Capital, fictions, and ecology

Capital, ficciones y ecología

Slavoj Žižek
Co-Director at the International Center for
Humanities, Birkbeck College, University of London.
Orcid: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4672-6942

DOI: https://doi.org/10.15366/bp2023.32.001
Bajo Palabra. II Época. Nº32. Pgs: 19-36
Recibido: 18/11/2021
Aprobado: 20/06/2022

Abstract Resumen

Marx’s critique of political economy La crítica de la economía política de

describes the expanded reproduction Marx describe la reproducción amplia-
of the capital as the basic reality of our da del capital como la realidad básica de
societies, and it may seem that Marx ig- nuestras sociedades, y puede parecer que
nores two main externalities of the social Marx ignora dos externalidades principa-
reproduction of capital, the domain of les de la reproducción social del capital,
symbolic fictions and nature, the pre- el dominio de las ficciones simbólicas y la
supposed habitat of every social activity. naturaleza, el hábitat supuesto de toda ac-
This impression is wrong. Marx’s Capi- tividad social. Esta impresión es errónea.
tal discovers fiction in the very heart of El Capital de Marx descubre la ficción en
the circulation of capital: what he calls el corazón mismo de la circulación del
“commodity fetishism” is a symbolic capital: lo que él llama “fetichismo de la
fiction which is not just an ideology - it mercancía” es una ficción simbólica que
structures the very social reality of the ca- no es sólo una ideología, sino que estruc-
pitalist process. Plus ecology was in the tura la propia realidad social del proceso
very center of Marx’s preoccupation in capitalista. Además, la ecología estuvo en
the last decade of his life: he clearly saw el centro de las preocupaciones de Marx
how the expanded capitalist production en la última década de su vida: vio clara-
leads to a rift between society and nature, mente cómo la expansión de la produc-
a rift which threatens the very survival of ción capitalista conduce a una ruptura
human species. For Marx already, socia- entre la sociedad y la naturaleza, una rup-
lism was eco-socialism. tura que amenaza la propia supervivencia
de la especie humana. Para Marx, el so-
cialismo era ya un ecosocialismo.

Keywords: Political Economy; Marx; Palabras clave: Economía política;

Capital; Ecology; Ideology. Marx; Capital; Ecología; Ideología..

20 —
T
he basic implicit premise of Marx’s Capital is that Hegel is paradoxically not
idealist enough. What Marx demonstrated in his Capital is how the self-re-
production of capital obeys the logic of the Hegelian dialectical process of
a substance-subject which retroactively posits its own presuppositions. However,
Hegel himself missed this dimension—his notion of industrial revolution was the
Adam Smith–type manufacture where the work process is still that of combined
individuals using tools, not yet the factory in which the machinery sets the rhythm
and individual workers are de facto reduced to organs serving the machinery, to its
appendices. This is why Hegel could not yet imagine the way abstraction rules in
developed capitalism: this abstraction is not only in our (financial speculator’s) mis-
perception of social reality, it is “real” in the precise sense of determining the struc-
ture of the very material social processes: the fate of whole strata of population and
sometimes of whole countries can be decided by the “solipsistic” speculative dance
of capital, which pursues its goal of profitability in a blessed indifference to how
its movement will affect social reality. Therein resides the fundamental systemic
violence of capitalism, much more uncanny than the direct precapitalist socio-ideo-
logical violence: this violence is no longer attributable to concrete individuals and
their “evil” intentions, but purely “objective,” systemic, anonymous.
But does this mean that Marx was able to discern the abstraction that mediates
the self-movement of the capital? Things are here much more ambiguous than it
may appear. While he clearly saw that capital self-reproduces itself like a Hege-
lian notion, i.e., that Hegel’s dialectical self-mediation of a notion is a speculati-
ve-mystified expression of the self-reproduction of the capital, he ultimately tends
to reduce this speculative movement to the ideological inversion of the actual life.
The symptom of this reduction is the rhetorical figure “instead of ” to which Marx
regularly resorts, especially in his youthful texts. His implicit (and sometimes ex-
plicit) line of reasoning begins with “instead of…” (which stands for the alleged
“normal” state of things), and then they goes on to describe the alienated inversion
of this “normal” state: instead of being the realization of the worker, labor appears
as the loss of his realization; instead of appearing as what it is, the appropriation
of the object in through labor appears as its estrangement; instead of possessing
what he produces, the more the worker produces the less he possesses; instead of
civilizing himself through producing civilized objects, the more civilized his object,
the more barbarous becomes the worker; etc., etc. The implication of this figure is

— 21
that the revolution should somehow return things to normal: labour should be the
realization of the worker who should civilize himself through work, etc. – and we
should question precisely this restoration of normality, as does Marx himself in his
late work. Even when the mature Marx returns to this figure from time to time, he
gives it a specific spin, as in the following passage from Capital:

