labor
10 Feb 2024 - 07 Sep 2026
- I'm fascinated with the Marxist concept of labor, because I don't quite understand it, there is some mystical element there. Something beyond economic rationality.
- What we usually think of as work Marxists would call alienated labor, that is, tasks produced for external purposes, dictated by capitalist reality. Real labor is more like "the creative engagement of the human mind and will with the world".
- Ask Claude
- Labor Day is a fitting occasion for this, though the American holiday was deliberately scheduled in September to avoid May Day and its socialist associations.
- Why it feels mystical
- Because it is, in a precise sense: Marx's concept of labor is a secularized theology, and he knew it. The lineage runs Hegel → Feuerbach → Marx.
- From Hegel, Marx took the idea that spirit becomes actual only by externalizing itself into an object and then recognizing itself there. The master-slave passage in the Phenomenology is the source text: the bondsman, forced to form the thing, finds his own mind in the formed object and thereby becomes a self. Marx's verdict on Hegel in 1844 was that he grasped labor as the essence of humanity but only ever meant mental labor.
- From Feuerbach, Marx took the inversion: God is the human essence projected outward, alienated, then worshipped as an alien power. Marx transposes this from religion to economics. Capital is accumulated human productive power standing over against its creators as a thing with a will of its own. Hence the gothic vocabulary that runs all through Capital: capital as dead labor, vampiric, animated only by sucking living labor; the commodity as something that transcends sensuousness and stands on its head. In the fetishism section Marx says outright that to find an analogy he must retreat into the misty realm of religion. The mysticism you're detecting is not decoration. It's the claim that under capitalism social relations really do take the form of relations between things, and that this appearance is not an illusion in people's heads but a fact about the structure.
- The 1844 account
- Your gloss is close to the young Marx. The technical term is Gattungswesen, species-being: humans are the species that makes its own life-activity an object of will and consciousness. Animals produce only under immediate physical need, and only for themselves; humans produce universally, in the absence of need, and can form objects according to the standard of any species and the laws of beauty.
- Alienated labor breaks this in four ways: the worker is estranged from the product (it confronts him as an alien thing owned by another), from the activity itself (which is not his own, is not freely chosen, and he flees it like the plague), from species-being (his defining capacity becomes a mere means to keep him alive), and from other people (who become competitors or owners).
- The corresponding image of unalienated labor appears in a fragment on James Mill: producing in a way that objectifies my individuality, and knowing that another person's need has been met by my activity, so that I am affirmed in both my own thought and their love. That's your "creative engagement of mind and will with the world," and it's frankly closer to Schiller and the Romantics than to anything in economics.
- The architect and the bee
- Even in Capital, twenty-three years later, the definition of labor is teleological, not economic. The worst architect beats the best bee because he raises the structure in imagination before building it in wax or brick. Labor is purposive activity in which a plan held in mind is imposed on matter, and Marx calls the whole process a Stoffwechsel, a metabolism between humanity and nature. Human nature is itself changed in the process; you make yourself by making things.
- The mature turn, which complicates your framing
- Two moves in Capital shift the register from anthropology to critique.
- First, labor versus labor-power. The worker does not sell labor. He sells labor-power, the capacity to work, for a definite period. Its value is the cost of reproducing it. Its use yields more value than it costs. That gap is surplus value, and it is why exploitation can occur with every exchange perfectly fair by the market's own rules. No cheating is required.
- Second, concrete versus abstract labor. Tailoring and weaving are qualitatively different activities. But as producers of value they count only as undifferentiated expenditures of human labor-power, measured in time. Marx considered this distinction his own best contribution to political economy. Crucially, abstract labor is not a mental generalization economists perform. It is a real abstraction: the market actually reduces heterogeneous human activity to a homogeneous magnitude, behind everyone's back, and enforces the reduction on them. Value is congealed abstract labor time.
- The pressure point
- Your framing (real labor is creative self-expression; capitalism prevents it) is the standard humanist reading, and it has serious opposition.
- Moishe Postone's Time, Labor, and Social Domination argues that Marx's critique is a critique of labor, not a critique made from the standpoint of labor. Labor in capitalism is historically specific: it plays a social-mediating role there that it plays nowhere else. The traditional reading treats labor as a transhistorical human essence that capitalism fetters, and then imagines socialism as the liberation of that essence. Postone thinks this is exactly what Marx was undermining. What needs abolishing is the form of labor, not the shackles on it.
- Marx himself supplies ammunition. In Capital volume 3 he says the realm of freedom begins only where labor determined by necessity leaves off, that it lies beyond the sphere of material production, and that the shortening of the working day is its basic prerequisite. That's not a vision of labor redeemed. It's a vision of labor minimized. It sits awkwardly with the Grundrisse, where he mocks Adam Smith's view of work as pure sacrifice and insists that genuinely free labor, composing music being his example, is damned serious effort.
- Hannah Arendt pressed the incoherence hard in The Human Condition. She separates labor (cyclical, biological, its products consumed immediately, leaving nothing behind) from work (fabrication of durable objects that constitute a world) from action (speech and deed among others). Her charge is that Marx runs the first two together, then glorifies labor as humanity's defining activity while also promising to abolish it, and that a society of laborers freed from labor would have no idea what to do with itself.
- So the mystical residue you're picking up is real, and it's load-bearing. It's what makes the theory a critique rather than an alternative economics. Whether it survives contact with the mature economic argument is the live question, and it's been the fault line in Marxist theory for a century, from Lukács on reification through Althusser's claim of an epistemological break between the humanist young Marx and the scientific old one.
- As a concept, it has a resonance with embodiment , which also attempts to repair a split in the cosmos.
- see also play, Luddism, WorkPlay, Volunteered Slavery, Severance
- Previously
- From April 3rd, 2022
- Man, computation is so anti-labor, no wonder Marx and tech don't mix very well. They used to, back in the industrial machine era. But the whole point of computation is to eliminate the need for human labor. That would be doing humanity a favor, if not that labor was the chief source, not just of income, but of dignity and meaning, for so many.