the romanticization of labour - call it the protestant work ethic if you'd rather - is a bourgeois position designed to maximize surplus value by warping the minds of workers. it's propaganda, and it's necessary for the system to function; in turn, leftists need to stop buying into it if they have any kind of meaningful revolutionary ambitions.

i've always wondered why politicians make that pilgrimage to auschwitz. is it to push this idea of never forgetting? or is it far more nefarious than that? because the protestant work ethic, the romanticization of labour, has another formulation, namely work will set you free. and, those work camps are merely the idea taken to it's most violent, brutal conclusion.

the orientation of the left should not be to romanticize work. it should be to help construct the conditions that allow us, one day, to walk away from it.