“This inversion (Verkehrung) by which the sensibly-concrete counts only as the form of
appearance of the abstractly general and not, on the contrary, the abstractly general as pro-
perty of the concrete, characterizes the expression of value. At the same time, it makes un-
derstanding it difficult. If I say: Roman Law and German Law are both laws, that is obvious.
But if I say: Law (Das Recht), this abstraction (Abstraktum) realizes itself in Roman Law and
in German Law, in these concrete laws, the interconnection becoming mystical.” 1

In this case, however, one should be very careful: Marx is not simply criticizing
the “inversion” that characterizes Hegelian idealism (in the style of his youthful
writings, especially German Ideology) – his point is not that, while “effectively” Ro-
man Law and German Law are two kinds of law, in the idealist dialectics, the Law
itself is the active agent – the subject of the entire process – which “realizes itself ”
in Roman Law and German Law; Marx’s thesis is not only that this “inversion” cha-
racterizes capitalist social reality itself but above all that both positions - the alienated
inversion as well as the presupposed “normal” state of things - belong to the space of
ideological mystification. That is to say, the “normal” character of the state of things
in which Roman Law and German Law are both laws (i.e., in which a worker
possesses what he produces, in which the more powerful labor becomes, the more
powerful becomes the worker, in which the more civilized his object, the more
civilized becomes the worker, etc.) is effectively the everyday form of appearance of
the alienated society, the «normal» form of appearance of its speculatve truth. The
desire to fully actualize this «normal» state is therefore ideology at its purest and
cannot but end in a catastrophe.
What makes this figure of «instead of» really interesting is that it should be put
into a series with two other similar figures. When the mature Marx analyzes the
figure of hoarder, he resorts to a similar rhetorical reversal, but with an added cas-
trative dimension:

“Our hoarder is a martyr to exchange-value, a holy ascetic seated at the top of a metal
column. He cares for wealth only in its social form, and accordingly he hides it away from
society. He wants commodities in a form in which they can always circulate and he therefore
withdraws them from circulation. He adores exchange-value and he consequently refrains

1
 Quoted from http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch04.htm.

22 —
 from exchange. The liquid form of wealth and its petrification, the elixir of life and the
philosophers’ stone are wildly mixed together like an alchemist’s apparitions. His imaginary
boundless thirst for enjoyment causes him to renounce all enjoyment. Because he desires to
satisfy all social requirements, he scarcely satisfies the most urgent physical wants.” 2

Or, as Marx puts it in Theories of Surplus-Value, “the industrial capitalist becomes

more or less unable to fulfill his function as soon as he personifies the enjoyment
of wealth, as soon as he wants the accumulation of pleasures instead of the pleasure
of accumulation.” 3 Here Marx enacts a Hegelian reversal: when, instead of accu-
mulation of pleasures, we get the pleasure of accumulation, this second pleasure
becomes jouissance on behalf of its castrative dimension described by Marx (the
capitalist’s “imaginary boundless thirst for enjoyment causes him to renounce all
enjoyment”) – it is not just a symmetrical reversal since Marx brings out the cas-
trative dimension of this reversal. (Freud similarly talks about repression of desire
turns into a desire of repression, talking about pleasure turning into pleasure of
talking…) So if the first “instead of ” reversal is imaginary (the second “abnormal”
version the symmetrical reversal, the mirror-image, of the first “normal” one), the
second reversal is symbolic due to the castration implied by universalization. Recall
also Marx’s analysis of the Party of Order which took power when the 1848 revolu-
tionary élan in France dwindled: the secret of its existence was

“the coalition of Orléanists and Legitimists into one party, disclosed. The bourgeois class
fell apart into two big factions which alternately — the big landed proprietors under the
restored monarchy and the finance aristocracy and the industrial bourgeoisie under the July
Monarchy — had maintained a monopoly of power. Bourbon was the royal name for the
predominant influence of the interests of the one faction, Orléans the royal name for the pre-
dominant influence of the interests of the other faction — the nameless realm of the republic
was the only one in which both factions could maintain with equal power the common class
interest without giving up their mutual rivalry.” 4

The parliamentary deputees of the Party of Order perceived their republicanism

as a mockery: in parliamentary debates, they all the time generated royalist slips
of tongue and ridiculed the Republic to let it be known that their true aim was
to restore the kingdom. What they were not aware of is that they themselves were
duped as to the true social impact of their rule. What they were effectively doing

2
 Karl Marx, A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, New York: International Publishers 1970, p. 134.
3
 Karl Marx, Theories of Surplus-Value, Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1963 pg. 282-283.
4
 Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Selected Works, Volume 1, Moscow: Progress Publishers 1969, p. 83.

