Marx was boring

As I mentioned previously I went to the local Alliance for Worker’s Liberty’s socialist-ecologist reading group on Tuesday of last week. We analyzed some of Marx’s ideas on the environment in Das Kapital Volume 1. We were specifically analyzing Marx’s idea of stoffwechsel (metabolism). I’ll explain these ideas in simple terms (something which Marx completely failed to do).
They are explained thus: Man, Nature and Society are linked. If Man cuts down a tree both He and Nature are changed. In building cities made of concrete Man prevented the return of material to the Earth. Over time Man learned Nature’s rules (science) and used them to dominate Nature. What Man forgets is that every time He exploits Nature He takes from Himself because He is part of Nature.

Man’s relationship with Nature is mediated by Social Labour (this term basically applies to anything Man does within Society). Social Labour in turn is mediated by Capitalism. Capitalism alienates Man from Nature and ignores the metabolism. Capitalism (and other forms of Industrial Society) assume that Nature is an infinite resource and so abuses it for the gain of profit.

In this way Man is exploited by (Capitalist) Society because he has to sell his labour to live. So the circle continues until Climate Change kills off Man or a revolution occurs and Society is changed. Either way the balance will be restored.

Here’s how Marx put it:

It is not the unity of living and active humanity with natural, inorganic conditions of their metabolic exchange with nature, and hence their appropriation of nature, which requires explanation and is the result of a historic process, but rather the separation between these inorganic conditions of human existence and this active existence, a separation which is completely posited only in the relation of wage labour and capital.

Reading Marx’s books are a headache and if it means I had to spend a whole hour piecing together meaning from a paragraph of text he wasn’t doing his job as a writer properly. I confess to having not read any of Marx’s literature. I tried listening to an audiobook of the Communist Manifesto, it just went totally over my head. I tried reading the same book in French, I got a few pages in then lost interest. It’s not that I’m lazy or a terrible socialist, it’s that Marx was boring.