Labor Day

We all used to read old Karl Marx, back when his thinking seemed to control 50 percent of the world's population.  One thing that struck me was his exhaltation of the value of individual work  - its nobility, even, although I doubt he would have said it this way.
It seemed to belie one line of critique about socialism - that the system does not spur, did not reward, people's work.  Hard workers thrive under capitalism, so the thinking went, while in a socialist world they would just be suckers.

He also seemed, from the lofty vantage of an enthusiastic teenager in the '60's, to be celebrating something that sounded pretty much like a drag.  I figured he was touting the value of work only because it gave him cred.

It added up, so I thought, to a kind of a fraud.  He really didn't believe that work was a virtue, or that the system he proposed would reward it.  He just used the idea to get across his larger pitch, that he had an inside track on how the world's societies would evolve.

A lot later, I now think he was not at all fraudulent.  Completely wrong, as to how the world really works, but not fraudulent.  Or at least I agree with the idea - individual work is noble.  When you are really really rolling you go into the flow, and if you could build a society around that, you'd have something.