Marx and the history of nature

by Camille Chamois
, 5 June

According to Frédéric Monferrand, Marx considers capitalism as a vast effort to put nature to work. This includes human bodies, as well as non-human environments. Monferrand outlines a “historical naturalism,” demonstrating its political and ecological relevance.

Frédéric Monferrand’s book proposes a critical reinterpretation of Karl Marx’s Economic & Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844. By emphasizing the pathologies of work, such as reduced life expectancy and physical deformities, the description of the proletariat’s experiences allows one to better grasp the nature of modern institutions, particularly the role of the state, private property, the division of labor, and money. Thus understood, the “social” does not refer primarily to the employment of symbols, but to practices that engage the bodies of workers and transform their surrounding environments (hence the “ontological” significance of the book’s argument, which is laid out in the introduction, “Capitalism, Naturalism, Ontology,” p. 11-28).

For a critical phenomenology

In the book’s first part (“The Phenomenology of Proletarian Experience,” p. 29-131), Monferrand proposes that the 1844 Manuscripts be read as “a report on workers,” that is, as a description of the experience of workers in the mid-nineteenth-century. The critical interest of such an approach, for Marx, consisted in recognizing that the misery of the proletarian way of life was a consequence of capitalism’s development—and not an effect of their supposedly depraved morality or a leftover of the old regime that industrial progress would soon overcome. In this vein, Marx emphasizes the physical and psychological exertion that workers experience, as well as more complex phenomena, such as the disappearance of needs and desires that, because they could not be satisfied, were repressed. This was true not only for “social” desires, such as the desire to travel, but also for more primary desires, such as food’s reduction to mere nourishment. [1] Consequently, the proletarian experience cannot be reduced to lacking what one does not have the means to obtain. It also results in the disappearance of desire itself, in a “passivity that underpins all activity, and an experience of deprivation without which no capacity has any reason to activate itself” (p. 96). The interest of the book’s first part lies in its presentation of the ways in which capital structures the lived experience of social actors by distinguishing different forms of social alienation:

To be alienated is thus to be submitted to the blind mechanisms of accumulation. Neither workers nor capitalists have control over these mechanisms, as they constrain the former to present themselves as disciplined to avoid unemployment and the latter to remain competitive to avoid bankruptcy (p. 85).

The meticulousness of this description is what, according to Monferrand, justifies the term “phenomenology.’ In fact, his analysis corresponds to what has recently been called”critical phenomenology,“namely the description of experiences situated in the social field (such as race, class, or gender, for example) that make it possible to identify various oppressive mechanisms with a view to criticizing them. [2] In Marx’s text, the epistemic privilege of the proletariat has much to do with the condition of domination in which it finds itself. Domination renders workers particularly sensitive to the mechanisms of constraint inherent to the social field, simply because they need to know these constraints to fight them (p. 69). This is why Marx’s perspectivism is not a bland relativism, but one, rather, that inaugurates an epistemological tradition that focuses on situated viewpoints—situatedness being in no way opposed to a claim on truth (p. 62). [3].

Putting life to work

The lived experience of poverty thus constitutes an entry point into understanding the nature of the social. Consistent with a long tradition of philosophical readings of Marx, from Herbert Marcuse to Louis Althusser, the Economic & Philosophical Manuscripts are notable primarily for their claim about an anthropological specificity: humans distinguish themselves from other animals by their work, that is, by their capacity to create voluntarily a world of artifacts within which they develop. This interpretation considers work “unique to humans” and has consequently been deemed a “humanism” (which emphasizes the exceptionality of the human subject, defined as distinct from the rest of nature). In the book’s second part (“Ontology of Capitalism,” p. 133-227), Monferrand criticizes this interpretation. From the standpoint of lived experience, work is not primarily “unique to humans,” but an external constraint that is the root of our experience of alienation (p. 195). It is in this sense that the proletarian experience begins with a definition of capitalism as being “put to work”:

The critique of alienation formulated in the 1844 Manuscripts is not based on a philosophical anthropology with existentialist inflections. To the contrary, it results in a social ontology that is austerely naturalistic. It is not because Marx decided a priori that “man’s being” consists in work that Marx criticized capitalism’s institutions for their lack of justice and freedom. It is because he saw capitalism as a vast system for putting bodies and milieus to work that he ultimately saw it as a historically distinct—and distinctly alienating—phase in the socialization of human and non-human nature (p. 27).

