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Introduction

For quite a long time, the expression “Marx’s ecology” was regarded as oxymoronic. Not just critics of Marx but even many self-proclaimed Marxists believed that Marx presupposed unlimited economic and technological developments as a natural law of history and propagated the absolute mastery of nature, both of which run counter to any serious theoretical and practical consideration of ecological issues such as the scarcity of natural resources and the overloading of ecospheres. Since the 1970s, when grave environmental threats to human civilization gradually but undoubtedly became more discernible in Western societies, Marx was repeatedly criticized by new environmental studies and an emerging environmental movement for his naïve acceptance of the common nineteenth-century idea advocating the complete human domination of nature. According to critics, such a belief inevitably led him to neglect the destructive character that is immanent in the modern industry and technology that accompanies mass production and consumption. In this vein, John Passmore went so far as to write that “nothing could be more ecologically damaging than the Hegelian-Marxist doctrine.”¹

In subsequent years, the critique against Marx’s “Prometheanism,” or hyperindustrialism, according to which unlimited technological development under capitalism allows humans to arbitrarily manipulate external nature, became a popular stereotype.² Consequently, it was not rare to hear the same type of critique, that Marx’s theory, especially with regard to ecology, was fatally flawed from today’s perspective. His historical materialism, it was said, uncritically praised the progress of technology and productive forces under capitalism and anticipated, based on this premise, that socialism would solve every negative aspect of modern industry simply because it would realize the full potential of productive forces through the radical social appropriation of the means of production that were monopolized by the capitalist class. Marx was depicted as a technological utopian who failed to grasp the “dialectics of Enlightenment,” which would ultimately bring about the vengeance of nature when the ultimate productivism was realized.³

This particular critique, which was common in the Anglo-Saxon world, remains widely accepted in Germany, Marx’s homeland. Even in recent years, Thomas Petersen and Malte Faber repeated the widespread critique against Marx’s productivism, albeit without much textual analysis. According to these German scholars, Marx was “too optimistic in terms of his supposition that any production process can be arranged in such a manner that it does not incur any environmentally harmful materials.… This optimism of progress is certainly due to his great respect for the capitalist bourgeoisie, which is already documented in the Manifesto of the Communist Party.”⁴ Rolf P. Sieferle, another German scholar, also rejected the possibility of Marx’s ecology because Marx wrongly believed, based on his historical understanding of capitalism, that the “limits of growth of natural factors would be uncoupled” in the future. Sharing the dominant modernist tendency of the time and the idea of mastery of nature, Marx’s alleged Prometheanism succumbs to anthropocentrism.⁵ Hans Immler, best known as the author of Nature in Economic Theories (Natur in der ökonomischen Theorie), which is regarded as one of the earliest works of political ecology in Germany, also recently reinforced his rebuttal of Marx’s unacceptable productivism. According to Immler, Marx’s unecologocial standpoint is grounded in his anthropocentric value theory, which absolutizes human labor as the sole source of value and dismisses nature’s contribution in value production. He argues that “due to its one-sided concentration on value and value analysis and due to its fundamental neglect of the physical and natural sphere (use values, nature, sensuousness),” Marx’s critique “remains unable to address and analyze … those developments of social practice that result not only in the most fundamental threats to life, but also represent decisive impulses toward a transformation of socio-economic reality, such as ecological politics.”⁶ Both Sieferle and Immler agree with other critics of Marx in asserting that the founder of historical materialism was decisively unecological in his faith in the positive effects of unlimited technological and economic growth, a view that can no longer be accepted in the twenty-first century. Immler thus concludes: “So forget about Marx.”⁷

The current state of German debates over Marx’s ecology surely gives an impression of outdatedness to English readers, who are more familiar with the development of Marxist ecology in the last fifteen years, initiated by two important works: Paul Burkett’s Marx and Nature and John Bellamy Foster’s Marx’s Ecology.⁸ Their careful reexaminations of Marx’s texts convincingly showed various unnoticed or suppressed ecological dimensions of his critique of political economy and opened up a way to emancipate Marx’s theory from the Promethean stereotype dominant in the 1980s and ’90s. Today many Marxist scholars and activists do not regard it as an exaggeration when Burkett claims that Marx’s critique of capitalism and his vision of socialism can be “most helpful” for the critical reflection upon ongoing global eco-crises.⁹

