In 1972, a French management magazine reported on a bizarre incident that had taken place in a factory over the course of the previous summer. One Monday morning, all of the workers suddenly, and without any warning, stopped working. The workers, far from being up in arms, appeared to be relaxed and, despite enquiries, by the close of the day, they had made no demands to the management. The following day, Tuesday, the same thing happened. The workers all turned up to the workplace, but spent the day chatting and playing cards. The management approached the workers’ representatives, in an effort to learn the reasons for the strike, but, yet again, none was forthcoming. On Wednesday, the workers once again came to the factory, but this time they organised comedy sketches and ‘psychodramas’ about the everyday life and idiosyncrasies of the fac tory for their own amusement ; even the boss, apparently ‘without insolence’, was play-acted in these mini dramas. By Thursday, the management, at its wits’ end, decided to be proactive and announced an increase in holiday pay of 300 francs. The announcement, however, fell completely flat and things continued as before. ‘The strikers’, the magazine notes, ‘had not asked for anything, and wanted nothing more it seems than to let the machines rest’. After a week of this, the workers all turned up at their posts on the Monday morning and got on with their jobs as though nothing had happened. The management could not understand ‘what demon’ had possessed the workers the previous week. ‘And the most extraordinary thing about this story’, writes the author, ‘is that it is true.’ [1]

This incident has all the qualities of a fairy tale. It is as if some witch or wizard had cast a magic spell. The workers, as though at the wave of a magic wand, seem to forget, for a brief while, the totalitarian rule of the labour form : the need to produce, to obey, to be ‘present’ in the way that capitalism demands. The whole world of work seems to have existed for them as some kind of distant dream or fancy to be played out by mechanicals on the stage of the factory floor. It is labour, and not a world beyond it, that has been relegated to fantasy. It is, however, like all fairy tales, ultimately self-contained. At the end of the story, the spell must be broken, and everything reverts back to the mundane. A world that has been turned on its head (or, perhaps more accurately in this case, turned right side up) returns to normal. It is, in fact, as though nothing had ever happened. This story, in many ways, encapsulates the ambiguities and contradictions of the critique of work in the period, our own period, after the events of May ’68 and the global economic crisis that hit the world economy in the 1970s. Never had a certain ‘artistic’, ‘qualitative’, critique of work — of the kind developed by the authors previously examined in this study — been more implanted in the working class and, yet, despite the hopes, and continued hopes, that the proletariat would finally fulfil its role as the revolutionary subject of history, to abolish itself by abolishing labour, never, in hindsight, has such a dream seemed more distant. This chapter will explore the way in which a certain ‘artistic’ critique of labour continued to flourish in the 1970s and how, in the course of several decades, it was partially incorporated into the very logic of capitalism itself. At the same time, it is the story of how, in the face of the failures of a critique of work couched within the conceptual framework of traditional Marxism, a new, deeper, categorical critique of labour began to emerge.

The New Spirit of Capitalism

The year 2018 marked the 50th anniversary of the ‘events’ of May ’68. The empirical situation of the economy and culture between our own time and the post-war period can seem almost like mirror images of one another. In the 1960s, the critique of capitalism took place in the context of effectively full employment, with growing purchasing power, social benefits and an almost universally positive vision of technological development. Culturally speaking, the dominant personality of the ‘forces of order’, identified with the bourgeoisie, was that of the authoritarian ‘type’ whose positive model of human being rested upon deference to hierarchy, sexual repression and a strong Protestant work ethic. The critique of capitalism, in its empirical form, therefore consisted primarily in a rejection of ‘bourgeois’ values — identified with all forms of authority and social taboos — and finding ways to realise the utopian promise of the productive capacity capitalism had so far created. Today, the situation could not be more different. We are, since successive economic crises, from the mid-1970s onwards, faced with mass under- and unemployment, precariousness, rising wealth inequality and a constant attack on social benefits and workers’ rights in the name of competitiveness. The promise of technology, to which some still cling, appears now only in the form of ever-greater populations ‘superfluous’ to the production process. Moreover, our productivity even seems to put the very existence of life on this planet into peril. At a cultural level, though, things are apparently ‘freer’ than ever. Capitalism, although it continues, of course, to wield the Protestant work ethic and hierarchy as a stick when necessary (which is often), increasingly invites us to realise our every desire, to recognise no limits and no authority, to transgress every boundary, to break every taboo. Labour, if one is ‘lucky’ enough to get it, is imagined today less as a duty or necessity, but more as a means to an end that lies beyond itself, to leisure and consumption, and even as a means of self-fulfilment, a privilege, rather than a ‘vale of tears’ for the worker.

Observing the advertisements on the contemporary Paris metro can be instructive as to the types of normative changes that have taken place since the 1960s. Take, for example, the phrase ‘Metro, boulot, dodo’ [Work, Tube, Sleep]. In the 1960s it stood, with its simple phonic rhythm, for a popular critique of the seemingly endless repetitive cycle of an everyday life structured by work, that is, the way in which labour pursues the self even beyond the factory or the office. It was, in this respect, a complement to Debord’s ‘never work’ graffito, an act of defiance against an oppressive and hierarchical society that did not like to admit that people would rather be doing something else. Today, however, the slogans of the 1960s are marshalled in the aid of advertising. In a relatively recent example, one of those large posters that hug the curved walls of the Paris metro reads, ‘Metro, boulot, libido’, an advertisement for a website that helps married people cheat on their spouses. The 1960s rejection of the morality of the family is actively adopted in the aid of the value form, as the daily alienation of the commuter is recognised as a prime space for promoting the promise of sexual self-realisation, in the form of a consumable service, beyond it. Capitalism adapts popular expressions of discontent originally aimed at itself for its own purposes. In a similar example, an advert for a clothing brand reads, ‘Everything is permitted’ ; a phrase that once stood for the height of transgressiveness among the avant-garde milieu of the 1960s. As was noted in Chap. 1, even the phrase ‘never work’ has been co-opted. An American consultancy firm uses the tagline ‘never work’, because ‘if you love your job, you’ll never work a day in your life’. Capitalism no longer seeks to deny feelings of alienation at work, it uses them to sell products. At the same time, it divests itself of responsibility. If your job is dull and stressful, it is your own fault for not finding a better one or for not having a ‘positive attitude’.
In The New Spirit of Capitalism, first published in French in 1999, two sociologists, Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello, sought to analyse these dramatic changes in the world of work and everyday life since the 1960s. The central argument of the book is that, starting in the mid-1970s, the management of capitalist enterprise in developed countries began to shift away from the hierarchical, repetitive, utilitarian model of Fordism towards a new form of accumulation based on the metaphor of networks. Firms that adopted the new network model aimed to provide workers with greater autonomy, creative input and a sense of self-investment in the work they were expected to perform. These changes, Boltanski and Chiapello argue, were, at least in part if not wholly, driven by the critiques that were levelled at capitalism in the post-war period and which reached a high point in the anti-capitalist movements of the 1960s.

