The crisis of capitalism is not confined to the economic sector. The crisis of capitalism is also an ecological crisis, the effects of which we’re currently experiencing. Melting ice caps, rising sea levels, submerged coasts, temperature increases, and so on are all symptoms of this crisis.

We all know that human-made fossil fuel is a major contributing factor to this catastrophic reality. We also know that, at a more fundamental level, this crisis finds its origin in the accumulation of capital, in capitalism. The voracious appetite of capital to accumulate more of itself is a vicious cycle of violence that only continues to expand. By extracting raw resources, transforming them into commodities, and selling them for a profit in the world market, the planet and its life-sustaining ecosystems undergo tremendous destruction.

However, Marx’s critique of the political economy also tells us that capital is more than just a profit-driven accumulation of wealth. The accumulation of capital destroying flora and fauna is dead alienated labor. According to Marx, capital is dead alienated labor that accumulates itself through extracting energy from living labor. Dead alienated labor not only dominates over living labor but also dominates over Nature that sustains living labor.

I will be arguing that Marx’s theory of alienation tells us something important about the ecological crisis. We’ll be looking at Marx’s Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, specifically one of his manuscripts titled “Estranged Labor,” where he discusses alienated labor in depth. More specifically, the question for my talk is “how does alienation bear on the ecological crisis?” I’ll attempt to show that we can find a clue in Marx’s Estranged Labor and this clue offers tremendous insight to not only the crisis of capitalism but the ecological crisis.

In this Manuscript, Marx begins by examining estrangement (alienation) from our product and estrangement from our act of production. Before explaining estrangement from our product, Marx distinguishes between objectification and estrangement. Today, the term “objectification” has a negative connotation; for many, objectification means being perceived as an object without any agency or subjectivity. For Marx, however, the term has a different meaning. For Marx, deeply influenced by Hegel, objectification means the realization of labor by transforming our mental and physical energy into objects through our productive activity. In other words, we find fulfillment when we produce something that we enjoy. Estrangement from a product, however, is when our congealed labor (object) appears to us as an independent, alien, and hostile power that dominates over us.

Marx argues that under capitalism, workers experience objectification as estrangement. Instead of finding fulfillment and self-actualization in the fruits of our labor, the fruits of our labor become an independent, alien, and hostile power that dominates over us. For Marx, the more we produce objects, the less we are. As the world of commodities grows through our labor, the more impoverished the workers are.

Marx proceeds from estrangement from a product of our labor to estrangement from our own labor (or act of production) itself. Marx sees that since a product of our labor is the material summary of our activities, estrangement from a product stems from alienated labor itself. Marx describes alienated labor as labor that denies rather than affirms us, as mortifying our mental and physical energy as opposed to freely developing them, and extraneous to our essence as opposed to being part of us. What the mature Marx later articulates is that our labor, in its alien commodity-form, conforms to the law of value and thereby valorizes capital. Alienated labor valorizes capital, but it doesn’t realize our human potentiality; it does not see this potentiality as an end in itself.

So far, Marx described two aspects of alienation: alienated labor and alienation from a product of our labor. However, Marx argues that a third aspect of alienation can be deduced from these two aspects of alienation. Marx writes:

“We have still a third aspect of estranged labor to deduce from the two already considered. Man is a species-being, not only because in practice and in theory he adopts the species as his object, but also because he treats himself as the actual, living species; because he treats himself as a universal and therefore a free being.”

Here, the passage raises two questions. First, what is species-being? Second, why does Marx think that we can deduce alienated species-being (Gattungswesen) from two aspects of alienation? I’ll try to answer the first question. The term “species-being” is a translation from the German word “Gattungswesen.” The German word “Gattung” means “species” whereas the word “Wesen” means being or essence. In the Hegelian tradition, “Gattungswesen” is closely related to the idea that reason itself is an embodied living organism that is conscious of itself as a “subject-object.”^[1] For Hegel, followed by Marx in his concept of species-being, a “subject-object” is a living subject that is in part defined by not being an object which is other than itself. An object is the living subject’s “other” by virtue of not being the living subject or being other than a living subject. In this respect, an object is the negation of the living subject. The object is the dialectical opposite of the living subject yet the living subject overcomes this opposition or contradiction by integrating an object into its self-conception. But the living subject constantly exists in this contradiction because without its object it can’t exist as a living subject. In this sense, both subject and object exist in relation to each other as an organic unity of opposites. To put my point simply and differently, as a species-being we live on appropriating aspects of Nature into human objects yet we can’t exist without Nature.

One might argue that what I just said about species-being doesn’t differentiate human beings from animals. After all, animals and other living organisms too are living subjects that exist through their other by appropriating it as their own. A bird appropriates from a tree to build a nest for its offspring. Bees appropriate from flowers to produce honey. Marx argues that what differentiates us from animals is this: we produce freely by virtue of being able to produce universally. Here, Marx describes the similarity and difference between us and animals:

“The life of the species, both in man and in animals, consists physically in the fact that man (like the animal) lives on organic nature; and the more universal man (or the animal) is, the more universal is the sphere of inorganic nature on which he lives. Just as plants, animals, stones, air, light, etc., constitute theoretically a part of human consciousness, partly as objects of natural science, partly as objects of art – his spiritual inorganic nature, spiritual nourishment which he must first prepare to make palatable and digestible – so also in the realm of practice they constitute a part of human life and human activity. Physically man lives only on these products of nature, whether they appear in the form of food, heating, clothes, a dwelling, etc.”

