned to analyze the concrete process between humans and nature, which is, on the one hand, transhistorical as an “eternal necessity,” but is, on the other hand, thoroughly socially mediated, given that the economic function of labor differs considerably in each mode of production. In The German Ideology, Marx became fully aware that the metabolic interaction takes place within a tight entanglement of both historical and transhistorical aspects. Marx carefully analyzed this dynamic social process in nature in order to comprehend the material conditions for transcending the “separation” in the metabolic interaction between humans and nature.

Marx’s research in the following years became more and more characterized by this unique duality. He studied political economy as an analysis of the social forms of economic categories, and simultaneously studied the natural sciences to achieve a scientific basis with regard to material qualities in the physical sphere. As emphasized in the following section, Marx’s ecology deals with the synthesis of the historical and transhistorical aspects of social metabolism in explaining how the physical and material dimensions of the “universal metabolism of nature” and the “metabolism between humans and nature” are modified and eventually disrupted by the valorization of capital. Marx’s analysis aims at revealing the limits of the appropriation of nature through its subsumption by capital.

This enormous project nonetheless cost Marx time and energy, so much so that he was not able to finish his magnum opus. Nonetheless, this does not mean that the project was a failure because Marx succeeded in elucidating his theory of metabolism in Capital and various economic manuscripts. Furthermore, there are a number of hints for his further theoretical development in his excerpt notebooks that are of great importance. Before analyzing these notebooks, it is helpful first to trace his own description of “metabolism” in the context of its usage in natural scientific and political economy.

ON THE GENEALOGY OF METABOLISM

The concept of “metabolism” was first employed in physiology at the beginning of the nineteenth century, even though it is often claimed that Liebig’s “book on Organic Chemistry in Its Application to Physiology and Pathology (1842) was the first formal treatise on the subject, introducing the concept of ‘metabolism’ (Stoffwechsel).”⁹ The famous German chemist is today known as the “father of organic chemistry”; along with Friedrich Wöhler he conducted a series of experiments to analyze chemical elements to find out not only that two molecules with the same molecular formula can have different properties (an isomer) but also that millions of different kinds of organic compositions can be formed out of various combinations of the simple and presumed unchangeable structures of organic compounds, even though their assumption of unchangeability later proved false.¹⁰ After 1837, Liebig conducted research in physiological chemistry and published the epoch-making Organic Chemistry in Its Application to Agriculture and Physiology, usually simply called Agricultural Chemistry, as the aforementioned Organic Chemistry in Its Application to Physiology and Pathology is usually called Animal Chemistry. In these books Liebig applied his newest discoveries in chemistry to an analysis of the organic process of plants and animals. He investigated the reciprocal relationship of plants, animals, and humans as chemical interactions of organic and inorganic substances, even claiming that “the animal organism is a higher kind of vegetable.”¹¹ Liebig opened up the new field of chemical analysis of metabolism, which synchronized nicely with the newly discovered law of conservation of energy.¹² He was highly critical of the dominant vitalist dualism of Jean-Baptiste André Dumas and Jean Baptiste Boussignault, who postulated the clear difference between “two kingdoms of plants and animals.”¹³

In one of the earliest usages of the term metabolism Liebig depicted the constant interactive process of formation, transformation, and excretion of various compounds within an organic body:

It cannot be supposed that metabolism in blood, the changes in the substance of the existing organs, by which their constituents are converted into fat, muscular fiber, substance of the brain and nerves, bones, hair &c., and the transformation of food into blood, can take place without the simultaneous formation of new compounds which require removal from the body by the organs of excretion.… every motion, every manifestation of organic properties, and every organic action being attended by metabolism, and by the assumption of a new form by its constituents.¹⁴

Metabolism is an incessant process of organic exchange of old and new compounds through combinations, assimilations, and excretions so that every organic action can continue. Liebig also maintained that the chemical reaction in combination and excretion is the ultimate source of electric current as well as that of warmth and force. Liebig’s theory of metabolism prepared a scientific basis for further analyses of a living organism as pure chemical process.¹⁵

