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Concept
Critique of work
Summary
Critique of work or critique of labour is the critique of, and wish to abolish, work as such, and to critique what the critics of works deem wage slavery.
Critique of work can be existential, and focus on how labour can be and/or feel meaningless, and stands in the way for self-realisation. But the critique of work can also highlight how excessive work may cause harm to nature, the productivity of society, and or society itself. The critique of work can also take on a more utilitarian character, in which work simply stands in the way for human happiness as well as health.
Many thinkers have critiqued and wished for the abolishment of labour as early as in Ancient Greece. An example of an opposing view is the anonymously published treatise titled Essay on Trade and Commerce published in 1770 which claimed that to break the spirit of idleness and independence of the English people, ideal "work-houses" should imprison the poor. These houses were to function as "houses of terror, where they should work fourteen hours a day in such fashion that when meal time was deducted there should remain twelve hours of work full and complete."
Views like these propagated for in the following decades by e.g. Malthus, which led up to the Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834.
The battle of shortening the working hours to ten hours was ongoing between around the 1840s until about 1900. However, establishing the eight-hour working day went significantly faster, and these short-hour social movements aligned against labour, managed to get rid of two working hours between the mid-1880s to 1919. During this epoch, reformers argued that mechanization was not only supposed to provide material goods, but to free workers from "slavery" and introduce them to the "duty" to enjoy life.
While the productive capacity rose enormously with industrialization, people were made busier, while one might have expected the opposite to occur. This was at least the expectation among many intellectuals such as Paul Lafargue.
Official source
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