Marx starts with labour. Labour is described as ‘the worker’s own life-activity, the manifestation of his own life’. Yet it becomes, under capitalism, a commodity the worker must sell in order to live. Therefore his life-activity is reduced to a means to go on living. It is not part of his life, but ‘a sacrifice of his life’. His real life only begins when his work ceases, ‘at table, in the public house, in bed’
