Brief Excerpt from The Worker: Dominion and Form by Ernst Jünger

For Labor Day, some reflections from Ernst Jünger’s The Worker: Dominion and Form * on the worker, the economic world, and the question of power.

“Idealism or materialism—this is a contradiction for impure spirits, whose power of imagination can cope with neither the idea nor the material. The harshness of the world can only be met by hardness, not by trickery.

“Let us be clear: it is not a matter of economic neutrality, nor that the spirit be turned away from all economic battles; on the contrary, it is rather a matter of fighting these battles as fiercely as possible. However, this does not happen if the economy determines the rules of combat, but only if a higher law of battle rules over the economy.

“This is why it is so important for the worker to reject every explanation that seeks to interpret his appearance as an economic phenomenon, even as a product of economic processes, thus, basically, as a kind of industrial product, and for him to see through the bourgeois origin of these explanations. No action can cut through these fateful bonds more effectively than a declaration of independence of the worker from the economic world. This does not mean abandoning this world, but rather that it is subjected to a claim to a more comprehensive kind of dominion. This means that the pivotal point of insurrection is not economic freedom and economic power, but power alone.”

* Excerpted from The Worker: Dominion and Form by Ernst Jünger (Northwestern University Press, 2019), p. 16