As Foster recounts recent developments with respect to socialist environmental thought in his introduction to the new edition of Burkett’s Marx and Nature, the discursive constellation around Marx’s ecology has significantly changed with a series of publications by Marxists inspired by Foster and Burkett. These analyze environmental crises as a contradiction of capitalism based upon the “metabolic rift” approach: “A decade and a half ago the contribution of Marx and Marxism to the understanding of ecology was seen in almost entirely negative terms, even by many self-styled ecosocialists. Today Marx’s understanding of the ecological problem is being studied in universities worldwide and is inspiring ecological actions around the globe.”¹⁰ Various studies examine current ecological issues such as ecofeminism (Ariel Salleh), climate change (Del Weston, Brett Clark, and Richard York), ecological imperialism (Brett Clark), and marine ecology (Rebecca Clausen and Stefano Longo).¹¹ The concept of metabolic rift has subsequently become influential beyond a small circle of the radical left. Notably, Naomi Klein’s critique of capitalist global warming in This Changes Everything draws upon Foster’s approach in an affirmative manner, though she is not a Marxist.¹² The significance of “Marx’s ecology” is now positively recognized on both theoretical and practical levels, to the point that allegations of Marx’s Prometheanism are now generally regarded as having been proven false.

However, despite or precisely because of the increasing hegemonic influence of the “classical” Marxist tradition represented by “second-stage ecosocialists” such as Foster and Burkett in the environmental movement, there remains the persistent reservation toward accepting Marx’s ecology among the so-called first-stage ecosocialists, such as Ted Benton, André Gorz, Michael Löwy, James O’Connor, and Alain Lipietz.¹³ Recently, first-stage ecosocialists have found new adherents, who in various ways seek to downgrade Marx’s ecological contributions. Recognizing the validity of Marx’s ecological analysis only to a limited extent, these thinkers always end up claiming that his analysis was fatally flawed in its failure to be fully ecological and that his nineteenth-century discussions of the ecological problem are of little importance today.¹⁴ For example, they argue that Marx was “no god of any kind” since he did not adequately anticipate today’s climate change due to the massive usage of fossil energy. Daniel Tanuro maintains that Marx’s time is now so distant in terms of technology and natural sciences that his theory is not appropriate for a systematic analysis of today’s environmental issues, especially because Marx did not pay enough attention to the specificity of fossil energy in contrast to other renewable forms of energy.¹⁵ Furthermore, Jason W. Moore, changing his earlier valuation of the metabolic-rift approach, now directs his critique against Foster, claiming that a theory of value is missing in Foster’s metabolic-rift approach. Foster, Moore claims, fails to comprehend the dynamic historical transformation of the whole ecosystem—Moore calls it “oikeios”—through the process of capitalist accumulation. According to Moore, Foster’s analysis describes no more than “a statistic and ahistorical theory of natural limits,” and so it is inevitable for the metabolic-rift approach to have “apocalyptic” implications.¹⁶ Critics of the theory of metabolic rift complain that “Marx’s ecology” as such can at best point out the banal fact that capitalism is bad for the environment.

In order to refute such persistent misunderstandings of Marx’s ecology and to demonstrate its larger theoretical significance, this book aims at a more systematic and complete reconstruction of Marx’s ecological critique of capitalism. Although Foster and Burkett have carefully examined various texts by Marx for the purpose of demonstrating the power of his ecological theory, their analyses sometimes give a false impression that Marx did not deal with the topic in a systematic but only in a sporadic and marginal way. On the one hand, it is thus necessary to reveal the immanent systematic character of Marx’s ecology, that there is a clear continuity with his critique of political economy. This constitutes the main task of Part I of this book. On the other hand, in Part II I offer a more complete examination of Marx’s ecology than the earlier literature, scrutinizing his natural science notebooks that will be published for the first time in the new Marx-Engels-Gesamtausgabe, known as MEGA². These notebooks will allow scholars to trace the emergence and development of Marx’s ecological critique of capitalism in a more vivid and lively manner, unraveling various unknown aspects of his astonishingly encompassing project of Capital. The notebooks display just how seriously and laboriously Marx studied the rich field of nineteenth-century ecological theory and integrated new insights into his own dissection of capitalist society. In this process, Marx consciously parted from any forms of naïve Prometheanism and came to regard ecological crises as the fundamental contradiction of the capitalist mode of production. The key concept in this context is “metabolism” (Stoffwechsel), which leads us to a systematic interpretation of Marx’s ecology.

