The peculiar thing which Marx doesn't really mention in his 1844 Manuscripts is how human "species activities" such as caring for an infant can cease to be fully human expressions which offer satisfaction or interest, but just become "work which has to be done", which we sigh about at times, i.e. simple human pleasures, or expressions of human bonding become transformed into "work", but this work has the tendency to become abstract labour as well, i.e. the work does not appear as an expression of human "species activity" which humanises, despite all rhetoric and ideology to the contrary, but just "work to be done". I consider this has everything to do with the commodity form, with the value form, as suggested by "the oldest profession" which Marx considers at the beginning of his manuscript
Thank you...that was what I was trying to get at, but not very well. Yet, the issue predates capitalism. As a woman, I am particularly sensitive to the discussion of the value of woman's (reproductive) work and as far back as it goes...for me that's Plato's "Phaedrus"; what you see, over and over and over is a consistent dismissal of the value or meaning of this work. It gets sentimentalized in the nineteenth century...and that's about it. Asking that women get paid for it misses the point completely.
Somehow, perhaps because it is always men who write about it, there is this notion that there is nothing "creative" about "reproducing" life. As if my children were nothing but copies of me...as if the next spring were nothing but the last spring at a later moment in time...as if life itself were not sufficient grounds for being, meaning, joy....but that there must always be something other that sets itself above that and is greater than it. This setting itself apart and above always winds up justifying some kind of class priviledge...and infects all our thinking about the matter of "mere" reproduction.
Joanna
