Hannah Arendt’s account of action calls into question Karl Marx’s concept of labor. Arendt's magnum opus, The Human Condition, published in 1958, began in part from her 1954 lecture series, “Karl Marx and the Tradition of Political Thought” (Arendt, 1998, p. 327). Recently published lectures and papers from 1953 and 1954 show the depth Arendt thought about Marx's idea of human freedom and the seriousness of her objection to his concept of labor (Arendt, 2018). Apparent in the initial research, which would evolve into The Human Condition, is her thesis that Marx problematically adopts Aristotle's social ontology. On Arendt's account, this inherence has the dramatic political implication of sacrificing action for labor.1 Evidently, for Arendt, crucial questions for thinking about human action and freedom derive from the relation between Marx and Aristotle. In this article, I defend Marx’s concept of labor by arguing that Aristotle helps illuminate the normative aspects imbedded in his idea of freedom. In the fragmentary and unfinished “Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844” (EPM), Marx locates an ontological conception of sociality in his understanding of alienated labor.2 In my view, Marx's notion of “species-being” entails an account of human flourishing, in which to flourish is to realize both human capabilities and the conditions for freedom. Marx's conception of unalienated labor as allowing for human flourishing distinctly develops an Aristotelian strain of thinking about human beings in which a latent human potential is formed and realized in society. Arendt's challenge to this kind of construal of Marx's concept of labor is outlined in Part 1. In her probing assessment of Marx's social ontology, Arendt argues labor is glorified, reducing politics to the necessity of life and erroneously folding ethics into the fact of labor. However, I contend that Arendt's distinction between “labor,” “work,” and “action” fails to capture the richness of Marx's concept of labor, once properly understood as the critique of alienated labor. While many leading Arendt commentators “deliberately leave aside questions about the accuracy or otherwise of her interpretation of Marx,” I directly address this problem (Canovan, 1992, p. 64). If Arendt identifies the concept of labor as Marx's major weakness in thinking about freedom, I argue that in fact, his critique of alienated labor entails a strong normative dimension as a theory of human action and political freedom. In Part 2, I offer a discussion of Marx's largely overlooked “Comments on James Mill” (CJM). This text provides a critical vantage point for Marx's move towards the critique of political economy and contains his earliest thoughts on the fetishized character of value. In Part 3, I address the central claims of the EPM and trace the relation between Marx's early thought and Aristotle. From Aristotle, Marx preserves the centrality of rationality in activity, while historicizing the relation between actuality and potentiality. In Part 4, I offer an immanent critique of Arendt. I aim to reduce the polemical opposition between Arendt and Marx by showing that her commitment to the political realm of action shares something fundamental with Marx's understanding of human flourishing, once the richness of this concept is adequately articulated.3 Both Arendt and Marx insist that politics needs to be located in the shared interaction between human beings acting in the world. However, Marx's critique of the social form of alienated labor provides a critical standpoint to assess Arendt's own argument. The difference between both thinkers demonstrates what is at stake in the concept of labor for thinking about human freedom. My conclusion reflects upon Marx's further development of the concept of value as anticipated in the EPM. In the modern world, the social and political realms are much less distinct. That politics is nothing but a function of society, that action, speech and thought are primary superstructures upon social interests, is not a discovery of Karl Marx but on the contrary is among the axiomatic assumptions Marx accepted uncritically from the political economics of the modern age. (Arendt, 1998, p. 33) Arendt's argument is a directed critique of Marx's social ontology. She draws a strong distinction between “labor,” “work,” and “action.” Her argument is phenomenological, drawing on the changing linguistic usages, reflected in political theory and culture, in which it is “a simple fact that every European language ancient and modern, contains two etymologically unrelated words, for what we have come to think of as the same activity” (Arendt, 1998, pp. 79–80).5 For Arendt, the synonymous use of “labor” and “work”—fully expressed in Marx's inheritance from political economy—is in actuality “the glorification of labor.”6 Labor, the act of the animal laborans is “enslaved by necessity.” Labor is toil and suffering, the bondage of natural life. Work, however, is creative and formative. With work, man is the maker (homo faber), of the “unnaturalness of human existence,” of the “‘artificial’ world of things.” The third category, action, is Arendt's governing concept. Action allows for political life without the mediation of “things or matter” (Arendt, 1998, p. 7). For Arendt, “While dire necessity made labor indispensable to sustain life, excellence would have the last thing to expect for it” (Arendt, 1998, p. 48). This expectation is precisely the problem with Marx's social ontology, which elevates production to an idealized social standpoint, but really its “sole purpose” is the “entertaining of the life process—and this is the unfortunately quite unutopian ideal that guides Marx's theories.” A footnote to this sentence, adds the suggestion that for Marx social humanity (vergesellshafteter Mensch and gesellschaftliche Menschheit) and “species-being” (gattungswesen) paint an ideal society as “a state of affairs where all human