— 23
was to establish the conditions of bourgeois republican order that they despised
so much (by for instance guaranteeing the safety of private property). So it is not
that they were royalists who were just wearing a republican mask: although they
experienced themselves as such, it was their very “inner” royalist conviction which
was the deceptive front masking their true social role. In short, far from being the
hidden truth of their public republicanism, their sincere royalism was the fantas-
matic support of their actual republicanism – it was what provided the passion to
their activity. Is it not the case, then, that the deputies of the Party of Order were
also feigning to feign to be republicans, to be what they really were? Such double
feigning is for Lacan what characterizes the symbolic dimension.
There is yet another, third, figure of “instead of ” which is found in Marx’s Poverty
of Philosophy (1847), his critical analysis of Proudhon’s “philosophy of poverty” (so a
reversal is already in the title itself ): “Instead of the ordinary individual with his or-
dinary manner of speaking and thinking we have nothing but this ordinary manner
in itself – without the individual.” 5 Although this passage is a rather cheap stab at
(Proudhon and) Hegel, it fits Pippin’s description of what Hegel is doing in his logic:
Hegel deploys the basic forms of argumentative thinking in its independence of who
is thinking – whenever and wherever there is thinking, these forms are operative:

“if someone simply persists in asking what we were asking above: ‘But where is all this
thinking and explaining happening?’ all one can reply is ‘wherever there is thinking.’ This is
not to say that there is not always a thinker or subject of thought; it is to say that thought
that can be truth-bearing is constituted by what is necessary for truth-bearing, by any being
of whatever sort capable of objective (possible true or false) judgment.” 6

In this sense, Hegel’s logic is the logic of the Real: precisely where it appears to
be at its most idealist (analyzing pure thinking in its independence of any positive
bearer of thinking, i.e., ignoring the material and psychic conditions of thinking,
ignoring what Marx always adds: “But thinking is actually always an activity per-
formed by individuals who live, interact and produce in a material social reality,
it is as aspect of human social practice!”), Hegel’s logic touches the Real. And, as
Johnston amply demonstrates, does Marx not do the same in his analysis of the
capital’s drive? Capitalism’s

“fundamental driving force, the unshakable thirst for surplus-value (i.e., M-C-M´ as the
core logic of capital), is a strange selfless greed. This motivating structural dynamic is an
acephalous and anonymous prosthetic drive, an impersonal template implanted into those

5
 Quoted from https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/download/pdf/Poverty-Philosophy.pdf.d
6
 https://iai.tv/articles/the-return-of-metaphysics-hegel-vs-kant-auid-2032?_auid=2020.

24 —
 subjected to capitalism. /…/ This Wiederholungszwang of capital’s self-valorization through
the boundless accumulation of quantified surplus-value is an acephalous kinetic configuration
disregarding and overriding any and every other interest. The latter include even the (self-)
interests of those human beings who, as capitalists, are this drive’s personifications/bearers.” 7

So if “the only subject who truly enjoys capitalism is anonymous Capital itself as
the idiotic, acephalous repetition of M-C-M´, as a drive without a driver,” does this
description not directly echo Lacan’s description of drive as idiotic acephalous push?
Lacan is, of course, well aware that drive is always related to individual human and
social bodies – the same as Hegel who is well aware that thinking appears, comes
to exist “for itself,” only in bodily human beings (he develops how this happens in
his “Anthropology” at the beginning of the philosophy of Spirit, the third part of
Encyclopaedia). But what Marx also knows is that, in order to grasp how capitalism
functions, one has to describe it “counterfactually” as the Real of an acephalous me-
chanism. This Real is, of course, purely virtual, with no actual existence in itself – but
it has to be presupposed by individuals as an In-itself if capitalism is to function.
No wonder, then, that there are in Marx’s Capital long passages which deal with
the necessary role of fiction in capitalist reproduction, from commodity fetishism
as a fiction which is part of social reality itself to the topic of fictitious capital in-
troduced in Capital II and elaborated in Capital III. The three volumes of Capital
reproduce the triad of the universal, the particular, and the individual: Capital I
articulates the abstract-universal matrix (concept) of capital; Capital II shifts to
particularity, to the actual life of capital in all its contingent complexity; Capital III
deploys the individuality of the total process of capital. In the last years, the most
productive studies of Marx’s critique of political economy focused on Capital II –
why? In a letter sent to Engels on 30 April 1868 Marx wrote:

“In Book 1 [...] we content ourselves with the assumption that if in the self-expansion
process £100 becomes £110, the latter will find already in existence in the market the elements
into which it will change once more. But now we investigate the conditions under which
these elements are found at hand, namely the social intertwining of the different capitals, of
the component parts of capital and of revenue (= s)”. 8

Two features are crucial here, which are the two sides of the same coin. On
the one hand, Marx passes from the pure notional structure of capital’s reproduc-
tion (described in volume I) to reality in which the capital’s reproduction involves

7
 Quoted from Adrian Johnston’s monumental Infinite Greed (manuscript).
8
 Quoted from Letter to Friedrich Engels, April 30, 1868 - Marxists-en (wikirouge.net).