The analysis of “putting bodies and milieus to work” opens the book’s framework to ecological considerations. Since the early 2000s, authors such as Paolo Virno, Michael Hardt, and Toni Negri have shown that capitalism operates less by hindering desires than by channeling, to its advantage, the vital tendencies that preexisted it. [4] Monferrand builds on this “vitalist” interpretation of “capitalism’s subsumption of life” (p. 220), but in a way that opens it to a decidedly non-anthropocentric perspective, by showing that capital also “alienates non-humans from their actions and agency” (p. 224). This does not only mean animals put to work for their motor power (like workhorses) or their productive capacities (like livestock). At a broader level, the trend is to put all living things (from vegetables to microbes by way of mushrooms) to work, through such processes as pollination or the storing of carbon in peatlands [5]

A company would simply cease to be competitive if it had to pay for all the “services” that a given ecosystem provides it for free or if it had to invest in an artificial infrastructure to replace it … It would appear that the free appropriation of non-human agency constitutes the necessary condition for the accumulation of profit through the exploitation of human activity (p. 225).

A history of environmental sensibilities?

In the third part of the book (“Historical naturalism,” p. 229-300), Monferrand describes the analysis of the “putting to work” of bodies and milieus as “historical naturalism.” The category of “naturalism” that he uses does not consist in identifying some part of the world that lies beyond culture nor to assert that the “natural” sciences can provide an exclusive explanation of the evolution of human society. His point, rather, is that each society establishes a particular relationship with nature, understood in the sense both of a nature “inside us” (bodies, needs, and human tendencies) and nature “outside us” (ecosystems). By emphasizing the “care-burdened, poverty-stricken man” who “has no sense for the finest play” and the “dealer in minerals” who “sees only the commercial value but not the beauty and the specific character of the mineral,“ [6] Marx shows that”what a body is capable of, what it is capable of doing and experiencing, depends on the organization of society at one stage of its development“(p. 91). Monferrand, in this way, emphasizes”sensitive“and even”sensory“experience, drawing on Marx’s assertion that our”sensory apparatus" evolves historically:

By maintaining that the five senses undergo a process of Bildung—that is, of cultivation or development—Marx sought to call attention to the following fact: if it is only natural for us to perceive the world through sight, hearing, and touch, what we perceive and the way that we perceive it nonetheless varies across time periods and societies (p. 271).

In this way, Marx belongs to the “(pre)history of sensibilities” [7] and even the history of “environmental sensibilities” if one recognizes that the senses in question are interfaces with the environment. [8] The interest of the concept of alienation in this context is that it can describe not only different forms of sensory organization, but forms of sensory organizations that are more or less “rich,” “developed,” or “refined” than others (p. 126, 272). In short, it allows one to articulate a descriptive or analytical approach to the history of sensory apparatuses and a normative or political approach to more or less desirable forms of sensory organization. Even so, it is reasonable to ask whether, beyond an “aesthetic education that recalls Schiller” (p. 125), the call for an “enrichment of the senses” (p. 126) and a “more differentiated world” has any real sociopolitical significance.

It has, of course, been maintained that modernity is characterized by a “crisis in sensibility” to nature (in the sense of an incapacity to perceive and identify the natural beings around us) and that an “enrichment” of our perceptions would be an efficient way of fighting a generalized environmental amnesia. [9] Yet if one takes to its logical conclusion the idea that the history of the senses depend on the history of social organization and that the social division of labor is related to a division of perceptive labor, there is no reason to maintain that an “enrichment” or “refinement” of sensibility is inherently desirable. [10]

For the wine and soy sauce industries to flourish, consumers had to be encouraged to learn how to identify soy sauce aged in cedar barrels and strongly tannic wine. [11] And the ability to distinguish gold flakes in black sand is necessary to becoming a gold panner and, by extension, to industrial gold mining: [12] “the full development of the sensibility” can thus be understood as a way of using every aspect of nature—that is, in a very utilitarian and extractivist sense.

Consequently, should one consider a refined sensibility as also alienated (though in a way that remains to be specified)? Or, rather, must one consider the alienation of the sensibility beyond the “impoverished”/“rich” dichotomy (but if so, using what criteria)? Or should one promote a sensibility that is voluntarily limited (in the sense of desired sobriety)? While the book mentions these problems, it does not really provide answers. [13] In his conclusion (“The Resurrection of Nature,” p. 302-314), Monferrand asks rather for greater awareness of the role played by insects, viruses, and bacteria in making the world inhabitable, while also calling for nature to be “returned to wilderness”—that is, that vast spaces be preserved where evolution can occur without human interference. The book thus links a meticulous interpretation of the early Marx to an effort to make him relevant to political ecology, without trying to turn Marx into an extraordinary thinker who managed to anticipate contemporary feminist and ecological issues, from which remain largely alien to his thought. In these ways, Monferrand enriches in a particularly clear and convincing manner the dialogue between eco-Marxism, critical phenomenology, and the history of environmental sensibilities by showing how alienation is a concept that is fundamental to contemporary thought.

