On 20 March 2026, the International Energy Agency published a document that no Western government read with the seriousness it deserved. It is called Sheltering From Oil Shocks, and at the top of its ten-point emergency plan to reduce oil demand sits a precise recommendation: work from home where possible. Not second, not third. First. Before highway speed limits. Before incentives for public transport. Before any other immediate energy-saving measure.

The reason is arithmetic and leaves no room for interpretation: road transport accounts for approximately 45 per cent of global oil demand. Every day a worker does not travel from home to the office is a day that share does not burn fuel. The IEA calculates that three remote working days per week, where job functions allow, could reduce national car oil consumption by between 2 and 6 per cent.

Three days a week. That is the proposal of an international agency describing the most severe energy crisis in the history of the global oil market. Three days as the minimum threshold of response to an unprecedented emergency.

In Italy, almost no one reaches that threshold. The reality of agile work in 2026 consists of two days a week — in the fortunate cases where they exist at all — dispensed with a degree of reluctance as an act of managerial grace, revocable at any moment, subject to the mood of whichever line manager happens to be on duty. They are not a right. They are not a contractual gain. They are an individual exemption regulated by Law 81 of 2017, which governs agile work as a bilateral agreement between employee and employer, with no general obligations, no minimum enforceable standards, no structural protection of any kind. Those who work remotely do so because their employer permits it. Not because they have the right.

And yet this is where the debate begins. Three days as revolution. Two days as reality. Zero as norm.

It would be tempting to dismiss the issue as a cultural lag, a problem of mindset to be overcome with the right communication, the right incentive, the right regulatory pressure. This reading is wrong — not because it underestimates the resistance, but because it places that resistance at the surface when it resides at depth. Resistance to remote work is not a habit to be corrected. It is a structure to be understood. And to understand it, one must go deeper than public debate usually ventures.

One must go to Marx. And to Jung.

Karl Marx’s Capital is not an economics manual. It is a philosophy of labour. This distinction is not academic — it is the condition for understanding what Marx was truly trying to say, beyond the ideological readings that transformed a work of thought into a political catechism or a polemical target.

Marx begins with an elementary question: what happens to a human being when they work within the capitalist system? The answer, sketched in the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 and later developed in Capital of 1867, is called alienation. Labour, in the Marxian view, is not a simple productive activity. It is the act through which the human being objectifies itself in the world, recognises itself in the things it produces, builds its own identity through the transformation of matter. To work is the way in which a person says: I was here. I changed something. This exists because I made it.

Capitalism breaks this bond. It separates the worker from the product of their labour — which belongs to those who own the means of production, not to those who used them. It separates the worker from the productive process — which is subdivided, parcelled out, rendered incomprehensible in its totality. It separates the worker from other workers — because competition replaces collaboration as the organising principle. And it separates the worker from themselves — because what they do at work does not express who they are, but who they must be in order to survive.

Within this framework, visual control is not an aberration. It is not a residue of cultural backwardness that will vanish with the right management training. It is a structural necessity of capital.

When the capitalist purchases the worker’s time — labour-power, in Marx’s language — they purchase a potentiality, not a certainty. Labour-power is the capacity to work, not the actual work. Transforming potentiality into reality, extracting actual labour from purchased labour-power, is the capitalist’s fundamental problem. And the historical solution to this problem is surveillance.

The overseer — the foreman, the plant manager, the office manager — is not an accident of the system. Not one organisational choice among many. It is the function capital gives itself to ensure that purchased time is transformed into extracted labour. It is the system rendering itself visible in a human figure. Marx analyses this in Capital with a precision that has lost nothing in nearly two centuries: the capitalist production process is a process of valorisation of capital, and surveillance is the condition of that valorisation.

“If I cannot see you, you are not working.” This sentence — uttered by multinational CEOs in 2026 with the same matter-of-factness with which a fifteenth-century estate manager would have said it — is not stupid. It is not ignorant. It is the logic of capital stated without euphemism. Capital does not buy results — it buys time. And time is controlled with the eye.

