Florida State University Department of Philosophy Social Theory and Practice

Florida State University Department of Philosophy
Marx and Alienation From Nature

Author(s): Steven Vogel
Source: Social Theory and Practice, Vol. 14, No. 3, Special Issue: Marxism-Feminism: Powers
of Theory/Theories of Power (Fall 1988), pp. 367-387
Published by: Florida State University Department of Philosophy
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Marx and Alienation From Nature
It is increasingly common in contemporary discussions of science,

technology, and society, especially those influenced by environ
mentalism, to find the claim that humans today are "alienated from
nature." Typically proponents of this claim argue that the scien
tific-technological project itself expresses such an alienation, by
treating nature as an inert and passive matter to be "dominated" by
human will, and by failing to see that the complexity of the ecosys
tem places severe constraints on what can be done "to" nature
without producing ecologically dangerous consequences.
Humans, this view asserts, feel themselves to be independent of
nature, and masters of it, and believe science makes it possible to
bend nature to their will; in fact, however, they are part of nature,
themselves subject to its laws, and any act to change it potentially
rebounds back to humanity's (and nature's) own peril.
The clearest expression of our alienation, it is also claimed, lies
in the way we treat the natural environment. Rather than learning
from nature, from its complexity, its organismic and holistic
character, we treat it as "mere matter" to be manipulated for pure
ly human purposes, destroying forests and wetlands in the name
of "development," killing lakes and streams with the acid pollu
tion from modern industry, genetically engineering new species
while callously allowing the extinction of thousands of old ones,
etc. This form of environmentalism thus tends to be characterized
by deep misgivings about human interventions into nature and
natural processes, particularly large-scale technological ones; in
stead of attempting to master nature, it suggests, we ought to learn
to live in harmony with nature, recognizing our bond to it and treat
ing it with the respect and dignity its role as source of all life deser
ves.1
In this paper I wish to examine the notion of "alienation from
nature," by considering one of its intellectual roots: the account
of alienation in the work of Marx. My claim is that this account
provides a useful framework for thinking about the relation be
tween humans and nature, and about what an "alienated" relation
to nature might consist in, but at the same time that it leads to con
Copyright 1988 by Social Theory and Practice, Vol. 14, No. 3 (Fall 1988)
367
368 Social Theory and Practice
elusions very different from the ones drawn by the environmen

talist position I have just outlined. In particular, I think a con
sideration of Marx's account suggests that although contemporary
society is marked by alienation from something like nature, that
alienation is not the result of our hubristic attempt to dominate na
ture through technology, nor is it to be overcome by the decision
to refrain from large-scale interventions in natural processes, or by
the resolution to live in "harmony" with nature. Indeed, I will
argue, the position just outlined in a sense appears much more like
a symptom of our alienation than a correct account of it.
Much of my discussion of Marx's theory of alienation will be
familiar, but its relation specifically to questions about nature and
the environment has rarely been brought out.2 Marx's account
bears reconsideration precisely because its implications are indeed
so different from conclusions about the environment that are today
often taken for granted, particularly in a "leftist" or "progressive"
context. To be sure, Marx is sometimes criticized by environmen
talists for holding a purely utilitarian and "dominative" view of the
relation between humans and nature. But this criticism seems to
me at best partial and misleading, and to beg central questions;
rather than judge Marx by the standard of contemporary environ
mentalism, I would prefer to show the coherence and interest of
his position itself ~ and to suggest on the contrary the ways in
which it helps to clarify and to resolve some deep difficulties that
environmentalism faces.
Marx defines alienation in the famous section on "Estranged

Labor" in the 1844 Manuscripts, explicitly associating it with an
economic system based on private property. Alienation, he writes,
arises when
the object which labor produces - labor's product - confronts it as something,

alien, as a power independent of the producer.... The worker puts his life into
the object; but now his life no longer belongs to him but to the object... The
alienation of the worker in his product means not only that his labor becomes
an object, an external existence, but that it exists outside him, independently, as
something alien to him, and that it becomes a power on its own confronting him.
Alienation from Nature 369
It means that the life which he has conferred on the object confronts him as
something hostile and alien.3
For Marx, alienation thus has fundamentally to do with the rela

tion of humans to objects that they have produced- to objects of
labor. Under alienation these objects turn into alien and inde
pendent powers over and against humans, achieving a kind of sham
self-sufficiency and externality in which the objects seem to be
master over those who produced them. And the paradigm case of
such alienation, Marx argues, occurs under the current economic
system when the object produced by the worker is counted as ad
ding to the wealth of the capitalist. The "objectification" of the
worker's labor-the process by which that labor (and, by extension,
the worker's subjectivity or "life") is transmuted into an object,
and so made "objective"- appears, Marx writes, instead as "loss of
the object and bondage to it," as estrangement, alienation.5
The account of alienation in Marx thus directs us to the realm
of "produced objects." By making labor into the central category
of both his epistemology and his social theory, Marx draws our at
tention to the fact that most of what we call the "objective world,"
the world of objects, is in fact a world of human objects, objects
produced by humans through labor. We are alienated from this
world when we fail to recognize its humanity, when we are unable
to see it as our world, our product, and when it accordingly begins
to appear as an alien power over and against us. In the 1844
Manuscripts Marx speaks of this as an alienation of the human
from what he calls (following Feuerbach) the human "species
being":
In the practical creation of an objective world, in his work upon inorganic na

