The idea of beneficial labor

Labor is any human activity that brings benefits and does not harm. Labor can be done for oneself, for example, by working in one’s garden, or for someone, for example, by selling what is grown, or by working for hire, or by providing services to someone. The main purpose of labor is to provide oneself with prosperity, that is, some resources that will allow one to survive. Almost any modern work is an activity for someone, the satisfaction of someone’s needs for something. Many of these mutually beneficial relationships we call “market” or “economy”. By labor, I will mean not only the work to perform a certain task, but the satisfaction of one or another need, leading to profit.

Work can be divided into the following stages:

Search for a need, some kind of research activity.

Search and selection of resources, as well as designing how the final product will look like and how the activity itself will take place.

The very activity of creating a product from certain resources found.

Search for someone to whom you can sell the finished product and directly negotiate, bargain, that is, the sales process itself.

And only after the goods are sold, it can be said that the customer’s need for the goods, and the seller’s need for money, is satisfied. From this we see that the potential need for the division of labor arises not only at the stage of production, but in the most diverse stages of satisfaction of the final need.

In other words, in my understanding, highly organized modern labor, in a general sense, is always a business. That is, labor is a process that uses the resources, time and skills of a person, leading to satisfying the needs and desires of a person in a competitive environment.

The modern economy is based on the division of labor, which implies cooperation between people. Alone, a person is practically not able to create something valuable enough and at a low price, that is, without a lot of time spent. Thus, the desire for material goods already implies cooperation in order to create something that is difficult to create alone.

Everything that is produced must be demand-driven, that is, eventually sold to someone and satisfy demand, that is, the need of another person who is able to pay, that is, the same, in turn, create something useful himself.

If this is not an activity for oneself for the sake of the very result of labor, for example, growing potatoes in one’s own summer cottage, then this is always an activity for the client. Usually for working people, it occurs through the employer, who is the connecting link between the result of labor and the end consumer – the client, one might say, an intermediary.

So, this intermediary between directly those who produce

something and a client, let’s call him an entrepreneur, performs the function of both production itself and sale in a competitive environment, that is, a full cycle of labor that satisfies the end consumer.

An entrepreneur, as a seller, fixes the fact of the sale of a particular product or the provision of a service, for brevity I will talk about the product, he is also able to understand the reasons why and why this or that product is bought, what need it ultimately satisfies. The latter, in turn, allows you to further improve the quality of the product, that is, the ability of the product to directly satisfy the need. In other words, an entrepreneur is that person who creates something, and also receives and transmits feedback to production so that it produces the goods most needed by the market.

This is especially important in modern information spheres and for so-called luxury goods. We can also notice that, in general, with the development of technology, the demand for goods, if not luxury, then far from essential goods is growing, for example, if you calculate the revenue of an ordinary store, then the bulk of the profit will not come from bread, cereals, milk, potatoes and the like. basic products. But with alcoholic beverages, juices and sodas, sweets, sausages and other ready-to-eat products.

All these highly profitable goods are the result of the activities of an entrepreneur who creates goods that are in the greatest demand. Such activity of analyzing existing demand or creating this demand by advertising or creating a new product is also called marketing. Thus, it can be said that any labor as a whole consists of two parts: the actual labor of production itself and the labor that involves selling, which includes finding out what needs to be produced.

Most often, production labor is more concerned with either essential goods, such as food, for example, cereals, vegetables, or the creation of the means for production themselves: metal, sand, cement, etc. But any final product for the consumer combines both production and marketing components, for example, the sale of potatoes by weight, and not in bags of 40 kilograms, is already the result of some kind of marketing activity.

 

Thus, we will single out 2 forms of labor, directly production labor and marketing labor, the seller’s labor, which identifies or creates needs through advertising, in order to then satisfy them through production.

Conditional sale and production are only ideal categories, in reality, of course, these activities are intertwined with each other in a wide variety of activities and professions.

Any work in itself does not yet imply a result, that is, the satisfaction of demand. Demand satisfies only goods of the required quality, that is, sufficient to satisfy the needs of the client at the appropriate price. Thus, any work is somehow connected with the risk that the production or marketing component of labor will not cope with its tasks and waste time and resources that the entrepreneur should already have, he will risk them, thus taking responsibility for the end result of your work.

And usually, such a risk compensates for the profit, since luxury goods, not essentials, usually have a large margin and, as a result, a large profit covering the risks. Essential goods, on the other hand, usually have a lower risk of not being sold.

That is, an entrepreneur or business owner takes responsibility for the fact that his decisions in marketing and the interaction of employees will be of high quality and, as a result, lead to a result, that is, to any profit. Thus, profit is a payment for marketing work and the risks associated with its implementation, or a payment for a more efficient organization of production than, for example, the production of one person for himself. For example, at a high-tech agricultural enterprise, it takes 5 minutes of a person’s time to grow one kilogram of potatoes, and for personal independent activities without equipment, technology, and other things, it takes 10 minutes. From this it is obvious that for the organizer of production, the cost of potatoes will initially be lower.

So, for objective reasons, we can notice a trend that, where possible, large enterprises that are highly organized and equipped with technology are crowding out small ones that cannot afford neither equipment nor the level of technology and opportunities for the division of labor. All this usually ultimately leads to a reduction in the cost of the final product.

Beneficial and harmful labor

So, having figured out what, in general, labor consists of, I would like to highlight in it what I consider useful and harmful to society. Since we have determined that the main goal of the workers themselves is profit or wages, while the public good is improved directly from the fact that goods are created.

But, given the factors of the limited planet, the use of limited resources, the negative impact of almost any production on nature, we cannot leave the economy only in the form in which its goal is profit and the creation of goods, it should also become part of the environment.

That is, we must consider the impact of our labor on nature and try to change both the very principles of impact, that is, production labor, and change our needs, that is, marketing labor. Simply speaking about the latter, we should not create new needs, first of all, in goods not of prime necessity, but in them, in general, through marketing efforts, they create needs and generate most of the profits. For example, various kinds of equipment and goods made of plastic.

Thus, by skillfully adjusting the opportunities for marketing influence on needs, we can significantly reduce these needs or change them to those that do not use the exhaustible resources of the planet or do not harm it. Here it is worth clarifying that by resources I mean not only fossil resources such as coal, oil, metal, but also clean fresh water, clean air, land as soil and as a place for storing waste.

As we know, our desires are not limited, and desires give rise to needs, which, obviously, rest against the limitation of resources, due to the fact that we are on planet Earth, which is a ball hanging in space, at a grand distance from everything that has given us new resources or even just space to live.

Thus, we come to the need to create a new eco-friendly economy, which implies not only the result in the form of the well-being of man and the state, but also the need for the well-being of nature, that is, leaving it in its natural original form, I call such an economy the economy of harmony. Therefore, any labor directed towards the creation of such an economy, I consider beneficial, that which does not harm it.