This explains why data are not enough. For decades, empirical research on agile work has produced convergent results: productivity does not decline, often increases; workers report higher levels of satisfaction and motivation; voluntary resignation rates fall; companies reduce operating costs. A randomised controlled trial conducted by Stanford University economist Nicholas Bloom, on over sixteen hundred employees of a technology company — published in the scientific journal Nature in 2024 — found that working from home two days a week produces no negative effects on either productivity or career advancement prospects. The study also documented a finding that management struggles to absorb: before the experiment, managers predicted on average that remote work would reduce productivity by 2.6 per cent. By the experiment’s end, they had changed their minds. International surveys of employees in hybrid arrangements consistently record high proportions declaring themselves more effective than when they were always on-site.

These numbers exist, are accessible, have been published in academic journals and industry platforms. They are not cited in the meetings where it is decided to call everyone back to the office five days a week. They are not cited because the problem does not lie there. The problem is that capital does not measure productivity — it measures control. And visual control is the only form of surveillance the capitalist has known since the nineteenth century.

There is, however, something that the Marxian reading alone does not fully capture. Marx explains the objective structure. He explains why the system needs visual control. He does not explain — or does not explain sufficiently — why the individual manager, the person in flesh and blood sitting in the room with an unobstructed view of the desks, feels something resembling pleasure when they see the chairs occupied. Why that eye on the employee is not merely an instrument: it is a need.

That is why one must go to Jung.

Carl Gustav Jung never wrote about agile work. He never analysed corporate presenteeism, nor the return to office policies of large corporations. But he developed a map of the human psyche that applies to these phenomena with a precision no more recent instrument has managed to match. Applying Jung to management is not a rhetorical exercise. It is an attempt to see, beneath the surface of the organisational decision, what truly drives it.

The starting point is the concept of the Shadow — not as a generic metaphor for the dark side, but as a precise technical category. The Shadow, in Jung, is the part of the personality that the conscious ego refuses to recognise as its own. It is not evil in a moral sense. It is everything that has been excluded from conscious identity: everything censored, repressed, declared incompatible with the image one holds of oneself. It may contain negative impulses, but also positive qualities that for some reason one cannot accept as one’s own. The structure is always the same: the conscious ego constructs itself by differentiation, excluding what it cannot integrate.

The Shadow does not disappear because it has been excluded. It continues to exist in the unconscious, accumulating energy there. Sooner or later it seeks an outlet. The mechanism through which it manifests without being recognised is projection: the Shadow is attributed to the other. What one does not wish to see in oneself becomes what one sees in the other with crystalline clarity. The accusation levelled at others is often a portrait of oneself that one cannot accept.

The mechanism of projection is the heart of the dynamic under analysis. The manager who does not trust the employee they cannot see is projecting onto them something that belongs to themselves. What are they projecting? Precisely what they fear: the desire to evade control, the temptation not to work when no one is watching, the impulse to do something else, to stop, to get lost. Human things, universal, known to everyone. But which the manager’s conscious ego refuses to acknowledge as its own, because they are incompatible with the image it holds of itself: the one who always works, the one who can be counted on, the one who never stops.

“If I cannot see you, you are not working.” Jungian translation: “If they cannot see me, I am not working.” The sentence describes the subject who utters it, not the recipient. It is a confession disguised as an accusation. And like all projections, it is all the more violent the more the subject is incapable of recognising it as such.

It is worth pausing on this mechanism, because it is more subtle than it appears on first reading. Projection is not a deliberate lie. It is not a calculated strategy to shift blame onto the other. It is an unconscious process — the projecting subject is genuinely convinced they are describing the other, not themselves. This is what makes it so resistant: it cannot be dismantled with logic, because it was not built with logic. It is dismantled — when it is dismantled at all — only through a process of consciousness-raising that requires time, willingness, and often the mediation of someone standing outside the projective field.

