Marx had been reading Aristotle, who regarded leisure as freedom. It begs the question, is this meaningful work as you quote above and earlier not a pro social and productive leisure?
There seems to be a bit of an equivocation of terms going on here, as leisure can be understood in two different senses. There is leisure as "ability to do as one wills without coercion or compulsion" (e.g. "to do at one's leisure"), and then there's leisure as "idleness," as contrasted with industriousness, as Narz characterized it, or as a paradisiacal return to the the state of the garden, as João characterized it, quoting Simone Weil. If you define leisure as the former, then leisure as freedom is a tautological statement; both terms would then mean "the ability to do according to one's will without coercion or external compulsion." If the latter, then we're dealing in a vision totally at odds with Marx's conception of the human condition, and we return to my original point: that Marx did not see in communism an abolition of labor or a return to a Edenic state of eternal hedonic indolence.
Coming into this one late so forgive me for bringing this one back up. I'm totally confused now on what Marx was trying to achieve. I always thought Marx wanted to get rid of greed and selfishness by making everyone equal.
You seem to be saying that Marx thought that people were naturally inclined to aid one another and that no one likes to be placed in a category of society that is lower than someone else. IOW we're all at the bottom or we're all at the top. Is this a correct assessment?
So a couple of points. The first thing you need to understand if you want to get Marx is his notion of humanity as a species being:
Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844 said:
In estranging from man (1) nature, and (2) himself, his own active functions, his life activity, estranged labor estranges the species from man. It changes for him the life of the species into a means of individual life. First it estranges the life of the species and individual life, and secondly it makes individual life in its abstract form the purpose of the life of the species, likewise in its abstract and estranged form.
For labor, life activity, productive life itself, appears to man in the first place merely as a means of satisfying a need – the need to maintain physical existence. Yet the productive life is the life of the species. It is life-engendering life. The whole character of a species, its species-character, is contained in the character of its life activity; and free, conscious activity is man’s species-character. Life itself appears only as a means to life.
The animal is immediately one with its life activity. It does not distinguish itself from it. It is its life activity. Man makes his life activity itself the object of his will and of his consciousness. He has conscious life activity. It is not a determination with which he directly merges. Conscious life activity distinguishes man immediately from animal life activity. It is just because of this that he is a species-being. Or it is only because he is a species-being that he is a conscious being, i.e., that his own life is an object for him. Only because of that is his activity free activity. Estranged labor reverses the relationship, so that it is just because man is a conscious being that he makes his life activity, his essential being, a mere means to his existence.
In creating a world of objects by his personal activity, in his work upon inorganic nature, man proves himself a conscious species-being, i.e., as a being that treats the species as his own essential being, or that treats itself as a species-being. Admittedly animals also produce. They build themselves nests, dwellings, like the bees, beavers, ants, etc. But an animal only produces what it immediately needs for itself or its young. It produces one-sidedly, whilst man produces universally. It produces only under the dominion of immediate physical need, whilst man produces even when he is free from physical need and only truly produces in freedom therefrom. An animal produces only itself, whilst man reproduces the whole of nature. An animal’s product belongs immediately to its physical body, whilst man freely confronts his product. An animal forms only in accordance with the standard and the need of the species to which it belongs, whilst man knows how to produce in accordance with the standard of every species, and knows how to apply everywhere the inherent standard to the object. Man therefore also forms objects in accordance with the laws of beauty.
It is just in his work upon the objective world, therefore, that man really proves himself to be a species-being. This production is his active species-life. Through this production, nature appears as his work and his reality. The object of labor is, therefore, the objectification of man’s species-life: for he duplicates himself not only, as in consciousness, intellectually, but also actively, in reality, and therefore he sees himself in a world that he has created. In tearing away from man the object of his production, therefore, estranged labor tears from him his species-life, his real objectivity as a member of the species and transforms his advantage over animals into the disadvantage that his inorganic body, nature, is taken from him.
Similarly, in degrading spontaneous, free activity to a means, estranged labor makes man’s species-life a means to his physical existence.
What Marx is saying here is that the nature of human life that distinguishes it from all other forms of life is consciousness: that humans are able to conceptualize their activity outside the frame of bare necessity: you eat
so that you can do whatever labor brings you meaning, as contrasted with other species who
eat so they can go on eating. In other words, the core essence of humanity is freedom: the ability to shape one's reality according to one's will over and above the demands of coercion. It is on this basis that Marx condemns capitalism, as it inverts that fundamental human condition by turning via coercion humans into mere tools: objects that do not conceive of the activity outside the frame of bare necessity, but rather do only because of that necessity, and only insofar as that necessity extends. The freer the human worker is in the workplace, the worse they are as a tool, as a tool's utility derives from its ability to be predictable, reusable, and interchangeable with like tools, which is why we have things like bosses or overseers or work surveillance: the capitalist needs to constrain the human desire to act freely and replace it with predictable, regimented activity. Therefore capitalism is, by its very nature, contrary to human life: it is life-denying, and the movement to abolish that life-denying arrangement (i.e. communism) is, by contrast, definitionally life-affirming.
In the second part, Marx was opposed to "equality" as a guiding principle for the reasons he stated in the passage I quoted above, and for the reasons that a couple others have pointed out in this thread: that equality is a logical impossibility given that different people are, by definition, different. The only way for two things to be equal would be for them to be identical, which is physically impossible. You can only make two things equal in respect to some criterion, but again, given the impossibility of true equality, to make them equal in some respect will necessarily make them unequal in some other respect.
To take a quick example, let's imagine two workers, John and Laura. Both work in a factory making widgets. Laura is a very capable widget maker, and is able to produce 8 widgets per hour, while John isn't as capable, and can only produce 4 per hour. You could make things equal on a per diem basis (everybody gets paid, say, $50 for 8 hours of work), but in this case they are unequal on a production basis, as Laura is getting paid $1.28 per widget while John is getting paid $1.56 per widget. On the other hand, were you to pay an equal rate on a per-widget basis, then precisely the opposite problem arises, where Laura and John are putting in equal effort and working equal time, but Laura is earning twice as much as John. Finally, the same problem arises again if you pay everyone equally on a by-quota basis, as Laura will be working half the time as John to meet the same quota. It is for this reason that the guiding principle of communism, as set down in the Manifesto is "from each according to one's ability, to each according to one's need." And Marx spent much of his later years raking various other theoreticians over the coals for organizing on principles like "equal pay for equal work" or "a worker is entitled to all that he produces."
So then, Marx's vision of communism was, in his words: "the real movement which abolishes the present state of things," which is to say, an arrangement of social relations which present themselves as free, but which, in truth, deny freedom and thereby compel humans to deny themselves and their nature. And consequently communism is the popular movement for universal self-emancipation, and a striving to achieve true freedom.
