Key Arguments

• All activities arising from coping with nature’s cyclical processes have no beginning or end properly speaking
• Work’s end comes when the object is finished and ready for the world
• Labor always moves in the same circle prescribed by the biological process of the living organism, ending only with death

Source Quotes

While nature manifests itself in human existence through the circular movement of our bodily functions, she makes her presence felt in the man-made world through the constant threat of overgrowing or decaying it. The common characteristic of both, the biological process in man and the process of growth and decay in the world, is that they are part of the cyclical movement of nature and therefore endlessly repetitive; all human activities which arise out of the necessity to cope with them are bound to the recurring cycles of nature and have in themselves no beginning and no end, properly speaking; unlike , whose end has come when the object is finished, ready to be added to the common world of things, always moves in the same circle, which is prescribed by the biological process of the living organism and the end of its “toil and trouble” comes only with the death of this organism. When Marx defined labor as “man’s metabolism with nature,” in whose process “nature’s material [is] adapted by a change of form to the wants of man,” so that “labour has incorporated itself with its subject,” he indicated clearly that he was “speaking physiologically” and that labor and consumption are but two stages of the ever-recurring cycle of biological life.

Key Concepts

• all human activities which arise out of the necessity to cope with them are bound to the recurring cycles of nature and have in themselves no beginning and no end, properly speaking;
• unlike , whose end has come when the object is finished, ready to be added to the common world of things, always moves in the same circle, which is prescribed by the biological process of the living organism and the end of its “toil and trouble” comes only with the death of this organism.

Context

13 LABOR AND LIFE: Directly contrasting labor’s cyclical, endless character with work’s finite, world-adding character.