The celebration of “key workers” in Britain during the pandemic forms the basis of what Althusser described as an “ideology of work,” a largely humanistic ideological machinery deployed in the service of maintaining and reproducing capitalist relations of production in the face of the present crisis. As opposed to a benign expression of national unity in response to a threat, this essay argues that the ideological celebration of key workers in Britain has been crucial to the protection of key accumulation strategies threatened by the crisis and to the neutralization of any potential resistance by those workers endangered by these strategies. This ideology of work has underpinned the implementation of numerous social policies in the service of protecting these relations of production: a fact which this essay argues must be adequately confronted prior to the imagination of alternative social policies and social futures after the pandemic
