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You're listening to the Partially Examined Life, episode 355, Part 2, we've been discussing some 1844 essays by Karl Marx, mostly the essay, estranged labor.

We'll also get to private property and communism and the power to money on bourgeois society.

I think you had left us, Dylan, with a question. Maybe this will get us to the beginning of the estranged labor essay of what actually is

the labor that he's talking about.

Is this all the kind of activities that we do?

Or is it only a very specific kind of activity where we take the land, we take the natural

resources, and we add our labor and we convert it and we make

it into a tangible product that can then be sold or stolen from the worker or any number of other

things. I mean, any initial thoughts. Is this the only kind of work he's concerned with? Is this

enough? I can speak to this a bit. I think an important point here is that Marx thinks that

productive work is essential to our nature, and it's the essential component of our nature.

Now, the kind of productive work we do is different from the kind of productive work an animal does.

It's informed by reason. It's informed by our specifically human mode of feeling.

But nevertheless, it is life activity, which is the activity of meeting our needs and also

expressing our capabilities through productive activity that is the most important, the most

determinative feature of human nature. And so he can't be saying all work is bad because it's through work

that we fully realize our nature. And I do think that he, in a sense, counts kind of any

expression of a human capability that results in some objectification of that capability. So if you

build something with your hands, you're objectifying

your ability to build that thing. But there's also more abstract kinds of objectification.

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