Heinrich Detering – Marx as a romantic alienation critic

Even though there is a little otherwise in public consciousness from Marx ‘writings, many now know that his criticism of the capitalist circumstances was not only the exploitation of the workers, but also to destroy “nature”. Marxists such as Kohei Saito, Simon Schappep or Donna Haraway can therefore attack the destruction of our livelihoods with the manner of capitalist business with Marx. They relate, for example, to the wonderful sentence, which scandalizes the ownership of a part of humanity in a far greater part plus the whole earth from a utopian perspective: »From the point of view of a higher economic social formation, the private property of individual individuals on the globe will appear as tired as the private property of another person. Even an entire society, a nation, indeed all simultaneous societies, are not owners of the earth. They are only their owners, their beneficiaries, and as a bonus of Patres Familias, they have improved the following generations. “

But how does it come about that a renowned literary scholar like Heinrich Detering, in 2019 and has been a deacon in 2019 and has been a member of the Central Committee of German Catholics, Marx with this quote as a preliminary and fellow thinker of a radical ecological criticism? How can it be that one who otherwise wrote to Thomas Mann, Johann Wolfgang Goethe and other important literary studies, and admires Marx ‘writings (from front to back) and admires his “ecosocialism”?

More humanistic than people

Detering opens up Marx from the romantic natural poetry (Wackenroder, Tieck, Günderode, Novalis) and from his self -written poems in the “Book of Love” (“” Handling to Goethe “) and in the” Book of Songs “(” With explicit reference to Heine “) in the 1830s. However, Marx does not stop the “nostalgic summon of the forest and nature”, which recognizes determining, in the famous series of articles “debates about the wood the theft” (1842) to complain about those who are only owned by the forest and trees, which can only be exploited for the rich. Because the trees drop their old wood that the poor need to be bitter to heat in winter, she describes Marx as “a friendly power that is more humane than human”.

Avaluously from the “romantic subjects of his youth writings” develops Marx “a preference for a rhetoric of the cold,” said Detering. In the mid -1840s it says in the “Paris manuscripts”, in which the workforce is not yet an issue: »The work produces miracles for the rich, but it produces discharge for the worker. She produces beauty, but crippling for the worker (…). She produces spirit, but she produces nonsense, cretinism for the worker. «For Detering, this means that man is alienated from nature by capitalist work:» It was not the original work that separated the bond between man and nature. It only did their transformation into capital. “

Against Kohei Saito, who does not exist as “banal”, the uniqueness of Marxen considerations, which the statement postulated by Marx could not exist in reality, in reality. His remarks would expand the concept of nature and undermine the simple natural culture dichotomies. Humans are therefore not only inevitably part of nature, but also »everything he generates, from the first tool to the most abstract argument and the most subtle work of art, is and remains part of a relationship between nature to yourself“The following applies to determining:” With its transformation of work equipment, the workers and work products in exchange values, in Waren, in capital – this capitalism is The fatal metabolic disorder of this body. It is not in his effects, but already in his constitution himself. «

Romantic Gaia-Kitsch

As much as the capitalist economy flows as much, it is so little able to criticize the pre -capitalist states appropriately; They sometimes get to the idyll and too harmonious. Goethe and Schiller may have lived well in their bourgeois conditions- for the majority of the people of the 18th and 19th centuries, the central question was that of survival in sometimes cruel work and dependency conditions. This idealization of romanticism may have tempted to think of Marx as the forerunner of the Gaia hypothesis of the sociologist Bruno Latour: »The family picture designed around the Mother of Gaia will Capital Pull through as a thread. The earth always remains the original provider who appears to be the original person as her pupil. ”But Detering does not approach Marx ‘” Capital “as a source for his family picture, but the” Parisian manuscripts ” – which one should not let a literary scholar go through.

Likewise, a criticism of that “new sociology for a new society” in which the “unfortunate concept of society must be dissolved”, as Bruno Latour postulates. “Mother Earth” and her children sit in this “Heidegger-Eerneuer”, as Latour described himself, in a “parliament of things” to forget to do so-class differences are forgotten-for his nature destruction. Even if it is doubtful whether “capital” is all about the earth as a mother of nature: The author can prove with a variety of passages that Marx sees the economy embedded in many of his late writings “deeper and more comprehensive in his previous considerations” on which it depends on how the continued existence of human species “.

Detering knows Marx’s famous letter to Vera Sassulitsch, whom he writes two years before his death (1883). In it he doubts whether “the stages of capitalist society on the way to exemption (…)” or whether the life and economic form of “self-sufficient Russian village community” is a possible form, from the other ways than through the acquisition of state power by the working class, a communist community is possible. Marx manages to give the Russian socialist an answer to this question: This sees “common property on arable soil”, but also emphasizes that the lack of national constitution of this form of common property and the endangerment from capital interests are a major problem. Only as a “communist property” as a higher level could be spoken of a change in formation. But Marx ‘uncertainty on this question should not worry us. Allows you to think that we have to think about whether there are “islands” of the communitarian and non-designed man in the current social conditions who throw a “appeal” (Ernst Bloch) on another, just world.

Heal the alienation?

Even if the Catholic Detering does not cite the Bible at any point, he still refers twice to the genesis with the fall of man through the “apple bite”: This “was the violation of the border between man and God, that is the tusky relationship between the workers on the one hand, their physical workers and the soil as the primary resource on the other”. This “tearing” of man with nature and man with themselves – is it “curable” in a utopian idea?

For Detering, the “way out” consists in a communist society. In the so named chapter, he quotes the famous position from the “economic-philosophical manuscripts” from 1844, which-as Brecht writes-shows that communism is the simple one that is so difficult: “The communism when positive Lift of the Private property when human self -alienation and therefore as a real appropriation of the human being through and for humans … He is that true Dissolution of the conflict between man with nature and man. «

Despite the sometimes backward-looking idea of ​​a human-nature relationship that excludes the contradictions of real life, Detering’s book is written as he claims by Marx: “Marx writes massive and tender, imaginative and rough, passionate, outraged and empathetic, and he writes in constant dialogue.”

Heinrich Detering: The revolt of the earth. Karl Marx and Ecology. Wallstein 2025, 221 pages, born, 28 €.