The Right to Be Lazy (1883)

https://www.marxists.org/archive/lafargue/1883/lazy/ch01.htm

by mitchbob • 4 years ago

134 209 4 years ago

marxists.org

spacKingChamath• 4 years ago

Some additional info.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Right_to_Be_Lazy

Definitely an interesting way to look at the world.

mjfl3• 4 years ago

What an ironically privileged position, considering how much he calls out the bourgeoisie.

tstrimple2• 4 years ago

Automation, which had already come a long way in Lafargue's time, could easily reduce working hours to three or four hours a day. This would leave a large part of the day for the things we really want to do, such as to spend time with friends, relax, enjoy life, and be lazy. Lafargue argues the machine is the saviour of humanity but only if the working time it frees up becomes leisure time. The time that is freed up is usually converted into more hours of work, which he compares to more hours of toil and drudgery. Working too many hours a day is often degrading, while working very few hours can be very refreshing and enriching, leading to general advancement, health, joy, and satisfaction.

Doesn't seem like a privileged argument. If the needs of a society can be met with 3-4 hours of work a day and automation for the rest, fighting to work only 8 hours a day does seem to miss the mark. Whether 3-4 hours of work a day is actually enough is a separate discussion worth having. There is good evidence supporting the idea that with more free time employees could get done in 30 hours a week what they are currently doing in 40. But he's been demonstrated to be absolutely right with regards to where the spoils of increased productivity go. It rarely if ever materializes as less work or better pay for the masses and always seem to be funneled to the moneyed class instead. I hardly think it's privileged to believe that the progress and advancements made in a society should benefit everyone instead of a handful of already extremely wealthy people.

https://cepr.org/voxeu/columns/teams-become-more-productive-...

giraffe_lady4• 4 years ago

It is consistent with the meaning of bourgeoisie then, which transposed to modern systems means more like "the owner class" than the contemporary social connotation of well-compensated professionals. Owners benefit from more/harder work, both their own and that of others, and so it (reasonably) becomes a class value for them.

A non-owner worker doesn't benefit in the same way, but many still value work in the same way the bourgeoisie do. Workers don't benefit like owners do and so they shouldn't want to work like owners do. That's the point being made.

kergonath5• 4 years ago

This is a fallacious position. The modern attitude of “you’re not one of us, therefore you cannot possibly have a valid opinion” is wrong on many levels.

It is not logically consistent (a variation of ad hominem arguments).

It is counter productive because having a range of opinions helps avoiding echo chambers and have a broader outlook and understanding, and ultimately find better solutions and strategies.

It opens the door to no true Scotsman sterile arguments that are very easy to use in bad faith against people you disagree with.

It creates counter-productive dissent when people who actually agree on an idea or policy don’t work together for ideological reasons.

Don’t do it.

matkoniecz5• 4 years ago

According to Lafargue, wage labour is tantamount to slavery

It does seem to be quite useless way to look at the world.

It seems that they are unaware of what slavery actually means or deliberately mislead. Or Wikipedia is inaccurate.

giraffe_lady4• 4 years ago

It's meant in the sense of "coerced into working." Eg if you don't have a viable alternative to working, did you choose work freely? Everyone using this comparison from that time period knows it's an extreme metaphor and is using it at least partially for the shock value of the comparison, to jar people into seeing the everyday pressures in a different way.

They aren't comparing the conditions of slavery to the conditions of wage labor, just that the force that compels a proletarian worker to work is on the same continuum with the force that compels a slave to work.

laurentoget2• 4 years ago

considering lafargue was born in 1842 in cuba on a coffee plantation and was of mixed race he probably had a pretty good idea of what slavery was.

mgrthrow5• 4 years ago

Slavery means lots of things. Chattel slavery, yes, but also forced labor like in us prisons. Indentured labor, child soldiers, forced marriage, etc etc.

The concept of "wage slavery" is basically, "you are not free to not earn a wage because you will starve". It's also easy to draw parallels between the commodification of ones labor and slavery.

It's a term that is not new, is widely used, and debated plenty. The incorrect response is to say, "that's a useless way to think". Show some intellectual curiosity - why do people believe that, what values do they hold, what are their reasons, which arguments do I disagree with, etc.