Frédéric Monferrand, La nature du capital. Politique et ontologie chez le jeune Marx (The Nature of Capital: Politics and Ontology in the Young Marx), Paris, Éditions Amsterdam, 2024, 320 p., 22 €.

[1] “The Irishman no longer knows any need now but the need to eat, and indeed only the need to eat potatoes.” “If I have no money for travel, I have no need – that is, no real and realizable need – to travel.” Karl Marx, Economic & Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, Marxists Internet Archive, https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/download/pdf/Economic-Philosophic-Manuscripts-1844.pdf.

[2] See, for instance, this assertion from a recent book:”This conviction holds that phenomenology, as an intellectual tradition and a method, consists of important theoretical resources for helping us to understand and fight oppression in their ordinary manifestations, notably the gendered and racial oppressions that the contributors address in this volume." Marie Garrau and Mickaëlle Provost, eds., Expériences vécues du genre et de la race. Pour une phénoménologie critique, Paris, Éditions de la Sorbonne, 2022, p. 5.

[3] For a synthesis of these questions, see Camille Chamois and Didier Debaise, eds., Perspectivismes métaphysiques, Paris, Vrin, 2023.

[4] Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Multitude, Paris, La Découverte, 2004; Paolo Virno, Grammaire de la multitude. Pour une analyse des formes de vie contemporaines, Paris, L’Éclat, 2007.

[5] On this point, see, too Paul Guillibert, Exploiter les vivants. Une écologie politique du travail, Paris, Amsterdam, 2023.

[6] Marx, Economic & Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844.

[7] On this concept, see Hervé Mazurel, “De la psychologie des profondeurs à l’histoire des sensibilités,” Vingtième Siècle. Revue d’histoire, vol. 123, no. 3, 2014, p. 22-38. This text is cited on p. 272.

[8] On this category, see Camille Chamois, Quentin Deluermoz et Hervé Mazurel, “Sensibilités: entre histoire et anthropologie,” L’Homme. Revue française d’anthropologie, no. 247-248, Éditions de l’EHESS, 2023, p. 5-40.

[9] Baptiste Morizot, Manières d’être vivant, Arles, Actes Sud, 2020.

[10] On this idea, see Camille Chamois, “De la division du travail perceptif,” Ateliers d’anthropologie, vol. 52, 2022 (online: https://journals.openedition.org/ateliers/16742).

[11] On this example, see Alice Doublier, “Le goût de l’indifférence. La sauce soja artisanale face à la cuisine japonaise contemporaine,” Anthropology of Food, vol. 15, 2021. https://journals.openedition.org/aof/12812

[12] On this example, see Muriel Champy and Anna Dessertine, “’C’est la chaîne alimentaire, chacun prend pour lui.’ Économie quotidienne de l’extraction aurifère de petite échelle dans un village de Côte d’Ivoire,” Afrique contemporaine, vol. 277, no. 1, 2024, p. 79-101.

[13] For an explicit formulation of the problem: “The ’fighting naturalists’ who inventory the flora and fauna in the wooded countryside of Notre-Dame-des-Landes, which is threatened by major government projects, appropriate nature just as much as the engineers whom Vinci pays to build an airport. One could even say that they appropriate it more, since the countryside is less alien and more familiar to those who want to see its populations prosper than those who see it as just a deserted space to cover with concrete” (p. 305). It remains to be seen if the description of the experience of Vinci’s engineers as subjects who only see a “deserted space to cover with concrete” is consistent with the requirements of a critical phenomenology as defined in part one. For a discussion of the phenomena, see: Vincent Beaubois and François-Xavier Ferrari, “L’éco-design ou l’épreuve de l’invisible écologique,” Sciences du Design, vol. 11, no. 1, 2020, p. 51-59 ; Vincent Beaubois and Camille Chamois, “Pluraliser les régimes de signe pour rendre compte de l’usage,” MEI : Médiation et Information, vol. 40, 2017, p. 131-139.