Boltanski and Chiapello employ the concept of the ‘spirit of capitalism’, drawing on the work of Max Weber, to provide a critical framework for grasping the normative values that capitalism marshals in order to give people ‘the opportunity to participate in it more enthusiastically’. [2] Given that a wage labour society assumes a ‘certain amount of voluntary subjection’, they argue that capitalism requires strong personal incentives — ‘possibilities for self-realisation and room for freedom of action’— and moral arguments— in the name of the common good —in order to both excite interest in and justify the goal of capital accumulation (not least because it marks a deep rupture with all other known forms of human society). [3] In essence, the ‘spirit of capitalism’ is the ideology or normative framework that motivates people to take part in capitalism willingly and even with excitement. The authors provide a periodisation of three distinct forms that this ‘spirit’ has taken over the course of the history of capitalism. [4] First, from the early-modern period until the Great Depression, the spirit of capitalism could be characterised as utilitarian, adventurist, and thrifty. It was generally smaller in scale and focused on family businesses, or small firms, where the owner was often known to the workers. Secondly, from the 1930s until the mid-to-late 1970s, capitalism emphasised a certain dirigisme and long-term planning. It favoured large, sometimes state-run, enterprises that were faceless organisations in which the figure of the ‘director’ was the ideal ‘type’. Thirdly, from the 1970s and continuing today, the ‘new’ spirit of capitalism emphasised networks, ‘leaders’, non-hierarchical structures, personal initiative, goal-orientation, and, in some cases, it even incorporated aspects of play and spontaneity into the accumulation process (one might think of the big tech companies such as Google and Facebook). [5]

Boltanski and Chiapello argue that ‘critique’ plays the important role of a historical ‘motor’ of change in the spirit of capitalism in its successive phases. The second spirit of capitalism — with its emphasis on a long-term planned economy and large organisational structures —was inspired in part, they argue, by the critiques that socialists and communists levied at the first spirit of capitalism. They point out, for example, that the dirigisme of the post-war French economy was aligned in many respects with the goals and ideals of French Communists. We might add that the political motivations were even very similar, for example, the need to bring the market under the ‘democratic’ and ‘conscious’ control of the state in order to work for the good of the people, rather than leave them at the mercy of a risky and unregulated market. The historical transformation of cultural, economic and social norms embodied in the shift to the second spirit of capitalism therefore provides an historical example of how capitalism, when it is ‘obliged to respond positively to the points raised by critique’, is forced to ‘incorporate[…] some of the values in whose name it was [previously] criticised’. [6] In the case of the second spirit of capitalism, it was obviously the crisis of the 1930s that encouraged labour and capital to adopt the ‘anticapitalist’ criticism of its earlier, liberal, spirit. Capitalism needed to be controlled and reigned in through state intervention. Crucially, Boltanski and Chiapello argue that a similar transformation of the spirit of capitalism began in the mid-to-late 1970s in response to the criticisms levelled against it by the May ’68 movement, that is, a lack of personal autonomy, creativity, self-realisation, play, equality and community.

Boltanski and Chiapello identify two primary modes of critique of capitalism : artistic and social. [7] The former, the artistic critique, was developed within the Bohemian, artistic and intellectual milieu, particularly in Paris, from the mid-to-late nineteenth century right up to the Situationists in the 1960s (in essence much of what we have described in more detail in the previous two chapters). Artistic critique, the authors argue, focuses on a critique of capitalism that emphasises inauthenticity and disenchantment as well as a lack of freedom to act and express oneself. For the artistic critique then, capitalism is primarily problematical due to the fact that it places barriers in the way of the full realisation of the creative individual. Social critique, in contrast, focuses primarily on the material poverty that capitalism leaves in its wake and, equally, the way in which it encourages a certain selfishness and absence of human community or fellow feeling. Social critique, in other words, seeks to redress the exploitation of the worker that takes place in the production process by giving her back the full value of her labour and organising the economy in such a way as to benefit the greatest number. We will return to this thematic later. For now, it is worth saying that although these categories help us to discuss side by side some of the more general themes or superficial aspects of these critiques — in particular the ‘artistic critique’ — they are somewhat reductive and do not accurately reflect much of the complexity that we have discussed in previous chapters. The authors, for example, state that it is ‘virtually impossible to combine these different grounds for indignation and integrate them into a coherent framework’. [8] However, as we saw in Chap. 1, we can, through a categorical critique, easily account for both realities. As such, it is highly questionable to hold that artistic and social critiques, or at least the issues that they seek to address, are irreconcilable. Nevertheless, in identifying the artistic critique, the authors highlight an important point of connection between the modes of criticising capitalism and the normative frameworks that have emerged over the course of the past half-century.

