They want your time , enough of it to make you theirs, even if they have no use for most of it. Otherwise why hasn’t the average work week gone down by more than a few minutes in the last sixty years?

To take only one Roman example, Cicero said that “whoever gives his labor for money sells himself and puts himself in the rank of slaves.”

At present most work is useless or worse and we should simply get rid of it.

Finally, we must do away with far and away the largest occupation, the one with the longest hours, the lowest pay and some of the most tedious tasks around. I refer to housewives doing housework and child-rearing. By abolishing wage-labor and achieving full unemployment we undermine the sexual division of labor. The nuclear family as we know it is... See more

Unions and management agree that we ought to sell the time of our lives in exchange for survival, although they haggle over the price.

The only thing “free” about so-called free time is that it doesn’t cost the boss anything.

the only occasion on which man realizes his complete humanity by giving full “play” to both sides of his twofold nature, thinking and feeling.

Like most social and political theory, the story Hobbes and his successors told was really unacknowledged autobiography.

Doubtless we all need a lot more time for sheer sloth and slack than we ever enjoy now, regardless of income or occupation, but once recovered from employment-induced exhaustion nearly all of us want to act.