activities derive as naturally from human ‘nature’ as the secretion of wax by bees for making the honeycomb; to live and to labor for life will have become one and the same” (Arendt, 1998, p. 89). Behind Marx's theory of interests stands the conviction that the only legitimate gratification of an interest lies in labor. Supporting this conviction and fundamental to all his writing is a new definition of man, which sees man's essential humanity not in his rationality (animal rationale), or in his production of objects (homo faber), or in his having been made in the likeness of God (creatura Dei), but rather in labor, which tradition had unanimously rejected as incompatible with a full and free human existence. Marx was the first to define man as an animal laborans, as a laboring creature. He subsumes under this definition everything tradition passed down as the distinguishing marks of humanity: labor as the principle of rationality and its laws, which in the development of productive forces determine history, make history comprehensible to reason. Labor is the principle of productivity; it produces the truly human world on earth. (Arendt, 2005, p. 79) For Arendt, Marx occupies a paradoxical relationship to the western tradition of political thought. Marx's break with the tradition is in his definition of human beings in terms of labor, which reduces life (including action) to production. At the same time as Marx makes this challenge, Arendt stresses his place within the tradition. She views Marx as a “traditionalist” since he tries to resolve Aristotle's preoccupation with the relationship between freedom and necessity. This problem is a crucial element of The Human Condition; however, her 1953–1954 manuscripts show the extent her critique of Marx's social ontology explicitly animates the development of her thesis. Arendt draws a straight line—“given by Aristotle on one side and Marx on the other”—between the definition of the human being as a “political animal” and the definition of the “animal laborans” (Arendt, 2018, pp. 264, 269). Central to both Aristotle and Marx is the conception of social ontology based on the bios. As a result, Arendt claims Marx's economic thought is marked by this “reliance on Aristotelian philosophy” (Arendt, 2005, p. 79).7 Marx takes the productivity of the political economists and further naturalizes labor by way of an Aristotelian naturalism. Biological life is elevated over human reason (Arendt, 2018, p. 264). The deficiency in his concept of labor is its veneration of society and labor over politics and action. In so far as political action exists for Marx, it is now “past” as history (Arendt, 2018, p. 272). Human beings might make our own history, but the emphasis on making reveals Marx's proclivity for elevating productivity over action. Her interpretation is perceptive, not only in emphasizing the Aristotelian aspect of Marx's social ontology but also in the recognition that this ontology decisively shapes his concept of labor. Further, by identifying his attempt to overcome the distinction between the realm of freedom and the realm of necessity, “by abolishing labor,” Arendt argues that Marx's social ontology results in folding the latter into the former (Arendt, 1998, pp. 104–105). However, in reassessing Marx's early writing, it becomes clear that the conflation of necessity and freedom that Arendt takes Marx to endorse, is in fact a problem he identifies precisely because human activity is reduced to the necessity of alienated production. Marx views the negation of this social form as contingent on the establishment of a public realm in which private interests are not defined by the necessity of capital accumulation, but the life of free activity. Freedom in Marx's sense is the condition of life in which human activity can be untied from the necessity of capital as dead labor. Rather than glorifying necessity, Marx conceptualizes production in terms of human activity in order to capture what is distinctive about a form of social life defined by unfree forms of activity. What Arendt fails to acknowledge is that the theory of alienation allows Marx to integrate necessity into the historical conditions for freedom. The movement from the realm of necessity to the realm of freedom requires a form of action which is dependent on the rationality of human beings to articulate a shared sense of political association. In the sublation of necessity to freedom, Marx construes the realm of freedom as a higher, rather than separate, sphere from the realm of necessity. Necessity is an essential condition for human activity to be concretely free. Arendt fails to grasp that Marx's concept of labor depends upon the critique of alienated labor. Marx's critique of political economy is precisely that it conceives of labor transhistorically as economic nature, rather than the specific social form of alienated labor. Once clarified, Marx's concept of alienation—absent in Arendt's criticisms—allows labor to be seen as an activity not just of necessity but of substantive freedom. This resolution provides a prism to see that Marx shares with Arendt an understanding of the necessity of political action. Rather than conflating freedom with necessity, Marx should be understood in line with Arendt's commitment to the freedom which arises with human action. In his early writings, the notion of freedom is not an added extra, but central to Marx's social theory. The inability of political economy to recognize the alienated form of wage-labor shapes Marx's emergent immanent and normative critique of economic theory. In CJM, Marx provides his first critique of political economy's naturalization of social form as economic law.8 Through an analysis of money and credit, and in a preliminary discussion of value, Marx ties James Mill's economic theory with a presupposed notion of human nature, which posits human beings as egotistical producers. Additionally, Marx provides a very early conception