The significance of a systematic reading becomes clearer if we take a look at a typical interpretation by first-stage ecosocialists. For example, believing that Marx’s work can be used at best as a source of citations that might resonate with today’s environmental concern, Hubert Laitko, a German Marxist, argues that Marx’s ecology “lacks a systematic character and rigor, and it can possibly give some stimulation for theoretical works, but not more than that.”¹⁷ Obviously, it is true that Marx was by no means a “prophet,” and thus his texts cannot be literally and directly applied to and identified with today’s situation. Nonetheless, this rather trivial fact does not justify Laitko’s judgment. If Marx’s Capital could only be used for the purpose of mere citations, then why refer to Marx at all for conducting an ecological investigation of contemporary capitalism? Indeed, this is the hidden implication when the first-stage ecosocialists point to a fatal flaw of Marx’s ecology, and this is precisely why one must be cautious when many ecosocialists seem to place value on this “precious heritage for political ecology” without actually providing any positive reason for returning to Marx. Alain Lipietz bluntly contends that “the general structure, the intellectual scaffolding of the Marxist paradigm, along with the key solutions it suggests, must be jettisoned; virtually every area of Marxist thought must be thoroughly reexamined in order to really be of use.”¹⁸ Similarly, André Gorz, another important figure among first-stage ecosocialists, goes further and explicitly admits that “socialism is dead.”¹⁹ If the general structure of Marx’s thought, such as his theory of class, value, and socialism, must be abandoned because “socialism is dead,” it becomes extremely hard to imagine why those who are seriously concerned with the current ecological crises should waste their time reading Marx’s “obsolete” texts, when urgent actions are required on a global scale. By dismissing the pillars of Marx’s critique of political economy, first-stage ecosocialists negate the entire significance of Marx’s theorization of the capitalist mode of production.

In order to avoid this negative evaluation of Marx’s intellectual legacy, in this book I will demonstrate that Marx’s ecological critique possesses a systematic character and constitutes an essential moment within the totality of his project of Capital. Ecology does not simply exist in Marx’s thought—my thesis is a stronger one. I maintain that it not possible to comprehend the full scope of his critique of political economy if one ignores its ecological dimension. In order to ground this statement, I will explore Marx’s theory of “value” and “reification” (Versachlichung), because these key categories reveal that Marx actually deals with the whole of nature, the “material” world, as a place of resistance against capital, where the contradictions of capitalism are manifested most clearly. In this sense, Marx’s ecology not only constitutes an immanent element for his economic system and for his emancipatory vision of socialism, it also provides us with one of the most helpful methodological scaffolds for investigating the ecological crises as the central contradiction of the current historical system of social production and reproduction. The “precious heritage” of Marx’s theory can only be appreciated completely with his ecology.

To be sure, it is important to admit that Marx was in the beginning not necessarily “ecological” but sometimes appeared to be “productivist.” Only after a long, arduous process of developing the sophistication of his own political economy, during which time he earnestly studied various fields of the natural sciences, did Marx become fully conscious of the need to deal with the problem of environmental disaster as a limitation imposed upon the valorization process of capital.

Yet it is vital to recognize that a key ecological motive is already present in Marx’s notebooks of 1844 (known as Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844). In chapter 1, I show that Marx in 1844 is already dealing with the relationship between humanity and nature as the central theme of his famous theory of alienation. Marx sees the reason for the emergence of modern alienated life in a radical dissolution of the original unity between humans and nature. In other words, capitalism is fundamentally characterized by alienation of nature and a distorted relationship between humans and nature. Accordingly, he envisions the emancipatory idea of “humanism = naturalism” as a project of reestablishing the unity between humanity and nature against capitalist alienation.

However, Marx in The German Ideology discerns the inadequacy of his earlier project, which simply opposes a philosophical “idea” against the alienated reality. As a result of distancing himself from Ludwig Feuerbach’s philosophical schema, Marx comes to examine the relationship between humans and nature using the physiological concept of “metabolism” to criticize the degradation of the natural environment as a manifestation of the contradictions of capitalism. In chapter 2, I trace the formation of the concept of metabolism in Marx’s theory. Marx used it for the first time in his neglected London Notebooks and elaborated on it even more in the Grundrisse and Capital. The concept of metabolism allowed him not only to comprehend the transhistorical universal natural conditions of human production but also to investigate their radical historical transformations under the development of the modern system of production and the growth of forces of production. In other words, Marx examined how the historically specific dynamics of capitalist production, mediated by reified economic categories, constitute particular ways of human social praxis toward nature—namely the harnessing of nature to the needs of maximum capital accumulation—and how various disharmonies and discrepancies in nature must emerge out of this capitalist deformation of the universal metabolism of nature. Marx’s seminal contribution in the field of ecology lies in his detailed examination of the relationship between humans and nature in capitalism.