The concept of metabolism, under the influence of Liebig, soon went beyond the nourishment of individual plants, animals, and humans. That is, it could be used to analyze their interaction within a certain environment. Today’s concept of metabolism can be applied not just to organic bodies but also to various interactions in one or multiple ecosystems, even on a global scale, whether “industrial metabolism” or “social metabolism.”¹⁶ This physiological and chemical concept about an extensive organic whole in nature found a wide reception and was employed beyond natural science, in philosophy and political economy, where it has been used to describe a social metabolism by way of analogy. This was the case in Marx’s writings. However, out of this extension there emerged a certain ambiguity due to the term’s multiple meanings, and it is necessary to distinguish them with commentary.

A careful conceptual differentiation of metabolism in Marx’s writings is of importance, for there are a number of debates in the earlier literature in terms of how he integrated this concept into his political economy.¹⁷ Even if it is difficult to determine every single source of his inspiration, given that he actively modified the concept for the purpose of his own analysis, this does not mean that one can use text in an arbitrary manner as a source for the sake of justifying a certain interpretation of Marx. Liebig is without doubt one of the most important intellectual sources, as has been convincingly demonstrated by John Bellamy Foster.¹⁸ The intellectual heritage of Liebig first became manifest in Capital. Yet Marx did not simply take the concept from Liebig’s Agricultural Chemistry, in which the term metabolism appears only twice, but developed and modified the concept through his study of various texts in chemistry and physiology.

It is worth discussing Marx’s first usage of the concept of metabolism, which was not at all referred to in the earlier debates about his ecological perspective. The relevant text is in one of his London Notebooks of March 1851, titled Reflection, which was later published in the MEGA².¹⁹ The date clearly indicates that Marx knew the concept of metabolism before his reading of Liebig’s book in July 1851.

Because of the scant attention the fourth section of the MEGA² received, the key passages in Reflection about metabolism were not taken into account in the debates. However, the text provides a helpful hint for Marx’s reception of the physiological concept, for he was not studying natural science so intensively then, so it is safe to assume that he took up the concept right before writing Reflection.

The term “metabolic interaction” (Stoffwechsel) appears three times in Reflection:

Unlike ancient society where only the privileged could exchange this or that [item], everything can be possessed by everybody [in capitalist society]. Every metabolic interaction can be conducted by everyone, depending on the amount of money of one’s income that can be transformed into anything: prostitute, science, protection, medals, servants, cringer—everything [becomes a] product for exchange, just like coffee, sugar, and herring. In the case of rank [society], the enjoyment of an individual, his or her metabolic interaction is dependent on a certain division of labor, under which he or she is subsumed. In the case of class [it is dependent] only on the universal means of exchange that he or she can appropriate.… Where the type of income is still determined by the type of occupation, and not simply by the quantity of the universal medium of exchange like today but by the quality of one’s occupation, the relationships, under which the worker can enter into society and appropriate [objects], are severely restricted, and the social organ for the metabolic interaction with the material and mental productions of the society is limited to a certain way and to a particular content from the beginning.²⁰

In Reflection, Marx again explicates his critique of the money system with a method of comparison between various forms of society, revealing the class antagonism hidden under the formally free and equal relationship of the bourgeois society. In order to illuminate the specificity of the mode of appropriation under the monetary system, Marx contrasts the appropriation of products in capitalist society with that in precapitalist societies, comprehending the problem as different ways of organizing the “metabolic interaction.” In this sense, the concept of “metabolic interaction” is clearly used to deal with the transhistorical character of the necessity to organize social production.

Since in the precapitalist societies the appropriation of products took place based on the direct personal and political dominance legitimated by tradition, innate privileges, and violence, the variability of labor was limited to that within a certain “rank,” and thus “the social organ for the metabolic interaction with material and mental productions of society” remained much narrower than in capitalist society. In capitalist society, the appropriation and transfer of products takes place on a much larger scale among the formally free and equal owners of commodities and money. The commodity exchange appears totally free from class conflicts, and the “metabolic interaction” seems to enlarge with an increasing amount of money. Equality and freedom “without class character,” however, soon turns out to be an “illusion.”²¹ In reality, the quantitative volume of money decides the “enjoyment of an individual, his metabolic interaction,” totally independent of actual concrete needs. Marx points to the brutal fact that the abstract formal equality under the system of money is inverted into the restriction of freedom and equality. To sum up, Marx in Reflection argues that the individual and social “metabolic interaction” in the capitalist mode of appropriation ends up heavily limited, particularly because of the hidden class character of money, so that individuals are thoroughly impoverished and subjugated to the alien power of money independently of their concrete needs.

