The Dignity of Self-Directed versus Other-Appropriated Labor

Rick's and Susan's moving words posted just after May Day remind me of what I found so compelling, during my youth, in Marx's reflections on labor and human action first in the 1844 Manuscripts, then in the Grundrisse, and finally even in Capital.  The picture of our relation to our own work that emerges in these writings carries the imprint of both a very Aristotelian, and a very Kantian-German-Romantic, conception of human action-in- and on- the world.  It seems to me that this vision remains both very powerful and rather resonant with that conveyed in Rick's  post.  It is also a vision that is difficult to reconcile with the role of and treatment of labor under certain forms of capitalism, including both (a) much, though not all, of today's American rendition of that form of economic arrangement, and (b) much, though not all, of old Soviet 'state' capitalism.  (Today's PRC, interestingly and troublingly, appears to feature many of the most objectionable characterisitics of both of those capitalisms.)

Here is a sample of Marx's writing on labor and its siginficance as articulated relatively late in his life, in Volume I of Capital:

Labour is, in the first place, a process in which both man and Nature participate, and in which man of his own accord starts, regulates, and controls the material re-actions between himself and Nature. He opposes himself to Nature as one of her own forces, setting in motion arms and legs, head and hands, the natural forces of his body, in order to appropriate Nature’s productions in a form adapted to his own wants. By thus acting on the external world and changing it, he at the same time changes his own nature. He develops his slumbering powers and compels them to act in obedience to his sway. We are not now dealing with those primitive instinctive forms of labour that remind us of the mere animal. An immeasurable interval of time separates the state of things in which a man brings his labour-power to market for sale as a commodity, from that state in which human labour was still in its first instinctive stage. We pre-suppose labour in a form that stamps it as exclusively human. A spider conducts operations that resemble those of a weaver, and a bee puts to shame many an architect in the construction of her cells. But what distinguishes the worst architect from the best of bees is this, that the architect raises his structure in imagination before he erects it in reality.

There is of course in this passage a residue of Hegelian 'oppositional' thinking that is a bit violently and unfortunately nature-denigrating in my view, but the Aristotelian and Kantian resonance seems to me unmistakable too.  Counterpart passages in the Manuscripts and the Grundrisse, moreover, written as they were earlier in Marx's life before the long, ultimately unsuccessful struggle with cigar-chomping robber barons, dreamily ineffectual 'utopian socialists,' and 19th century counterparts to today's NSA had embittered and hardened his heart to the degree that they ultimately did, read even more beautifully.

In any event, here is more of the chapter of Capital from which the above quote is taken:   

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch07.htm

And here is a very interesting reflection, posted at the Westminster College webpage, both on the early Marx's understanding of labor and on its resonances with the thought of the Romantics: 

https://www.westminstercollege.edu/myriad/?parent=2514&detail=4475&content=4791

Happy belated May Day to all!