I'm a socialist, I don't think capitalists have a "useless way to think about the world", I have fundamental critiques of specific policies and different values on certain social behaviors.

heavyset_go12• 4 years ago

The abolitionist and former slave Frederick Douglass had this to say on the subject of wage labor[1]:

[E]xperience demonstrates that there may be a slavery of wages only a little less galling and crushing in its effects than chattel slavery, and that this slavery of wages must go down with the other

From Wikipedia[1]:

Douglass went on to speak about these conditions as arising from the unequal bargaining power between the ownership/capitalist class and the non-ownership/laborer class within a compulsory monetary market: "No more crafty and effective devise for defrauding the southern laborers could be adopted than the one that substitutes orders upon shopkeepers for currency in payment of wages. It has the merit of a show of honesty, while it puts the laborer completely at the mercy of the land-owner and the shopkeeper"

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wage_slavery#History

AnimalMuppet5• 4 years ago

I've seen that as a meme and/or talking point, here on HN, far too many times.

Your alternatives are to be independently wealthy, own your own business, to be a subsistence farmer, to work in a co-op, to be on welfare, or to work for wages. Those who trot out this line never specify which option they think is better. Either they haven't thought that far, or they're thinking we're all going to work in co-ops, or they're thinking the rest of us should support them. But that just turns into more slavery for everyone else...

(I will give the more thoughtful ones the credit that they seem to want co-ops, or full-on communism, which could be considered co-ops on a larger scale.)

kergonath5• 4 years ago

I cannot voluntarily not work, and I don’t get to choose who gets the benefits of my work. And I am in a privileged situation because I could lose my work and still pay rent for long enough to find another one, but this is not the case for a vast class of people in western countries. These people are effectively bound to their employer because losing their job means losing their home and means of subsistence.

The world is not black and white, and the fact that a situation is not as absolutely terrible as a sex slave in Mauritania should not shut down any discussion. There are shades of involuntary work.

whateveracct• 4 years ago

Love this. I tend to be lazy at least every Thursday+Friday. I did a little work during that Argentina WC game just now and am now logged off for the day after two hours of distracted work.

Luckily, I'm stretching some work from Wednesday with sawdust ;) so no worries

Remote work really has been a game-changer this last decade. I've gotten effectively paid to have fun more than to work.

I think I'll go work on an art project I've been putting off now..

laurentoget2• 4 years ago

https://www.marxists.org/archive/lafargue/1883/lazy/ not to undermine the NYRB, but this is in the public domain, for anybody interested

FooBarBizBazz4• 4 years ago

You're in debt if your liabilities exceed your assets.

Your liabilities include rent, food, and clothing.

In the assets column, include various sources of income or capital gains, like dividend stocks.

In a HCOL place like the United States, the columns balance around $1 million, which is effectively "zero". That's the point where you start being able to afford a frugal lifestyle in that built/social environment, without work. And that's not without sacrifices.

So in that sense, most people are debt-slaves for most of their lives.

archarios2• 4 years ago

IDK about y'all, but being lazy generally makes me feel horrible. I love getting things done. I hate having to labor simply to enrich others and for me to survive. But I love doing work that I think is meaningful and makes a difference so much more than chilling all day. Chilling needs to happen, but not all the time!

rootusrootus• 4 years ago

being lazy generally makes me feel horrible

Yes, very much agree. If I get sucked into HN and blow a big chunk of the day on stuff like this, I feel quite terrible at the end. I feel so much better when I can look back on my day and see accomplishments.

kilbuz• 4 years ago

What accomplishments are you most proud of this year?

nonrandomstring3• 4 years ago

Me too. As a 'victim' of the Protestant Work Ethic, or maybe personality traits of the industrious/conscientious type, I find it the struggle is fighting for my right to be active in a world that increasingly lionises a passive, convenient and dependent life-stance. I just want to shake people sometimes. Look around you and see what needs to be done and the duty life demands of you!

archarios2• 4 years ago

Yeah I suppose if we had fully automated space communism already I may have a different viewpoint..

annyeonghada• 4 years ago

duty life demands of you

I have no duty towards life. I didn't choose to be born, did I? In fact, I vegetate waiting to have enough strength to suppress my fear of death and kill myself.

Yes, I've tried therapy in the last 15 years. Yes, I've tried exercise, meditation, journaling, workaholism, idleness, religion, philosophy, science and so on and on. I just want to be done. Every evening I pray to deities I don't believe in: "Have mercy on my suffering, do not make me wake up".

So, no: there is no duty towards anything, just the futility of existence in itself.

satori99• 4 years ago

"Progress isn't made by early risers. It's made by lazy men trying to find easier ways to do something."

