Karl Marx’s Ecosocialism. Kohei Saito
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