From https://old.reddit.com/r/theideologyofwork/comments/blql8o/the_ideology_of_work_by_jacques_ellul/

One must, before every inquiry or consideration regarding work in our society, become aware of the fact that everything here is dominated by the ideology of work. In almost all traditional societies, work is regarded as neither a good thing nor a main activity. The important moral value of work appears in the western world in the 17th century in England, in Holland, then in France and it develops in these three countries gradually with economic growth. How does one explain this, starting with the mental and moral change which entails going from work as grief and punishment or an unavoidable necessity, to work as a moral value and a good thing? One must observe that this reinterpretation which leads to the ideology of work stems from the coincidence of four events that changed western society. First of all, work becomes more and more punishing with industrial development – and obviously more inhumane. Working conditions worsen considerably in passing from cottage industry and even from factory manufacturing (which was already hard but not inhumane.) This produces a new kind of work – merciless. And since, with the necessity of capital accumulation, wages are less than product value, work becomes more invasive: it encompasses a man’s whole life. At the same time, the worker is required to make his wife and children work in order to manage to survive. Work is thus, at once, more inhuman than it was for slaves and more totalitarian, leaving no room in life for anything else – no play, no independence, no family life. It appears to the workers to be a kind of fate, a kind of destiny. It was thus essential to compensate for this inhuman state of affairs through a sort of ideology (which, by the way, appears here as corresponding exactly to the ideological view according to Marx), which turned work into a virtue, a good thing, a redemption, an uplift. If work had still been interpreted as a curse, this would have been completely intolerable for the worker.

Yet this popularization of “A Good Job” is particularly necessary in order for the society of this era to abandon its traditional values. And this is the second factor. On the one hand, the ruling classes stop believing devoutly in Christianity. On the other hand, the workers who are uprooted country folk, lost in the city, have no relationship with their old-fashioned beliefs. Consequently one must quickly invent a replacement ideology – a network of values to integrate oneself into. For the bourgeois, value is going to become that which is the origin of their power, of their advancement. Work (and then Money). For the workers, we’ve just seen that one must also furnish them with some explanation, or validation, or justification of their circumstances, and at the same time a value system adapted to be substituted for the traditional one. In this way, the ideology of work appears and grows in the absence of other beliefs.

But there is a third factor: what has become the necessity for systemic economic growth is taken to be valuable – has become essential. Economics didn’t take a primary place in thought until the 17th and 18th centuries. Economic activity is the creator of (economic) value. It becomes in the thought of the elites – and not just of the bourgeoisie – the center of development, of civilization. How, from then on, [could one] not attribute to it an essential place in one’s moral life. Yet what is the determining factor in this economic activity, the most beautiful aspect of man, is work. Everything rests on diligent work. This is not yet clearly formulated in the 18th century but many are those who already understand that work produces economic value. And one passes quite early from this value to the other (moral or spiritual) one. It was quite necessary that this activity, so fundamentally materialistic, be justified morally and psychologically as well. Creator of economic value – one employs the same word to say that he is the founder of moral and social value.

Finally, a last factor comes to assure this predominance. The ideology of work appears when there is a decisively greater separation between those who command and those who obey within the internal operation of the same production process. Between the one who exploits and the one who is exploited, corresponding to radically different categories of work. In the traditional system, there is the one who works and the one who doesn’t work. There is a difference between the intellectual worker and the manual worker. But there was no radical opposition between the tasks of organization or even of command and those of execution – a much greater degree of initiative had been left to the manual. In the 18th century, he who organizes work and who exploits it is himself a worker (and not a non-worker like the lord of the manor) and everything is taken from the labor circuit but with total opposition between the exploited subordinate and the managing exploiter. There are totally different categories of work in the economic domain. These are, I believe, the four factors that lead to the formulation (spontaneous, not Machiavellian) of the ideology of work, a strategy which plays in all ideologies: on the one hand, conceal the real situation by transposing it into an ideal realm, by directing all attention to the ideal, the noble, the virtuous; on the other hand, justify this same situation by coloring it with the colors of goodness and meaning. This ideology of work has infiltrated all places. It even rules to a large extent our habits of thinking.

