Let's bow in honor of labor tonight

A new dawn broke over China today. The Olympics Games will be declared open at the National Stadium in a matter of hours. People across the world will watch China's offering with amazement, or regret, depending on the color in their eyes. The insinuations, allegations and drummed-up paranoia of the media with an agenda, and hence of their bosses, will not be laid to rest, though. But that is another story.

Today's story is about sport, and consequently physical health. That brings us to physical labor, and thus laborers. The relation between the two is deep-rooted. In China of not so long ago, sport (or recreation) was the prerogative of the ruling class. In a way, the laborers didn't need sport to keep fit. Instead, they needed rest more than anything else at the end of every backbreaking day of labor. But sport does not equal all physical activity. It is just one way of being physically active. And in the true sense of the term, it is recreation of the mind too.

The subsequent increase in the use of machinery and division of labor didn't make the life of a laborer any better in China, or elsewhere in the world. Instead, as Marx says in his Manifesto of the Communist Party, "the work of the proletarians has lost all individual character, and, consequently, all charm for the workman. He becomes an appendage of the machine, and it is only the most simple, most monotonous, and most easily acquired knack, that is required of him".