THE PRINCIPLE OF HOPE

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Leisure as imperative, only half explored goal
The path there is an economic one, masters and servants have to go. Social order eliminates both, in the same accomplishment, and much more as well. Previous
economic contradictions disappear, discordance that remains produces no external and filthy misery any more. The differences between manual and brain work,
between country and city disappear, but above all, as far as possible, those between work and leisure. They only acquired this harshness through capitalism anyway;
pre­capitalist production knew work with more share in works made by hand and joy with less dreariness. Socialism, by removing from work the drudgery for others,
has already largely taken the alienation from it. But only a classless society contains the basis to liberate work, that reduced to a minimum, from the curse of alienation
completely and leisure from the devil's blessings of the ‘Grande Jatte’. It eliminates the expropriation of work from man, that in which the worker feels himself to be
expropriated, alienated, a reified commodity, and is therefore unhappy in his work. The classless society removes from leisure, by means of the same re­expropriation,
the unlived emptiness, the Sunday thoroughly corresponding (and not contrasting) to the dreariness of work. It removes from leisure above all the false kind, nurtured
by that type of ideology which belongs to illusion and consequently ends in cliché and total fraud. This ideology began only with the appearance of master and slave, is
solely posited with the class society based on the division of labour and disappears with it, as separation of social being and consciousness. The origin of this ideology,
as Marx presents it, explains precisely its end without resurrection: ‘The division of labour only really becomes division from the moment when a division of material and
intellectual labour occurs. From this moment on, consciousness can really imagine it is something other than the consciousness of prevailing practice, that it really
represents something without representing something real — from this moment on, consciousness is capable of emancipating itself from the world and giving itself over
to the formation of ‘‘pure theory”, theology, philosophy, and morality. But even if this theory, theology, philosophy, morality etc. enter into contradiction with prevailing
conditions, this can only occur through the prevailing social conditions having entered into contradiction with the prevailing force of production’ (Deutsche Ideologie,
Dietz, 1953, p. 28). With these sentences Marx unequivocally cites class division as the origin, and class society as the support of ideology,