CHAPTER 1

Marxian Theory and the Critique of Work

The critique of work has historically been treated as a marginal topic in

discussions of French thought. Although there have been a number of
studies of popular resistance to work in the workplace itself,1 analysis of
the intellectual history of anti-work discourse in France is fragmentary at
best and only very rarely a focus of critical interest. This is an unfortunate
state of affairs because France has a singularly rich intellectual tradition of
criticising work which stretches at least as far back as the early nineteenth
century and which has galvanised some of its most important thinkers and
cultural movements. It includes the utopian-socialist Charles Fourier
(1772–1837), who called for the abolition of the separation between work
and play; Marx’s wayward son-in-law, Paul Lafargue (1842–1911), who
called for The Right to Laziness (1880); the father of Surrealism André
Breton (1896–1966), who demanded a ‘war on work’; and, of course, the
French Situationist Guy Debord (1931–1994), who authored the infa-
mous graffito, ‘never work’; as well as a host of other groups and figures
before and since. Nevertheless, although many of these figures are today
quite rightly considered to have made major contributions to the develop-
ment of French thought, the anti-work aspects of their respective intel-
lectual projects, along with the key ideas that drove this dissident tradition
as a whole, have not been the subject of a great deal of serious theoretical
analysis. It would not be too much of a caricature to say that, just as work-
ers who refuse to obey the beat of the factory drum have often found

© The Author(s) 2019 1

A. Hemmens, The Critique of Work in Modern French Thought,
Studies in Revolution and Literature,
[Link]
2 A. HEMMENS

themselves vilified and marginalised, so too those radical French thinkers

who have argued that work might be something quite suspect have, by
and large, found this aspect of their writing ignored and dismissed as
naïvely utopian and even as reactionary.2
The fact that critiques of work in theory and practice still meet with a
great deal of resistance today is not surprising. The political consensus,
since at least the nineteenth century, is that work is both a natural necessity
and, barring exploitation at least, a social good. There are many who con-
sider it the foundation stone of all human society and even the defining
characteristic of human being. The identification of mankind with homo
faber, or ‘man the maker’, a being who consciously constructs himself and
the world around him through the productive process is foundational to
nearly all forms of modern social thought. Work as such has been treated
variously in the modern era as a source of social wealth, of identity, of
pride, of freedom, social progress, social justice and even as the essence of
society or, as Marx puts it in Capital (1867), ‘life itself’.3 Indeed, to the
extent that labour has a hold on modern society, this really is the case.
Most modern people, from the moment they are born, are destined for a
childhood given over to training for competition on the labour market
and, if they are one of the ‘lucky winners’, for an adulthood that is spent
mostly in the factory, the shop or the office. Even the son of the bour-
geois, who, and this is said with no judgement, may never have to work a
day in his life, owes his continued existence to the world of work and often
has a job all the same. Political and social theory has therefore turned not
so much on the critical analysis of work as such but on how best to manage
work and distribute its fruits for the greatest social benefit.
In fact, far from criticising it, both sides of the political spectrum have,
to a greater or lesser degree, turned work (and very often the ‘Worker’)
into a veritable cult of worship. As Anselm Jappe notes, even the more
libertarian wings of leftism, such as anarcho-syndicalism, were not entirely
free from this fanaticism, as can be seen from this ideology’s celebration of
industry.4 This religion of production reached its terrible apogee, of course,
in the Soviet gulags and in the ‘negative factories’5 of Nazi concentration
camps, where, as the Situationists once noted, the sign above the gates read
‘Work will set you free.’6 At present very few governments, save for rogue
states such as North Korea, feel the need to organise anything as systematic
as the gulags; contemporary capitalism, as even the briefest glance at today’s
newspapers will attest, is quite capable of pulling off the most extreme sac-
rifices to the labour god without state intervention. It should be recalled
 MARXIAN THEORY AND THE CRITIQUE OF WORK 3

that the crude productivist propaganda images of the ‘recuperative mod-

ernisation’ regimes of the past,7 so easily mocked by today’s liberals, were
only considered necessary because these ‘backward’ peasant populations
had not yet fully submitted themselves to an industrial labour discipline
that had long ago been internalised in the West in the form of the deepest
structures of the modern psyche. In other words, attendance at the church
of labour is no less compulsory in the present-­day world of Western ‘free
markets and democracy’ where we are now supposedly recognised only as
citizen-consumers. If anything, as the Orwellian doublespeak of today’s
left-wing politicians will attest, the language has only become more insidi-
ous. There is no longer a ‘working class’, only ‘working people’ and ‘work-
ing families’. There are no ‘unemployed’; there are only ‘job seekers’. As
the German social-democrat Friedrich Ebert (1871–1925) once said, in all
seriousness, ‘Socialism means working a lot.’8
There are signs, however, that the social consensus that has surrounded
work for the past several centuries is in a state of decomposition. Although
there have always been pockets of resistance and opposition to work, capi-
talism thankfully can never evenly develop everywhere and at all times,
what we are witnessing today, even in the most developed capitalist coun-
tries, seems to be something far more widespread, as a kind of desperation
takes hold. The furore in France over the ‘loi travail’, or labour law, which
saw a socialist government seek to knock back some of the meagre protec-
tions that workers are allotted, has led to huge protests with people march-
ing in the streets holding signs reading ‘work kills’ and, in a call back to
Debord, ‘never work’ once more. One might also think of the mainstream
success in France of books, such as Bonjour Laziness: Why Hard Work
Doesn’t Pay (2004) by Corinne Maier, which suggest ways of resisting cor-
porate discipline in the modern workplace; and of Pierre Carles’ documen-
tary Attention Danger Travail (2003) that follows the movement of French
‘jobseekers’ who proudly say, in a manner that is genuinely brave in the
context of the ‘work society’, that they simply want to be left to enjoy their
lives living off the dole without the hassle of looking for work that either
does not exist or, under the conditions imposed, is hardly worth doing.
Indeed, everywhere one looks, one finds an ever-growing number of
proposals from all quarters of society, even business management schools,
for dealing with the ‘problem of work’: from well-intentioned calls for
basic income, ‘degrowth’ and wages for housewives, to arguments in
favour of a better work-life balance, a green economy and, the same refrain
that has been sung since the start of the Industrial Revolution, hope that
4 A. HEMMENS

technology will finally liberate us from the ‘natural necessity’ of labour

through automation. In Britain and America alone, the past few years have
seen a plethora of titles that claim to offer the possibility of a more critical
stance towards work.9 Many of these studies, like the social movements
taking place in France today, make reference to figures from the history of
the French critique of work, albeit sometimes quite superficially, both to
find a source of intellectual inspiration from the past for dealing with the
problems of the present and to situate themselves within an ongoing his-
tory of popular resistance to capitalist exploitation. It is not in the least bit
surprising that British and American authors should look to France given
our shared history of projecting onto the French either the quality of lazi-
ness or of placing greater cultural value on life outside work, depending on
one’s point of view. Although, while such projections might have had a
certain truth to them in the past thanks to the history of uneven industrial
development (with the caveat that laziness, if it means resistance to the
modern labour process, can only be a good thing), it could hardly be said
to characterise post-war French society, even if a few French workers pre-
serve the dignity of not hastily eating a sandwich at their desk for lunch
and still enjoy some social benefits denied to their British and American
counterparts.10
These recent developments are first and foremost a reaction to the
global financial crisis of 2008 that was itself only an epiphenomenon on
the surface of the deeper structural crisis that capitalism has been undergo-
ing since the end of the post-war boom in the early 1970s. Although there
are still plenty of paid-up economists who continue to beat the drum of
future prosperity, it has become increasingly difficult for even the most
partisan of observers to ignore the patent absurdity of the immense pro-
ductive capability of society and the reality of mass under- and unemploy-
ment, working poverty, precariousness and relentless cuts to the arts,
education and social services. Even the official figures of unemployment in
many Western countries today would have made any post-war govern-
ment resign in embarrassment.11 At the same time, there is an awareness,
even in the higher echelons of power, that we cannot go on as we have
been if we want the planet to continue to be a viable habitat, and yet we
continue to do so. Mainstream papers in the UK and France are even talk-
ing about the plethora of, what David Graeber has described as, ‘bullshit
jobs’12 (something of a tautology one might add) and there is a genuine
sense of decline of the ‘work society’ as conditions of hyper-competition
drive successive national governments to impose worse conditions in an
 MARXIAN THEORY AND THE CRITIQUE OF WORK 5

age that the baby-boomer generation was told was to be dominated by the
pursuit of leisure.13 Everything, in short, suggests that social movements,
if they are to be effective, are increasingly being forced to address the cult
of labour head on and this is why the French critique of work has more
relevance than ever.
It is not the job of critical theory, however, to chase after social move-
ments and oppressed subjects to tell them how great they and what they
are doing already are. While there are many positives that have emerged
from these intellectual and social developments, there also seems to be a
great deal of incoherence and confusion about what work actually is and
of what the critique of work, as a result, might meaningfully consist. On
the one hand, there is clearly a growing dissatisfaction with the concrete
forms and conditions of work, and its compensation, as it currently stands.
There has even been a widespread sense of the loss of the importance of
the work ethic and of work itself as the centre of social life.14 On the other
hand, while there is a general desymbolisation, or post-modern decon-
struction, of the work ethic, a recognition of its relativity, there is no real
sense of what it is relative to nor what socially substantiates it. Indeed, the
work ethic, which is only a cultural epiphenomenon, is nearly always con-
flated with ‘work’ as such or work in general. And it shows just how
attached to work per se the modern subject truly is. Everything and every-
one can be at fault but work itself: the work ethic, neo-liberal governance,
the work-life balance, the historical losses and betrayals of the working
class, capitalist exploitation in general (as if it were not a veritable privilege
today to even have a job where one can be exploited) and so on. All of the
major left ideologues, including the likes of Thomas Piketty,15 continue to
aim their critique at the spheres of circulation and exchange as though
work as such really were an entirely neutral fact of life.
In 1999, the French sociologists Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello had
already noted that a certain artistic critique of work embodied in the
French avant-gardes of the past had been incorporated, albeit denuded of
wider social critique, into a ‘new spirit of capitalism’.16 Indeed, in the
course of researching this book, I came across a consultancy firm that used
the phrase ‘never work’ in its advertising spiel because ‘if you enjoy your
job, you’ll never work a day in your life’. The traditional Protestant work
ethic, long ago, ceased to be treated by mainstream Western society as an
unquestionable positive. However, as this example demonstrates, simply
rejecting the work ethic and seeking to escape its drudgery is really quite
meaningless if it is not part of a deeper social critique. You can hate work
6 A. HEMMENS

in the name of making other people work for you. You can hate your job,
but imagine a better one where you would have longer holidays and a
nicer car. You can work minimum wage and live in a tiny bedsit in New York
City while convincing yourself that your precariousness is a glamorous
bohemianism. You can abhor the neo-liberal workplace, but dream nostal-
gically about the post-war Fordist factory floor. Above all, you can think
that, under the right conditions, work would not be a problem at all for
anyone, and see yourself as part of a heroic history of popular opposition
to capitalist oppression. Even if you imagine a post-capitalist ‘non-work’
future, you can still think in terms of the organisation of labour. Workers
and capitalist alike are just as likely to condemn as ‘parasites’ those who do
not work or do not work hard enough (an accusation they have often
thrown at each other). What is surprisingly rare, however, and ultimately
this applies to a greater or lesser extent to many of the French thinkers
examined in this study, is to take the promise of a ‘critique of work’ literally
and criticise the category of work or labour itself.

