Bearing a Title: What is Labor?

by Lucy S.

This will be quick and informal because I am now in the throes once again of my work for the upcoming semester. Well, quick for me may not mean short, because I find that it takes far longer to write something shorter than to type quickly, rambling away from thought to thought. (Thus Mark Twain famously wrote that if he’d had more time, he would have written a shorter letter…) I have modified this blog’s name, as you will see, from “Bear Down” to “Labor 2 Bear Down.” This is in part because it matches the site address, and partly because there are umpteen blogs called Bear Down (something I realize, in retrospect, was bound to be the case), but also because I want to emphasize the labor which brings us to and is inherent in these various forms of bearing down to produce – create.  

But I am interested in the question of what we even mean by laboring. What constitutes labor?  Is it labor only if someone pays us money for doing it? Is it labor only if we dislike it? Is it labor only if we produce a material object? Is it labor only when it benefits someone else rather than solely oneself? Is it labor only when it meets the basic needs humans have to stay alive? What if someone labors hard to support her/himself and perhaps their loved ones as well but the labor produces something which has harmful effects on those who buy the product or on the environment? Is this blog labor? I would really like to hear people’s thoughts on this. I think we could benefit from some extended dialogue on this topic.

David Graeber writes, near the end of his book Debt: The First 5,000 Years:

I would like, then, to end by putting in a good word for the non-industrious poor. At least they aren't hurting anyone. Insofar as the time they are taking off from work is being spent with friends and family, enjoying and caring for those they love, they're probably improving the world more than we acknowledge. Maybe we should think of them as pioneers of a new economic order that would not share our current one's penchant for self-destruction (390). 

I love him for saying this (and I love that whole book). But I am wondering if “enjoying and caring for those they love” constitute labor, too. If I am a first grade teacher and read stories to my students during part of the day, is that labor? What if I read stories to the neighbor’s daughter who I am paid to take care of? What if I read to kids who are not my own and who I’m not paid to take care of, but do so as a favor to their parents? What if I do it because I enjoy it, and the parents are home? What if I read to my own kids?  At what point is this labor and at what point is it not?  Is it labor if I am a paid psychologist listening to clients talk about their life struggles and providing feedback and suggestions, but not labor if these are friends or family who do not pay me?  Is it not labor if I then in turn talk with them about my own struggles? 

At the same time, I do not want an interrogation of labor to result in a conclusion which says that one person working in a grueling factory or harvesting job all day is the same as another person reading stories to others, having lunch with friends to talk over ideas and challenges, and so on. There is actual work that must be done for our physical survival and for what we have decided are necessities or highly desired extras. I believe ideally this work should be shared and that it would not take up very much of anyone’s time if we all did our part in the ways that we can and if we stopped producing the glut of junk which does nothing to contribute to a better quality of life for anyone. But we do not live in that ideal society.  We live out our real lives in our real societies, and the question I always have is how to not just succumb to the same old so-called pragmatism which does nothing to challenge the ruinous status quo while keeping serious change always in some imaginary space inside of our wistful heads. How do we labor to labor better? Is there a way to challenge these false divisions of labor in our real lives now?