Work (review)

This work concerns Zola's fantasy of the growth of a new society guided by the formation of a healthy association of labor groups and the overthrowing of the wage-system that the author sees as enchaining humankind to a system of rewards and punishments. It leaves one asking, why did this society of the future not come to fruition at the time it was written, in the early 20th century, or sooner ? The masters of war saw to it that man would be continuously divided along racial and class lines, along any lines they could devise that would serve as a pretext for the exploitation of capital, to make any flickering flame of intellectual talent but to bend to become the slave and the penitent of capital. The invention of atomic weapons was the final triumph of the real politics of war, the two great wars of the 20th century saw to it that humanity would forever be unsatisfied with reality-presented-as-fact; humanity withers and fades away in the triumph of commercialism and mass-culture, religion disappears under the fallen edifice of a church not longer supported in a world where money is God and greed becomes society's sole guiding principle. When work becomes a matter of manipulating the instruments that one has been accustomed to since just after leaving the nursery, as in Zola's society of the future, the postmodern age begins as the workers reconstruct society on the basis of a female-centered empathy for the poor and abused, those citizens previously relegated to society's contemptuous negligence. This book is very relevant for 21st century America and, specifically, for a post-Trump political age.