of human flourishing beyond capital. CJM consolidates Marx's 1843 texts, especially OJQ, by developing a political critique of economic categories. Marx's early assessment of the capitalist state as an alienated social form leads to his concept of species-being and his investigation of value. Political emancipation is the reduction of man on the one hand to the member of civil society, the egoistic, independent individual, and on the other to the citizen, the moral person. Only when real, individual man resumes the abstract citizen into himself and as an individual man has become a species-being in his empirical life, his individual work and his individual relationships, only when man has recognized and organized his forces propres [own forces] as social forces so that social force is no longer separated from him in the form of political force, only then will human emancipation be completed. (Marx, 1975a, p. 234)9 The split between political life and private life empties both spheres for the citizen and the individual, rendering both abstract and alienated. By seeking only political emancipation, political life cannot overcome this contradiction but, as Marx's argues, confirms the antinomy.10 Moreover, the political realm is judged to exist independently of the social realm.11 The political realm is empty if narrowly conceived as the state and divorced from the social dimension of freedom. Marx offers the term “species-being” as the actualization of the individual who recognizes themselves socially. Political emancipation is necessary but remains particular until unified in an adequately universal notion of freedom. This view of politics allows for social freedom, as human emancipation, to be conceived universally. Marx's objection to the simple equation of politics with the modern state is that “the contradiction between public and private life [and] between universal and particular interests,” makes impossible a political solution to the misery of poverty (Marx, 1975d, p. 412). Marx negates the split between the political and social and seeks to sublate both into an idea of human community. The freedom and equality of the modern citizen would become realized in an actualized subject which is universal. Marx calls the social being gattungswesen, “species-being,” “species-essence,” or “species-life.” This term, which is present in his 1843 writings, becomes a key notion in 1844. However, Marx strengthens his account of political and social alienation by providing an assessment of the way in which the individual is posited in economic theory. In CJM, Marx considers the economic laws theorized by Mill to be abstracted from the actual functioning of economic life. Following David Ricardo, Mill hangs his analysis of supply and demand and the relation of production to exchange value on the role of money as the medium of exchange. Money is the substance of value. Marx faults this analysis since it posits money as the determinant of meaning between human beings and the products of their activity, which become the “relation between things” (Marx, 1975b, p. 260). Contra Mill, Marx inverts the money-to-production relation. Political economy posits money as the embodiment, the essence of private property. However, Marx suggests that the real mediator is productive activity; that is alienated and objectified by private property and money. He claims this situation is “dehumanized” and as a result, the human becomes a slave to money (Marx, 1975b, pp. 260–261). Why must private property finish up as money? Because as a social animal man must finish up in exchange and exchange – given the premise of private property – must finish up in value. For the mediating movement of man engaged in exchange is not a social, human movement, it is no human relationship: it is the abstract relation of private property to private property, and this abstract relation is the value which acquires a real existence as value only in the form of money. Since in the process of exchange men do not relate to each other as men, things lose the meaning of personal, human property. The social relationship of private property to private property is already one in which private property is estranged from itself. Hence, money, the existence-for-itself of this relationship, represents the alienation of private property, an abstraction from its specific personal nature (Marx, 1975b, p. 261). Marx notes that simple exchange is an expected form of social interaction and different in kind to the exchange principle formed by private property. What is particular about private property is the manner in which human relationships become abstract. Private property begets private property, expressing social meaning as money and value. Marx's identification of the abstract domination of things ties his analysis of social being with the critique of private property relations. His insight that value appears as money, anticipates his mature value-form theory and the concept of commodity fetishism (Marx, 1976, pp. 163–170).12 Private property reflects the relation in which productive activity and the products of that activity become functional and determined by exchange. To Marx this means that the processes and results of productive activity do not embody human relations in which artifacts of human activity are embedded with meaning as human creations. Instead, there is a lack of correspondence between the needs and desires of the producers and the social fabric in which those products are made. As value, productive activity forms an abstract relation to private property, in effect emptying the human content. Money comes to represent this relationship. Marx writes “the real value of things is their exchange value” (Marx, 1975b, p. 262). He comes to fully explain this process in Capital, but in CJM the embryo of Marx's later distinction between use and exchange value is present. This distinction has key explanatory power in both texts, although in