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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 problematic. Consequently, it is no longer possible to enrich the physical and mental dimensions of the human species-being together. Instead of free mutual intercourse and collaboration, there emerges antagonistic and atomistic competition for survival.

To sum up, Marx’s analysis of estranged labor delineates the modern unfree reality where one cannot execute labor as an end in itself but rather labor functions as a process of loss of reality, impoverishment, dehumanization, and atomization. Marx argues that the only way to overcome this alienated reality is to transcend the system of private property so that humans can relate to nature through labor in a thoroughly conscious, free, universal cooperative manner and acquire self-affirmation with the totality of the external world with their own objectified products. This will lead to the absolute realization of human essence as species-being. Marx envisions communism as a goal of the historical process, in which humans overcome the estranged dichotomy of the subject and object through a revolution to realize the absolute unity between humanity and nature under the name of human species-being.

It is obvious that Marx’s project of 1844 is heavily influenced by Feuerbach, who is supposed to have achieved “the establishment of true materialism and of real science.”¹⁸ Feuerbach in his Essence of Christianity put forward a theory of alienation as a critique of religion. Individuals suffer from alienation in religion because they are finite beings and project an infinite being (that is, God) in opposition to which they find themselves powerless. Feuerbach argues that this religious estrangement can be overcome if they are able to recognize the hidden truth that humans are actually projecting their own essence as a species-being onto God. God is nothing but the product of human imagination that later became more and more powerful and independent, dominating humans as an alien existence. Against this inverted reality, Feuerbach opposes the importance of “sensibility,” and particularly “love,” as the unique materialist foundation of truth:

Love is the middle term, the substantial bond, the principle of reconciliation between the perfect and the imperfect, the sinless and sinful being the universal and the individual, the divine and the human. Love is God himself, and apart from it there is no God. Love makes man God and God man. Love strengthens the weak and weakens the strong, abases the high and raises the lowly, idealizes matter and materializes spirit. Love it the true unity of God and man, of spirit and nature. In love common nature is spirit, and the preeminent spirit is nature.¹⁹

Feuerbach claims that with the power of love humans will be able to transcend religious estrangement, because through love they can cooperate with one another to overcome their isolated state of being and this intersubjective unity allows them to see through their own essence as species-being.

Feuerbach’s explanation of alienation together with its transcendence had a tremendous impact upon the Young Hegelians. Marx at the time firmly believed that Feuerbach had carried out a thorough critique of religion and revealed the true principle of a coming revolutionary “philosophy of the future.” He felt it necessary only to extend its scope to include other spheres of the modern bourgeois society: “For Germany the criticism of religion is in the main complete, and criticism of religion is the premise of all criticism.”²⁰ Marx’s Paris Notebooks document his attempt to carry out this type of criticism of alienation, combining it with his recent discoveries in the field of political economy. However, he neither published these notebooks nor discussed the concept of alienation in an extensive manner again.

It has been heatedly disputed whether Marx stuck to his original plan to extend the concept of alienation to political economy in later works. Marx’s theory of alienation was interpreted from a philosophic perspective ever since the publication of the text as The Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts in 1932. What is more, the participants in this debate never questioned this tendency, something that must now change based on recent philological findings. At the time, Marx was reading various works of political economy, and if he started his discussion on alienation rather spontaneously while he was making other excerpts of political economy in his Paris Notebooks, political economy must have affected his theoretical interest even with regard to alienation.

In terms of philosophizing the text and ignoring political economy, Herbert Marcuse played a particularly important role. He published an article on the newly discovered manuscripts in 1932 titled “The Foundation of Historical Materialism” and shed light on the novel dimension of Marx’s “philosophical critique” of alienation. Marcuse argued that there is an important “breakthrough” within the first manuscript, and that Marx’s analysis “seems initially to proceed completely on the ground of traditional political economy and its theorems. Marx significantly starts by dividing his investigation into the three traditional concepts of political economy: ‘The Wages of Labor,’ ‘The Profit of Capital’ and ‘The Rent of Land.’” However, according to Marcuse, Marx’s radical critique of alienation and estrangement “point[ed] in a completely new direction,” and his critique emerged only after “this division into three [was] exploded and abandoned.” Marcuse went further, claiming that the “development of the concept of labor thus breaks through the traditional framework for dealing with problems.”²¹ Thus, Marx’s philosophical critique of modern bourgeois society and political economy as its ideologue only begins when he supersedes the “three traditional concepts of political economy.” A radical break exists between the economic and philosophic parts.

As Marcuse emphasized, Marx first excerpted relevant sentences by Jean-Baptiste Say and Adam Smith from his notebooks into the Manuscripts and then added detailed comments on them.²² Subsequently, he began his discussion of estranged labor only after page XXII of the first “Manuscript.” Yet, this fact does not mean that Marx’s comments on these economists within their framework are insignificant for his concept of alienation as Marcuse’s interpretation implies. Marcuse’s analysis almost completely neglects Marx’s economic critique in the first half of the first manuscript.²³ This tendency of Marcuse to underestimate the economic part of the first manuscript was widely shared by later Marxists, showing that Marcuse’s interpretation was quite influential. For example, Erich Fromm shared the same view, and his popular edition of The Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts omitted the economic part of the first manuscript, which reinforced the philosophic interpretation of alienation.²⁴ Marcuse and Fromm only recognized the original theoretical contribution by the young Marx in his philosophical criticism of “alienated labor,” without going into the very beginning, which deals with his critique of political economy.

The impression of Marx’s “breakthrough” was reinforced by an editorial title, “Estranged Labor,” at the beginning of the second half of the first Manuscript, which does not exist in Marx’s own notebooks. In contrast to the dominant tendency, I argue that the “emergence of a theory” in Marx’s notebook must be understood in a close relation to his analysis of political economy because his original theory of alienation is formulated in the process of a critique of it. If one misses the importance of the first part of the first Manuscript, one cannot avoid being confronted with a theoretical difficulty, as was the case in the earlier literature. In other words, the young Marx has been unjustly criticized being unable to explain the cause of modern alienated labor.

In 1844, Marx was trying to analyze the “facts” of private property, the existence of which bourgeois economists simply took for granted. He aimed at revealing the historical conditions of the system of private property, and he argued that its “essence” lies in a certain form of labor in capitalist society. In this sense, Marx stated that private property is the “product” and “necessary result” of estranged labor:

Private property is thus the product, the result, the necessary consequence, of alienated labor, of the external relation of the worker to nature and to himself. Private property thus results by analysis from the concept of alienated labor, i.e., of alienated man, of estranged labor, of estranged life, of estranged man. True, it is as a result of the movement of private property that we have obtained the concept of alienated labor (of alienated life) in political economy. But analysis of this concept shows that though private property appears to be the reason, the cause of alienated labor, it is rather its consequence, just as the gods are originally not the cause but the effect of man’s intellectual confusion. Later this relationship becomes reciprocal.²⁵

Marx pointed to the “reciprocal” relationship, according to which both private property and alienated labor function as “cause” and “effect” and reinforce each other. However, this situation only emerged later. In this way, he intended to make it clear that at the beginning private property must not be treated as a given “fact” precisely because it is a specific historical and logical “result” that arose from alienated labor.

