despite Marx's insistence  that waged work for those without other options is a system of 'forced labor', it remains for the most part an abstract mode of domination. In general, it is not the police or the threat of violence that force us to work, but rather a social system that ensures thet working is the only way that most of us can meet our basic needs

daydreams in this sense induce desires for different futures, experimentst with ways to fulfill them, and enjoy their imagined satisfaction. daydreams are not utopias, but in them we might nonetheless catch a glimpse of the same Not-Yet-Conscious that animates utopian thinking; nascent expressions of political reason and imagination inspired by the desire for and will to new and better forms of life, even if only in this limited and-in bloc's estimation-unambitious form

daydreaming is often treated as an embarrassment, not only for the lack it represents-a lapse in concentration, a waste of time, an interruption of productive activity-but for what it reveals of our immoderate desires to be and have more, an excess of social desire comparable to the libidinal excesses that can fuel the sleeping dream

raising children with attributes that will secure them forms of employment that can match if not surpass the class of their parents is the gold standard of parenting. in addition, 'making people capable of working is,' as Nona Glazer notes, 'the central goal of schooling, a criterion of successful medical and psychiatric treatment, and an ostensible goal of most welfare policies and unemployment compensation programs.'

one is its reification: the fact that at present one must work to "earn a living" is taken as part of the natural order rather than as a social convention. consequently, as c. wright mills observes (in one of the epigraphs above), we tend to focus more on the problems with this or that job, or on their absence, than on work as a requirement, as a system, work as a way of life.

particularly when we include the time spent training, searching, and preparing for work, not to mention recovering from it-would suggest that the experience warrants more consideration. work is crucial not onlyy to those whose lives are centered around it, but also, in a society that expects people to work for wages, to those whoa re spelled or excluded from work and marginalized in relation to it. perhaps more significantly places of employmentt and spaces of work would seem to be supremely relevant to the very bread and butter of political science: as sites of decision making, they are structured by relations of power and authority, as hierarchical organizations , they raise issues of consent and obedience, as spaces of exclusion, they pose questions about membership and obligation.

what is perplexing is less the acceptance of the present reality that one must work to live than the willingness to live for work