— 25
temporal gaps, dead time, etc. There are dead times that interrupt smooth repro-
duction, and the ultimate cause of these dead times is that we are not dealing
with a single reproductive cycle but with an intertwinement of multiple circles of
reproduction which are never fully coordinated. These dead periods are not just
an empirical complication but an immanent necessity, they are necessary for the
reproduction, they complicate the actual life of capital. 9 On the other hand, fiction
intervenes here (in the guise of fictitious capital whose notion is further elaborated
in volume III of Capital); fiction is needed to overcome the destructive potential of
complications, delays, dead periods, so that when we pass from pure logical matrix
to actual life, to reality, fiction has to intervene.
The volume II of Capital focuses on the problem of realising surplus value, dis-
rupted first and foremost by time and distance. As Marx put it, during its circula-
tion time, capital does not function as productive capital, and therefore produces
neither commodities nor surplus-value: capital’s circulation generally restricts its
production time, and hence its valorisation process. This is why industry is increa-
singly clustered outside of urban centres close to motorways and airports in order
to streamline circulation.
Another implication is the growing role for a credit system that enables produc-
tion to continue throughout the circulation process. Credit can be used to bridge
the gap in situations where surplus value has not yet been realised and under con-
ditions where capitalists expect future consumption of their goods and services.
This may seem like rather a banal point, but it has real consequences for how the
economy functions, illuminating a systemic reliance on fictitious capital (although
Marx introduced this term later, in Capital, Volume III). Money values backed by
yet unproduced or sold goods and services are thus the essential lifeblood of capita-
lism, rather than an eccentric or irregular consequence of an otherwise self-reliant
system: in order to function as capital, money must circulate, it must again employ
labour-power and again realise itself in expanded value. Let’s take an industrialist
who has enough money in his bank account so that he can retire and live of inte-
rests: the bank must loan his capital to another industrialist. The industrialist who
has borrowed the money must service the loan, i.e., pay interest, out of the profits
he makes. The sum of money on the market is thus redoubled: the retired capita-
list still owns his money, and the other capitalist also disposed with the money he
borrowed. But as the class of speculators, bankers, brokers, financiers, and so on,

9
 Incidentally, the same holds for market competition: a participant in it never disposes of complete data about
supply and demand which would enable him/her to make the optimal decision, and this incompleteness (the
fact that individuals are compelled to decide without full information) is not just an empirical complication, it
is (to put it in Hegelese) part of the very notion of market competition.

26 —
grows, as is inevitably the case wherever the mass of capital in a country reaches a
sufficient scale, the bank finds that it is able to loan out far more than it has depo-
sited in its vaults; speculators can sell products that they do not possess, “the right
kind of person” is good for credit even when they have nothing. Note how trust,
i.e., interpersonal relations, re-enters the scene here, at the level of what appear to
be the utmost impersonal financial speculations: the ability of the bank to make
unsecured loans is dependent on “confidence”:

“In this way, the money form produces not only impersonal relations of domination
but at the same time produces interpersonal forms of domination as fictitious capital exists
as a form of appearance of value not on the basis of the substance of abstract labour that
produces the subject-object inversion, but through interpersonal forms of domination that
promise future production of value as substance. / Therefore, there is a different kind of sub-
jection working on the bearers of fictitious capital which is on the basis of an interpersonal
relation forged through a contract.” 10

Thus one and the same unit of productive capital may have to support not just
the one retired industrialist who deposited his savings with the bank, but multiple
claims on one and the same capital. If the bank accepts one million from our re-
tiree, but loans out ten millions, each of those ten millions has equal claim to that
same value - this is how ficitious capital comes about. At times of expansion and
boom, the mass of fictitious capital grows rapidly; when the period of contraction
arrives, the bank finds itself under pressure and calls in its loans, defaults occur,
bankruptcies, closures, share prices fall, and things fall back to reality – fictitious
value is wiped out. This brings us to a formal definition of fictitious capital: it is that
proportion of capital which cannot be simultaneously converted into existing use-values.
It is an invention which is absolutely necessary for the growth of real capital, it is
a fiction which constitutes the symbol of confidence in the future. Or, as Rebecca
Carson resumes this entire movement:

“non-capitalist variables become formally subsumed through circulation, making them

necessary for the reproduction of capital, yet they are variables nonetheless necessarily exte-
rior, described by Marx as ‘interruptions’ within the movement of capital.” 11

What this means in socio-economic terms is that we should unconditionally

avoid any notion of Communism as an order in which fictions no longer reign over

10
  htps://www.academia.edu/38109734/The_Logic_of_Capital._Interview_with_Chris_Arthur
11
 Rebecca Carson, “Time and Schemas of Reproduction” (manuscript).

