Marx e Engels: a relação intelectual revisitada a partir de uma perspectiva ecológica

O Marxismo Ocidental assume frequentemente a divisão intelectual do trabalho entre Marx e Engels. Conforme tal perspectiva, este último especializou-se no campo da “natureza”, enquanto o primeiro analisou particularmente a “sociedade” humana. No entanto, este binário natureza-sociedade não se sustenta mais: novos materiais publicados recentemente pelo projeto Marx-Engels-Gesamtausgabe (Mega) mostram que Marx também estudou de modo intenso as ciências naturais, principalmente em seus últimos anos de vida. Porém, houve uma tentativa de Engels em subestimar a importância da pesquisa científica natural de Marx. Estimulado pelas expressivas discussões sobre a ecologia de Marx entre os ecossocialistas, este artigo visa explicitar o escopo teórico da crítica ecológica de Marx ao capitalismo com base no projeto Mega. Em contraste com John Bellamy Foster e Paul Burkett, que não reconhecem nenhuma diferença significativa entre Marx e Engels no que diz respeito à ecologia, argumentamos que através da Mega é possível identificar elementos únicos da ecologia de Marx que são distintas daquelas apresentadas por Engels em aspectos centrais. A crítica ecológica de Engels, desenvolvida principalmente em A ideologia alemã e no Manifesto comunista, durante a década de 1840, permaneceu dentro do esquema do “antagonismo entre a cidade e o campo”, e esta perspectiva foi mantida em Dialética da natureza e no Anti-Dühring na década de 1870. Por outro lado, Marx, depois de ler a sétima edição de Agricultural Chemistry de Justus von Liebig em 1865/66, desenvolveu sua teoria da “ruptura metabólica”, que vai para além da ideia bastante estática do “antagonismo entre a cidade e o campo”. Após 1868, Marx estudou ainda mais entusiasticamente várias disciplinas das ciências naturais, como química, geologia e botânica, a fim de examinar a (in)sustentabilidade do modo de produção capitalista, cujo desejo ilimitado de valorização do capital acentua de forma inevitável graves desequilíbrios em várias esferas do planeta. Particularmente, os cadernos de excertos sobre as obras de Carl Fraas e Joseph Beete Juke documentam que os interesses ecológicos de Marx estiveram sempre expansão até o último momento de sua vida. Marx não foi capaz de integrar seus novos conhecimentos de ciências naturais, mas hoje o projeto Mega finalmente lança mais luz sobre esses aspectos ecológicos desconhecidos da crítica de Marx à economia política.

Introduction to Special Issue: Plant Microbiome Augmentation and Stimulation—New Strategies to Grow Crops with Reduced Agrochemicals

Since the early work of Justus von Liebig on nutrient absorption in plants in the 1800s [...]

Liebig’s Law and Haber’s Tragedy

The fertilizers commonly used by gardeners have many ingredients, but the biggest two are nitrogen and phosphorus, either of which can limit plant and algal growth. The idea that only one nutrient limits growth is encapsulated by Liebig’s Law of the Minimum, named after Justus von Liebig, a 19th-century German chemist. Liebig is also called the “father of fertilizer” because of his work on formulating and promulgating commercial fertilizers. However, he wasn’t the first to discover the Law, and he was wrong about the most important ingredient of fertilizers. This chapter outlines the arguments among limnologists, oceanographers, and geochemists about whether nitrogen or phosphorus sets the rate of algal growth and thus production of the organic material that drives oxygen depletion. The chapter discusses that the limiting nutrient varies with the type of aquatic habitat. In dead zones like the Gulf of Mexico, parts of the Baltic Sea, and Chesapeake Bay, bioassay experiments have shown that nitrogen is usually limiting. The nitrogen necessary for fertilizer and ammunitions comes from the Haber-Bosch process. The chapter reviews the life of one of the two German inventors, Fritz Haber, and how it was full of contradictions if not tragedy.

Contagiousness as a Problem in Social Epistemology

The theory of infection, although it arose in parallel with the advance of positive knowledge, has never embodied only the logic of the laboratory, in which a “clean” experiment can be devised in order to expose the true causes or symptoms of a disease. To the contrary, both the advent of laboratories and the way they work have come about as the result of a clash between the old paradigm for infection (miasma) and the new one (particular forms of life). The structure of an infection is primarily a structure of social relations, in which the history of an infection and the factors that contributed to its spread are reconstructed. The uncertainty about how an epidemic spreads led to the vindication of the autonomous knowledge which arrived at original ways of representing itself and could prove the soundness of its approach. Any discursive accuracy was regarded as questionable and unable to result in a treatment that would be superior to letting the infection run its course. The efforts of such leading epidemiologists in the modern era as Justus von Liebig, Carlos Juan Finlay, Patrick Manson, and the staff of the Bernhard Nocht Institute for Tropical Medicine in Hamburg brought about a reconstruction by professionalizing the stages in handling epidemics. It is argued that laboratories asserted their autonomy from universities not because of anything distinctive in their nature, but more because of a general understanding of cause and effect relationships in matters of need and famine. That counted for much more than any shortcomings in the previously established logistics and expansion of production. In addition, the development of forms of colonial, industrial and scientific expansion coupled with new types of enterprise, such as the Panama Canal or Germany’s trade with its colonies, fostered a new vision of epidemics not as natural disasters, but as a complex situations that can be managed and neutralized.

