Politics from A to Z by Richard Ganis

Author:Richard Ganis [Ganis, Richard]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Zephyros Press
Published: 2015-10-29T21:00:00+00:00

Martin Luther King, Jr. (left) at a meeting with President Lyndon B. Johnson (right), whom he was able to pressure into passing the 1964 Civil Rights Act.

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LABOR

Labor occurs when human beings apply their physical and mental energies toward the production of something, be it a material good, a service, or an idea. Regardless of the context in which it takes place, all labor uses time, consuming at least part of the days, and ultimately part of the lifetimes, of those who engage in it. Unlike play, labor is generally not perceived as an end in itself: it is meant to generate a product, especially a product that becomes available to others and useful for the reproduction of the community.

Throughout human history, societies have devised numerous systems of labor. In ancient Greece and Rome, for example, skilled and unskilled slaves were utilized in agriculture and manufacturing. In the feudal economy of the Middle Ages, aristocratic landlords granted protection to peasant farmers and gave them the right to use their land as a means of sustenance. In exchange for these privileges, peasants were obliged to pay the aristocracy (here) with both goods and services. This arrangement was enforced not only by the aristocratic landowners, but also by the executive and judicial authority of the state (here). Under feudalism, areas that were not under the direct rule of the aristocracy were known as free cities. It was here that laborers in the manufacturing crafts (blacksmiths, stonemasons, shoemakers, and so on) went to ply their trades. To protect their interests, they organized themselves into guilds. However, the fate of the guild worker remained in the hands of the powerful guild masters, who alone had the authority to promote apprentices to the master level. Accordingly, despite being situated in the free cities, guild craftsmen managed only to free themselves from the rule of the aristocracy; their labor was still anything but “free.”

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