The confusion between human activity and work is intrinsic to capitalist ideology, and it is essential to this ideology to maintain this confusion, which is reflected in the constant sacralization of the notion of work, attempting to make us forget that this “work” is above all and for everyone a dispossession of the possibilities of their own activity in favor of something that is fundamentally foreign to them. This “something” is, when we look closely, nothing other than the endless growth of capital, its cannibalistic valorization at the expense of all truly human activity. In the capitalist world, everyone is therefore more or less forced to give up the activity that could give meaning to their life, that would allow them to express their particular form of existence and their individual talents, in favor of this dehumanized abstraction that we also call political economy. In this world, the human subject does not exist, their aspirations are denied, their possibilities for fulfillment reduced to insignificance, since it is the needs of the Market and not their own that will be decisive, most of the time in total contradiction with everything they could wish for.
To this end, capitalism has constantly worked to dissolve social ties and eradicate any sense of belonging to an effective community, a community where the need for activity specific to each individual could be expressed in the common interest. But capitalism, in its particular objectives, reigns only through separation, generalized competition, and the disguised slavery that is work. There is no doubt that the massive deployment, from the mid-nineteenth century onwards, of machinery and technologies specifically geared towards increasing profit and based on a purely quantitative logic played a decisive role in this dispossession, which resulted in transforming the bulk of human activity into work and then turning the worker into a mere cog in the machine.
Marx, at that time, in his preparatory studies for Capital, in his Grundrisse, already discerned the process quite clearly: “The activity of the worker, reduced to a mere abstraction of activity, is determined and regulated on all sides by the movement of machinery, and not the other way around. (…) The consideration of the labor process as a mere moment in the process of capital valorization is also posited from a material point of view by the transformation of the tool of labor into machinery, and of living labor into a mere living accessory of this machinery; as a means of its action.”
We can see, then, that far from aiding human activity (living labor), the technologies and scientism of the megamachine of capital have only served to marginalize and debase it. Human beings find themselves stripped of their unique expression and creative resources. They are increasingly reduced to the role of accessories to the blind march of political economy and under the constant threat of appearing completely superfluous and therefore, within this system, deprived of all resources.
The increasingly invasive and alienating grip of digital technology in the contemporary world only serves to complete this process. The difference is that it is no longer the workers who are directly threatened, but the white-collar workers, the entire proliferating middle class that in previous decades had believed itself to be immune to modernization and even to be its beneficiaries, without ever measuring the loss that accompanied it. The functions they performed in the service of the megamachine will now be carried out without too much difficulty by AI. Yet the cheerleaders of the capitalist religion continue to proclaim at every turn and without shame that we must work, work more and work longer—under the pretext that there is a debt; without it being clear where this debt comes from, who is responsible for it, or to whom it should be paid… Sorry, guys, but you’ll have to deal with your debt and your work yourselves, because as far as we’re concerned, we’re going to try to make room for creative activity for everyone, and we’re really not going to have time to work.