Then Marx continued to ask: “We have accepted the estrangement of labor, its alienation, as a fact, and we have analyzed this fact. How, we now ask, does man come to alienate, to estrange, his labor? How is this estrangement rooted in the nature of human development?”²⁶ Here his question seems to indicate that Marx felt the necessity to explain the ultimate cause of the estrangement of labor in capitalist society, but in the following sentences he did not explain it, and the notebook is disrupted without going into this question. The text gives an impression that Marx had difficulty in revealing the cause of alienation, that is, when he tried to grasp the notion that private property arose from alienated labor, he seemed to fall into a circular explanation that labor is alienated because of the system of private property. Lars Tummers thus asked: “How can private property be both an effect of and a factor that influences alienation?” This question is a common one, and Tummers follows Ignace Feuerlicht, who also pointed to the young Marx’s theoretical limitation in a similar manner: “One of the most conspicuous contradictions lies in the fact that young Marx considers private property sometimes as the cause and sometimes as the effect or symptom of alienation.”²⁷ Feuerlicht moans that one can only try in vain to find the answer to the obvious question about the exact historical and logical genesis of alienated labor.

On the contrary, Michael Quante attempts to solve Marx’s circular explanation, though he shares the same presupposition with Marcuse that Marx’s “own philosophically founded analysis of national economic phenomena” is “expounded in the second part of the first manuscript with the concept of alienated labor.” Since Quante neglects the economic critique by Marx in the first part of the first notebook, he naturally reaches another “philosophic answer” to the problem concerning the cause of alienation, which is the Hegelian logical and historical movement of “negation of negation.” He explains that the emergence of alienation is an “inevitable intermediary step” on the way to the “conscious appropriation of species-being.”²⁸ Without doubt, this type of schematic account does not provide any attractive and convincing solution to the problem because its reductionistic understanding of Hegel’s logical and historical dialectics cannot avoid the criticism of determinism, although Quante is not interested in defending Marx from such consequences.

As will be shown in the next section, both Feuerlicht and Quante miss Marx’s original intent and end up directing an “imagined” critique. It is “imagined” because the aporia of alienation does not exist at all. It appears to exist only because earlier studies arbitrarily divided the notebook’s text into two parts and focused exclusively on the second “philosophic” part. A Japanese Marxist scholar, Masami Fukutomi, pointed out the importance of the first economic part, especially Marx’s discussion of the “intimate ties of man with the earth.”²⁹ It will provide us with a solid basis for consistently comprehending Marx’s entire project.

THE DISSOLUTION OF THE ORIGINAL UNITY BETWEEN HUMANITY AND NATURE

In one paragraph in the first notebook that hardly gained attention in the philosophic literature, Marx compares the capitalist form of property with the feudalist form of possession. The neglect is surprising, because it is in this paragraph in the Paris Notebooks that Marx for the first time discusses the relationship between the pathological reality of modern production and the concept of estranged labor. After he describes the total commodification of landed property as the completion of capitalist relations, Marx provides a reason why this transformation of landed property exerts such a decisive impact on the emergence of alienated labor.

Marx first makes it clear that his historical comparison must not be confused with a romantic idealization of past feudal society, as if there had been no alienated labor in precapitalist societies. He argues that such an idealization occurs only through a lack of scientific investigation:

We will not join in the sentimental tears wept over this by romanticism. Romanticism always confuses the shamefulness of huckstering the land with the perfectly rational consequence, inevitable and desirable within the realm of private property, of the huckstering of private property in land. In the first place, feudal landed property is already by its very nature huckstered land—the earth which is estranged from man and hence confronts him in the shape of a few great lords.³⁰

The romantic bemoans the collapse of feudal domination and the resultant commodification of the land and the loss of the lords’ noble values to the avarice of merchants. Rejecting such a view, Marx argues that “the huckstering” of the land also existed in feudal landed property, so that labor and land were estranged from humans to some extent under the dominion of “a few great lords.”

Furthermore, “shamefulness,” Marx says, is not the fundamental characteristic of the modern money aristocracy, because the boundless desire for money that the defenders of romantic ideals find unacceptable is actually an “inevitable” and even “desirable” result, viewed from a wider historical perspective, because it is nothing but an embodiment of the rationality of modern bourgeois society. In other words, the “shameful” behavior of the modern landowners is not a moral defect but makes concrete the new social rationality after a radical transformation of social structure. Romantics like Pierre le Pesant de Boisguilbert cannot recognize this; they can only moralistically reproach the shameful behavior of individuals in capitalism.³¹ In clear opposition to the idealization of the past, Marx points to the fact that there were relations of domination grounded in feudal landed property, under the system of which people were also “estranged” from the land and “confronted” by it.³²

Marx continues his analysis on feudal possession of land, illustrating the situation of serfs in opposition to the landlord:

The domination of the land as an alien power over men is already inherent in feudal landed property. The serf is the adjunct of the land. Likewise, the lord of an entailed estate, the first-born son, belongs to the land. It inherits him. Indeed, the dominion of private property begins with property in land—that is its basis. But in feudal landed property the lord at least appears as the king of the estate. Similarly, there still exists the semblance of a more intimate connection between the proprietor and the land than that of mere material wealth. The estate is individualized with its lord: it has his rank, is baronial or ducal with him, has his privileges, his jurisdiction, his political position, etc. It appears as the inorganic body of its lord.³³

Serfs, on the other hand, have lost their ability to conduct independent and free activity insofar as they cannot relate to the land as their own property but only as the lord’s. Their existence is reduced to a mere “adjunct” of the earth, which is the foundation of material wealth. Marx recognizes that due to this subjugation there exists a certain level of alienation from nature and their own activity even under feudal social relations. Nature functions only as an “inorganic body” of the lord who can appropriate the product of the land and the labor of serfs. In this way, serfs become a part of the inorganic body in the production process. Land is as such “privatized” and “individualized” by the lord, which Marx considers the beginning of the “domination of private property.”

However, without directly deducing the cause of modern alienated labor from this class antagonism in the feudal social system, Marx points to its important qualitative difference from landed property in capitalist society. According to Marx, feudal social relations are grounded on “personal” and “political” domination; that is, the appropriation of products of the land takes place through the lord’s direct dominance over serfs with his personal and political power thanks to innate privileges and a monopoly of violence. Thus serfs are totally conscious of this personal domination by the lord, and this is why the lord’s “family history, the history of his house etc.” become so important to legitimate the relations of domination, as “all this individualizes the estate for him and make it literally his house, personifies it.” The land and family history individualizes the landed property and legitimizes its monopoly, which transforms a piece of land into the “inorganic body” of the lord.³⁴

The direct personal and political domination and exploitation in this precapitalist society is dependent on tradition and custom, which results in a unique relation of the laborer to the earth. Marx emphasizes the notable difference between serfs and day-laborers:

Similarly those working on the estate have not the position of day-laborers; but they are in part themselves his property, as are serfs; and in part they are bound to him by ties of respect, allegiance, and duty. His relation to them is therefore directly political, and has likewise a human, intimate [gemüthliche] side. Customs, character, etc., vary from one estate to another and seem to be one with the land to which they belong; whereas later, it is only his purse and not his character, his individuality, which connects a man with an estate.³⁵

Those working the land under feudal domination are negated in such a way that their personal independence is not recognized by their lord. Serfs are regarded as a part of the lord’s landed property. This relation of domination and dependence essentially differs from the situation of day-laborers in modern bourgeois society because the latter are free from any direct political domination and recognized as “free” and “equal” legal subjects.