ture, man proves himself a conscious species-being....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 ¿so actively, in reality, and therefore sees him
self in a world that he has created. In tearing away from man the object of his
production, therefore, estranged labor tears from him his species-life, his real
objectivity as a member of the species, and transforms his advantage over
animals into the disadvantage that his inorganic body, nature, is taken away from
him.6
It is precisely in this failure of humans to "see themselves in the

world they have created" that the alienation consists.
In this framework "alienation from nature" seems a misnomer; it

would be more correct to speak of "alienation from the environ
ment," or from the "built environment." In the Theses on Feuer
bach and The German Ideology Marx criticizes previous
materialism (including Feuerbach's) for failing to see the material
environment as the product of concrete human activity, and hence
for falling into a simplistic naturalism in which humans appear as
merely the passive products of external circumstances. Feuerbach,
Marx writes in The German Ideology,
does not see that the sensuous world around him is not a thing given direct from
all eternity, remaining ever the same, but the product of industry and of the state
of society; and, indeed,... it is an historical product, the result of the activity of
a whole succession of generations, each standing on the shoulders of the preced
ing one.... Even the objects of the simplest "sensuous certainty" are only given
him through social development, industry and commercial intercourse. The
cherry-tree, like almost all fruit-trees, was, as is well-known, only a few cen
turies ago transplanted by commerce into our zone, and therefore only by this
action of a definite society in a definite age has it become "sensuous certainty"
for Feuerbach.7
Against this, Marx's materialism, by emphasizing labor, asks us to

look not at nature but at the transformation of nature by humans
as the clue to understanding society. "Nature is man's inorganic
body," Marx writes8; what humans do — "by nature" — is to trans
form nature, to remake it, through their labor. This is not to deny,
he writes, "the priority of external nature"; clearly nature existed
before humans. But today a nature entirely independent of human
action is scarcely any longer to be found ("except perhaps on a few
Australian coral islands of recent origin"9). Rather, it is "the na
ture which develops in human history" that is "man's real nature,"
he writes. "Industry is the actual, historical relationship of nature
... to man. If, therefore, industry is conceived as the exoteric
revelation of man's essential powers, we also gain an under
standing of the human essence of nature or the natural essence of
man." Thus "history itself is a real part of natural history," Marx
writes, "of nature developing into man [des Werdens derNatur zuv
Menschen]."10 History then is a natural process, the process of na

ture becoming humanized; and this applies above all to the history
of "industry"-that is, of technology.
Marx is writing, of course, in a specifically economic context.
It is the worker who is alienated, through the process of capitalist
production. The worker quite literally through his or her labor
produces the modern world of industry, and yet this world, argues
Marx, comes to appear to him or her as an alien and hostile power,
appears as the source of his or her oppression; indeed "the worker
becomes all the poorer the more wealth he produces, the more his
production increases in power and size....The devaluation of the
world of men is in direct proportion to the increasing value of the
world of things."11 In The German Ideology he writes that "man's
own deed [die eigne Tat des Menschen] becomes an alien power
opposed to hiim, which enslaves him instead of being controlled
[beherrscht] by him."12
In the latter work alienation is explicitly associated with the
division of labor, or more precisely with the particular form it takes
under contemporary economic conditions.1 Instead of seeing his
or her product as something that directly satisfies the human needs
of others, the worker views it merely as a means to an end ~ a
troublesome necessity requisite to obtain the money for the satis
faction of his or her own needs. Thus whereas from an external
standpoint we can see the production of the object as part of an
overall system of mutual and interdependent production, in which
the labor of all functions to satisfy the needs of all, this implicitly
social and co-operative element to the act of production is hidden
from the worker, who produces the object only because he or she
has to in order to be paid.
Marx describes this as a contradiction between the worker's
"particular" interest and the "common" interest of the society of
which he or she forms a part, a contradiction which takes the form
of alienation. Since the interdependence and mutuality implicit in
capitalist production is never explicitly recognized as such by the
producers themselves, the "common" interest appears as an alien
interest, as a power external to and separate from the individual
producers. It appears, in fact, in the form of "the market," the "laws
of supply and demand," the "invisible hand," etc., which seem to
rule over human productive activity although in fact they are rather
its result. Marx calls this a "fixation [Sichfestsetzen] of social ac
tivity," a "consolidation of what we ourselves produce into a
material power above us, growing out of our control," and goes on
to say:
The social power, i.e., the multiplied productive force that arises through the co
operation of different individuals caused by the division of labor, appears to
those individuals, since their co-operation is not voluntary but has come about
naturally [naturwuchsig], not as their own united power, but as an alien force
existing outside them, of the origin and goal of which they are ignorant, which
they thus are no longer able to control [beherrschen]}4
Until the implicit sociality of production is recognized and made

