Electricity arrived in Portugal’s capital in that dawn of the 20th century. The Tejo Power Station stood down by the river where boats plied back and forth carrying the coal that it devoured. The plant was the main generator of electricity for the city and the Greater Lisbon region for half a century. Continuous flows of workers laboured there, where soot was their life’s breath and their doom. Technology was changing work and everything else changed with it. It changed life and death. It changed physics and metaphysics. It changed society and poetry, as we can see in Pessoa. It changed economics and art.

The EDP Foundation is home to a collection of photographs by Kurt Pinto. They bear witness to the Tejo Power Station, the work done there and the workers who toiled inside. We look at these pictures, where the people and boilers reflect each other, and we see on their faces the suffering of hard labour entwined with the exaltation of modern technology.

Those faces that posed for posterity, those bodies exhausted by their toil, those overalls soiled with coal and oil are symbolic images of an anthropological revolution. The faces of these threatened men, who literally earned their living with the sweat of their brows, portray a pungent innocence.

It is as if, looking at them now from a distance opened up by swiftly passing time, we do not have their permission to think otherwise than the fact that we are looking at secret and sacrificial beauty. The other name for this beauty is dignity pursued by the tragic splendour with which, in that industrial Epidaurus, they faced their nemesis, the vengeful fury that the gods reserve for those who dare to challenge them with their hubris, even if it is unconscious and involuntary.

The meeting between man and machine in these photos is the renewal of that myth in which the Greeks credited Prometheus (etymologically ‘forethought’) with the sacrilegious audacity of stealing fire from the gods. This connection between labour and technology has been made since the first Industrial Revolution, as one was a prosthesis of the other. But there were people who regarded modern man not as a new Prometheus, but rather as a new Faust, who sold his soul to the Devil in return for the privilege and possession of technology.

Opposites often attract and are confirmed in what does not destroy them. In the 1930s, Ernst Jünger published The Worker: Dominion and Form and Walter Benjamin released three versions of The Work of Art in the Age of Technological Reproducibility. These two men viewed the world from such different places and through such different eyes. They acutely regarded their time and what was happening in it from a new perspective and compared it with the pasts that made up the past. They demonstrated unexpected and astonished agreement on one fundamental issue of their present that has grown vastly in ours: the overwhelming, imperative and operational rule of technology – and its central role in the configuration of humanity, existential functions, social roles and everyday behaviour.

In the opinion of the right-wing writer and the left-wing thinker, revolutionaries from two radically opposed revolutions who, one and the other, became the symbols and faces of two overbearing and hostile cultures, technology was by no means neutral, instrumental or merely utilitarian.

With the unsettling figure of Heidegger passing between them, they knew that technology was ontologically the founder of another being and another entity, of another art and another culture, of another space and another time, of another form and another world. Technology exerts its worldwide power as it levels, homogenises, standardises, massifies, secularises, denatures, deculturalises, resanctifies, refounds and reconstitutes. With its omniscient, omnipotent, omnipresent sovereignty, technology changes humankind’s relationship with nature, with other humans and with itself. It changes the past, present and future. Technology makes reality unreal and unreality real.

Technology speaks a new language that everyone has learned to speak. Technology faces and overcomes the obstacles that spring up before it and pulls all vestiges along in its aura. For the two German authors, technology changed the image of the worker, and work would never be the same again. In his Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts, Karl Marx predicted: ‘Since the worker has sunk to the level of a machine, he can be confronted by the machine as a competitor.’

The worker becomes the subject and the object of technology, its producer and its product. Its master and its slave, its hero and its martyr. Its victim and its apostle, its spy and its detective. Its patient and its physician, its militant and its dissident. Its pontiff and its believer. Work is the altar and the worker the altar boy. It is in work that work becomes his body.

For 150 years, this debate has been made up of persistent, peremptory debates. In Tecnologia, Modernidade e Política, Hermínio Martins upholds that sociological literature on the subject in the 19th and 20th centuries can be recognised and distinguished by its membership of two ideal-type traditional families: that of Prometheus and that of Faust. The great Portuguese sociologist explained:

These debates were increasingly topical in those years of the 1930s in which the world was unwittingly preparing for unimaginable barbarity, whose horror was methodically constructed by action or omission, complicity or cowardice, in various forms. Yet they have survived to our time, the time of the so-called Fourth Industrial Revolution, with an intensity, validity and visibility that make them a safe-conduct to the future.

