Alienation from Nature

Marx meant two things when he said that working for wages alienates us from the product of our labor. In part, it's a purely economic fact: we don't own what we make and we encounter it in the market as a commodity, an alien object. But it's also about the way capitalism stifles the creative potential that lies at the heart of our "species being." Under capitalism, most humans (the making animals) cannot form fulfilling personal connections to the beautiful things they (could) make.

Marx doesn't develop the idea that our human nature also includes the potential for accruing intimate knowledge of nature by mixing our labor with it. Capitalism distorts this feature of our species being too. Enclosure and urbanization remove us physically from the land. As a result, we face natural environments as alien spaces. And our capacity to understand and interact with richly complex ecosystems ends up being refocused on the comparatively simple second nature of the suburbs and the slums. Marxism, in other words, concretizes the fuzzy environmentalist idea that we have "lost touch with nature."

Mike Davis points out that that "the idea the labor is doubly alienated from its 'art' and from the natural world is William Morris's fundamental contribution to Marxism, however clad in gothic romanticism. Patrick Geddes, influenced by Kropotkin's insight that new forces of production (electricity) would make industrial spatial centralism and pollution unnecessary, developed a very complex, and still not fully appreciated (partially because Lewis Mumford, his brilliant but unradical protege, was the principal transmission belt for his ideas) conception of a sustainable relationship between city-region-wild nature. This tradition, of course, fertilized the garden city idea, originally a socialist utopia, spreading through labor zionism in Palestine and influencing some of the German/Austrian social democrats and some of the Constructivists." (Correspondence, November 2, 2007)