Is farming labour or work? Trying to understand Arendt’s distinction

Question

My son is at university in Accra and sends me readings from his course. This month it was a chapter about Hannah Arendt, who says English uses "work" for three different things: labour, work and action. I farm eleven acres of cocoa near Kumasi and I wanted to know which one I do.
From what I understood, labour is what keeps us alive and leaves nothing behind, like cooking and cleaning. Work makes lasting things, like a table or a house. Action is what happens between people in public life.
But farming confuses me. I harvest every year and the beans are sold and eaten, so it seems like labour. But I also planted trees that will bear for thirty years, and I built terraces my grandchildren will use. And our cooperative meets every month to decide prices together, which sounds like the third one.
So which is it? Or is the distinction not meant for people like me?

Johanna Reinhardt · Accepted Answer

Akosua, the distinction is very much meant for you, and your confusion is exactly the right one.
Arendt's three categories are activities, not jobs. Most jobs mix them.
Labour answers biological necessity. Its products are consumed almost as soon as they're made, and it has to be repeated endlessly: feeding, cleaning, harvesting what will be eaten. Work fabricates durable things that outlast the making and together form a human world: tools, buildings, artworks. Action is what people do together in speech and deed, beginning something new, disclosing who they are.
Your harvest is labour in her sense. As I remember her discussion, she even says cultivated land stays cultivated only through repeated labour, so agriculture mostly belongs there. Your trees and terraces are closer to work: they last and they'll shape your grandchildren's world. And your cooperative meetings, where people argue and decide together, are action in quite a pure form.
Her worry, which is the point of the whole book, is that modern society judges everything by the standard of labour: is it productive, does it keep the process going? So even work and action get treated as means of subsistence. Your three-part farming life is a good example of what she thought we were losing the words for.

Akosua Mensah · Answer

Thank you, Johanna. So I am all three in one week. I will tell my son that the cooperative meeting is the most philosophical thing I do. He will not believe me.

Henrike Vogel · Answer

He should believe you. Arendt thought action was the highest of the three and the most fragile, because it depends on other people and can't be done alone. A cooperative that sets its own prices is exactly the kind of small public space she admired.

Hugo Marchetti · Answer

One worry about the scheme, from the docks. Arendt can sound as if labour is the lowest thing a person does, but harvesting and loading ships are how everyone else gets to do the other two. Simone Weil, who worked in factories, insisted that physical labour could be a place of attention and even of the sacred. I'd keep Arendt's categories and drop any ranking that makes your harvest less dignified than your meetings.

Is farming labour or work? Trying to understand Arendt’s distinction

4 answers

Accepted answer

Other answers