Chapter 44: LABOR

INTRODUCTION

Men have dreamed of a golden age in the past when the world was young and everything needed for the support of life existed in profusion. Earth, Lucretius writes, “first spontaneously of herself produced for mortals goodly corn-crops and joyous vineyards; of herself gave sweet fruits and glad pastures; which now-a-days scarce attain any size even when furthered by our labor; we exhaust the oxen and the strength of the husbandmen; we wear out our iron, scarcely fed after all by the tilled fields; so niggardly are they of their produce and after so much labor do they let it grow.” When the aged plowman “compares present times with times past,” Lucretius adds, “he praises the fortunes of his sire” living in the time of earth’s plenty.

This ancient myth of a golden age has sometimes taken the form, as with Rousseau, of an idealization of primitive society, uncorrupted by civilization, in which an easy, almost effortless, existence corresponded to the simplicity of man’s needs. Rousseau pictures a situation in which “the produce of the earth furnished [man] with all he needed, and instinct told him how to use it,” so that “singing and dancing, the true offspring of love and leisure, became the amusement, or rather the occupation of men and women assembled together with nothing else to do.”

In our own day, industrial utopias have been projected into a future made free from toil by the adequacy of machines or the efficiency of atomic energy. Long before the industrial era, Aristotle envisioned, as a supposition contrary to fact, a society built upon labor-saving machines. “If every instrument could accomplish its own work,” he writes, if it could obey or anticipate commands, if “the shuttle would weave…without a hand to guide it, the chief workmen would not want servants, nor masters slaves.”

In all these conceptions of a better life, labor is eliminated or reduced. The implication seems to be that the labor required for the maintenance of all historic societies is an affliction, a drudgery, a crushing burden which deforms the lives of many, if not all. The pains of toil do not belong to human life by any necessity of human nature, but rather through the accident of external circumstances which might be other than they are. “Work became indispensable,” according to Rousseau, only when “property was introduced,” and then “vast forests became smiling fields, which man had to water with the sweat of his brow.” It was the result of “some fatal accident, which, for the public good, should never have happened.” Man might have realized his nature more surely and richly if, like the lilies of the field, he neither toiled nor spun.

The contrary view would maintain that work is not a curse but a blessing, filling man’s hours usefully, turning to service energies which would otherwise be wasted or misspent in idleness or mischief. The sinfulness of sloth implies the virtue of work. The principle of activity, according to Hegel, whereby “the workman has to perform for his subsistence,” gives man a dignity which “consists in his depending entirely on his diligence, conduct, and intelligence for the supply of his wants. In direct contravention of this principle” are “pauperism, laziness, inactivity.”

It is even suggested that useful occupations save men from a boredom they fear more than the pain of labor, as evidenced by the variety of amusements and diversions they invent or frantically pursue to occupy themselves when work is finished. The satisfactions of labor are as peculiarly human as its burdens. Not merely to keep alive, but to keep his self-respect, man is obliged to work.

“In the morning when thou risest unwilling,” the emperor Marcus Aurelius tells himself, “let this thought be present—I am rising to the work of a human being. Why, then, am I dissatisfied if I am going to do the things for which I exist and for which I was brought into the world? Or have I been made for this, to lie in the bed-clothes and keep myself warm? But this is more pleasant. Dost thou exist, then, to take thy pleasure, and not at all for action and exertion?”

The perspectives of theology give still another view of labor. It is not an accidental misfortune which men may some day be able to correct. But neither is it a blessing nor the thing for which man was created. When the golden age of Saturn came to an end, and Jupiter replaced him on the throne of heaven, then, as Virgil tells the story, labor was first introduced into the world.

Before Jove

Fields knew no taming hand of husbandmen;

To mark the plain or mete with boundary-line— Even this was impious; for the common stock They gathered, and the earth of her own will All things more freely, no man bidding, bore. He to black serpents gave their venom-bane, And bade the wolf go prowl, and ocean toss; Shook from the leaves their honey, put fire away, And curved the random rivers running wine, That use by gradual dint of thought on thought Might forge the various arts, with furrow’s help The corn-blade win, and strike out hidden fire From the flint’s heart.