— 27
actual life, i.e., in which we return to actual life: as Hardt and Negri repeatedly
insisted, there is an unexpected emancipatory potential in the craziest speculations
with fictive capital. Since valorization of the working force is the key aspect of
capitalist reproduction, we should never forget that in the sphere of fictitious ca-
pital there is no valorization, no market exchange of commodities and no labour
that produces new value – and because in a capitalist society personal freedom is
grounded in the “free” exchange of commodities, inclusive of the labour power as
a commodity, the sphere of fictitious capital no longer demands personal freedom
and autonomy: direct interpersonal relations of subordination and domination re-
turn in it. It may appear that this reasoning is too formal, but one can elaborate
this in a more precise way: fictitious capital involves debt, and being indebted limits
personal freedom; for the workers, debt is involved in the (re)production of their
work force itself, and this debt limits their freedom to bargain for a work contract.
So where is here any emancipatory potential? Elon Musk proposed a mega-al-
gorithm program that would manage our investments better than any stockbroker
company, allowing ordinary people to invest small sums under equal conditions
as billionaires – the idea is that, when this program is freely available, it will lead
to a more fair distribution of wealth… Although the idea is problematic and am-
biguous, it does indicate the ultimate nonsense of stock exchange games: if a me-
ga-algorithm can do the work better than humans, stock exchanges could become
an automatic machine – and if this works, private ownership of stocks will also
become useless since all we’ll need will be a gigantic AI machine for the optimal
allocation of resources… this is how the extreme of financial capitalism can open
up an unexpected path to Communism.
However, fictions operate in the space of what Lacan called the big Other, the
symbolic order, and there is a fundamental difference between subject’s alienation
in the symbolic order and the worker’s alienation in capitalist social relation. We
have to avoid the two symmetrical traps which open up if we insist on the ho-
mology between the two alienations: the idea that capitalist social alienation is
irreducible since the signifying alienation is constitutive of subjectivity, as well as
the opposite idea that the signifying alienation could be abolished in the same way
Marx imagined the overcoming of capitalist alienation. The point is not just that
the signifying alienation is more fundamental and will persist even if we abolish
the capitalist alienation – it is a more refined one. The very figure of a subject that
would overcome the signifying alienation and become a free agent who is master
of the symbolic universe, i.e., who is no longer embedded in a symbolic substance,
can only arise within the space of capitalist alienation, the space in which free indi-
viduals interact. Let’s indicate the domain of this symbolic alienation with regard to

28 —
Robert Brandom’s attempt to elaborate “the way to a postmodern form of recogni-
tion that overcomes ironic alienation. This is the recollective-recognitive structure
of trust.” 12 For Brandom, this

“may be the part of /Hegel’s/ thought that is of the most contemporary philosophical
interest and value. That is partly because he attributes deep political significance to the
replacement of a semantic model of atomistic representation by one of holistic expression.
/…/ It is to lead to a new form of mutual recognition and usher in the third stage in the
development of Geist: the age of trust.” 13

“Trust” is here trust in the ethical substance (the “big Other,” the set of establi-
shed norms) which doesn’t limit but sustains the space of our freedom. Referring
to Chomsky, Brandom gives his own reading to the classic distinction between ne-
gative freedom and positive freedom: negative freedom is the freedom from predo-
minant norms and obligations which can lead only to universalized ironic distance
towards all positive regulations (we shouldn’t trust them, they are illusions masking
particular interests), while positive freedom is the freedom whose space is opened
up and sustained by our adherence to a set of norms. As Chomsky pointed out,
language enables an individual who inhabits it to generate an infinite number of
sentences – this the positive freedom of expression provided by our acceptance of
the rules of language, while negative freedom can only lead to ironic alienation…
But is the freedom of irony, of ironic distance, also not a form of positive free-
dom grounded in a deep acquaintance with the rules? Is something like ironic alie-
nation not inherent to those who really inhabit a language? Let’s take patriotism:
a true patriot is not a fanatical zealot but somebody who can quite often practice
ironic remarks about his nation, and this irony paradoxically vouches for his true
love of his country (when things get serious, her is ready to fight for it). To be able
to practice this kind of irony, I have to master the rules of my language much more
deeply than those who speak it in a flawless non-ironic way. One can even say that
to really inhabit a language implies not just to know the rules but to know the me-
ta-rules which tell me how to violate the explicit rules: it doesn’t imply to make no
mistakes but to make the right kind of mistakes. And the same goes for manners
that held together a given closed community – this is why, in the old times when
there were still schools to teach ordinary people how to behave in a high class so-
ciety were as a rule an abominable failure: no matter how much they did teach you
the rules of behavior, they were not able to teach you the meta-rules that regulate

