Apply this same critique to the Protestant work ethic and the capitalist morality of work influenced by it, how it transforms the worker into a self-policing slave.

The morality of work is the morality of slaves, and the modern world has no need of slavery.

(Bertrand Russell)

"If you work for a living, why do you kill yourself working?"

— Tuco from The Good, The Bad and The Ugly, 1966

“Let your competence take effect, collect yourselves, and there will be no lack of money — of your money, the money of your stamp. But working I do not call ‘letting your competence take effect’. Those who are only ‘looking for work’ and ‘willing to work hard’ are preparing for their own selves the infallible upshot — to be out of work.”

— Max Stirner,
The Ego and Its Own (Second part. II. 2)

“A child free from the guilt of ownership and the burden of economic competition will grow up with the will to do what needs doing and the capacity for Joy in doing it. It is useless work that darkens the heart. The delight of the nursing mother, of the scholar, of the successful hunter, of the good cook, of the skillful maker, of anyone doing needed work and doing it well — this durable joy is perhaps the deepest source of human affection and of sociality as a whole.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin,
The Dispossessed (chapter 8)

“Society has decreed a welfare as the ‘true welfare’, if this welfare were called enjoyment honestly worked for; but if you preferred enjoyable laziness, enjoy­ment without work, then society, which cares for the ‘welfare of all’, would wisely avoid caring for that in which you are well off.”

— Max Stirner,
The Ego and Its Own (Second part. II. 2)

The refusal of work and authority, or really the refusal of voluntary servitude, is the beginning of liberatory politics. Long ago Étienne de La Boétie preached just such a politics of refusal:
‘‘Resolve to serve no more, and you are at once freed. I do not ask that you place hands upon the tyrant to topple him over, but simply that you support him no longer; then you will behold him, like a great Colossus whose pedestal has been pulled away, fall of his own weight and break into pieces.’’

La Boétie recognized the political power of refusal, the power of subtracting ourselves from the relationship of domination, and through our exodus subverting the sovereign power that lords over us.

— Michael Hardt & Antonio Negri,
Empire (2.6)

If you can no longer believe a thing, you do not have to force yourself into faith or to busy yourself lastingly as if with a sacred truth of the faith, as theologians or philosophers do, but you can tranquilly draw back your interest from it and let it run. Priestly spirits will indeed expound this your lack of interest as ‘laziness, thoughtlessness, obdu­racy, self-deception’, and the like. But you just let the rubbish lie, notwithstanding. No thing, no so-called ‘highest interest of mankind’, no ‘sacred cause’ is worth your serving it, and occupying yourself with it for its sake; you may seek its worth in this alone, whether it is worth anything to you for your sake. Become like children, the biblical saying admonishes us.* But children have no sacred interest and know nothing of a ‘good cause’. They know all the more accurately what they have a fancy for; and they think over, to the best of their powers, how they are to arrive at it.

— Max Stirner,
The Ego and Its Own (Second part. II. 3)

Certain ways of life, especially leisureliness and contemplation, are said to be marked by ‘self-sufficiency’ (Aristotle). Here there is a double connotation of not needing much from others to carry on such a life, and of the life itself having the character of finality. Both connotations suggest forms of independence. Not needing much from others means being independent of them. And ‘finality’ implies that the activity of thinking, or, more generally, of being leisurely has intrinsic worth. Thus the leisurely person is independent in the sense that the value of his leisure does not depend on any consequence it may have, for example, the consequence that it restores his energy for the next day’s work.

— Lawrence Haworth, Autonomy: An Essay in Philosophical Psychology and Ethics

“A master in the art of living draws no sharp distinction between his work and his play, his labour and his leisure, his mind and his body, his education and his recreation. He hardly knows which is which. He simply pursues his vision of excellence through whatever he is doing and leaves others to determine whether he is working or playing. To himself he always seems to be doing both. Enough for him that he does it well.”

— L. P. Jacks, Education Through Recreation (chapter 1)

“But what is work, and what is play? When you listen to a master performing great music on the violin, or watch a Pavlova visibly enacting the music of the human body, arts acquired by years of the sternest discipline, is it work, or is it play that you are witnessing? It is both. Work and play have joined hands. Labour and leisure have combined their natures. Art and industry have become one. The highest kind of work and the highest kind of play are indistinguishable one from the other. They are two names for the same thing.”

