You're listening to the Partial Examined Life, Episode 359 Part 2.

We've been discussing Karl Marx. We finished with his thesis on Feuerbach. We've now moved to the Grun-Risse, also called Foundations of a Critique of Political Economy

from 1857.

And we were getting into just this holistic explanation that these British political

economists that he is responding to had a notion of an isolated individual, tried to sort of give that as the

cell that then develops into, you know, with a division of labor, into more sophisticated

systems. And he wants to say, no, actually, all these things are in a very Hegelian way,

moments in the same process. The predominant moment is production, but production,

consumption, distribution, and exchange are all part of one big thing. They all slide through

history together. And if you pretend that you are analyzing just the primordial, he, Marks does

say that, yes, we have a primordial relationship to nature such that we have to work.

He acknowledges some things come free from nature. You could just pick fruit off the trees.

But for the most part, we have to work nature, and that is what gives sustenance.

But everything, and even the division of labor within a tribe, within a

family, there's sort of natural things sort of given by biology of like, okay, you're going to be,

you're smaller, you don't have to lift the heavy stuff.

We're a hunter-gatherer sort of stuff.

That's all very natural, but to then think that the capitalist system itself, with its

division of labor within a factory, you're going to do this one little thing and you're

going to do this one little thing, and that's going to be her life and you're going to be

humanized to defend all that as being just, oh, it's just how nature just rolls.

It's just this current instantiation

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