The manager who summons everyone to the office five days a week is not lying when they say they do it for collaboration, for company culture, for the transmission of knowledge. They believe it. This is the most important thing to understand: they genuinely believe it. Ideology — in the Marxian sense, as a system of representations that conceals the real relations of production — does not operate through conscious deception. It operates through the sincere conviction of telling the truth.

But the projection of the Shadow is only the first layer. Beneath it lies another, denser one, concerning the structure of the manager’s self as a function of role.

Jung distinguishes between the ego — the centre of consciousness — and the persona, the social mask the individual wears to relate to the external world. The persona is not false in a pathological sense: it is necessary, it is the form that social life imposes. The physician who dons the white coat, the judge who dons the gown, the manager who dons the jacket and sits at the desk with an unobstructed view of everyone else’s desks: all are performing a persona, all occupying a social role that has a precise, recognisable, transmitted form.

The problem arises when the individual identifies entirely with the persona, when they cease to know who they are beyond the role they play. When the mask becomes the face. Jung describes this condition with a certain severity: whoever identifies with the persona is like an actor who cannot step out of character even when the curtain has fallen. Their identity is entirely external — it depends on recognition by others, on social confirmation, on the visibility of their own role.

The middle manager — the one who does not set strategy but manages people, positioned midway in the hierarchy, high enough to hold power and low enough to be subjected to something far greater — is particularly exposed to this identification. Their identity is built entirely around the visibility of their own power. They have no spectacular results from the corporate apex to exhibit. They have no technical expertise of the frontline worker to draw on. They have the role. And the role manifests through the visible management of the people beneath them.

The desk with the slightly higher chair. The office with the glass door through which one sees and is seen. The meeting that is not always necessary, but is always called. The corridor traversed with a purposeful step. The open-plan floor of desks across which their gaze runs freely, without obstacles, without blind spots. These are all elements of a set that produces a sense of self. They are concrete proof, daily renewed, that they are someone. That they count. That they have people working beneath their eye.

The full office is a mirror. The manager who arrives in the morning and sees the desks occupied sees themselves reflected in that scene: I am the centre of this system, without me it would not function, my presence organises the presence of the others. It is not an explicit, conscious thought. It is something more visceral, more rapid, something that occurs before thought. An immediate and somatic confirmation of the identity the role has built for them.

The empty office is a mirror that reflects nothing. The manager who arrives and finds no one dramatically loses that confirmation. It is not merely a matter of productive control — it is a matter of the survival of the self-image. The employee working from home is not merely evading surveillance: they are depriving the manager of their reason for being visible. And this produces something resembling anxiety — not irritation, not rational concern about productivity. Anxiety. That form of objectless unease that Jung associates with threats to the integrity of the self.

“It’s nicer to see people in person.”

As a statement it deserves to be taken seriously, because it says something true about the psychology of those who utter it, even if it says nothing useful about the subject it purports to address.

The beauty of the sight. The purely aesthetic pleasure of the full office. This sentence — which genuinely circulates, pronounced by executives of contemporary companies with a disconcerting ease — is the most honest of the three formulas of visual control. It does not pretend to be an argument. It does not cite collaboration, does not invoke creativity, does not speak of company culture. It is an aesthetic, precisely. The employer who contemplates their employees seated at their desks feels something. It is not the pleasure of productivity. It is the pleasure of sight. The satisfaction of one who gazes upon what they possess and sees it where it should be, according to their own personal conception.

Organisational psychology studies document this phenomenon with some regularity: managers report higher levels of job satisfaction when their collaborators are physically present, regardless of measured productivity. It is not sadism. It is not malevolence. It is an addiction — to a self-image that control produces and that without control vanishes. An addiction that cannot be cured with education for change, nor with training courses on agile working. Because it is not rational. It comes from further away.

