>
> I've done dishwashing, merchant marining, toll collecting, loading
> trucks, mopping floors - all in small doses, with the knowledge that
> it was almost certainly very temporary. But that sort of manual labor
> leaves one exhausted and mentally numb.
When people ask me what I do, I tell them I dig ditches with my brain. I'm a technical writer.
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. Mental labor can lead to all the dead ends where symbol manipulation and the logic of ideas can lead...in the absence of a reality check. Most inventions are the inventions of craftsmen, not exclusively mental laborers.
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.
It is the marriage of mental and physical labor we should be aiming for; not the justification that one should be subordinate to the other. It is the elimination of alienated labor which we should be aiming for, which includes both mental and physical labor.
The denigration of physical labor often goes hand in hand with the denigration of nature and of the work of "merely reproducing life" (largely the work of women). We should be wary of falling into this trap.
Joanna