Boltanski and Chiapello argue that the rise of mass consumption in the post-war period brought about new cultural norms that came into conflict with the old spirit of capitalism. Consumerism promoted individuality, self-expression and immediate gratification based on credit in a manner that contrasted strongly with the more restrained, controlling and save for-hard-times attitude of the first and second spirits of capitalism. Equally, the expansion of higher education — the increase in the number of school leavers going onto do degrees — meant that a more educated French work force was less willing to perform mind-numbing, repetitive tasks that required no creative input and did not allow a great deal of personal autonomy. The Fordist workplace with its scientific organisation of labour and strict hierarchies looked less attractive and was less willingly submitted to by the new post-war generation. Boltanski and Chiapello argue that groups such as the Situationists, whom they refer to explicitly, adopting the artistic critique developed by groups such as the Dadaists and the Surrealists, ‘answered to the expectations and anxieties of new generations of students and cadres, and spoke to the discrepancy between their aspirations to intellectual freedom and the forms of work organisation to which they had to submit in order to be integrated socially’. [9] It was to these values, to this artistic critique that had inspired a generation, that capitalism turned in order to make itself appear more attractive, to create more willing, enthusiastic, subjects of the process of capitalist accumulation. Boltanski and Chiapello refer specifically to the Belgian Situationist Raoul Vaneigem, and his magnum opus of May ’68 rebellion, The Revolution of Everyday Life, to highlight the similarities between the anti hierarchical, network-based, and creative model of the new, or third, spirit of capitalism that took hold in the years after its original publication in the late 1960s. They provide a number of examples that, they say, ‘could feature in the corpus of neo-management’ : [10]

Has anyone bothered to study the approaches to work of primitive peoples, the importance of play and creativity, the incredible yield obtained by methods which the application of modern technology would make a hundred times more efficient ? [11]

Using makeshift equipment and negligible funds, a German engineer recently built an apparatus able to replace the cyclotron. If individual creativity can achieve such results with such meagre stimulation, what marvels of energy must be expected from the qualitative shock waves and chain reactions that will occur when the spirit of freedom still alive in the individual re-emerges in collective form to celebrate the great social fête, with its joyful breaking of all taboos. [12]

The problem then is how to organize, without creating a hierarchy ; in other words, how to make sure that the leader of the game doesn’t become just ‘the Leader’. The only safeguard against authority and rigidity setting in is a playful attitude. [13]

These examples are interesting as they are extracts from the work of Vaneigem that are most obviously inspired by his reading of Fourier. The idea is that, by making work more attractive, in the manner described by artistic critique, it could actually produce greater yields and release more energy, but in a fashion that is attractive to the individual. Here we really are in the realm of ‘it’s not “work” if you enjoy doing it’. This is hardly sound theoretical territory. However, Boltanski and Chiapello do not seem to understand the problem of ‘recuperation’ in these terms, but rather see it as the result of the separation of the artistic critique of work from the context of the original social critique to which it was attached. Moreover, the exact nature of the criticism directed at Vaneigem is not clear. Is it that there is something wrong in these arguments — already anticipated in Fourier — or is it simply that Vaneigem happened to be the one expressing them at a time when capitalism needed to adapt its management style and normative framework ? In either case, the important point for Boltanski and Chiapello is that capitalism did partly incorporate these criticisms into itself. It provided employees in many firms with greater autonomy and created structures that encouraged them to invest themselves creatively in their work (albeit often with the result that oppression is all the more individualised). However, all this, for Boltanski and Chiapello, was at the cost of cutting back wages and making work more precarious at a material level. The artistic critique triumphs where the social critique gives way.

The problem with these arguments is that the categories upon which they rest are largely superficial. Boltanski and Chiapello, although they do hit upon a significant issue in the recuperation of the artistic critique, do not distinguish between an ‘affirmative’ (or purely ‘phenomenological’) and a ‘categorical’ critique of work. As we saw in Chap. 1, a crucial theoretical distinction must be made between the critique of the concrete empirical phenomena that fall under the rubric of work and a critique of work as such, labour qua labour, understood as being, in and of itself, a socially destructive, historically dynamic and tautological form of abstract domination. We have seen, throughout the current work, that elements of both modes of critique have played a part in the history of the critique of work in French thought. Ideally, the critique of the empirical forms of labour, and whatever vague ideas we may develop about a world beyond it, is grounded in a categorical critique. What Boltanski and Chiapello describe is, therefore, not so much, as they perceive it, a problem of a critique that has become detached from its ‘social’ content, but rather the way in which those aspects of the French critique of work that were ‘affirmative’ — that were not grounded in a critique of the category itself — reached a vanishing point where they were finally, and in a great historical irony, incorporated back into the management of labour. The affirmative critique of work, in other words, turned back upon itself to reinforce the labour form. So long as the critics of work clung to the assumption of the transhistoricity of labour, this was always a danger. The problem is most obvious in Fourier precisely because, unlike Debord, he had very little insight into abstract domination. Nevertheless, as we see here, even in the case of the SI, a certain affirmative critique of work found expression.