Here, while labor may in some sense be a punishment, or at least a fall from the golden age, it still does result in benefits. “The divers arts arose” from Jove’s “whetting the minds of men with care on care, nor suffering realm of his in drowsy sloth to stagnate.” But although “toil conquered all,” it is still “remorseless toil.”

According to Christian doctrine, labor is an inevitable consequence of man’s fall from grace, a punishment for Adam’s disobedience like disease and death. In the earthly paradise of Eden, the children of Adam would have lived without labor or servitude of any sort. But when Adam sinned, the Lord God said unto him: “Cursed is the ground for thy sake; in toil shalt thou eat of it all the days of thy life… In the sweat of thy face, shalt thou eat bread, till thou return into the ground.”

That work should be painful belongs to its very essence. Otherwise it would not serve as a penalty or a penance. But, in the Christian as in the Virgilian view, labor also contributes to such happiness as man can enjoy on earth. The distinction between temporal and eternal happiness is a distinction between a life of work on earth and the activity of contemplation in Heaven. This does not mean the elimination of leisure and enjoyment from earthly life, but it does make labor their antecedent and indispensable condition. It also means that even in his highest activities—in the development of his arts and sciences—man must be perpetually at work. His achievement of truth or beauty is never so perfect and lasting that he can rest in it.

IN THESE DIVERSE conceptions of the relation of labor to human life, work seems to have several different meanings. It always involves activity or exertion. Its clearest opposite is sleep. But other things are also opposed to work—play or amusement, leisure, idleness. When leisure is not identified with idleness, it involves activity no less than work. So, too, many of the forms of play require intense exertion of body or mind. The difference, therefore, must lie in the nature or purpose of the activity.

Aristotle suggests what the difference is when he puts play, work, and leisure in an ordered relationship to one another. Nature, he writes, “requires that we should be able, not only to work well, but to use leisure well.” Leisure is “the first principle of all action” and so “leisure is better than work and is its end.” As play and with it rest (i.e., sleep) are for the sake of work, so work in turn is for the sake of leisure.

The characteristics of work as the middle term here seem to be, first, that work is activity directed to an end beyond itself and, second, that it is productive of the necessities which sustain life rather than of the goods by which life is perfected. The political or speculative activity which Aristotle considers the proper occupation of leisure is intrinsically good or enjoyable. For participation in such activities leisure—in the sense of time free from labor—is required; but since the good life cannot be lived unless life itself is sustained, labor also is a prerequisite.

Work is thus defined by wealth as its immediate end—the production of the external, economic, or consumable goods which support life. Though play has the immediately enjoyable character of an activity performed for its own sake, Aristotle subordinates it to work, assigning to it the same utility which rest has. Both refresh men from the fatigues of labor and recreate the energies needed for work. “Amusement,” he writes, “is needed more amid serious occupations than at other times, for he who is hard at work has need for relaxation, and amusement gives relaxation.”

The economic sense which connects work and labor with wealth seems to be the primary but not the only sense in which these terms are used in the great books. There is the more general sense of human work as any productive activity in which men exercise some art or skill. The familiar distinction between skilled and unskilled labor may be only a distinction in degree if there is truth in the theory that some degree of skill—some rudimentary art at least—is required for the performance of the simplest tasks of hand and eye.

Kinds of work, according to this theory, can be differentiated by reference to the type of art involved. The ancient distinction between the servile and the liberal arts also divides workers into those who manipulate and transform physical materials and those who employ the symbols of poetry, music, or science to produce things for the mind. This distinction between manual and mental work, based on the character of the work itself, is not to be identified with the distinction between slave and free labor. The latter is based on the status of the worker. Even in the slave economies of the ancient world, some freemen were artisans, farmers, or sailors, and some slaves were philosophers. Nor is mental as opposed to manual work necessarily directed to the production of the goods of the mind. The white-collar workers of an industrial economy, employed with the symbols of finance, accounting, or management, do mental work which has its ultimate end in the production or exchange of material goods.

