Key Arguments

• He grounded theory on labor as 'reproduction of one’s own life' and begetting as production 'of foreign life' ensuring species survival.
• He replaced 'abstract labor' with the labor power of a living organism and understood surplus as the remaining labor power beyond self-reproduction.
• He aligned modern theory with ancient insights (Hebrew and classical) linking labor to giving birth.
• By equating productivity with fertility, the development of 'productive forces' follows the command 'Be ye fruitful and multiply,' as if nature speaks.
• Labor’s fertility partakes of nature’s superabundance; the 'blessing or the joy' of labor is the human experience of sheer aliveness within nature’s cycle.

Source Quotes

Perhaps nothing indicates more clearly the level of Marx’s thought and the faithfulness of his descriptions to phenomenal reality than that he based his whole theory on the understanding of laboring and begetting as two modes of the same fertile life process. Labor was to him the “reproduction of one’s own life” which assured the survival of the individual, and begetting was the production “of foreign life” which assured the survival of the species. This insight is chronologically the never-forgotten origin of his theory, which he then elaborated by substituting for “abstract labor” the labor power of a living organism and by understanding labor’s surplus as that amount of labor power still extant after the means for the laborer’s own reproduction have been produced.

Labor was to him the “reproduction of one’s own life” which assured the survival of the individual, and begetting was the production “of foreign life” which assured the survival of the species. This insight is chronologically the never-forgotten origin of his theory, which he then elaborated by substituting for “abstract labor” the labor power of a living organism and by understanding labor’s surplus as that amount of labor power still extant after the means for the laborer’s own reproduction have been produced. With it, he sounded a depth of experience reached by none of his predecessors—to whom he otherwise owed almost all his decisive inspirations—and none of his successors.

He squared his theory, the theory of the modern age, with the oldest and most persistent insights into the nature of labor, which, according to the Hebrew as well as the classical tradition, was as intimately bound up with life as giving birth. By the same token, the true meaning of labor’s newly discovered productivity becomes manifest only in Marx’s work, where it rests on the equation of productivity with fertility, so that the famous development of mankind’s “productive forces” into a society of an abundance of “good things” actually obeys no other law and is subject to no other necessity than the aboriginal command, “Be ye fruitful and multiply,” in which it is as though the voice of nature herself speaks to us. The fertility of the human metabolism with nature, growing out of the natural redundancy of labor power, still partakes of the superabundance we see everywhere in nature’s household.

The fertility of the human metabolism with nature, growing out of the natural redundancy of labor power, still partakes of the superabundance we see everywhere in nature’s household. The “blessing or the joy” of labor is the human way to experience the sheer bliss of being alive which we share with all living creatures, and it is even the only way men, too, can remain and swing contentedly in nature’s prescribed cycle, toiling and resting, laboring and consuming, with the same happy and purposeless regularity with which day and night and life and death follow each other. The reward of toil and trouble lies in nature’s fertility, in the quiet confidence that he who in “toil and trouble” has done his part, remains a part of nature in the future of his children and his children’s children.

Key Concepts

• Labor was to him the “reproduction of one’s own life” which assured the survival of the individual, and begetting was the production “of foreign life” which assured the survival of the species.
• by substituting for “abstract labor” the labor power of a living organism and by understanding labor’s surplus as that amount of labor power still extant after the means for the laborer’s own reproduction have been produced.
• the true meaning of labor’s newly discovered productivity becomes manifest only in Marx’s work, where it rests on the equation of productivity with fertility
• “Be ye fruitful and multiply,” in which it is as though the voice of nature herself speaks to us.
• The “blessing or the joy” of labor is the human way to experience the sheer bliss of being alive

Context

14 LABOR AND FERTILITY: Reconstruction of Marx’s core innovation linking labor, surplus, and fertility.