Here Jung introduces a third category, the most difficult and the most necessary: archetypal possession. Not in the supernatural and folkloristic sense of the term, but in the precise technical sense Jung attributes to it in his work on the collective unconscious. We are in the presence of archetypal possession when an individual ceases to be the subject of their own choices and becomes the vehicle through which a collective psychic complex expresses itself. When they do not choose, but are chosen. When they do not act, but are acted upon by something that precedes and surpasses them.

The collective unconscious, in analytical psychology, is not the sum of individual unconsciouses. It is the deepest layer of the psyche, shared by all of humanity, containing the fundamental structures of human experience: the archetypes. Archetypes are not fixed images. They are dispositions, empty forms that fill with historical and cultural content. The Father. The King. The Warrior. The Trickster. The Shadow. The Anima. Each of these patterns organises experience in a characteristic way, produces recognisable emotions, generates typical behaviours. They activate when circumstances require it — or when the ego is weak enough not to be able to contain them.

The Master — not in the legal-contractual sense, but in the archetypal sense — is one of these forms. It is the figure of the one who possesses, who disposes of others’ labour, who has the right to see and to judge. It is not an invention of industrial capitalism: it is a psychic structure as ancient as the human division of labour. The Mesopotamian master who supervised the servants in the fields. The feudal lord who counted the villages from the castle. The nineteenth-century manufacturer who walked among the looms. The call centre director who watched the monitor showing response times. The 2026 manager counting occupied chairs at nine in the morning. The form changes. The archetypal structure remains.

Capitalism filled that archetype with specific content, gave it a precise institutional form, legitimised it through contract and private property. But the underlying disposition — someone who watches, someone who is watched, and watching as an exercise of power — is far older than any mode of production. This explains why resistance to remote work is not a specifically capitalist phenomenon, in the strict sense. It is the response of an archetypal psychic structure to the threat of its own dissolution.

The manager who wants to see the desks occupied is not making a rational managerial choice. They are embodying this archetype. They are allowing that ancient form to speak through them in the voice of the present. It is not an individual failing. It is not a psychological weakness to be corrected with coaching. It is possession in the precise Jungian technical sense: a collective psychic complex that takes control of the ego and uses it as an instrument. Whoever is possessed by an archetype does not know it. They believe they are choosing freely. This is precisely the nature of possession.

The Industrial Revolution materialised this archetype in precise architectures and practices that have sedimented into the collective unconscious. The factory as a site of absolute control over the body and time. Taylorism as its most scientific form: work decomposed into elementary movements, each measured, each optimised, each supervised. The call centre of the nineties as its reincarnation in immaterial labour: the fixed workstation, the headset, the monitor recording every second of inactivity. The open space office of the 2000s as its most sophisticated aesthetic form: no walls, no hiding places, the unobstructed view as architectural principle, control transformed into design.

Every era has had its form of surveillance. Every form has left a trace in the collective unconscious of those who work and those who make others work. They stratify. They sediment. They become habitus — in the sense Bourdieu gives the term: incorporated dispositions, schemes of perception and action that operate below consciousness, that seem natural because they have been internalised so deeply as to be no longer distinguishable from nature itself. The manager who cannot imagine work that is not seen is not exercising their own will: they are executing a programme that history has written into them through generations of practice, imitation, and unconscious incorporation.

It is worth citing a documented case that illuminates this dynamic with an almost surgical clarity. In 2023, when several large American technology companies — those that above all others had built their identity on the idea of reinventing the future of work — imposed a return to the office on their employees, the stated reasons were exactly those expected: collaboration, innovation, company culture. But researchers who analysed internal data found something different: middle managers were the most ardent supporters of the return, far more so than senior leadership and far more so than frontline workers. And middle managers were also those whose coordination function — their very reason for existing in the corporate hierarchy — was most easily replaceable by digital tools. The return to the office was not an organisational choice: it was an identity defence.

