2. Give two examples each of manual and intellectu labour
Answers
The simplest and shortest rule of morality consists in a man compelling as little service as possible from others, and serving other men as much as possible, in demand- ing as little as possible from others, and in giving others as much as possible.
Mahathir Mohamad: Before we needed jobs, so people who had huge assembly lines employing manual labour, they were...
Donald Walker: If you have a high labour, easy-to-ship part, it has already gone, for the most part, to a low-cost.
intellectual labour (especially MARXISM) all those forms of labour in which the work is by the brain rather than by the hand.
Derrick Chow
The Intellectual Labour of Social Movements
by Aziz Choudry Aug 16, 2016 11 min read Share
Some of the most profound understandings about our world emerge from ordinary people coming together and working for change. They come from Indigenous peoples holding the line on their land against state and corporate assaults on their sovereignty. They come from within the organized movements of small farmers – many of them women – against land and water grabs, industrial agriculture, and the commodification of nature. They come from migrant and immigrant workers – often deemed unorganizable by trade unions – fighting for labour and immigration justice. These struggles are incubators for ideas that can not only enrich our analysis of the world, but also help us to think through, in our own lives and locations, the possibilities and ways to change it.
In order to get a handle on what it actually takes to organize for change, we must take seriously the learning and the production of knowledge that occurs in the intellectual work of daily struggles, as people come together to discuss problems and injustices, debate strategies, and act. All too easily, people’s work and actions can get cut up and compartmentalized: protesters protest, researchers research, educators educate, organizers organize. When we overlook the fact that everyone has the capacity to learn and reflect in the course of struggles for change, we are left with simplistic “paint by numbers” accounts of movements and activism that focus on great individuals, charismatic leaders, clever slogans, and professional spokespeople, and that mistakenly attribute the rise of social struggles and movements to social media.
British feminist adult educator Jane Thompson argues that the purpose of knowledge has to be more than an individualistic solution to personal disadvantage. As she puts it: “Social change, liberation … will be achieved only by collective as distinct to individual responses to oppression.”
Amnesia in organizing
Sociologist and activist Gary Kinsman, concerned about how the radical roots of movements and community resistance get replaced with more “respectable,” liberal versions of history, reminds us of the need to overcome the “social organization of forgetting.”