The Exoteric Marx

The main philosophical argument of this book, and the mode of analysis
that it takes up, is that there are really only two possible ways of under-
standing and approaching the critique of work. The first effectively
dives straight into an empirical, historical, ethical and moral critical
analysis assuming that work as such is not problematical but might
become so under certain conditions. The second grounds its analysis of
these phenomenological expressions of work in capitalism in a critique
of the category itself. Although these two different approaches might
occasionally arrive at very similar conclusions, though they may equally
diverge radically from one another, they must necessarily start from very
different conceptions of what work and its role in capitalist society actu-
ally is. It is even possible, as we shall see, that aspects of both approaches
can be found in the work of a single author and, most significantly of all,
in the writing of Karl Marx himself, who could be thought of as the
main intellectual founder of two different, and sometimes complemen-
tary, opposing schools of thought about work in modern critical theory:
that found in traditional Marxism and the Marxian ‘critique of value’
respectively. A better understanding of these two approaches helps to
highlight some of the key theoretical problems and critical perspectives
that the current work seeks to address.
 MARXIAN THEORY AND THE CRITIQUE OF WORK 7

The first approach, which is broadly tied to, what Robert Kurz calls, the
‘exoteric’ side of Marx’s thought (more about this later),17 but is equally
characteristic of modern thought in general, we might refer to as a ‘phe-
nomenological’ mode of analysis in that it starts primarily with a critique
of definite empirically perceived objects in a fashion that is, as Kurz argues,
even in post-modern form, implicitly positivistic.18 From such a perspec-
tive ‘work’ per se could never be the object of critique, only specific phe-
nomena that fall under its rubric. Plenty of ink has been spilled therefore
criticising or describing the phenomenology or sociology of work: the
division of labour, its conditions, its compensation, who does it, why, in an
immediate sense, do they do it, how it is organised, how it has developed,
its technologies, its unfairness, what it feels like to do it, how its products,
and the activity itself, are alienated from the producer and so on. These
kinds of analyses can produce very powerful historical and empirical cri-
tiques of how work has been promoted to and experienced by the masses
over the course of the past two centuries and more. They have even, at
times, galvanised large numbers of people in revolutionary social move-
ments and, as in the case of many of the authors examined in this study,
provided the basis for imagining entirely different societies where the
‘abolition of work’ and some other kind of human ‘metabolism with
nature’, as Marx puts it, might be possible.
On the other hand, such a perspective, precisely because it does not
begin with a critique of work in and of itself, comes with a lot of philo-
sophical baggage that is not always perceived as such. So that, when it
comes to defining work (or under its other banners of ‘labour’ and ‘pro-
duction’), many thinkers try to understand the category without reference
to capitalism and its historical specificity as a mode of social life. Work is,
above all, understood to be a ‘rational’ or ‘nominal’ abstraction that can
be applied, as part of a critical analysis, to any form of historical or, poten-
tial, post-capitalist society. That is to say, it is imagined to be, in itself, a
neutral, anthropological constant or transhistorical social form of funda-
mental human activity. The anthropologist Herbert Applebaum, for
example, in his The Concept of Work (1992) provides a definition that
would be fairly familiar to almost anyone:

The human condition compels the existence of work as the condition of life.
Human beings are both in nature and outside of nature. They are in nature as
biological beings subject to the laws of nature and the cycles of birth and
death. They are outside of nature by what they create as a human environment
8 A. HEMMENS

which is built and organised through work […] no human society can exist
without work. There are no Gardens of Eden for human beings. Even picking
apples is work. Whatever type of future we project with our high technology,
we still must grow food, build shelters, and make clothes and other objects to
protect ourselves and to satisfy our material needs. And we will also have to
offer and exchange services to satisfy our needs. What is work? No definition
is satisfactory because work relates to all human activities, and one would have
to exhaust all such activities to exhaust the provinces of work.19

At face value, this definition could not be more innocuous. It certainly

describes a reality that we all, as modern people, are completely familiar
with. Applebaum is definitely not wrong to state that many if not all of the
different activities he describes will need to continue even in a vastly dif-
ferent future and that many of the activities we perform today were done
by our ancestors also. But what is it that allows Applebaum to group all of
these different activities under the rubric of a single abstraction, ‘work’,
when he himself points out that there is nothing about the concrete quali-
ties of these various activities themselves that might meaningfully allow us
to group them together? Equally, can we be so sure that ‘work’ exists to
satisfy material human needs? Is the opposite of not working simply soci-
ety having everything handed to it on a plate as if by magic, as his Garden
of Eden image seems to suggest? And is nature really what compels us to
work? Suffice it to say for now, before answering these questions, that
treating ‘work’ in this way carries with it a set of basic assumptions about
human society and human beings, or what we might call a social ‘ontology
of labour’, that is by no means neutral or not open to question.
This kind of ontological discourse about labour, which is not transhis-
torical, is in fact an inheritance from the idealism of Enlightenment phi-
losophy. Work, in the period when capitalism was starting to emerge as a
transforming social dynamic, had been seen as a limited form of social
activity that was both torturous and reserved for the lowest members of
society. This is perhaps best evidenced by the dubious etymologies estab-
lished for ‘labour’ in early-modern French dictionaries, oft quoted with
glee by the critics of work, as deriving from the Latin tripaliare, to torture
with a three-pronged instrument.20 Enlightenment thinkers, however,
increasingly came to understand ‘work’ or ‘labour’ in terms of a broader,
universal abstraction for all social activity and the simple expenditure of
human energy in general (the nineteenth-century French physicist
Gaspard-Gustave de Coriolis [1792–1843] would later introduce the
 MARXIAN THEORY AND THE CRITIQUE OF WORK 9

c­ oncept of ‘work’ as a description of the energy expended by a force in

mechanical action). Work could be understood therefore as an innate cat-
egory of Reason, or logos, through which the individual could grasp hold,
both materially and ideally, of the whole of reality. Labour was as a result
closely tied to the Enlightenment notion of human being as an individual
‘subject’—in this specific case as the ‘producer’, the man of industry or
homo faber, if not homo economicus—that consciously dominates itself and
its environment through the application of reason, becoming, as René
Descartes (1596–1650) put it, the ‘masters and possessors of nature’.21
Descartes, for example, is famously meant to have claimed that the only
reason that apes do not speak to humans is that they do not want to be
forced to work.22 Much later, Kant, likewise, simply identified labour with
the ‘realisation of reason’ full stop.23
Labour, which had previously been a term reserved for the lowest mem-
bers of society, was increasingly a category that was positively applied to
everyone and almost any kind of activity. Even monarchs were thought and
actually expected to ‘work’ in some sense like the lowliest of peasants.
Queen Elizabeth II (1952–), who today is often praised for her extremely
active role in public life (the no doubt nauseating and endless round of
hospital openings and public parades), would have been looked on with
disdain by the medieval aristocracy, and perhaps the peasantry also, for ever
submitting to such a Protestant work ethic.24 The same could be said for
today’s bourgeoisie in general. ‘Economics’, which, in pre-modern times,
simply meant the running of the household,25 now became a scientific dis-
cussion of how to manage most rationally and, in the true utilitarian fash-
ion paved by ‘philanthropic’ social reformers such as Jeremy Bentham
(1748–1832), for the greatest social benefit, the ‘energies’ embodied in the
nation’s ‘workforce’; a reductive mode of thinking about human beings
and society that could then be projected retroactively as a critique of the
imagined backwardness and irrationality of ‘economic’ life in the pre-mod-
ern world. Bourgeois political economists, in particular David Ricardo
(1772–1823), further aided the cultural valorisation of labour from an eco-
nomic point of view by arguing that work was the source of all economic
value or social wealth (a discovery that is often incorrectly imputed to Marx
though he himself never claimed to have invented the idea).26
Marx, at least in the ‘exoteric’ side of his work where he plays both the
theorist of the workers’ movement and the political economist par excel-
lence, largely adopts the progressivist and positivistic conception of labour
and the development of productive forces from bourgeois idealism. In the
10 A. HEMMENS

Grundrisse (1857–1858), for example, Marx recognises that ‘production

in general is an abstraction’, but he claims, without any attempt to sub-
stantiate this, that it is ‘a rational abstraction in so far as it really brings out
and fixes the common elements’.27 Elsewhere, Marx asserts, again without
establishing any kind of evidence, that ‘the notion of labour in this univer-
sal form, as labour in general, is also extremely old’ and that it ‘express[es]
an ancient relation existing in all social formations’ that is ‘valid in all
epochs’.28 Though he immediately contradicts himself by saying that
‘“labour” is a modern category as are the relations which create this simple
abstraction’.29 In Capital, Marx attempts to rationalise the abstraction of
‘work itself’ by defining it simply as ‘purposeful activity’.30 This is equally
contradictory, however, because the fact that an action is performed with
a purpose could logically only form the basis for a rational abstraction if
those purposes were the same. The abstraction ‘worship’, for example,
unites many different forms of activity together by the fact that they have
a common purpose even if they are performed very differently. Under
Marx’s definition, however, even private prayer or obeying a call of nature
could equally be considered a form of ‘labour’.
In another section of Capital, Marx attempts to fix the rationality of
the labour abstraction to a concept of utility: ‘Labour […] as the creator
of use-values, as useful labour, is a condition of human existence which is
independent of all forms of society.’31 Here the same problem arises, how-
ever, because, as Kurz notes about this passage, use-value itself, or the
‘paradoxical-real determination’ of abstract utility, is only the specific way
in which capitalism takes hold of ‘objects that are in themselves not
abstract’.32 Use-value, that is to say, is a concrete manifestation of the
abstract universality of labour. It does not refer to the real usefulness or
necessity of particular products and services for human life. It is only the
expression of the historically specific ‘need’ to ‘realise’ value in exchange
by means of some product or service in which dead labour can be con-
gealed. This explains, for example, the great efforts that producers go to
in order to ‘educate’ and excite the ‘need’ for their, often absurd and poor
quality, products in potential consumers. Use-value is therefore not a
­transhistorical social form. This is a point of confusion for traditional
Marxism which, while it can, when it considers the problem at all, occa-
sionally allow that a ‘bad’ value-producing (or profit-making) ‘abstract
labour’ form—terms discussed in more detail below —might be specific to
capitalism, always wishes to preserve the concept of a ‘good’ transhistori-
cal ‘use-­value’ producing ‘concrete labour’. Such aporetic, and ultimately
 MARXIAN THEORY AND THE CRITIQUE OF WORK 11

s­implistic, thinking about work means that a certain progressivism, utili-

tarianism and Protestant work ethic is often able to creep into the critical
theory of even many of the most radical critics of capitalist society in very
subtle ways. Moreover, at the more extreme end of the spectrum, this can
be expressed as a hatred of ‘bad’ profit-making capital (and jobs), in favour
of the celebration of ‘good’, ‘productive’ and ‘socially-useful’ capital (and
jobs); an ideology that played an important role in the development of
modern Antisemitism, as we will see in our chapter on Fourier, as well as
other dangerous forms of pseudo-opposition to capitalist domination.33
Marx, although he is thankfully far more interesting and ambiguous in
his approach to work than many of his latter-day Marxist interpreters, still
wishes to preserve some concrete basis for labour as a rational abstraction
because his thinking reflects and even further contributes to the social
ontology of labour of bourgeois political economy. Marx goes on to say,
for example, that ‘[labour] is an eternal natural necessity which mediates
the metabolism between man and nature, and therefore human life
itself’.34 Here Marx conflates the fact that human beings must have some
kind of relationship with the natural environment with the mediation of a
single social abstraction. A fact of life that, while typical of capitalism, is
certainly not the case for all forms society. Marx, in other words, repro-
duces the Cartesian formal opposition between the subject, ‘man’, and the
object’, nature’, such that ‘labour’ takes on the role of dominating and
appropriating nature that logos does in rationalist thought.35 Through the
labour process, Marx says, the producer imposes his ‘sovereign power’ on
nature.36 Marx, in this aspect of his writing at least, imagines this relation-
ship, which is very real in modern society, not as the product of a specific
form of social life, capitalism, but as a kind of positivistic scientific fact that
arises out of human biology.37 Labour, and the rational domination of
nature (and oneself), therefore becomes synonymous with the mediation
of ‘life itself’ and, as a result, the essence of human being. Man is labour
or, to put it in the language of the younger Marx, labour is man’s ‘species
being’. It is, for Marx, transhistorical ‘natural necessity’ then, not a
historically specific socially imposed reality, that makes work a ‘rational’
abstraction and provides the basis for the work ethic (something to which
he himself, unlike his son-in-law Paul Lafargue, was quite attached).38
Marx, despite offering a very different perspective elsewhere in his
work, wants to preserve labour as a rational abstraction based in human
need in large part because he is deeply attached to bourgeois notions of
social ‘progress’ through technological development and, albeit more
12 A. HEMMENS

ambiguously, the rationalisation of the labour process. Nature, in the con-

text of such a teleological development of productive forces, can only be
envisioned as a barrier to the full flourishing of human powers and a fron-
tier that must be crossed. Marx, in volume three of Capital, develops this
social ontology of labour further by dividing all human activity into a
realm of necessity and a realm of freedom.39 The realm of necessity, which
gives rise to ‘necessary labour’, is the concept that labour is first and fore-
most characterised by those activities that are most basic to human survival
in a hostile world. Because Marx places it in opposition, it is implicitly
characterised by a lack of ‘freedom’. However, through the development
of productive forces, mankind increasingly wins for itself, through the
social appropriation of free time made possible by technological develop-
ment, the ‘freedom’ to perform activities that are not strictly concerned
with reproduction. The realm of freedom is therefore the domain of ‘sur-
plus labour’, not strictly ‘necessary’ labour, and leisure.
The increasing domination of nature is, as a result, the tool of man-
kind’s liberation, in this limited sense and in the context of a socialist
society, because it allows the ‘necessary labour’, demanded by a hostile
nature, to be temporally reduced through rationally ‘accomplishing it with
the least expenditure of energy’, even if it will never entirely disappear.40
Though even then Marx criticises pre-modern elites for using up their free
time in ‘pure idleness’, so presumably much more will be expected from
workers in a socialist society.41 Marx presents here, in volume three of
Capital, a real mishmash of different concepts that, while they may—due
to the historically specific relationship of labour power to capital discussed
below—characterise modernity, make very little sense as transhistorical
social categories. Indeed, the idea of ‘necessary labour’ is far more redo-
lent of bourgeois notions of natural scarcity and the hardships of imagined
pre-modern subsistence economies, which have been overturned, or at
least complicated, by more recent historical and anthropological research.42
It, nonetheless, allows Marx, in this ‘exoteric’ part of his work that became
foundational for the Marxism of the classical workers’ movement, to pre-
serve labour, particularly in its ‘concrete’ form of utility, homo faber and
the rational domination of nature, as a transhistorical and progressive
activity. These issues will be of particular importance in our chapter on
Guy Debord and the Situationists.
The fact that Marx does not fully identify labour per se with capitalism,
a practice that characterises all major modern intellectual paradigms, has
had a major impact on how his critique of capitalist society has been
 MARXIAN THEORY AND THE CRITIQUE OF WORK 13