THERE ARE STILL other traditional distinctions among kinds of work and types of workers, all of which cannot be put together into a single scheme of classification without much overlapping. Some distinctions, like that between hand-work and machine-labor or between healthful and unhealthful occupations, turn on the characteristics of the work itself. Some depend on the social conditions under which the work is done or on the relationship between the individual worker and other men. The work to be done may be accomplished by an individual working alone, or by the cooperative labor of many; and, in the latter case, the social organization of the laboring group may involve the ranking of men according to the functions they perform.

Here we get the division into the master-craftsmen, who plan and superintend, and all grades of helpers who execute their directions. One meaning of the word “menial” as applied to work signifies the inferior tasks in the hierarchy of functions; but it is also used to express society’s opinion of those who perform certain tasks, such as that of the domestic servant. The distinction between what is menial and what is dignified work varies, of course, from society to society.

The characterization of labor as productive or non-productive, and of work as useful or wasteful, is based on strictly economic criteria and on considerations of social welfare. The sense in which work cannot be divorced from the production of some extrinsic effect is not violated by the conception of non-productive labor as work which in no way increases the wealth of nations.

“There is one sort of labor which adds to the subject upon which it is bestowed; there is another which has no such effect. The former,” writes Adam Smith, “may be called productive; the latter, unproductive labor… The labor of some of the most respectable orders in society is…unproductive of any value… The sovereign, for example, with all the officers both of justice and war who serve under him, the whole army and navy, are unproductive laborers… Like the declamation of the actor, the harangue of the orator, or the tune of the musician, the work of all of them perishes in the very instant of its production.”

The standard by which Marx judges the usefulness of labor also implies the economic notion of a commodity. “Nothing can have value,” he says, “without being an object of utility. If the thing is useless, so is the labor contained in it.” But Marx also adds a criterion of social utility. “Whoever directly satisfies his own wants with the produce of his labor, creates, indeed, use-values, but not commodities. In order to produce the latter, he must not only produce use-values, but use-values for others, social use-values.” It is by this last criterion that Marx criticizes the capitalist economy for its “most outrageous squandering of labor power” in superfluous or socially useless production.

THE PRINCIPLE OF the division of labor does not depend upon any particular classification of work or workers according to type. Nor does it belong to one system of economy rather than another. But the ancients, concerned as they were with its bearing on the origin and development of the state, saw the division of labor as primarily of political significance; whereas the moderns are more concerned with its economic causes and consequences.

Thucydides compares the poverty and crude life of the early Hellenic tribes with the wealth, the power, and the civilization of Athens, Sparta, Corinth, and other city-states at the opening of the Peloponnesian War. The difference is not to be accounted for in terms of the invention of new tools, but rather in terms of the greater efficiency in production which is obtained by a division of labor. This is both an effect and a cause of the enlargement of the community and its increasing population. The greater the number of men associated in a common life, the greater the number of specialized tasks which can be assigned to different members of the community.

This observation is formulated by Plato and Aristotle in their accounts of the origin of the state. The advantages which the state confers upon its members are in part won by the division of labor in which they participate.

The isolated family, Aristotle remarks, is barely able to supply the “everyday wants” of its members. The tribe or village, which is an association of families, can achieve a little more than bare subsistence; but not until several tribes unite to form a city does a truly self-sufficing community come into existence, and one with an adequate division of labor. Some men, if not all, can then acquire the leisure to engage in the arts and sciences and politics—the pursuits of civilization which have their material basis in sufficient wealth.

The effect of the division of labor on the social structure of the state seems to be generally agreed upon by all observers, ancient and modern. Men are divided into social classes according to the kind of work they do—not only by reference to the type of economically productive labor, but also in terms of the distinction between labor and leisure, or between economic and other functions in society.