Capital the unity in contradiction between use and exchange value are theorized within the value-form at a much higher level of abstraction. Marx's discussion in CJM of money and value reconceives economic processes in terms of human activity and sociality rather than merely in the terms of political economy, whose abstractions are continually reproduced by the real abstractions of the exchange relation under private property. Implicit in Marx's critique of political economy in CJM, is a view of production in which human artifacts can embody human meaning. Modern life under capitalism subjects all modes of interaction to the compulsion of exchange. Human “morality,” “social worth and status” are now mediated by money in the form of credit. The language used here is significant. Marx maintains that human relationships—ethical interaction—are now debased to an alienated abstraction. Money becomes the “moral existence, the social existence, the very heart of man, and because under the appearance of mutual trust between men it is really the greatest distrust and a total estrangement” (Marx, 1975b, p. 263). Marx is describing the form of misrecognition that arises out of the abstract but universal relation of money. Human beings now relate primarily through a “trust” which is predicated on competition and self-gain. Alienated labor means that human activity becomes a “torment” and “wealth appears as poverty,” dissolving the collective character of labor, subverting and naturalizing individual competitive experience. Real economic abstractions dominate social life.13 Marx writes that the “separation from other men appears to be his true existence, his life appears as the sacrifice of his life, the realization of his essence appears as the de-realization of his life, their production is the production of nothing, his power over objects appears as the power of objects over them” (Marx, 1975b, p. 266). In normative terms, the significance of alienation is the limitation of human life to the conditions of unfree activity. Human activity is determined by the necessity to reproduce, defined not as the realization of human good but the bare essentials of life. Alienation distorts human life so that the very activity which would give it definition and animate its freedom becomes its unfreedom. Marx points out how political economy misunderstands this historical form. At a fundamental level, Adam Smith's commercial society takes the philosophical standpoint of the individual merchant. He constructs a model of history based on this standpoint, in which the individual develops according to the natural end of commercial society. The Smithian conception of social relations is that of eternally competing private property (Marx, 1975b, p. 265). Smith's understanding of human nature supports his analysis of transhistorical economic laws. Individuals appear abstracted from society, ready to truck, barter and exchange and only entering society, as Simon Clarke notes, in an “economic function” (Clarke, 1982, p. 19). Following this model, political economy takes alienated labor simply as labor. Alienated labor is naturalized and presented as a perpetual and fixed necessity of commercial society. Conversely, for Marx, economic laws reflect definite social forms. Private property represents a finite historical juncture where exchange value has decisively transformed the simple circuit of use values that characterized precapitalist economic forms. Marx’s understanding of productive activity under capitalism as alienated labor allows him to see past the world of the merchant and the market. Individuals interact with the mutual interest of self-advantage. Marx argues exchange as an act and social relation is normatively impoverished. Citing CJM, Axel Honneth is right to suggest that “members of this society do not supplement each other in their ‘social relationship’ through their respective individual acts; rather, they perform these acts merely ‘with the intention of plundering”’ (Honneth, 2017, p. 16). the expression of my own individual life during my activity and also, in contemplating the object, I would experience an individual pleasure, I would experience my personality as an objective sensuously perceptible power beyond all shadow of doubt… In the individual expression of my own life I would have brought about the immediate expression of your life, and so in my individual activity I would have directly confirmed and realized my authentic nature, my human, communal nature. (Marx, 1975b, pp. 277–278) This flourishing society is Marx's “good-life,” where practices can be recognized as ones which entail human creativity and intelligibility. This position offers a positive vision of the possibilities and capabilities of a different form of societal organization, based on a negative critique of historically specific forms of domination. Marx's first encounter with political economy, especially his critique of its naturalization of alienated labor, is developed through an enrichment of the concept of human activity. The EPM provides the architecture for the specific import that productive activity holds for Marx's social ontology. The mediations of laboring activity are comprehended as transformative for social being-and-becoming. In confronting the alienated form of labor under capitalism, Marx conceives of social being in modern society as constituted by productive activity. Marx identifies a central structural relation in the determination of wage-labor and capital. His characterization of the abstract and alienated form of labor in capitalist society and his critique of the political economy of Smith, Ricardo and Mill, develops a normative notion of species-being. Human essence is historicized and made concrete in the EPM by the interaction of productive activity with the being and the way of becoming of human potential.14 Species-being conceptually embodies Marx's fundamental ontological commitment to the view that