This does not mean, however, that day-laborers can enjoy a freer and better life than serfs. Marx argues that the opposite is the case. Precisely because serfs are negated and deprived of their rights, there remains their unity with the objective conditions of production and reproduction, so that the physical existence of serfs is guaranteed. As Masami Fukutomi pointed out, the unique relation of serfs to the land is decisive for Marx’s analysis of alienation in the Paris Notebooks.³⁶ Notably, Marx emphasizes in the cited passage that personal domination in feudal society possesses “a human, intimate side” despite the antagonistic opposition of the land to those working on it. Though the concrete situation varies according to the different customs and characters of lords, the fundamental characteristic common to feudal production is the unity of producers with the land. In spite of the negation of their independence as legal subjects, they can attain a guarantee for their own physical existence as well as freedom and independence in the production process. There is no room for the reified domination by capital because direct personal domination prevents capital from penetrating its autonomous power. Under this situation, the producers provide surplus labor and surplus products only through the threat and often the reality of physical coercion, which inevitably impedes the increase of productivity. The feudal lord also does not strive to attain maximal advantage from his land, but rather “consumes what is there and calmly leaves the worry of producing to the serfs and the tenants.”³⁷

The lord’s seemingly moderate behavior is praised by Romantics as a manifestation of his noble character, but it is clearly conditioned by the underlying objective relations of production. In this vein, the entire production in feudal society acquires a stable character because its aim is fundamentally directed to the satisfaction of concrete social needs. In contrast to the Romantics, Marx concludes that it is not the moral character of the lord but the relationship between humans and the earth that realizes the “nobility’s relationship” to landed property and casts “romantic glory on its lord.”³⁸

Then Marx investigates modern bourgeois society, where, together with the dissolution of feudal personal domination, landed property has been fully transformed into an object of “huckstering.” This change creates a wholly different type of domination, one that is the non-personal and reified domination of capital, accompanied by a specific form of alienated labor:

It is necessary that this appearance be abolished—that landed property, the root of private property, be dragged completely into the movement of private property and that it become a commodity; that the rule of the proprietor appear as the undisguised rule of private property, of capital, freed of all political tincture; that the relationship between proprietor and worker be reduced to the economic relationship of exploiter and exploited; that all personal relationship between the proprietor and his property cease, property becoming merely objective, material wealth; that the marriage of convenience should take the place of the marriage of honor with the land; and that the land should likewise sink to the status of a commercial value, like man.³⁹

As the landed property becomes a commodity and thus comes to be integrated into the huckstering system of private property after the dissolution of the earlier personal relationship of domination and dependence, individuals, on the one hand, can face each other as formally free and equal subjects. They are all uniformly recognized as legal subjects in the civil society. On the other hand, they also lose the direct connection with the earth, so that they now have to appear in the market to sell their labor power. In illustrations by political economists, this new modern relationship provides a foundation of an ideal and harmonious realm of freedom and equality in which the relationship of domination seemingly ceases to exist. Marx rejects this view and argues that the bourgeois ideal of “freedom” and “equality” is not the end of domination at all. This ideal turns out to be an appearance, for instead of the relationship of personal domination between the exploiting and the exploited, there comes an impersonal and reified relationship of domination. Day-laborers must be subordinated to a qualitatively different, modern form of alienation, and their working conditions prove much worse and more alienated in various aspects than in feudal society.

Domination in capitalist society must be strictly differentiated from that of the feudal world. Due to the commodification of land, the producers in modern society lose any direct connection with the earth and come to be separated from their original means of production, whereas serfs were still tightly connected to the land.⁴⁰ Consequently, modern individuals are all constantly obligated to sell their own labor power, the only commodity they have, to another person and thus become day-laborers suffering from estrangement from their own activity. According to Marx, this transformation of the relationship between humans and the earth is decisive in order to understand the specificity of the capitalist mode of production.⁴¹

Modern workers lose any guarantee of physical existence, and their activity becomes estranged, controlled and dominated by alien forces. Propertylessness, precariousness, alienation, and exploitation are tightly connected. It is true that exploitation existed for the serfs, and they had to provide the lord with surplus labor and surplus products. However, contrasting this with the situation of modern workers, Marx argues that the labor of serfs still possessed an “intimate side,” because, thanks to the connection with the earth serfs maintained autonomy in the production process and their material life was secured. Ironically, this is a particular result of the negation of their personality in feudal society, which transforms them into a mere part of the objective means of production. In this regard, Marx without doubt recognizes a positive side of the feudal mode of production.

The regulation of the autonomous power of capital can take various forms, such as “craft, guild, corporation, etc., within which labor still has a seemingly social significance, still the significance of the real community, and has not yet reached the stage of indifference to its content, of complete being-for-itself, i.e., of abstraction from all other being, and hence has not yet become liberated capital.”⁴² Within a craft, guild, and corporation there no longer exists the direct unity between humans and land, but there is still a stable connection of the producers with their means of production thanks to the intersubjective coordination of the entire production, which hinders the full penetration of the power of capital. The complete dissolution of the tie between the workers and their objective means of production for the first time prepares “free” labor, in a “double sense,” and thus the impersonal, reified dominance by “liberated capital.”

Modern laborers, on the contrary, lose any direct connection to the land. On the one hand, they are free from personal dominance. On the other hand, they are also free from the means of production and thus can no longer relate to nature as their own “inorganic body.” The original unity with the land disappeared with the collapse of precapitalist personal domination. Its result is alienation from nature, activity, species-being, and other people—or simply said, modern alienation arising from the total annihilation of the “intimate side” of production. When the land becomes a commodity, the relationship between humans and land is radically modified and reorganized for the sake of producing capitalist wealth. After the universalization of commodity production over the entire society, the whole of production is not primarily directed to the satisfaction of concrete personal needs, but to the valorization of capital alone. Following the new rationality of production, the capitalist does not simply let the workers conduct their job as they please; rather, in accordance with his “filthy self-interest,” he actively transforms the entire production process in such a way that human activity is fully subjected to a reified dominance, without consideration of autonomy of work and material security.⁴³

In societies where the logic of commodity production becomes dominant, the modern form of alienation takes up a fully different shape in comparison with precapitalist estrangement. Since the reified dominance of capital is not dependent upon legitimatization through personal history and honor, “liberated capital” ignores all kinds of “ties of respect, allegiance, and duty” and even the concrete material life of individual workers. Capital is simply indifferent even if those workers are dying as long as “the race of laborers” does not die out.⁴⁴ The concrete content of labor is fully abstracted for capital. Capital only counts the wages of labor as mere “costs” in addition to costs for maintaining other instruments. In other words, there is no significant difference between wages for workers and oil for wheels. According to the new social relations, capitalists act with self-interest and avarice. However, this is not a mere moral corruption, but a result of following the new rationality under competition for more profit. This is because “it is essential that in this competition landed property, in the form of capital, manifests its dominion over both the working class and the proprietors themselves who are either being ruined or raised by the laws governing the movement of capital.”⁴⁵

Marx thus points to a great historical transformation of the human-nature relationship underlying the estrangement of modern labor, as a result of which the activity of workers can no longer function as the subjective realization of the free and conscious capability of human beings in and with nature. Human beings are reduced to “wage laborers” who are dependent on capital for the sake of their own physical lives; and accordingly, their entire activity is minimized into “wage labor.” Though humans as wage laborers can only survive in relation to alien capital, this relationship between capital and labor is “an indifferent, external and accidental relationship to each other” because liberated capital is not interested in workers and their concrete lives.⁴⁶

Therefore, the circular argument that Tummers and Feuerlicht find in the first manuscript in terms of the specific historical condition of modern alienated labor does not exist. This is because in the section on “ground rent” in the same notebook Marx discusses the specificity of the capitalist mode of production and alienation in comparison to the feudal mode. For Marx, the cause of modern estrangement is quite clear, and his argument is consistent.⁴⁷ Though Marx in his private notebook, never intended for publication, did not repeat every single point in a reader-friendly manner, a careful analysis of the notebook, with attention paid to his excerpts from Engels’s Outline, demonstrates that private property as the dominion of reified relations of commodity and money emerges out of a loss of the original unity between producers and their objective conditions of production.