understood. Traditionally, Marx is believed to have ‘corrected’ political

economy by revealing the ‘theft’ of the full value of the workers’ labour
that is carried out by the capitalist class. Workers are forced to sell the only
commodity that they possess, their ‘labour power’ or their capacity to
perform labour, because the capitalist class owns the means of production.
The capitalist, however, only pays the workers in the form of a wage
enough to reproduce their labour power, so the workers are only fully
compensated for a fraction of their working day, while the capitalist takes
the value produced in the rest of the time that the worker works, or sur-
plus value, in the form of profit. Capitalism is, as such, imagined to be
primarily a system of personal domination in which a small stratum of
wealthy elites, the bourgeoisie or the capitalist class, extracts the surplus
created by the producers. The ‘theft’ is concealed because the exchange of
labour power for wages appears to be an exchange between equivalents. In
vulgar Marxism, this process can often be understood simply as a kind of
trickery. Workers are, as a result, alienated from the product of their labour
and from the activity itself, over neither of which have they any control.
The capitalist class uses propaganda and state institutions to prevent work-
ers from questioning the system of oppression and, when they do pose a
problem, to crush them with the use of violence. The economic interests
of the workers are therefore entirely opposed to the capitalist class. They
must through a process of class struggle seize the means of production
and, in more authoritarian versions, the institutions of the state in order to
create a society in which workers receive back the full value of their labour
(or value is made to work for the workers more rationally) and, in more
libertarian versions, control the conditions and results of production
themselves through direct democracy. Work, and the working class, would
thereby be liberated from capitalism.
This is the ‘exoteric Marx’—the Marx of class struggle, the dissident of
political economy and the positivistic scientist who celebrated the process
of modernisation embodied in technological development—that we are all
familiar with from our basic educations and that is easy to understand. It
is above all this aspect of Marx’s work that has animated the workers’
movement and traditional Marxism, and in many respects, there is a great
deal to recommend this schema. Profit certainly does arise from the extrac-
tion of surplus value and, at a phenomenological level, there are obvious
structures of oppression, including great inequalities in wealth and power,
that are tied to sociological classes. Equally, the state certainly has, and
continues, to use propaganda and violence to enforce capitalism; even if its
14 A. HEMMENS

self-proclaimed enemies are far fewer and further between than earlier in
its historical development. Furthermore, while many of the worst regimes
in history—one need only think of the USSR, Maoist China or Pol Pot—
have been inspired by this ‘exoteric’ side of Marx’s work, there have also
been some movements, particularly within the Anarchist tradition, that
have taken it very close to realising a genuinely emancipatory social move-
ment against capitalism. There is certainly room for a great deal of varia-
tion in what it has and continues to inspire, and it is not by any means the
intention of this book to dismiss these historical experiences out of hand.
The ‘exoteric’ reading of Marx, however, holds within it a number of
very problematical assumptions about the essence of capitalism, and of
social oppression in capitalism, thanks to the social ontology of labour
upon which it is built. Is work really just a neutral activity that is ‘per-
verted’ in some sense in capitalism? Are human beings actually subject-­
producers who must rationally dominate the natural world? Can the vast
complexity of capitalist society, with its, seemingly out of control, social
and environmental destructiveness, really be reduced to the machinations
of a class of powerful elites (the ‘one per cent’ as so many contemporary
activists like to claim)? Is the development of productive technology and
the crossing of all external frontiers an unquestionable social good that
arises out of human need? Why have so many social movements against
capitalism failed or even, as in the case of real-existing socialism, become
the most violent expression of many of its core features? Above all, how
can it explain the current crisis, worsening working conditions and the
difficulty of finding work today? There are, of course, many attempts from
within this exoteric Marxian tradition to answer these questions, not all of
which can be dealt with in detail here, but, alternatively, might not it be
possible that Marx himself, in another part of his work entirely, provides
us with a very different understanding of the labour form and the nature
of oppression in capitalist society? Might not we be able, following a very
different reading of Marx, to take the critique of work literally?

The Esoteric Marx

The notion that Marx might point the way towards a critique of work per
se is a relatively new one in the history of ideas. It is perhaps most clearly
expressed in the critical theory of the late Robert Kurz (1943–2012) and
other members of the Wertkritik, or ‘critique of value’, school of Marxian
theory associated with the German-language journals Krisis and Exit!.43 It
 MARXIAN THEORY AND THE CRITIQUE OF WORK 15

equally finds expression in the radical reinterpretation of Marx’s mature

works undertaken, on an entirely independent basis, by Moishe Postone
(1942–2018), a professor of history at the University of Chicago, in the
United States.44 Postone is now, quite rightly, a widely respected critical
theorist and academic. Kurz, however, is still hardly known in the English-­
speaking world despite enjoying an important reputation abroad. Anselm
Jappe (1962–), who has himself contributed to the development of the
Wertkritik paradigm particularly in France,45 has suggested that this is in
large part due to a certain hostility towards a body of theory that overturns
many traditional Marxist assumptions.46 One might also refer to the fact
that Wertkritik was, from the start, a critical project that self-­consciously
took place, for the most part, outside the official spheres of intellectual
discourse such as academia and the media in favour of a more polemical
and independent position. Kurz, for example, was himself a worker, in the
traditional sociological sense, who worked nightshifts packing newspapers
for delivery. Moreover, although Postone is obviously available to English
readers, there has been a dearth of translations of Wertkritik theory that has
only relatively recently started to be addressed.47 Nevertheless, as this book
hopes to show, the critical approach of Kurz, and others like him, repre-
sents a major leap forward in terms of our understanding of what work is
and, therefore, of what a critique of work might meaningfully consist today.
The importance of these critical theories is to have shown that, far from
unambiguously presenting a positivistic vision of the social ontology of
labour, Marx, in another part of his work, puts forward a radical critique
of the labour form. Here Marx presents labour, first and foremost, already
as an inherently destructive, fetishistic and anti-social category of social
synthesis that forms the basis for an ‘abstract domination’ by an ‘auto-
matic subject’, the value form (or ‘dead labour’), that proceeds, in the
manner of a quasi-Kantian a priori, the sociological ‘character masks’
worn by workers and capitalists alike. This ‘esoteric’ side of Marx’s work—
‘esoteric’ for being difficult to understand, little known and requiring a
certain initiation48—was largely ignored by traditional Marxism, which,
when it considered the problem at all, tended to either reduce the discus-
sion of fetishism to a description of the obfuscation created by bourgeois
property relations or dismiss it entirely as unfortunate Hegelian non-
sense.49 Western Marxism, however, which included such movements as
the Frankfurt School and the Situationists, would take on certain aspects
of this ‘esoteric’ critique, in particular as commodity fetishism, but often in
a manner that reproduced Marx’s aporetic understanding of labour.
16 A. HEMMENS

Labour ‘in capitalism’ might, for these critical theorists, be in some sense
abstract, but the abstraction itself was still preserved as a rational one, as
was the notion of the proletariat as the revolutionary subject, which,
through the process of class struggle, could or would liberate labour, or
productive activity, from the yoke of bourgeois exploitation. This is not to
say that class struggle and the subject form do not exist; they certainly do
(even if neither is necessarily emancipatory), but that the radical impor-
tance of the ‘esoteric’ Marx, which suggests a very different conception of
social transformation—that is, through an ‘ontological break’ with the
labour form—was not fully understood nor developed to its logical con-
clusion, which would have meant a break with modernisation, the subject
form and class struggle.
Postone shows, through a rigorous rereading of his mature works, that
Marx provides not only ‘a critique of capitalism from the standpoint of
labour’, and therefore a critical political economy, but ‘a critique of labour
in capitalism’, and therefore, as the subtitle of Capital tells us, ‘a critique of
political economy’, that is, of the basic categories themselves, which mediate
social reality in capitalism.50 Labour as such therefore forms the basis of a
form of ‘abstract domination’, historically specific to modernity, that cannot
be sufficiently understood within the traditional Marxist remit of a ‘con-
crete’, or personal, domination carried out by individuals or groups, nor
primarily as a critique of private property relations and the market, that is,
the particular modes of distribution and exchange.51 Rather, labour, and the
industrial mode of production itself, ‘constitutes a historically specific, quasi-
objective form of social mediation that, within the framework of Marx’s
analysis, serves as the ultimate social ground of modernity’s basic features’.52
In other words, labour is, for Marx, not a neutral fact of all social life, nor is
modern industry an inevitable stage in human evolution; rather it is a his-
torically specific social form that establishes the grounds for an impersonal,
subjectless, and abstract domination that gives a historical ‘directionally
dynamic’ character to phenomenological reality.53 Work, as such, is essen-
tially a category of social mediation that forms the grounds of social being
only in capitalism, structuring both historically determinate, social practices
and quasi-objective forms of thought, culture, worldviews and disposi-
tions.54 Work, within the limited sphere of capitalist modernity, mediates
and therefore shapes the whole of objective and subjective reality (and even
necessarily overcomes, and explains, such theoretical dichotomies).55
Kurz, and Wertkritik as a whole, has arguably gone further even than
Postone in the direction of a critique of work as a basic category of social
 MARXIAN THEORY AND THE CRITIQUE OF WORK 17

synthesis specific to capitalism. Work, for Kurz, is not only, as in Postone,

the basic social ground for the fundamentally abstract oppression embod-
ied in capitalist modernity, it is also a category that is, and has been since
the mid-1970s, in a state of crisis. Wertkritik distinguishes itself from other
critical theories in large part by its insistence that the financialisation of
markets and various forms of crises currently visible at all levels of capitalist
society are part of a wider process of collapse as capitalism reaches its inner
limits of accumulation due to technological development.56 Such an end
to capitalism, however, is not imagined necessarily as a moment of eman-
cipation but rather as the threat of even greater barbarism precisely because
the ‘subjects’, which, for Kurz, are no more than ‘objects’ of the valorisa-
tion process, by definition have no control over the ‘beautiful machine’ of
capitalist accumulation and, at the same time, have themselves already
internalised its constraints into the deepest parts of their psyche. Equally,
Wertkritik has made another significant theoretical advance through the
theory of ‘Abspaltung’, or ‘dissociation’, developed by Roswitha Scholz
(1959–), that seeks to encompass those areas of modern life—such as
domestic ‘labour’—that are excluded from and subordinated to the sphere
of valorisation.57 These different facets of Wertkritik are discussed in more
detail below and will provide an important context for our analysis of the
authors studied in the current work.
On what basis then can we claim that work is an inherently destructive
social form? Let us return first to the notion that work, or labour, is a
‘rational’ or nominal abstraction that is so crucial to the social ontology
of labour examined above. We normally understand abstractions as gen-
eralisations that human beings make about the concrete world in order
to describe and think about complex phenomena. An abstraction is
‘rational’ to the extent that it is a generalisation that is based on the con-
crete similarities, the form or essence, that objects, which are strictly
speaking non-­identical, share. The word ‘tree’ is a rational abstraction
because it refers to different species of flora that, although not the same,
share common characteristics: they have limbs, leaves, roots and so on.58
Equally, the abstraction ‘carpentry’ refers to a set of different activities
that, nonetheless, use the same or similar tools, similar movements of the
hands, similar materials and create similar products. The substance, of
these abstractions, the characteristics that give them form, and a certain
rational validity, arise out of the shared qualities that these objects pos-
sess. Each substance, in turn, can be thought to be essentially different
with respect to its form and content from another.59
18 A. HEMMENS