To describe the unecological character of the specific modern relationship of humans to their environment, I provide in chapter 3 a systematic reconstruction of Marx’s ecology through his theory of “reification” as developed in Capital. I focus on the “material” (stofflich) dimensions of the world as essential components of his critique of political economy, which is often underestimated in earlier discussions on Capital. Marx’s Capital systematically develops the pure formal categories of the capitalist mode of production, such as “commodity,” “value,” and “capital,” revealing the specific character of capitalistically constituted social relations of production, which operate as economic forces independent of human control. In this sense, in Germany, the “new reading of Marx” (neue Marx-Lektüre), first initiated by Helmut Reichelt and Hans-Georg Backhaus—and now put forward with more depth and rigor by Michael Heinrich, Ingo Elbe, and Werner Bonefeld—has convincingly reinterpreted Marx’s critique of classical political economy as a critique of the fetishistic (that is, ahistorical) understanding of economic categories, which identifies the appearance of capitalist society with the universal and transhistorical economic laws of nature.²⁰ Marx, in contrast, comprehends those economic categories as “specific social forms” and reveals the underlying social relations that bestow an objective validity of this inverted world where economic things dominate human beings.²¹ Marx’s critique cannot be reduced to a simple categorical reconstruction of the historically constituted totality of capitalist society, however, because such an approach cannot adequately explain why he so intensively studied natural sciences. In fact, the “new reading of Marx” remains silent on this issue.

In contrast, I stress in this book that Marx’s practical and critical method of materialism actually goes beyond this type of “form” analysis and deals with the interrelation between economic forms and the concrete material world, which is closely related to the ecological dimensions. Insofar as Marx’s analysis regards the destruction of nature under capitalism as a manifestation of the discrepancy arising from the capitalist formal transformation of nature, it becomes possible, after examining formal economic categories in close relation to the physical and material dimensions of nature, to systematically reveal Marx’s critique of capitalism. Thus I argue that “material” (Stoff) is a central category in Marx’s critical project. This is not a minor point. If the systematic character of Marx’s ecology in Capital is not correctly understood, his remarks about nature and its destruction under capitalism only appears sporadic and deviating, without offering a comprehensive critique of today’s environmental destruction under capitalism. However, if it is possible to correctly conceive the role of “material” in its relation to economic “forms,” Marx’s ecology turns out not only to be an immanent component of his system but also a useful methodological foundation for analyzing the current global ecological crisis.

In this context, it is important to add that, even if I intend to present a systematic interpretation of Marx’s ecology against the first-stage ecosocialists, Marx was not able to complete his own system of political economy during his lifetime. Volumes two and three of Capital were edited by Frederick Engels after Marx’s death and published in 1885 and 1894, respectively. As Marx’s system remained unfinished, its full reconstruction is an important task, which might be an impossible endeavor. Nonetheless, this implies that every attempt at a reconstruction might inevitably be in vain and unproductive. In recent years the historical and critically complete edition of Marx and Engels’s works continues to publish a large number of new materials that remain unknown even more than one hundred years after Marx’s death. They contain highly informative passages that document his long efforts to complete his own project of Capital. Notably, all of eight original manuscripts for volume 2 of Capital are published in the second section of the MEGA² in 2012, so that now instead of reading a mixture of manuscripts put together by Engels we can more clearly see how Marx’s theory of capital circulation developed until the last moment of his life. The original manuscript for volume 3 is also available, and a careful comparison reveals important differences between Marx and Engels.²²

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 his evaluation of Liebig’s theory and even more passionately argued for the necessity for a post-capitalist society to realize a rational intercourse with nature. The important figure in this context is a German agronomist, Carl Fraas, who was critical of Leibig. In Fraas’s historical research, Marx even found an “unconscious socialist tendency.” Even if Marx was not able to integrate his new evaluation for Fraas fully into Capital, his excerpts from Fraas document why the natural sciences acquired increasing meaning for his economic project. In this sense, the year 1868 marks the beginning of a new period for his critique of political economy, with much wider scope than before. Unfortunately, this made the completion of his critique extremely difficult.

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.