In this culture, labor is one of the closest concepts to the sacred, or the pure. One is saintly if one labors. It exists as some self-evident reason for doing anything good. As a concept, labor can be quite flexible, and of course, any kind of work or development in a certain direction sets one up as master over one's domain in that direction.
And so this context allows the flexible concept to be wrapped around limited activities favored by the ruling class. The labor concept was as the blade of a shovel that forced the indigenous off of their land. The laboring colonialists were doing something worthwhile and progressive, while the idling natives were sinners that let their talents and environments languish. Pure nonsense of course, but it made for a convenient rationalization to kill and dispossess.
It is the concept of labor that both the left and right struggle to socially define, as the near whole of our modern conception of virtue is attached to it. In the political imagination of the left, labor belongs to the laborer, so the laborer should be rewarded. Or else the meaning of labor is expanded to blanket the activity of marginalized peoples, which also should be rewarded.
And then on the right, any sort of activity that is just and good is activity that occurs under the guided supervision of capital and white males in general.
This shovel, once transformed into a revolutionary tool, did indeed bring life to its many wielders - sometimes justly derived life - but the shovel has also been transformed into the whip that drives the value-creating activity that fuels capital.
Now it is time for the whip to transform once again, perhaps as a noose to fit around the neck of capital. Labor is wholesome which occurs in a direction away from the aims of sustaining capital.
