"i'd say that you need to examine the quote from marx that i quoted at you. you seem to be suggesting that work is something we should want to avoid in principle, rather than something that is fundamentally part of character as humans, as marx saw it. insects, for marx, as you well know if you know the quote, are unlike humans because they don't consciously think about what they are going to do in the future, together, let alone work together cooperatively, reflecting on that process, rather than instinctively as insects do."
Not asking for your help in understanding Marx, merely pointing out that in your rendering human nature was not all that distinct. Now you include 'consciousness' and 'planning', which brings us only slightly closer to a what is a confused and misplaced problematic in the first place - that of revealing what Marx saw as the 'essence of man'.
"marx thought we could create a world in which labor wasn't seen as dehumanizing, but fulfilling our fundamental natures as laboring beings. Work was fundamental to the human essence, for marx.
This is just a tautology. Too right 'work' is something to be opposed in principle when what is understood by that principle coincides with absoltuely with its current social form. 'Work' would have an absolutely different essence under communism, and its not true to Marx nor to that project to conflate them. It is contradictory to argue that for Marx man's essence is the result of the totality of historically existant social relationships and then in the same breath argue that he thinks one type of social relation is an enduring quality of being human. Still, I think I know what you mean.
cheers
EE
p.s. a question: if capitalism 'de-humanizes' where was its orginal un-adulturated form? How does an entity that has had its essence negated reclaim it, surely it would no longer exist or have become something else?