Pre-modern societies had a variety of ‘rational’ or ‘nominal’ abstractions

to refer to different kinds of human activity, some of which contained decid-
edly social content, but there was no concept, nor material reality, of a uni-
versal and generalised social activity or substance.60 The medieval words
‘labour’ and ‘travail’, from which our modern terms arise, had much more
restricted meanings and, arguably, a more rational basis. In French, for exam-
ple, travail referred almost exclusively to activities that were either reserved
for the lowest members of society, in particular field work, or empirically
painful or exhausting, or both. Modern English retains some of the original
meaning of ‘travail’ in its archaic usage such as the ‘travails of Christ’. Equally,
we speak about the ‘labour’ that women perform in childbirth. Labour
could, potentially, have a wider, and linked, social meaning in medieval soci-
ety of fulfilling one’s Christian duty. The medieval Christian criticism of
‘sloth’, for example, did not refer to a social need to be ‘productive’ but
rather to carrying out one’s social role as a Christian, within the context of
the feudal hierarchy, which would be different depending on a person’s caste.
There was absolutely no sense in these pre-modern societies that the activities
of a peasant, a knight and a king were essentially the same thing. Equally,
although each task had its own concrete time (the harvest always needs to be
brought in before the storm and the emperor needs his new clothes yester-
day), there was no universal abstract time through which these tasks could be
compared to one another.61 There was therefore no abstract social pressure
to be ‘productive’, no ‘work ethic’, beyond what was necessary to the repro-
duction of social life, something that could be debated, or that was, at least,
overtly exploitative. As Kurz puts it, ‘All premodern societies implicitly start
from the position that there is in any case always enough time available so
that everyone “has time” and this does not have to be put additionally into
some “shortage relation” of various human activities or alienation gener-
ally.’62 Indeed, if medieval people, including peasants, aspired to anything, it
was precisely to be like God, and to rest, as the lives of the nobility, the weekly
ritual of the Sabbath and the surprisingly large number of holy days would
attest.63 In some parts of the world, whole seasons would, thanks to weather
conditions, be from the modern perspective ‘unproductive’. At the same
time, there was no separate social space for ‘productive’ activity that had its
own rules from that of the home and normal social life. It is incorrect there-
fore to think that pre-modern people ‘worked’ and, as Kurz argues, it is a
mistake to translate these pre-modern words directly64; even if many of the
activities, such as the growing of food and the building of shelter, which we
call work today were also performed in these societies.65
 MARXIAN THEORY AND THE CRITIQUE OF WORK 19

The modern abstraction ‘labour’, however, cannot meaningfully be

said to be a primarily ‘rational’ or ‘nominal’ one of the sort described
above. There is nothing about the activities themselves, no movement of
the hands, no training, no concrete purpose inherent to the task, no mate-
rials, no tools, no physical qualities or even strictly sociological class group-
ing that allows us to bring together the work of a banker, a cleaner, a
schoolteacher, a miner, a prime minister and a plantation slave under the
rubric of a single abstraction. Nevertheless, the objectivity of the labour
abstraction, of a universal form of social activity—whether embodied in
the concept of ‘work’ or ‘labour’ or even, strictly speaking, ‘production’—
is no less real in our society for all that.66 It would be impossible, if this
were not the case, to use the word with the confidence, and naturalness,
that we do in modern society. The abstraction ‘labour’, that is to say, takes
on, increasingly over the course of the past five centuries, a phenomeno-
logical form that is in many ways ‘empirically’ abstract.67 ‘Work’, for exam-
ple, is an activity that often takes place in a separate social place that is
removed from the rest of social life such as an office or a factory.68 Here
there are regulations that do not necessarily apply in other spheres of life.
One is expected to be ‘working’ all the time that one is employed, breaks
are expected to be reduced to a minimum and the rhythm and conditions
of production are defined according to criteria established by direction.
One is not ‘at home’ when one is at work.69 One is expected to be ‘useful’
to the production process. More importantly, work is something that a
person performs, necessarily, in order to have access to a market of goods
that allows them to purchase commodities, and, as a result, and particu-
larly when times are hard, many workers are ultimately indifferent to what
the particular form of work in question is. They, after all, have no other
way to survive. These kinds of phenomenological forms of abstraction, in
particular the emergence of ‘wage labour’, embodied in a separate sphere
of social life are in large part what have made it possible to think in terms
of a generalised social activity in our everyday language. However, these
phenomenological forms—the ‘concrete’, or empirical, ways in which
labour is organised and which are the subject of most critical discussions
of labour—are not the ‘essence’ of ‘labour’ or ‘work’ as such, but only
secondary, albeit no less objective, modes of appearance that arise out of
it. Equally, just because this concrete side of labour produces material
things or services, it does not make it transhistorical or non-destructive, it
is still the same anti-social (abstract) labour.70
20 A. HEMMENS

The real, and more essential, abstraction embodied in labour is already

contained in the form of social mediation itself. In fully developed capital-
ism, which is what we are always referring to here, human beings do not
decide in advance on what they are going to produce and under what
conditions. Instead individual producers—individuals or businesses—pro-
duce commodities for anonymous markets in conditions of total competi-
tion. Human activity as such—which is not in itself abstract but made up
of an infinite variety of concretely different forms of activity—only ‘counts’,
at the most essential level of social reality, as an abstract undifferentiated
expenditure of human energy. This expenditure is measured in ‘socially
necessary labour time’ which is the average amount of time that it takes to
produce a particular commodity. If, for example, it takes an artisanal tailor
on average one hour to make a shirt, a shirt will be ‘worth’ one hour of
socially necessary labour time. If, however, a factory owner introduces a
machine that allows a worker to produce a shirt in 30 minutes, the same
tailor, using the old method, might still take 1 hour to make a shirt, but
that shirt will, under the new social conditions of production, only be
worth 30 minutes of socially necessary labour time. Equally, if it takes two
hours to make a cluster bomb and one hour to make a child’s toy, the
bomb will be worth, in the capitalist sense, which is nonetheless the most
essential mode of socialisation, twice as much as the child’s toy. Of course,
what really matters from the point of view of the actors involved is the dif-
ference in surplus value, and ultimately the profit, that is produced. Labour
is an ‘abstract’ social form—it is ‘abstract labour’—therefore because it
recognises only differences in quantity and does not, at the deepest onto-
logical level, recognise any concrete qualitative social content. If it is more
profitable to employ people to make bombs than toys, that is, regardless
of the moral compunctions of the various actors involved, what will tend
to happen. The particular form, what Marx calls ‘concrete labour’, that
labour takes—bomb-making or tailoring—and the ‘use values’ it makes—
bombs or shirts—does not matter from the perspective of ‘value’.71
The ‘value’ form, or ‘dead labour’, is the form that labour or ‘living
labour’—labour, that is, simply in the moment that it occurs—takes on
once it has been expended. Human activity, in capitalism, is therefore
transformed into an abstract ‘substance’; it takes on a new function or
essential character, as its essence changes through the mediation of labour.
There is more or less ‘value’, more or less social ‘substance’, produced in
the labour process according to how much living labour has been turned
into dead labour. One hour of expended living labour, or undifferentiated
 MARXIAN THEORY AND THE CRITIQUE OF WORK 21

human energy measured in socially necessary labour time, is embodied in

one hour of dead labour, or value. The goal of production is to produce
value (use-value only occurs as a necessary by-product that allows dead
labour to be ‘crystallised’ in an object that is not itself abstract). However,
the value created in production only counts once it is recognised as a valid
expenditure of socially necessary labour time. A value, in other words, can
only be realised in exchange, that is, on the market, because it is only here,
after production is complete, that the energy expended can be socially
recognised by comparing all of the different labour performed in society.
It is perfectly possible, and it happens at every moment of every day, that
labour is performed and commodities are produced that do not find a
buyer. In such cases the labour is simply voided because its value has failed
to realise. This is precisely because the products of labour are not created
to satisfy pre-existing human needs, nor are they, as in pre-modern societ-
ies, the result of a social discussion and negotiation (even if, as in feudal
society, such social discourse and control could be one sided and hierarchi-
cal). The individual producers are forced, by structural constraints, to
compete with each other to realise the social validity of the labour that has
been employed in order to win back, in the form of money, a portion of
the total mass of social substance, or ‘value’, produced by society.
We can already see here that it makes no sense to try to define labour
without reference to the specific negative forms of social mediation that
occur in capitalist society because it is only on the basis of these abstract
social forms that the category of ‘labour’, and the social ontology of
labour, could have any material basis to exist. It is, indeed, nothing less
than labour, in its form of ‘dead labour’, that gives value, money and capi-
tal substance. At the same time, it is precisely from the perspective of ‘dead
labour’, or rather the forms that result from it—value, money and capi-
tal—that ‘living labour’ must be constantly employed. The individual
producers, particularly from the perspective of ‘living labour’, the work-
ers, once they have realised a value on the market, selling their labour
power, for example, must repeat the formal process of substantialisation
in order to reproduce themselves. Equally, from the perspective of the
possessors of ‘dead labour’, in its money form, simply trying to repeat the
process so as to arrive at the same amount of value with which one
began makes no logical sense. Recall that labour does not refer to any
concrete content or to qualitative human need. It only knows quantitative
differences. A greater quantity of value means a greater quantity of the
­substance of social wealth in capitalism. Value that is simply ­consumed,
22 A. HEMMENS

CMC (commodity–money–commodity), or arrives at the same amount of

social substance, MCM (money–commodity–money), must therefore be
considered a failure because it disappears or remains the same, it is not
‘productive’ for the individual producers and possessors of dead labour
(persons, businesses, states, pension funds, etc.).72 As a result ‘dead
labour’ cannot simply sit idle, rather it must transform itself, in a purely
quantitative movement, into more dead labour or, as Marx puts it in
Capital, MCMʹ (money–commodity–more money). It is here therefore
that ‘dead labour’ logically takes on the form of capital: dead labour that
invests itself in living labour in order to produce a greater quantity of dead
labour.73 The whole of ­society, regardless of sociological class, therefore
relies on the successful realisation of value and its self-valorisation because,
in capitalism, it is the only way that social ‘wealth’ can be accessed and
created. In essence, therefore, the labour form, labour sans phrase, can be
defined as the undifferentiated expenditure of human energy—measured
in socially necessary labour time—for no other purpose than the purely
formal, quantitative, fetishistic and autotelic process of turning itself into
greater quantities of itself in its dead form, that is, turning £100 into £110.
The labour form, furthermore, contains within itself another funda-
mental and essential directional and destructive social dynamic that escapes
the control of the individual producers. Let us return to our previous
example. When the capitalist introduces a machine that can make a shirt in
30 minutes as opposed to the artisanal tailor’s 1 hour, he can reduce the
price or exchange value (which, as we can see from this example, is not
directly identical with value)74 of the shirt just enough to undercut the
artisan and take over his share of the market. The capitalist will therefore,
for a period of time, not only take over the market but, equally, he will be
able to make a significant profit because he is selling shirts at a price that
reflects the fact that other individual producers, his competitors, are still
artisanal tailors taking one hour to make a shirt. One of the results of this
process is that the capitalist, by introducing his machinery, has essentially
destroyed jobs and therefore livelihoods, irreversibly, because less labour is
required to produce the commodity. However, in capitalist society, the
introduction of new technology is incapable of allowing people to work
less because access to social wealth can only take place through commod-
ity production and the reduction of labour time does not, paradoxically,
contribute to ‘wealth creation’, from the perspective of capitalism as a
whole, but destroys it. Instead the artisanal tailor has to either go work for
the capitalist or find a job in a new sector, which, precisely because labour
 MARXIAN THEORY AND THE CRITIQUE OF WORK 23

power can only reproduce itself with access to the market and because liv-
ing labour is the only source of value, means that capitalism constantly has
to find new sectors of growth to provide new jobs to keep people
employed.75 Without such growth, it would be impossible for labour
power, and society at large, to reproduce itself.
At the same time, although the capitalist will, for a time at least, domi-
nate the market, he still has to compete with other individual producers
who must, in order to realise their dead labour on the market, seek to
catch up with or surpass him technologically. Indeed, this is one way in
which Kurz theorises the various ‘Communist’ systems that emerged in
the twentieth century, as models of ‘recuperative modernisation’ that
allowed certain industrially backward countries to ‘catch up’ with Western
production techniques so that they would not be as vulnerable to the
modernisation of the global marketplace, as was the case for much of the
Global South.76 Technological development is, thanks to competition on
anonymous markets, a question of survival for individual producers.
However, when competitors catch up to the technology of our shirt-­
making capitalist, the socially necessary labour time, or average produc-
tion time, for the creation of a shirt drops to just 30 minutes. The shirt,
which, under artisanal conditions, was ‘worth’ 1 hour, is now only worth
30 minutes. It embodies half as much ‘dead labour’ or ‘value’ as before.
Such ‘time-saving’, which can only seem innocuous from the perspective
of ‘necessity’ and ‘efficiency’, leads to the destruction of livelihoods and
the ruin of whole communities (as can be seen in much of the misty-eyed
nostalgia for the heyday of industrial working-class manufacturing com-
munities). More subtly, however, it also reduces the amount of value that
can be realised in the production of a specific commodity. In other words,
in order to realise the same amount of ‘value’, or ‘dead labour’, the capi-
talist must produce and sell twice as many shirts as he did before. At the
same time, the same capitalist must use up twice as much physical matter
to create that same amount of value. That is, if a shirt now embodies
30 minutes of value, he must sell two shirts to realise 1 hour of value,
when it only took one shirt before.77
It is this constant time pressure, and pressure on materials, arising out
of the labour form that gives capitalism its directional and destructive his-
torical dynamic, its need to constantly grow and expand, to dominate ever
more ‘rationally’ and utilise scientifically human energy and the natural
world. The more one can reduce the amount of labour time it takes to
produce a commodity, the less expensive it becomes to make, the higher
24 A. HEMMENS