Marx used the concept of metabolism in Reflection, and not in the earlier part of the London Notebooks. Despite this fact, it is possible to find out the source. Gerd Pawelzig, in his analysis of Marx’s concept of metabolism, offers the information that in February 1851 Marx received from his friend Roland Daniels a manuscript for a book titled Mikrokosmos: Entwurf einer physiologischen Anthropologie.²² Daniels was an “excellent, scientifically educated doctor” according to Marx and Engels, and he was a member of the Communist League.²³ His intellectual relationship with Marx was built on a close friendship, and Marx dedicated his book The Poverty of Philosophy to Daniels.

Daniels wrote to Marx in a letter of February 8, 1851, asking for a “sharp and candid” critique of his manuscript.²⁴ As he explained in his next letter, the principal aim of his Mikrokosmos was to ground, in contrast to the spiritualist theory, “the possibility” to understand “human society in a materialist manner,” based on a “physiological description of activity.”²⁵ Daniels conveyed to Marx that he was attempting to apply the newest physiological knowledge in order to treat the material and mental activity of humans on both individual and social levels as an object of (materialist) scientific investigation. In this context metabolism played an important role. Notably, Daniels used the term in his very first letter to Marx: “I would risk my organic metabolism against a mental metabolism, and I doubt if I would be able to digest and assimilate so many things well to reproduce something ordinary.”²⁶

Marx carefully studied Daniels’s manuscript in the next month and commented on it critically, as Daniels had asked in his letter dated March 20.²⁷ The first usage of the concept of “metabolism” in Reflection is certainly closely connected with his critique of Daniels’s Mikrokosmos, as both texts were written in the same month. Pawelzig was nonetheless not conscious of the relevant paragraph in Reflection and simply concluded that Marx and Engels in 1851 did not use the term metabolism in their notes and letters.²⁸ But this statement is incorrect.

In Daniels’s Mikrokosmos, the concept of “organic metabolism” appears many times. For instance, he defines it as “simultaneous destruction and regeneration, through which these bodies maintain their individuality as they incessantly and newly produce this individuality—this is a uniqueness whose analogy cannot be found in inorganic bodies.”²⁹ Though there is some affinity between Daniels and Liebig in their treatment of metabolism, Daniels’s discussion displays his originality when he divides “organic metabolism” into “animal and mental metabolism” and criticizes the ungrounded supposition of “vital force.”³⁰ His materialist understanding of mental metabolism is directed both against the philosophical dualism of “body” and “spirit” and against the Hegelian speculative philosophy of “absolute spirit.”³¹ Nonetheless, Daniels’s materialist orientation tends toward a naïve materialism because he interprets human thought, freedom, and history as pure “nerve physiological” phenomena.³² Even if Daniels, in accordance with Marx’s German Ideology, sometimes demands historical explanation through an analysis of “each type of production of material needs of life,” he tends to reduce all dimensions of human activities to a compound of pure physiological—and thus totally ahistorical—“reflex movement” that functions independently of historical production. Consequently, his theory turns out to be mechanistic and deterministic. Marx was not really content with Daniels’s Mikrokosmos, as he reported to Engels: “What little sense there is in his letter is a reflection of my own to him.”³³

