Critical labour in capital: a reading of Marx’s life in his work

Abstract

This essay proposes a reading of Marx’s Capital that considers the correlation between life and labour, between material existence and productive activity, as essential to the book’s critical project. It argues that there is a critical and paradoxical moment in the plexus of this relationship that academic discourse should consider: if Capital argues that capitalism constitutes a system of organization of life, inscribing human labour as labour power, that is, as commodity or market goods, then how can we extract critical labour itself from this totalizing structure? In other words, what kind of labour is critical labour and what function should it represent in a world in which all labour would already be inscribed within the logic of capital? Drawing on biographical, anecdotic and circumstantial considerations about Marx’s labour while writing Capital, this essay traces the conditions of existence of the author and creates a reading position that explores the relationship between life and work, between Marx and Capital, and thus questions critical labour itself as a productive activity and the material life it contains.