Duhring cannot comprehend this idea, which amounts to the difference between labour and work. Engels quotes his comment,
“A game consisting purely of pleasures without any further serious aim soon makes one blasé, or, what amounts to the same thing, exhausts all capacity to feel. Real labour, in some form or other, is therefore the natural social law of healthy beings.” (p 237)
Contained, here, of course, is a grain of truth. Some years ago, I wrote “What If Life Were A Computer Game?”. I've referred to it earlier, and its been discussed in the media more recently, as a result of various papers by numerous writers who have proposed that “The Matrix Is Real”. As I wrote in that old post, anyone that plays computer games gets a sense of accomplishment only if they are challenging, though there are always those who look to be able to use cheat codes. If humans, as a species, simply sat back and allowed robots, using AI, to do everything, it would, indeed, spell the end of their usefulness, and time for them to be superseded. But, is that what humanity would be likely to do? No.
If we think back to Ancient Greece and Rome, it was the freedom from “work” of the elite, the Eloi of Wells' future, as depicted in “The Time Machine”, which allowed them to devote their time to the development of art, science and culture. Even the industrial proletariat makes a distinction between the “work” it must do for an employer, to obtain wages to live, as against the “labour” they undertake voluntarily, in their own time, be it painting, gardening doing woodwork, or numerous other hobbies, in which this “labour” is, then, indistinguishable from leisure, and is a true expression of their creativity and humanity.
There is, also, a clear distinction between the labour done voluntarily, as against the labour, also, performed, not for an employer, or as a self-employed commodity producer, but done as a part of a direct production of use-values. The peasant producer does not work for an employer, and most of the labour they perform is their own necessary labour required to produce the food and so on required to live. Today's industrial workers engage in labour to keep their homes, cars and so on maintained, to do domestic labour to launder clothes etc. This is labour undertaken, usually, out of necessity, convenience or financial advantage, compared to paying someone else to do it, rather than being voluntary.
As with the examples given by Marx, in Capital I, of Robinson Crusoe, and the peasant household, this labour, undertaken to produce these products/use-values, involves an assessment of “value”, i.e. the labour-time required, as against the use-value/utility obtained from it. That is clear from the fact that, when domestic appliances became available, no one voluntarily washed clothes by hand and so on, any more. In other words, it is the operation of The Law of Value. Where someone engages in labour on a purely voluntary basis, simply as a hobby, or leisure activity they do so outside the constraints of The Law of Value. Only at the point where humanity, as a whole, reaches such a point, i.e. where productivity has risen to such a degree that all of its needs can be met without the constraint of having to choose to expend in labour in one sphere, rather than another, will the Law of Value cease to exist.
Far from such a condition spelling the end of humanity, it is the condition for its true emergence, as, from that point on, everything it does it does freely, as an expression of its humanity, and not because of any constraint to produce to live.
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