[...] Production is carried on within specific forms of life, and is thus suffused with social meaning. Because labour always signifies, humans being significant (literally, sign-making) animals, it can never be simply a technical or material affair. You may see it as away of praising God, glorifying the Fatherland or acquiring your beer money. The economic, in short, always presupposes a lot more than itself. It is not just a matter of how the markets are behaving. It concerns the way we become human beings, not just the way we become stockbrokers.

Marx writes wonderfully in the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of the protean, shape-changing, alchemical nature of money

Labour as we know it is an alienated form of what he calls "praxis"--an ancient Greek word meaning the kind of free, self-realising activity by which we transform the world.