The fact that Boltanski and Chiapello are unaware of the categorical critique of labour also complicates the analysis found in The New Spirit of Capitalism in another important way. As we saw in Chap. 1, we can understand the empirical changes that reshaped the world of work since the 1970s as the result of capitalism reaching its internal limits. The current period is essentially one of a capitalism that is in crisis at all levels. Boltanski and Chiapello, in interpreting these changes as primarily the result of cultural recuperation, mistake the present moment. The collapse of traditional social critique and the recuperation of the artistic critique of work are symptoms, epiphenomenal changes, and not the cause. Boltanski and Chiapello, however, reject the very notion that capitalism is in trouble at all. Crisis is designated as a ‘stock theme’ and the prevalent desire to use the term is described as ‘inapposite’. [14] They reject crisis theory on the basis that the period in question has been marked by a ‘massive redeployment of capitalism’. [15] It is true that these words were written a decade before the 2008 financial crisis. Nevertheless, the suggestion is that the various crises of past decades — the OPEC Oil Embargo, the dotcom bubble, as well as the general financialisation of the markets, falling wages and increasing unemployment — are not the result of an inevitable collapse of the valorisation process, but rather part of the normal cycle of boom and bust, and the successful realisation of the personal domination of those nominally in power. The ‘failure’ of the artistic critique of work is understood, therefore, not in terms of its failure to grasp the deepest, most essential level of social ontology, but rather as a failure to be ‘social’. However, this purported ‘social critique’ is, as we saw in Chap. 1, just as affirmative in nature as the artistic. The period after 1968 should therefore be correctly understood as the moment when the artistic critique of work faced its own internal limits, as affirmative critique, even at the height of its triumph. The moral of our opening fairy tale is precisely this. It encapsulates the contradictions and limitations of the artistic critique of work that finally found a working-class audience in the 1970s.

The ‘crisis of work’ and the ultra-left

The triumph of artistic critique, the point at which it reached its maximum influence among workers, reached its apogee in the decade 1968–1978. A new wave of industrial action and changes in cultural attitudes to work, or at least the work on offer, caused immense consternation among mainstream observers. Sociologists, politicians, directors and union bosses, who had traditionally understood the interests of workers in terms of ‘quantitative’ demands — roughly what Boltanski and Chiapello call ‘social critique’ — struggled to get to grips with the nature of young people’s dissatisfaction with and indifference towards work. The period saw a dramatic increase in opposition and resistance to work in the factories and in everyday life : in workplaces, sabotage, slow-downs, poor quality production, stoppages, wildcat strikes and attempts at self-management (the most famous example being the LIP incident, where workers, who had been let go from a watchmaking factory, took over the premises and began organising production themselves) ; in everyday life, young people ‘dropping out’, actively choosing to live off unemployment, [16] doing odd jobs and everything they could to avoid being integrated into the labour force along Fordist lines. These stances and practices were not in themselves new — a certain Anarchist, Bohemian and artistic milieu had always defined itself in similar terms, and workers had always engaged in similar actions — but the scale of the rejection of work, understood as a rejection of the Fordist model of work and, in some cases, a rejection of work as such, certainly was. In fact, by the mid-1970s, it had become common among sociologists to speak of the historical moment as a veritable ‘crisis of work’.

The ‘crisis of work’ was the subject of a great deal of sociological discussion at the time and produced a number of important studies, the titles of which, such as The Allergy to Work (1974), are, in themselves, quite evocative of the epoch. [17] Sociologists, in an attempt to understand the nature of the crisis — which, as Boltanski and Chiapello have shown, was really a crisis of the second spirit of capitalism, based on the scientific organisation of labour and large-scale dirigiste enterprise — spoke to young people in order to get a sense of their demands. They were, however, often horrified by the results and failed to understand fully the terminology through which discontent with labour was expressed. Consider, for example, this extract from an analysis of attitudes to work among young people in the 1970s :

Their refusal of work is based on […] abstract values, that is, many of them tell us : ‘but working isn’t living’. There is a contradiction between work and life […] Work is the alienation of freedom. That is, work implies that one enters into an organisation, thus into a hierarchy, with chains, and middle class youths refuse with all their strength all form of hierarchy. Therefore, it is the alienation of freedom. And then, working, it is also (this moreover surprised me), it is the opposite of festival, that is, the opposite of the realisation of oneself, the opposite of that which allows one to express oneself. As this labour, when you get down to it, is too utilitarian, too functional, too fragmented, and it seems to me that this category here seeks at heart a form and reactionary one at that. That is, they are looking somewhat for a passive relationship with nature and for them the productive act does not exist, it has no value, it is without interest for ‘real life’. [18]

Here the researcher comes face to face with the ‘artistic’ critique of work — or at least a vulgar version of it — that had been developed within and popularised by the radical avant-garde. If nothing else, the events of May ’68 had brought to the attention of millions of young people, and perhaps many older ones too, that it was possible to imagine a different kind of relationship with one’s own creative activity and that one could oppose capitalism not only in terms of pecuniary poverty, but also, and even primarily so, in terms of the ‘poverty of experience’. The qualitative nature of these ‘demands’ was not easily processed by the highly Cartesian, rationalist and economistic intellectual framework of the managers, who, until recently, had understood the struggle between classes largely in terms of a battle over remuneration. The consternation of the researcher presented with this ‘artistic’ critique of work — his accusation that it is ‘reactionary’ — rests upon an absolute identification of labour with the ‘productive act’ or, rather, with human activity as such. He is able to ascertain that young people react against labour, or at least this labour, because it turns them into an instrument of utility, a mere cog in a greater machine. Young people reject their role in the hierarchy and feel alienated. They even explicitly oppose work to ‘real life’ ; that is, they recognise that there must be more to living than accumulation through production. The researcher, however, can only see such an ‘artistic’ critique as reactionary because, for him, labour is the expression of our humanity and, perhaps also, the basis of human community and fellow feeling. A traditional Protestant work ethic, resting on a rationalist (perhaps socialist) conception of labour, confronts an ‘artistic’ critique that seeks to move beyond it. These two opposing views of contemporary, Fordist, industrial labour, and even, albeit to a lesser degree, labour as such, were those that confronted one another in the ‘crisis of work’ in the 1970s.