If one does not take the section on ground rent into account, one faces a risk of an even greater misunderstanding. Without correctly understanding the fundamental cause of alienation, it is not possible to recognize Marx’s vision of transcending it. Only if one comprehends the estrangement in capitalist society as a dissolution of humans’ original unity with the earth does it becomes evident that Marx’s communist project consistently aims at a conscious rehabilitation of the unity between humans and nature.

This idea builds the core of “humanism = naturalism,” as Marx was already aware of the task of realizing free individuality in the future society, using the concept of “association”:

Association, applied to land, shares the economic advantage of large-scale landed property, and first brings to realization the original tendency inherent in [land] division, namely, equality. In the same way association also reestablishes, now on a rational basis, no longer mediated by serfdom, overlordship and the silly mysticism of property, the intimate [gemüthliche] ties of man with the earth, since the earth ceases to be an object of huckstering, and through free labor and free enjoyment becomes, once more, a true personal property of man.⁴⁸

Speaking of the practical task of association, Marx comes back to the earlier discussion and emphatically demands the reconstruction of “the intimate ties of man with the earth,” now on a higher level after its destruction in capitalism. In contrast to the feudal society and its monopoly of lands, the conscious construction of the unity between humans and nature must be free of any personal and political subjugation and dominion, and association must realize free intersubjective relationships through the social appropriation of the means of production and products by the direct producers. Consequently, this totally new mode of production makes a “rational” relationship to the land possible on a social scale, which is radically different from its ruthless “huckstering” in capitalism. The entire social activity of production and its products thus does not confront the producers as alien objects, but thanks to the higher unity with the earth as “a true personal property of man,” serves to make possible the “free labor and free enjoyment” of all producers. Marx’s vision of the future society is without doubt fully consistent with his critique of modern alienated labor.

It is in this economic sense that Marx in 1844 insists that establishment of the absolute unity of humanity and nature is the central task of communism:

Communism as the positive transcendence of private property as human self-estrangement, and therefore as the real appropriation of the human essence by and for man; communism therefore as the complete return of man to himself as a social (i.e., human) being—a return accomplished consciously and embracing the entire wealth of previous development. This communism, as fully developed naturalism equals humanism, and as fully developed humanism equals naturalism; it is the genuine resolution of the conflict between man and nature and between man and man—the true resolution of the strife between existence and essence, between objectification and self-confirmation, between freedom and necessity, between the individual and the species.⁴⁹

Marx depicts the historical movement toward the transcendence of self-alienation and the loss of object under the system of private property as a process of the true reconciliation of humanity and nature. As a condition for its realization, he points to the necessity of a radical transformation of the existing mode of production and the abolition of private property. The “society” to come is nothing but a collective and conscious organization and regulation of the relationship between humans and nature: “Thus society is the complete unity of man with nature—the true resurrection of nature—the accomplished naturalism of man and the accomplished humanism of nature.”⁵⁰ The unity between the organic and inorganic body of humans can only be realized through a fully conscious and rational regulation of their interaction with nature. Marx’s critique of alienation of 1844 regards the “rational” reorganization of the relationship between humans and nature as essential, and thus he envisions the idea of communism as the accomplished “humanism = naturalism.” This is a beginning, even if it is only a beginning, of Marx’s economic and ecological critique of capitalism.

THE CONTINUITY OF A THEORY

Marx did not significantly alter his original, fundamental insight of 1844, in terms of the unity of humans and nature, until Capital. In a consistent manner, he criticized in his Poverty of Philosophy of 1847 the modern commodification and huckstering of the land as separation of humans from nature: “Rent, instead of binding man to nature, has merely bound the exploitation of the land to competition.”⁵¹

Another more notable paragraph is in The Original Text [Urtext] of a Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy of 1858, where Marx, employing the same terminology, refers to the dissolution of the unity between humans and nature as the essential condition of modern society:

The peasant no longer confronts the landowner as a peasant with his rural product and his rural labor, but as the money owner.… On the other hand, the landowner no longer regards him as an uncouth individual producing means of subsistence in peculiar living conditions, but as one whose product—exchange value become independent, the universal equivalent, money—is no different from anyone else’s product. Thus, the intimate appearance [der gemühtliche Schein] that covered up the transaction in its previous form is dispelled.⁵²

In this passage, the theoretical continuity since 1844 is obvious, since Marx again deals with the dissolution of feudal personal dominion into the relationship among proprietors of commodity and money in the market and thematizes this change as the disappearance of the “intimate appearance that covered up” the production process. With similar words, he describes the transformation of the relation of domination into a pure economic form as a result of “the shedding of relationships of personal dependence, as a victory of bourgeois society.”⁵³ The social relationships become reified as they are mediated through money and commodity, though unlike precapitalist society, individuals appear capable of behaving equally and independently of one another. The market transactions seem to take place between “free” and “equal” commodity owners, but it turns out in reality to be the expanding process of appropriating other people’s wealth and concentrating social wealth to few people’s hands. Thus, even the “intimate appearance” disappears in capitalist society.

Furthermore, in the 1860s, Marx repeatedly points to the separation of the producers from the land as a historical and logical presupposition for the emergence of the capitalist mode of production:

The formation of a class of wage laborers, whether in manufacture or in agriculture itself—at first all manufacturers appear only as stipendiés, wage laborers of the cultivating proprietor—requires the separation of the conditions of labor from labor capacity, and the basis for this separation is that the land itself becomes the private property of one part of society, so that the other part is cut off from this objective condition for valorization of its labor.⁵⁴

In a similar manner, Marx argues in Capital:

In the section on primitive accumulation we saw how this mode of production presupposes on the one hand that the direct producers are freed from the position of mere appendages of the soil (in the form of bondsmen, serfs, slaves, etc.) and on the other hand the expropriation of the mass of the people from the land. To that extent, the monopoly of landed property is a historical precondition for the capitalist mode of production and remains its permanent foundation, as with all previous modes of production based on the exploitation of the masses in one form or the other. But the form of landed property which greets the capitalist mode of production at the start does not correspond to this mode. The form that does correspond to it is only created by the capitalist mode of production itself, through the subjection of agriculture to capital; and in this way feudal landed property, clan property, or small peasant property is transformed into the economic form corresponding to this mode of production, however diverse the legal forms of this may be. It is one of the great results of the capitalist mode of production that it transforms agriculture from a merely empirical set of procedures, mechanically handed down and practiced by the most undeveloped part of society, into a conscious scientific application of agronomy, insofar as this is at all possible within the conditions of private property; that on the one hand it completely detaches landed property from relations of lordship and servitude, while on the other hand it completely separates the land as a condition of labor from landed property and the landowners, for whom, moreover, this land represents nothing but a certain money tax that his monopoly permits him to extract from the industrial capitalist, the farmer.… Landed property thus receives its purely economic form by the stripping away of all its former political and social embellishments and admixtures.⁵⁵

As clearly indicated in this paragraph, Marx repeatedly explains the specificity of the capitalist mode of production, with the monopoly of landed property as its “historical condition.” Even if the monopoly of landed property is also a permanent condition in “all previous modes of production based on the exploitation of the masses in one form or the other,” its capitalist form is distinct because it takes a “purely economic form,” while the precapitalist exploitation is carried out through the political “relations of lordship and servitude.” According to Marx, this qualitative transformation of the relationship between humans and the earth results from “the subjection of agriculture to capital.” In this sense, Marx still holds his insight of 1844 that the absolute separation of humans from their objective conditions of production is the essential presupposition for the emergence of the relation of capital and wage labor, whereas in precapitalist societies, despite the monopoly of landed property as a condition of exploitation of bondsmen, serfs, and slaves, the access to the means of production remained guaranteed to these direct producers. Through the transformation of the form of landed property in the process of “original accumulation,” a mass of peasants was driven out and lost their independent relationship to the land as the means of production and subsistence, so that they were forced to sell their own labor force as a commodity on the market. The emergence of the “purely economic form” of landed property—“huckstering of the land,” which caused the modern alienation from nature—is the fundament of the capitalist mode of appropriation.

