Karl Marx’s Ecosocialism. Kohei Saito
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