[Market Economy Guide] The Social Meaning of Labor

“Robinson Crusoe merely lived self-sufficiently alone on an island;

it was not labor producing what other people wanted.”

Robinson Crusoe is the protagonist of the novel Robinson Crusoe, published in England in 1719. Robinson was a successful international merchant engaged in intermediary trade between South America and Africa. Then one day, after being cast adrift in a storm, he ended up living alone for as long as 27 years on a deserted island in the middle of the vast ocean. During his time on the island, Robinson did everything by himself—building a house, growing crops, raising livestock, and making a canoe. He also made all his own daily necessities, such as farming tools, clothes, and dishes.

Frequently cited as a “one-person economic model”

For that reason, although Robinson is a fictional character from a novel, he is widely known as the very symbol of someone who survived alone without anyone’s help. He endured solitude by himself for about half a century, yet the novel contains few scenes in which he complains of loneliness. Remarkably, Robinson’s tale of being cast away was based on a true story. It is said that author Daniel Defoe wrote it after being inspired by the survival story of a Scottish sailor who lived alone for four years on a deserted island off the coast of Chile. Today, the Chilean government has renamed the island “Robinson Crusoe Island” and is attracting tourists.

Robinson is also quite popular among economists. That is because he represents the quintessential one-person economic model. On the deserted island, Robinson created the most simplified possible economy: one-person production and one-person consumption. That makes him an ideal example for simplifying and explaining important concepts in economics, a field often crowded with complex formulas and graphs. Anyone who has read an economics textbook has probably seen Robinson and his Black friend Friday appear from time to time in explanations of the production possibility curve or the theory of comparative advantage.

Robinson may have lived well on his own, but human beings are by nature social animals. The ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle believed that human beings do not exist alone, but exist through constant relationships with others.

Labor becomes true labor only when it is exchanged

A similar expression exists in the East as well. It is embedded in the Sino-Korean word for “human” itself, ingan (人間). The characters for ingan carry the meaning that a person (人) must exist among other people (間) to be a person in the true sense. It is interesting that from ancient times, both East and West regarded human beings as truly human only when they lived together with other human beings.

If human beings are social animals, then human action can be said to be social action. Human labor, therefore, is also social action. Labor is the act of anticipating and providing goods or services that others value and need. Thorough self-sufficiency in complete isolation, as in Robinson’s case, is difficult to call labor. That is because such behavior is commonly seen in the animal world as well. Animals, too, act to obtain food for themselves, but we do not call that labor. Human labor is undertaken to provide what others need—in other words, to exchange one another’s labor—and the institution of the market arose to mediate that exchange.

The author of Robinson Crusoe, Daniel Defoe, was an intellectual and journalist active in 18th-century England. The 18th century was the point at which domestic handicraft production was coming to an end and giving way to modern factory industry. Considering also that Britain was the birthplace of the Industrial Revolution, it is difficult to dismiss the birth of Robinson Crusoe as mere coincidence. Defoe created a versatile jack-of-all-trades who could skillfully make by himself all the things needed for daily life, but labor performed alone had no social meaning whatsoever. This becomes clear in the final part of the novel. When Robinson was given the chance to return home, he chose to do so without hesitation, leaving behind the kingdom he had built over decades with sweat and toil.

Self-sufficiency fails

Robinson Crusoe is not a story about a person eating well and living well all alone. It is a story about how even the most exceptional human being must in the end return to where other human beings live. Human beings, and the labor they perform, acquire meaning when they help one another. In that sense, Robinson Crusoe may perhaps be interpreted as an allegory of one man crossing from the premodern world of solitary labor into the modern world in which people help one another.

■ Please remember

Labor is the act of anticipating and providing goods or services that others value and need. Thorough self-sufficiency in complete isolation, as in Robinson’s case, is difficult to call labor.

Sung-no Choi, President of the Center for Free Enterprise (CFE)

---

Original title: [시장경제 길라잡이] 노동의 사회적 의미

Author: Sung-no Choi

Date: 2019-05-13

Source: https://www.cfe.org/bbs/bbsDetail.php?cid=column&pn=13&idx=20184