THE PRINCIPLE OF HOPE

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life there is no rest, but rather our energies are still to be exercised on higher objects in further spheres of activity. The paradises of the orientals have
nothing of this, and someone who must know better than we do what things are like there does not place the blessed at a loom again for example, but
rather at the table with Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.
Johann Peter Hebel, The Jews
The realm of freedom begins in fact only where working which is determined by deprivation and external expediency ceases; it therefore lies in
accordance with the nature of the matter beyond the sphere of actual material production.
Marx, Das Kapital, III2
The whip of hunger
Let us return to a simpler spot again. To the ground at our feet, which is mostly hard. In previous social life lives the suffering which longs most powerfully for a remedy
and dreams it most exactly. Hunger forces us to work, but this work wears us out in its own way exactly like hunger. The entrepreneur who is eager for his profit does
not know what this sort of work is, that of the servant; artists and scientists do not know any more about it either, though for different reasons. For it is drudgery,
imposed, imposed for alien purposes; only the proletarian and the employee know the whole dreary extent of this drudgery. Work has furthermore become more
monotonous than before, where at least a whole piece was still to be made with love. A piece which gave the craftsman the pleasure of being created and skilfully
completed. Whereas the worker who, through the division of labour, increasingly lost sight of the whole piece, makes only a part, day in, day out the same part of the
same screw, without love, with hatred, mitigated only by desolation, and with the same flick of the wrist. The wish has always existed to shake off imposed work, or at
least to reduce the time which is spent on it. But dependent people never succeed in this or not for long.
From the casemates of the bourgeoisie
The poor man always has to earn every mouthful the hard way first. The master is one by squeezing the servant dry, by living off his work. With the goods which the
worker produces beyond his own requirements (kept