Marx’s critique of Daniels does not mean that he entirely dismissed the importance of the manuscript. Daniels’s replies to Marx’s criticisms indicate that he patiently provided him with critical comments and explanations to his questions. Even if Marx did not accept the general direction of Daniels’s materialist project, intensive discussions between them prompted Marx to use the concept of metabolism in his private notes in Reflection, and he came to be more interested in physiology, as documented in the London Notebooks after July 1851, most notably in excerpts from Liebig’s work. Marx shared an opinion with Daniels that the new physiological concept could be usefully applied to social analysis. In this vein, Marx used the concept not only in terms of “enjoyment of the individual,” in the sense of consumption and digestion, but also in the context of “material and mental production” on a social scale. Using the analogy to physiological metabolism, he endeavored to comprehend the modern social dynamics of production and consumption where, under a particular form of social division of labor, individuals as organs for “material” and “mental” production are ruinously alienated and impoverished. In Reflection, Marx applied the new concept to national economy, following in this sense the direction of Daniels’s program: “The theory of human organism and its relationship to society and nature also builds the sole stable foundation for the reform of the communal institution, that is, for the reform of society.”³⁴

Unfortunately, further intellectual exchange between Marx and Daniels was interrupted when the latter was arrested in June 1851 in Cologne because of his political activity. He suffered terrible conditions in prison, and after his release died, on August 29, 1855. Marx wrote on September 6, 1855, to his widow, Amalie Daniels:

It is impossible to describe the grief I felt on hearing that dear, unforgettable Roland had passed away.… Seen amongst the others in Cologne, Daniels always seemed to me like the statue of a Greek god deposited by some freak of fate in the midst of a crowd of Hottentots. His premature decease is an irreparable loss not only to his family and friends but also to science, in which he gave promise of the finest achievements, and to the great, suffering mass of humanity, who possessed in him a loyal champion.… It is to be hoped that circumstances will some day permit us to wreak upon those guilty of cutting short his career vengeance of a kind sterner than that of an obituary.³⁵

Even if Marx did not discuss the concept in detail in Reflection, his reading of Mikrokosmos clearly prepared a foundation for the further integration of natural sciences into political economy before his excerpts from Liebig’s Agricultural Chemistry.

Subsequently, Marx’s usage of the term metabolism became more general and systematic during the process of witing the Grundrisse. In the passage from the Grundrisse quoted above, Marx deals with the incessant interaction between humans and nature with this physiological analogy, treating nature as the inorganic body of humanity. In this vein, Marx discusses the labor process as “metabolic interaction with nature,” that is, as material interaction of three moments of production taking place within nature: raw materials, means of production, and human labor. According to Marx, this “production process in general” is “common to all social conditions” as long as humans produce within nature.³⁶ Humans must work and produce, constantly taking out raw materials from nature, modifying nature to create various means of production and subsistence, and giving back waste materials. Labor is an essential moment in this process, and it is a transhistorical and material activity in nature, which Marx also calls “natural force.”³⁷ After comprehending these three moments, Marx then analyzes how this incessant material exchange between humans and nature transforms itself when it receives a specific capitalist function as “valorization process of capital.” This point is the most important aspect, and I will come back to this theme in the next chapter.

In the Grundrisse, there are other meanings of metabolism that Marx continued to use until Capital. “Changes of material (Stoffwechsel = metabolism)” is contrasted with “changes of form (Formwechsel).” “Change of form” signifies exchanges of economic forms between money and commodity during the circulation process—“C-M-C” and “M-C-M”—and “change of material” has to do with the constant changes among use values within capitalist society:

Simple circulation consisted of a great number of simultaneous or successive exchanges.… A system of exchanges, changes of material [Stoffwechsel], from the standpoint of use value. Changes of form [Formwechsel], from the standpoint of value as such.³⁸

Stoffwechsel in this sense takes place as changes of different commodities through their exchanges, and Formwechsel between money and commodity occurs at the same time. Stoffwechsel proceeds within the sphere of circulation, when necessary use values are distributed among private producers similar to the way blood provides each organ with necessary nutrients. In this usage Marx usually adds the adjective “social”: “Insofar as the process of exchange transfers commodities from hands in which they are non-use-values to hands in which they are use-values, it is a process of social metabolism.… We therefore have to consider the whole process in its formal aspect, that is to say, the change in form or the metamorphosis of commodities through which the social metabolism is mediated.”³⁹ This juxtaposition of Formwechsel and Stoffwechsel in Capital also indicates Marx’s original methodological approach to treat the objects of his investigation from both “material” (stofflich) and “formal” (formell) aspects.

