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Culture War Roundup for the week of July 3, 2023

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For most of human history, this has been the case.

Sure, but what's their concept of heaven? More labor? No, a rest from having to do labor all the time. "Not enjoying it and wishing it would stop" is pretty much the defining difference between labor and fun. I don't think anybody's ever invented a wageslave heaven. (Maybe the Chinese...?)

I'm not saying the work shouldn't be done. I'm just drawing a difference between work as an instrumental and terminal goal: in fact, "instrumental goal" is also a pretty good synonym of labor.

People live embedded in communities. They live within a context of other human beings that you can never completely and permanently isolate themselves from.

I mean, I don't think constructing social necessity is particularly hard. If we find we want, terminally, for there to be socially useful labor (even aside how we're pretty alienated from the fruits of our labor in our current society, something something letterbombs), I don't think that's going to be hard to arrange even in the absence of any true environmentally-imposed scarcity. But note that now we're looking at labor as a terminal goal. So that's what I'd argue: all non-terminal labor should be abolished - not in the sense of just not doing it, but in the sense of not having to do it.