Waste Labor and the Capitalist Mythology in Total Refusal’s Hardly Working

Abstract

This article explores Hardly Working (2022), a four-channel video installation by the Austrian media collective Total Refusal, which appropriates the open-world environment of Rockstar Games’ Red Dead Redemption II (2018) to critique capitalist mythology and the representation of labor. The film foregrounds non-player characters (NPCs) – a washerwoman, street-sweeper, carpenter, and stablehand – whose labor, while visually present in the game, is functionally meaningless and algorithmically repetitive. By removing the player-avatar and focusing on these peripheral figures, Total Refusal reconfigures the game’s spatial and narrative hierarchies, transforming it into a site for Marxist critique.
Drawing on theoretical frameworks from Karl Marx, Hannah Arendt, Guy Debord and Georg Lukács, the article examines how Hardly Working engages themes of alienation, discipline, spectacle, myth, and class consciousness. The analysis reveals that Red Dead II perpetuates a frontier mythology that aligns with neoliberal ideals of freedom, individualism, and market inevitability, while simultaneously erasing the structures of labor that support this fantasy. By presenting NPCs as digital laborers caught in Sisyphean loops, Hardly Working exposes the game’s ideological function: to normalize and aestheticize capitalist exploitation.
Total Refusal’s work operates through remediation, transforming a commercial video game into a critical visual performance. The installation’s observational style and moments of algorithmic rupture allow for a Brechtian distancing effect, encouraging spectators to question the “naturalness” of digital labor and its real-world analogs. This article situates Hardly Working within a broader discourse on media, power, and representation, arguing that it exemplifies how artistic interventions in digital spaces can reveal the hidden logics of capitalist systems and provoke critical reflection on labor, visibility, and consent.