[castille]

Its funny how people talk about labour...."your labour should be worth this much and this much", "you can't get money without labour".

But every second of the day, we're not really doing any labour. A typical non-factory worker spends his day letting his computer do all the labour, and even factory workers are letting machines do their labour. During a tour to a state armaments factory (the last bastion of communism, people say), nobody was actually doing any work. People were just pulling levers, pressing buttons, while sitting down or standing around comfortably.

And to think, 150 years ago in the days of Marx, people used to actually lift boxes manually without big forklifts, and stick a shovel into dirt instead of pressing buttons so a big machine can do it for them.

I can still remember 5 years ago, cleaners would actually go into toilets with a clean cloth and wipe out all the dirt. Now they've got detergents and spray guns doing all the work.

People say this is the information age, where labour is defined by how much thinking you do, not how much sweat you produce. Do you think this is true?