Work could be defined only as an activity that an economic agent agrees to carry out for remuneration. The rest – the social function of work, the meaning it takes on for those who exercise it, the time devoted to it – could be left to individual appreciation or else to contractual agreement. But no. With us, work is something stronger, bigger. It is a “value”. This famous “work value” which a commonly received opinion would have Nicolas Sarkozy have, like a political Prometheus, stolen from the left, which would never have really recovered.
In fact, on a television set, Sandrine Rousseau was heard declaring that work is a “right-wing value”, to which Pierre Nora replied, wearily, that work had been at the heart of the values of the left and had to stay. Which of the two is right? It’s all so complicated.
Thus, what is (or was) right-wing, the hatred of productive work, the celebration of leisure, is theotium aristocratic (a otium that sometimes embellishes opium). What is or was on the left is the refusal of work as the exploitation of man by man, and therefore as the transformation of human life into a factor of production. However, what is or was on the left is the conception of work which emancipates, makes it possible to trace one’s own path, frees from the determinisms of birth, and thus manufactures the pride of the worker, mother of all struggles. Quite clearly on the right, on the other hand, is the virtue of work as a social discipline, the celebration of the order that it builds, of the morality that it develops, made up of probity and honesty in contrast to an idleness that is the mother of all vices. The idea that work allows the constitution of a capital, affirmation and condition of an irrefutable freedom, correlated to the talent of each one, is rather on the right.
From there, a fairly right-wing conception: the priority given to profit over working conditions, the search for gain against regulation, therefore work as an accumulation of assets. What seems to be on the left is work as a non-monetary activity, the praise of commitment, sometimes voluntary, in the service of the common, or even this choice to face the wounds of society in defiance significant remuneration, to “give meaning” to his life. But on closer examination, this vision also that of a certain right, when the charitable commitment is also based on a mistrust of the State and its unequivocal priorities. We could also compare the dream (on the right) of corporations and that (on the left) of communities, etc.
Work, a collective myth
The “work value” is all this and many other things. It’s a lot of heritage, traditions, social and political experiences. No doubt by dint of adjustments and negotiations, the government was hoping for a reform that was less systemic than parametric, less philosophical than technical, which would somewhat neutralize the “work value” in favor of somewhat gray but less inflammable accounting logic. The ace ! Ambition has fizzled out, because the “work value” is back in a boomerang.
We wanted the affair to be economic and social, it is through and through philosophical and moral. For a few more terms, the work is scrutinized from all angles: its meaning, its nature, its organization, and even its necessity. We see the specters of Paradise Lost, of Plato, of Rousseau, of Proudhon, Marx, Lafargue, Kropotkine, of the kibbutz and the phalansteries, of the ZADs and the national workshops, of the yellow vests and the great strikes. Added to this is a lively questioning of the new forms of work emerging before our eyes, particularly among young people, of these demographic data which seem to condemn the pay-as-you-go model, of the metamorphosis of the very nature of employment that promises so now the refinement of the AI.
It is that basically work is less a “value” than a collective myth, less a factor of production than a vector of passions, less a subject of reform than a deep nerve of our national imagination. It is, therefore, one of the only really great political subjects of our time.