The crisis found its strongest voices in the plethora of ultra-left publications that proliferated in France in the aftermath of May ’68. These groups, heavily, and often explicitly, influenced by the Situationists and Socialism or Barbarism, but also Bordigism and, later, the Italian Autonomist movement, included the Workers Union for the Abolition of Wage Slavery, the Friends of Four Million Young Workers, the writer Claude Berger, author of For the Abolition of Wage Labour (1976), as well as a variety of other journals and small-scale publications such as Le Mouvement Communiste, Invariances, Négation and Voyou. What unites these groups is precisely the central role that the critique of wage labour played in their critique of capitalism. It was, moreover, primarily their opposition to wage labour, and with it the whole metaphysics of the first and second spirits of capitalism, that set these groups apart from the other ‘anti-capitalist’ movements that they despised, such as Maoism, Stalinism and, albeit to a slightly lesser extent, Trotskyism. Berger writes, for example, that ‘[t]he greatest mystification of the century is the claim to be creating communism while preserving wage labour’. [19] Furthermore, these groups — in particular Workers Union — had arguably a much greater presence in French factories than the Situationist International ever had (ironically, as we shall see, this seems to have given some of them the confidence to pursue a critique of the ‘worker’ that was never developed in Situationist writing). [20]

The focus of these groups is primarily on the development and propagation of a critique of wage labour. The key slogan was ‘Let’s Abolish the Wage System’ [Abolissons le salariat]. It was a call, in other words, for the abolition of the condition of being a wage labourer. Workers Union reproduces images of these words graffitied upon important monuments — a triumphal arch and a statue of Joan of Arc — in Bordeaux in the mid-70s. In Berger’s For the Abolition of Wage Labour, the slogan appears in a roughly drawn cartoon as coming from the mouths of workers, while, below them, a capitalist surrounded by a Fordist assembly line gesticulates wildly, declaiming, ‘That would disorganise everything !’ [21] Berger argues that May ’68 and the industrial disputes that have followed it hold within them, ‘in embryo’, the ‘abolition of wage labour’, and he speaks of the current struggles in terms of the ‘revolution against wage labour’. [22] Workers Union, likewise, draws attention to the words of Marx himself, who, in a speech to the WMA in June 1865, stated that ‘Instead of the conservative motto, “A fair day’s wage for a fair day’s work !” [Workers] ought to inscribe on their banner the revolutionary watchword, “Abolition of the wages system !”’ [23] One of Workers Union’s more inspired attacks was a pamphlet, widely circulated on 1 May 1975, entitled ‘Down with the Festival of Alienated Labour’. Instead of celebrating the heart of the alienation of the worker — a festival fit only for bureaucrats, priests and Stalinists — the worker ought instead to celebrate the ‘critique of alienated labour’. Elsewhere, Workers Union writes ominously : ‘Wage slavery is a horror without end, the communist revolution prepares for it an end full of horrors.’ [24]

The primary object of critique is obviously the productivism, the economism and the scientific organisation of labour — ‘fragmentary, uninteresting, gruelling labour’ [25] — that predominated in the post-war period. [26] Workers Union speaks of the ‘everyday prison of the factory’ and, beneath a mournful image of workers heading in to work, writes : ‘Slaves from birth to death’. [27] ‘The modern hell of the assembly line’, Workers Union writes, ‘time clocks, stopwatches, bonuses, Stakhanovisation and unpaid forced labour has pushed the extreme dehumanisation of all life to its limit.’ [28]

The socialist state, and the traditional conception of revolution within the Marxist and social-democratic workers’ movement, is, as such, far from being a negation of capitalism, but in many respects its apotheosis : ‘What is most miserable in workerism (whether it be Stalinist or leftist) is that it treats the proletariat purely as “labour power”, realising within its ideological heart what capital had already achieved in production.’ [29] The Friends of Four Million Young Workers express a similar sentiment in A World Without Money (1975–1976) : ‘Mandatory planning, collective ownership of the means of production, proletarian ideology … none of this has anything communist about it.’ [30] Even Fourier is, correctly, criticised for not seeking to abolish the wage labour system. These criticisms are, on the whole, not entirely new and owe a great deal to the Situationist International. However, what is new is that what was often merely implicit in the writing of the SI, specifically that which related to the critique of work, is made more explicit here and serves as the central pivot around which the critique turns. It is no longer the ‘construction of situations’ but the ‘abolition of wage labour’ that takes the foreground, an historical move that was, nevertheless, only possible thanks, in large part, to the critique of work developed within SI.

The critique of these post-Situationist groups, however, retains, and even deepens, the problem of remaining largely within the realm of the traditional Marxist conception of capitalism as a form of personal domination. Wage labour, rather than work per se, remains the main object of criticism because labour continues to be conceived of mainly as a transhistorical activity that is dominated by the ruling class. Most of these groups fall into the language of opposing the concrete ‘useful’ side of labour with its ‘bad’ abstract side. At the same time, there are a few surprising points that touch upon a more categorical critique. The Friends, for example, drawing on the recently published writings of the American anthropologist Marshall Sahlins, reject the notion of a pre-modern world as one defined by scarcity and note that ‘primitive man’ was ‘wealthy, not because he accumulated wealth, but because he lived as he wished’. The group also draws attention, as Vaneigem had done in The Revolution of Everyday Life, to the fact that the etymology of the French word ‘travail’, or labour, is torturous activity. [31] However, they noted that one of the key differences between the pre-modern and modern uses of the term was its generalised and universal character : ‘What characterises the word for work or labour is precisely its abstract quality. It no longer designates this or that special activity but activity and effort as such. One no longer plants cabbages, or weaves, or herds cattle ; one works. All work is basically the same.’ Unfortunately, this categorical insight stands largely on its own and does not become a basis for the rejection of the category as such. Rather, as in Situationist theory, it is the transformation of the activity, and even the construction of ‘situations’, that is imagined to form the basis of a universal form of activity beyond labour. ‘Communism’, the Friends state, ‘is first and foremost a radical transformation of human activity. In this respect one can speak of the abolition of labour.’

