The Great Conversation

It is our duty to seek to become rounded, complete creature, a whole sufficient unto itself or, on the contrary, to be only a part of the whole, the organ of an organism?

—The Division of Labour in Society by Émile Durkheim

Further, as the division of labour increases, labour is simplified. The special skill of the worker becomes worthless. He becomes transformed into a simple, monotonous productive force that does not have to use intense bodily intellectual facilities. His labour becomes a labour that anyone can preform.

—Karl Marx, Wage Labour and Capital

The less you are, the more you have; the less you express your own life, the greater is your alienated life - the greater is the store of your estranged being.

—Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844

And the worker, who for twelve hours weaves, spins, drills, turns, builds, shovels, breaks stones, carries loads, etc. - does he consider this twelve hours’ weaving, spinning, drilling, turning, building, shoveling, breaking stones as a manifestation of his life, as life? On the contrary, life beings for him where this activity ceases, at table, in the public house, in bed. The twelve hours’ labour, on the other hand, has no meaning for him weaving, spinning, drilling, etc., but as earning, which bring him to the table, to the public house, into bed.

—Karl Marx, Wage Labour and Capital

By reducing the worker’s need to the barest and most miserable level of physical subsistence, and by reducing his activity to the most abstract mechanical movement. Hence, he says: Man has no other need wither of activity or of enjoyment. For he call even this life human and existence.

—Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844

Every product is a bait with which to seduce away the other’s very being, his money; every real and possible need is a weakness which will lead the fly to the gluepot.

—Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844

The worker becomes all the poorer the more wealth he produces, the more his production increases in power and range. The worker becomes an even cheaper commodity the commodities he creates. With the increasing value of the world of things proceeds in direct proportion devaluation of the world of men.

—Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts

The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point, however, is to change it.

—Karl Marx, Theses on Feuerbach

If I long for a particular dish or want to take the mail-coach because I am not strong enough to go by foot, money fetches me the dish and the mail-coach: that is, it converts my wishes from meditated, imagined or willed existence into their sensuous, actual existence - from imagination to life, from imagined being into real being. In effecting mediation, money is the truly creative power.

—Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844

By reducing the worker’s need to the barest and most miserable level of physical subsistence, and by reducing his activity to the most abstract mechanical movement. Hence, he says: Man has no other need either of activity or of enjoyment. For he calls even this life human life and existence.

—Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844