explicit, that is, production (our "own deed") will continue to ap
pear in the form of an opaque and independent social system that
humans are unable to master, and as a set of "economic laws"
operating behind their backs. Abolishing alienation is thus not a
matter of abolishing the sociality of production by abolishing the
division of labor, but rather of explicitly recognizing this sociality
by asserting conscious social control overproduction (through, for
example, the democratic planning Marx associates with com
munism).15 As long as the co-operative character of production
remains implicit, it appears naturwuchsig ~ as something that has
grown up "by nature," without any human intervention or plan
ning, and hence comes to seem an independent and non-human
power.16
In Capital and the notes that form the Grundrisse, the account
of alienation appears in a more sophisticated form. Marx's earlier
emphasis on labor as the central philosophical category reappears
in his mature economic work as the assertion of a labor theory of
value. It is central to Marx's argument that since labor is the only
source of value, it follows that capital, labor's antithesis, is simp
ly labor: "dead labor," as he calls it, or "congealed labor," the labor
of past workers "embodied" concretely not only in the capitalist's
wealth but in the machinery and the factories that serve as the en
vironment for the oppression of current workers.17 The analysis
of capital thus has the same logical structure as the earlier analysis
of alienation: the workers' labor is objectified, and its object, in
the form of capital, turns into an independent and alien force over
and against them. Further, Marx extends this to the social system
as a whole. The mysteries he discovers at the heart of phenomena
such as interest, profit, money, prices, etc., reveal them to be not
primary phenomena at all but rather the reified form in which
human productive activity appears under conditions of alienation
- when, as he writes, "a definite social relation between men... as
sumes, in their eyes, the fantastic form of a relation between
things."18
The center of Marx's analysis is of course the commodity, that
"very queer thing, abounding in metaphysical subtleties and
theological niceties."19 A commodity is first of all the product of
human labor, and this labor is the source of its value. But under
conditions of capitalist production, Marx points out, it does not ap
pear as such: rather, the value of the commodity appears as a
natural fact about it, an "objective" fact independent of human ac
tion. Marx writes that
a commodity is ... is a mysterious thing simply because in it the social charac

ter of men's own labor appears to them as an objective character of the products
of that labor, as socially natural characteristics [gesellschaftliche Natureigen
schaften] of those things and thus also because the social relation of the
producers to their collective labor appears to them instead as a social relation,
existing independently and outside them, between objects.
21
The commodity, Marx writes, is a "social hieroglyphic" in which
the truth about contemporary social relations is written, but in an
initially unreadable form. As in The German Ideology, Marx
claims that it is above all the sociality of production that is hidden
from us. Again, a relation between humans- that is, the implicit
mutuality and co-operation of our labor-here appears only in the
distorted and alienated form of a relation between things -that is,
between the prices of external objects whose source in human
labor, and thus whose connection to us, has been lost. In the
"free market" where these prices are expressed, Marx writes, our
"own social action [Bewegung] " thus "takes the form of the action
of objects [Sachen], which rule the producers instead of being ruled
by them." 3
In this analysis of the "fetishism of commodities" all the strands

of the earlier discussions of alienation are brought together. The
commodity is part of the "built environment," not a naturally oc
curring object but a product of human labor. The labor that
produces it is implicitly social-that is, co-operative-labor: it is
produced for the purpose of satisfying the needs of others. But this
sociality remains only implicit, concealed as it is by economic
structures of private property and private exchange. Thus it can
only reach expression in an alienated form, in which the human
world of objects produced by labor comes to seem an independent,
external, and "natural" world, and a power over and against the
producers. The overcoming of alienation, then, would consist in
the recognition and the explicit assertion of the sociality of labor
by the associated human community. This is why it is central to
Marx's vision of the future communist "realm of freedom" that the
anarchy and Naturwuchsigkeit of the market be replaced by a sys
tem of conscious and democratically controlled social planning of
production. Only in this way can humans regain control over their
own objects, reassert their power over that which had come to seem
alien and independent.
We can summarize,then, by saying that for Marx alienation arises

from the failure to recognize the human origin of objects that have
been produced by human activity, and that the overcoming of
alienation is for him associated with the achievement of this recog
nition. The "human origin" of the objects, further, means in par
ticular their social origin, as products of co-operative, social labor.
Thus as I have argued above Marx's account points us toward a
recognition of the sociality of the environment, of its character as
"built," consisting almost entirely of products of human labor
designed to fulfil human needs.
This seems to me a crucially important, and underappreciated,
insight-above all in discussions of "alienation from nature." The
"environment" we inhabit, the world of objects we find around us,
is an environment of objects built by humans-not "nature," if by
this is meant a world of things untouched by human activity, but