What exactly is Marx saying here? Marx asserts that animals are limited to an aspect of Nature that they appropriate for themselves to survive and reproduce themselves. In contrast, the scope of what humans can appropriate from Nature as their object is virtually the entirety of Nature. Here, “appropriate” should be understood broadly as including both a theoretical/aesthetic activity and a practical activity. Theoretically/aesthetically, Nature can be an object of science, art, poetry, and other spiritual activities. Practically, through productive labor, we can turn parts of Nature into our clothes, shelter, food, instruments of production, and other artifacts. What makes humans free universal beings is that the entire sphere of Nature is available to our theoretical and practical activity through which we expand and enrich our self-conception as a species. Marx further elaborates on this point:

“It is just in his work upon the objective world, therefore, that man really proves himself to be a species-being. This production is his active species-life. Through this production, nature appears as his work and his reality. The object of labor is, therefore, the objectification of man’s species-life: for he duplicates himself not only, as in consciousness, intellectually, but also actively, in reality, and therefore he sees himself in a world that he has created.”

A critical insight of this passage is that when we work upon Nature through objectification, both theoretically and practically, nature appears as our work or our reality. To put it in Hegelian terms, we humanize Nature and thereby make it our home. It’s by humanizing nature that we self-actualize and understand ourselves through Nature. So far, the impression that some of us might have is that the young Marx is excessively Promethean, that he sees our relationship with Nature as that of conquest. However, there is a passage by Marx that contradicts this reading:

“The universality of man appears in practice precisely in the universality which makes all nature his inorganic body – both inasmuch as nature is (1) his direct means of life, and (2) the material, the object, and the instrument of his life activity. Nature is man’s inorganic body – nature, that is, insofar as it is not itself human body. Man lives on nature – means that nature is his body, with which he must remain in continuous interchange if he is not to die. That man’s physical and spiritual life is linked to nature means simply that nature is linked to itself, for man is a part of nature.”

What the passage seems to say is that precisely because we can work upon the entirety of Nature theoretically and practically, we depend on Nature in an analogous way that we depend on our body. Our body is not alien to us because it is integral to our very being. Similarly, Marx describes Nature as our “inorganic body” because it is integral to us as a species-being.

Furthermore, notice that Marx writes that we must remain in continuous interchange with Nature or else we will die. The young Marx doesn’t articulate the idea of labor as a metabolic process between us and Nature. The young Marx,  doesn’t explicitly articulate that we transform Nature into human use-values for our social reproduction and human development as the mature Marx does in Capital. Nonetheless, the idea of labor as a metabolic process does seem implicit in the word “interchange.”

At the end of the passage, Marx concludes that Nature is linked to itself because our physical and spiritual life is linked to nature; we are part of nature. The entire passage seems to suggest that the young Marx has an ecological conception of Gattungswesen. We depend on Nature as that which we work upon theoretically and practically to make it our home where we develop ourselves as human beings. At the same time, we can’t carelessly appropriate Nature without undermining the basis upon which we develop as human beings. Nature is meant to be appropriated or worked upon in such a way that is humanized into our home where we flourish. If we destroy or vandalize our home, we can’t flourish.

So far, I have answered the first question: What is species-being? The answer I gave was quite long, but necessary. This brings us back to the second question: why does Marx think that we can deduce species-being (Gattungswesen) from two aspects of alienation? I want to answer this question in a roundabout way with another question: why does Marx discuss alienation so much before discussing the nature of species-being? Why not explain species-being prior to explaining alienation? I think it’s because Marx, being a dialectician, thinks that we can only derive unalienated labor from alienated labor. Alienated labor carries within itself the potential to become unalienated labor (this is something that Peter Hudis discusses in his book Marx’s Concept of the Alternative to Capitalism).

This potential, latent within alienated labor, points beyond itself to unalienated labor. What is unalienated labor? Unalienated labor is our fully actualized species-being in which we are able to work upon Nature theoretically and practically to self-actualize ourselves, all the while maintaining a sustainable relationship with Nature.

Marx also describes our species-being as our free conscious life-activity that is contained within our productive life. We can bring out this free conscious life-activity through objectification, both theoretically and practically, under unalienated conditions. Our free conscious life-activity includes the production of use-values for our development, but it isn’t limited to that. Our free conscious life-activity is also a spiritual, theoretical, athletic, aesthetic, leisure-oriented, social, and overall creative activity, which takes place in what the mature Marx calls the realm of freedom. Marx argues that alienated labor ultimately is alienated species-being. Human labor’s potential is to become free conscious life-activity through Nature.

In conclusion, I have argued that Marx’s theory of alienation can tell us something very important about the ecological crisis. Marx’s theory of alienation ultimately points to what unalienated life looks like: it is our species-being or Gattungswesen. I argued that the concept of species-being (Gattungswesen) is essentially an ecological concept according to which humans and Nature exist in an organic unity of opposites. Labor as a metabolic process mediates the relationship between us and Nature. Humans can realize themselves through working upon Nature to make it their home, but it is precisely because of this relation that they depend on Nature to develop themselves.

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Based on a presentation to a panel discussion, “A World on the Precipice: Reflections on War, Race, Class, and Gender,” sponsored by the Chicago Institute for Philosophical Humanism and the International Marxist-Humanist Organization, July 18, 2024

^[1] See Karen Ng, “On subjects, objects, and grounds: Life as the Form of Judgment,” European Journal of Philosophy (2021): 1162-1175.