— L. P. Jacks, Education Through Recreation (chapter 2)

“As Western nations became more prosperous, leisure, which had been put off for several centuries in favor of the pursuit of property, the means to leisure, finally began to be of primary concern. But, in the meantime, any notion of the serious life of leisure, as well as men’s taste and capacity to live it, had disappeared.”

— Allan Bloom,
The Closing of the American Mind (I. §3)

Abolish money and wage and salary and profit system and introduce common ownership and common production for the use not only of your immediate neighbors, but for the whole country later on. There should be no question of not only buying and selling and profiteering for anybody, but also no question of bartering and exchange even in kind. We produce as much as we can of what is necessary for all in the village, town, or quarter.

Let there be no employers and owners, no salaries and wages, differential or equal. Let all the bodies of persons be treated as one and indivisible.

Let everyone go to work voluntarily wherever he wants and is accepted—making work easy and pleasant for all, like play, and making it short. Money produces nothing—nay, production is kept down by money and by private ownership, profit, and the supply and demand of buying and selling.

— M. P. T. Acharya, Anarchist Manifesto

“I distrust the perpetually busy; always have. The frenetic ones spinning in tight little circles like poisoned rats. The slower ones, grinding away their fourscore and ten in righteousness and pain. They are the soul-eaters.”

— Mark Slouka, Quitting the Paint Factory

“Idleness is not just a psychological necessity, requisite to the construction of a complete human being; it constitutes as well a kind of political space, a space as necessary to the workings of an actual democracy as, say, a free press. How does it do this? By allowing us time to figure out who we are, and what we believe; by allowing us time to consider what is unjust, and what we might do about it. By giving the inner life (in whose precincts we are most ourselves) its due. Which is precisely what makes idleness dangerous. All manner of things can grow out of that fallow soil. Not for nothing did our mothers grow suspicious when we had ‘too much time on our hands.’ They knew we might be up to something. And not for nothing did we whisper to each other, when we were up to something, ‘Quick, look busy.’”

— Mark Slouka, Quitting the Paint Factory

“Ask for work. If they don't give you work, ask for bread. If they don't give you work or bread, take bread.”

— Emma Goldman

“If you are losing your leisure, look out! – It may be you are losing your soul.”

— Logan P. Smith, letter to Virginia Woolf

“How many of the wage class, as a class, are there who can avoid obeying the commands of the master (employing) class, as a class? Not many, are there?

Then are you not slaves to the money power as much as were the black slaves to the Southern slaveholders? Then we ask you again: What are you going to do about it? You had the ballot then. Could you have voted away black slavery? You know you could not because the slaveholders would not hear of such a thing for the same reason you can’t vote yourselves out of wage-slavery.”

— Lucy Parsons,
Americans! Arouse Yourselves!

Plato said that virtue has no master. If a person does not honor this principle and rejoice in it, but is purchasable for money, he creates many masters for himself.

You request my presence at the Olympic Games, and for that reason you have sent envoys. For myself, I would come for the spectacle of physical struggle, except that I would be abandoning the greater struggle for virtue.

In my judgment excellence and wealth are direct opposites.

— Apollonius of Tyana, letter to Euphrates

Soldiers! Don't give yourselves to brutes — men who despise you, enslave you, who regiment your lives, tell you what to do, what to think and what to feel; who drill you, diet you, treat you like cattle, use you as cannon fodder! Don't give yourselves to these unnatural men — machine men with machine minds and machine hearts! You are not machines! You are not cattle! You are men!

Soldiers! Don't fight for slavery! Fight for liberty! In the 17th Chapter of St. Luke, it is written: ‘the Kingdom of God is within man’ — not one man, nor a group of men, but in all men! In you! You, the people, have the power — the power to create machines. The power to create happiness! You, the people, have the power to make this life free and beautiful, to make this life a wonderful adventure.

— Charlie Chaplin,
The Great Dictator (1940)

“Practical life is not necessarily directed toward other people, as some think; and it is not the case that practical thoughts are only those which result from action for the sake of what ensues. On the contrary, much more practical are those mental activities and reflections which have their goal in themselves and take place for their own sake.”

— Aristotle, Politics (Bk. VII)