Bookbag: Labor Theory

. . . the futile effort to bring socialism to tzarist Russia in 1905 assumes that the labor theory of value, having its origins in medieval craft society, can continue into the modern industrial age, where all values succumb to market forces.

In the Christian conception, work stood for the wage of sin, an act of atonement that suggests necessity, affliction, and misery; and if work had more positive connotations in the earlier handicraft age, modern industrial life endows it with little moral significance.

From Max Weber: Politics and the Spirit of Tragedy.