The M ediation o f Nature through Society

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In the Grundrisse M arx wrote, in entirely Schellinjpan

language, o f the 'constant individualization o f the ele
mental, which is as much a moment o f the natural process
as the 'constant dissolution o f the individualized into the
elemental.1*8
T h e labour-process is embedded in the great context o f
nature. In the final analysis, nature triumphs over all
human intervention, since it is the higher unity o f society
and the particular segment o f nature which has been appro
priated. T h e materials o f nature, despite their permeation
by man, sink back into their original immediacy. Schelling
pointed out correctly that raw matter can only be described
as destructible 'in so far as it has assumed a definite form
through human ingenuity'.188
T h e concept o f the life-process, which is present in
M arxs writings from the German Ideology onwards, is
related in Schelling and H egel only to organic nature. In the
same way, the notion o f external nature as the inorganic
body o f man, as it appears in the Paris M anuscripts, and the
description o f the labour-process as the metabolism be
tween man and nature, as it dominates the preliminary
studies and the final version o f Capital, belong to the
physiological rather than to the social sphere. These con
cepts o f natural science attain a qualitatively new character
by being applied to social situations, as a result o f the
M arxist transition from narrowly naturalistic to historical
materialism; at the same time they remain closely tied to
their origin, even in their sodo-historical application. In the
same way as the continued existence o f an individual is
bound up with the functions o f the body, society too must
stand in an uninterrupted productive contact with nature.
M en pass through the materials o f nature, while these
materials pass through their hands in the form o f usevalues, only to be transformed back into mere nature. From
M arxs criticism o f the abrupt division between town and
country typical o f the capitalism o f his tim e, it emerges
unmistakably that he understood the concept o f metabolism
not only metaphorically but also in an iutfuediately physio
logical sense. T his division, M arx said, severely disturbed
the metabolism between man and the earth, i.e. the return