Such, therefore, are the principal elements of this ideology: first of all, the central idea that becomes evident is that man is made for work. There is no other alternative in life. Life can only be fulfilling through work. I recall a certain tombstone with its only inscription, under the name of the deceased, “work was his life.” There was nothing else to say about the man’s entire life. And at the same time in the first half of the 19th century appeared the idea that man had been separated from the animals – had truly become man – because from the very beginning he had worked. Work had made man. The distance between the ape and man had been established through work. And, quite significant, while in the 18th century one calls prehistoric man in general homo sapiens, at the beginning of the 19th century the one who’s going to take precedence will be homo faber: man making tools for work. (I know, of course, that this had been linked to actual discoveries of prehistoric tools but this change of emphasis remains illuminating.) Even as work is, at its origin, human, likewise it is work which can give meaning to life. This [life] has no meaning in and of itself. Man brings to it [meaning] through his works and the fulfillment of his person through his work which, itself, has no need to be justified, legitimized. Work has meaning in itself. It brings with it its own reward – both through the moral satisfaction of the “accomplished task” and, in addition, through the material benefits that each draws from his work. It brings with it its own compensation and, moreover, a complementary compensation (money, reputation, justification.) “Steady work conquers all.” This motto becomes the major premise of the 19th century. Because work is the father of all virtues and laziness the mother of all vices. The lines of Voltaire, one of the originators of the ideology of work, are utterly illuminating on the subject: “Work rids us of three great evils: boredom, depravity, and want” and even “Make men work. You will make them honest people”. And it’s not for nothing that it should be precisely Voltaire who brings to the forefront the virtue of work. For he is the one who becomes virtue justified. One can commit many sins of all degrees, but if one is a hard worker, one is forgiven. One step more and we come to the assertion, which is not modern, that “Work is freedom.” This slogan brings with it a tragic sound today because we remember the slogan at the entrance to the Hitlerian camps “Work makes you free.” But in the 19th century one reasoned quite seriously that, in fact, only the worker is free, as opposed to the itinerant who depends on circumstances and the beggar who depends on the good will of others. The worker, he – each knows it – depends on no one. How about his work! In this way the slavery of work is transformed into a guarantee of liberty.

And from this moral we find two applications more modern: the West has seen in its capacity to work the justification and, at the same time, the explanation for its superiority with regard to all the peoples of the world. The Africans were lazy. It was a moral obligation to teach them to work, and it was a rationalization of the conquest. One couldn’t grasp the point of view that one stops working if one has enough to eat for two or three days. The conflicts between western employers and Arab or African workers between 1900 and 1940 were countless with regard to that theme. But, quite remarkably, this valorization of man through work has been adopted by some feminist movements. Man has kept woman subordinate because only he carries out socially recognized work. Woman is validated today only if she “works” – not counting housekeeping and child raising to be labor because it is not productive, monetized work. G. Halimi says, for example, “The great injustice is that woman has been separated from professional life by man.” It is this segregation that prevents women from reaching their full humanity. And even makes us regard them as the last colonized people. In other words, work which in industrial society is effectively at the source of value, which becomes the origin of all reality, finds itself transformed by ideology into surreality, vested with an ultimate meaning from which all life takes its meaning. Work is in this way identified with all morality and takes the place of all other values. It is the bearer of the future. This, whether it concerns the future of the individual or that of the collective, rests on the efficacy and generality of work. And at school one teaches the child – first of all and above all – the sacred value of work. It is the basis (along with nationalism) of primary education from 1860 to around 1940. This ideology is going to completely infiltrate the generations.

And this leads to two obvious consequences (among others.) First of all, we are a society which has gradually put everyone to work. The man of independent financial means, like the nobleman and the monk (both of them idlers of olden days) becomes a vile character towards the end of the 19th century. Only the worker is worthy of the name man. And at school one puts the child to work – although never in any civilization did one make children work. (I’m not talking about the atrocious industrial and mine work of children in the 19th century, which was incidental and not linked to the value of work but to the capitalist system.) And the other consequence noticeable nowadays: one cannot comprehend what the life of a man would be if he shouldn’t work. The unemployed man, even if he should receive adequate compensation, remains out-of-sync and practically disgraced by the absence of some socially redeeming activity. Too much leisure time is troubling, accompanied by a bad conscience. And one must also consider numerous “tragedies of retirement.” The retiree feels frustrated for the most part. His life no longer has productivity or legitimization. It no longer serves anything. It’s a very widespread feeling that stems strictly from the fact that ideology has convinced the man that the only normal use for his life was work.

