What, after all, is work?

In the introduction to The Idler's Glossary, Mark Kingwell spends a few paragraphs dismantling the arguments for Productivity-As-Virtue. Here is the first bit, slightly revised:

The work-ethic condemnation of idleness as unproductive is familiar; it is rooted in the even older notion that morose idleness is sinful, an insult to God’s grace. The shared idea in both secular and religious versions of the condemnation is that if one is not engaged in some useful occupation – if one is not working for gain of some sort, whether money or status or progress in the soul’s journey – then one is committing a kind of failure: to self, to community, to supreme being, or to all three.

The presuppositions of this view have been comprehensively dismantled by many philosophers by noting just how unfulfilling and stupid most work actually is.

What, after all, is work?

“Work is of two kinds,” Bertrand Russell notes: “first, altering the position of matter at or near the earth’s surface relatively to other such matter; second, telling other people to do so. The first kind is unpleasant and ill paid; the second is pleasant and highly paid. The second kind is capable of indefinite extension: there are not only those who give orders, but those who give advice as to what orders should be given. Usually two opposite kinds of advice are given simultaneously by two organized bodies of men; this is called politics.”