Marx's Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts – "Estranged Labor"

 Questions

1. What is dialectical relation between property as the product of alienation and the means by which labor alienates itself?

2. What is the relation of labor to/as life activity with Arendt's distinction of labor and work (77)?

3. Animals reproductive labor seems to be immediate. Does this mean that there is a distortion of human temporality in/through alienated labor?

4. What is species-being? How is it related to the universal?

5. What is a contradiction for Marx (79; 81)?

6. What is man's "essential nature" for Marx and what does he mean by the "objective world"?

Discussion

There seems to be a way to read the alienation of life activity and the reduction of labor to wage-earning activity to be tracking a similar (the same?) process that Arendt is diagnosing of the collapse of work to (into) labor. There is no time for work nor for action.

There is a "building" (or, perhaps, multi-layerdness) of alienation. And this has to do with the actual owner of the products of labor, even if Marx does describe it as a "feeling."

It can be useful to situate this in the context of world-building and how alienation distorts or affects this.

How can you assume that species-being is conscious or mediating but also that it can be transformed historically?

What is it about consciousness that allows for alienation or that makes it amenable to estrangement?

If reflective is pictured not mentalistically (as consciousness) but as will (more praxis), we perhaps can reduce some of the hermeneutical difficulties.