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When Hannah Arendt talks about work and its role for the ancient Greek,
she's actually discussing the moment of 1957, when she wrote about it.
She wants to talk about work in 1957, in the time she was living.
And she says something very interesting: the separation between "labor" and "faber"
-- Labor is all the work that sustains existence. -- Mostly based on agriculture.
Yes, agriculture, or even metalworking. Actually, metalworking doesn't fit in here. But agriculture does!
In the end, all the work that sustains our life, that nourishes our existence on a basic level.
(and this can lead us to think, on which level to place the telemarketing today. But I'm not there yet...)
And "faber" is the creative work. It's the inventive work: the artist, the woodworker,
the metalworker, the architect. These are... It's the poet. These are the "faber".
Then she goes further by saying that, in the industrial culture,
the "faber" takes a place that is very auratic.
Gradually, it becomes a work full of aura, because it is "art".
Thus, it has to be a sublime speciality in order to keep its value.
So, the work that is creative doesn't have any value in the productive system.
It has value as a speciality, as essence of beauty,
which are values that don't account for the culture of that who fabricates on labors.
-- But you're just viewing it from an industrial perspective...
-- Yes. I'm on her reality of 1957.
-- The Renaissance
-- Yes. The Renaissance. And 1957 witnessed the rupture of all that.
Then she says that the disqualification people feel about their work
is because, throughout the centuries, people have been disqualifying the "good work",
the work that gives one pleasure in the sense that it is creative,
it reconnects you with the earth, with the world and the cosmos.
Because that was the "faber" work.
The work that connects the existence to the transcendence, and so on.
And she says that we need to urgently review the value of work.
How sad that one needs to keep doing something only in order to consume
and not because it gives him pleasure?
Much of the pleasure at work was lost, because it has a relationship with productivity,
that disconnects it from any other values.
-- But somehow, nowadays we're living the opposite of that.
Sérgio Ferro also brought that topic up: the issue of alienation, and so on.
But, the late capitalism, the capitalism where we live in now,
it is fed more and more on culture and creation
using them as driving forces for the production of value.
This leads to the odd situation where the new proletariat
is not made up by those working in the factory anymore, but by the people who create.
And those people are in a dangerous situation because the system is dependent on that constant creation
and on that invention of culture, values and desires.
But those people can no longer be subjected in the same way as those who worked in the factory
because it's not about having access to means of production anymore.
We all have access to means of production. We just need a laptop.
That leads to an ambiguous and uncomfortable situation.
We now have, for the first time ever, a possibility to break off.
Something that we didn't have in the industrial times.
And this is insane! Somehow, the issue of the means of production has been surpassed
by the inherent ability of the industrial system
to indiscriminately reproduce means of production.
-- Yes, but I don't know how that works in China, where that thing is actually made...
-- There are still reminiscences. -- ... under absolutely exploitative terms of employment
and poor conditions of existence.
-- Yes, there are still reminiscences... -- I don't know... But it's a very complex topic.