The idea that there is an “ecological” turn in Marx between the Manifesto and Capital, via his engagement with Liebig’s work on soil degradation, rests on a complete neglect of his Aristotelian-Hegelian theory of nature from 1844. This is Marxology at its academicist worst. 1/
Saito’s contention that Marx’s theory of metabolism in Capital marks a “break” - an often abused interpretive technique in the literature - misses that in the 40s Marx had worked out the philosophical foundations for the later theory. 2/
Following Hegel, Marx in the Paris Manuscripts understands human reason as nature brought to self-consciousness - and thus as “identical” with nature from the get-go. It is for this reason that the degradation of nature matters - bc it is a degradation *of us*. 3/
Capital is responsible for turning “nature into an alien world antagonistically opposed to [the worker],” into an external object to be dominated, rather than cultivated and sustained as part and parcel of cultivating and sustaining *ourselves*. 4/
“Nature is the body of man,” Marx writes, “with which he must remain in continuous intercourse if is not to die.” It is through our estrangement from nature that our “metabolic” interchange is disrupted and our own “body” begins to decay. 5/
The idea that Marx only overcomes his aggressive “productivism” after reading about soil degradation in the early 60s - and that recent scholarly advances have made such an insight possible - follows from the ingrained anti-Hegelianism of Marxology. 6/
Marx did not begin to “develop a theory of metabolism” in the 1860s but 20 years earlier, through his intensive readings of Aristotle and the German Idealists, who had developed an extensive metabolic theory with which Marx would have been intimately familiar. 7/
Ignorance dressed up as scientific progress - this is the interpretive basis of the most prominent degrowth reading of Marx. But this isn’t only an issue about when Marx actually developed the theory; it concerns the nature of the theory itself. 8/
Saito’s reading remains fundamentally dualist: nature constitutes an external limit to human activity, a finite resource we have to treat with care. But Marx’s thought is different: we *are* nature and it is not an external limit but an *internal condition*. 9/
That is, the point is not to accommodate ourselves to an externally imposed constraint but to *realize ourselves* by recognizing the conditions for our own flourishing and by adapting them in a self-consistent, rational, and democratic manner. 10/10