On Marx's three formulations of labour and the human being

© 2010 Lachlan RossThis thesis is a study of the oeuvre of Karl Marx that explores the basic concept that Marx’s experiments with different modes of material production were all born of his belief that humanity is a highly mutable thing, yet literally impossible to change except via an alteration of the technique of production. This thesis breaks down the oeuvre of Marx into three paradigms of labour and the human being: one in which ‘life’ and ‘work’ are combined; one in which ‘work’ is overcome; and one in which ‘life’ and ‘work’ are institutionally separated into distinct spheres. Each paradigm of labour is expected to engender a different genus of human being: the human being as a whole, profoundly connected to the earth; as a cultural being rich in time; and as a free master of itself and its world. This thesis is a critique of the last paradigm of labour (qua ‘work’) as poiesis, something purely technical, the goal of which (‘life’ qua freedom) is external to itself; and it is an argument for the first paradigm of labour (qua ‘work’/’life’) as praxis, in which the goal—the high quality/individuality of the human being formed by labouring in this particular manner—is internal to, or realised within, the homogenised labour process. In fact, however, when the limited bourgeois form is stripped away, what is wealth other than the universality of individual needs, capacities, pleasures, productive forces etc., created through universal exchange? The full development of human mastery over the forces of nature, those of so-called nature as well as of humanity’s own nature? The absolute working out of his creative potentialities, with no presupposition other than the previous historic development, which makes this totality of development, i.e. the development of all human powers as such the end in itself, not as measured on a predetermined yardstick? Where he does not reproduce himself in one specificity, but produces his totality? Strives not to remain something he has become, but is in the absolute moment of becoming? In bourgeois economics—and in the epoch of production to which it corresponds—this complete working-out of the of the human content appears as a complete emptying-out, this universal objectification as total alienation, and the tearing-down of all limited, one-sided aims as sacrifice of the human end-in-itself to an entirely external end ..