― Robert Heinlein

BizarroLand• 4 years ago

I feel like the point is that we shouldn't be goaded into activity for the sake of capitalism, that we should have the right to be lazy even if we never use it.

It would be nice if I could just walk out of my job for 2 weeks and get rested and refreshed and then come back like it was nothing without first having to make an appointment for said vacation and possibly take calls and deal with issues remotely the whole time, you know?

lampshades• 4 years ago

I feel physically ill if I’m completely unproductive.

I_complete_me2• 4 years ago

"My young men shall never work. Men who work cannot dream; and wisdom comes to us in dreams." - Native American chief to the Europeans

throwayyy4790872• 4 years ago

Howd that go for them?

BitwiseFool3• 4 years ago

"The Right to Be Lazy reminds us that the urge to work is not always beneficial, let alone necessary. It can also be a “strange madness” consuming human lives."

To me, this is one of those things that is designed to be provocative while employing weasel words to great effect. In trying to type out a critique of it, I realize that "not always" and "let alone necessary" can be used to dismiss claims that this is anti-work. Despite the fact that it is highly critical of the "need" to for work.

j7ake• 4 years ago

Being too lazy seems like a waste of potential.

Not being lazy enough is also not good; you burn out or lose perspective.

armchairhacker• 4 years ago

Roughly how much "work" does every person in the world need to do so that every person in the world can live a minimal but decent lifestyle?

Of course, some people will want and take more than "decent", some people are disabled so its unreasonable to expect and unfair to demand for them to contribute the same amount, some people genuinely like to work all sorts of jobs (including hard labor), and speaking of, there are different jobs and no one way to quantify their "work".

But this is a good starting point to answer the question: how much work is "enough"? With modern knowledge and medium-scale factories, can people spend 15-hour weeks producing enough to live comfortably, or do you need the average person to work 20-hour weeks of hard labor (or have 1/3 of the population work 60-hour weeks)?

BitwiseFool3• 4 years ago

I think this is a question with an impossible answer. Life on Earth is far to varied and chaotic for any baseline value. Just like an ecosystem, everything is in constant flux.

nradov5• 4 years ago

You're asking the wrong question. Regardless of the specific number of work hours that would be necessary to live a minimal but decent lifestyle (however you choose to define that), some people will always choose to work longer and harder in order to raise their social status. That status is often denominated in money but it can also take the form of possession of scarce resources, athletic skills, physical appearance, or fame. Most people are very status conscious and will then work harder themselves in order to keep up with the competition (or at least not fall too far behind).

You might claim that this status seeking is irrational or unhealthy or whatever, but that's a moot point. It's fundamental human nature and will never change.

ruined• 4 years ago

social status is, by definition, cultural, and cultural values are malleable.

i think it's also worth pointing out that work is perhaps not so connected to status as may be assumed. there is plenty of work that provides no status, and it seems to me that higher-status people work less.

janef0421• 4 years ago

Even if humans would continue to attempt to gain social status by training to become buff pole-vaulters, I think it would be a massive improvement if that status seeking was decoupled from the economic system.

WalterBright6• 4 years ago

Roughly how much "work" does every person in the world need to do so that every person in the world can live a minimal but decent lifestyle?

It turns out people have to work harder for that than they do working under a free market system, where they get to keep what they earn.

WaxProlix• 4 years ago

they get to keep what they earn.

And 'earn' what they're allowed -- 'earn' is kind of a weasel word in that sentence.

osigurdson• 4 years ago

What we need is for workers to control the means of production so that eventually one guy can become the king and rule by decree.

HyperSane2• 4 years ago

GDP/hour of labor is a really interesting metric. For the US it is about $75/hour.

M95D• 4 years ago

Romania has the second highest GDP/h in EU. Why? Because of undeclared employment / illegal work.

zemvpferreira• 4 years ago

I also think this is a tricky but fun question. First off, what's minimal but decent? Maybe owning a phone with internet access and 4 changes of clothes. Eating enough nutritious food every week. Having a comfortable place to sleep, indoor plumbing and ease in moving about a 10 mile radius. Healthcare for emergencies only.

That might total the equivalent of $50/week in consumption and $20K in sunken costs per person in the developed world. Much less in developing nations.

You're thinking in terms of tens of hours when we could get by on minutes of work per day, if we optimised for comfortable survival. At the cost of stagnation. But not a bad trade-off to consider.

