Labour as Mediation. Reconstructing Nature in the Young Marx

This article examines the relation between labour, nature, and emancipation in Marx’s Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 by situating them in a comparative frame with Feuerbach’s early 1840s writings. While Feuerbach conceives nature as an immediate, pre-social ground of human essence, Marx redefines nature as a historically mediated relation constituted through labour. Through close textual analysis, the article reconstructs Marx’s emerging materialist conception of nature and identifies the Manuscripts as introducing a key theoretical innovation: labour as the metabolic nexus through which the human-nature relation is produced, estranged, and rendered transformable. Estranged labour appears as the mechanism that disrupts this metabolism, while emancipated labour becomes the condition for its restoration. The conclusion critically engages leading interpretations – Foster and Burkett’s ecosocialism, Clark and Collier’s naturalism, the Althusserian rupture thesis, and Butler’s anthropological account – to argue that, although elements of this view are present across these readings, Marx offers a more explicit claim: ecological emancipation requires the historical reorganisation of the social relations that mediate humanity’s metabolism with nature.