12
 Robert Brandom, The Spirit of Trust, Cambridge: Harvard University Press 2019, p. 501.
13
 Op.cit., p. 506.

— 29
the subtle transgressions of the rulers. And, speaking about expressive subjectivity,
one can also say that subjectivity appears in a speech only through such regulated
violations – without them, we get a flat impersonal speech.
And what if we imagine Communism in a similar way: as a new ethical substan-
ce (a frame of rules) that enables positive freedom? Maybe this is how we should
reread Marx’s opposition of the kingdom of necessity and kingdom of freedom:
Communism is not freedom itself but the structure of a kingdom of necessity that
sustains freedom, the principal commitment to a Cause which makes all my trans-
gressive pleasures possible. In other words, we shouldn’t imagine Communism as
a self-transparent order with no alienation but as an order of “good” alienation, of
our reliance on thick invisible cobweb of regulations which sustains the space of
our freedom. In Communism, I should be led to “trust” this cobweb and ignore
it, focusing on what makes my life meaningful. This constitutive alienation in the
symbolic substance is missing in Kohei Saito’s Karl Marx’s Ecosocialism 14, the latest
most consistent attempt to think humanity’s embeddedness in nature without re-
gressing into dialectical-materialist general ontology.
In his search of a pre-capitalist foundation of human life, he posits the process of
metabolism between nature and humans as the ground on which the process of Ca-
pital is based. This metabolism was distorted by Capital which parasitizes on it, so
that the basic “contradiction” of capitalism is the one between natural metabolism
and capital - nature resists capital, it poses a limit to capital’s self-valorization. The
task of Communists is thus to invent a new form of social metabolism which will
no longer be not market-mediated but organized in a human (rationally planned)
way. That’s why Saito is profoundly anti-Hegelian: his axiom is that Hegelian dia-
lectics cannot think the natural limits of Capital, that the self-movement of Capital
cannot ever fully “sublate”/integrate its presupposed natural base:

“Marx’s ecology deals with the synthesis of the historical and transhistorical aspects of
social metabolism in explaining how the physical and material dimensions of the ‘universal
metabolism of nature’ and the ‘metabolism between humans and nature’ are modified and
eventually disrupted by the valorization of capital. Marx’s analysis aims at revealing the limits
of the appropriation of nature through its subsumption by capital.”(68)

Marx does not talk about subsumption under capital in abstract formal terms,
he is interested in how this subsumption is not just a formal one but gradually
transforms the material base itself: air gets polluted, deforestation, land is exhausted
and rendered less fertile, etc. Saito is right to see in this rift the basic “contradiction”
14
 Kohei Saito, Karl Marx’s Ecosocialism, New York: Monthly Review Press 2017. Numbers in brackets refer to
the pages of this book.

30 —
of capitalism: once social production is subsumed under the form of the self-valo-
rization process of the Capital, the goal of the process becomes capital’s extended
self-reproduction, the growth of accumulated value, and since environment ulti-
mately counts just as an externality, destructive environmental consequences are
ignored, they don’t count:

“capital contradicts the fundamental limitedness of natural forces and resources because
of its drive toward infinite self-valorization. This is the central contradiction of the capitalist
mode of production, and Marx’s analysis aims at discerning the limits to this measureless
drive for capital accumulation within a material world.”(259)

Ecology is thus for Saito in the very centre of Marx’s critique of political eco-
nomy, and this is why, in the last decades of his life, Marx was extensively reading
books on chemistry and physiology of agriculture. (The reason why Marx turned
to physiology and chemistry of agriculture is clear: he wanted to study the life
process of metabolism without falling into the trap of conceiving life that precedes
capital in the terms of a Romantic “vital force.”) Saito’s central premise is that THIS
“contradiction” cannot be grasped in the Hegelian terms – this is why he mockin-
gly mentions that Western Marxism “primarily deals with social forms (sometimes
with an extreme fetishism of Hegel’s Science of Logic)”(262). But we cannot get
rid of Hegel in such an easy way. When Marx wrote that the ultimate barrier of
capital is capital itself (in Capital, Vol III, Chapter 15 entitled “Exposition of the
Internal Contradictions of the Law”) – “The real barrier of capitalist production
is capital itself” (“Die wahre Schranke der kapitalistischen Produktion ist das Kapital
selbst”) - we should be precise in the Hegelian sense and clearly distinguish Schranke
from Grenze: Grenze designates an external limitation while Schranke stands for the
immanent barrier of an entity, for its internal contradiction. Say, in the classic case
of freedom, the external limitation of my freedom is the freedom of others, but
its true “barrier” is the insufficiency of this notion of freedom which opposes my
freedom to the freedom of others – as Hegel would have put it, this freedom is not
yet true freedom. And the whole point of Marx is that capital is not just externally
limited (by nature which cannot be exploited indefinitely) but immanently limited,
limited in its very concept.
Which mode of relating to Hegel should then an ecologically-oriented Marxism
assume today? When Chris Arthur says that “it is precisely the applicability of
Hegel’s logic that condemns the object as an inverted reality systematically alie-
nated from its bearers,” 15 he thereby provides the most concise formulation of the

15
 https://www.academia.edu/38109734/The_Logic_of_Capital._Interview_with_Chris_Arthur.