It is particularly in this sense that Marx’s Grundrisse discusses the problem of “alienation” in terms of the dissociation of producers from the objective condition of production. In the precapitalist relations of the “working subject” to nature, the “first objective condition of his labor appear[s] as nature, earth, as his inorganic body; he himself is not only the organic body, but also the subject of this inorganic nature.”⁵⁶ Marx calls this unity within the production process where both the subjective and objective sides of production are tightly combined “the natural unity of labor with its material presuppositions.”⁵⁷ Alienation and impoverishment in the bourgeois society are, on the contrary, the products of this “absolute divorce, separation of property, i.e. of the objective conditions of labor from living labor capacity.” Marx continues to argue that it is

absolute separation between property and labor, between living labor capacity and the conditions of its realization, between objectified and living labor, between value and value-creating activity—hence also the alien quality of the content of labor for the worker himself—this divorce now likewise appears as a product of labor itself, as objectification of its own moments.… The worker emerges not only not richer, but emerges rather poorer from the process than he entered. For not only has he produced the conditions of necessary labor as conditions belonging to capital; but also the value-creating possibility, the valorization which lies as a possibility within him, now likewise exists as surplus value, surplus product, in a word as capital, as master over living labor capacity, as value endowed with its own might and will, confronting him in his abstract, objectless, purely subjective poverty.⁵⁸

Even though Marx does not use the term “alienation” in this passage, the theoretical continuity since 1844 is quite obvious. The “objectless” and “purely subjective” condition of modern workers cannot allow them to realize their own labor capacity because they do not possess the necessary objective conditions for it. The realization of labor capacity is only possible when they as voluntary and independent owners of a commodity—that is, labor power—sell it on the market only to be subjugated to the alien dominance of capital. Without control over the material foundation of his or her own life, the “free” worker always remains a “virtual pauper.”⁵⁹ From the alien character of labor activity, which is inevitably caused by the estrangement of the worker’s subjective capacity in the production process organized by capital, the alien character of the objective world is also produced because labor can only produce products of its own realization as an alien reality. The producers cannot appropriate the product of labor; under a reified dominion, their own activity only realizes itself as a subjugating alien power. This process of de-realization and impoverishment, together with accumulation of capital, produces a constantly growing alien world beyond human control.

In the Grundrisse, Marx again contrasts this modern situation with pre-bourgeois society: “In the relations of slavery and serfdom this separation does not take place,” because labor in the form of the slave or that of the serf “is classified as an inorganic condition of production along with other natural beings such as cattle, as an accessory of the earth.”⁶⁰ Furthermore, Marx argues that in the “pre-bourgeois relation of the individual to the objective conditions of labor” an individual can appear as a “working subject.”⁶¹ It is precisely in this form of the subjectivity of the pre-bourgeois working subject that Fukutomi found the potentiality for the free development of individuality of laboring serfs as direct producers.⁶² Even if the serfs remained subjugated to personal dominance and their existence was reduced to the objective condition of production itself, they nonetheless maintained a certain independence and freedom of activity in the production process, thanks to the unity with the earth, and accordingly, they could appropriate the fruits of labor for themselves in the form of small-scale operations. Here existed the material basis for the “free development of individuality” as it flourished during the transition to capitalist landed property when producers actually got emancipated from personal dominion in the aftermath of the collapse of feudalism.

Marx calls this period after the downfall of the feudal system “a golden age for labor in the process of becoming emancipated,” as exemplified by the yeomanry in England in the fourteenth and first half of the fifteenth century.⁶³ Marx also writes about it in Capital:

The private property of the worker in his means of production is the foundation of small-scale industry, and small-scale industry is a necessary condition for the development of social production and of the free individuality of the worker himself.… But it [this mode of production] flourishes, unleashes the whole of its energy, attains its adequate classical form, only where the worker is the free proprietor of the conditions of his labor, and sets them in motion himself: where the peasant owns the land he cultivates, or the artisan owns the tool with which he is an accomplished performer.⁶⁴

The development of “the free individuality of the worker” is an expression that Marx usually uses in the context of a future society established among the associated producers, but as an exception he uses it to characterize precapitalist small-scale family agriculture, where the worker can behave as “the free proprietor of the conditions of his labor,” even if it is still a limited premodern form. This freedom of labor became possible because, after the dissolution of the relationship of personal dependence, the workers can freely relate to the earth as their own means of production. Consequently, the relation of humans to nature flourished as a free one in which the direct producer could now enjoy the “intimate” aspect of the earlier production, but without a landlord. Thus, in opposition to a popular critique that Marx’s optimistic vision of technological development undervalues small-scale family agriculture, Marx explains why this type of production could more than adequately sustain farm families, even if after the introduction of the capitalist mode of production into English agriculture it had to decline because it is “unfitted to develop labor as social labor and the productive power of social labor. Hence the necessity for the separation, for the rupture, for the antithesis of labor and property.”⁶⁵

Insofar as the objective condition of one’s physical existence is still present in feudal society—thanks to the intimate connection with the land—the universal commodification of laboring capacity cannot penetrate the entire society. Therefore, the reified dominion of capital first needs to secure the dissociation of the original unity between humans and the earth and replace it with a relationship of capital and wage labor. As a result of the separation of land, means of production, and subsistence manifested in the history of enclosure, the producers of small-scale operations in the countryside are now sent to the large cities as “doubly free” proletariats, not just freed from personal dominance but also freed from the conditions of production and reproduction. Without objective capacity for production, modern “free and rightless (vögelfrei)” workers are compelled to estrange their own living labor capacity and to work under the alien commands of capital for the sake of attaining a minimal amount of means of subsistence.⁶⁶ Marx calls this deprivation of all objective possibility of production the “absolute poverty” of modern workers:

Labor separated from all means and objects of labor, from its entire objectivity. This living labor, existing as an abstraction from these moments of its actual reality (also, not-value); this complete denudation, purely subjective existence of labor, stripped of all objectivity. Labor as absolute poverty: poverty not as shortage, but as total exclusion of objective wealth.⁶⁷

No matter how much salary workers attain, it does not allow them to escape this absolute poverty. The total exclusion of objective wealth remains the essential characterization of the worker’s situation under the capitalist mode of production, and alienation of nature is the fundamental cause.

