Marx second lecture
A. To finish on the material from "On the Jewish Question":
1. Marx's view is that political emancipation falls short of full human emancipation (see, e.g., p. 103). Political emancipation is liberating human beings, as participants in political life, from factors that would distort that life: e.g. established religion or property qualifications for voting. These factors still shape people's lives even after the factors have been deprived of political significance. So the life of an individual falls apart into two lives. The first is life in the political community (spiritual, heavenly), which expresses (as far as it goes) the true essence of human beings (see p. 157, Thesis VI). The second is life in civil society (material, earthly) — shaped by the factors from which political life has been emancipated — which is reflective of human beings as egoistic.
2. This generates an illusion about human nature. Because material life is most of real life, it seems that human nature is as it appears in material life, i.e. pretty much as Hobbes thought. The real truth about human nature (Thesis VI) looks like idealistic abstraction, out of touch with how things actually are.
3. One might think the way to ensure human emancipation would be to secure human rights to everyone. But Marx argues (p. 105 and following) that the so-called "rights of man" are protective of human beings as they figure in civil society ("man separated from life in the community and withdrawn into himself, into his private interest and his private arbitrary will," p. 109). They just institutionalize the way in which material life fails to reflect human beings as they should be (as they have it in them to be).
4. So what would human emancipation be? See p. 114. It would require that "everyday life," and in particular "individual work," be such as to express the true essence of the human individual as a communal being.
5. Note that seeing things like this, Marx must see himself as obliged to work for social and economic change; he can't see the result of his thinking as merely intellectual. (See p. 158, Thesis XI.)
B. "Alienated Labor":
1. According to "On the Jewish Question," life in civil society (i.e. just about all of everyday life) isn't truly human, given that the true essence of human beings is to be communal beings. "Alienated Labor" discusses a specific dehumanization of the lives of workers.
2. What would properly human work be like? See pp. 137-140. Human beings are special (unlike other animals) in being capable of acting freely, and with a special consciousness that's bound up with the capacity for freedom. Compare Rousseau on how a human being, unlike other animals, can step back from the impulsions of nature and decide whether to go along with them. A version of that thought shows up in Marx: "[An animal that produces, e.g. a beaver] produces under the domination of direct physical need while man produces even when he is free from physical need and produces truly, indeed, only in freedom from such need" (p. 139). So if a human being produces only "under the domination of direct physical need," that activity fails to be properly human.