By publishing a Indispensable précis of work detestation, Frédéric Schiffter has taken a big risk: that of making critics want to go on strike like him. Admittedly, I read his pamphlet to the end because it’s so short. Let’s face it, reading Schiffter has never been a job worthy of a hardship allowance. He’s concise, scathing, always funny, and here much more upbeat than in his Délectations moroses (2009). This primer on office life is arguably his most Marxist work.

He follows in the footsteps of Right to laziness by Paul Lafargue (1880) and Against work by Giuseppe Rensi (1923), updating them for the 21st century.^e century. Its main flaw is that it doesn’t explain how I pay my taxes if I stop working, but I don’t care: it brilliantly ridicules capitalism’s new inventions, from start-ups to burn-outs. The most amusing passages are those that make a mockery of managerial vocabulary. The word “box”…