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Critique of work or critique of labour is the critique of, and/or wish to abolish, work as such, and to critique what the critics of works deem wage slavery.[1][2][3]
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.[1][4][3] But the critique of work can also highlight how excessive work may cause harm to nature, the productivity of society, and/or society itself.[5][6][7] 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.[8][2][1][9]
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was invoked but never defined (see the help page).Thinkers such as André Gorz, Bertrand Russell, Herbert Marcuse, and even Marx, in his later writings, have argued for the expansion of a realm of freedom beyond the necessities of labour, in which individuals have more liberty to transcend biological and economic imperatives and be 'free for the world and its culture'
[...]it was the successes of the proletarian struggle for shorter hours that provoked capital to mechanize production[...]
Unsurprisingly, work is increasingly regarded as bad for your health: "Stress … an overwhelming 'to-do' list … [and] long hours sitting at a desk," the Cass Business School professor Peter Fleming notes in his new book, The Death of Homo Economicus, are beginning to be seen by medical authorities as akin to smoking.
Gorz, for example, pointed to the irrationality of a society that strives for full-employment in spite of having developed the technological means to conquer scarcity.