nature transformed, reworked, reshaped, humanized: plants into
clothing, trees into furniture, iron and clay into houses, petroleum
into plastics, sand into glass and microchips. As I look about me
there is not a single object in my environment (nor, I would guess,
in that of many readers) that is not in this sense literally a human
object, the objectification of human, and indeed of social, labor.
To choose a single object in the immediate environment, this
wooden paperweight, for instance, and to think of all the humans
involved in producing it — those who felled the tree, who cut the
timber, who transported the logs from the forest, who formed it
into its present shape, carved the decorations on it, polished it —
but not only these, for each of them used tools in the process, and
so there must be added to the list those who built the saws, the
trucks, the lathes, the polishing machines, and then those who built
the tools that made these in turn possible, and so on, stretching off
into the past in a geometrically increasing manner ~ is to begin to
recognize, in the image of human solidarity this potential infinity
of labor suddenly reveals, the depth of the sociality hidden in each
of the objects we find surrounding us.24
These objects indeed are, as Marx says, hieroglyphics for our
interdependence, for the sociality of our activity, for the way we
co-operatively and compulsively remake the world in our own
image. But we fail to read the message they carry. We see the ob
jects surrounding us as "mere things," as simply part of the exter
nal scenery we "naturally" find around us; indeed in general we
barely see them at all.25 We value them-if indeed we do- for their
beauty, or their usefulness, or especially their price, but not as sym
bols of our connection, or of our power.
Marx's analysis, I am suggesting, implies that the "environment"
from which we are alienated is a social environment, and that our
alienation derives from our failure to recognize its sociality. To
say that our environment is social is not merely to say that social
forces and institutions-the market, the political system, gender
roles, etc-are as "real" to us as the physical objects that surround
us; it is to point out that even those physical objects themselves are
always already the result of social labor. Just as we are alienated
from the social institutions around us when they come to appear
not as the product of human action but rather like forces of nature
--i.e, independently given and unalterable facts entirely outside of
our control-so too we are alienated from the objects around us
when they appear to us not as the result of social labor but rather
as mere "commodities" entering into mysterious relations with
each other on the basis of a seemingly natural price. In the last
analysis these aspects of the "social environment" cannot be
separated: social institutions are not distinct from physical objects
but are rather embodied in them (in bankbooks, voting booths,
price tags, wedding rings, etc.), just as the physical objects with
which we daily interact have the meanings they do only within the
context of specific social institutions. "Alienation from the en
vironment" is thus a single phenomenon, in which the products of
our action-social institutions as well as physical objects-appear as
external and independent forces whose connectedness to us has
been lost. To overcome the alienation would mean to reassert the
sociality of the environment: to see it consciously as our own, and
explicitly and consciously to exert the kind of control over it that
we already implicitly possess-to raise it, that is, from the natur
wuchsig to the truly social.
But this sense of "alienation from the environment," and this no
tion of its overcoming, are certainly not those of much contem
porary environmentalism. For Marx, I am arguing, recognizing
our connectedness to the environment means recognizing its
sociality, for the environmentalist position I began by outlining,
on the other hand, our connectedness to the environment means
rather our rootedness in nature, and the increasing sociality of the
physical environment (the result of technological development)
appears rather as a symptom of our denial of this connectedness,
and hence of our increasing alienation. Thus for this view we over
come our alienation not by explicitly asserting the humanness of
the environment, but by acknowledging and emphasizing the
naturalness of humans-by learning to live in harmony with nature
and to respect its laws instead of trying to dominate it, and above
all by limiting the extent to which we act to transform it.
Such a position uses the word "alienation" in a sense radically
different from that of Marx. What was essential to Marx's concept
of alienation, I argued above, was the notion of an object produced
by humans that comes to appear as an external and independent

force above them; here that notion has disappeared, replaced by
what seems like the opposite one-that of an object ("Nature") that
really is an external and independent force, but which has mis
takenly (and arrogantly) been viewed by us as human. By the same
token, whereas for Marx the overcoming of alienation involves
recognizing and reasserting the sociality of the object and hence
abolishing the sham externality it presents to us, for this view we
overcome alienation only by admitting the externality of the ob
ject, acquiescing in its power over us, and agreeing to live in ac
cordance with its dictates. Let me suggest some reasons why I
think this latter view is mistaken.
At first glance the whole dispute seems to turn on an ambiguity
in the word "environment." The environment of which environ
mentalism speaks is not the world of directly human objects, of the
commodities with which we surround ourselves, that I have
described above, but rather the world of nature, the pre- and extra
human natural environment that surrounds the human world. It is
indeed precisely the increasing encroachment of the "human"
world upon the "natural" one that contemporary environmentalism
wishes to warn us against. But by seeing human activity in the
world of nature as somehow an encroachment on it, or a violation
of its "naturalness," such a view seems to be curiously guilty of
just the sort of dualism it ascribes to the project of "dominating na
ture": somehow the activity of humans in transforming their en
vironment, alone of all other species, is "unnatural." Further,
such a view fails to grasp Marx's point against Feuerbach that the
cherry-trees we admire as part of "nature" are in truth the result of
earlier labor (see above, p. 5). An enormous amount of what we
naively see as "pure" nature has in fact already been the object of
human action. True "wilderness"-in the sense of land never af
fected by human activity-is extremely rare in this country; even as
"preserved" in national parks and the like (a preservation that it
self is only the result of a social decision and a social act) it presents
us not with "pure" nature but rather with something highly artifi
cial: a piece of nature that has been withdrawn from the natural
order in which human transformative activity plays such a crucial
part.
The point is not that those who admire the cherry-trees are labor
ing under an illusion, and should only admire indigenous species,
or that we ought to redouble our efforts to save whatever "pure"
nature is left. The point is that the concepts "natural" and "human"
are not mutually exclusive, as I have already argued: history, as
Marx put it, is part of natural history.27 Thus the cherry-trees are
part of nature, as are synthetic fibers, skyscrapers, and Tang ~ be
cause we are. Hence ultimately the word "environment" is not am
biguous: we live in a single environment, not two, and it is a
natural one-and so is increasingly becoming a human one as well.
Thus there is no point to preferring the "natural" to the "human"