Throughout the process of the development of his critique of political economy, Marx never gave up his 1844 insight in terms of the original unity of humans and nature. From the beginning, Marx comprehended the historical negation of a certain relationship between humans and nature as a central characteristic of the capitalist mode of production, and its negation as a positive rehabilitation of the original unity on a higher level—“the negation of the negation”—is, as before, the essential task of the future society.⁶⁸ Thus Marx wrote: “The original unity can be reestablished only on the material foundation which capital creates and by means of the revolutions which, in the process of this creation, the working class and the whole society undergo.”⁶⁹ In accordance with the cause of estrangement, Marx proposed the same necessity for the conscious rehabilitation of the original unity between humans and nature through “association”: “The alien property of the capitalist in this labor can only be abolished by converting his property into the property of the non-individual in its independent singularity, hence of the associated, social individual.”⁷⁰

In contrast to Althusser’s interpretation that simply dismisses Marx’s texts before 1845, one finds important insights in his Paris Notebooks of 1844 that fundamentally characterize Marx’s lifelong project of critique of political economy. His formulation is, however, not at all the final one, but a personal sketch without an intent to publish it. Thus the humanist interpretation of The Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts turns out to be one-sided, because though Marx preserved a certain economic insight attained in 1844, he also quickly gave up his philosophical conception of alienation, which he borrowed from Feuerbach and Moses Hess. The fact that Marx abandoned Feuerbach’s anthropological philosophy was of significance with regard to his ecology as well because his new critique of philosophy in Theses on Feuerbach and The German Ideology prepared the theoretical basis for a more adequate understanding of the historical modifications of the relationship between humanity and nature. Why did Marx have to abandon his earlier Feuerbachian schema, while he kept his economic insight? How did Marx reconceptualize the relationship between humans and nature?

LEAVING PHILOSOPHY

The German Ideology, together with Theses on Feuerbach, documents the moment when Marx decisively distanced himself from philosophy and began to move forward to the non-philosophic conception of the unity between humanity and nature. His evaluation of Feuerbach rapidly changed during this time, and he came to realize that Feuerbach’s avoidance of any practical engagement with the socialist movement was an inevitable consequence of his abstract philosophy, which aimed at educating the masses with the truth about species-being. As a result, Marx rejected not only Hegel’s idealism but also Feuerbach’s materialism, which claimed to have revealed the truth hidden under the estranged mystification by means of “sensibility.” In this divergence from Feuerbach’s philosophy, one can find a crucial development for Marx’s entire theory. Although his critique of bourgeois society in 1844 still opposed Feuerbachian concepts such as “love,” “sensibility,” “species-being,” etc., to an estranged reality, in order to describe historical progress as a process of reappropriating the human essence, the primacy of praxis in The German Ideology aims at the analysis of concrete social relations themselves, relations that structure the inverted consciousness and behaviors of individuals trapped within them.

One should be careful, however, not to confuse Marx’s rejection of philosophical questioning with an “epistemological break” from an old paradigm. As shown above, the central economic insight of 1844 remains without doubt in the late Marx as well. It is necessary to ask different questions: Why did Marx, in spite of this theoretical continuity, change his evaluation of Feuerbach’s materialism? How did he reconceptualize his earlier vision of “humanism = naturalism” as a truly materialist analysis of the relationship between humans and nature in accordance with this distancing from Feuerbach? In this context, the formation of Marx’s “materialist method” is of importance.⁷¹

The main point of Marx’s critique of Feuerbach and other Young Hegelians in The German Ideology is that they simply opposed a hidden “essence” to the estranged “appearance,” without examining the specific social relations that bestow an objective reality to this appearance. For example, Feuerbach argues that religious alienation in front of God is an “illusion” that humans themselves produce in their heads due to the misrecognition of their own species-being, thereby allowing an inverted essence to dominate their consciousness and activity. Marx in the Paris Notebooks was highly supportive of this Young Hegelian discourse because he believed that through the application of Feuerbach’s schema to labor alienation in bourgeois society it would be possible to envision the social abolition of private property as a way to reappropriate and realize human species-being.⁷² However, Marx now argues that Feuerbach’s critique is “purely scholastic” and incapable of leading to radical social change.⁷³ This is because Feuerbach’s method only allows for the necessity of an epistemological change concerning the religious inversion “through the ‘spectacles’ of the philosopher” without an actual practical engagement.⁷⁴ In other words, Marx criticizes Feuerbach for naïvely (and wrongly) believing that he could simply educate the masses with his philosophy that the essence of God is really that of humans themselves without touching upon the alienated social relations at the root of the problem.

The difference between the standpoints of Marx and Feuerbach after 1845 becomes clearer if one follows Marx’s various usages of “praxis” during this period. It is true that Marx from the very beginning consistently demanded the necessity of transcending philosophical dualism in actuality, in contrast to Hegel’s idealist philosophy, which tries to overcome the contradiction only on a theoretical level.

In September 1843, Marx had already formulated, in a letter to Arnold Ruge, his demand for “ruthless criticism of all that exists” with the following words:

The reform of consciousness consists only in making the world aware of its own consciousness, in awakening it out of its dream about itself, in explaining to it the meaning of its own actions. Our whole object can only be—as is also the case in Feuerbach’s criticism of religion—to give religious and philosophical questions the form corresponding to man who has become conscious of himself.⁷⁵

Here it is obvious that Marx, following Feuerbach’s critique of religion, primarily aimed at the “reform of consciousness.” The epistemological emancipation from illusion through ruthless criticism is, according to Marx, the most important task, from which radical praxis should emerge. This philosophical approach is also reflected in his political solution. In his Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, written between March and August 1843, Marx dealt with the contradiction of the modern world as a dualistic opposition between the state and civil society. In order to overcome this “alienation,” Marx opposed to alienated reality the philosophical idea of “democracy,” in which every private individual should be able to participate in the public sphere, overcoming the dualist separation between the two spheres.⁷⁶

In On the Jewish Question, Marx rapidly came to criticize this type of democratic idea after he recognized the limitation of “political emancipation.” He realized that political emancipation through democracy simply contributes to the completion of the modern world, and not its transcendence. Marx argued that democracy alone cannot bring about a radical political action as long as the existence of bourgeois society is taken for granted. The political sphere remains depoliticized in order to protect the interests of “an egoistic, independent individual.”⁷⁷ In this vein, Marx admitted that the abstract idea of “democracy” only reflects the abstract idea of the political state in modern society. Abandoning his naïve view of democracy, he began to problematize bourgeois society itself as the actual contradiction of the modern world. Here Marx was already carrying out a partial overcoming of Feuerbach’s schema, recognizing that the actual antagonistic dualism between the state and bourgeois society cannot be brought into a unity solely through a philosophic idea of democracy.

Despite this theoretical development, Marx at the same time still cherished another aspect of Feuerbach’s philosophy. Against the egoism of bourgeois society, with its endless desire to attain money, Marx opposed the concrete “sensibility” of human beings as the true principle for human emancipation. Thus, Marx argued in Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, the Introduction of which was published in the journal Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher, that a radical transformation of bourgeois society is not possible through a political ideal but only through a “passive element” (sensibility), that is, as a result of alienated workers grasping their “universal suffering,” which can then become the basis for acting upon it.⁷⁸ This is why Marx emphasized the power of praxis, based on the workers’ concrete sensible desires, as the sole means of solution for the modern contradiction: “As the resolute opponent of the previous form of German political consciousness, the criticism of speculative philosophy of law turns, not towards itself, but towards problems which can only be solved by one means—practice.”⁷⁹ One finds a certain ambivalence in Marx’s argument. On the one hand he recognized the limitation of a simple opposition of an abstract philosophical idea against the alienated objective reality and emphasizes the primacy of practice more strongly than Feuerbach. On the other hand Marx still followed him, appreciating his concept of “sensibility” precisely as the concrete materialist foundation of revolutionary practice.