the rate of surplus value realised; until a competitor catches up, and the
whole cycle begins once again from a new technological standard. This is
why in modernity there is, indeed, never enough time and time is money
in a very literal sense. The competitive mechanism built into labour means
that an abstract universal time of production becomes the measure for all
things; there can be no ‘unproductive’ seasons, the labour process must be
intense and any pauses during work hours must be reduced to a minimum.
It is this dynamic that shapes, and brings about, the phenomenological
side of labour: the work ethic, the working week, the division of labour,
wage labour, the workplace, the different social classes (and their roles)
and everything that is, quite rightly, usually discussed within the context
of a study related to ‘work’. At the same time, this need for constant
growth is the root cause of the history of primitive accumulation as a
whole, the destruction of pre-modern ways of life, Western imperialism
and the expansion of consumer culture. The value form, and, indeed, the
entire society that has become mediated by it, requires ever newer and
larger markets regardless of the social and environmental cost. Equally, it
is the cause of our seemingly unstoppable destruction of the planet; for
technological development means ever more material must be used to cre-
ate the same amount of value. The human beings that are caught up in this
real-existing cult of labour are reduced to ‘combustion engines’: they are
only the ‘human material’ that, to the tick of the universal clock time that
has taken over the globe, is used up in a runaway process of abstraction
that is beyond the control of any persons, institutions or groups.78
The labour form, nevertheless, contains within itself a kind of pre-­
programmed limit against which the valorisation process, and the whole
society mediated by it, must ultimately come up against. If the amount of
value embodied in a commodity will fall over time due to technological
competition, this means that the overall mass of surplus value produced by
society is also being gradually reduced.79 As noted above, capitalism has
historically responded by constantly growing and expanding into new areas.
The most dramatic of these expansions in the twentieth century was the
post-war boom, or ‘Thirty Glorious Years’ as it is known in France, when,
through a combination of Keynesian government policies and Fordist busi-
ness practices, a huge amount of labour was employed in the modernisation
and rebuilding of a devastated European continent. These modernisation
efforts, which relied in large part on the creation of mass consumer com-
modities, which were previously only luxury goods, such as automobiles
and televisions, led to an unprecedented increase in the mass of value pro-
 MARXIAN THEORY AND THE CRITIQUE OF WORK 25

duced by society as a whole. It was above all this historically specific, and
today unrepeatable, situation that allowed, from an economic standpoint,
increases in the standard of living for working people—including full
employment, rising wages and the expansion of social programmes—as
enough labour was being productively employed, and, therefore, value cre-
ated, to fund these kinds of social-democratic measures.
However, at the same time as new jobs were being created, the Second
Industrial Revolution, which relied upon a Taylorist hyper-rationalisation
of the division of labour, and the emerging Third Industrial Revolution,
which introduced cybernetics, was expelling huge amounts of labour from
the production process, on a scale that had never before been seen. The
sheer size of post-war modernisation and rebuilding programmes was,
from the late 1940s to the late 1960s, able to compensate for the real
subsumption of labour by displacing workers into new jobs, but it could
not do so indefinitely. The OPEC oil crisis of 1972–1973—which appeared
around the same time as the end of the gold standard and a growing
awareness of the ecological crisis—was an epiphenomenal moment that
revealed how fragile the Keynesian model of capital accumulation had
become and brought an end to the post-war boom. In the decades that
followed, successive governments, including socialists, in France, for
example, François Mitterrand in the 1980s and François Hollande more
recently, found that the introduction of neo-liberal policies and the
­financialisation of the markets appeared as the only ways in which to keep
the economic system going at all. On the one hand, this has meant trying
to stay more competitive on the global market by reducing the cost of
labour power through reducing wages, taking away many labour protec-
tions and cutting social programmes. On the other, it meant encouraging
markets to trade in financial products that, essentially by betting on the
future creation of value in the real economy, allowed value that had not yet
been created to be spent. As each of these transactions relies upon a false
premise, that value will be created in the future, such financialisation has
led to the creation of ever-larger financial bubbles, which, when the prom-
ised value inevitably fails to realise, must, as with the dotcom bubble in the
1990s or the subprime market in 2008, burst with devastating social
consequences.80
The process of crisis that we are currently living through is an intractable
and systemic one that cannot be resolved by changing government policies.
This is why, for example, there is constant pressure on and cuts to education,
social services and healthcare because, from the perspective of the valorisa-
26 A. HEMMENS

tion of value, these are nothing but necessary evils. It is equally why capital-
ism cannot be saved by simply paying people a basic income or putting
people to work in jobs that, from a qualitative point of view, might seem
socially beneficial such as teaching and medicine, or the arts. All of these
proposals rely upon someone somewhere producing both value and surplus
value, yet it has become increasingly impossible for capitalism to do so due
to technological development based on conditions of absolute competition.
The only way to keep capitalism going at all, over the course of the past
decades, was to virtualise the process of valorisation for a time through
financialisation and to engage in the vicious circle of cuts to basic social
protections, wages and anything not immediately profitable that we have
witnessed from the mid-1970s onwards. Even these are only desperate tem-
porary measures, however, and the crisis can only deepen at all levels of
society as time progresses. What we are witnessing therefore is nothing less
than a crisis of ‘work’ itself and the way of life founded upon it.
It should be noted at this point that ‘labour’, understood as ‘abstract
labour’, is a more or less precise category that cannot be applied to any-
thing and everything. In fact, perhaps one of the most oppressive and
fundamental characteristics of labour—and, by extension, of value—is pre-
cisely that it is based upon the exclusion, abstraction and denigration of
vast swathes of human experience that do not, and cannot, contribute
directly to the valorisation of value. Labour, that is, necessarily assumes a
division and organisation of social life into that which contributes to the
valorisation of value (the fetishistic heart of capitalist society) and that
which cannot (the ‘unsaid’ or ‘dark side’ of capitalist socialisation).81
Work, in other words, assumes and requires the existence of non-work:
those aspects of social life that cannot be mediated by the labour form,
which do not produce value, but without which it could not properly
function. Scholz employs the concept of ‘dissociation’, or ‘Abspaltung’, a
term consciously taken from Freudian psychoanalysis, in order to describe
the process of suppression, repression and interdependence of these differ-
ent aspects of social life.82 That which is ‘dissociated’ (and does not take
the form of labour)—in particular, domestic activity such as childcare, but
also art, friendship, community, love, family life and so on—is not just a
pre-existing, nor an inessential, derived, substrate, a mere appendage, to
capitalism, that exists autonomously from production; rather, it is abso-
lutely necessary to the continued existence of the labour form and tied up,
albeit indirectly, with its rule over society. These facets of social existence
are necessary for the reproduction of labour power, but they cannot be
 MARXIAN THEORY AND THE CRITIQUE OF WORK 27

placed directly under or understood within the exigencies of the ‘time-­

saving’, total competition and production of surplus value that character-
ise the labour form. One is not in competition, as a parent, for example,
with all other parents, to reduce the amount of time it takes to comfort a
crying child; nor does one expect, by investing in one’s household, neces-
sarily to realise a profit. Scholz argues, as such, that it is incorrect to try to
understand domestic ‘labour’ as a form of ‘work’ or ‘labour’.83 Rather, it
is one of the oppressive realities of capitalism that the labour form—and
the valorisation process as a whole—exists in tandem with an informal,
subordinate, set of dissociated realities, functions and roles, which include
‘housework’.84 The common cultural application of the words ‘work’ and
‘labour’ to these aspects of modern life is misleading and does not reflect
the most essential social determination. The activities that generally fall
under the rubric of ‘housework’ may well be just as hard, if not harder,
and just as, if not more, socially beneficial—looking after children all day
and cleaning the house is obviously both an extremely taxing task and
more beneficent than making AK47s—but they do not take the form of
‘labour’ in the modern capitalist sense. This structural relationship of sub-
ordination to the sphere of valorisation—the turning of dead labour into
more dead labour—explains why these ‘jobs’ are generally unpaid and
often understood, culturally speaking, as being in some sense inferior. The
ideological tendency to apply the category of ‘work’ to everything in exis-
tence—no matter how inappropriate from the perspective of a critical
theory of labour—is due to the abstract, empty and completely irrational
character that the labour form gives to the concrete world—its incapacity
to see in any human action anything other than an ‘undifferentiated
expenditure of human energy’. Labour, as such, makes a false claim to
totality that it could never truly realise in practice and, as a result, ‘dissoci-
ates’—in the full psychoanalytical sense—from all that contradicts it.
To be clear, the argument that ‘domestic labour’ is not a form of ‘labour’
as such is not an omission on the part of the critical theory of value-dissocia-
tion, but, on the contrary, one of the ways in which the theory seeks to
describe the fundamentally patriarchal character of capitalist modernity. Its
role in society requires its own theorisation and it cannot be subsumed within
the categories of the critique of political ­economy, nor understood simply in
terms of an extension of class exploitation. Value-dissociation, labour and
non-labour, logos and that which lies outside it, ‘masculinity’ and ‘femininity’,
emerge together as a dynamic and dialectical process transforming each other
and the world around them. Capitalism is a ‘broken totality’,85 a system of
28 A. HEMMENS

identity and non-identity, wherein the sphere of valorisation developed those

characteristics that came to be designated as ‘male’ (as well as white and
European)—hard-­ heartedness towards oneself and others, Reason, hard
work, physical and moral strength, leadership and the ‘rational’ use of force
(everything in short that allows one to realise a profit)—and the dissociated
sphere of all that lay outside it was projected onto the ‘female’ (and various
‘others’)—soft-heartedness, sentimentality, irrationality, laziness, physical
and moral weakness. As a general rule, therefore, the character mask of
value—in its forms of money, labour and capital—fell to men and everything
left was allotted to women and other marginalised groups. Nevertheless,
value-­dissociation should not be understood in simplistic terms as a strictly
binary, static, structure. On the contrary, not only were women historically
active in the sphere of valorisation from the very beginning (albeit often less
well paid and unrecognised), gender roles, and notions of gender, have been
in a state of constant flux since the inception of capitalism. Today, for exam-
ple, there are many house husbands and female CEOs, and gay marriage is
accepted as law in many of the most developed capitalist countries; all of
which would have, at other periods in the history of capitalism, been unthink-
able. However, even though the particular race, gender and sexual orienta-
tion of those assigned to these different spheres have been made more equal
or queered or become more gender fluid (with the caveat that racism, trans-
phobia, homophobia and sexism remain entrenched empirical problems to
be overcome), the structural problem of dissociation has not essentially
changed: ‘housework’, whoever is performing it, necessarily remains unpaid,
degraded, dissociated from and in a subordinate position to ‘production’.
Value-dissociation can change its forms of appearance but not its essentially
oppressive character. The critique of work should, as such, go hand in hand
with a concomitant critique of patriarchy and other forms of marginalisation
and discrimination, but it has not always done so.86
It is necessary to stress here that all of the oppressive social processes
that have so far been described—from unemployment and hospital clo-
sures to financial crises and the destruction of the planet—can be explained
without any recourse to the malevolent machinations of any human per-
sons or groups. They arise out of the essentially fetishistic character of the
labour form itself. There are people performing these actions, but they are
only carrying out the orders of the fetishistic social laws that govern them.
The only ‘doer’ in all of this is the value form, or ‘dead labour’, which
 MARXIAN THEORY AND THE CRITIQUE OF WORK 29

