[...] Capitalist work systems are not defined by a numerical threshold, a kind of red line that only when crossed can we reasonably speak about exploitation. No, this is a qualitative relationship. For that reason, the capitalist mode of production by its very nature has always entailed overwork, no matter how much time is spent toiling in the post-modern office. This point is made very well by Kirsty Ross in relation to the anthropological investigations of Pierre Clastres:

[...] What we disparagingly called ‘subsistence economies’, societies where one works to satisfy one’s needs and not to produce a surplus, are to be seen, according to Clastres, as operating according to a refusal of a useless excess of activity. Work, then, appears only with the constitution of a surplus; work begins, properly speaking, as overwork.