The following sentence from the Paris Notebooks represents the same ambiguity. At first glance, Marx’s claim may give an impression that he had already established the primacy of practice against Feuerbach’s philosophical position:

We see how the resolution of the theoretical antitheses is only possible in a practical way, by virtue of the practical energy of man. Their resolution is therefore by no means merely a problem of understanding, but a real problem of life, which philosophy could not solve precisely because it conceived this problem as merely a theoretical one.⁸⁰

It is true that Marx without doubt acknowledged the necessity of practice for the transcendence of “theoretical antitheses” that reflect the contradictory reality, criticizing that idealist philosophy for failing to make any practical engagement with the concrete objective contradiction. However, his claim still accepted Feuerbach’s schema when he also demanded overcoming the antitheses, such as those between “subjectivity and objectivity, spirituality and materiality, activity and suffering,” through Feuerbachian “sensuous perception.”⁸¹ Since Marx’s critique was directed only against the abstract nature of idealist philosophy from his own standpoint of sensuous perception, he, together with Feuerbach, recommended overcoming these philosophical antitheses with concrete sensuous praxis and, more precisely, “labor” that can actualize the free and universal subjectivity of human beings in the concrete objective world. Thus what Marx problematized in the notebooks of 1844 is essentially dependent upon the return to concrete “sensuous perception” in labor being the true principle of radical materialism, and in this vein Marx demanded that human beings should first correctly recognize their own species-being and then get engaged in revolutionary praxis against alienated reality under capitalism.

It is not hard to understand why Marx highly valued Feuerbach’s concept of species-being. He was convinced that in contrast to Hegel’s “spirit” and Bruno Bauer’s “self-consciousness,” the human subject conceptualized by Feuerbach could function as a real and true basis for the progress of historical movement and show the way to transcend alienation. His critique of philosophy in 1844 principally aims at correcting earlier misrecognitions of the true philosophical principle in a similar way that Feuerbach opposed his species-being to Hegel’s spirit as the true subject of history. In this sense, Marx’s demand for praxis in 1844 still clearly moved within the paradigm of the Young Hegelian philosophy.

On the contrary, in The German Ideology Marx rejects any antitheses that take place within philosophy:

Since, according to their fantasy, the relations of men, all their doings, their fetters and their limitations are products of their consciousness, the Young Hegelians logically put to men the moral postulate of exchanging their present consciousness for human, critical or egoistic consciousness, and thus of removing their limitations. This demand to change consciousness amounts to a demand to interpret the existing world in a different way, i.e., to recognize it by means of a different interpretation.… The only results which this philosophic criticism was able to achieve were a few (and at that one-sided) elucidations of Christianity from the point of view of religious history.⁸²

As before, Marx certainly emphasizes the importance of praxis in order to radically transform existing social contradictions. However, it is evident that Marx also points out that “a demand to change consciousness” through elucidations and education only ends up producing the “moral postulates” of what ought to be, without actually changing the real problems. He claims that the earlier debates among the Young Hegelians are barren because they are simply trying to discover a “true” philosophical principle for imagining the historical subject, whether “self-consciousness,” “species-being,” or “the ego.”⁸³ Marx thus problematizes and rejects the entire debate within the Young Hegelians after realizing that the demand for another interpretation of the world alone is not at all capable of a radical social transformation.

According to Marx, Feuerbach’s critique of religion may be able to educate the masses about God being a mere illusion whose predicates should be actually prescribed to humans as species-beings. The problem is that Feuerbach’s critique ends there without posing a more substantial question: “How did it come about that people ‘got’ these illusions ‘into their heads’?”⁸⁴ In other words, God is not a mere illusion that would disappear after its falseness was recognized. Rather, the illusion is an objective appearance produced by social relations. Thus Marx argues against Feuerbach’s optimism that it is most essential to comprehend “the actual material premises as such.” Without a radical transformation of social relations, the religious “illusion” will be repeatedly reproduced as an objective force through social practice. It is not possible to transcend the alienated reality by simply pointing out the alienated inversion of the objective world from a standpoint of philosophy. The real problem is not an epistemic misrecognition of a truth of the world but rather its inversion, which is based on objective social relations and social practice.⁸⁵ Since individuals are always already conditioned by social relations independently of their will, Feuerbach’s demand to “change consciousness” alone cannot bring about any radical praxis, no matter how correct his critique of religion may be. In this sense, Feuerbach’s concept of “sensuous perception” still remains for Marx within an abstract philosophical discussion, because the way Feuerbach poses questions is a mere epistemic one, trying to discover another “true” foundation that discloses the human “essence” hidden under the alienated reality.

Despite Feuerbach’s assumption, however, there is no privileged standpoint for the philosopher from which the direct access to the “essence” can be guaranteed, as Marx writes in the third thesis:

The materialist doctrine concerning the changing of circumstances and upbringing forgets that circumstances are changed by men and that the educator must himself be educated. This doctrine must, therefore, divide society into two parts, one of which is superior to society.⁸⁶

Marx problematizes the presupposition of “the educator”—obviously he means Feuerbach—because there is no such thing as pure sensuous perception that guarantees access to essence independently of the existing objective social relations. The intuition of philosophy is not outside the world but always already within the inverted world and thus conditioned by it. Therefore Feuerbach’s philosophic idea of “sensuous perception” and “love” remains inevitably abstract, insofar as he does not seriously take social conditions within the inverted world into account. If the philosopher is satisfied with a discovery of “essence,” philosophy only hinders radical praxis by giving another expression to the alienated reality and leaving it unchanged. What it really needs, so says Marx, is a critical investigation of the objective social relations in order to comprehend the possibility of resistance from the really existing contradictions of society itself.

On the contrary, Feuerbach’s idea amounts to a set of abstract theses without any specific social analysis. He does not take the objective force of the inverted world seriously enough, as if the alienated reality could be simply transformed through an alternative philosophical intuition. As a consequence, Feuerbach’s philosophy ironically preserves the current estranged situation of the world, avoiding a serious theoretical confrontation with reality. For Marx, it is much more important to practically confront the existing order of things and radically change it. He emphasizes the significance of a social and historical investigation with regard to how and why the objectively inverted world beyond human control emerges out of social practice, so that the material conditions for its transcendence can be understood.

Because Marx distanced himself from philosophy, he came to acknowledge the limitations of his own earlier schema of 1844. Even though Marx was aware that humans always relate to nature through the mediation of labor and that modern alienation deforms this relationship, his entire project of communism in 1844 was dependent upon a philosophically conceptualized idea of “humanism = naturalism.” Since his critique of alienation still roughly identified “capitalism” with “the system of private property,” Marx inevitably fell into a deterministic understanding of history, one that failed to carefully analyze the historical specificity of the capitalist mode of production.

This is a reason why Marx’s project of 1844 still inevitably possessed a “Romantic” tone; it could only oppose to the alienated reality the philosophical idea of species-being that is supposed to realize the unmediated absolute unity of humans and nature.⁸⁷ The more Marx depended on Feuerbach’s concept of “species-being” to ground his claim for the realization of “humanism = naturalism,” the more abstract his analysis of modern capitalism became. It is because of this that Marx initially envisioned the content of species-being ontologically, with abstract and ahistorical predicates such as “passion,” “sensuality,” and “universality.”⁸⁸ Consequently, Marx’s own critique of political economy, which was supposed to reveal the specificity of modern society, became invisible, buried under the transhistorical discourse of the Young Hegelian philosophy.