To think about technology and work, and their mutations, to think about their causes and effects, is to think about what we are, what we know and what we do. It is to think about life today and the contemporary world, about the instability generated by the many rifts and revolutions, while being aware of the vertigo caused by their effects. To think about this is to think a thought that keeps escaping us.

Not only artificial intelligence, robotisation, teleworking, tele-education, telemeetings, teleconferences, teleshows, telemanagement, telecontrol, tele- -security, driverless cars, dematerialisation of work, ongoing training and the technological euphoria that they generate, but also the unemployment, seasonality, inadequacy, precariousness, instability, uncertainty, solipsism, anguish and anxiety that they cause, are pieces that are played in the game of digital chess that our time plays against itself and against the future.

For many people, although this had all been around for quite a while, it became clearer and more evident during the total or partial confinement imposed by Covid-19, which brought telecommuting and work closer both to home and their private lives. What has happened as a result of these intense, forced changes is the revelation of a movement that, though it already existed, has now been densified and imposed. In the end, it was the sudden, widespread germination of a seed that had already been planted. And no-one knows what is going to happen in the next few years, in a world that is now afraid of itself and in a society that has become increasingly atomised, although, in its vain pride and erroneous presumption, it thinks that it is more and more connected.

Thinking about work in this passage from its present to its future is the purpose of the Subject section in this tenth number of Electra. It is an issue whose complexity – with everything in it that is unthought-of or even unthinkable – makes it endless and unfinished. Thinking about the changes on this battlefield, where so many things are being decided and are radically transforming individual and collective lives, is only getting started on a job that will always be a work in progress.

In a show-time world with so many categorical certainties and such a great lack of awareness of how inappropriate and unproductive this is, the queries and questions that arise are what make the issue of work so topical, on the basis of ongoing change and its openness to the uncertain, unknown and unpredictable. Here are some of them:

At what moment are we commuting from work to post-work? How are we going to work and how does this change the world and its people? Is the new way of working an unexpected liberation or inescapable submission? What are the effects of the new work systems on workers and their identity, health, and professional, psychological, affective and family lives? How much do the new ways of organising and doing work condition and change politics and geopolitics, and with what effect? What effects will they have on our fundamental guarantees and freedoms, on war and peace? What democracies and dictatorships will we have in the future?

What does it mean to be a reactionary or progressive in this field? What is being contemporary in the face of changes that make work different? In view of the new functional and methodological work systems, when can we say that our disposition and attitude are synchronic or anachronic? What will workers’ rights look like? How will socialism and neoliberalism regard this revolution and what will the effects be on the thinking on which they are based? What will trade-unionism, or the lack thereof, be like? What is the new relationship between work and employment? And between work and inequality? And between work and displacement? What are the effects and impacts of future work on future education? Has work gone from being necessary to being contingent? Has it gone from safe, complete and permanent to ephemeral, partial and precarious?

How will capitalism evolve with these new foundations, resources and goals in the economics, sociology and psychology of work? What is ‘corporate ideology’ going to be like after this? What is the point of talking about classes and the class struggle? How are philosophers, economists, sociologists, historians, scientists and political doctrinarians who configured our modernity going to be read in the light of this new world? From now on, what globalisation will there be, in its advances and retreats? Does this new work favour internationalisation – and with what advantages and disadvantages? What are the new relationships between work and leisure, personal and work life, and active and contemplative life going to be like? What forms of going back will work be made up of (back to the country, back home, back to school, back to the past)? What kind of relationship will there be between work, ecology and climate change? What will the new work ethic be?

In this dossier about work, which is necessarily incomplete and provisional, the idea is to throw into the arena some of the mobile ideas that we use as tuning forks to tune the different instruments that make up the great orchestra of work.

To talk about work is to talk about reality and utopia. It is to talk of a material value and a moral value, of history and sociology, of economics and philosophy, of ideology and religion, of literature and art. It is to talk about what we do in life and what sometimes leads to our death.

At the beginning and the end of our lives, work is used to refer to our birth and our death: labour pains and the work of grieving. And dream work connects and disconnects them, giving them a larger, more fleeting form than the one they have.

