ABSTRACT

One of the difficulties in understanding Marx, one that Hannah Arendt encountered, stems from the lack of clarity in his concept of labour. In my view, the passages on labour in the Grundrisse can help us overcome the difficulty. In his early writings, Marx emphatically declares that ‘the self-creation of man’ should be understood the way it is in Hegel, ‘as a process’: ‘objectification as loss of object, as alienation and as suppression of this alienation’. This shows, he says, that Hegel has correctly conceived ‘the essence of labour’, and, in consequence, ‘objective man – true, because real man – as the outcome of man’s own labour’ (Marx 1975: 332-3).1 This emphasis on the significance of labour for the essence of ‘true, real man’ stands in a problematic relationship to an often quoted formulation in Capital, which, however, deserves to be read more carefully than it usually is. In Capital, volume III, Marx affirms that

the actual wealth of society, and the possibility of constantly expanding its reproduction process, therefore, do not depend upon the duration of surpluslabour, but upon its productivity . . . the realm of freedom actually begins only where labour which is determined by necessity and mundane considerations ceases; thus in the very nature of things it lies beyond the sphere of actual material production.