Work is the new religion - Federico Campagna

Launched in September 2013, Britney Spears' latest single Work Bitch is the most recent production in the new genre of motivational work music. Spears' lyrical efforts (You wanna live fancy? / Live in a big mansion? / Party in France? / You better work bitch, you better work bitch) sit alongside gems such as David Guetta's anthem Work Hard Play Hard ([It's] the only thing we know how to do / We work hard, play hard / Keep partyin' like it's your job).

But the joint venture of work and party ethics exceeds the commercial music scene, as rave parties have also recently produced their own motivational, work-oriented subgenre, to be enjoyed just before office hours. Having been the soundtrack to the dark rebelliousness of 80s and 90s cyber culture, house and techno rhythms seem to have found a new role as the chamber music of an increasingly aggressive work culture. Which is something that restaurant cooks, working 10-hour shifts over a happy hardcore soundtrack, have long learned to enjoy.

To a British audience, this could hardly sound like news. Perhaps reassured by Max Weber's claim that their Protestantism justifies their obsessive work ethics, Anglo-Saxons have long embraced work as a religion for contemporary times. As with any religion, it is not a matter of dealing with it in any effective or functional way, but rather of engaging in it with blind enthusiasm. In an age struggling between crises of economic overproduction, environmental catastrophe, falling salaries and increasing robotisation, there cannot be any other explanation for the current culture of "hard work" than that of a burgeoning religious cult. After the collapse of all 20th century ideologies – including capitalism, which until 2008 claimed to be the only explanation for everything in the world – it might be the discomforting feeling of having an empty sky above our heads that has pushed millions of people to recreate a new, seemingly ideologically neutral religion: work.

Yet work is hardly devoid of ideological content. As we do it and understand it today, work has become in itself the very essence of ideology: the act of willingly submitting the short time allowed to us by our mortality, to an all-encompassing, faceless abstraction. In the words of Guetta, we work endlessly because it is "the only thing we know how to do". What really matters, and really defines us as worthy people – unlike those benefit scroungers – is that we keep working hard, regardless of whether our work goes towards the production of land mines, the deforestation of the Amazon forest or the supply of frog-shaped slippers to gadget shops. Abstaining from work, or being forcefully cast out of it, puts one in the dangerous position of a stateless person during a war, or of an atheist in a theocracy.

But religion isn't just for Christmas. Work never ends. While in the past the devastation caused by working class alcoholism used to be regarded as an ugly side-effect of industrialisation, today's party culture is an integral part of the cult of work. Now that human work has become devoid of any true economic function, as the unemployment rate largely demonstrates, its essence boils down to the relinquishment of any whim of taking control over our own lives or of pursuing any personal existential goals, in favour of a mystical union with the abstract flow of global capital. The degradation of drunkenness, or of a ketamine blackout, perfectly mirrors the essence of dehumanising office jobs. In both cases, the point is to stop being ourselves, to go beyond our limits to the point of becoming unrecognisable even to ourselves. Performed in overcrowded spaces, as mediated by standard technologies, and aimed at complete yet subtle conformism, fun and work have finally created an boundless common land. Keep partying till you drop, till your nose bleeds, till you pass out in the shower. You love it, you don't care.

Within the rhetoric of the big society, work might be indeed what defines one's legitimacy to enjoy the rights of citizenship. Alongside the transformation of work into a religion, the state itself has taken the road that leads an institution built in the interest of its members into the indifferent form of a church. Between the Britain of the spirit of '45 – which gave birth to the welfare state as we (no longer) know it – and David Cameron's G4S state, lies the same distance that exists between a free association and a Vatican dungeon. Now that the state no longer wishes to provide services aimed at enhancing the happy life of its citizens, the only ground on which it can find any legitimisation to its continuing existence lies in the stupor of religious allegiance. What better way to educate the citizens of a state than to train them early and throughout their life in the religion of dehumanising and senseless work?

Work hard, play hard, keep partyin' like it's your job. Bitch.