While every normal civilization, thanks to its upward orientation, intended to bestow a character of action, creation, and “art” even upon work (see, for instance, the corporations in the ancient world), exactly the opposite is happening in the present economic civilization:

even action (or whatever is still worthy of the term) is increasingly attributed the character of “work” (i.e., an economic and proletarian character), almost out of a masochistic pleasure in degradation and contamination.

Thus, we have gone as far as formulating the “ideal” of a “State based on work” and fantasizing about a “humanism of work,” even in milieus that profess to be anti-Marxist.