The 1970s distinguished themselves from the proceeding decade in another important respect. They introduced the theme of ecological and economic crisis as quasi-apocalyptical themes. In another cartoon from For the Abolition of Wage Labour, there is an image of a mushroom cloud with the words, ‘Utopia is continuing to believe that one can “earn a living” by destroying the planet’, while nearby a man dressed in rags responds, ‘You’re just saying that to discourage me, right ?’ The Friends of Four Million Young Workers similarly criticise the way in which the productivist logic of capitalism is so reductive in its attempts to dominate the natural that it treats a chicken as if it were a ‘factory for producing eggs’. [32] Likewise, Workers Union points out the absurdity of the ‘crap production’ that characterises modern wage labour : ‘Must we perpetuate wage slavery by polluting the entire planet in order to make guns, plastic bottles, deodorant, useless medicines, bombs, mineral water !’ [33] Berger simply entitles one article, ‘Wage Labour Is Pollution’. [34] Debord himself would take on the theme of ecology after May ’68, in his text, ‘Sick Planet’, written originally in 1971, but not published until 2004, ten years after his death in 1994. Raoul Vaneigem would likewise take on the issue of ecology as central to his critique of capitalism and continues to do so in his most recent work. [35] Another Situationist, René Riesel (1950–), would later support the movement in France to destroy genetically modified crops. [36] Today, in France, it is also the ‘degrowth’ movement that has taken on the theme of linking capitalist production to the destruction of the planet in a manner that has certain similarities with the ‘critique of value’. [37] The introduction of the theme of ecology into the critique of work in the 1970s was in large part due to the influence of authors such as Jacques Ellul, who corresponded with Debord, and Ivan Illich of the radical school of ecological thought. The global economic crisis equally provoked a number of reactions from the French anti-work milieu of the 1970s. Workers Union, in an article largely devoted to the situation in England, refers to the growing problems of unemployment and precarious work that led to a series of violent responses from workers internationally. The nature of the crisis is thought of squarely in terms of a crisis of overproduction and the traditional Marxist notion of the tendency of the rate of profit to fall. The group states unequivocally, however, that the crisis is a ‘mortal’ one and that there are no solutions — such as austerity — that can simply take us back to the post-war ‘society of abundance’. [38] Rather, capitalism is only able to respond with its traditional ‘remedies’ of war, credit, imperialism and mass unemployment. [39] The Friends of Four Million Young Workers foresee a future in which the development of productive technology would essentially make the proletariat, referred to as ‘human machines’, into a ‘superfluous’ population, reduced to the situation of ‘refugees’ or even, through violence, ‘totally eliminated’. [40] Berger, in contrast, rejects the notion that the contemporary crisis is fundamentally different to any other as capitalism is perpetually ‘in crisis’. [41] What all of these groups seem to agree upon, nevertheless, is that the ‘real’ crisis is not economic, but one brought about by the activity of the proletariat. Berger, for example, claims that the crisis of overaccumulation itself is brought about by the demands and struggles of European workers. [42] The Friends, likewise, suggest that even the development of new productive technologies results from the fact that workers are ‘too unruly’. [43] However, as Berger expresses it, it is above all the crisis of consciousness, the ‘struggle against the oppression of labour’, [44] that is understood to be at the heart of an ‘objective crisis of wage labour’ : the ‘attraction of a salary is no longer enough to compensate for the unattractiveness of work’. [45] The crisis of capitalism remains, as such, largely understood within subjective terms. [46]

Despite its popularity among a certain milieu, the critique of work in France in the 1970s can feel a little derivative, lacking innovation, at least in comparison to the earlier critiques that we have examined in the current work. There is, however, one area where this is not the case : the critique of the empirical ‘worker’. Workers Union, although it engaged in the traditional ultra-left critique of unions and parties as class ‘traitors’, continually decries the ‘patriotism’ of the factory and argues that it is necessary to develop a ‘realist political theory of the real proletariat’. [47] While recognising that the working class is, of course, the working class of its revolutionary moments — in particular May ’68 — and of resistance in the workplace, the group also insists that the working class is a class that demonstrates ‘an immense incapacity to even conceive of the possibility of a society without classes’. [48] French workers are criticised for wanting ‘interesting work’, for their ‘professionalism’ [fierté de métier], for wanting a ‘democratisation’ of the workplace, for taking pride in the creation of a ‘quality product’ (a concept the group found absurd in the context of planned obsolescence), for their chauvinism, their racism and for clapping when union bosses, such as Georges Séguy, general secretary of the Confédération générale du travail (CGT), give speeches in favour of French arms manufacture. [49] Even the recent LIP factory incident, where workers at a watchmaking factory, who had been let go, famously seized the premises and ran the company themselves for more than a year, is considered merely a ‘Pyrrhic victory’. [50] It is necessary, the group argues, to confront the ‘formidable spread of the cultural and moral values of the generalised Gulag’, which large swathes of workers have internalised. [51]

This critique of the proletariat from the left, consisting essentially of a critique of its positive identification with labour, is about recognising that the problem is not only the existence of an autonomous representation of the working class — in unions and parties — but also, and even primarily so, a class that is, except in exceptional circumstances, willing to listen to these kinds of pro-work discourse. One of the most vehement expressions of this kind of critique is addressed to workers who attended a union organised rally against unemployment in the name of the ‘right to work’ :

The tools of the bosses – the workers’ unions – must have really made you thick-headed that you would in your thousands demand to lose your life (whether you die in an accident at work or little by little), demand to be alienated, that is, you would submit to dispossession and the negation of yourselves through labour. Shit, when you work, you look forward to clocking out, you hate Mondays, you are always thinking about the weekend, about your days off, you love it when there is a power outage and the noise stops, the bosses run about and you are prevented from working. And you would wear out your shoes to go on a protest demanding work !!! You think that’s normal ? Or do you see that you are being fucked ? Do you see, for goodness’ sake, that your union masters have used you ? […] They order you (and you obey) not to contest exploitation, to go on surviving our shite existence. Moreover, they suggest that you should demand a shite existence : start work at eighteen, retire at sixty, return to a forty-hour workweek, more work, more work … ‘Let’s fatten capital’ would become, from this point of view, a good slogan. Go on, shout it ! […] Your union strategists do not say : ‘Death to labour, never work, let’s abolish wage slavery, right to laziness, death to survival’ … Wonder why… [52]

