Marx’s Ecological Notebooks

Abstract

The article investigates Marx's natural-scientific (ecological) manuscripts (1864- 1872), among which the most important are notebooks of 1868. These manuscripts are mainly excerpts from works of various authors, but they also contain Marx's own original ideas and allow us to see his interests before and after the publication of the first volume of Capital in 1867, and the directions he might have taken through his intensive research into disciplines such as biology, chemistry, geology, and mineralogy, much of which he was not able fully to integrate into Capital. The author of the article argues that the common view of Marx as a supporter of the ecological "Prometheanism" (an extreme commitment to industrialism, irrespective of natural limits) does not correspond to reality. The ecological notebooks show that Marx criticized the capitalist mode of production which inevitably leads to the disturbance of the metabolic interaction (German: stoffwechsel) between humanity and nature, when modern agriculture as a "robbery system" causes soil exhaustion, deforestation and therefore diminishes natural conditions of labor productivity. Marx considered metabolic disturbance to be one of the fundamental capitalism's contradictions, calling it the metabolic rift. He believed that its overcoming and restoring a harmonious metabolic interaction between human and nature would be, among other things, the most important step towards socialism and communism. The author of the article comes to the conclusion that Marx's ecological theory is not outdated at all (as well as his economic doctrine), it remains fully open to new possibilities for integrating natural scientific knowledge with the critique of contemporary capitalism.

Keywords

• metabolic interaction
• nature
• metabolic rift
• prometheanism
• robbery system
• deforestation
• law of replacement