All do not agree, however, that such class distinctions are as beneficial to society as the increase of wealth or opulence which the division of labor affords. They not only threaten the unity and peace of the society, but tend to degrade the condition of labor by reducing the individual worker to a cog in the machine. The division of labor frequently restricts him to a slight and insignificant task, repetitively performed, and so makes it impossible for him to develop his skill or to enjoy any pride of workmanship. From a purely economic point of view, Adam Smith advocates the greatest intensification of the division of labor. Each more minute sub-division of tasks augments efficiency in production. But from the human point of view, he sees that this method of maximizing wealth by dividing men into functional groups—one man, one task—leads to the mental impoverishment of the men, who require a multiplicity of functions for their development.

“In the progress of the division of labor,” Smith writes, “the employment of the far greater part of those who live by labor…comes to be confined to a few very simple operations, frequently one or two… The man whose whole life is spent in performing a few simple operations…has no occasion to exert his understanding or to exercise his invention… He naturally loses, therefore, the habit of such exertion, and generally becomes as stupid and ignorant as it is possible for a human creature to become.”

The situation seems even worse to Marx. The industrial system, revolutionizing the mode of work, “converts the laborer into a crippled monstrosity, by forcing his detailed dexterity at the expense of a world of productive capabilities and instincts.” It makes the individual worker “the automatic motor of a fractional operation.”

THE GREAT ISSUES concerning labor seem to be moral and political rather than economic. The consideration of the division of labor from the point of view of efficiency in production remains purely economic only when it is abstracted from any concern about the effect upon the laborer. The analysis of factors affecting the productivity of labor ceases to be merely economic when the hours, conditions, and organization of work are viewed in terms of the working men.

The determination of wages by the buying and selling of labor (or, as Marx insists, of labor-power) as a commodity subject to market conditions of supply and demand; the difference between real and nominal wages as determined by the level of wages in relation to the price of other commodities; the so-called “iron law of wages” according to which wages cannot be reduced below the minimum of bare subsistence for the laborer and his family—these are matters which the economist may deal with in a descriptive or historical manner, calculating rates and ratios without regard to questions of justice. But in terms of such formulations questions of justice are raised and become the great issues concerning the rights of workmen to the fruits of their labor, to the security of full employment and other forms of protection, to collective bargaining, to a voice in the management of industry or business.

Stated in this way, the issues seem to be peculiarly modern. These are the problems of a capitalist economy, to which the partisans of capital and of labor propose different solutions. Yet the principles of justice to which the parties in conflict appeal seem to be no less applicable to earlier conflicts in other economic systems—between master and slave or between feudal lord and serf. All the institutional differences among these three economies should not, according to Karl Marx, conceal from us the profound analogy which obtains in the relation between owners and workers, whether the workers are chattel slaves, peons bound to the land, or industrial proletarians selling their labor-power.

“Wherever a part of society possesses a monopoly of the means of production,” he writes, “the laborer, free or not free, must add to the working time necessary for his own maintenance an extra working time in order to produce the means of subsistence for the owners of the means of production, whether this proprietor be the Athenian gentleman, Etruscan theocrat, civis Romanus, Norman baron, American slave-owner, Wallachian Boyard, modern landlord or capitalist.”

Marx undertakes to explain how the surface difference between slave labor and wage labor conceals the analogy.

“In slave labor, even that part of the working-day in which the slave is only replacing the value of his own means of existence, in which, therefore, he works for himself alone, appears as labor for his master. All the slave’s labor appears as unpaid labor. In wage-labor, on the contrary, even surplus labor, or unpaid labor, appears as paid. There the property-relation conceals the labor of the slave for himself; here the money-relation conceals the unrequited labor of the wage laborer.”

Two phrases here—“unpaid labor” and “unrequited labor”—indicate that Marx is thinking in terms of justice. Elsewhere he calls the industrial proletariat “wage-slaves” to emphasize the presence in an apparently free economy of the same unjust exploitation which the word “slave” connotes when it refers to the use of men as chattel. The essential similarity in all forms of economic exploitation—which makes all forms of economic slavery essentially similar—is seen by Marx in terms of the production of a surplus value by the laborer; that is, he produces a greater value in commodities than he needs to support his own subsistence. This surplus value, when appropriated by the owner of the materials and the tools on and with which the propertyless laborer works, becomes an unearned increment, or, in other words, an unjust profit from the work of another man.