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“Hegel’s logic as the logic of the capital”: the very fact that Hegel’s logic can be
applied to capitalism means that capitalism is an perverted order of alienation…
Or, as John Rosenthal put it, “Marx made the curious discovery of an object do-
main in which the inverted relation between the universal and the particular which
constitutes the distinctive principle of Hegelian metaphysics in fact obtains”: “The
whole riddle of the ‘Marx-Hegel relation’ consists in nothing other than this: /…/
it is precisely and paradoxically the mystical formulae of Hegelian ‘logic’ for which
Marx finds a rational scientific application.” 16 In short, while, in his early critique
of Hegel, Marx rejected Hegel’s thought as a crazy speculative reversal of actual
state of things, he was then struck by the realization that there is a domain which
behaves in a Hegelian way, namely the domain of the circulation of Capital.
Recall the classic Marxian motive of the speculative inversion of the relationship
between the Universal and the Particular. The Universal is just a property of parti-
cular objects which really exist, but when we are victims of commodity fetishism it
appears as if the concrete content of a commodity (its use-value) is an expression
of its abstract universality (its exchange-value) - the abstract Universal, the Value,
appears as a real Substance which successively incarnates itself in a series of concrete
objects. That is the basic Marxian thesis: it is already the effective world of com-
modities which behaves like a Hegelian subject-substance, like a Universal going
through a series of particular embodiments.
In Marx’s reading, the self-engendering speculative movement of the Capital
also indicates a fateful limitation of the Hegelian dialectical process, something that
eludes Hegel’s grasp. It is in this sense that Lebrun mentions the ”fascinating ima-
ge” of the Capital presented by Marx (especially in his Grundrisse): “a monstrous
mixture of the good infinity and the bad infinity, the good infinity which creates
its presuppositions and the conditions of its growth, the bad infinity which never
ceases to surmount its crises, and which finds its limit in its own nature.” 17 This,
perhaps, is also the reason why Marx’s reference to Hegel’s dialectics in his “critique
of political economy” is ambiguous, oscillating between taking it as the mystified
expression of the logic of the Capital and taking it as the model for the revolutio-
nary process of emancipation. First, there is dialectic as the “logic of the capital”:
the development of the commodity-form and the passage from money to capital
are clearly formulated in Hegelian terms (capital is money-substance turning into
self-mediating process of its own reproduction, etc.). Then, there is the Hegelian
notion of proletariat as “substance-less subjectivity,” i.e., the grandiose Hegelian
16
 
Quoted from https://www.academia.edu/3035436/John_Rosenthal_The_Myth_of_Dialectics_Reinterpre-
ting_the_Marx-Hegel_Relation.
17
 Gerard Lebrun, L’envers de la dialectique, Paris: Editions du Seuil 2004, p. 311.

32 —
scheme of the historical process from pre-class society to capitalism as the gradual
separation of the subject from its objective conditions, so that the overcoming of
capitalism means that the (collective) subject re-appropriates its alienated subs-
tance. The Hegelian dialectical matrix thus serves as the model of the logic of the
capital as well as the model of its revolutionary overcoming.
So, again, which mode of relating to Hegel should an ecologically-oriented Mar-
xism assume today? Hegelian dialectics as the mystified expression of the revolutio-
nary process, as the philosophical expression of the perverted logic of the Capital;
as the idealist version of a new dialectical-materialist ontology; or should we simply
claim (as Althusser did) that Marx only “flirted” with Hegelian dialectics, that his
thinking was totally foreign to Hegel? There is another one: a different reading of
Hegel’s dialectical process itself that leaves behind the predominant notion of this
process as the process of gradual subjective appropriation of substantial content.
Already decades ago, in the early years of modern ecology, some perspicuous rea-
ders of Hegel noted that the Hegelian idealist speculation does not imply an abso-
lute appropriation of nature – in contrast to productive appropriation, speculation
lets its Other be, it doesn’t intervene into its Other. As Frank Ruda pointed out 18,
Hegel’s Absolute Knowing is not a total Aufhebung – a seamless integration of all
reality into the Notion’s self-mediation -; it is much more an act of radical Aufgeben
– of giving up, of renouncing the violent effort to grab reality. Absolute Knowing is
a gesture of Entlassen, of releasing reality, of letting-it-be and stand on its own, and,
in this sense, it breaks with the endless effort of labour to appropriate its Otherness,
the stuff that forever resists its grasp. Labour (and technological domination in
general) is an exemplary case of what Hegel calls “spurious infinity,” it is a pursuit
which is never accomplished because it presupposes an Other to be mastered, while
philosophical speculation is at ease, no longer troubled by its Other.
This brings us back to the topic of fiction. Does this gesture of releasing rea-
lity, of letting-it-be and stand on its own, mean that we accept reality as it is in
itself, outside the network of symbolic fictions? Here things get more complex.
For Hegel, the form of this “letting-it-be” is knowledge, scientific knowledge (in
his sense of the word) which doesn’t mess with its object but merely observes its
self-movement. What scientific knowledge observes is not its object in itself but the
interaction between in-itself and our fictions, where fictions are an immanent part
of in-itself – and it is the same with Marx for whom, if we subtract fictions, social
reality itself disintegrates. Today’s experimental science, however, displays a stance
towards its object which is the opposite of Hegel’s: not a stance of impassive obser-