From the Bible to Marx, from Plato to Keynes, from Sisyphus to Camus, from Hercules to Sartre, from Buddhism to Max Weber, from Rousseau to Dickens, from Locke to Zola, from Hobbes to Fourier, from Adam Smith to Hegel, from Thomas Aquinas to Hannah Arendt, from Kant to John Paul II, from Campanella to Foucault, from Condorcet to Eça de Queiroz, from Nietzsche to Bakunin, from Thomas More to Proudhon, from situationists to Freud, from Eisenstein to Visconti, from Lewis Hine to Fritz Lang, from Fredrick Taylor to the Beat Generation, from Giuseppe Pellizza da Volpedo to the Krisis Group, from Marcuse to Frank Capra, from Charlie Chaplin to Bernard Stiegler, from Tocqueville to Pierre Rosanvallon, from Adorno to Thomas Piketty, work has been affirmation and denial.

The Bible says:

Physics says: work is a force applied to a body, causing it to move.

Economics says: work is the most important factor of production. Work presupposes effort with a goal, awareness and intentionality.

History explains: the word ‘travail’, meaning work, comes from the Latin word tripalium, an instrument of torture and punishment for slaves. In those days, work was depreciated and depreciative. The ancient Greeks believed that only creative idleness was worthy of a free man. This idea changed somewhat but still continued into the Middle Ages. It was the Protestant ethic that endowed work with a fundamental moral value. In the 19th century, after the Industrial Revolution, work came to have crucial importance in our societies. Work in bourgeois society now generated a good conscience and a good reputation, rather than a bad conscience and a bad reputation. As a result it swapped axiological places with idleness, which had been more highly reputed for centuries.

From the late 20th century, with the revolutions of new digital technology, work and what we thought of it was in transit to an as yet unknown world, which we glimpsed here and there with curious or concerned eyes. One thing is certain: over time, work and how it is perceived and performed has modulated the great political, social and cultural changes.

Simone de Beauvoir wrote:

Work is also at the crux of issues of gender equality and inequality.

Regarded as condemnation and salvation, submission and liberation, prison and freedom, virtue and flaw, cause and banner, union and division, product and merchandise, strength and weakness, pleasure and pain, identity and alienation, poverty and wealth, movement and immobility, work has gone from poesis to práxis that transforms us. And now it is – more and more – the transition from work to post-work that is on everyone’s lips.

From the comical proverb, with a taste of Cervantes, ‘A man who works is wasting precious time’ to the tragic slogan Arbeit macht frei over the entrance of Nazi concentration and extermination camps, work is at the core of the greatest human issues. Will this always be the case?

Coming from a time that, in spite of being exhausted, is not yet extinct, we have these uncovered faces of the workers at the Tejo Power Station, which Kurt Pinto captured with a sensitivity born of complicit curiosity. We look at them and see the truth in what Emmanuel Levinas meant when he said that the face of the other speaks and is the starting point of our responsibility and obligation to respond to it. Here, with this dossier about work, this responsibility and obligation remain.

In these weirdly dramatic times, comments from our readers have confirmed the advisability of and urgent need for an open, deep-reaching debate driven by a thirst for knowledge and a desire to understand. When we think of work and technology, we think about the time that changes them and changes us.

And as technology is the focus of this Editorial and this number that it introduces, we give this talk about technology a way of talking about our magazine. We are proud to announce, in this space in which the conversation with our readers is a beginning, that Electra now has its own website and a profile on Instagram.

We would like to underscore what we have been saying since its presentation: this is a magazine designed and produced on the basis of an editorial idea that is inseparable from a visual idea. The graphic design and art direction are specially conceived as a print edition. This is why we would like to say that Electra is a magazine to be read and seen! Furthermore, Electra is a magazine to be read and collected.

Nonetheless, as an editorial project, this magazine, with its international aspirations, now incorporates these two digital tools for global dissemination and projection. They reflect, extend and reinforce its conceptual matrix and aesthetic atmosphere and make it, even more, one and the same and consistently different from others. This is what we call identity and otherness, autonomy and heteronomy, which are the heads and tails of the coin bearing the face of Electra, which continues to ask: What can we say that is right?

This is the question to which our endeavours continue to seek an answer.

*Translated by Wendy Graça