ALTHOUGH he was talking about the production of raw materials, rather than what has since evolved into modern man’s obsession with consumption, Karl Marx (1818-1883) rightly posited that under capitalism humans tend to ‘fetishize’ goods. Even more accurate, however, is the fact that Marx himself tended to ‘fetishize’ labour. As the journalist, Stuart Jeffries, notes:

“Marx’s concept of work was to prove particularly controversial for the Frankfurt School. His suggestion was that man and woman need to work to flourish and achieve dignity. Even in a communist paradise, we must work.”

In fact it was one of the Frankfurt School’s most foremost thinkers, Max Horkheimer (1895-1973), who explained that

“to make labour into a transcendent category of human activity is an ascetic ideology. […] Because socialists hold to this general concept, they make themselves into carriers of capitalist propaganda.”

Horkheimer’s observation, as is evidenced by the number of left-wing demonstrators who carry placards demanding ‘the right to work,’ is absolutely correct. Another Frankfurt School ideologue, Walter Benjamin (1892-1940), says essentially the same thing:

“This vulgar Marxist conception of labour […] already displays the technocratic features later encountered in Fascism […] The new conception of labour amounts to the exploitation of nature which with naive complacency is contrasted with the exploitation of the proletariat.”