18
 See Frank Ruda, Abolishing Freedom, Winnipeg: Bison Books 2016.

— 33
ving the object’s self-movement in its interplay with fictions but the stance of active
intervention in its object and its technological manipulation, even creation of new
objects (through biogenetic mutations), which simultaneously aims at how this
object is in itself, independently of our interaction with it. Let’s take brain science,
the exemplary case of today’s science, brain science: neurobiologists and cognitive
scientists like to undermine our common sense of being autonomous free agents
with the claim that subjective freedom is a fiction – in reality, in itself, our brain
processes are fully determined by neural mechanisms. The Hegelian answer to this
is that yes, freedom is immanently linked to fiction, but in a more subtle way – to
quote a well-known passage from the “Preface” to Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit:

“The activity of dissolution is the power and work of the Understanding, the most as-
tonishing and mightiest of powers, or rather the absolute power. The circle that remains
self-enclosed and, like substance, holds its moments together, is an immediate relationship,
one therefore which has nothing astonishing about it. But that an accident as such, detached
from what circumscribes it, what is bound and is actual only in its context with others,
should attain an existence of its own and a separate freedom—that is the tremendous power
of the negative; it is the energy of thought, of the pure I.” 19

The power of the Understanding is the power of tearing apart in one’s mind
what in reality belongs together – in short, the power to create fictions. One should
be attentive to a key detail in the quote from Hegel: this power is not just the
basic form of human freedom, it is the power of “separate freedom” acquired by
an object itself when is torn out of its living context and thus obtains a separate
existence of its own. But is this power only active in our mind while reality remains
the same in itself? In other words, are we dealing with a new version of Sartre’s
opposition between the reality of being-in-itself and consciousness as the vortex
of being-for-itself? We should recall here Marx’s definition of human labour from
chapter 7 of Capital I:

“A spider conducts operations that resemble those of a weaver, and a bee puts to shame
many an architect in the construction of her cells. But what distinguishes the worst architect
from the best of bees is this, that the architect raises his structure in imagination before he
erects it in reality. At the end of every labour-process, we get a result that already existed in
the imagination of the labourer at its commencement.” 20

19
 G. W. F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, New York: Oxford University Press 1977, pp. 18–19.
20
 https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch07.htm.

34 —
 These imaginations – fictions – are, of course, not just in the worker’s head, they
emerge out of the socio-symbolic interaction of workers which presupposes the
”big Other,” the order of symbolic fictions. So how does the “big Other” relate to
(what we experience as) external reality? This is THE basic philosophical problem
– and, at this point, we should stop.

— 35
References

Brandom, B (2019) The Spirit of Trust, Cambridge: Harvard University Press 

Carson, R “Time and Schemas of Reproduction” (manuscript). Personal Co-
munication.
Hegel, F (1977) Phenomenology of Spirit, New York: Oxford University Press
Johnston, A. monumental Infinite Greed (manuscript). Personal Comunication.
Lebrun, G (2004) L’envers de la dialectique, Paris: Editions du Seuil
Marx, K (1970) A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, New
York: International Publishers
Marx, K (1963) Theories of Surplus-Value, Moscow: Progress Publishers
Marx, K & Engels, F (1969) Selected Works, Volume 1, Moscow: Progress Pu-
blishers.
Marx, K (1999) Tha transformation of money into capital. In Capital. Volumen
I. Available in: https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch04.
htm
Pippin, R (2022) The Return of metaphysic: Hegel vs Kant. Available in: https://
iai.tv/articles/the-return-of-metaphysics-hegel-vs-kant-auid-2032?_auid=2020
Ruda, F (2016) Abolishing Freedom, Winnipeg: Bison Books 
Saito, K (2017) Karl Marx’s Ecosocialism, New York: Monthly Review Press

DOI: https://doi.org/10.15366/bp2023.32.001
Bajo Palabra. II Época. Nº32. Pgs: 19-36

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