(nor, for that matter, for the opposite preference either); the dis
tinction cannot be coherently be made, or at least cannot be made
to do the work this version of environmentalism wants it to. If we
wish to reserve the word "nature" for that part of the world that has
not yet been transformed by humans, we may certainly do so-but
only at the cost of making the claim that our technology is "un
natural" analytic. The real question isn't whether what we do "ac
cords with nature "-of course it does, and trivially so. The question
is whether we like what we have wrought. And if we find oursel
ves living in an environment of ugly shopping malls and endless
superhighways, of dangerous nuclear power plants and toxic waste
dumps, of rotting slums and polluted rivers, it is not because we
have violated nature but because our own acts remain powers over
and against us: because we have not yet exerted conscious social
control over our own activity, and so that activity remains under
the sway of Naturwuchsigkeit, of alienation.
From this point of view the emphasis in the environmentalist
position I am criticizing on nature's power over us, on its delicate
harmony and complexity, and on the dangers of attempting to
change it, I want to suggest, represents not so much an analysis as
a symptom of our alienation. In the call for reverence before
nature's mystery, in the warnings about the "limits to growth" and
the need for us to curb our technology for fear of nature's
"revenge," the world of objects surrounding us is once again as
serted to be an alien and independent power over and against us;
the world of humans is once again devalued in favor of the world
of things. To use words like "domination" or "subjugation" of na

ture, to talk of it taking "revenge" on us, etc., is to employ
categories appropriate to relations between persons as if they ap
plied to relations with things. "Nature" is not a person, and to treat
it like one, I want to argue, is precisely to reproduce the fetishism
Marx criticized as characteristic of an alienated social order — an
order in which facts about humans and human relations are false
28
ly projected onto the world of objects.
The environmentalism I am discussing talks of a reverence and
love for nature, for its "holistic" character, its complexity, its un
fathomable harmony-but its talk of nature's revenge, of the in
evitability of catastrophe in the human attempt to "use" nature for
our own ends, betrays a deeper fear of nature. The reverence it
counsels is that of an impotent and terrified mortal before a jealous
and angry God. Concepts such as that of the "ecosphere" as an in
divisible whole, of the earth as a single organism ("Gaia"), etc.,
work to reinforce the notion of nature as a mammoth, complex,
and frighteningly inhuman force that we cannot successfully
change but to which we must rather adjust ourselves. In our at
tempt to "live in harmony" with nature, it seems that we make all
the compromises; nature remains aloof, silent, stubborn-our
master. I want to suggest that this view of nature, increasingly
common over the last quarter-century, represents the projection
onto nature (onto things) of a set of facts about society (about
humans).
For it is society, it seems to me, that appears today as a complex
unity that seems to transcend both our ability to understand it and
any possibility of our changing it. In the face of mysterious and
crushing abstract forces like the "market," the "arms race," the
"global economy," etc., individual humans feel small and power
less; unable to affect such forces, we have to learn to "live in har
mony" with them, to acquiesce, that is, in their power over us. It
is that experience, I am saying, that is falsely projected onto nature
in the environmentalist views under discussion.
Individuals in this society know all too well the feeling of being
under the power of massive external forces they cannot control.
This is just the fact of alienation described by Marx, and is I think
an almost constant feature of the phenomenology of contemporary
social life. But it is crucial, as a step towards overcoming this

alienation, to see that these forces are the result of our own action,
and thus that they can be controlled, that their Naturwiichsigkeit
can be eliminated. Instead, the position I am criticizing goes in the
opposite direction, mystifying the real situation further by ascrib
ing these forces to an entirely non-human nature, and seeing any
attempt to assert control over them as anthropocentric hubris. I
have argued above that part of the solution to alienation is to recog
nize the sociality of the environment and so to dissolve its apparent
independence and externality. In contrast, this view denies its
sociality, wishes instead to reassert its independence and exter
nality-and thus, I would argue, it partakes in, rather than working
against, dominant illusions. It hypostasizes the ruling (and oppres
sive) social powers into a divine and unchangeable Nature
("Gaia"), and then dolefully warns us against attempting to fight it
—thus reinforcing, on a deep level, the very structures of oppres
sion to which it believes itself opposed. Overcoming alienation
requires increasing humans' faith in their own ability to change
their own conditions, not criticizing it as hubris.
I have no wish to defend contemporary technology, nor to deny
the threat it represents. On the contrary, I think environmentalism
is quite correct to point to the real dangers posed to us by the tech
nologies we employ today, and by the thoughtless, short-sighted,
and unplanncd-naturwiihsigl- ways in which they are introduced.
The dangers of pollution, acid rain, soil erosion, ozone depletion,
radioactive waste, etc.-and above all those of thermonuclear war
are ominous and profound; unchecked, the development of con
temporary technology seems to be leading us towards an
ecological catastrophe that might well mean the end of human life,
or even of life itself, on earth.
But it is precisely contemporary technology that requires such
a critique, and not technology as such. Contemporary technology
takes place under the sign of alienation (in Marx's sense): it is a
social product but appears like an autonomous force, responding
to the imperatives of the market, or the balance of power, in ways
we feel incapable of affecting. It is not the social character of our
interventions in nature that deserves criticism but rather their very
Naturwuchsigkeit -the fact that they have not been sufficiently so
cialized, that there exists no means of exerting over them

