I find it a bit condescending how multiple people have responded to the “i do not dream of labor” post by basically going “oh yeah? yet you still love to do x and y, which is labor, you just hate it because you hate capitalism” or by implying that saying you hate labor means that you don’t want to be involved in your community (??) or worse affirming “actually you do dream of labor”. Again and again people who id as anti-capitalist are using this gotcha to prove to people that labor is actually a central and absolute necessity, by pointing out that wow, people say they hate labor AND YET! they still enjoy doing stuff and admit that doing stuff is a necessity. It’s not difficult to understand that people are, in fact, aware that they enjoy doing stuff, helping others, being useful, creating things, and yet they are also extremely aware that there is a difference between all that and labor. “People will say they don't dream of labor and say they want to keep a garden” yeah, because I don’t consider it labor when i tend to vegetables, just like i don’t consider making tea when i wake up, making a cake, sewing clothes, taking care of someone who’s sick, listening to my friend’s problems, or sweeping the floor, “labor”. First, you know perfectly well that in the sentence “i do not dream of labor”, the word labor refers to the form labor takes under capitalism (see the question OP was answering: “dream job?”), and not your idealized version of what labor could be. Secondly, even if you want to pretend that labor has a “true” transhistorical form that people could actually be dreaming about, and that the labor we know today is just a skewed version of it because of capitalism, people still do not have to aspire to labor and they are entitled to centering their lives around other ideas and activities. You’re arguing that people saying they do not dream of labor haven’t examined its relationships to capitalism closely enough, but on the contrary: labor is central to our lives and to the maintenance of society because of capitalism, and that doesn’t mean that everything that would be central in our lives in a non-capitalist existence should be called labor. Labor does not have to be central to a communist society, labor doesn’t have to subsume every activity and social relation. And yes, you can try to rehabilitate the concept of labor by imagining what labor could mean in a non-capitalist future, but that doesn’t mean people who recognize how tied that concept is to capitalism and are not interested in rehabilitating it as something that is centrally constituting our society or an ideal future one and are not aspiring to it, are wrong and clueless. And like if you need academic sources on this read Postone or at least read this article.
Far from considering labor to be the principle of social constitution and the source of wealth in all societies, Marx's theory proposes that what uniquely characterizes capitalism is precisely that its basic social relations are constituted by labor and, hence, ultimately are of a fundamentally different sort than those that characterize noncapitalist societies. [...]
"Labor" here has become the ontological ground of society - that which constitutes, determines, and causally controls social life. If, as traditional interpretations maintain, labor is the only source of wealth and the essential constituting element of social life in all societies, the difference among various societies could only be a function of the different ways in which this regulating element prevails - whether in a veiled and "indirect" form or (preferably) in an open and "direct" form. [...] In other words, when "labor" is taken to be the transhistorical essence of social life, mystification necessarily is understood as follows: the historically transitory form that mystifies and is to be abolished (value) is independent of the transhistorical essence it veils ("labor"). Demystification, then, is understood as a process whereby the essence openly and directly appears. [...] We shall see that labor is indeed socially constituting and determining, according to Marx, but only in capitalism. This is so because of its historically specific character and not simply because it is an activity that mediates the material interactions of humans and nature. What theorists such as Hilferding attribute to "labor" is, in Marx's approach, a transhistorical hypostatization of the specificity of labor in capitalism.
[...] Finally, because labor, in this view, constitutes the relationship between humanity and nature, it serves as the standpoint from which the social relations among people can be judged: Relations that are in harmony with labor and reflect its fundamental significance are considered socially ''natural.'' The social critique from the standpoint of "labor" is, therefore, a critique from a quasi-natural point of view, that of a social ontology. It is a critique of what is artificial in the name of the "true" nature of society. The category of "labor" in traditional Marxism, then, provides a normative standpoint for a social critique in the name of justice, reason, universality, and nature. [...]
A noncapitalist society is not constituted by labor alone. Positions that do not grasp the particular function of labor in capitalism, attribute to labor as such a socially synthetic character: They treat it as the transhistorical essence of social life. Why labor as ''labor'' should constitute social relations cannot, however, be explained. Moreover, the relationship we have just examined, between appearance and essence, cannot be elucidated by such critiques from the standpoint of "labor." As we have seen, such interpretations postulate a separation between forms of appearance which are historically variable (value as a market category) and a historically invariable essence ("labor"). According to such positions, while all societies are constituted by "labor," a noncapitalist society would presumably be directly and overtly so constituted.[... ] Social relations constituted by labor can never be overtly social, but necessarily must exist in objectified form. By hypostatizing the essence of capitalism as the essence of human society, traditional positions cannot explain the intrinsic relation of the essence to its forms of appearance and, therefore, cannot consider that a hallmark of capitalism may be that it has an essence.
[...] In considering the category of concrete labor, I noted how the abstract general social mediation that structures capitalist society also gives rise to this other form of generality; activities and products that may not be deemed similar in other societies become socially organized and classified as similar in capitalism- for example as varieties of (concrete) labor or as specific use values.
Moishe Postone, Time, Labor, and Social Domination
“Capitalism, according to Marx, is characterized by the fact that its fundamental social relations are constituted by labor. Labor in capitalism objectifies itself not only in material products–which is the case in all social formations–but in objectified social relations as well. By virtue of its double character, it constitutes as a totality an objective, quasi-natural societal sphere that cannot be reduced to the sum of direct social relations and, as we shall see, stands opposed to the aggregate of individuals and groups as an abstract Other. In other words, the double character of commodity-determined labor is such that the sphere of labor in capitalism mediates relations that, in other formations, exist as a sphere of overt social interaction. It thereby constitutes a quasi-objective social sphere.6″
Postone’s analysis of abstract labor, and his call to abolish rather than affirm it, is not based on a utopian notion that a post-capitalist society will require no concrete human activity. Rather, Postone’s argument is a critique of labor in capitalism as a form of social mediation. To abolish abstract labor, then, means to abolish the distinction between “work” and “not work.” [...]
“The material foundation of a classless society, according to Marx’s exposition in the Grundrisse, is a form of production in which the surplus product no longer is created primarily by direct human labor. According to this approach, the crucial question of socialism is not whether a capitalist class exists but whether a proletariat still exists.11″
Postone’s analysis, then, reaches deeper than overt class domination into the “domination of people by their labor.”12
[...] “Marx’s analysis of the trajectory of the capitalist process of production does not point toward the possible future affirmation of the proletariat and the labor it performs. On the contrary, it points toward the possible abolition of that labor.14″
Avery Minnelli, The Tyranny of Time: Moishe Postone’s Immanent Critique
