Chapter 4 - Marx: Labor in Spiritual Life and Social Pathology

Summary

Chapter 4 examines the importance of labor in Marx's diagnoses of social pathologies. Marx conceives of labor as social, productive activity that has the potential to make material reproduction a spiritual phenomenon subject to normative standards beyond those internal to biological life. Meeting those standards requires a re-appropriation of our activity that turns alienated social powers into free activity, where re-appropriation takes place along three dimensions: knowing (or understanding) it as it really is; collectively controlling or organizing it; and affirming it without illusion as appropriate to human beings' spiritual nature. In other words, unalienated social powers must be transparent, self-determined, and productive of the good of those whose powers they are. Moreover, making social powers productive of the good, and hence genuinely affirmable, requires re-organizing, and not merely re-interpreting, our activity so as to make it social in a sense that in capitalism it is not.