War & Peace Quote by Raoul Vaneigem

Vaneigem is aiming a knife at a culture that treats human energy like a fuel source and then congratulates itself for the smoke. The line hinges on a deliberate confusion: work gets framed as virtue, productivity as proof of worth. In that moral economy, “necessity” isn’t neutral; it’s coercion disguised as common sense. You don’t just produce to live, you live to produce, and anything that can’t be counted gets quietly downgraded as indulgence.

The subtext is Situationist: an industrial society doesn’t merely organize labor, it colonizes desire. “Create” here isn’t a cute synonym for “make stuff.” It points to play, experimentation, the unruly forms of life that refuse a time sheet. Creation is risky, inefficient, and often socially illegible until after the fact. Production is legible immediately: units, outputs, KPIs, “impact.” The enemy relationship Vaneigem names is structural. When survival is tethered to output, creativity becomes either a hobby for the secure or a resource to be mined and repackaged.

Context matters: writing out of mid-century European consumer capitalism and the radical critique that fed into May ’68, Vaneigem is rejecting both the factory and its slicker descendants. The quote still lands because our “post-industrial” era perfected the confusion: we brand ourselves, optimize ourselves, hustle as identity. Even the arts get audited for “content.” Vaneigem’s intent is to pry apart two verbs that power wants merged, and to remind you that a society obsessed with producing will eventually forget why anyone wanted to make anything at all.