This ideology of work exhibits a totally specific interest to the extent that it is a perfect example of the idea (which one mustn’t generalize) that the dominant ideology is the ideology of the dominant class. Or even that this imposes its own ideology on the dominant class. In fact, this ideology of work is, with the expansion of industry, an integral creation of the bourgeois class. This replaces all morality with the morality of work. But it’s not in order to fool the workers. It’s not in order to cause them to work more. Because it [the bourgeois class] itself believes in it. It is the bourgeoisie which, for itself, puts work above all. And the first bourgeois generations (the captains of industry for example) are made of men devoted to work – working more than anyone. One devises this morality not to constrain others, but as justification for what one does oneself. The bourgeoisie no longer holds religious values and holds few traditional values. It replaces all of it with this ideology that simultaneously legitimizes what it does, the way in which it lives, and also the system itself that it organizes and arranges. But of course, we have already said how, like every ideology, this one serves to conceal, to hide the condition of the proletariat. (If it works, it is not by force but by virtue.) Yet what is fascinating is to observe that this ideology produced by the bourgeoisie becomes the ideology deeply held and essential to the working class and its thinkers. Like most socialists, Marx traps himself within this ideology. He, who himself has been so clear in criticizing bourgeois thought fully embraces the ideology of work. The writings abound in it: “History is nothing but the creation of man through human labor. Work created man himself.” (Engels).

And here are some pretty lines from Marx himself:

“In your use of my product, I will directly benefit from the awareness of having satisfied a human need and reified man’s essence, of having been for you the intermediary between you and the human race, of being thus recognized and felt by you as a complement to your own being and a necessary part of yourself. Thus in my being confirmed as much as in your thought as in your love, of having created in the individual expression of my life, the expression of your life, of having thus attested to and produced directly in my work…the essence of humanity, my social essence.” – K. Marx, Manuscript. 1844.

“It’s in the shaping of the world of objects by his work that man actually reveals himself as a species-being. His production – it is his species-life creator. Through it, nature appears as his work and his reality. It’s for this reason that the goal of work is the objectification man’s species-life because he doesn’t duplicate himself, ideally, through his consciousness but, in reality, as creator. In this way, he sees himself in a world that he has made for himself through his work.” – K. Marx, Manuscript. 1844.

And one of Marx’s merciless attacks against capitalism will address exactly this point. Capitalism has degraded human work. It turns it into a debasing and alienating thing. Work in this world is no longer work. (He forgot that it was this world that had fabricated this noble image of work!) Capitalism must be condemned, among other reasons, so that work can rediscover its nobility and its value. Marx, by the way, attacked at the same time the anarchists – the only ones to to be skeptical about the ideology of work – on this point. “Work, by its nature, is the manifestation of man’s personality. The object produced expresses man’s individuality, his objective and tangible extension. It is the means of direct subsistence, and the confirmation of his individual existence.” In this way, Marx interprets everything through work, and his celebrated demonstration that only work is the creator of value rests on this bourgeois ideology (for that matter, there were many bourgeois economists who, before Marx, had made out of work the origin of value…) But it’s not just the socialist thinkers who are going to adopt this perspective. The workers themselves and the trade unions also [adopt it.] During the whole last part of the the 19th century, one witnesses the advancement of the word “Workers”. Only the workers are justified in, and have the right to be honored, as opposed to the idlers and persons of leisure who are vile by nature. And what is more, by “Worker” one understands only the manual worker. In the period around 1900, there will be heated debates within the trade unions to determine if one can grant to functionaries, intellectuals, and staff members the noble title of worker. Likewise in the trade unions, one doesn’t stop repeating, between 1880 and 1914, that work ennobles man, that a good trade unionist must be a better worker than the others. One spreads the idea of a job well done, etc… And finally, today in the trade unions, one demands above all the just distribution of the products of labor, and even the allocation of power to the workers. In this way one can say that, in a very general way, trade unions and socialists have contributed to the dissemination of this ideology of work and to strengthen it, which in fact is quite understandable!