democratic social control. Only when we find a way to assert that
control, and so end our own alienation, will it be possible to begin
to work for a technology that truly solves human problems instead
of being an alien and autonomous force threatening to destroy us.
We are active participants in nature, which is to say we make
our environment human by remaking nature. We change it through
our labor in accordance with our needs and desires, and at the level
of skill our knowledge and experience permits. Whether we do so
well or poorly depends on the one hand on the current state of our
understanding of nature and our skill at transforming it. But on
the other hand (and much more importantly today, when our tech
nical expertise has far surpassed the rationality of our social arran
gements) it depends on our ability to articulate and to justify to
ourselves socially what our needs and desires really are, and to
determine rationally and democratically what we wish to do (and
are willing to do, and to risk) to satisfy them. To the extent that
we have not done this, and remain subject to a social system we
do not know how to control, our technology will inevitably fail us.
The solution thus is not to abolish technology, or the attempt to
remake nature, but to establish democratic mechanisms of social
29
decision-making based on rational discourse about norms.
Two concepts have been central in the preceding discussion,

"humanization" and "recognition." I have argued that a certain
strain in environmentalism arrives at a mistaken view of alienation
from nature by failing to see that it is part of what it is to be human
to produce a world of human (social) objects-to humanize nature.
Alienation occurs not when we humanize nature but when we fail
to recognize that that is what we are doing: when our act becomes
an alien power over and against us. Humanization is thus constant,
implicit in the use of tools from the species' beginning: but without
recognition, the conscious assertion by society of its control over
its own production, the humanization process occurs in a
naturwüchsig manner, and becomes an external and independent
force (becomes like nature),and so only appears in an alienated

form.
The end of alienation means making explicitly true (true "for
us") what is now only true "in itself - producing a world of ob
jects whose sociality is transparent, the result of conscious social
decisions and co-operative social acts. In the 1844 Manuscripts
Marx writes that "man does not lose himself in his object"-that is,
avoids alienation
only when the object becomes for him a human object or an objective human
[menschlicher Gegenstand oder gegenstandlicher Mensch], This is possible
only by the object becoming for him a social object [gesellschaftlicher
Gegenstand] and he himself becoming a social being, just as society becomes
a being for him in this object.... It is only by objective reality becoming
everywhere for humans in society the reality of essential human powers, human
reality... that all objects become for him the objectification of himself, become
objects which confirm and realize his individuality, become his objects.30
"Recognition" here does not denote merely a passive acknow

ledgment, as if alienation could be overcome simply by a change
in attitude. To say we recognize the humanness of our products is
at the same time to say we begin to produce different products, and
in the process become different ourselves. A non-alienated rela
tion to the world would require a change in our activity in the
world: a change in technology that cannot be separated from chan
ges in the way that technology is organized, or in the social order
within which it is embedded. But it also means a change in us: a
truly social world, a world of objects in which we see ourselves
and our projects directly reflected, both requires and in turn helps
to produce truly social humans. Thus the remaking of the world
is at the same time a remaking of humanity.
Marx writes that "the senses of the social man differ from that
of the non-social man," and adds that it is only through the objec
tive development of humanity's essential powers-that is, through
their expression in objects-that such truly social or human senses
come into being. Indeed, he continues, this applies not merely to
the ordinary senses but more broadly, to the "practical senses (will,
love, etc.)," to all human relations to the world. "In a word, human
sense, the humanity of the senses, comes to be by virtue of its ob
ject — humanized nature.... The objectification of the human es

sence, both in its theoretical and practical aspects, is required to
make humanity's sense human [die Sinne des Menschen
menschlich zu machen]."31
There is thus a complex dialectic at work here, in which our acts
to "humanize" nature, once they are recognized for what they are,
lose their alienated and naturwuchsige form, and so produce a new
relation to nature, a new kind of humanization. This complexity
is not sufficiently captured by the simplistic assimilation of all acts
of humanization to alienated attempts at the "domination of na
ture." Such an assimilation seems to make a subtle version of the
mistake for which Marx criticized Hegel-confusing objectification
with alienation, that is to say, seeing the process of actively ex
pressing one's humanity in the objective world as inevitably in
volving a loss of self and a separation from the object. The
(justified) rejection of the wasteful and dangerous ways we misuse
the environment today leads such a position to counsel a kind of
passive "letting nature be," because it is unable to imagine any ac
tive human relation to the environment that is not one of "exploita
tion" and destructive misuse. Thus the current relation to the
external world (one which takes place under alienation) appears as
the only possible one, and all "humanization" of the environment
appears as "domination" of it.
For Marx, on the other hand, the end of alienation means a new
kind of humanization, a new relation to the world of objects:
The eye has become a human eye, just as its object has become a social, human
object, made by humans for humans. The senses ... relate themselves to the
thing [Sache] for the sake of the thing, but the thing itself is an objective human
relation to itself and to humans.... Need or enjoyment have thus lost their egotis
tical nature, and nature has lost its mere utility [Nutzlichkeiû by use becoming
human use [menschlichen Nutzen]?2
To see "use" only as exploitative, egotistical use, and to talk of all

humanization as dominative, is to fail to see that it might be pos
sible to "relate to the thing for the sake of the thing" while still
recognizing the thing as a human object, as an expression of a
human relation. To see the environment as both already human
and as potentially further humanizable is not necessarily to see it
as unimportant, as "mere matter" to be manipulated, but rather per

