ABSTRACT
This chapter presents a synthetic approach: by focusing on Karl Marx’s research in the field of natural sciences ignored by Western Marxism, it aims at revealing ecological differences between Marx and Friedrich Engels. Western Marxism regarded the natural science as Engels’ domain of expertise and separated it from Marx’s philosophy to save the latter from the mechanism and economic determinism of the Soviet ‘dialectical materialism’. Marx’s Capital precisely analyses human alienation and alienation from nature under capitalist production due to this alienated relationship. Marx problematized the capitalist squandering in relation to the two fundamental factors of production: the exhaustion of ‘labour power’ and ‘natural forces’. Marx’s analysis started with the recognition that in every society humans must work upon nature. Marx’s theory of metabolism also helps understand the meaning of his notebooks on natural sciences after 1868. Hints for imagining the unwritten part of Capital exist in these little-known notebooks.
