In common parlance, the concept of labor itself betrays the nature of the society in which that concept has taken on its modern shape. Typically when we think of labor we think of jobs and paid "work," that is, wage labor.
Which is just as well, as culturally devaluing the multitude of labor forms in favor of the forms that are useful to capital serves to cheapen that labor by narrowing the range of obligation of repayment for that labor.
After all, what exactly is labor, other than the general expenditure of energy to organize and harmonize energy in the individual, social, and natural environment?
Emotional labor to maintain relationships, parental labor to raise children, physical labor to maintain one's living space and community space, all of these things must be done whether we like it or not. They are intrinsic to maintaining the stability of the human organism, as it relates to its environment.
There is a joy to much of it, yes, but much of it is simply hard work in the sense of it being psychologically and physically taxing. And yes, emotional labor can be physically taxing, as stress and strain necessarily have bodily effects.
It is taxing because any sort of movement or organization of energy and resources requires the organization and maintenance of the very structures required to move those energy and resources. Consider basic physical labor for a simple illustration.
At its base, the muscles must be replenished with proteins and other nutrients as they extend and hold themselves in order to move mass outside themselves, which itself requires the mobilization of the throat muscles, stomach, circulatory system, brain, and a host of other things.
For each different activity, a different set of muscles, memory, and skill sets must proceed from a weak state to a strong state, which is basically the process of repeating a state of organization in fast enough succession, a process which is constantly in a state of decay as time passes from its peak state.
This hurts in many different ways: it is not completely pleasant to grow and change. Even a state of rest becomes painful after too long, as boredom sets in or a certain body part is put too much pressure on for too long. What's more, as we act on the environment, and the environment itself is far from static, we find that constant change, constant development of different faculties is necessary, so that things like contentment and security can stay the same. As we see, pain, pleasure, and change form a very complicated matrix that I can't really address right now.
The more strenuous and unrewarding the work becomes, the more painful, which I'll briefly address in an accompanying post.
It is a good enough amount of work to simply account for one's immediate community's daily needs. But any sort of large scale infrastructure project, even in the form of a simple building, requires labor that is in addition to the requirements of the reproduction of the laborers themselves, labor which not only erects the buildings, but produces and maintains the instruments required for building.
Capital, with its intense drive to constantly grow, requires a constant compression of that necessary labor, so that it can squeeze out ever greater amounts of that surplus, which it uses to technologically, spatially, and temporally extend ever further.
It does this in many ways, but one of those ways is an incessant negotiation of what frequencies of the myriad labor types should actually be repaid, which comes down to: which parts of labor should be replenished, and what parts should be exhausted to their extremes? How much can it get away with, and who can it shit on the most?
We see the greatest extremes of this negotiation play out historically and ideologically in the form of phenomena like slavery, prison labor, domestic labor, and sweatshop labor. As critical race theorists have long pointed out, slaves and prisoners have been dehumanized in various ways, so that in the end they are seen to barely deserve any sort of life, and the free labor they are providing is actually some kind of favor for them.
To give a brief example, the Pacific Coast Highway, that widely revered piece of infrastructure that passes through the illustrious Big Sur, a region that has grown preposterously rich due to the magnetic worldwide attraction its natural beauty creates, and which has rewarded its private and passive private landowners most, was built with the help of free prison labor, with the excuse that the work was a form of rehabilitation for "brutish" convicts, themselves caught in a battle for basic survival and sustenance. It was the infrastructure that made the regional wealth possible, so given our premises, the wealth was stolen, especially when one takes into account the land itself was stolen, and overlaid with an alien colonial political economic system.
In this way, an industrial society bangs its most vulnerable and damaged about the head with one hand, and with the other points with a disapproving finger when those being hit react to that banging, giving it ever the more self-justification to go on banging a bit harder.
Similarly, as feminists have also long since pointed out, traditional domestic labor, which is just as necessary for any sort of decent quality of life, is downplayed and attributed to the nobility of those meek sacrificers toiling away hidden in that sphere, which has historically been relegated to women.
What we see ultimately played out is a reward system put in place that spreads benefits mapped out to those closest to the image of the individuals in greatest control of the direction of capital: that of the binary heterosexual "sane and white" man, a designation which has undergone struggles and negotiations of its own.
More historically, labor becomes ever more legitimate the more wealth is attached, and the wealth in turn circulates and builds up where various families and institutions, positioned socially and temporally as they are, are able to benefit from the walling off and privatization of the commons, and the profit that is made available by this.
In the end, to the dominant culture, what counts is labor is that which maintains and augments money, and more broadly, wealth. Those who perform the labor, and those who are rewarded for it are given in turn rights to dispose of what spheres of wealth they have accrued, while the rest of the labor hovers somewhere in the ambient environment, under various designations like sacrificial domestic labor, rehabilitative ventures, community service, and criminal activity.
