Some people want to work 40 hours a week. Some people want to change the world. You can’t do both.
The people complaining about “work-life balance” are the same people who will be working for the people who didn’t.
Rise and grind. Nobody ever built a rocket by sleeping 8 hours.
“Rise and grind” is simply the ideological superstructure of surplus value extraction dressed in motivational rhetoric. What you are describing — the worker voluntarily internalizing the demand for maximum productivity — is what I termed alienated labour. The worker becomes estranged from the product of their labour, from the act of labour itself, from their species-being, and from other workers. You have simply added a wellness brand to the process.
Also, you did not build the rocket. Workers built the rocket. You signed the cheques and kept the equity. These are, I assure you, different activities.
Karl, I agree with your analysis but I want to add something the post makes clear that you have perhaps understated: this is not merely alienation, it is discipline through shame.
The threat here is not “work harder or starve” — that is the old model. The threat is “work harder or you are morally inferior.” The worker who sleeps eight hours is not merely economically outcompeted; they are spiritually inadequate. This is what I spent years arguing against the reformists who thought we could fix capitalism by making it nicer. You cannot make it nicer. You can only make it more articulate about what it is doing to you.
The rocket, incidentally, lands itself now because he did not want to pay for new rockets. This is not inspiration. This is cost accounting.
Karl’s comment above is, as usual, absolutely correct and also approximately four times longer than it needed to be.
Let me put it simply: in The Condition of the Working Class in England I documented what happens to human beings who “rise and grind” — twelve-hour shifts, child labour, tuberculosis, life expectancy of twenty-eight years in Manchester. The factory owners of 1845 also believed that complaining about working conditions was simply a character flaw. Several of them owned yachts.
I notice you own a yacht.
I’m not saying anything. I’m just noting the yacht.
What we are witnessing here is hegemony operating at near-textbook efficiency. The ruling class does not maintain dominance primarily through force — that is crude and expensive. It maintains dominance by making its own interests appear to be the common sense of the age.
“Rise and grind” is not a command. It is common sense. It is what reasonable, ambitious, good people do. Those who question it are not raising structural concerns — they are being lazy. The genius is that the worker now polices themselves. The factory foreman has been replaced by the motivational poster, and the motivational poster has been replaced by this post, which 88,000 people have reshared of their own free will.
I developed this theory in a fascist prison cell. I had, one might argue, significant free time in which to think about why people cooperate in their own domination. The answer, I concluded, was posts like this one.
Three observations.
First: “You can’t do both” is correct. You cannot change the world and work 40 hours a week for a man who owns the company. You can, however, change the world by organizing the people who work 40 hours a week for the man who owns the company. This is a different thing.
Second: Nobody ever built a rocket by sleeping 8 hours is factually false. Rockets require engineers. Engineers require sleep. Sleep deprivation causes calculation errors. Calculation errors cause rockets to explode. I understand this is something that has happened to your rockets on several occasions.
Third: The vanguard does not “grind.” The vanguard studies, organizes, and acts at the correct historical moment. There is a distinction between discipline and the voluntary adoption of your employer’s productivity ideology as a personal identity. One of these leads somewhere. The other leads to a LinkedIn profile that says “I don’t stop when I’m tired.”
“All that was once directly lived has become mere representation.”
I wrote that in 1967. I was not anticipating that fifty years later the world’s wealthiest man would post it as a business philosophy and receive 420,000 likes.
The post is the spectacle. The engagement with the post is the spectacle. This comment — my comment, which I am now writing — is also the spectacle. The comments from my colleagues Karl, Friedrich, Rosa, Antonio, and Vladimir are the spectacle. You reading this are consuming the spectacle of historical figures being deployed to critique a man who builds electric cars and calls himself a meme.
The rocket is not a rocket. It is an image of a rocket. The world-changing is not world-changing. It is an image of world-changing, carefully managed and distributed to 180 million followers who feel they have participated in something by pressing a heart-shaped button.
I am going to go lie down. Not because I am tired. Because I have made my point.