The controversy over the theory of surplus value in Marx’s Capital can be separated from the controversy over the revolutionary program of the Communist Manifesto. But neither can be separated from issues of justice. It is questionable whether those economists join issue with Marx who criticize his analysis in terms of the facts or conclusions of economics as a purely descriptive science, and who put aside all considerations of the fair and the equitable. Yet those facts or conclusions, especially with regard to the operation of the capitalist economy, become relevant in the dispute as to whether capitalist profits are intrinsically unjust, because they are incapable of accruing except from the exploitation of labor.

Those who dispute this matter seldom deny that chattel slavery is unjust. On that there may be conflicting opinions, as indicated in the chapter on SLAVERY, but they are not germane to the present issue. Nor do the opponents seem to argue their case in terms of a different theory of what is just and unjust. They themselves appeal to the common principle of fairness in exchange and distribution to defend the rights of the owners of capital to a profit in return for their own prior labor in accumulating capital stock, as well as for the risks they take when they invest their reserves in productive enterprises. The problem, therefore, seems to narrow down to such questions as whether laborers are exploited when they receive in wages less than the full value their work creates; whether capitalist profits are entirely reaped from the surplus value which is the differential between what labor creates and what labor receives; or whether, if profit is not identical with surplus value, it always contains a marginal element of unearned increment derived from the exploitation of labor.

THE NOTION OF VALUE—the value of commodities and the value of labor itself—is obviously of central importance. As indicated in the chapter on JUSTICE, the formulae of equality, which determine fair exchanges or distributions, require some measure of equivalents in value. What determines the intrinsic value of a commodity according to which it can be compared with another commodity, without reference to the price of each in the market place? Adam Smith’s answer to this question is labor. It is the answer given before him by Locke, and after him by Marx.

“Equal quantities of labor, at all times and places,” Smith declares, “may be said to be of equal value, to the laborer. In his ordinary state of health, strength and spirits; in the ordinary degree of his skill and dexterity, he must always lay down the same portion of his ease, his liberty, and his happiness. The price which he pays must always be the same, whatever may be the quantity of goods which he receives in return for it. Of these, indeed, it may sometimes purchase a greater and sometimes a smaller quantity; but it is their value which varies, not that of the labor which purchases them.”

From this Adam Smith concludes that “labor alone, therefore, never varying in its own value, is alone the ultimate and real standard by which the value of all commodities can at all times and places be estimated and compared. It is their real price; money is their nominal price only.”

This labor theory of value raises the further question of the value of labor itself. What determines its natural or real price, as opposed to its market or nominal price? On this Marx and Smith appear to part company, which may account for their further divergence when Marx declares that “the real value of labor is the cost of its production, not the average price it can command in the market”; and then goes on to explain how a surplus value is derived by the capitalist who pays for labor-power on a basis of the cost of producing and sustaining the laborer, but uses his labor-power to produce a real value in commodities which exceeds the real price of labor itself.

Smith, on the other hand, holds that “the whole produce of labor belongs to the laborer” only “in that original state of things, which precedes both the appropriation of land and the accumulation of stock.” When “land becomes private property,” the landlord “makes the first deduction” in the form of rent; and the capitalist, or the person who invests some part of his stock accumulation, “makes a second deduction” in the form of profit. After rent and profit are taken, the laborer’s wage represents what is left of “the whole produce of labor.”

Yet Smith also says of the landlords that “as soon as the land of any country has all become private property,” they, “like all other men, love to reap where they never sowed.” The implication of unearned increment in this remark suggests that Smith is neither disinclined to mix moral judgment with economic description, nor at variance with Marx on the principle of economic justice. That Smith regards profit as the price properly paid for the use of capital and that he does not see reaping without sowing as an essential element in profit-making may perhaps be read as a challenge to Marx’s development of the labor theory of value into a theory of surplus value and unearned increment.