seeks to mediate the whole of social reality, setting strict rules for what it
is possible and necessary for the various actors in this historically specific
social system to do. This is why Marx refers to both workers and capitalists
as the ‘character masks’ of value. The value form demands that the whole
complexity of human relationships be mediated by a purely quantitative
and undifferentiated expenditure of human energy for no other purpose
than its own tautological expansion. Whole alternative ways of life are
destroyed, and millions are killed or maimed or have their lives wasted, in
the name of this form of abstract social mediation that is unrelenting in its
indifference to human suffering. All of social reality must be made to be
‘useful’, to serve a ‘purpose’, to the value form, which demands that the
natural world be further appropriated and dominated through the devel-
opment of productive technology and highly rational modes of scientific
thought that project its abstract categories of social life as timeless univer-
sals. This impersonal, quasi-autonomous, quality of capitalism is the rea-
son why Marx chose to describe value, or ‘dead labour’, as the ‘automatic
subject’,87 or, as Kurz puts it, capitalist society is a form of fetishistic domi-
nation ‘without a subject’.88
Labour—and, at a metalevel, value-dissociation—has the quality of
being a quasi-Kantian a priori or ‘total social form’.89 The category of
labour—and with it the commodity, value, money and capital—precedes,
limits, shapes and determines the forms of thought and action that are
possible in modern society. It should be stressed, however, that such a
position is understood as a criticism of capitalism and not a general state-
ment about human society as such. Capitalism, in other words, is oppres-
sive, destructive and alienating precisely because of its deterministic,
unconscious and fetishistic character. Of course, no society can be, or has
ever been, entirely conscious, in control, and rational, but capitalism,
thanks to the abstract character of its social forms, has a peculiarly deadly
and tight grip on what is, and can be, done and thought. Value, the ‘auto-
matic subject’, only recognises human beings in as far as they are able and
willing to carry out its orders. The very emergence of the concept, and
reality, of the ‘subject’ form in the early modern period was closely tied to
the rise of capitalism as it transformed social life and notions of human
being. Early modern philosophy, as we saw above, relegates nature, and
concrete reality, to an object that the subject, man, consciously and ratio-
nally acts upon and transforms, realising his will. The notion of the sub-
ject, however, is not simply incorrect, as some have argued; rather, it
reflects the reality of the value form as it shapes human consciousness and
30 A. HEMMENS

action. It is value, and its iron laws, that is the true subject that relegates
the entire concrete world to an object in which it realises itself. Human
beings attain the status of ‘subject’ when they begin to perceive the world
as it does, when they have proved capable of acting as a character mask of
value, whether in its form of labour, capital or money. As a result, to be a
subject is, ironically, in reality to be an ‘object’ of value. Historically, the
status of subject was first accorded to white European property owners—
the first real ‘NCOs’ of capital—and only gradually awarded to different
groups, such as workers, once they had fully incorporated the exigencies
of value; that is, they could be trusted to carry out, even with enthusiasm,
its orders and further its interest (in the name of technological ‘progress’
or the ‘Republic of Labour’, for example).90
The critique of the subject put forward in Wertkritik marks a major
point of departure from traditional Marxism and has ‘political’ implica-
tions.91 Most anti-capitalist theories hold that capitalism is a form of per-
sonal domination in which a subject, the bourgeoisie, exploits a growing
portion of humanity, the proletariat. The proletariat develops through its
history of struggles with its enemy into a consciousness of its own exis-
tence as a class and, in turn, becomes a subject that asserts its interests
against those of the bourgeoisie. These proletarian interests, moreover,
were supposed to be entirely opposed to those of its class antagonist.
Capitalism, as such, was imagined to bring about its own ‘gravedigger’ in
a ‘radical’ subject: the working class. However, as Kurz argues, in many
respects, the concept of a radical subject is problematical. The subject, as
it is generally conceived here, is a fetishistic concept because, on the one
hand, it claims to be autonomous from capitalism and emancipatory, while
on the other, it is always thought of precisely as an object that is created
through the development of the logic of capitalism itself.92 The develop-
ment of the class struggle schema of social emancipation emerges from the
history of struggles of living labour against capital. These struggles were
very real, sometimes deadly and even a matter of life or death for the par-
ticipants; however, they were still battles that turned around the distribu-
tion and management of categories—value, money, labour and capital—that
were not in themselves questioned. Not least because to be seen to break
with these forms would mean to cease being a ‘subject’. Indeed, the work-
ers’ movement—precisely because it represented the interests of human
beings only in as far as they were ‘workers’, that is, as labour power, the
character masks of labour—often played an important role in breaking
barriers to the full realisation of the valorisation of value. It pushed for
 MARXIAN THEORY AND THE CRITIQUE OF WORK 31

many modernisations in the face of a reactionary bourgeoisie that was,

especially in the nineteenth century, quite happy to maintain the status
quo. Workers gained the right to vote, to take part in government, to
enter into contracts, to demand higher wages and so on; all of which
implicitly promoted and extended the material and ideal reach of the value
form over social life. Class struggle is therefore not an emancipatory con-
flict but a ‘family quarrel’ or competition over categories that are taken for
granted or even celebrated, as in the case of labour, by both sides. The
gradual erosion of the importance of the workers’ movement in politics
over the course of the twentieth century has led many thinkers to identify
new potential radical subjects that could fulfil the promise of social eman-
cipation—youth, students, the precariat and so on—but the same logic
applies. No ‘subject’ can save us.
Wertkritik has often been criticised for these positions because it would
appear, from the perspective of a more traditional approach, that it simply
dismisses the immanent struggles of social movements and seems to offer
no space for any kind of autonomy from capitalism to emerge. However,
Kurz is quick to argue that immanent struggles—over, for example, social
protections, the closure of hospitals, wage cuts and so on—are the neces-
sary starting point for social movements. What is important, nevertheless,
is the way in which these movements develop.93 The same old tactics will
not work anymore. It is not possible, in the context of the current crisis,
to impose Keynesian economic policies, and this is not simply due to a lack
of political will. In the face of ever-worsening conditions, we need social
movements that seek to construct a different way of life beyond, and
against, the mediation of labour, the market and the state. Jappe, for
example, states the need for a new ‘grassroots revolution’ that would not
hesitate to seize basic necessities—food, shelter and other things necessary
for a new metabolism with nature—by ‘bypassing’ money.94 He argues,
moreover, in favour of uniting different struggles, over the environment
and technology, for example, in order to bring about a real ‘transforma-
tion of civilisation’ that would be far more profound than anything that
could occur in the ballot box or through the seizure of the state. What is
necessary therefore is that social movements develop in the direction of a
‘categorical break’ with the ontology of labour that we have described in
this chapter. The end of capitalism, as such, requires the abolition of work.
The ambiguity of the history of the ‘critique of work’ that is explored
in this study also has important political consequences. It demonstrates
quite clearly the pitfalls of what Kurz calls ‘affirmative critique’: a critique
32 A. HEMMENS

of work that touches upon its phenomenological side but does not reach,
at least not fully, the category itself.95 Such an approach, Kurz argues, may
logically only result in the call for a ‘quasi-adjectival’ change and not the
necessary ‘categorical break’:

The critique and suspension of the categories themselves appears to be

unthinkable. Thus, it is possible to critique a certain politics in order to
replace it with another; but within modern ontology it is impossible to cri-
tique politics in itself and replace it with another mode of social regulation.
For this we lack the appropriate form of thought, and therefore all the con-
cepts as well. Only the determinate content of politics is malleable, but not
the categorical form or mode of all content. The same goes for the catego-
ries of nation, state, rights, labour, money, and market, as well as of the
individual, subject, and gender relations (social masculinity and femininity).
At any given point, any of these categorical forms can be modified, only in a
quasi-adjectival sense. Yet the category itself and its corresponding social
mode are never put up for substantial negotiation.96

Work is already per se a form of social being that is worthy of our criticism
even before we start to think about issues of workplace hierarchy, exploita-
tion and ‘alienation’ in the immediate sense. What Kurz is saying is that
the ‘critique of work’ must be taken literally as a critique of a historically
specific and socially destructive real abstraction. Critical insights into the
essentially negative character of the labour form have, for a long time, only
been partial and often contradicted in the writing of a single author by a
more limited, one-sidedly phenomenological, mode of critical discourse
that constantly reasserts the social ontology of labour. One of my wishes
for this book therefore is that it will, by counteracting this trend, contrib-
ute in some small way to the development of the forms of thought neces-
sary for effective social critique. The abolition of work, if it is to have a
positive meaning at least, will not be a technological achievement but the
result of actual human beings thinking critically and acting accordingly.
Before we can do that, we need to understand what it is we are facing.
This lengthy exposition of the categorical critique of work as developed
by the ‘critique of value’ might seem out of place in a book that is osten-
sibly devoted to the critical analysis of an aspect of French intellectual his-
tory. However, the perspective that I have put forward here is fundamental
to my analytical approach and, due to the fact that it is little known in the
English-speaking world, I felt it necessary to clarify for the reader a per-
spective with which they might not be familiar. In short, the critical theory
 MARXIAN THEORY AND THE CRITIQUE OF WORK 33

of work that I have described above provides a new critical perspective

from which to analyse past critiques of work. Traditional Marxist, Anarchist
and liberal conceptions of labour could, at best, see in these historical
forms of anti-work discourse only a history of ongoing popular resistance
to the capitalist exploitation of the working class. It is true that many of
the critiques examined in this book adopt something of this perspective
themselves. However, what makes these specific authors—and the French
anti-work tradition in general—so interesting is precisely that they con-
tain, to a greater or lesser degree, elements of a ‘categorical’ critique of
labour. We can therefore draw upon the critique of value in order to
unpack and explain the complexities and ambiguities of these discourses,
their historical and social context and their strengths and weaknesses. The
fundamental distinction drawn by Kurz and others between a purely phe-
nomenological, and therefore ‘affirmative’, critique of work and a negative
categorical critique is absolutely essential to the argument put forward in
this book. What is ultimately presented is, I hope, more interesting, and
useful, than a far-left utopian hagiography, while still being deeply sympa-
thetic to the shared radical goal of overcoming the crushing restraint that
labour imposes upon human life.

Notes
1. See, for a historical example, Michael Seidman, Workers Against Work:
Labor in Paris and Barcelona During the Popular Fronts (Berkley:
University of California Press, 1991), and, for a sociological study of more
recent trends, Stephen Bouquin, ed. Résistances au travail (Paris: Syllepse,
2008).
2. A particularly egregious example of the latter occurred in 2007 when the
reigning French Finance Minister Christine Lagarde surprised the National
Assembly by accusing Paul Lafargue of being a reactionary. Lagarde
claimed that Lafargue represented an aristocratic disdain for work that he
had inherited from the Ancien Regime. The implication being that any
attack on the length of the working day was in some way an attack on lib-
erty itself. Suffice it to say that the absolutist monarchies of the past would
certainly not have advocated anything like Lafargue’s call for a three-hour
working day. National Assembly, 13th Legislature, Extraordinary Session,
First Sitting, Summary, 10 July 2007. [Link]
3. Karl Marx, trans. Ben Fowkes, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy,
vol. 1 (London: Penguin, 1990), p. 133.
4. Anselm Jappe, trans. Alastair Hemmens, The Writing on the Wall: On the
Decomposition of Capitalism and Its Critics (London: Zero Books, 2017),
p. 15.
34 A. HEMMENS

5. Moishe Postone, ‘Anti-Semitism and National Socialism: Notes on the

German Reaction to “Holocaust”’, in Germans and Jews since the Holocaust,
edited by Anson Rabinbach and Jack Zipes (New York: Holmes and Meier,
1986).
6. ‘Arbeit macht frei’, literally ‘Work makes free.’ The phrase was taken from
the title of an 1871 novel by the nationalist writer Lorenz Diefenbach
(1806–1883) in which a gambler and fraudster is reformed into a produc-
tive German citizen through hard work. The phrase can be interpreted in
a number of ways: first, a lie to the entrants of the camps that they would
be freed if they were to work hard; secondly, a mantra that expresses the
belief that the internationalisation of labour discipline would reform them
of their ‘degeneracy’; and thirdly, that the German people would be ‘freed’
by working its purported enemies to death.
The Situationists would later reproduce a picture of these words above
the gates of Auschwitz in the same issue of their journal as a reproduction
of Guy Debord’s, diametrically opposed, ‘never work’ graffito. See Chap. 5.
7. Robert Kurz’s manner of referring to real-existing socialism. See Robert
Kurz, Der Kollaps der Modernisierung: Vom Zusammenbruch des
Kasernensozialismus zur Krise der Weltökonomie (Frankfurt: Eichborn,
1991).
8. Cited in Anselm Jappe, Les Aventures de la marchandise: Pour une critique
de la valeur (Paris: La Découverte, 2017), p. 114.
9. See, for example, Peter Fleming, The Mythology of Work: How Capitalism
Persists Despite Itself (London: Pluto Press, 2015); David Frayne, The
Refusal of Work: The Theory and Practice of Resistance to Work (London:
Zed Books, 2015); Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams, Inventing the Future:
Postcapitalism and a World Without Work (London: Verso, 2015); and
Kathi Weeks, The Problem with Work: Feminism, Marxism, Antiwork Politics
and Postwork Imaginaries (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011).
10. Indeed, many observers have, in typical pro-work fashion, discussed the
advantages of the French social model precisely on the basis that the work-
ing population is, despite common misconceptions, statistically far more
productive than the British. See Ferdinando Giugliano and Sarah
O’Connor, ‘Boasts Debunked as France Gets Last Laugh over UK on
Productivity’, Financial Times, 19 March 2015, [Link]
content/c413ca76-ce3c-11e4-86fc-00144feab7de
11. See Robert Kurz, Schwarzbuch Kapitalismus. Ein Abgesang auf die
Marktwirtschaft (Eichborn Verlag, 1999), pp. 354–359.
12. David Graeber, ‘On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs’, Strike! Magazine,
17 August 2013, [Link]
13. Lorraine de Foucher, ‘Absurdes et vides de sens: ces jobs d’enfer’, Le
Monde, 22 April 2016.
 MARXIAN THEORY AND THE CRITIQUE OF WORK 35