Marx’s usage of Stoffwechsel and Formwechsel differentiates from that of Wilhelm Roscher, who employed the same set of categories before Marx’s Grundrisse. This comparison is particularly interesting because Marx read volume 1 of Roscher’s Principles of Political Economy, published in 1854, before writing the Grundrisse and wrote down a number of vertical lines to highlight relevant paragraphs in his personal copy.⁴⁰ Roscher also integrated new discoveries of physiology and opposed his own “historical and physiological method” of national economy to the “idealist” one, so that Marx encountered various physiological analogies while he read the book.⁴¹ Furthermore, Roscher openly refers to the physiological analogy of “metabolism” in a national economy:

The greater portion of the national capital is in a state of constant transformation. It is being continually destroyed and reproduced. But from the standpoint of private economy, as well as from that of the whole nation, we say that capital is preserved, increased or diminished accordingly as its value is preserved, increased or diminished.

In a footnote to the last sentence, Roscher continues to argue: “J. B. Say, Traité d’Economie Politique I, ch. 10. Only think of the famous principle of metabolism (Stoffwechsel) in physiology!”⁴² Unfortunately, the relevant pages in Marx’s personal copy are missing, so we cannot tell how he reacted to this passage.

Referring to Say’s Traité, Roscher also deals with the Formwechsel of capital in the production process, in which capital is consumed and transformed into another shape without interruption. With Formwechsel, Roscher means change of material shapes, rather than changes of economic forms between money and commodity, as Marx does. Say writes in one of the relevant passages in chapter 10 of the Traité: “In manufacture, as well as agriculture, there are some branches of capital that last for years; buildings and fixtures for instance, machinery and some kinds of tools; others, on the contrary, lose their form entirely; the oil and potash used by soap-makers cease to be oil and pot-ash when they assume the form of soap.”⁴³ Roscher calls these constant transformations of various materials in the everlasting process of production and consumption within a society Stoffwechsel, similar to Liebig’s comprehension of the physiological process of an organ that sustains its equilibrium in spite of the constant changes of production, consumption, assimilation, and excretion. This analogy nonetheless marks Roscher’s theoretical limitation, for, though he contrasts “form” and “material,” he is not able to abstract the pure economic exchanges of form between commodity and money, but instead confuses the role of exchanges of form with the transformation of matter. Despite this decisive difference between Marx and Roscher, Roscher’s argument clearly shows that Marx’s contemporary economists were also willing to use the physiological concept for their own analysis of the modern economy.

The connection between the Stoffwechsel of physiology and political economy was often mentioned at the time. Even Liebig himself referred to an analogy between organisms and the state economy in his Familiar Letters on Chemistry:

As in the body of an individual, so also in the sum of all individuals, which constitutes the state, there goes on a change of matter [Stoffwechsel], which is a consumption of all the conditions of individuals and social life. Silver and gold have to perform in the organism of the state the same function as the blood corpuscles in the human organism. As these round discs, without themselves taking an immediate share in the nutritive process, are the medium, the essential condition of the change of matter, of the production of the heat and of the force by which the temperature of the body is kept up, and the motions of the blood and all the juices are determined, so has gold become the medium of all activity in the life of the state.⁴⁴

Liebig’s analogy, based on an organic theory of the state, is crude, absent an analysis of money within the capitalist society. It is still interesting that the proponent of the concept of metabolism tried to connect physiology and political economy, a project soon taken up by Roscher and Marx.

