Glossary of
Marxist Philosophy
Antithesis
of Mental and Physical Labour,
the historically
formed relations between people, in which mental labour is separated from
physical labour, and the manual workers, i.e., producers, become the object of exploitation
on the part of the ruling classes. This antithesis arises in the initial stage
of the slave-owning society. The division of labour (q.v.) itself, and in
particular the separation of mental from physical labour, was at the time a
progressive phenomenon, insofar as some of the people were freed from arduous
physical labour and thus allowed to engage in the development of science,
culture, etc. In the antagonistic socio-economic formations, this separation
takes the form of social, class antagonism: engagement in mental labour becomes
the privilege of the dominant classes, while physical labour falls to the lot
of the exploited classes. Under socialism, the liquidation of exploitation of
man by man, the sharing in government and culture by the masses, the increasing
transformation of labour into creative labour in which physical and mental
activities are drawn closer to each other, etc., help overcome the antithesis
between physical and mental labour. The enmity between the manual workers and
the intelligentsia also disappears; the intelligentsia themselves developing
from among the working people change their social character. However, even
under socialism there still remains an essential distinction between physical
and mental labour. It lies in the distinct gap between the cultural and
technical level of the intelligentsia, on the one hand, and of the working
class and the peasantry, on the other, in the difference in the nature of their
work. This difference precludes antagonism of interests and has an altogether
different social content. The distinction between mental and physical labour
gradually becomes obliterated in the process of communist construction. The
decisive condition for this obliteration is the creation of the material and
technical basis of communism (see Material, etc.), the transformation of the
Very nature of labour, in which arduous physical work is to be replaced by
machines; production will demand workers of engineer-technician standard, with
a high cultural and technical level. The shortening of the working day frees
time for man's all-round physical and spiritual development. The old division
of labour, which nailed a man to a particular specialty, will disappear;
possessing a high degree of training, each will be able 5 to choose his
profession and pass from one profession to another. AH this will mean the
complete merging of physical and mental labour.
* * *
Source: M.
Rosenthal and P. Yudin, Editors
A Dictionary or
Philosophy
Progress Publishers
Moscow 1967