It is possible, of course, that the difference in the conclusions of Smith and Marx from a common premise can be explained by the different directions their analyses take. It may not represent a direct opposition on a point of fact. The proposition that value derives from labor seems to yield a number of theoretical consequences.

Locke, for example, holding that it is labor which “puts the difference of value on everything,” makes this the basis for the right to private property, certainly in its original appropriation from the common domain which is God’s gift to mankind. “Though the earth and all inferior creatures be common to all men, yet every man has a property in his own person. The labor of his body and the work of his hands we may say are properly his. Whatsoever, then, he removes out of the state that nature hath provided and left it in, he hath mixed his labor with, and joined to it something that is his own, and thereby makes it his property.”

This view seems to be shared by Rousseau. “It is impossible to conceive,” he says, “how property can come from anything but manual labor; for what else can a man add to things which he does not originally create, so as to make them his own property?” In the same vein, Smith declares that “the property which every man has in his own labor, as it is the original foundation of all other property, so it is the most sacred and inviolable.”

What further conclusions follow from this justification of private property as a right founded upon labor? How is the original right to property extended into a right of inheritance? How does this conception of the origin of property bear on the Marxist conception of the origin of the proletariat—the propertyless workers who have nothing but their labor-power to sell? Denying the charge that communists desire to abolish “the right of personally acquiring property as the fruit of a man’s own labor,” Marx and Engels make the countercharge that the development of industrial capitalism “has to a great extent, already destroyed it and is still destroying it daily.” They propose public ownership of the means of production to protect the property rights of labor; they seek to abolish only “the bourgeois form of private property” which, in their view, is a use of property to exploit labor.

The rights of labor seem to be central in any formulation of the problem of a just distribution of wealth. But when other rights are taken into consideration, the problem of economic justice becomes more complex, and different solutions result from differences in emphasis. Even with regard to one group of solutions, J. S. Mill observes that “some communists consider it unjust that the produce of the labor of the community should be shared on any other principle than that of exact equality; others think it just that those should receive most whose wants are greatest.” To weigh the merits of competing solutions, as well as to reach an adequate statement of the problem, the discussion of labor must be connected with the discussion of related considerations in the chapters on JUSTICE, REVOLUTION, and WEALTH.

THERE ARE ISSUES of justice concerning labor other than the strictly economic problem of distribution. In the ancient world, for example, not only chattel slaves but also free artisans were frequently regarded as incapable of participation in political life. Only men of independent wealth had enough leisure for the activities of citizenship which, in the Greek city-states, was almost a full-time occupation. This, according to Aristotle, is one reason for the disfranchisement of the laboring classes who must devote a great part of their energy to earning a living and who have neither the time nor training for liberal pursuits. “Since leisure is necessary both for the development of virtue and the performance of political duties,” citizens, he maintains, cannot “lead the life of mechanics or tradesmen.”

Against this oligarchical view (which also involves the notion that wealth deserves special political privileges), the Greek democrats take the position that all free men should be citizens on an equal footing, regardless of the amount of their property or their conditions of labor and leisure. But the oligarchical principle still tends to prevail among republicans in the 18th century. Kant, for example, holds that citizenship “presupposes the independence or self-sufficiency of the individual citizen among the people.” On this basis he excludes from the suffrage, as only “passive” citizens, “the apprentice of a merchant or tradesman, a servant who is not in the employ of the state, a minor (naturaliter vel civiliter), all women, and, generally, everyone who is compelled to maintain himself not according to his own industry, but as it is arranged by others (the state excepted).” They are “without civil personality, and their existence is only, as it were, incidentally included in the state.”

The preference shown by the writers of The Federalist for a republican as opposed to a democratic form of government—or representative government as opposed to direct democracy—rests partly on their fear of the political incompetence, as well as the factional interests, of wage earners and day-laborers. While expressing “disapprobation” of poll taxes, they still defend the right of the government to exact them, in the belief that “there may exist certain critical and tempestuous conjunctures of the State, in which a poll-tax may become an inestimable resource.” Yet such a tax would seem to be primarily a device for disfranchising workingmen of no property and small income, and in the opinion of a later day it is so regarded.

