Abstract
The communist future envisaged by Marx bears the characteristics of a happy eschatology. The famous author was a workaholic, had been writing about work from his beginnings up to the end of his life, but seemingly – and rather paradoxically – he hated his subject, was uncomfortable with it. There is nothing noble about work in Marx: on the contrary, work is gloomy, it destroys or reduces men to animals, is a source of mortification. Marx’s main concepts, alienation and reification, are directly related to death: the paper investigates several occurrences of death in Marx’s early writings, especially in the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844

Keywords
Karl Marx, work, death, Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844, 19th century.