Although the criticisms are still couched in terms of a critique of the unions, it is clear here that Workers Union is addressing a working-class subject that lends itself to, and even actively promotes, a self-conception and an understanding of its confrontation with capital purely in terms of living labour. The group even goes as far as to say that ‘capital is workerist’, which, by implication, suggests that workerism is fundamentally capitalist. The next step might be to say that the ‘worker’ in as far as he or she exists as a ‘subject’ is nothing more than the ‘object’ of capital, that is, that the worker acting as a worker, and without a categorical critique of labour, is fundamentally capitalist. However, such a logical step was impossible for the ultra-left of the 1970s to make so long as it held onto a revolutionary theory in which capital created its own gravedigger in the ‘worker’. Essentially, Workers Union, like all the other groups of the period possessed of a critique of labour, was faced with the same conundrum as the Situationists : how to reconcile revolutionary theory in which the proletariat was to act as the ‘subject’ of history, bringing about the end of wage labour, with a ‘real existing’ proletariat that proved to be an integral part of the capitalist social matrix, even, for example, cheering for French arms manufacture because it creates jobs ? It was a question that, frankly, was never properly answered and remains a problem for most far-left currents.

Neither the Situationists nor the critics of work of the 1970s were unaware that capitalism was capable of adopting aspects of the critiques levelled against it. [53] The Situationists, after all, developed the concept of ‘recuperation’ precisely to describe the process whereby oppositional values and works of art that were originally designed to damage capitalism could, over time, be used to heal it again. In 1972, Guy Debord and Gianfranco Sanguinetti, the last remaining members of the SI, noted :

The language of power has become frantically reformist. It shows nothing but well-being in every store window, all sold at the best price ; it denounces the ever-present defects of its own system. The owners of society have suddenly discovered that everything has to be changed without delay, in education as in urbanism, just as thoroughly in the way work is lived as in the uses of technology. [54]

Debord recognises that capitalism was, in the 1970s, in the process of seeking to address the criticisms of the post-war spirit of capitalism. However, such ‘recuperation’ of criticisms directed at certain empirical phenomena — such as assembly line work — changes nothing essential about the domination of social life by the economy, the ‘Spectacle’, that Debord criticised in 1967. To the extent that the Situationists developed a categorical critique, the fundamental criticism cannot be recuperated. Workers Union, also, in the 1970s recognised that capitalism was in the process of reincorporating these criticisms back into itself. As we saw above, the group criticises concrete workers’ demands for the democratisation of the workplace, for ‘good’ bosses and for more interesting work. Berger, likewise, asks us to ‘imagine a self-managed factory making batons for the CRS [the riot police] or gadgets that break very quickly, as soon as one uses them, with, at the heart of it all, a self-managed boss and always wage labourers’ [55] It would be wrong therefore to suggest, as Boltanski and Chiapello seem to, that the ‘artistic’ critiques of work were unaware of the possibility that they could be incorporated, in some fashion, into capitalism. It was, in fact, a tendency that they were already witnessing. Nor is it entirely correct to suggest that they have been entirely denuded of radical potential. The central point is that it is only those aspects of the critique that are ‘affirmative’ in nature that are open to recuperation (and even then, only partially — it is not as though most work today is now ‘fun’ and ‘spontaneous’). The categorical critique of work, however, remains as relevant today as it was in 1967, or 1867 for that matter.

Towards a critique of abstract labour

As the ‘crisis of work’ began to wind down at the end of 1970s, the far left in France sought to address the reasons why the dreamt-of proletarian revolution had never materialised. Roland Simon and others associated with the journal Théorie Communiste, founded in 1978, criticised the preceding period of revolutionary theory as a form of ‘programmatism’. [56] Groups such as the Situationists, they argue, had imagined revolution as a programme — the abolition of work — that the proletariat would put into practice. The workers would, that is to say, immediately become autonomous from capitalism through the self-management of production. The problem, according to these more recent ‘Communisation’ theorists, is that such a model of revolution presupposes an essentialist conception of class that passes over the fact that the proletariat must come into conflict with its own being as a class through struggle. After the ‘crisis of work’, however, the proletariat is increasingly, through its immanent struggles, confronted by its own class being. Communism, as such, is understood as the struggle of the working class in the here and now to establish new social relations outside capitalist socialisation and, in so doing, overcome its class being. These criticisms, on the one hand, provided the far left with an explanation of the limitations of the preceding period and, on the other hand, did so in a way that permitted it to retain its traditional focus on class struggle as a motor of revolutionary social change. The proletariat could remain, for Simon and others, the subject of history. [57] The 1970s and 1980s also saw the emergence of a critique of work within academia and public intellectual life. André Gorz (1923–2007), a key theorist of the New Left in France and a journalist who co-founded Le Nouvel Observateur in 1967, took on many of the themes that had been addressed within the ‘crisis of work’ of the 1970s and that were brought increasingly to the fore as the global economic crisis deepened. Gorz courted controversy among the left when he published Farewell to the Proletariat (1980), an unequivocal critique of the cult of the worker that had dominated the traditional workers’ movement. [58] In this text, Gorz argues that the working class no longer represents the only road to resolving the social issues raised by the new productive technologies. Likewise, in A Critique of Economic Reason (1988), Gorz takes issue with the persistence of the Protestant work ethic and seeks to historicise labour with reference to the writing of Karl Polanyi. [59] Gorz, throughout his life, essentially sought out what he considered to be workable solutions to the problems of a society organised around the system of wage labour in the context of the global economic crisis. He was for or a long time one of the greatest proponents in France of introducing a universal income as official public policy. Nevertheless, his critique of capitalism remained, until the end of his life, largely within the confines of an affirmative critique of labour. His main focus of criticism is on the empirical problems themselves and not on the deeper categories that lay behind them. It was only later, thanks in part to his friendship with the French philosopher Jean-Marie Vincent (1934–2004), that Gorz became interested in a categorical critique of labour. [60]