The democratic revolution does not begin until the middle of the 19th century. But even then, Mill, who advocates universal suffrage, argues for the disqualification of paupers or those on the dole, without raising the question whether the right to work—to avoid poverty and involuntary indigence—is not a democratic right inseparable from the right to citizenship. It is “required by first principles,” Mill writes, “that the receipt of parish relief should be a peremptory disqualification for the franchise. He who cannot by his labor suffice for his own support has no claim to the privilege of helping himself to the money of others. By becoming dependent on the remaining members of the community for actual subsistence, he abdicates his claim to equal rights with them in other respects.”

The historic connection of democracy with a movement toward political justice for the laboring classes seems to suggest that political democracy must be accompanied by economic democracy in order to attain its full realization.

OUTLINE OF TOPICS

1. Labor in human life [930] * 1a. The curse of labor: myths of a golden age and the decay of the world * 1b. Labor, leisure, and happiness: the servile, political, and contemplative life * 1c. The pain of labor and the expiation of sin: the disciplinary and penal use of labor [931] * 1d. The social necessity of labor and the moral obligation to work * 1e. The honor of work and the virtue of productivity: progress through the invention of arts for the conquest of nature [932] * 1f. The degradation of labor: the alienation of the laborer’s work in chattel slavery, serfdom, and industrial wage slavery

2. The nature of work * 2a. The ends of work: the good of the product and the good of the workman * 2b. The process of work: the relations of art, hand, machine, and matter [933]

3. The kinds of work and the relationship of different types of workers * 3a. The differentiation of work according to the human talent or ability required: skilled and unskilled labor; manual and mental work * 3b. The differentiation of work according to the social status of the worker: servile and free, menial and honorable work * 3c. The classification of occupations by reference to bodily and mental concomitants of the work: healthy and unhealthy occupations; pleasant and unpleasant tasks [933] * 3d. Types of work distinguished by reference to the manner in which the work is done: solitary and group work; the relation of master-craftsmen and helpers [934] * 3e. Types of work distinguished by reference to their effect on the increase of wealth: productive and non-productive labor * 3f. The differentiation of work in terms of its relation to the common welfare: socially useful and wasteful or superfluous work

4. The division of labor * 4a. The economic causes and effects of the division of labor: its relation to the exchange, production, and distribution of goods and services; its bearing on opulence * 4b. The social consequences of the division of labor: the development of classes * 4c. The moral aspects of the division of labor: the acquisition of the virtue of art; the attenuation of art by insignificant tasks [935]

5. The organization of production: the position of labor in different economies * 5a. Domestic or chattel slavery in a slave economy * 5b. Serfdom or agrarian peonage in a feudal economy * 5c. The wage earner or industrial proletariat in a capitalist economy [936] * 5d. The condition of the worker in a socialist economy

6. The wages of labor: kinds of wage payments * 6a. Labor as a commodity: the labor market * 6b. The iron law of wages: the subsistence level and the minimum wage * 6c. The distinction between real and nominal wages: variable factors affecting wage levels * 6d. The natural wages of labor and the labor theory of value

7. Economic and political justice to the laborer * 7a. Fair wages, hours, and working conditions: labor legislation * 7b. The right to property: the ownership of the means of production [937] * 7c. The consequences of economic inequality or oppression: the class war * (1) The economic determination of antagonistic social classes: slaves vs. freemen; laboring vs. leisure classes; propertyless vs. propertied classes * (2) The organization of workmen and the formation of trade unions to protect labor’s rights and interests [938] * (3) The proletariat as a revolutionary class; its revolutionary aims * 7d. The underprivileged condition of workers: the exclusion of slaves from citizenship; the disfranchisement of the laboring classes * 7e. The problem of poverty and pauperism: unemployment and the right to work * 7f. The relation of economic to political freedom: economic democracy [939]

8. Historical observations on the condition of labor [939]