Reimagining Social Contribution through Ibn Khaldun’s Views on Work

The question of what constitutes value and how societies should measure it has occupied thinkers across civilizations. For Ibn Khaldun, writing in the fourteenth century, work was the fundamental source of value in all economic and social life. His reflections, revisited in The Bridge of Becoming: Reimagining Work and Capital through Ibn Khaldun and Western Economic Thought, anticipate later Western debates over the labor theory of value while also embedding work within a broader moral and civilizational framework. Unlike approaches that elevate capital, privilege, or ownership as autonomous sources of wealth, Ibn Khaldun insisted that every form of earnings—whether agricultural, artisanal, commercial, or administrative—ultimately rested on the labor of human beings. The very act of transforming raw matter into usable goods, or of organizing society into functional order, is itself the indispensable foundation of value.

This insight is not merely confined to human affairs but can be extended to the natural world. At its most elemental level, life on Earth is sustained by work in the form of energy transformations. Plants engage in photosynthesis, laboring to capture sunlight and convert it into chemical energy. This process underpins all food chains, ensuring that energy is made available to herbivores, carnivores, and humans alike. Without this foundational work of plants, the materials of the Earth would remain inert, unfit for sustaining life. Similarly, the unheralded labors of ecosystems—bees pollinating crops, wetlands filtering water, microbes decomposing organic matter—constitute vast networks of work that maintain balance and continuity in the biosphere. Even geological and climatic processes, such as the cycling of water or the slow formation of soils, can be understood as forms of natural work, transforming matter and energy into conditions hospitable to life.

Human societies reproduce this natural logic in cultural and economic forms. The farmer who cultivates crops, the artisan who fashions raw materials into tools, and the teacher who shapes the minds of the young are all engaged in transformative labor that adds value to the community. Ibn Khaldun emphasized the crafts in particular, noting that they create goods whose worth surpasses their raw inputs precisely because of the skill and effort invested. Yet beyond material production, there are less tangible but equally vital forms of work: the efforts of governance that sustain justice and stability, the intellectual labors of scientists and innovators who expand the horizons of knowledge, and the unpaid but essential caregiving that nurtures households and communities. These forms of labor often remain invisible to conventional economic measures, yet without them the social fabric would unravel.

The undervaluation of such work raises pressing questions of equity. Modern economic systems frequently privilege capital accumulation, rent-seeking, or ownership over direct labor. Wealth is often generated through mechanisms detached from actual productive effort, whether through speculative finance, inheritance, or monopoly power. This decoupling of capital from work risks obscuring the true foundations of social value and, as argued in the article cited above, contributes to inequality and instability. Ibn Khaldun’s framework offers a corrective by re-centering work as the generative principle of wealth, culture, and civilization. To adopt this view today would mean rethinking not only economic theories but also policies, ensuring that all forms of work—visible and invisible, paid and unpaid—are properly recognized and rewarded.

The implications extend beyond questions of wages and productivity. If work is understood as the universal foundation of value, then the unpaid labor of caregivers, the ecological labor of nonhuman species, and the intellectual labor of researchers are all indispensable contributions to the common good. Equitable valuation requires more than market adjustments. It requires a moral and institutional commitment to honoring the dignity of work in all its forms. Such recognition would entail designing social policies that support caregiving, environmental stewardship, and education, while curbing the disproportionate privileges of unearned income and rent extraction.

In both nature and human society, nothing of value comes into being without work. The photosynthetic labor of plants, the unseen efforts of pollinators, the artisanal transformation of matter, the teaching of knowledge, the care of families—all are threads in the web of becoming that sustains life and civilization. To forget this truth is to risk building societies that exploit rather than sustain, that collapse rather than endure. To remember it, as Ibn Khaldun insisted centuries ago, is to acknowledge that work is not merely an economic necessity but the ontological foundation of human and ecological flourishing.