Melakha is about the political/economic order

Melakha is not merely a set of (39) productive actions; melakha refers as well to the class of all products of common purpose. Melakha is about the political/economic order. It is about the management structure of greater productivity, where management styles come into play to coordinate the activities of the variety of different players and actors and workers in the ensemble of work groups. The work gangs of Egypt are but one instance of a degraded melakha, one that had degenerated into avodah. Melekhet avodah could well mean the individual work one does that ultimately serves a common purpose: hence the exemption for okhel nefesh when melekhet avodah is prohibited on the festival days. By that definition the prohibition of melekhet avodah is more severe than the prohibition of melakha, which would stand to reason. Then shabbat shabbaton and initem et nafshoteichem in conjunction with lo taasseh kol melakha becomes the highest form of suspension of common purpose. On the sabbath, the entire nation suspends all activities of common purpose because the institutions of common purpose are shut down on that day, for maintenance. 

The problem with defining melakha the conventional way, as a set of productive actions, is that it removes the institution of Shabbos from the larger political/economic conversation. The fundamentalist interpreters of the sacred teachings were simply not sophisticated enough in their grasp of what the teachings were driving at to do them justice or to situate those teachings properly into the political/economic conversation so as to make them relevant to the questions of power and productivity. It comes as little surprsie that at the end of the day those fundamentalist interpretations of the teachings are at once both durable and, at the same time, irrelevant to the construct of the social order. Indeed, the interpretations are so irrelevant to the social order that their irrelevancy has become the primary criterion by which people identify with those teachings. The adherents to those conventional interpretations have removed themselves behind ghetto walls, whether they be the ghetto of the private residence or of the individual’s mind or practice; and they have made it a token of membership in their ghetto-ized communities that the rules of practice for those teachings cannot in any way impinge on the real world challenges of the people who or of the communities that implement those interpretations. They have removed themselves from the ideological and political conversation and have reduced the entire system to one that is mius and goel nefesh. 

The fundamentalist interpretation is the triumph of shallowness over depth, engagement and intimacy. The simple have a claim to power too, and they will sieze it with just as much alacrity, if not more so, as will the deep thinkers and the respecters of nuance and complexity.