Toward the Foundations of Economic Activity

Contemporary economic theory relies on a set of concepts—labour, value, production, exchange—that are treated as explanatory primitives. Despite their centrality, these notions are applied to increasingly heterogeneous forms of activity without preserving a consistent criterion of distinction. Activities requiring substantial effort are routinely classified alongside those directly involved in material reproduction, obscuring a fundamental difference between effort and labour. This paper proposes that the difficulty lies not in the diversity of activities, but in the absence of a criterion distinguishing expenditure from integration into processes of reproduction. Effort is understood as expenditure, whereas labour presupposes integration into systems that maintain conditions of life. To clarify this distinction, the paper introduces a minimal account of culture as the continuity of reproducible forms of activity and the relations between them. Within this framework, the persistence of activities detached from their original conditions is explained through objectification: the stabilization of activity in forms that can be reproduced, circulated, and coordinated independently of their initial context. Drawing on examples ranging from tourism and play to money and technological devices, the analysis shows how relational complexity is displaced into stable forms, enabling a reduction of both cognitive and physical effort. This process is interpreted as a redistribution of effort across internal and external domains. The emergence of economic systems from subsistence-oriented activity is reconsidered in this light. Rather than constituting a simple expansion of activity, systematic exchange transforms the criteria by which activity is integrated into processes of reproduction. As a result, the distinction between effort and labour becomes unstable. The paper concludes by suggesting that categories such as property, justice, and exploitation operate at a derivative level: they describe configurations in which objectified forms of activity are already stabilized, rather than the processes that give rise to them.