{"id":13456,"date":"2022-06-13T23:30:53","date_gmt":"2022-06-13T21:30:53","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.sciencespo.fr\/research\/cogito\/home\/comment-le-travail-est-devenu-un-concept-revolutionnaire\/"},"modified":"2022-06-14T17:28:29","modified_gmt":"2022-06-14T15:28:29","slug":"how-work-became-a-revolutionary-concept","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.sciencespo.fr\/research\/cogito\/home\/how-work-became-a-revolutionary-concept\/?lang=en","title":{"rendered":"How Work Became a Revolutionary Concept"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Karl Marx, painted portrait. Cr\u00e9dits : Courtesy of Organ Museum, Thierry Ehrmann, CC BY 2.0, Flickr<\/p><\/div>\n

On the eve of the 1848 revolution, the founders of contemporary socialism\u2014primarily Karl Marx and Pierre-Joseph Proudh\u2014\u2014saw the working class as a unified entity: a revolutionary subject whose action would overthrow the capitalist system and establish socialism. These ideas were quite new at the time. Twenty years earlier, workers were rarely considered as a social class, let alone as the political subject of a socialist ideology. The world of work was often divided into trades, including by the workers themselves. Many reasons drove the conceptual shift, but they are mainly attributable to the emergence of a new take on work, considered as the only activity with economic, political, and moral value. This approach quickly split into two discourses on work: a liberal and a socialist one.<\/p>\n

\u201cGet rich!\u201d<\/h4>\n

The idea of the working class as a unified group defined by a commensurable activity called work is not an invention of revolutionary thinkers. It was first a central element of eighteenth-century physiocratic thought<\/a>, which distinguished three classes: a \u201cproductive\u201d class, an \u201cowner\u201d class, and a third so-called \u201csterile\u201d class defined as non-agricultural labour(1)<\/sup><\/a>Marie-France Piguet, Classe, histoire du mot et gen\u00e8se du concept: des Physiocrates aux historiens de la Restauration<\/i><\/a>, Presses universitaires de Lyon, 1996.<\/span><\/span>