Revolt becomes real freedom only when it returns to positive action.

Evidence

This mystification of useless effort is more intolerable than fatigue. Life imprisonment is the most horrible of punishments because it preserves existence in its pure facticity but forbids it all legitimation. A freedom can not will itself without willing itself as an indefinite movement. It must absolutely reject the constraints which arrest its drive toward itself. … But it again assumes the negative aspect of revolt when the oppressor is a human freedom. One can not deny being: the in-itself is, and negation has no hold over this being, this pure positivity; one does not escape this fullness: a destroyed house is a ruin; a broken chain is scrap iron: one attains only signification and, through it, the for-itself which is projected there; the for-itself carries nothingness in its heart and can be annihilated, whether in the very upsurge of its existence or through the world in which it exists. The prison is repudiated as such when the prisoner escapes. But revolt, insofar as it is pure negative movement, remains abstract. It is fulfilled as freedom only by returning to the positive, that is, by giving itself a content through action, escape, political struggle, revolution. … There are limited situations where this return to the positive is impossible, where the future is radically blocked off. Revolt can then be achieved only in the definitive rejection of the imposed situation, in suicide. — Simone de Beauvoir, The Ethics of Ambiguity, 28

Categorization

• SEED: Article angle: useless labor as a form of psychological punishment — the 1848 national workshops, Italian pebble-breaking, and modern busywork invite comparison.
• ADDENDUM: The useless-effort paragraph ties to the sacrifice article’s theme of meaning-giving labor: meaningless toil is the inverse of sacrificial work that confers value on existence.