haps to cherish it as an objective expression of our connection, of
our own objectivity. It is thus hard to understand why such a view
is criticized as an anthropocentric hubris that will lead to the
environment's destruction. It would seem much more likely to
lead to an increased respect for the environment -not the awe-filled
respect of a helpless mortal before an omnipotent divinity, to be
sure, but the self-respect of an autonomous and rational com
munity, conscious both of its own achievement and its own respon
sibility.
Our problem today is not with nature so much as it is with a set
of social arrangements that prevent humans from recognizing tech
nology as their project, and so from changing it to satisfy their
needs. Ruled by Naturwuchsigkeit, our technology has become a
power outside our control, threatening in the near future to destroy
us. But the solution to this-to our alienation from our environ
ment, our failure to see it as ours- is then not to abdicate the human
project of shaping nature for our own needs, but rather to bring it
under democratic social control; it is not to set up "Nature" or
"Gaia," as too much contemporary talk about nature and technol
ogy does, as yet another non-human power independent of us we
dare not change, but rather to recall humans to their own power,
their own ability to change the world and to decide how they want
to live. The point, that is, is not to dominate nature but to abolish
Naturwuchsigkeit, the power uncomprehended social acts have
over humans.
Notes
1. This account is particularly associated with what has come to be called the
"deep ecology" movement, but can be found elsewhere as well, especially in
more popular discussions of environmental issues. It has also been a com
mon theme in certain feminist discussions of science and technology. For
some examples, see, for example, William Devall and George Sessions, eds.,
Deep Ecology, (Salt Lake City: Peregrine Smith Books, 1984), Arne Naess,
"The Shallow and the Deep, Long-Range Ecology Movement," Inquiry 16
(1973): 95 - 100, Theodore Roszak, Where the Wasteland Ends (London:
Faber, 1973), Murray Bookchin, The Ecology of Freedom (Palo Alto:
Cheshire Books, 1982), Fritjof Capra, The Turning Point (New York: Simon
and Schuster, 1982), Jeremy Rifkin, Algeny (New York: Penguin, 1983),
Susan Griffin, Woman and Nature (New York: Harper and Row, 1978),
Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature (New York: Harper and Row,
1980). Note that I am certainly not claiming that all contemporary environ
mentalism argues in this manner.
2. Among the works that do touch this subject, see Alfred Schmidt, The Con
cept of Nature in Marx (London: NLB, 1973); Georg Lukács, History and
Class Consciousness (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1972); Jürgen Haber
mas, Knowledge and Human Interests (Boston: Beacon Press, 1969); Louis
Dupré, The_Philosophical Foundations of Marxism (New York: Harcourt,
Brace, 1966); and Andrew Fccnbcrg, Lukács, Marx, and the Sources of Criti
cal Theory (Totowa, NJ.: Rowman and Littlefield, 1981).
3. Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Collected Works, vol. 3 (New York: Inter
national Publishers, 1975), p. 272. I will refer to the Collected Works in what
follows as MECW.
4. MECW 3, p. 278.
5. MECW 3, p. 272.
6. MECW 3, 276-77(translation somewhat altered). The German version of
the Manuscripts is contained in Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Werke, Er
ganzungsband (Berlin: Dietz Verlag, 1977), which I will refer to henceforth
as Manuskripte-, the reference here is on pp. 516-17.
7. MECW 5 (New York: International Publishers, 1976), p. 39. See also p. 40:
"So much is this activity, this unceasing sensuous labor and creation, this
production, the foundation of the whole sensuous world as it now exists that,
were it interrupted for only a year, Feuerbach would not only find an enor
mous change in the natural world, but would very soon find that the whole
world of man and his own perceptive faculty, nay his own existence, were
missing."
8. MECW 3, p. 276.
9. MECW 5, p. 40.
10. MECW 3, pp. 303 - 304 (Manuskripte, pp. 543 - 44).
11. MECW 3, pp. 271-72.
12. MECW 5, p. 47. See Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Die Deutsche
Idéologie (Berlin: Dietz Verlag, 1953), p. 29.
13. See MECW 5, pp. 46 - 54.
14. MECW 5, pp. 47 - 48 (translation slightly altered). See Die Deutsche
Idéologie, p. 31.
15. See, for instance, MECW 5, p. 81: "Communism differs from all previous
movements in that it... for the first time consciously treats all naturally
evolved [naturwiichsigen] premises as the creations of hitherto existing
humans, strips them of their natural character [Naturwiichsigkeit], and sub
jects them to the power of the united individuals.... The conditions which
capitalism creates are precisely the true basis for rendering it impossible
that any conditions should exist independently of individuals, insofar as
these conditions are ... only a product of the preceding intercourse of in
dividuals." (translation altered; s te, Die Deutsche Idéologie, p. 71.)
16. The concept oiNaturwuchsigkeit is of central importance to Marx's analysis
of alienation from the environment. It is unfortunate that there is no good
English equivalent for it:: the word "naturwiichsig" is typically translated
as "natural," which fails to capture the difference between it and "natur