14. See, for example, Dominique Méda, Le Travail: une valeur en voie de
­disparition? (Paris: Flammarion, 2010).
15. Thomas Piketty, trans. Arthur Goldhammer, Capital in the 21st Century
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014).
16. Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello, trans. Gregory Elliott, The New Spirit of
Capitalism (London: Verso, 2007).
17. The notion of an ‘esoteric’ and ‘exoteric’ Marx is put forward in Robert
Kurz, trans. Hélène Steinberg and Lucien Steinberg, ‘Les Déstinées du
marxisme’, in Lire Marx: Les textes les plus importants de Karl Marx pour le
XXIe siècle, choisis et commentés par Robert Kurz (Paris. La Balustrade,
2013), pp. 13–41.
18. See Robert Kurz, trans. Robin Halpin, The Substance of Capital (London:
Chronos, 2016), pp. 8–13.
19. Herbert Applebaum, The Concept of Work: Ancient, Medieval, and Modern,
(Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1992), pp. ix–x.
20. Jean Dubois, Henri Mitterand, and Albert Dauzat, eds. Dictionnaire
­étymologique et historique du français (Paris: Larousse, 1995), p. 778.
21. René Descartes, trans. Ian Maclean, A Discourse on the Method of Rightly
Conducting One’s Reason and Seeking the Truth in the Sciences (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2006), p. 51.
22. This apocryphal tale is, unfortunately, almost certainly untrue. The Dutch
physician Jacobus Bontius (1592–1631), in his Historiae naturalis et medi-
cae Indiae orientalis libri sex (1658), notes that the people of Java claimed
that orangutans could talk ‘but they did not want to because they did not
want to be forced to work’, cited in Chris Herzfeld, trans. Kevin Frey, The
Great Apes: A Short History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2017),
p. 14. Descartes, who had no doubt read the book, then mentions this
observation in a private letter, seemingly as a joke, where he complains
that, since he has made it known to the world that he is a writer of books,
he is never left alone in peace. ‘If I had only been as wise as they say the
savages persuaded themselves that the monkeys were, I never would have
become known as a maker of books: Since it is said that they imagined that
the monkeys could indeed speak, if they wanted to, but that they chose not
to so lest they be forced to work. And since I had not the same prudence
to abstain from writing, I now have neither as much leisure nor as much
peace as I would have had if I had kept quiet.’ Letter to Pierre Chanut, 1
November 1646, cited in Amir Aczel, Descartes’s Secret Notebook: A True
Tale of Mathematics, Mysticism and the Quest to Understand the Universe
(New York: Broadway Books, 2005), p. 182. While the apocryphal tale
might not be true, it nevertheless says something about how the author has
been interpreted over the years.
23. Chris Rojek, Decentring Leisure: Rethinking Leisure Theory (London: Sage,
1999), p. 189.
36 A. HEMMENS

24. In this vein Jappe cites an anecdote told by an eighteenth-century French

moralist that recalls a time just before the Revolution when France had
already gone through the Enlightenment cultural valorisation of labour,
while Spain clearly had not:
A Frenchman was given permission to visit the study of the King of
Spain. Coming before his chair and desk, he said: ‘So this is where the
great king works.’ ‘What’s that! Work,’ said the guide, ‘what insolence!
The great king, work! You just came here to insult His Majesty!’ A
quarrel erupted in which the Frenchman had to take great pains to
make the Spaniard understand that he had meant no offence to the
majesty of his master.
Sébastien-Roch Nicolas de Chamfort, Maximes et pensées, caractères et
anecdotes (Paris: Garnier-Flammarion, 1968), p. 242. (N.B. All transla-
tions are my own unless otherwise stated.)
The king, of course, was a ‘man of leisure’ and any suggestion that he
‘worked’ was an insult not only to his person but to his subjects also. Such
examples of uneven historical development give some clue as to how dif-
ferent the pre-modern understanding of the word ‘labour’ is from our
own.
25. Aristotle, in The Politics, underlines the importance of ‘economics’ for
other aspects of life, such as the running of the city (politics), but the key
difference is that it is a question of establishing the nature of the right
social roles, relations between people (as in a household), rather than rela-
tionships between people and things or the most efficient and utilitarian
expenditure of their own ‘undifferentiated energy’. Equally, what we might
think of as the ‘stuff’ of economic life, such as merchandise and coin is by
no means the focus of his work. Rather, it is a question of socially manag-
ing land and people, in which objects that are traded and bartered are only
one part rather than the essential focus of social life. See Moishe Postone,
‘Thinking the global crisis’, South Atlantic Quarterly, Spring 2012,
pp. 247–248: ‘In the first volume of Capital, Marx notes that, for Aristotle,
shoes and houses are incommensurable. Hence he could not locate the
grounds for their mutual exchangeability. Those grounds, for Marx, are
historically specific and social. What renders them commensurable is value,
a historically specific form of wealth that has nothing to do with their prop-
erties, whether material or immaterial, but is the crystallized expression of
a historically specific form of social mediation that, in Marx’s analysis, is
constituted by a historically specific form of labor.’
 MARXIAN THEORY AND THE CRITIQUE OF WORK 37

26. Marx, although he contributes in many respects to the cultural valorisation

of work, actually criticises Ricardo for his ahistorical conception of the
labour abstraction. See Anselm Jappe, Les Aventures, p. 137.
27. Karl Marx, trans. Martin Nicolaus, Grundrisse (London: Penguin, 1993),
p. 85.
28. Ibid., p. 103, 105.
29. Ibid., p. 103.
30. Marx, Capital, vol. 1, p. 284.
31. Ibid., p. 133.
32. Kurz, Substance, pp. 28–29.
33. See Postone, ‘National Socialism’, op. cit.
34. Marx, Capital, vol. 1, p. 133.
35. In the same passage, Marx even reinforces the gendered character of labour
and the labouring subject with reference to the eighteenth-century econo-
mist William Petty: ‘Labour is the father of material wealth, the earth is its
mother.’ Ibid., p. 134.
36. Ibid., p. 283.
37. Marx, it should be remembered, was a great admirer of Darwin and, at
times, expressed the wish that his work should take on a similar scientific
status.
38. What is being presented here is explicitly an examination of the pro-work,
or ‘exoteric’, side of Marx; something that should become clearer below
where we see that Marx also presents a very different, negative, theoretical
conception of the labour form. For a detailed exploration of these ambi-
guities in the work of Marx himself, however, see Jappe, Aventures, ‘Le
travail est une catégorie capitaliste’, pp. 120–131.
39. Karl Marx, trans. David Fernbach, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy,
vol. 3 (London: Penguin, 1991), pp. 958–959.
40. Ibid., p. 959.
41. Ibid., p. 958.
42. See, for example, the anthropological research of Marshal Sahlins on
hunter-gatherer communities, Marshall Sahlins, Stone Age Economics (New
York: de Gruyter, 1972), and, his critique of homo economicus, The Western
Illusion of Human Nature (Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press, 2008). For a
historical analysis of how modern economies differ from more recent pre-
modern modes of life, made on the basis of a non-Marxian framework, see
Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation [1944] (Boston: Beacon Press,
2001).
43. For a brief introduction to Kurz and Wertkritik, see Anselm Jappe, trans.
Alastair Hemmens and John McHale, ‘Kurz, A Journey into Capitalism’s
Heart of Darkness’, Historical Materialism 22, no. 3–4 (2014), pp. 395–
407; and trans. Alastair Hemmens and Engel Di Mauro, ‘Towards a
38 A. HEMMENS

History of the Critique of Value’, Capitalism Nature Socialism 25, no. 2 (3

April 2014), pp. 25–37.
44. Moishe Postone, Time, Labour, and Social Domination: A Reinterpretation
of Marx’s Critical Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003).
45. See Jappe, Aventures, op. cit. This book serves as an excellent detailed
introduction to the critique of value, in particular its anti-work aspects, for
sceptical readers more familiar with traditional Marxist modes of analysis.
46. See Jappe, ‘Kurz’, op. cit.
47. See Neil Larsen, Mathias Nilges, Josh Robinson and Nicholas Brown, eds.
Marxism and the Critique of Value (Chicago: MCMʹ Publishing, 2014).
The volume brings together English translations of a number of texts that
are foundational to key aspects of Wertkritik.
48. The Left Young Hegelian Heinrich Heine distinguished between the ‘eso-
teric’ and ‘exoteric’ readings of Hegel in his On the History of Religion and
Philosophy in Germany (1834). Marx himself would go on to apply a similar
schema to Adam Smith in Theories of Surplus Value (1863) (both in chapter
10 and chapter 20). See Karl Marx, Theories of Surplus Value (Moscow:
Progress Publishers), vol. 2 (1968), pp. 166, 169 and vol. 3 (1971), p. 69.
49. The French Structuralist, Louis Althusser, in a preface to a 1969 edition of
Capital volume one (Paris: Garnier-Flammarion, 1969), infamously
advised first-time readers to skip completely the first chapter, which, ironi-
cally, contains the foundation of Marx’s critique of commodity fetishism,
and he spends much of his introduction criticising Hegelian-influenced
readings of Marx.
50. Postone, Time, p. 5.
51. Ibid., pp. 3–4, 6.
52. Ibid., p. 5.
53. Ibid.
54. Ibid. Postone, it is true, largely glosses over the more positivistic concep-
tion of labour found in Marx, examined above. Moreover, he preserves the
notion of labour as a rational abstraction, in the form of ‘necessary labour’,
but, as Kurz argues, this still does not detract greatly from the extent of his
original insights. See Kurz, Substance, ‘Critique of Moishe Postone’s
Concept of Labour’, pp. 60–69.
55. Postone, Time, p. 5. As Jappe argues, the ‘economic determinism’ of tra-
ditional Marxism, or the ‘objective’ base versus ‘subjective’ cultural super-
structure model of historical materialism, is not entirely wrong to the
extent that it reflects the real subordination of human life to the ‘eco-
nomic’ in capitalism, but it is certainly not characteristic of any other form
of society: ‘It follows that “economism”, as the subordination of all human
activity to the economy, is not a theoretical error: it is actually quite real in
capitalist society, but only in this society. It is not an immutable fact of
 MARXIAN THEORY AND THE CRITIQUE OF WORK 39

human existence, much less something that must be defended. On the

contrary, this subordination constitutes an aspect of capitalist society that
can and must be changed. At the same time, it should be stressed that this
centrality of the “economy”, and of the “material” aspect in general, in
modernity (at the expense, for example, of “gratitude”) can only be
explained by the autonomisation of abstract labour.’ Jappe, Writing on the
Wall, pp. 89–90.
Equally, even in capitalism, the cultural superstructures or forms of sub-
jectivity structured by labour can sometimes trump its ‘objective’ eco-
nomic base or strictly economic individual interests. A person might, for
example, choose, for moral reasons, to do, what they perceive as, ‘honest’
blue-collar work, working with one’s hands, when a better paid, but sup-
posedly morally inferior, ‘white’ collar job, working with ‘other people’s
money’ in a bank, for example, is on offer. This can also work the other way
around, for example, when middle-class parents discourage their children
from pursuing a skilled blue-collar career, rather than a white-collar one,
even when, as is often the case today in the West, they are better paid and
more secure, due to cultural prejudice against manual labour, which, for
historical reasons, is seen as a step down the social ladder.
56. For a detailed exposition of this argument, see Ernst Lohoff and Norbert
Trenkle, trans. Paul Braun et al., La Grande dévalorisation: Pourquoi la
spéculation et la dette de l’état ne sont pas les causes de la crise (Fécamp: Post-
éditions, 2014).
57. Strictly speaking the contributors to the journal Exit! now refer to their
theory as Wertabspaltungskritik, the ‘critique of value-dissociation’, to
reflect this development. See Roswitha Scholz, Das Geschlecht des
Kapitalismus: Feministische Theorien und die post-moderne Metamorphose
des Kapitals (Bad Honnef: Horlemann Verlag, 2011) and ‘Patriarchy and
Commodity Society: Gender without the Body’, in Marxism and the
Critique of Value, op. cit., pp. 123–142.
58. See Norbert Trenkle, ‘Terror of Labour’, in Krisis: Contributions to the
Critique of Commodity Society (London: Chronos, 2002), pp. 3–8.
59. Modern philosophy, with the rise of capitalism, began to put forward the
concept that material reality might constitute a single abstract substance.
See Kurz, Substance, ‘The philosophical concept of substance and the real
metaphysics of capitalism’, pp. 12–21.
60. For empirical evidence and discussion of the historical specificity of
‘labour’, see, for example, Jacques Le Goff, ‘Pour une étude du travail dans
les idéologies et les mentalités du Moyen Age’, in Lavorare nel medio evo:
rappresentazioni ed esempi dall’Italia dei secc. X-XVI (Todi: Presso
L’Academia Tudertina, 1983); Robert Fossier, Le Travail au Moyen Âge
(Paris: Pluriel, 2012); Daniel Becquemont and Pierre Bonte, Mythologies
40 A. HEMMENS

