If Lasch were around today, he would undoubtedly see Occupy Wall Street as a source of both optimism and despair—as many of us have. One of his interests would be the movement’s vacillation between two conflicting visions of work. Its populist ninety-nine-versus-one-percent rhetoric, as well as its emphasis on debt and widespread unemployment, seem to point to a society in which good and meaningful work might be available for all. Yet in the carnivalesque atmosphere of the protests, with their drum circles and festive feel, there was also a sense that all work was oppressive, that a revolution would entail liberation from work entirely. Forty years ago, Lasch had already criticized the tendency for certain radicals to “define personal liberation … as freedom from work, discipline and from authority in general”:

The trouble with this definition of the “cultural revolution” is that it tends to divert attention from work to leisure, thereby reinforcing one of the strongest and most dangerous tendencies of advanced capitalist society—the attempt to compensate for the meaninglessness of work by holding out the possibility of spiritual fulfillment through consumption. Contrary to a widespread cliché of popular sociology, “the challenge of leisure” is not the most important issue in advanced society. The most important issue remains work—the loss of autonomy on the job, the collapse of high standards of workmanship, the pervasive demoralization that results from the mass production of goods that are widely recognized as intrinsically worthless by those who produce them, and the general crisis of a culture historically oriented around the dignity of labor.

Counterculturalists, Lasch believed, tended to picture “utopia as generalized leisure, thereby reaffirming, instead of contradicting, the vision of industrial society itself.” Yet, Lasch contended, “centuries of experience … have taught us that work is one of the deepest of man’s needs.” The task confronting the left was therefore not to overthrow the work ethic—which was already under attack from within capitalist society—but to invest it with new meaning.