lich." See Jeremy J. Shapiro, "The Slime of History" in John O'Neill, ed.,
On Critical Theory (New York: Seabury Press, 1976), pp. 145 -63.
17. See Karl Marx, Grundrisse (New York: Vintage Books, 1973), pp. 453 - 54.
18. Karl Marx, Capital, vol. 1 (New York: Modern Library, n.d.), p. 83.
19. Capital, p. 81.
20. Capital, p. 83, translation altered. See Karl Marx, Das Kapital, Bd. 1
(Frankfurt: Verlag Marxistische Blatter, 1976), p. 86.
21. Capital, p. 85.
22. See Grundrisse, pp. 156 - 57.
23. Capital, p. 86 (Das Kapital, p. 89.) See also p. 84 (Das Kapital, p. 87),
where Marx talks oxymoronically of "material [sachliche] relations be
tween persons and social relations between things [Sachen]."
24. John Locke, in the course of presenting his own version of the labor theory
of value in the Second Treatise of Civil Government, writes (paragraph
43):"it is not barely the plough-man's pains, the reaper's and thresher's toil,
and the baker's sweat, is to be counted into the bread we eat; the labor of
those who broke the oxen, who digged and wrought the iron and stones,
who felled and framed the timber employed about the plough, mill oven,
or any other utensils, which are a vast number, requisite to this corn, from
its being feed to be sown to its being made bread, must all be charged on
the account of labor, and received as an effect of that.... It would be a
strange catalogue of things, that industry provided and made use of, about
every loaf of bread, before it came to our use, if we could trace them; iron,
wood, leather, bark, timber, stone, bricks, coals, lime, cloth, dying drugs,
pitch, tar, masts, ropes, and all the materials made use of in the ship, that
brought any of the commodities made use of by any of the workmen, to any
part of the work; all which it would be almost impossible, at least too long,
to reckon up."
25. It is interesting to notice, for instance, that the tables philosophy professors
point to in introductory courses as part of discussions of Cartesian doubt,
or the chairs we kick as refutations of Berkeleian idealism (examples, sup
posedly, of those independent and external objects whose existence we need
to assure ourselves of) are always built objects, human objects, social ob
jects - and so, I would argue, in truth are objects whose epistemological
status is a lot more complicated, and a lot closer to that of "language" or
"morality" or other social institutions whose analysis is reserved for upper
level seminars, than we generally admit.
26. See on this point Richard Watson, "A Critique of Anti-Anthropocentric
Biocentrism," Environmental Ethics 5 (1983); 245 - 56.
27. See p.46 above.
28. Indeed, "Nature" is not even a thing — it is an abstraction; to treat individual
entities and their relations as though they were merely expressions of "Na
ture" conceived of as an individual is already to fetishize it in the manner
of idealist metaphysics. Marx makes this point in the highly interesting
"Sozialistische Bausteine" section of volume 2 of The German Ideology.
See MECW 5, pp. 470 - 83, especially pp. 473 - 74.
29. This point, of course, is central to Habermas's argument against Marcuse on

the "ideological" nature of technology. See Habermas's Toward A Ration
al Society (Boston: Beacon Press, 1970), chapters 4 - 6.
30. MECW 3, p. 301 (translation altered). See Manuskripte, p. 541.
31. MECW 3, pp. 301-02 (translation altered). See Manuskripte, pp. 541-42.
32. MECW 3, p. 300 (translation altered). See Manuskripte, p. 540. This is the
same kind of point Marx makes at MECW 3, p. 299, where he writes that
the Aufhebung "of private property- i.e., the sensual appropriation for and
by humans of the human essence and of human life, of objective humanity,
of human works - should not be conceived in the sense of immediate, one
sided enjoyment [Genuss], merely in the sense of possessing, of having."
(Transation altered; see Manuskripte, p. 539.)
Steven Vogel
Department of Philosophy
Denison University

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Florida State University Department of Philosophy

Marx and Alienation From Nature

Florida State University Department of Philosophy is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize,

It is increasingly common in contemporary discussions of science,

elusions very different from the ones drawn by the environmen

Marx defines alienation in the famous section on "Estranged

the object which labor produces - labor's product - confronts it as something,

For Marx, alienation thus has fundamentally to do with the rela

In the practical creation of an objective world, in his work upon inorganic na

It is precisely in this failure of humans to "see themselves in the

In this framework "alienation from nature" seems a misnomer; it

Against this, Marx's materialism, by emphasizing labor, asks us to

Menschen]."10 History then is a natural process, the process of na

Until the implicit sociality of production is recognized and made

a commodity is ... is a mysterious thing simply because in it the social charac

In this analysis of the "fetishism of commodities" all the strands

We can summarize,then, by saying that for Marx alienation arises

this is meant a world of things untouched by human activity, but

by humans that comes to appear as an external and independent

Thus there is no point to preferring the "natural" to the "human"

of things. To use words like "domination" or "subjugation" of na

social life. But it is crucial, as a step towards overcoming this

cialized, that there exists no means of exerting over them

Two concepts have been central in the preceding discussion,

force (becomes like nature),and so only appears in an alienated

"Recognition" here does not denote merely a passive acknow

ject — humanized nature.... The objectification of the human es

To see "use" only as exploitative, egotistical use, and to talk of all

as unimportant, as "mere matter" to be manipulated, but rather per

as "natural," which fails to capture the difference between it and "natur

29. This point, of course, is central to Habermas's argument against Marcuse on

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