In Chapter 1, Section 5, Baudrillard begins by a description of the ontology of labour as the self-determined essence of man, by various citations, including Marcuse. This is the pinnacle of the Marxist concept, of Labour as the means by which man is subject over his personified essence in a dialectical manner (e.g. Entailing reversal in political economy, where his objectivity becomes the medium of his own subject, i.e. Man worships himself in money, rather than the other way round). In this way, man imparts himself into nature, and thus "humanises" nature, as Baudrillard says. With further citation from Marcuse, Baudrillard diagnoses Marxism as inhabiting the "protestant work ethic", by reference to Weber; that if Labour is the means by which abstract Man "creates" himself, then his very Being is determined by his subjection to productivity in labour:
<this aberrant sanctification of work has been the secret vice of Marxist political and economic strategy from the beginning.After this, Baudrillard cites a brilliant excerpt from Walter Benjamin on the folly of Marxism's divinity of Labour (t. "Poesie et Revolution", 1971) which exposes the nonsense of esteeming Man's Being as a symptom of his capacity to labour (which, we must remember, was also the slogan above Auschwitz, "Arbeit Macht Frei"). Even "play" is defined by Marcuse as a "useless" product of a rationalised labour. Thus as Baudrillard sees it:
<In effect, the sphere of play is defined as the fulfillment of human rationality, the dialectical culmination of man's activity of incessant objectification of nature and control of his exchanges with it. It presupposes the full development of productive forces ; it "follows in the footsteps" of the reality principle and the transformation of nature. Marx clearly states that it can flourish only when founded on the reign of necessity. Wishing itself beyond labor but in its continuation, the sphere of play is always merely the esthetic sublimation of labor's constraints […] Work and non-work: here is a "revolutionary" theme. It is undoubtedly the most subtle form of the type of binary, structural opposition discussed above. The end of the end of exploitation by work is this reverse fascination with non-work, this reverse mirage of free time (forced time-free time, full time empty time: another paradigm that fixes the hegemony of a temporal order which is always merely tPost too long. Click here to view the full text.