Time & Perspective Quote by Karl Kraus

Kraus aims his blade at democracy’s self-congratulating moral economy: the way it pretends to honor “the people” while quietly sorting them into the virtuous and the disposable. The line is built like a simple binary - workers versus loafers - then sprung with a twist: the real excluded class isn’t the idle rich or the romantic drifter, but “those who have no time to work.” That phrasing is Kraus at his most corrosive. It flips the Protestant work ethic inside out and exposes the hidden casualty of modern civic life: the person so overrun by survival, caregiving, bureaucracy, or sheer precarity that “work” as a civic identity becomes a luxury.

The subtext is that democracy, in practice, often operates less as a theory of equal voice than as a system of moral credentialing. If you can’t present yourself as productively employed, you’re suspicious; if you’re too exhausted or structurally blocked to participate, you’re invisible. Kraus is pointing to a political design flaw: formal rights mean little when time, energy, and security are unequally distributed. Participation requires slack - hours to read, meet, argue, vote, organize. The people least afforded slack are then blamed for disengagement.

Context matters: Kraus wrote amid the churn of mass politics, industrial modernity, and the press-driven manufacture of public opinion in Austro-Hungarian and interwar Vienna. His lifelong war with complacent liberal rhetoric makes this line less anti-democratic than anti-sentimental: a warning that democracy can become another machine for sorting, shaming, and quietly excusing inequality as character.