“The less work is rewarded, the more we are praised for its ‘value'”

A social anthropologist, James Suzman is interested in the underlying cultural representations that discreetly structure societies. This field researcher has extensively studied the Bushmen of the Kalahari and lived among them, an experience from which he drew a remarkable book, “Affluence Without Abundance” (“Opulence without abundance”, Bloomsbury, 2017, untranslated), giving to see and understand the daily life and the values ​​of this people of hunter-gatherers, far from our clichés. He also worked in the world of large companies for a few years, before regaining his independence.

His new essay, “Work. The Great Deal of Humanity’, is full of surprises. It invites us to put into perspective our conception of work, which is, after all, only a recent invention in the history of our species, and which has not always been, far from it, a moral and an ideal in itself.

Since the beginnings of the industrial revolution, its duration has not ceased to be reduced, recalls the author – except very recently. A progress conquered by hard struggle through strikes and mobilizations, but which was also part of a certain capitalism where employers found it in their interest to improve the working conditions, even the wages, of their workers. In the 1930s, at the time of the New Deal, the US Senate had even voted to implement the 30-hour week – which, in the end, Roosevelt did not enforce.

Emmanuel Macron and his government