Work, a Value in Decline

Part of why work feels impossible to dislodge, Méda argues, is that we have quietly loaded it with three very different meanings and then fused them into one. We use a single word for three distinct things, and because they share a name, we assume they must come as a package. Pulling them apart is the heart of her argument, because once separated they stop supporting each other quite so neatly.

The first face is work as a factor of production — the economic sense. Here work is a cost, an input, something firms buy and organize to produce goods and services. In this register, the aim is efficiency, and the logic points toward using as little labor as possible, not as much. The second face is work as the essence of the human being — the anthropological and philosophical sense inherited from the nineteenth century. Here work is self-realization, the arena where we express and develop who we are, the thing that supposedly makes us fully human. The third face is work as the foundation of the social bond and of rights — the sense in which a job gives you a place in society, an income, a pension, protection, recognition, a reason to be counted.

If work has been so overloaded, why has no one managed to loosen its grip? Méda's answer is that the great emancipatory movements of the modern era, which might have offered alternatives, instead doubled down on work as the road to freedom. The utopia of liberation through labor became the shared horizon of otherwise opposed camps, and that consensus is remarkably hard to escape.

Marx is the central figure here, and Méda reads him with both admiration and critique. Marx inherited the Hegelian idea of work as human self-creation and made it the axis of his vision: under capitalism work is alienated, but freed from exploitation it would become the fulfilling activity through which humanity realizes itself. The problem, in Méda's reading, is that this keeps work at the summit of value. The socialist project did not dethrone work; it promised to purify it. Liberation meant better work, truer work, work finally reconciled with human nature — not a life organized around something other than work.

Step back, and Méda's deeper target comes into view: not work itself, but the decision to make it the single yardstick of individual worth and collective health. A society that measures itself almost entirely by its employment rate, its productivity, its growth, is a society that has smuggled a contested value into the status of a neutral fact. The question she presses is whether we could learn to measure ourselves differently — and, crucially, she is careful not to hand us a finished answer.

Méda is skeptical of the easy exits. She resists the celebratory "end of work" rhetoric that imagines automation ushering in effortless leisure; she doubts that technology alone will free us, and she worries that such talk masks a brutal reality where some have too much work and others none. Her instinct is less toward abolishing work than toward demoting it — returning it to the rank of one important human activity among several, rather than the activity that swallows all the others.

We began with the child asked what she wants to be, already answering with a job. Méda's history gives that scene a different texture. The reflex that makes us collapse a whole life into an occupation is not the natural order of things but the residue of a two-century project that promoted work from curse to calling, loaded it with three incompatible meanings, and routed every dream of emancipation through it. Seeing that it was built means seeing that it could be built otherwise.