Meanwhile, Marx intensively studied the problem of commodity and money in his Notes on James Mill in his Paris Notebooks, so that instead of falling into a rough schema of human history he actually continued his investigation into the specificity of the capitalist system. In The German Ideology, Marx finally came to be fully conscious of the danger immanent in Feuerbach’s abstractness: “Feuerbach’s whole deduction with regard to the relation of men to one another is only aimed at proving that men need and always have needed each other.”⁸⁹ An actual examination of the specific historicity of society is missing in Feuerbach’s philosophy. According to Marx, who had now distanced himself from his earlier project, there is no “essence” in Feuerbach’s sense such as “actual” nature and “actual” human beings, because both nature and humans are already thoroughly conditioned and constituted by social relations. The critical comprehension of the historically specific process of mediation now became the kernel of his scientific analysis:

Because he still remains in the realm of theory and conceives of men not in their given social connection, not under their existing conditions of life, which have made them what they are, he never arrives at the actually existing, active men, but stops at the abstraction “man,” and gets no further than recognizing “the actual, individual, corporeal man” emotionally, i.e., he knows no other “human relations” “of man to man” than love and friendship, and even then idealized. He gives no criticism of the present conditions of life. Thus he never manages to conceive the sensuous world as the total living sensuous activity of the individuals composing it; therefore … he is compelled to take refuge in the “higher perception” and in the ideal “compensation in the species,” and thus to relapse into idealism at the very point where the communist materialist sees the necessity, and at the same time the condition, of a transformation both of industry and of the social structure.⁹⁰

Instead of praising the primacy of practice in Feuerbach’s philosophy, Marx harshly criticizes it due to the separation between theory and practice. For Feuerbach, “man” as such is nothing but an abstract entity to which only ahistorical universal properties such as “human relations,” “love,” and “friendship” can be attributed. Feuerbach neglects real social relations as presupposition for actual individual activity and consciousness, so that he cannot explain why and how the inversion of the objective world in the modern society was produced and is constantly reproduced. “Man” as such, says Marx, exists only in “thinking which is isolated from practice.”⁹¹

The same theoretical limitation of Feuerbach’s philosophy manifests itself in his treatment of “nature.” Marx criticizes “nature as such,” which Feuerbach is seeking, because this does not exist anywhere. Nature as such, fully separated from humans, is a pure fantastic construction in thinking, which “today no longer exists anywhere (except perhaps on a few Australian coral islands of recent origin) and which, therefore, does not exist for Feuerbach either.”⁹² When he talks about nature, Feuerbach is always compelled to abstract it from existing social relations, fleeing into the world of “eternity” with his philosophical intuition. As a consequence, he overlooks the historical process of the formation of nature through the human activity of production.

It is true that Marx in 1844 recognized the necessity to treat nature and humans in their interrelationship: “But nature too, taken abstractly, for itself—nature fixed in isolation from man—is nothing for man.”⁹³ However, his remark was only an abstract ontological statement according to which history needs to be understood as a labor-mediated process of the humanization of nature and the naturalization of human beings. In contrast to this early formulation, Marx in The German Ideology emphasizes the historical formation of what counts as “nature.” Nature is not just there, but is constantly transformed through social production, in which both humans and nature work upon and constitute each other. Of course, the statement that humans and nature do not exist in reality without this reciprocal relation still sounds abstract and banal. To avoid this abstractness, it is essential for Marx’s “materialist method” to analyze the process of social and natural formation in capitalism, paying particular attention to its specific historical interaction between humans and nature, mediated by labor. Marx clearly recognized this point in The German Ideology and later analyzed this historical reciprocal process much more carefully with the concept of “metabolism” (Stoffwechsel), as will be shown in the following chapters.

In The German Ideology, Marx does not yet discuss the reciprocal constitution of humans and nature in detail. But in contrast to Feuerbach, he comprehends the antagonistic relationship between humans and nature as a specific modern product that resulted from capitalist industrialization. Furthermore, Marx intentionally formulates this historical development as a critique against Feuerbach:

The “essence” of the fish is its “being,” water—to go no further than this one proposition. The “essence” of the freshwater fish is the water of a river. But the latter ceases to be the “essence” of the fish and is no longer a suitable medium of existence as soon as the river is made to serve industry, as soon as it is polluted by dyes and other waste products and navigated by steamboats, or as soon as its water is diverted into canals where simple drainage can deprive the fish of its medium of existence.⁹⁴

Marx criticizes Feuerbach’s remarks in the Principles of the Philosophy of the Future: “That which is my essence is my being.” The being of the fish is its being in water, and from this being you cannot separate its essence. Language already identifies being and essence. Only in human life does it happen, but even here, only in abnormal and unfortunate cases, that being is separated from essence.”⁹⁵ Marx rejects Feuerbach’s Romantic tone, which only asks for the return to the essence as a countermeasure against the loss of that very essence. If the “water” is always the “essence of the freshwater fish,” there would be no room for a critique of water pollution. By opposing the polluted water to the “natural” fresh water as the essence of the fish, Feuerbach can at best show that the current water condition is “abnormal.” But simply pointing to the abnormality, Feuerbach cannot sufficiently analyze and identify the social cause of water pollution and comprehend the conditions for the cleaning of water. What he shows is that when the “essence” (water) is lost, the “being” (fish) must disappear. This statement is correct but obviously banal. In other words, Feuerbach’s analysis says nothing about the distorted relationship between humans and nature in modern society and laments the situation as an “unavoidable misfortune, which must be borne quietly.”⁹⁶ Marx argues that this ironic affirmation of alienation is a necessary consequence of Feuerbach’s philosophy, which despite its self-claimed radicality avoids any practical engagement with the negative cosnequences of the modern system of production.

Against Feuerbach’s presupposition of an ahistorical nature, Marx argues that it is always necessary to deal with humans and nature in their concrete reciprocity. So he asks what kinds of social relations make nature undergo various modifications in an antagonistic and alienated manner, and he attempts to reconstruct the specific historical process of social production and reproduction. It is the task of his scientific investigation of history to reveal this point:

The first premise of all human history is, of course, the existence of living human individuals. Thus the first fact to be established is the physical organization of these individuals and their consequent relation to the rest of nature. Of course, we cannot here go either into the actual physical nature of man or into the natural conditions in which man finds himself—geological, oro-hydrographical, climatic and so on. All historical writing must set out from these natural bases and their modification in the course of history through the action of men.⁹⁷

Humans must produce in order to live. Labor as an act of this production is inevitably conditioned by various natural and material factors. Under these conditions, humans also change their environment. According to Marx, any scientific investigation must pay attention to this historical transformation mediated by labor. In other words, Marx’s approach to the problem of the alienation of humans and nature after leaving the Young Hegelian philosophy changed fundamentally. He no longer opposes the alien dominion of capital to the philosophical idea of “humanism = naturalism” but asks why and how an antagonistic separation between humans and nature emerges and deepens under the capitalist mode of production.

This materialist orientation formulated in The German Ideology was only the beginning of a new period of research that lasted for the rest of Marx’s life. Marx’s intensive research in both political economy and the natural sciences in the following years represents nothing but the further development of his project to examine the historically specific mediation under capitalism of the transhistorically necessary act of production. In Marx’s examination of the relationship between humans and nature, the physiological concept of “metabolism” acquires a central role.