Jean-Marie Vincent is an important figure in the history of the development of a categorical critique of labour in France. Vincent was an academic who founded the political science department at Paris VIII university. He was also a member of the Revolutionary Communist League (though his ideas diverged greatly from the Trotskyist mainstream of the group). Vincent spoke fluent German and was deeply affected by the reinterpretations of Marx’s theory that occurred across the Rhine in the 1970s. He was, moreover, one of the first to introduce the French speaking public to the foundations of these debates in The Critical Theory of the Frankfurt School (1976). [61] Vincent, perhaps in contrast to many of his French contemporaries, displays a deep understanding of the esoteric reading of Marx, that is, the categorical nature of the critiques levelled at value and labour in the Grundrisse and Capital. There are many similarities between Vincent’s work and certain critique of value theorists such as Moishe Postone. Anselm Jappe states that his seminal study, The Critique of Work : Doing and Acting (1987) [62], is the French book that ‘most closely resembles the critique of value’. [63] We might add that Vincent also recognises aspects of value-dissociation. [64] It would not be going too far to say that Vincent represents perhaps the first example of a self-consciously categorical critique of labour in French thought. He understands that labour is an historically specific, negative and fetishistic category that dominates the concrete world in the tautological cycle of the valorisation of value : labour for the sake of labour. Moreover, Vincent criticises the post-modern trend in French thought on the basis that it tends to treat the abstractions that dominate social life purely in terms of language, that is, codes and symbols of power. Vincent, in contrast, insists that there are ‘real abstractions’ that dominate social life. [65]

Vincent equally breaks with the traditional Marxist cult of work and its teleology of praxis, or action, that conceives of human beings purely in terms of an objectification of the subject through the labour process. [66] He criticises, for example, the phenomenological focus of traditional sociology on the basis that researchers have ‘largely adopted the perspective of labour as activity’, that is, not as a determinate moment in the supra sensible process of the valorisation of value. [67] Sociology, as a result, seeks to understand labour through empirical categories — such as the satisfaction or dissatisfaction of workers — in order to give it meaning. Vincent argues, however, that it is incorrect to assume that human beings define work. Rather, the opposite is true. An ‘epistemological reversal’ is required in order to allows us to see that it is work, in the historically specific sense of abstract labour, that defines or at least ‘strongly marks’ us : ‘Labour as a social relationship detaches itself in some sense from those who produce it in order to subordinate them and carry them in its movement.’ [68] As such, Vincent argues that all manner of changes could be made to the world of work — including automation and the democratisation of the workplace — without changing anything essential about work per se. [69] Vincent suggests, in fact, that it is only once capitalism threw off its pre-modern forms of authoritarian discipline that the full fetishism of labour could develop and lead to the belief that it constitutes a form of individual expression. [70]

Vincent, in ‘The Legend of Labour’, also takes aim at another sacred cow of the left. [71] He argues that the subject of living labour, the worker, is not actually in the best position to understand what labour is due to his identification with it. The worker, in as far as he exists within the strictly phenomenological world of labour, apprehends only the specific activity in question. Work per se appears, from this limited perspective, as a relationship between the worker, his tools and his end-product. [72] However, labour is not essentially or even primarily a human relationship between subject, man, and its object, nature. Rather, it is simply a point in the process of the valorisation of value for its own sake :

It is a moment in the coming into relationship of the value form of technology and the value of form activity in order to give a value form to products (material or immaterial). In this sense, the labour process is the process of transforming values into values, a process in which the supra-sensible (valorisation) overdetermines the sensible. [73]

The phenomenological reality of labour, the sensible experience, is determined by the metaphysical, the supra-sensible, literally that which cannot be ascertained directly with the senses. The simple fact of experiencing work, while it might incite revolt, does not give a worker special access to understanding its essential nature or determinate form. The worker, in other words, does not occupy a special subject position that, thanks to his closeness to the labour process, gives him immediate, direct, access to the fetishistic social process in which he is caught. Vincent argues, moreover, that it is only when the worker has demonstrated that he can adapt to the exigencies of valorisation (that he has become an object) that he is allowed to express himself through labour (and is therefore awarded the status of subject). [74] Even when workers engage in collective action to improve working and living conditions, the degree of ‘sociability’ that can be attained is limited to what is permissible under the valorisation of value. [75] Any anti-capitalist movement must therefore seek to go beyond the valorisation of value to be at all effective. [76]

The fact that a certain ‘artistic’ critique of work was incorporated into the management speak of the late 1980s and 1990s does not immediately invalidate every aspect of that critique, nor does it mean that all forms of anti-work discourse are equally ‘recuperable’. Jean-Marie Vincent, in the best of his writing, represents a continuation of the tradition of the critique of work that has been examined in the current work, but on a more solid theoretical foundation. Although he still couches opposition to capitalism in terms of a workers’ movement that confronts it, his critique is aimed squarely at the categories themselves. [77] He is careful, that is to say, to distinguish between the ontological and phenomenological levels of critique. Vincent is, in this sense, close to Marx, but arguably goes much further. He emphasises the oppressive character of labour as such, labour qua labour, labour sans phrase. Vincent’s critique therefore embodies an alternative solution to the impasse in which the ‘critique of work’ in France found itself in the 1970s. The categorical nature of his critique and others like it means that they are logically less likely to be open to the kind of recuperation that the ‘artistic’ critique suffered over the course of the past 50 years. Today, the critique of work remains a vibrant tradition in France, and it will be all the more effective if it continues to develop on the basis of an ‘ontological break’ with abstract labour.