Du Travail. Le Travail Nommé (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2004), pp. 8–9;

Michel Freyssenet, ‘The Emergence, Centrality and End of Work’, Current
Sociology, 1999, vol. 47, n. 2, pp. 5–30 (a longer French version of this text
can be found at [Link]); Marie-Noëlle Chamoux, ‘Société avec et
sans concept de travail: remarques anthropologiques’, Sociologie du travail,
vol. 36, Sept. 1994, pp. 57–71.
61. On the historical development of abstract time over concrete time, see
Postone, Time, Labour and Social Domination, pp. 200–216.
62. Kurz, Substance, p. 55.
63. See Michael Perelman, The Invention of Capitalism: Classical Political
Economy and the Secret History of Primitive Accumulation (London: Duke
University Press, 2000), pp. 17–18; also Juliet Schor, The Overworked
American: The Unexpected Decline of Leisure (New York: Basic Books,
1991), pp. 43–53. Notwithstanding, it is also obviously the case that, par-
ticularly in certain monastic communities, toil for its own sake was often
seen as a means of expiating the sinful nature of the human condition. The
existence of such a self-abasing ideology in the Middle Ages was certainly
a factor in the future development of the modern work ethic.
64. Kurz, Substance, p. 27.
65. Some medieval historians have suggested that the originally negative con-
notations of ‘labour’ were the result of classism or an ‘aristocratic disdain’.
However, it is just as important to say that medieval people, in particular
the peasants themselves, quite rationally saw tasks that were, empirically
speaking, difficult or painful as something to be either suffered or avoided.
Indeed, to the extent that ‘labour’, in its original sense, was a curse for
original sin, the whole of pre-modern Christianity could be thought of
precisely as a form of consolation for and absolution from such activity.
66. This is a problem that, as we saw in the case of Applebaum above, is deeply
frustrating to thinkers who want an intellectually satisfying, generally posi-
tivistic, definition of labour as a transhistorical abstraction but who, at the
same time, can find no rational basis for it. A more postmodern vein of
thinking might simply recognise how seemingly arbitrary what is and is not
considered work in society and, as a result, conclude that it is simply a mat-
ter of one’s point of view, which simply dodges the question under the
guise of promoting the voices of the oppressed. (E.g. see Keith Grint and
Darren Nixon, The Sociology of Work [Oxford: Polity Press, 2015], p. 2.) A
more moralising definition might say that these activities are unpleasant or
forced and, therefore, a form of ‘work’, a common one for critics of work;
but, while this may hold true for some, it is hardly the case that all of the
activities that fall under the rubric of work as a generalised social activity
are, at an empirical level, experienced universally as pain and personal dom-
ination, even if this is, objectively, often the case. It would also not explain
 MARXIAN THEORY AND THE CRITIQUE OF WORK 41

why there is a strong tendency, even within physics, to project work onto
activity in general. Equally, attempts, such as those of Hannah Arendt in
The Human Condition (1958), to draw philosophical distinctions between
‘work’ and ‘labour’ bare no relationship to how these words are actually
used nor how the form of abstract labour itself mediates social reality, and
are, therefore, equally empty.
67. See Jappe, Aventures, pp. 53–54.
68. For a further discussion of this concretely abstract side of labour, or ‘con-
crete labour’, see Kurz, Substance, ‘What is really abstract about abstract
labour’, pp. 84–111.
69. ‘Modern humans come upon the space of business as a finished shape
whose disembedded character they feel, but can no longer name.’ Ibid.,
p. 90.
70. ‘If abstract labour is the abstraction of an abstraction, concrete labour only
represents the paradox of the concrete aspect of an abstraction – namely of
the form-abstraction “labour”. It is only “concrete” in the very narrow and
restricted sense that the different commodities require materially different
production processes: a car is made differently from, say, an aspirin tablet
or a pencil sharpener. But even the behaviour of these processes of produc-
tion is in no way indifferent, technically or organizationally, to the presup-
posed goal of valorization. […] the capitalist process of production is
configured in this respect: it is organized solely according to the maxim of
producing the greatest possible number of products in the shortest possi-
ble time. This is then called the economic efficiency of a business. The
concrete, material side of labour is thus nothing other than the tangible
form in which abstract labour’s diktat of time confronts the workers and
forces them under its rhythm.’ Norbert Trenkle, ‘Value and Crisis: Basic
Questions’, in Marxism and the Critique of Value, op. cit., pp. 9–10.
71. It should be stressed again that ‘abstract labour’ and ‘concrete labour’ are
not different types of labour. They are rather categories that allow us to
talk about labour at different levels of social ontology. Indeed, ‘abstract
labour’ is, Kurz argues, strictly speaking, a ‘logical pleonasm’—like ‘wet
water’—because labour is already an abstraction and this abstract quality of
labour is what defines its essence or form. At the same time, ‘concrete
labour’ is a kind of oxymoron or paradoxical-real determination because
the labour in question is, by definition, not concrete, but the category
allows us to talk about the paradoxical fact that, in an inversion of all previ-
ous social logic, a real abstraction, ‘abstract labour’, grasps hold of, organ-
ises and mediates concrete reality at all levels. All forms of ‘concrete labour’
are therefore just as abstract, at an essential social level, even if empirically
they appear otherwise. As such, concrete labour, along with use value, is
not a category that can be projected onto the pre-modern world. See Kurz,
Substance, pp. 27–28.
42 A. HEMMENS

72. Jappe, Aventures, pp. 70–75.

73. ‘It is not too much of an exaggeration to say that the inversion of the for-
mula C-M-C to M-C-M’ contains within it the entire essence of capitalism.
The transformation of abstract labour into money is the only goal of com-
modity production; all use-value production is only a means, a “necessary
evil”, with a single goal: to have at the end of the operation a larger sum of
money than at the start. The satisfaction of needs is no longer the goal of
production, but only a secondary aspect. […] the concrete serves only to
feed the materialised abstraction: money.’ Jappe, Aventures, p. 73.
74. See Jappe, Aventures, pp. 83–85.
75. Society has reached such a state of absurdity that these days ‘job creation’
has become a job in itself and even a foundation stone of left-wing
politics.
76. See Robert Kurz, trans. Alias Recluse, ‘The Apotheosis of Money: The
Structural Limits of Capital Valorization, Casino Capitalism and the Global
Financial Crisis’, 2012, [Link]
structural-limits-capital-valorization-casino-capitalism-global-financi. See
also Jappe, Aventures, pp. 204–205.
77. See Trenkle, Dévalorisation, pp. 92–93.
78. ‘A threefold real, practical process of abstraction takes place paradoxically
in the abstract space-time of the economy. Although it is they themselves
that “labour”, the functional subjects must first abstract from themselves,
extinguishing themselves in a certain way as human beings, to obey the
imperatives of abstract labour. This does not follow from the material char-
acter in itself, for instance from (social) production for others rather than
for one’s own needs, but from the fundamentally “alien” fact of the capi-
talist self-sufficient purpose, the valorisation of value. The point is not to
produce useful objects, either for oneself or for others, but it is essentially
to produce value and surplus value, that is to burn up a maximum of one’s
own abstract human energy within the functional space of economic space-
time, to turn oneself as a human being into a social combustion engine.’
Kurz, Substance, pp. 101–102.
79. Traditional Marxism always understood this process as the ‘tendency of the
rate of profit to fall’, which is a more phenomenological way of trying to
understand this process, but precisely because it was not based on a cate-
gorical critique, it was not something that was thought to put capitalism
itself into question.
80. See Trenkle, Dévalorisation, op. cit.; Jappe, ‘Le capital fictif’, Aventures,
pp. 157–166, and ‘The Writing on the Wall’, The Writing on the Wall,
pp. 60–80.
The more the labour and value forms come to mediate social life the
more dangerous these kinds of financial crises become. In a period when
 MARXIAN THEORY AND THE CRITIQUE OF WORK 43

the agricultural way of life was still widespread alongside modern industry,
people could simply return to the land. Today, at least for most people in
the West, this is simply not an option.
81. Anselm Jappe, ‘The “Dark Side” of Value and the Gift’, The Writing on the
Wall, pp. 84–103. Here Jappe draws parallels between the Maussian con-
cept of the ‘gift’ and Scholz’s theory of ‘dissociation’.
82. For a detailed discussion of value-dissociation and gender, see Roswitha
Scholz, Das Geschlecht des Kapitalismus: Feministische Theorien und die
post-moderne Metamorphose des Kapitals (Bad Honnef: Horlemann Verlag,
2011); ‘Patriarchy and Commodity Society’ (2009) in Marxism and the
Critique of Value, op. cit., pp. 123–1400; and trans. Stéphane Besson,
Simone de Beauvoir aujourd’hui (Paris: Le Bord de l’eau, 2014). See also,
Johannes Vogele, ‘Remarques sur les notions de ‘valeur’ et de ‘dissociation
valeur” in Richard Poulin and Patrick Vassort, eds. Sexe, capitalisme et cri-
tique de la valeur (Paris: M éditeur, 2012), pp. 89–102 and ‘Le côté obscur
du Capital, ‘Masculinité’ et ‘féminité’ comme piliers de la modernité’ in
ibid., pp. 103–120; Kurz, Substance, pp. 90–92, 96–97.
83. Scholz, ‘Patriarchy’, pp. 127–128, and Vogele, ‘Le côté obscur’, p. 112.
84. On the other hand, this does not prevent the domestic sphere from becom-
ing a utilitarian, functionalist and ‘productivist’ one in a certain sense. The
dissociated aspects of life constantly have to justify their existence and spe-
cific modes of organisation as taking place outside of the logic of produc-
tion and often they do so in its terms (e.g. one can imagine a worker in a
nuclear family stating to a spouse, ‘I work eight hours a day so you should
do eight hours of housework’); but, although they can have empirical simi-
larities, they still do not take the form of (abstract) labour.
85. Vogele, ‘Le côté obscur’, p. 112.
86. Although it is our focus here, we cannot think of ‘value-dissociation’ purely
in terms of patriarchy. The dissociated traits of laziness and irrationality
have often been projected onto the disabled and people of colour; they
have likewise suffered discrimination and been excluded from full partici-
pation in public life. Even illness, in modernity, is essentially defined by
whether a person is capable of working or not. In official French language,
for example, injury or ill health is usually spoken in terms of a period of
‘incapacité de travail’ or inability to work.
87. Marx, Capital, vol. 1, p. 255.
88. See Jappe, Aventures, ‘Le sujet automate’, pp. 98–107.
89. For a detailed exploration of these positions, see Anselm Jappe, La Société
autophage: capitalisme, démesure et autodestruction (Paris: Découverte,
2017). Jappe, drawing on Freud and the work of Christopher Lasch,
argues that the subject form is essentially narcissistic in character as it rec-
ognises no limits on itself. It therefore fixes the human psyche in an infan-
44 A. HEMMENS

tile stage of psychological development where the objective world is seen

only as a projection of the self. The empirical ‘subjects’ are increasingly
unable to form healthy reciprocal relationships with the exterior world,
which instead becomes the playground for the realisation of the most
primitive desires. At the same time, these subjects are increasingly caught
between feelings of omnipotence and total impotence as capitalism col-
lapses by reaching its own internal and external limits.
90. Jappe, Aventures, ‘Critique du progrès, de l’économie et du sujet’,
pp. 207–211.
91. The nature of value and labour as a priori forms, though historically spe-
cific, obviously excludes voting in general elections, active citizenship or
seizing the state as means of resolving the problem of capitalism. These
forms of ‘participation’ only permit empirical subjects access to different
management roles, or to cast an opinion on styles of management, within
the system of valorisation, which itself could never be voted upon or abol-
ished with a law.
92. Robert Kurz, No Revolution Anywhere (London: Chronos, 2012),
pp. 19–21.
93. Ibid., pp. 21–22.
94. Anselm Jappe, ‘We Gotta Get Out of this Place’, Brooklyn Rail, Sept. 2015.
[Link]
alastair-hemmens
95. Kurz, Substance, p. 61. In his case, Kurz specifically has in mind
Autonomism.
96. Robert Kurz, ‘The Ontological Break: Before the Beginning of a Different
World History’, Marxism and the Critique of Value, op. cit., pp. 357–72.