Joanna wrote:
> Mental labor can be every bit as exhausting and
> numbing as manual labor.This is a false distinction.
> Each kind of labor can lead to a different kind of
> idiocy.
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> The division of labor into physical and mental labor
> is a form of violence that is the result of our
> particular historical trajectory. There is nothing
> natural about it.
But this remains at the level of merely bemoaning the sensuous quality of particular types of labor, and as such remains incomplete.
Marx is so indispensable precisely because he takes up the question of the *social form* assumed by labor in capitalist society. Moishe Postone summarizes nicely in the following passage:
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"In a society in which the commodity is the basic structuring category of the whole, labour and its products are not socially distributed by traditional norms or overt relations of power and domination – that is, by ‘manifest social relations’ as is the case in other societies. Instead, labour itself replaces those social relations, by serving as a kind of quasi-objective means by which the products of others are acquired. A new form of interdependence comes into being, where people do not consume what they produce, but where, nevertheless, their own labour or labour product functions as a quasi- objective, necessary means of obtaining the product of others. In serving as such a means, labour and its product in effect pre-empt that function on the part of manifest social relations."
Full article at: <http://www.principiadialectica.co.uk/blog/?p=48>
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Joanna states that the division of manual and mental labor is a product of our specific historical trajectory, but I think to get a good understanding of that historical trajectory, we have to get a handle on the specific social forms that define that trajectory.
Joanna sort of hints at this when she writes:
> It is the elimination of alienated labor which we
> should be aiming for,which includes both mental and
> physical labor.
Though I would probably dispense with the term "alienated labor" (early Marx, not so good) and choose "abstract labor" (late Marx, much better).