The primitive societies could not visualise that anything can be work other than hunting and gathering. Both involve muscle. Though actually both involved mind more than muscle. If only muscles were needed for even hunting and gathering, Homo Sapiens stood just no chance. Even the monkeys would thrash us anyday.
But the primitive mind could only see moving limbs, it could not even know that what was guiding and seeing the limbs move was mind. So it engraved on its genes that the work meant only the moving limbs.
This genetic encoding has resulted into untold misery and millions upon millions of deaths. We still are not able to visualise the work as anything other than limbs moving. But only limbs moving gave us only kills and fruits both obtained with great struggle against the competitors. Even the cooking of the kill was the doing of the mind. And then growing of the fruits we liked, many of which later became “crops,” was purely the plan of the mind.
So everything up from the kills after great chases and the wild fruits is doing of the mind, not of limbs, not of labour. Mind makes steel, not limbs, and mind assembles that steel into a car, not limbs. Everything up from the kills and wild fruits is the division of labour, and the division of the labour is purely a doing of the mind. Human mind. And only mind can do valuation of the doings of the mind. No muscles can evaluate the output of a mind. And the division of labour and capacity to assign values to the products of this division is what we call modern industrial society. In fact Civilisation was always this only: division of labour and valuation of the resultant products. Industrial age is just the addition of machines to it, machines, again a creation of mind.
But the genetic encoding continues. We idolise limbs, and we curse the mind as the exploiter. We idolise workers, and we demonise as exploiters the minds who organise activities that engage those workers. Without those minds, the workers will not remain “unexploited,” they will in fact not remain even workers. They will have to become hunter gatherers again.
So on this “Labour Day,” disinfect your mind. Disinfect your language. And teach the workers that “work” isn’t movement of limbs. Work is the mind in use, not only moving the limbs, but also creating the opportunities which make it possible for the limbs to move at the levers of a machine, at the buttons of a cockpit, at the keyboard of a computer, most of these now air conditioned, instead of the limbs moving in chase of a hard-to-get deer.
If you could cure human mind of this cancer that makes “worker” not only a separate entity of limbs and no mind, but a separate species that is supposed to rule Homo Sapiens, no questions asked, you would have actually served the Labour. If you could exorcise the ghost called “Leftist” from the minds of the “workers,” you would truly liberate mankind from all exploitations.
