?The human significance and dignity of labor?: A keyword in Marxian anthropology

Abstract

Marx was active as revolutionary agitator, economist and journalist. What makes his work interesting today ? more than a hundred years after his death ? however, are not these aspects in themselves but the connective and philosophically grounded claim to be changing the 'world'. Kolakowski is quite correct when he writes in his three-volume work on the history of Marxism that "Karl Marx was a German philosopher". In its unity with political economy and historiography and with its goal of changing the world, Marx's philosophy is essentially different from contemporary philosophies that limit themselves to a great extent to the analysis of human knowledge and to the meaning of propositions. Marx' philosophy wants to be the con sciousness of the historical subject, of the proletariat, that changes the 'world', but which is brought forth along with its will for change by this same 'world'. This philosophy wants to be the consciousness of the 'world' that is being changed by the proletariat. The notion of 'world' is central to the work of Marx ? both by itself and in combination: 'world consciousness', 'world thrust', 'world order', 'state of the world'. This underlines the claim of Marxian thought to embrace the whole of reality, even though the 'world' that is the object of the will for change (including nature as its ground) is the world of man. The 'world' comes to be ? to join Marx in a moment of rhetoric as proceding from the efficacy of the historically culture-creating human species. The human species is 'world'-creative. Marx grasps the 'world' as unitary by deriving and explaining all of its forms ? be they relations of production or ideologies, political structures or cultural goods ? on the basis of the principle of motion of this world, the socially productive force of man. What remained for Goethe's Faust an unfulfilled wish, Marx thinks he has reached; namely, to understand what 'holds the world together from inside'. The assertions that the 'world' is a humanly created world and that the subject of decisive changes in the world is the proletariat allow us to see the central role of labor in Marx' worldview. In all of his important works, Marx sings the praises of labor. "Labor is