The invisible employee — the one who works from home, who cannot be seen, who requires no physical coordination — does not merely call into question the productivity of the system. They call into question the necessity of the manager as a figure. And this is a threat of an entirely different order, one that cannot be resolved with productivity data and cannot be placated by research from Stanford. Because it touches identity, not performance.

There is still one final layer to explore, the most uncomfortable. Jung analysed with precision the relationship between power and psychic libido. Power, in his reading, is not merely an instrument of external control: it is a source of psychic energy for those who exercise it. Exercising power produces excitement, produces vitality, produces a sense of expansion of the self. Not necessarily in conscious or perverse forms — it can be something very quiet, almost imperceptible. The satisfaction of the one who organises, who decides, who has beneath them something that obeys.

Visual control is one form of this pleasure. Not the most violent, not the most explicit. But one of the most quotidian and most deeply rooted. The eye that runs across the occupied desks performs an act of possession. It is not a metaphor: it is psychology. The object possessed, seen, controlled, reassures the possessor of their own identity and power. When the object disappears from sight, it is not merely absent: it calls into question the possessor themselves. The addiction manifests in that moment — in the anxiety before the empty chair, in the unease of the half-deserted office, in the need to call a meeting simply to see faces again.

This is why mandatory return to the office has never truly been a matter of productivity. The data have contradicted it for too many years for anyone to still believe it in good faith. It is a matter of identity, of confirmation, of the pleasure of control, of archetypal possession feeding on itself. It is the psychology of the master that has found in the physical workplace its natural theatre, and that has no intention of surrendering it — not because it cannot, but because it does not know who it would be without.

Why, then, are data not enough? Why do productivity research, wellbeing studies, energy-saving calculations shift nothing of substance? Not because they are false — they are true, verified, replicated. But because they are rational arguments addressed to a problem that is not rational.

The synthesis of Marx and Jung produces a diagnosis that neither alone could formulate in its entirety. Marx explains the objective structure: visual control is a necessity of capital, not an individual choice. It is the form the system gives itself to extract value from purchased labour-power. It does not disappear when it is shown to be unnecessary — because it was never necessary in a productive sense. It is necessary in a systemic sense: it is the way in which capital ensures that its logic is respected even when no one is explicitly overseeing it.

Jung explains the subjective dynamic: visual control is also a neurosis of power, a psychological need that feeds on itself, an archetypal possession that the individual manager experiences as if it were a free and rational choice when in reality it is the product of a history that inhabits them. The Industrial Revolution speaks through them. Taylorism speaks through them. A hundred and fifty years of discipline of the working body speak through them. They are convinced they are deciding. In reality they are obeying something far older than any decision they have ever made.

Taken together, the two planes produce something precise: resistance to remote work is not irrational from the point of view of those who exercise it. It is perfectly coherent within a logic — that of capital which needs to see in order to control, that of the psyche which needs to see in order to exist. The problem is not the logic itself: it is that this logic has become invisible to itself. It disguises itself as an organisational principle, as company culture, as concern for collaboration. It does not recognise itself for what it is.

A system that functions through structural necessity and through archetypal possession cannot be dismantled with a PowerPoint presentation. It cannot be dismantled with numbers. It cannot be dismantled by demonstrating that productivity has not fallen. It is dismantled by making visible what conceals itself. By naming the power structure that visual control serves. By recognising the psychology of the master for what it is, without moralism but without indulgence.

The 2026 energy crisis has made all of this urgent in a way that had never been so clear. It demonstrated, with the brutal precision of facts, that the daily commute is not a neutral choice: it is an energy, environmental and economic cost that falls on everyone. It demonstrated that visual control is not merely a private matter between employer and employee: it is a choice with global consequences. And it demonstrated that those who refuse to change it are not defending productivity. They are defending their own eye.

The master’s eye fattens the horse, as the proverb says. But the proverb was written when the horse was the only engine available and there were no alternatives to direct control. Today the alternatives exist, are proven, are economically advantageous and energetically necessary.