‘The worker feels himself at home only outside his work and feels absent from himself in his work. He feels at home when he is not working, and not at home when he is working. His work is not freely consented to, but is a constrained, forced labour. Work is thus not a satisfaction of a need, but only a means to satisfy needs outside of work.’
In these terms Marx analysed work relations over a century ago, at a time when the physical conditions of work were, almost everywhere brutal and dehumanizing. From a contemporary perspective, this description of work during the Industrial Revolution cannot fail to ring true: forced labour was indeed the condition of the working class. But it is hardly necessary to recall that Marx was not engaged solely in a description of working conditions in his time; the purpose of his critique was to pierce the opaqueness of the capitalist system and to reveal those aspects—including the relations and purpose of work—that were fundamental to it.