human beings are socially formed. Marx's borrows the phrase from Feuerbach but imbues the term with an Aristotelian social ontology.15 The individual is the social being. His vital expression—even when it does not appear in the direct form of a communal expression, conceived in association with other men—is therefore an expression and confirmation of social life. Man's individual and species-life are not two distinct things (Marx, 1975c, p. 350). For Marx, the ontological importance of human sociality and its teleological realization is in the type of association organized. Properly shared association, which Marx envisions as communism, has “society as its goal,” but can only eventuate from the actualization of this potential (Marx, 1975c, p. 365). Marx develops Aristotle's logical distinction between actuality and potentiality which renders intelligible the historical form of alienation. For Aristotle, this logical distinction between actuality and potentiality is crucial because it involves the movement of human activity as both rational (involving logos) and teleological. Marx accepts the teleological conception of form development and the rationality of the activity which must be involved in its coming-to-be, but inverts the historical relation between actuality and potentiality. By historicizing the relation, the normative dimension of a critique of actuality is made possible (Jaffe, 2016). For Aristotle, the development of an essence or form is the actualization of its potential. In this sense, “actuality is prior to potentiality” both in its form and temporality. Aristotle offers the formula: “for that which is in the primary sense potential is potential because it is possible for it to become actual.” As it applies to species, “the actual member of the species is prior to the potential member of the same species, though the individual is potential before it is actual” (Aristotle, 1984, 1049b4-20). The distinctive human function, the action which allows the good to be acquired, is reason (Aristotle, 1999, 1097a21-1098a-8). Adriel M. Trott characterizes the relation between actuality and potentiality as “both the principle of movement and the form or end” (Trott, 2014, p. 36). This view corresponds to the polis, since just as living well for a human being involves logos, the form of activity adequate to political life involves the coming-into-be of human beings and political communities simultaneously, in which the activity of political deliberation is an end in itself (Trott, 2014, pp. 41–45). The interrelation between human reason and political community is formed by self-activity. Marx preserves this concept of coming-to-be through human self-activity, but his concept of labor reverses the relation between actuality and potentiality. Actuality is understood historically as an alienated form of life. In reality, social relations are conflictual and determined by unfree activity. But if actuality is an alienated form, Marx maintains that there is a contingent potential for alienated beings to become free. In his language, species-being is a nonactualized potentiality. Productive activity is alienated in its historical articulation, its actuality, but if the capacity for creative labor is developed according to the possibilities inherent in the human essence, then the flourishing Marx associates with the human essence could be realized.16 The capacity for human beings to live reflectively, to understand being as self-directed and rational through our practices and activity, marks human beings distinctly as a species. Productive activity is ontologically significant precisely because it allows conscious and rational reflection.17 However, the concept of labor explicitly differentiates Marx's concept of species-being from Aristotle.18 For Aristotle, there is a sharp distinction between production (poiesis) and creative activity (praxis), since “production has its end in something other than itself, but action does not, since its end is acting well itself” (Aristotle, 1999, 1140b6-8). Aristotle allows for creative action, technē, which concerns production but necessarily has involved the coming-to-be of a reasoning that makes this action skillful (Aristotle, 1999, 1140a6-7). Aristotle views production as such as external to the coming-to-be of rationality. Thus, production, unlike action is not a good in-itself, but the necessity of bios.19 Aristotle associates production with slaves, as living instruments, since bios “is action, not production” and a slave is restricted from things related to action (Aristotle, 1996, 1254a6-7). Marx takes Aristotle's distinction between action and production to reflect the structure of Athenian inequality, but rather than dismissing Aristotle's concept of activity, he acts to show that all production is technē (Marx, 1976, pp. 175, 533). For Marx, labor is the mediating activity which allows rationality to be enacted, as well as the articulation of creativity and species-life. If this is correct, then Arendt's critique of Marx is undercut by the clear differentiation between Marx and Aristotle's notion of production. The contrast is not between Aristotle's condemnation and Marx's glorification of labor, but between the inbuilt limitation of Aristotle's understanding of technē given the historical conditions in which his concept of production arose. Marx's revaluation of Aristotle's idea of activity suggests that production itself must be understood as technē. Further, for Marx, the form of this activity is hindered from its rational end by the estrangement of the wage-labor/capital relation. Creative productive activity, that which defines human beings, is inverted into an alien power through wage labor. Forced to sell the ability to labor for a wage, Marx characterizes alienation (Entäusserung) as a process of objectification. For Marx, alienated labor individuates by estranging (Entfremdung) both the relation between producer and their product, and