ABSTRACT
Marx holds production to be both the most fundamental and the most encompassing of human activities. The productive powers of men and women may be different from those of other living things, more varied and more extensive; but it is not yet clear that they are powers so wholly different that humans can be called ‘laboring’ or ‘productive’ beings in a sense that other things cannot. Marx’s view is that human labor or production is to be distinguished from the life activities of other animals because it involves a certain kind of consciousness and purposiveness which animal behavior does not. The development or ‘self-genesis’ of the human being in history is for Marx fundamentally an expansion of the human being’s productive powers. Human beings are ‘objective beings’, beings which stand in an essential relation to natural objects. They need these objects both for their physical subsistence and in order to maintain a healthy human life style.