Philosophy of ecology of Justus von Liebig: different Liebig

German chemist Justus von Liebig is known in the ecological literature as the author of Liebigs law of the minimum. But the law of the minimum is absent in his publications, which ecologists cite. The law is nothing more than an interpretation of some of Liebigs statements. However, irrespective of the law of the minimum, Liebigs outstanding contribution to the theory of ecology is obvious: Liebig was one of the first who drew attention to the sustainability of the phenomenon of life organized into supraorganismal systems. Liebig showed that as a result of the interaction of plants and animals and as a result of their life processes, such as nutrition and respiration, there is a continuous transformation of a substance consisting of the same elements. On the example of the constancy of the gas composition of the atmosphere, Liebig comes to a generalization that is crucial for ecology: the interaction of plants and animals is a factor of sustainability of their own environment, which they create themselves and support for an unlimited time in a stable state.

CORD-LIKE BACTERIA – A LIVING BIOLOGICAL CAUSATIVE AGENT OF MALIGNANT CANCER

In the study of the malignant cancerous thickening of the tumor-like nature in a cat’s mammary gland with the subsequent staining of the pathological material by the improved method according to H. C. Gram, a category of rod-shaped bacteria of the cord form was found. It was noted that these microscopic (visible in an optical microscope) bacteria are able to cluster into dense formations and, with an increase in the temperature of the external environment, form dense living “ropes” and “bundles” from tens of thousands microbial individuals. This gives them the opportunity, getting and reproducing in a favorable environment, thereby increasing their population in quantity, inside the living body of the diseased animal organism, pulling the affected parts of the body and its internal organs and tissues with cord-like overlays, leading to their microbial suffocation. The flow of nutrient and protective elements with the blood stops and the transmission of the nerve impulse is disrupted, which immediately leads the affected parts of the body to tumor-like growths with their subsequent necrosis (necrosis). Dead tissue, and in our case, the mammary gland of a cat, is an excellent breeding ground for the development and reproduction of colonies of ciliated microbes in it, capable of forming spores in case of unfavorable factors for their vital activity. Reproducing and becoming sexually mature individuals, within 20 hours (approximately, in time, less than one day), cord-like microbes begin to immediately form living microbial bundles of various thicknesses and sizes. Covering a certain separate area of living tissue with a microbial “loop”, squeezing the affected parts of a living body – blood vessels and nerves, thereby slow down, and in some cases completely stop blood flow and nerve impulse. All these negative factors gradually lead to the extinction of the vital tone of muscle and nervous tissues, which inevitably leads to cell death and the growth of a dense tumor-like neoplasm. Malignant cancerous tumor of domestic animals does not arise from the previously voiced chemical theory of Justus von Liebig, but because of the presence of a living biological pathogen – ciliate rod-shaped formed bacteria – inside the living parts of the body. Staining according to the improved method of H. C. Gram with blue dye (methylene blue) instead of a violet dye gentian violet, and a red dye (safranin) instead of Pfeiffer's carbolic fuchsin, allowed under the optical immersion system of a light binocular microscope with a magnification of 1000 times, to see special cord-like, wriggling loop-shaped forms, consisting of a large number of rod-shaped microbes. They are able to create inseparable twisted chains and “loops” from their tiny microbial bodies, which gives grounds to assert their significant role in the occurrence of malignant cancerous neoplasms.

Justus von Liebig Makes the World

Just as capitalism’s exchange of commodities between disparate locations requires a singular referent of value, so does the movement of ideas and practices necessitate consolidations of meaning through complex fields of people, landscapes, and things. Introducing key innovations in agricultural and chemical science, Justus von Liebig’s chemical model of soil fertility involved a profound reenvisioning of organic development, distilling complex processes to a series of chemical relationships easily recognized in any geographic context. Drawing on Henri Lefebvre’s (1984) arguments about the production of abstract space, this article argues that Liebig’s assessment of nutrient extraction was essential to a broader midcentury reconsideration and reorganization of capitalist agricultural production, an example of what world ecologist Jason Moore calls an “organizational revolution,” allowing global capitalism to overcome past limits and thus move through systemic crises.