Also, the agriculturalist in Munich, Carl Fraas, whom Marx intensively studied in 1868, emphasized the importance of “metabolism” for political economy: “Organism and metabolism—therefore, metabolism in the national economy, too! It builds the natural scientific foundation of national economy that was almost completely neglected until now in order to develop mere mathematical economics. However, such national economy only investigates and combines data without grasping their cause!”⁴⁵ Even if there is no direct proof that Marx read Liebig’s Familiar Letters on Chemistry or Fraas’s article, it is conceivable, given the scientific discourse then, that Marx was also led to adopt this new physiological concept in his system of political economy.⁴⁶

In the Grundrisse, there is one more usage of metabolism, the “metabolism of nature,” which proceeds independently of human intervention. Use values “are dissolved by the simple metabolism of nature if they are not actually used.”⁴⁷ This “natural metabolism (natürlicher Stoffwechsel),” as chemical dissolution or modification of material substances, for example, occurs through oxidation and decomposition. Marx refers to this phenomenon again in Capital: “A machine which is not active in the labor process is useless. In addition, it falls prey to the destructive power of natural metabolism.”⁴⁸ Labor alone cannot create natural substances; it can only modify their shapes according to various purposes. Labor provides the “natural substance” with “external form.”⁴⁹

For example, the form of a desk that labor provides to the “natural substance” of wood is “external” to the original substance because it does not follow the “immanent law of reproduction.” Although the immanent law maintains the wood in its specific form of a tree, the new form of a desk cannot reproduce its substances in the same way, so that it now starts to get exposed to the natural force of decomposition. In order to protect the product of labor from the power of natural metabolism, a purposeful regulation of metabolism through productive consumption is required, which nonetheless cannot overcome the force of nature. Marx on the one hand emphasizes the human ability of labor to consciously and purposefully modify nature, but on the other hand he recognizes the inevitable limitations and restrictions imposed by nature on the human ability to control the metabolism of nature. He is aware of a certain tension between the immanent law of nature and the external form of nature artificially created by labor. The negligence of this material necessity results in decay and destruction of products by natural laws and natural forces.

To sum up, Marx in the Grundrisse employed the concept of metabolism of political economy with three different meanings and continues to do so until Capital: “metabolic interaction between humans and nature,” “metabolism of society,” and “metabolism of nature.” His sources of inspiration are not so apparent after his reading of Roland Daniels and Wilhelm Roscher because, following his own purpose of developing a system of political economy, Marx generalized and modified the concept as well. Precisely because of this generalization, Marx’s concept of metabolism is exposed to the risk of arbitrary interpretations, discussed together with irrelevant theorists, whose ideas actually have nothing to do with Marx’s theory of metabolism. In the earlier debates, one witnesses such cases that totally neglect Daniels and Liebig and focus only on the influence of “natural scientific materialists” (or “vulgar materialists” as Marxists often call them), such as Jacob Moleschott, Karl Vogt, and Ludwig Büchner. Such claims immediately sound very suspicious, considering that Marx referred to these authors only in private letters in a negative and pejorative tone.⁵⁰ This misinterpretation shows the importance of correctly grasping Marx’s parting from Feuerbach’s anthropological materialism and the originality of Marx’s theory of metabolism, which must be understood not just philosophically but in a close relation to his system of political economy.

THE LIMITATION OF ANTHROPOLOGICAL MATERIALISM

Those who overvalue natural scientific materialism misinterpret not only Marx’s metabolism theory but also his entire project, because the theoretical affinity between Feuerbach and these natural scientific materialists often hides Marx’s non-philosophical, practical standpoint after The German Ideology. A typical misunderstanding of Marx’s project through the lens of Feuerbachian materialism and natural scientific materialism is characteristic of Alfred Schmidt’s famous book, The Concept of Nature in Marx: “It may be concluded with some certainty that Marx made use of Moleschott’s theory of metabolism, not, of course, without altering it.”⁵¹ Although Schmidt’s view is widely accepted, a careful examination of the texts makes his claim difficult to accept. There is no philological evidence for his claim; Schmidt and his admirers should have seen that Moleschott’s view, as elaborated in The Cycle of Life (Kreislauf des Lebens, 1852), is hardly compatible with Marx’s alliance with Liebig.⁵²

