For Marx, human labor’s relation to nature is always socially organized and mediated.

Evidence

Culture has its roots in what Marx, in The German Ideology , called man’s “double relation”: to nature and to other men. Men, Marx argued, intervene in nature and, with the help of certain instruments and tools, use nature to reproduce the material conditions of their existence. But, from a very early point in the history of human development, this intervention in nature through labor is socially organized. Men collaborate with one another—at first, through the collective use of simple tools, the rudimentary division of labor, and the exchange of goods—for the more effective reproduction of their material conditions. This is the beginning of social organization, and of human history. From this point forward, man’s relation to nature becomes socially mediated. The reproduction of human society, in increasingly complex and extended forms, and the reproduction of material existence are fundamentally linked: in effect, the adaptation of nature to man’s material needs is effected only through the forms which his social collaboration with other men assumes. Men, then, reproduce themselves as “social individuals” through the social forms which their material production assumes. — Hall, Stuart, Essential Essays, Volume 1, 881

Categorization

• DEFINE: Establishes Hall’s reading of Marx’s foundational materialism: culture rooted in the social organization of labor, not in nature alone.
• XREF: connects to: Marx always treated economics as political economy and human interaction — Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination: A History…, 490