The paper is essentially based on two writings by Hannah Arendt: Marx and the tradition of Western political thought and Vita activa. In her confrontation with Marx, the author denounces the ambiguity of the glorification of labour and rejects the idea that absolute domination of necessity may well be lost. In the analysis of the different forms of operating Arendt persists in a characterization of work as a low level of existence because it pertains to the body, needs, the simple preservation of individual life. In this way the feeling of a mutual curlency of labour, work and action is lost. At the bottom of the labour society, Arendt finds marked attention to the happiness of the unhappy people, who would be at the origin of dangerous revolutionary excesses.