Accordingly, Schmidt underestimates, perhaps intentionally, Liebig’s influence on Marx, but provides no convincing reason for doing so. In only one footnote, he succinctly refers to Liebig: “The chemist J. von Liebig, whose views were not without influence on Marx (cf. Capital, Vol. I, p. 506, n. 1), compared the metabolism in nature with the same process in the body politic, in his book Chemische Briefe, Heidelberg, 1851, p. 622 et seq.”⁵³ Schmidt’s book does not go into Liebig’s Agricultural Chemistry because he believes that Marx “made use of the term ‘metabolism,’ which, for all its scientific air, is nonetheless speculative in character.”⁵⁴ He clings to the philosophical concept of nature in the young Marx, no matter what it costs in terms of the truth. For Schmidt, Liebig is too “natural science” compared to Moleschott. However, it is not necessary to interpret the concept of metabolism in such a “speculative” manner, and Schmidt’s remark also contradicts the fact that Marx did not study various disciplines of natural science in accordance with a definite program of the philosophy of nature, as Hegel and Schelling did.

In order to ground his own claim, Schmidt quotes from Moleschott’s theory of metabolism in The Cycle of Life:

What man excretes nourishes the plant. The plant changes the air into solids and nourishes the animal. Carnivorous animals live on herbivorous animals, to fall victim to death themselves and so spread abroad newly germinating life in the plant world. The name “metabolism” has been given to this exchange of material.⁵⁵

Moleschott’s explanation of metabolism, which is also expressed as “metempsychosis” among all material substances, is so general and abstract that one cannot immediately infer his influence on Marx’s theory.⁵⁶ Thus it is necessary to look at Moleschott’s theory of metabolism more closely to judge whether Marx would be willing to integrate it “not, of course, without altering it.”

Moleschott was a Dutch doctor and physiologist who participated with Ludwig Büchner and Karl Vogt in a heated “materialism debate” in the 1850s. He advocated a radical materialist view that every mental activity is “only a function of substances in the brain,” and that “the thought stands in the same relation to the brain as bile to the liver or urine to kidneys.”⁵⁷ Moleschott also reduced thought to a product of the movement of matter in the brain: “Thought is a movement of matter [Stoff].”⁵⁸ While Liebig in his Agricultural Chemistry emphasized the importance of phosphoric acid for an ample growth of plants, Moleschott argued its importance for humans in a provocative manner: “No thought without phosphorus.”⁵⁹ Admitting the necessity of further research on the functioning of the brain, he put forward a view that with the development of materialist physiology, both physical and mental activities and talents can be determined by measuring the assimilation and excretion of matter. In this vein, he argued that nourishment plays an important role in determining these activities. For example, he contrasted the English worker with the Italian lazzarone: “Who doesn’t know the superiority of the English worker fortified by roast beef compared to the Italien lazzarone whose predominat vegetable diet explains the large part of his disposition to laziness.”⁶⁰

Moleschott’s mechanistic understanding of the relationship between mental and physical characteristics and nourishment is also reflected in his theory of metabolism, in terms of which he supported the “humus theory” of Gerardus Mulder in Utrecht and criticized Liebig’s “mineral theory.” Liebig maintained, as a result of various chemical experiments, that the direct effect of humus—that is, the dark material of decayed plants in the top layer of soil—upon plant growth occurs only as a result of its decomposition into water and carbonic acid. In contrast, Moleschott and Mulder insisted, in agreement with Albrecht Thaer, on the direct and essential contribution of a soil nutrient called Dammsäure contained in humus for plant growth: “In contrast [to Liebig,] Wiegmann and Mulder, getting rid of any doubt, proved through experiments that neither carbonic acid nor ammonia can replace the effect of Dammsäure.”⁶¹

As he counted ammonium compounds of Dammsäure as the “most important substance of nourishment,” Moleschott undervalued Liebig’s theory of inorganic substances for plant growth, a theory still valid today, and ignored the concrete chemical reactions of bonding and dissolving among various organic and inorganic substances in the atmosphere, soil, and plants.⁶² While Liebig argued for the importance of a chemical analysis of soil composition, Moleschott reduced the chemical and physiological process of plant growth into an abstract and overgeneralized “metempsychosis,” forgoing concrete investigations.

In this metempsychosis that subsumes everything under it humans also lose their own labor-mediated historicity and functions within the social and natural metabolism. Moleschott simply stated that humans as ephemeral beings are decomposed into “Dammsäure and ammonia” in the soil after death, so that plants can again grow on the soil without exhausting it: