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The Emergence of Marxs Critique of Modern AgricultureEcological
Insights from His Excerpt Notebooks
K o h e i s a i t o
introduction
While he was preparing for his critique of political economy,
Marx produced an enormous quantity of excerpt notebooks. Sometimes
accompanied by his own comments, they largely consist of direct
quotes from various books, journals, and newspaper articles that
attracted his attention. Although they were neglected among Marxist
scholars for quite a long time without publication in any
languages,1 these notebooks, in addition to the manuscripts and
letters, constitute an invaluable original source for understanding
Marxs thinking pro-cess. In fact, as the new
Marx-Engels-Gesamtausgabe (MEGA2) has started to publish the
excerpt notebooks in its fourth section, their importance is slowly
becoming more discernible.2 Marxs notebooks record his ceaseless
efforts to grasp the totality of capitalism, and, since Capital
remains unfinished, they provide useful hints for speculating how
Marx would have completed his project of critique of political
economy.
As an attempt to comprehend the development of Marxs theory
through his notebooks, this paper analyzes his excerpts from books
by two agricultural chemists, Justus von Liebig and James F.W.
Johnston, in order to reveal a significant modification in regard
to Marxs attitude towards modern agricultural practice, which led
his to study the natural sciences even more intensively in his late
years.3 Marx eagerly read these agricultural chemists a couple of
times, once in the beginning of the 1850s during his first thorough
research on political economy, and again in the middle of the 1860s
when he was preparing the manuscripts of Capital.4 Examining Marxs
excerpts cautiously, one realizes that he first attained a truly
critical and eco-logical comprehension of modern agriculture, that
goes beyond the paradigm of the Ricardian theory of differential
rent, in the middle of
Kohei saito is a PhD candidate of philosophy at Humboldt
University, Berlin. He is also a member of the Japanese MEGA
editorial group and currently working on Volume IV/18.
25
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the 1860s. Although Marx was at first quite optimistic about the
posi-tive effects of modern agriculture based on the application of
natural sciences and technology, he later came to emphasize the
negative consequences of agriculture under capitalism precisely
because of such an application, illustrating how it inevitably
brings about dis-harmonies in the transhistorical metabolism
(Stoffwechsel) between human beings and nature.
marxs excerpts from liebigs Book on agricultural chemistry
In one section titled Modern Industry and Agriculture in
Capital, Marx famously writes:
Capitalist production collects the population together in great
centres, and causes the urban population to achieve an ever greater
preponder-ance. This has two results. On the one hand it
concentrates the historical motive-power of society; on the other
hand, it disturbs the metabolic interaction [Stoffwechsel] between
man and the soil, i.e., it prevents the return to the soil of its
constituent elements consumed by man in the form of food and
clothing; hence it hinders the operation of the eternal natural
conditions for the lasting fertility of the soil.5
Pointing out harmful consequences of capitalist agriculture
based on a division of town and country that quickly exhausts the
soil in the interest of maximizing profits, Marx warns that the
development of productive forces and technology under capitalist
relations of pro-duction does not automatically prepare the
conditions for human emancipation, but on the contrary causes a
deep alienation of human beings from their environment in the form
of a metabolic rifteco-logical disruption in their interrelations
with nature.6
The recent growing interest in this ecological aspect of Marxs
eco-nomic theorythanks to inspiring and convincing interpretations
by John Bellamy Fosters Marxs Ecology (2000) and Paul Burketts Marx
and Nature (1999)has directed attention to Marxs concept of
metabo-lism (Stoffwechsel) and to Liebigs use of the term.7 In
Capital, vol. 1, Marx refers in a footnote to the passage cited
above from the seventh edition of Liebigs Chemie in ihrer Anwendung
auf Agricultur und Physiologie (1862) (abbreviated henceforth as
Agricultural Chemistry), and espe-cially to its Introduction. He
praises Liebigs work for its immortal merits in revealing the
negative, i.e., destructive side of modern agri-culture from the
standpoint of natural science, adding that Liebigs treatment of the
history of agriculture, despite certain defects, con-tains flashes
of insight.8 In the first German edition, he even states
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that Liebigs analysis of the conditions of agricultural
productivity is more important than [that of] all the economists
put together.9
Apparently, therefore, Marxs critique of the metabolic rift in
capital-ism is especially indebted to this famous German chemist.
However, looking at the list of excerpted books in the fourth
section of the MEGA2, one notices that Marx had already read
Liebigs Agricultural Chemistry once in 1851. Nonetheless, a clear
reception of Liebigs agricultural chemis-try does not appear until
the first manuscript for the third volume of Capital. In other
words, Marx did not develop a critique of ecological dis-ruption
under capitalism when he read Liebigs book for the first time. What
is more, examining his excerpt notebooks, normally called London
Notebooks (Londoner Hefte), from 18491853, one learns that Marx
took notes impressed by Liebigs optimistic ideas about the
possibility of overcoming the diminishing agricultural productivity
through a scientific manage-ment of the soil based on a systematic
use of synthetic fertilizers.
It is certainly true that Liebig himself became more critical of
capi-talist agriculture as time went on, and thus his critique of
robbery culture in the seventh edition of Agricultural Chemistry
(1862), espe-cially in its Introduction, must have more decisively
contributed to developing Marxs critique of the metabolic rift than
its fourth edition (1842), which he had studied with eagerness in
1851.10 This is not to say that Marx failed to read anything
critical about capitalist agricul-ture before 1860. To the
contrary, he encountered critical books and articles in that
period, but, astonishingly enough, hardly paid attention at the
time. Furthermore, though he repeatedly referred to his own
notebooks in different economic manuscripts and in Capital itself,
Marx did not use the excerpts from Liebig in the London Notebooks
at all. This leads to the hypothesis that Marx later came to regard
his notebooks on agricultural chemistry in the London Notebooks as
unsatisfactory for his critical investigation of capitalism because
they only contained posi-tive prospects of its modern
development.
Despite the appearance in the last fifteen years or so of a
number of pathbreaking studies of Marxs ecological thought, such
studies were unable to throw sufficient light on the actual
evolutionary process in which Marxs critique of modern agriculture
emerged, during his decades-long attempt to complete Capital.11 His
notebooks on agricul-ture are thus indispensable, in that they
enable us to see precisely how he changed his attitude towards
modern agriculture, in the process of developing his materialist
conception of the metabolic interaction between humans and nature
mediated by labor.12
m a R x s c R i t i q U e o F m o D e R n a g R i c U l t U R e
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marxs London Notebooks and crit ique of the law of Diminishing
Returns
After his exile to London in 1849, Marx, despite severe
financial difficulties, went to the British Museum every day and
filled twenty-four notebooks, which also contain a substantial
amount of excerpts on agricultural chemistry. As Michael Perelman
points out, Marxs main aim in studying natural sciences during this
time was to reject a widespread assumption of the law of
diminishing returns.13 Ricardo famously propagates this law in
order to base his theory of differential rent. He argued that since
the availability of the best lands is severely limited, more
capital needs to be invested into less productive soils as pressed
by the growing population to supply more food. It follows that the
newly invested capital requires more labor in order to produce a
certain amount of agricultural products. Since the exchangeable
value of all commodities is regulated by production under the most
unfa-vorable circumstances, Ricardo insists that the price of
agricultural production necessarily rises with the cultivation of
less fruitful soils, allowing for capitalists with better
conditions of production to attain the surplus of profit as ground
rent.14
Though he accepted the basic mechanism of Ricardian differential
rent, Marx repeatedly criticized Ricardos unfounded assumption of
the law of diminishing returns early on. In 1845, he had already
written down in his excerpts from James Andersons A Calm
Investigation of the Circumstances that have led to the Present
Scarcity of Grain in Britain (1801) about the possibility of
advancing the natural fertility of soils to a consider-able degree:
productiveness may be made to augment from year to year, for a
succession of time to which no limit can be assigned, till at last
it may be made to attain a degree of productiveness, which we
can-not, perhaps, at this time conceive an idea.15 Later, in 1851,
when Marx read another book by Anderson, An Inquiry into the Causes
that have hitherto retarded the Advancement of Agriculture in
Europa (1779), he quoted a similar passage again: Infinite
diversity of soils exists, as they may be so much altered from
their original state by the modes of culture they have formerly
been subjected to, by the manures.16 Marxs intension is clear,
because later in the Manuscripts of 186163 he actually cited these
sentences from his own notebooks in the context of discarding the
Ricardian presupposition of differential rent theory.17 In
opposition to Ricardos assumption, Marx continued to highly value
Anderson who propagated positive effects of using drainage and
manures to improve the productivity of soils to such a degree that
food supply would suffice
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to cover the increase of population and the price of crops would
remain the same or even fall.
After reading Anderson again in 1851, Marx felt it necessary to
read more recent scientific works by agricultural chemists to gain
a detailed knowledge about the ways of advancing agricultural
productivity, especially the relationship between the use of
synthetic fertilizers and the fertility of the soil. In the London
Notebooks, there are two principal sources for this purpose: Liebig
and Johnston.
It appears that Marx first happened to encounter Johnstons Notes
on North America through two articles in The Economist.18 These
articles sum up Johnstons book well, and it is likely that they
motivated Marx to study his more theoretical books on agricultural
chemistry and geol-ogy. One of the articles starts by mentioning
the fact that despite the constant and growing communication
between England and North America, there was not sufficient
information about the agricultural capacity in the New World.
Consequently, as the article continues, a myth prevailed among
English readers that a great improvement of virgin soils had been
achieved, and the soil would be inexhaustible in North America. For
the purpose of disproving this fallacy, the author of The Economist
values Johnstons Notes on North America (1851) quite highly, as the
authors knowledge of science, and its practical relations with
agriculture, enabled him to obtain very clear and accurate views.
According to the article, one of the most important of these
conclu-sions is that the wheat-exporting power of North America has
not only been much exaggerated, but is actually, and not slowly,
diminish-ing or even worn out.19 However, as the article continues,
it is not in the farmers interest to maintain the fertility of the
land through good managementbecause it is actually cheaper to sell
it and settle upon new land, going further west once the land
becomes less agricultur-ally profitable. Thus, as the next article
maintains, the diminishment of crops is not at all surprising, once
we learn that in many districts the land has been cropped with
wheat for fifty years without any other manure than a ton of gypsum
a year applied to the whole farm.20 Succinctly summarizing
Johnstons book to rebuff a widespread illusion about American
agriculture, these articles conclude that it is in reality still
trapped in a very primitive state, without a proper investment or
management, which quickly exhausts soils.21
Reading those articles in The Economist, Marx quotes only one
sen-tence in regard to the exhaustion of lands in North America:
the Atlantic States of the Union and the western part of New York,
once
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so prolific in wheat, has now become almost exhausted, and Ohio
is undergoing the same process.22 Nevertheless, this sentence does
not contain much information because it explains neither a reason
for the exhaustion nor its seriousness. In contrast, Marx is much
more careful to write down the details about how the introduction
of drainage is difficult in North America due to the low cost of
abundant lands, and why a larger scale of farming is not profitable
and not popular.23 Here, Marx seems more attentive to descriptions
that there are not serious attempts to improve the soil through
mechanical and chemi-cal means due to the lack of farmers knowledge
and capital. Those excerpted passages give an impression that Marx
is less interested in the exhausted state of soils in North America
than in Johnstons reports about the primitive or pre-capitalist
state of agriculture, which at the same time implies the future
possibility of advancing the productivity of its lands under the
development of American society under capitalism.
Other excerpts from the same period also strengthen the same
impression. In the London Notebook VIII, Marx studies John Mortons
On the Nature and Property of Soils (1838), which is considered to
be one of the earliest studies on the relationship between
geological com-positions and the productivity of lands. Due to a
lack of adequate knowledge of chemistry, Morton does not correctly
grasp the role of inorganic materials, which he thinks augment the
productivity merely by changing the texture of the soil and thus by
improving the effectiveness of plants to absorb moisture, air,
heat, and organic materials.24 As he misses the function of
minerals and emphasizes the essential function of decomposed
plants, he also optimistically insists: On a careful examination
one finds that the production of veg-etables will never exhaust a
land. Morton argues that the quality of the soil on each, is
infinitely varied, and increases in value according to the degree
of culture it receives, or the soil is susceptible of a con-tinued
improvement by every fresh application of capital judiciously
employed. Despite the seemingly optimistic tone of Morton,
how-ever, one should note that according to him the powers of
nature to create vegetable productions appear never to diminish
only because the decay of one crop becomes the nourishment of the
next.25 Even if Mortons insight is restrained by the theoretical
and practical knowledge of his time, this limitation also allowed
him openly to presuppose the cycle of nourishment between old and
new plants as a feasible condition for sustainable agriculture.
30 m o n t h l y R e V i e W / o c t o B e R 2 0 1 4
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In this context, Marxs excerpts in the London Notebook X from
Henry C. Careys book, The Past, the Present, and the Future (1848)
are worth exam-ining. This book, like Johnstons Notes on North
America, very explicitly challenged Mortons thesis by pointing out
the fact that this way of recycling of nourishments was in danger
in North America because of its exhausting management of the soil:
the tendency of the whole sys-tem of the United States, is that of
taking from the great machine [i.e., soils] all that it will yield,
and giving nothing back.26 Here are some concrete examples about
the exhaustion offered by Carey himself:
The farmer of New York raises wheat, which exhausts the land.
That wheat he sells, and both grain and straw are lost. The average
yield per acre, originally twenty bushels, falls one-third. The
Kentuckian exhausts his land with hemp, and then wastes his manure
on the road, in carrying it to market. Virginia is exhausted by
tobacco, and men desert their homes to seek in the west new lands,
to be again exhausted; and thus are labour and manure wasted, while
the great machine deteriorates, because men can-not come to take
from it the vast supplies of food with which it is charged.27
According to Carey, the scattered settlement over the vast
continent makes it tremendously complicated to give soils back what
plants have taken from them. When consumers and producers lived
close to each other, it would be possible to pay them [soils] back
by giving them the whole refuse.28 Yet, as Carey reprimands, in the
current scattered state of the population, nothing can be done but
sending agricultural products to distant markets and thus losing
altogether the manure. He eagerly claims the necessity of building
an autarkic town community based on a concentration of producers
and consumers without a spe-cial opposition between town and
country.
In spite of these explicit remarks by Carey, similar to those in
The Economist, about the exhausted soils in the United States, Marx
does not seem to have paid any particular attention to them. In
fact, he did not quote any of these sentences despite the fact that
he did copy various passages before and after them. His excerpts
primarily focus on Careys descriptions about how the primitive
state of agriculture in North America actually improved as the
population increased. For instance, Marx wrote down a passage in
which Carey argues against the classi-cal political economist, J.
R. McCulloch, who, as a Ricardian, insisted upon the insurmountable
natural limits of agricultural development due to the scarcity of
best lands: Man is always going from a poor soil to a better, and
then returning on his footsteps to the original poor one,
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and turning up the marle or the lime; and so on, in continued
succes-sionand at each step in this course, he is making a better
machine.29 With a marginal line for emphasis, Marx also excerpted
from Carey that, contrary to the law of diminishing returns, the
increase in the population and the agricultural development
mutually reinforce each other: Everywhere, with increased power of
union, we see them exer-cising increased power over land.
Everywhere, as the new soils are brought into activity, and they
are enabled to obtain larger returns, we find more rapid increase
of population, producing increased tendency to combination of
exertion.30
Reading various books on agriculture, Marx found a range of
indi-cations that the improvement of agricultural productivity
requires a conscious management of lands, the potential of which
the advance of natural sciences and technology brought about for
the first time in history. However, he did not follow critiques by
Johnston and Carey in terms of the real situation of agricultural
practice that rapidly exhausts lands without proper management of
soils based on recycling of organic and inorganic materials.
Instead, since Marx was concerned with a critique of the law of
diminishing returns, he sought to rebuff Ricardos unsubstantiated
supposition by gathering scientific evidence that shows the
possibility of advancing the fertility of soils in accor-dance with
the progress of modern society.31 Consequently, Marx often appears
hastily and optimistically to attribute the problem of exhaus-tion
to the primitive state of agriculture in pre-capitalist countries,
and stress the strategic importance of ameliorating their
agricultural productivity in capitalism for the sake of a coming
socialist revolution: But the more I get into the stuff, the more I
become convinced that agricultural reform, and hence the question
of property based on it, is the alpha and omega of the coming
revolution. Without that, Parson Malthus will prove right.32
liebigs optimism in the Fourth edition of Agricultural
Chemistry
This tendency continues in the following London Notebooks
XIIXIV, that is, in Marxs careful excerpts from Liebig and
Johnston. Liebig is one of the most famous German chemists in the
nineteenth cen-tury, and he is often regarded as the father of
organic chemistry. In his Agricultural Chemistry (1842), Liebig
attempts to apply his knowledge of chemistry to the praxis of
agriculture. He propagates the merit of chemistry for the sake of
the progress of agriculture because it can determine what the
components of soils and plants are, how they
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function, and how they should be consumed and supplemented in an
efficient manner. Inadequate understanding of chemistry and plant
physiology, in contrast, leads to the fallacy of the so-called
humus theory advocated by Johann Heinrich von Thnen, which wrongly
assumes the direct contribution of the well-decomposed residue of
plants as the source of the plant food, absorbed, as organic
substances, through roots of plants. Liebig persuasively
demonstrates, based on his chemical experiments, that humus only
indirectly contributes to plant growth by providing carbons and
nitrogen in the process of its decay. Liebig concludes from his
observations that the importance of humus is therefore limited or
even nonexistent (in an earlier edition of the Agricultural
Chemistry he had gone so far as to say humus does not yield the
smallest nourishment to plants) because plants can later
suf-ficiently absorb carbon from carbonic gas in the atmosphere
through photosynthesis and receive nitrogen in the form of ammonium
from the soil.33 (It was not until much later that it was
discovered that certain plantslegumes, in association with bacteria
living in their rootswere able to draw nitrogen from the
atmosphere.)
Liebigs so-called mineral theory, as opposed to the emphasis on
organic materials by the humus theory, emphasizes the essential
role of inorganic materials in soil for ample plant growth.
However, according to Liebig, they can be exhausted due to
cultivation, because neither atmosphere nor rainwater can
sufficiently provide them. The loss of inorganic materials must be
restrained to a minimal degree so that the soil can sustain its
original fruitfulness over the long term. Liebig suggests a series
of methods for this purpose, such as fallow, crop rota-tion, and
drainage. It is, nevertheless, often necessary to directly add an
amount of necessary minerals to the soil if it is to avoid the
state of exhaustion or to increase its productivity: The fertility
of a soil can-not remain unimpaired, unless we replace in it all
those substances of which it has been thus deprived. Now this is
effected by manure.34 This occurs for instance by adding more
animal and human excrements and bones to the soil.
Yet, contrary to a dominant vitalistic belief at that time,
Liebig analyzes the purely chemical reaction of manures in the soil
and comes to a conclusion that for animal excrements, other
substances containing their essential constituents may be
substituted.35 Marx quotes a key passage where Liebig hopes to
replace animal excre-ments and bones through chemical fertilizers
produced in factories: whether this restoration be effected by
means of excrements, ashes,
m a R x s c R i t i q U e o F m o D e R n a g R i c U l t U R e
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or bones, is in a great measure a matter of indifference. A time
will come when fields will be manured with a solution of glass
(silicate of potash), with the ashes of burnt straw, and with salts
of phosphoric acid, prepared in chemical manufactories.36
As the passage quoted by Marx plainly shows, Liebig is
optimistic about the future development of natural science that
permits produc-ing a large amount of chemical manure in factories.
This possibility suggested by a famous chemist must have appeared
to Marx as a strong counterargument against the law of diminishing
returns.
Certainly, Liebig recognizes that insofar as inorganic materials
are finite, agriculture can exhaust soils. Some sentences in
Agricultural Chemistry actually acknowledge the exhausted state of
soils in Europe and the United States, but their tone still remains
quite weak because Liebig mentions the fact only strategically to
emphasize the essential role of minerals against humus theory.37
After all, Liebig assumes that the exhausted state of soils can be
cured through manures. It is clear that Marx studied Liebig very
carefully not because he was interested in the state of exhausted
lands due to agriculture, but rather because he was striving to
understand the function of organic and inorganic materials for
plant growth and a variety of methods for increasing crops,
including chemical fertilizers.
To understand more clearly Marxs intention in studying Liebig,
his excerpts from Johnstons books in the following London Notebooks
are useful. In his letter to Engels on October 13, 1851, Marx
affirma-tively referred to Johnstons Notes on North America (1851),
characterizing him (though a Scot) as the English Liebig.38 Before
writing the let-ter, Marx had already read Johnstons Lectures on
Agricultural Chemistry and Geology (1847) and Catechism of
Agricultural Chemistry and Geology (1849) and carefully studied
these books in the London Notebooks XIII and XIV.39 Since Marx
identifies Johnston with Liebig, excerpted texts from the formers
books simultaneously help us discern more clearly how Marx was
reading Liebig and which aspects of agricultural chemistry he was
trying to learn from these agricultural chemists.
Johnston, a Scottish chemist and geologist, is like Liebig one
of the leading figures in the field of agricultural chemistry in
the nineteenth century and contributed to the development of
agricultural praxis through the application of chemical and
geological knowledge acquired during his various travels through
Europe and North America. Similar to Liebig, Johnston also
recognizes that organic materials alone do not suffice for ample
plant growth, but that inorganic materials must be
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constantly returned to the soil after plants absorb them.40
Otherwise, sooner or later, it will be fully exhausted. It is
certainly preferable to cultivate lands under better natural
conditions, so Johnston proposes to conduct a geological survey and
to prepare a geological map that highlights fruitful soils.41 He
also firmly believes, contrary to Ricardo, that natural character
and composition is subjected to mechanical and chemical
improvements: the farmer can change the character of the land
itself. He can alter both its physical qualities and its chemical
com-position and thus can fit it for growing other races of plants
than those which it naturally bearsor, if he choose [sic], the same
races in greater abundance and with increased luxuriance.42
Although Johnston is surely aware of the danger of natural lands
being exhausted without a proper management, the following pas-sage
from his Catechism reflects the same optimism towards the use of
chemical manure as observed in Liebigs Agricultural Chemistry: if
the farmer puts in the soil the proper substances, in the proper
quanti-ties, and at the proper times, he may keep up the fertility
of the land, perhaps for ever. To make his land better, he must put
in more than he takes out.43 In order to attain constant profits,
Johnston advocates advancing productivity by changing the chemical
composition of the land through mechanical and chemical means. For
this purpose, he also suggests importing from foreign countries
guano and bones rich in mineral substances because they are
suitable for transport over great distances,44 even though this is,
as we see later, exactly the view that Marx calls into question in
the 1860s under Liebigs influence.
Now one can better comprehend why Marx calls Johnston the
English Liebig. Both Liebig and Johnston appreciate the essential
role of minerals for the plant growth, but, more importantly, they
share the same optimism about ameliorating agricultural
productivity to a considerable degree through the application of
natural science and technology. In the context of criticizing the
Ricardian law of diminish-ing returns, claims made by Liebig and
Johnston provide Marx with a scientific foundation about the
possibilities of modern agricultural pro-duction based on the
newest discoveries of natural sciences. Contrary to Ricardo, who
assumes a strict natural limit to the improvement of the
productivity of each soil,45 Marx comes to believe in the future
great advancement of agriculture.
Of course, this would not mean that the fertility of the soil
could be multiplied infinitely, as if there were no natural limits
at all for agricultural production. However, insofar as Marx,
influenced by
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Liebig and Johnston, presumes that the exhausted state of the
soil can be cured by using synthetic fertilizers, guano, and bones,
it is hard to find a concrete analysis on the relationship between
the exhausting culture and the natural limits of the soil, which
makes the general tone of Marxs notebooks from 1851 appear
sometimes too optimistic. Criticizing Ricardos ahistorical
understanding of the natural character of the soil, Marx too
strongly emphasizes the sociality of agricultural productivity, as
if the natural limit imposed upon agriculture does not really
exist. By doing so, his theoretical framework tacitly assumes the
static binary between naturalness and sociality without adequately
considering the dynamic entanglement between the internal logic of
the natural material world and its social and historical
modifications under capitalism.
However, Marx became much more conscious of this entangle-ment
in the 1860s, and this is how Liebigs concept of metabolism
decisively contributed to the deepening of Marxs critique of the
metabolic rift under modern agriculture. When Marx starts
theoriz-ing the natural limit of agricultural productivity, he does
not argue that it would manifest as a natural consequence of the
law of dimin-ishing returns. On the contrary, Marx claims that the
contradiction of capitalist agriculture emerges precisely because
the free power of nature is subjected to historical modifications
under the logic of valorization, resulting in the disruption of the
natural metabolic cycle under robbery culture in capitalism.
liebigs Agricultural Chemistry in 1862 and his crit ique of
Robbery economy
Finishing up writing his manuscript for the chapters on ground
rent in Capital, Marx, in a letter to Engels, emphasized the
importance of the scientific contributions by Liebig and Schnbein,
and then con-tinued: I concluded my theoretical investigation of
ground rent two years ago. And a great deal had been achieved,
entirely in the period since then, fully confirming my theory.46 In
the process of acquainting himself with the newest achievements of
agricultural chemistry, the development of Marxs critique of
political economy allowed him to integrate Liebigs agricultural
chemistry as a basis for his critical analy-sis of the capitalist
form of agricultural praxis.47 Marxs main concern is no longer
simply the law of diminishing returns, which he rejected through
his studies of agricultural chemistry in 1851. Yet, as seen above,
Marx did not pay sufficient attention to the concrete reality in
terms
36 m o n t h l y R e V i e W / o c t o B e R 2 0 1 4
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of how the very historicity and sociality of the fertility of
the soil could cause diverse contradictions in agricultural
production under certain social conditions.
Preparing the manuscript on ground rent, Marx takes up this
prob-lem seriously by dealing more cautiously with the capitalist
form of agriculturethat is, how the logic of capital modifies or
even distorts the relationship between human beings and nature
mediated by labor. The labor process in general, i.e., as a
transhistorical reality common to all forms of production, is
defined by Marx as the metabolic interac-tion between humans and
naturethe primary mediation between the human beings and the
natural conditions of their existence. Humanity needs to work upon
and transform nature to be able to reproduce its distinctly
human-social species being. However, the labor process, viewed from
the standpoint of any given concrete reality, and not sim-ply
transhistorically, always takes on a certain determinate historical
form (Formbestimmung), associated with a particular set of
relations of production. This reflects the varying ways in which
humans carry out the metabolic interaction with their
environment.
Marxs Capital reveals that the capitalist form of labor, i.e.,
wage labor, radically transforms and reorganizes material
dimensions of labor according to the logic of valorization. There
emerges the domi-nation of abstract labor as the sole source of
value, which violently abstracts labor from other essential
concrete aspects and turns humans into a mere personification of
the reified thing through formal and real subsumption under
capital. The process of accommodating human activity for the logic
of capital causes various disharmonies in the lives of workers,
such as overwork, mental illness, and child labor, as Marx
described in the chapters on The Working Day and Machinery and the
Modern Industry. This domination by capital goes beyond the
reorganization of labor in the factory as the sphere of
commodifica-tion enlarges to subsume agriculture. Consequently, as
the section on Modern Industry and Agriculture describes, it
produces various dis-cordances in the material world by disturbing
the natural metabolic interaction between humans and nature. It is
then no coincidence that Marxs notebooks on agricultural chemistry
also reflect a shift of his interest because he now studies it
again in order to deal with such a destructive transformation of
the material world under capitalism.
The seventh edition of Agricultural Chemistry must have been
par-ticularly insightful for Marxs purpose because Liebig also
altered his arguments in such a way that Marx thinks entirely
affirm my
m a R x s c R i t i q U e o F m o D e R n a g R i c U l t U R e
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theory. Liebig reinforced his critique of robbery culture
(Raubbau) in modern society, which takes mineral substances from
the soil without return for the sake of maximal profits. In the
newly added Introduction, Liebig warns: Each land will inevitably
become poorer not only by continuously exporting its crops, but
also by uselessly wasting the products of metabolism (Stoffwechsel)
that accu-mulate in large cities.48 The population growth in towns,
the result of industrialization, increases demands for agricultural
products from the country; but the mineral substances contained in
them do not return to the original soil. Farmers also strive to
sell as much as they can in order to attain more profits, so they
even end up selling bones and straw, which should be used for
maintaining the fertility of their own lands. Marx thus finds a new
scientific expression for the modern problem of the division
between town and land, which he and Engels suggested in The German
Ideology.
Liebig continues further: it is clear to everyone that labor as
such gradually but constantly makes the soil poorer and exhausts it
in the end. One knows that one returns nothing to the field in this
way, but always takes up [everything] into crops.49 Marxs notebook
carefully follows these explanations offered by Liebig that convey
how the rei-fied praxis of agriculture inevitably destroys the
natural metabolic cycle. By merely pursuing the maximal crops
without considering the reproducibility of the current fertility in
the future, robbery culture exploits the free power of the natural
world as a tool to squander for the sake of capital
accumulation.
As Liebigs seventh edition repeatedly warns that there is always
the danger of exhaustion, it is interesting in this context to see
differ-ences in tone between the two editions. In one passage cited
in the London Notebooks, Liebig writes: Soil formed from basalt,
grauwacke, and porphyry, are the best for meadowland, on account of
the large quantity of potash they contain. The potash abstracted by
the plants is restored during the annual irrigation. The amount of
potash con-tained in the soil itself is inexhaustible in comparison
with the quantity necessary for plants.50
In the seventh edition Liebig modifies the sentence: Soil formed
from basalt, phonolite, clay slate, grauwacke, porphyry are the
best for meadow-land under the same condition due to their
decomposition, on account of the large quantity of alkalies. The
amount of alkalies contained in the soil itself is very great in
comparison with the quantity necessary for plants, although not
inexhaustible.51
38 m o n t h l y R e V i e W / o c t o B e R 2 0 1 4
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The seventh edition suggests that even the most favorable lands
are by no means free from exhaustion. Furthermore, in the fourth
edition, Liebig argued, after the passage cited above, that the
exhaustion of the meadowland is simply due to the lack of potash,
and it is possible to regain the former productivity by adding ash:
But if the meadow be strewed from time to time with wood-ashesthen
grass thrives as luxuriantly as before.52 This gives the misleading
impression that ash could easily cure the exhaustion of the soil,
and so Liebig deletes this sentence in the seventh edition. He
seems to admit the limits of the effectiveness of manures in
preventing the loss of minerals.
Furthermore, Marxs excerpts from Johnstons Notes on North
America in 1865 reflect the same tone as his excerpts from Liebig.
As seen above, Marx did not pay any particular attention to the
exhaustion of lands in North America when he read the two articles
in The Economist and Careys book in 1851. Yet, after Marx cited a
sentence from Liebigs Agricultural Chemistry that this is the
natural course of the robbery culture, which has been pursued
nowhere on a larger scale than in North America, he actu-ally read
Johnstons Notes in order to study the real agricultural state in
North America, despite his general avoidance of travel
reports.53
This time, Marx clearly concentrates on those passages by
Johnston that describe the diminution of the productivity of soils
due to robbery culture, which Marx refers to as the system of
exhaustion in North America: The common system, in fact, of North
America of selling everything for which a market can be got [hay,
corn, potatoes etc]; and taking no trouble to put anything into the
soil in return.54 Johnston continues: There was however no
motivation for those American farmers who merely seek for profits
to conduct a more reasonable agri-culture with a good management of
their soils because careless and improvident farming habitsthus
introducedit was cheaper and more profitable to clear and crop new
land than to renovate the old.55 Consequently, farmers also have no
interest in preserving or improving the fertility of their lands
for their children: The owner has already fixed a price in his mind
for which hehopes to sell, believing that, with the same money, he
could do better for himself and his family by going still farther
west.56
As long as agriculture, under the monopoly of private property,
is carried out on the basis of profit calculation, the robbery
culture pre-vails over society simply because the squandering
exploitation of lands is more profitable in the short term. Facing
this deep contradiction of the capitalist form of agriculture,
Johnston, the very conservative
m a R x s c R i t i q U e o F m o D e R n a g R i c U l t U R e
39
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agricultural chemist (!) as Marx calls him, repeatedly tries to
justify it as a necessary, but only temporary, evil: the emigration
of this class of wilderness-clearing and new land-exhausting
farmers, is a kind of necessity in the rural progress of a new
country. It is a thing to rejoice in rather to regret.57 Curiously
enough, focusing on descriptions about the state of exhausting
agriculture under this system, Marx stops his excerpts right before
the passage cited just above and also ignores other passages where
the conservative agricultural chemist stresses, in vain, the future
possibility of introducing a more rational agricultural system
through education and the development of technology under
capitalism.
Against the robbery economy, Marx in Capital demands both the
pres-ervation and sustainable improvements of lands for future
generations:
From the standpoint of a higher socio-economic formation, the
private property of particular individuals in the earth will appear
just as absurd as the private property of one man in other men.
Even an entire society, a nation, or all simultaneously existing
societies taken together, are not the owners of the earth. They are
simply its possessors, its beneficiaries, and have to bequeath it
in an improved state to succeeding generations as boni patres
familias [good heads of the household].58
Obviously, Marx still recognizes the importance of rational
culture, an idea which he attained from Liebig and Johnston in the
1850s, and states that the unique merit of employing soils is the
possibility of con-stantly investing capital without losing
previous investments.59 However, Marx also makes it unambiguously
clear this time that it is not the primitive agricultural state in
North America, but precisely the capitalist relations of production
that prevent such a rational form of agriculture by forcing
American farmers to abandon lands, going further west once they no
longer produce enough profits. Capital actually constitutes a
sys-tem of robbery economy with an art of exploiting the productive
force of nature for free, as Liebig writes that the crude robbery
develops into the art of robbery.60 The exhaustion of lands in
North America has its origin precisely in the development of
capitalismand not simply due to the pre-capitalist backwardness of
its agriculture, as the articles of The Economist indicated in
accordance with Johnston. Marx plainly states in Capital: all
progress in increasing the fertility of the soil for a given time,
is a progress towards ruining the more long-lasting sources of that
fertility. The more a country proceeds from large-scale industry as
the background of its development, as in the case of the United
States, the more rapid is this process of destruction.61
40 m o n t h l y R e V i e W / o c t o B e R 2 0 1 4
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An important aspect of soil fertility was not yet recognized by
sci-entists, and, therefore, also not recognized by Marx. Plants do
not generally directly use nutrients that are part of organic
matter. They are first converted into inorganic elements that
plants can directly use during the process of decomposition by soil
organisms. However, it is now understood that soil organic matter
is a critical part of building and maintaining healthy and
productive soils. It positively influences almost all soil
propertieschemical, biological, and physical. While it is true that
organic matter (or humus) is not taken up directly by plants, its
depletion from soils is one of the main causes for decreased
productivity. Adding only inorganic chemical nutrients to replenish
those removed by crops can leave soils in poor biological and
physi-cal condition leading to numerous problems including
accelerated erosion, droughty soils (that do not store much water),
low nutrient holding capacity, more disease and insect problems,
and so on. In modern industrial agriculture these are corrected to
an extent with greater capital input in the form of pesticides,
fertilizers, more power-ful equipment, and more frequent
irrigation.62
guano imperial ism and global ecological crises
As his critical view toward modern agriculture develops, the
sev-enth edition of Liebigs Agricultural Chemistry thoroughly
criticizes existing attempts of agricultural praxis to maintain or
increase the fertility of the soil, including the dependence upon
imports of guano and bones. In the fourth edition this solution did
not bother Liebig so much; like Johnston, he simply stated that a
small quantity of guano could greatly improve poor land that
consists only of sand and clay.63 However, as the resource of guano
became scarce, Liebig added some passages in the seventh edition to
warn about importing guano from foreign countries because such a
form of agriculture would quickly exhaust lands and annihilate
guano in South America.64 Attempts to recover the fertility of land
in England and North America with guano could at most postpone the
unavoidable exhaustion to a very near future. What is more,
importing guano from South America is based on a system of
oppression and destruction. Not only does it create economic and
political inequalities through the brutal subju-gation and
exploitation of colonial inhabitants, but it also causes the
exhaustion of natural resources and the devastation of ecosystems,
which Brett Clark and Foster properly characterize as the global
metabolic rift due to ecological imperialism.65
m a R x s c R i t i q U e o F m o D e R n a g R i c U l t U R e
41
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Under the heated competition of so-called guano imperialism,
England and North America strove to import an enormous amount of
guano in order to prevent the loss of the fertility of their own
soils, but this even worsened the situation from an ecological
point of view, because the disruption of the metabolic cycle now
emerged on a global level. After importing a large amount of guano
from South America, North America exported wheat to England.
Minerals contained in guano were taken up by crops in North
America, but they returned neither to American nor English lands.
They simply ended up pouring into the River Thames as sewage,
severely degrading the living con-ditions in London.66 Importing
guano and wheat without returning them to where they came from,
English capitalism could barely sustain the existing robbery and
wasteful system of production. As capital-ism developed and its
network of commodity exchange became more global due to the
emergence of more effective means of transportation, the scarcity
of natural resources, and the exhaustion of land and guano,
prevailed more devastatingly than ever.
Marx recognized the capitalist tendency to anti-ecological
robbery from peripheral countries through his analysis of Englands
importa-tion in effect of the soil of Ireland, despoiling it of its
nutrients.67 His usage of Liebig in the 1860s thus proves to be a
more sophisticated one, in criticizing Ricardos rent theory, than
in the case of the London Notebooks. Marx does not simply
problematize Ricardos unscientific and ahistorical assumption of
the law of diminishing returns but also his solution to the
obstacle imposed upon capital accumulation due to the scarcity of
natural resources.
According to the law of diminishing returns, Ricardo argues that
the advance of the population requires the cultivation of less
fertile lands. It requires more labor to produce the same quantity
of crops and causes the general increase of wheat price, which also
never fails to raise ground rent and the labor wage. Corresponding
to the increase, the profit rate falls. In order to eliminate this
hindrance to capital accumulation, Ricardo famously supports the
idea of abolish-ing the Corn Law and insists upon importing cheaper
crops from foreign countries and concentrating on industrial
development within England instead of cultivating less fertile
lands under the pressure from the growing population to provide
more food. Here Ricardo only considers a constant retreat to less
productive lands without seri-ously taking their exhaustion into
account, for he actually believes in the original and
indestructible powers of the soil.68 Even if the best
42 m o n t h l y R e V i e W / o c t o B e R 2 0 1 4
-
land in England is limited, there would be enough fertile lands
in the world for English capital accumulation.
Referring to Liebig, Marx now warns, in opposition Ricardo, that
the international crop trade means nothing but the global reckless
robbery of the vitality of the soil: in capitalism large landed
property reduces the agricultural population to a constantly
falling minimum, and confronts it with an ever growing industrial
population crammed together in large towns; in this way it produces
conditions that provoke an irreparable rift in the interdependent
process of social metabolism, a metabolism prescribed by the
natural laws of life itself. The result of this is a squandering of
the vitality of the soil, which is carried by trade far beyond the
bounds of a single country (Liebig).69 Contrary to Ricardos
assumption, the import of crops from North America or Eastern
Europe would by no means solve the fundamental crisis of capitalist
agricultural production, because the import of crops would only
enlarge the metabolic rift under capitalism on a global level.
Insofar as the infinite desire for capital accumulation hinders
humans from constructing any rational and sustainable interrelation
to their environment, capitalism cannot overcome the metabolic rift
arising from natural limits inherent to the logic of the natural
world. On the contrary, it ultimately poses an insurmountable
obstacle to the regime of capital accumulation.
In contrast to Ricardo, Marx thus demands the abolition of the
capi-talist relations of production so that the problem of natural
limits can be managed without aggravating ecological disruptions:
the moral of the taleis that the capitalist system runs counter to
a rational agriculture, or that a rational agriculture is
incompatible with the capitalist system, and it requires the
control of the associated producers.70 A more ratio-nal management
of the metabolic interaction by associated producers includes
consciously giving back to soils what plants have taken away.
Surely enough, Marx recognizes that the modern development of
natural sciences and technology prepares the necessary material
con-ditions of rational culture by inventing better chemical
fertilizers or a more effective system of drainage. Yet the new
knowledge that the development of natural sciences brings about is
not neutral for the environment, as its capitalist application does
not primarily take the ecological sustainability into account but
aims to maximize profits, which rather leads to a wasteful or
irrational art of cultivation of the soil. Thus, it compromises the
necessary environmental bases for human reproduction itselfi.e.,
the existence of the land as perma-nent communal property, as the
inalienable condition for the existence
m a R x s c R i t i q U e o F m o D e R n a g R i c U l t U R e
43
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and reproduction of the chain of human generations.71 This deep,
crisis-laden estrangement from nature cannot help but bring into
ques-tion the legitimacy of the capitalist system itself in the
long run. Marx thus foresees that the limitation of subsumption of
the material world under capital creates a realm of resistance
against the logic of valoriza-tion. The disharmony forces an
enormous [new] consciousness to emerge with which human beings more
subjectively and consciously deal with their metabolic interaction
with nature.72
conclusion
To sum up, if, despite the intensive usage of synthetic
fertilizers, industrial agriculture under capitalism only exhausts
land over the long run, a socialist project needs to carry out a
radical change. This means learning to manage soils more
holistically, using better rota-tions and other management
practices than possible given the logic of capitalist markets.
These practices should aim to maintain and build soil organic
matter and enhance the health of the soil and its bio-logical,
chemical, and physical characteristics. Contrary to a common
critique of Marxs Prometheanism, he does not overestimate the
modern development of technology at all.73 Instead, analyzing how
the logic of capital transforms the transhistorical metabolism
between humans and nature, Marx convincingly emphasizes the
necessity of consciously interacting with nature to enable a
sustainable devel-opment of humanity and nature, and he attests to
the irrationality and contradictions of the development of
productive forces under the capitalist mode of production.
In order to theorize a more rational form of culture, modern
natural sciences, including the agricultural chemistry and geology
of Liebig and Johnston, play a significant role for Marx because
they uncover neces-sary conditions of reproducing the original
state of soil. After publishing the first volume of Capital, Marx
engaged in a more intensive study of the natural sciences.
Throughout the process, Marx attempted a critical comprehension of
the ongoing ecological degradation under capitalism from a broader
scientific perspective. Nonetheless, despite his ceaseless effort,
Marx was never able fully to integrate these broader historical
analyses of agriculture and civilization into his critique of
political econ-omy. Yet, as Marxs late notebooks become more
available through the MEGA2, their careful examination will enable
analysts to explain the way Marxs socialist project envisioned
reestablishing the absolute unity in the metabolic interaction
between human beings and nature.
44 m o n t h l y R e V i e W / o c t o B e R 2 0 1 4
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notes
1. Cf. Kevin Anderson, Marx at the Mar-gins (Chicago: The
University of Chicago Press, 2010), 24752.2. In addition to
Andersons work, see also: Kolja Lindner, Marxs Eurocentrism:
Postcolonial Studies and Marx Scholar-ship, Radical Philosophy 161
(May/June 2010): 2741. Through a careful analysis of Marxs
notebooks, Anderson and Lind-ner convincingly demonstrate that
Marxs view of modernity underwent a significant change in the 1860s
in that he came to abandon a view of linear historical
devel-opment. This paper aims to strengthen Anderson and Lindners
interpretation by examining Marxs reception of agricultural
chemistry.3. M a r x - E n g e l s - G e s a m t a u s g a b e
(MEGA2) (Berlin: Dietz Verlag, Akademie Verlag, 1975). A part of
the late Marxs excerpts on natural sciences are available as MEGA2
IV/26 and 31.4. The importance of Johnston and Li-ebig for Marx can
be conceived from the fact that he read them a second time both
Liebigs ber Theorie und Praxis in der Landwirthschaft
(Braunschweig: Verlag von Friedrich Vieweg und Sohn, 1856) in 1863
(to be published as MEGA2 IV/17) and Johnstons Elements of
Agricultural Chemistry and Geology, 4th ed. (London: William
Blackwood and Sons, 1856) in 1878 (MEGA2 IV/26). Due to the limited
space, it is not possible to deal with Marxs Liebig-excerpt of
1863, though it would more clearly show how careful Marx was
following theoretical changes in Liebigs agricultural chemistry.5.
Karl Marx, Capital, vol. 1 (London: Penguin, 1976), 637.6. John
Bellamy Foster, Marxs Ecology (New York: Monthly Review Press,
2000), ix.7. Foster, Marxs Ecology, and Paul Bur-kett, Marx and
Nature: A Red and Green Perspective (Chicago: Haymarket Books,
2014; original edition 1999), chapter 9.8. Marx, Capital, vol. 1,
638.9. MEGA2 II/5, 410. Marx modified this expresson in later
editions of Capital.10. Justus von Liebig, Die Chemie in ihrer
Anwendung auf Agricultur und Physiolo-gie, 7th ed. (Braunschweig:
Verlag von Friedrich Vieweg und Sohn, 1862); Li-ebig, Die
organische Chemie in ihrer An-wendung auf Agricultur und
Physiologie, 4th ed. (Braunschweig: Verlag von Fried-rich Vieweg
und Sohn, 1842). For Liebigs later criticisms, see William H.
Brock, Justus von Liebig, the Chemical Gate-keeper (Cambridge:
Cambridge Univer-sity Press, 1997); for his 1851 studies, see
Foster, Marxs Ecology, 149.11. Without doubt, this paper greatly
owes to recent works on Marxs ecological thought, especially to
Fosters books and
comments. My analysis of Marxs note-books also confirms his
interpretation.12. Marxs excerpts from Liebig in the 1860s are
still in preparation by a Japa-nese editorial group of the MEGA2
led by Teinosuke Otani, who also kindly sup-ported my project. Once
they appear in MEGA2 IV/18, it will be possible to deal with this
problem more thoroughly. 13. Michael Perelman, Marxs Crises
The-ory: Scarcity, Labor, and Finance (New York: Praeger, 1987),
3435. Another im-portant figure is of course Thomas Robert Malthus,
who also assumes the validity of the law; see Foster, Marxs
Ecolo-gy,14244.14. David Ricardo, On the Principles of Political
Economy, and Taxation (Cam-bridge: Cambridge University Press,
1951), 73.15. MEGA2 IV/4, 62; James Anderson, A Calm Investigation
of the Circumstances that Have Led to the Present Scarcity of Grain
in Great Britain (London: John Cummins, 1801), 3536.16. MEGA2 IV/9,
119; James Anderson, An Inquiry into the Causes that have hith-erto
retarded the Advancement of Agricul-ture in Europe (Edinburgh:
Charles Elliot, 1779), 5.17. cf. Karl Marx and Frederick Engels,
Collected Works, vol. 31 (New York: Inter-national Publishers,
1975), 372, 374.18. James F.W. Johnston, Notes on North America
(London: William Blackwood and Sons, 1851).19. North American
Agriculture, The Economist, no. 401, May 3, 1851, 475.20. Husbandry
in North America, The Economist, no. 404, May 24, 1851, 559;
emphasis in original.21. North American Agriculture, 476.22. MEGA2
IV/8, 87.23. Ibid, 89. Excerpted passages from Johnston are for
example: An objection to drainage is made in this country. The cost
of this improvement, even at the cheapest rate, say 4 l. or 20
dollars an acre is to a large proportion of the present price of
the best land in this rich district of Western New York; It is
plain that there is too great an abundance of land, which, for
little labour and with no skill, will pro-duce year after year,
moderate crops; Husbandry by capitalists not yet avail-able in
North America. on a larger scale, farming is not profitable. Beyond
purchasing a farm for their own use there is no much to be done
with land, for rent-ing land is not popular, and, in fact, the
economical condition of North America is not yet such as to render
such a mode of management necessary or desirable. See MEGA2 IV/8,
8889.
24. MEGA2 IV/8, 3067; Morton, On the Nature and Property of
Soils, 1st ed. (Lon-don: James Ridgway, Piccadilly, 1838),
14041.25. Ibid. 306, 309, 311, 305; Morton, On the Nature and
Property of Soils, 1st ed., 130, 20910, 221, 12930. 26. Henry C.
Carey, The Past, the Present, and the Future (Philadelphia: Carey
& Hart, 1848), 3045; for nourishment re-cycling, see Foster,
Marxs Ecology, 153.27. Carey, The Past, the Present, and the
Future, 3056.28. Carey, The Past, the Present, and the Future, 299.
29. MEGA2 IV/8, 746; Carey, The Past, the Present, and the Future,
129.30. MEGA2 IV/8, 744; Carey, The Past, the Present, and the
Future, 4849.31. cf. Perelman, Marxs Crises Theory, 34.32. Marx and
Engels, Collected Works, vol. 38, 425.33. Justus von Liebig,
Chemistry in its Ap-plication to Agriculture and Physiology, 4th
ed. (Cambridge: John Owen, 1843), 33. Humus is the portion of the
soil or-ganic matter that is well decomposed and stable (not
subject to more decom-position) and is different in chemistry from
compounds found in the original material. Humus is now known to be
a chelating agent (can hold plant available micronutrients such as
zinc) and to have a very high negative charge giving it an ability
to hold onto a lot of cations (posi-tively charged elements such as
calcium, magnesium, and potassium) allowing them to be held in the
soil (not easily leached out) while still being available for
uptake by the plant.34. MEGA2 IV/9, 207; Liebig, Chemistry in its
Application to Agriculture and Physiol-ogy, 4th ed., 174.35. MEGA2
IV/9, 209; Liebig, Chemistry in its Application to Agriculture and
Physiol-ogy, 4th ed.,182.36. MEGA2 IV/9, 210; Liebig, Chemistry in
its Application to Agriculture and Physiol-ogy, 4th ed.,187;
emphasis added. 37. Marx writes down one passage where Liebig
describes the exhausted state of lands in New England which have
pro-duced plenty of wheat and tobacco with-out manure but become
unproductive without manure after a while (cf. MEGA2 IV/9, 202).
Nonetheless, Liebig points out this fact only to substantiate his
demand for realizing the system of rational cul-ture composed of
fallow, crop rotation, and synthetic fertilizer. In fact, Liebig
does not elucidate any critical comments to agricultural praxis in
modern society that has caused such exhaustion in New England.
m a R x s c R i t i q U e o F m o D e R n a g R i c U l t U R e
45
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38. Marx and Engels, Collected Works, vol. 38, 476.39. James
F.W. Johnston, Lectures on Ag-ricultural Chemistry and Geology, 2nd
ed. (London: William Blackwood and Sons, 1847); Catechism of
Agricultural Chemis-try and Geology, 23rd ed. (London: Wil-liam
Blackwood and Sons, 1849).40. cf. Johnston, Lectures on
Agricultural Chemistry and Geology, 85556.41. MEGA2 IV/9, 382;
Johnston, Cate-chism of Agricultural Chemistry and Geol-ogy, 44.42.
MEGA2 IV/9, 299; Johnston, Lectures on Agricultural Chemistry and
Geology, 545; emphasis in original. 43. MEGA2 IV/9, 380; Johnston,
Cate-chism of Agricultural Chemistry and Geol-ogy, 38.44. MEGA2
IV/9, 381; Johnston, Cate-chism of Agricultural Chemistry and
Geol-ogy, 39. 45. According to Ricardo, although the in-crease of
agricultural productivity through manures and the improvement of
tools is possible, the natural tendency of profits to fall can only
be checked at repeated intervals by those countermeasures. See
Ricardo, On the Principles of Political Econ-omy, and Taxation,
1951, 120.46. Marx and Engels, Collected Works, vol. 42, 227.47.
Marx knew that Liebig became more concerned with the difficulty in
terms of recycling minerals for the sake of a last-ing fertility of
lands by 1860, as he writes in Herr Vogt: Liebig rightly criticizes
the senseless wastefulness which robs the Thames of its purity and
the English soil of its manure (Marx and Engels, Collect-ed Works,
vol. 17, 243). Marx may have got this information from Liebigs
article in The Times (December 23, 1859). As Brock points out
(Justus von Liebig, the Chemical Gatekeeper, 259), this article in
which Liebig talks about the question of the sewage of towns was
widely read at that time. However, Marx does not imme-diately
integrate such an insight by Li-ebig into his economic manuscripts.
Perelman argues that Marx became more pessimistic about
agricultural produc-tion when he was writing the Manuscripts of
186163. According to Perelman (Marxs Crises Theory, 3640), it was
due to the cotton famine in 1862 and Marxs personal hardships
during the crisis. In this context, it is important to indicate
that in 1863 Marx took notes from Li-
ebigs ber Theorie und Praxis in der Landwirthschaft, in which he
starts much more clearly emphasizing the danger of soil exhaustion.
Thus, it seems plausible when Foster argues that Marx changed his
view due to two historical develop-ments in his time: (1) the
widening sense of crisis in agriculture in both Europe and North
America...; and (2) a shift in Li-ebigs own work in the late 1850s
and early 1860s (Marxs Theory of Metabolic Rift: Classical
Foundations for Environ-mental Sociology, American Journal of
Sociology, 105, no.2 [1999]: 376). I has-ten to add however, that
the impact of ber Theorie und Praxis upon Marx is only partial
because Liebig remains still quite optimistic about modern
agricul-ture. For now, I attempt to examine the issue from another
perspective by point-ing out the methodological development of
Marxs political economy in analyzing the entanglement of form and
materi-al. Only after grasping the dynamic transformation of the
material world through the form determination by capi-tal, is Marx
able successfully to integrate Liebigs critique of the exhaustion
of soils into Capital.48. IISG, Marx-Engels-Nachla, Sign. B 106,
30; Justus von Liebig, Einleitung, in Die Chemie in ihrer Anwendung
auf Agricultur und Physiologie, 7th ed. (Braunschweig: Verlag von
Friedrich Vieweg und Sohn, 1862), 1156, 141. 49. IISG,
Marx-Engels-Nachla, Sign. B 106, 3031; Liebig, Einleitung, 142. 50.
MEGA2 IV/9, 193; Liebig, Chemistry in its Application to
Agriculture and Physiol-ogy, 4th ed., 118; emphasis added.51.
Liebig, Einleitung, 106; emphasis added. This modification actually
occurs in the fifth German edition (1843), which indicates that
Liebig already began to develop his critical view at that time.52.
Liebig, Chemistry in its Application to Agriculture and Physiology,
4th ed., 118.53. IISG, Marx-Engels-Nachla, Sign. B 106, 55; Liebig,
Einleitung, 124; em-phasis by Marx; for Marxs avoidance of travel
reports, cf. Marx to Engels, February 13, 1866, Collected Works,
vol. 42, 227.54. MEGA2 II/4.3, 239, 712; James F.W. Johnston, Notes
on North America: Agri-cultural, Economical, and Social, 2 vols.
(London: William Blackwood and Sons, 1851), 47. Marxs expression
system of exhaustion in North America is found in his Notizen zur
Differentialrente created
in 1868. It clearly conveys Marxs intention to read Johnstons
Notes on North America as a direct source about the system of
ex-haustion. The editor of MEGA2 II/4.3, Carl-Ehrlich Vollgraf,
reproduces many parts of Marxs Johnston-excerpt from 1865, and I
will refer to its pages here. 55. MEGA2 II/4.3, 712; Johnston,
Notes on North America, 54.56. MEGA2 II/4.3, 713; Johnston, Notes
on North America, 163.57. Marx, Capital, vol. 3 (London: Pen-guin,
1981), 754; Johnston, Notes on North America, 54. 58. Marx,
Capital, vol. 3, 911.59. Ibid., 916.60. IISG, Marx-Engels-Nachla,
Sign. B 106, 54; Liebig, Einleitung, 123.61. Marx, Capital, vol. 1,
638.62. Fred Magdoff and Harold van Es, Building Soils for Better
Crops (Sustain-able Agriculture Research and Education Program,
2010), http://sare.org.63. cf. MEGA2 IV/9, 187; Liebig, Chemis-try
in its Application to Agriculture and Physiology, 4th ed., 9596.
64. Liebig, Einleitung, 121.65. Brett Clark and John Bellamy
Foster, Ecological Imperialism and the Global Metabolic Rift:
Unequal Exchange and the Guano/Nitrates Trade, International
Journal of Comparative Sociology 50, no. 34 (2009): 31134.66.
Foster, Marxs Ecology, 163.67. After fully appropriating Liebigs
the-ory, Marxs Capital also applies it to the exhausted state of
lands in Ireland due to exporting its agricultural products to
Eng-land: If the product also diminishes rela-tively per acre, it
must not be forgotten that for a century and a half England has
indirectly exported the soil of Ireland, without even allowing its
cultivators the means for making up the constituents of the
exhausted soil. See Marx, Capital, vol. 1, 860.68. Ricardo, On the
Principles of Political Economy, and Taxation, 67; emphasis
added.69. Marx, Capital, vol. 3, 949; emphasis added.70. Marx,
Capital, vol. 3, 216.71. Marx, Capital, vol. 3, 949.72. cf. Marx
and Engels, Collected Works, vol. 34, 246.73. cf. Burkett, Marx and
Nature, chapter 11.
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