ABSTRACT
In a well-known passage in the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, Karl Marx complained that, as long as mere survival remains paramount for workers, the activities of eating, drinking, excreting, and reproducing will continue to be their “sole and ultimate ends.” Workers now feel themselves to be free only while engaging in these activities, while in their “human functions”—the activities that should allow them to develop their potential qua members of the species—they do not feel themselves to be “anything but an animal.” 1 For Marx, of course, it is the labor process under capitalism that has turned human functions into a mere means to the end of sustaining individual life. 2 Rather than affirming themselves as members of the species, workers spend their lives struggling to preserve their individual, biological existence over and against the existence of others in a Hobbesian war of each against all.
