In his Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 Marx pointedly argues that within the capitalist system “the worker is related to the product of his labor as to an alien object” (Marx 1984: 71). As Marx contends, and as is well known, it is precisely the power of labor that has become “congealed in an object,” that is, in a commodity (or service) that exists independently and “becomes a power on its own confronting him.” In short, the life which the power of labor has conferred on “the object confronts him as something hostile and alien” (Marx 1984: 72). Our work has become a foe, a test and trial we must endure before we can begin to do what we really want to do. Work or play, as Deleuze and Guattari note, has become one of the great molar segments that divides us, an exclusive disjunction that pervades daily life. There is the melancholy of the Monday morning blues; there is the hope that emerges as Wednesday, hump day, draws to a close and there is less of the drudgery of work before us than behind us; and finally how many times have we heard our colleagues at work express joy at the fact that it is Friday. We can even spend our hard-earned cash at T.G.I. Friday's, for now it is time to play.

Despite the alienation Marx speaks of, we nonetheless continue to show up for work. The reason we do so is simple: necessity. As Marx puts it, labor has become “merely a means to satisfy needs external to it” – namely, it allows us to put food on the table. It was for this reason that Marx argues that the worker “no longer feels himself to be freely active in any but his animal functions,” (Marx 1984: 74) for as this point is clarified a few pages later, animals such as bees, beavers, and ants produce “only under the dominion of immediate physical need, while man produces even when he is free from physical need and only truly produces in freedom therefrom” (Marx 1984: 77).