Liebig, Marx, and the depletion of soil fertility: relevance for today's agriculture - German chemist Justus von Liebig; Karl Marx

Monthly Review, July-August, 1998 by John Bellamy Foster, Fred Magdoff

This argument was developed systematically in Marx's analysis of capitalist ground rent in the third volume of Capital, where Marx also observed that, "In London ... they can do nothing better with the excrement produced by 4.5 million people than pollute the Thames with it, at monstrous expense." Such considerations on capitalist agriculture and the recycling of organic wastes led Marx to a concept of ecological sustainability - a notion that he thought of very limited practical relevance to capitalist society, but vital for a society of associated producers. The "conscious and rational treatment of the land as permanent communal property," he wrote, is "the inalienable condition for the existence and reproduction of the chain of human generations." Further:

From the standpoint of a higher socioeconomic formation, the private property of particular individuals in the earth will appear just as absurd as the private property of one man in other men. Even an entire society, a nation, or all simultaneously existing societies taken together, are not owners of the earth, they are simply its possessors, its beneficiaries, and have to bequeath it in an improved state to succeeding generations, as boni patres familias [good heads of the household].

Subsequent thinkers in the Marxist tradition, such as Kautsky and Lenin, were to be deeply affected by the arguments of Liebig and Marx on agricultural sustainability and the necessity of recycling organic wastes, and argued for the return of nutrients to the soil as a necessary part of a revolutionary transformation of society - despite the increased availability of fertilizers in their time. In The Agrarian Question (1899), Kautsky insisted that:

Supplementary fertilisers ... allow the reduction in soil fertility to be avoided, but the necessity of using them in larger and larger amounts simply adds a further burden to agriculture - not one unavoidably imposed on nature, but a direct result of current social organization. By overcoming the antithesis between town and country, or at least between the densely populated cities and the desolated open country, the materials removed from the soil would be able to flow back in full. Supplemental fertilisers would then, at most, have the task of enriching the soil, not staving off its impoverishment. Advances in cultivation would signify an increase in the amount of soluble nutrients in the soil without the need to add artificial fertilisers.

Similarly, Lenin observed in The Agrarian Question and the "Critics of Marx" (1901) that,

The possibility of substituting artificial for natural manures and the fact that this is already being done (partly) do not in the least refute the irrationality of wasting natural fertilisers and thereby polluting the rivers and the air in suburban and factory districts. Even at the present time there are sewage farms in the vicinity of large cities which utilise city refuse with enormous benefit to agriculture; but by this system only an infinitesimal part of the refuse is utilized.