The notebooks Marx's ecological

Abstract

Challenging the literature that suggests Karl Marx’s propositions were blind to “natural limits”, Kohei Saito’s article analyses the opposing evidence found in Marx’s natural-scientific notebooks, written in the last years of his life simultaneously to Capital. Based on these texts Saito shows Marx’s recognizably increasing concern with various ecological issues. Among them, this article focuses on two points: first, Marx’s continuing study of the theses on soil exhaustion advanced by Justus von Liebig; and second, the analysis of critical comments to these theses (particularly Carl Fraas’ alluvion theory and his defence that historical climate changes are linked to anthropogenic factors). Based on these findings, Saito argues that if Marx had completed his critique of political economy, he would probably have emphasized the “metabolic interaction between humanity and nature” as the fundamental contradiction of capitalism.