Mizza• 4 years ago

Related classic, Bertrand Russel's 1932 'In Praise of Idleness':

https://harpers.org/archive/1932/10/in-praise-of-idleness/

I_complete_me2• 4 years ago

"An Apology for Idlers" by R.L. Stevenson is also worth reading for the beautiful way it is written if for no other reason.

dang• 4 years ago

We changed the URL from https://www.nyrb.com/products/the-right-to-be-lazy, which doesn't have the text, to a page that does.

tayo42• 4 years ago

I wonder what these anti working writers and philosophers would say about doing nothing in our modern day. Where nothing is still frequently capitalist driven consumption, scrolling through our phones endlessly getting advertised to, watching tv/streaming, engagement traps of social media etc...

It's almost like it isn't safe to be lazy now, your downtime attention is fought for so hard by groups with so much resources then you can ever fight back with.

cauefcr• 4 years ago

That's one reason why co-operatives are interesting, same as unions, they change the balance of power to favor the oppressed by capital, relative to their size.

elefanten• 4 years ago

Funny this guy was arguing, in 1883, that automation could reduce the average workday to 4 hours.

Good example to consider when reasoning about the current AI wave

quickthrower2• 4 years ago

The thing that will reduce the workday is everyone deciding to do it. Imagine the silly meetings and pointless work that just can’t be done when you starve the machine of humute (human compute) hours. Innovation would be the result. Entire businesses may be untenable and rightly so.

Few things need long work days if we are happy to sacrifice some convenience. Supermarket hours can be fewer for example.

Jobs like police, doctors etc. maybe not but we should probably reward them more accordingly.

nathan_compton• 4 years ago

When your solution to a problem is "everyone spontaneously decides to do it" what you really want is _regulation_.

geenew• 4 years ago

I'm lazy, so I'll just post this, from Office Space. I'm sure most people here can guess what quote it is.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rQ-bp_A61MI

throwaquestion5• 4 years ago

This is from 140 years ago but feel very modern

"The manufacturers have lost their bearings and know not which way to turn. They can no longer find the raw material to satisfy the lawless depraved passion of their laborers for work. In our woolen districts dirty and half rotten rags are raveled out to use in making certain cloths sold under the name of renaissance, which have about the same durability as the promises made to voters. At Lyons, instead of leaving the silk fiber in its natural simplicity and suppleness, it is loaded down with mineral salts, which while increasing its weight, make it friable and far from durable. All our products are adulterated to aid in their sale and shorten their life. Our epoch will be called the “Age of adulteration” just as the first epochs of humanity received the names of “The Age of Stone”, “The Age of Bronze”, from the character of their production"

eternityforest2• 4 years ago

On the other had, we are a lot better at making things out of cheap materials. Clothes from Target are relatively durable considering the price, especially if you do basic repairs like they would have back then.

Even the food is probably better now.

It's not perfect, but modern products are pretty amazing. A shirt can sell for $2 and last 20 years in some cases.

Of course sweatshops and pollution are still awful.

Broken_Hippo2• 4 years ago

Sure, clothes from Target might be relatively durable considering the price. But you need more clothing now. In a lot of places, it is socially unacceptable to wear the same thing for days in a row, even if you change your undergarments. You also don't have a realistic choice to make your own clothing. Cloth, thread, buttons and zippers aren't cheap and it became more out of reach in the late 80s and through the 90's (my mother sews and has for decades). That's not even considering things like a sewing machine, fabric scissors, and the fact that you might look like your clothes are homemade (which doesn't always fare well). Your Target clothing also won't be usable when it is worn, so you can't piece it together to make a new garment or even a blanket even if the stretchy material was easier to work with. You really can't do basic repairs like they used to do.

I'm not sure this is cheaper.

slim• 4 years ago

The age of obsolescence

cjfd• 4 years ago

A very good thing to read to realize that when one hears this kind of complaining today there is nothing new in it and it is not a signal of the apocalypse coming or of a unique new age. Well, the apocalypse or a new age might be coming, but this is not an indication that it is. It always was the case that one should pay attention to from whom one is buying.

IndySun2• 4 years ago

cjfd... >when one hears this kind of complaining today...

What complaining, and what kind of complaining is it?

pdimitar• 4 years ago

It's also an indication that the corporate squeezes that are being done on people are nothing new as well and they are just as problematic today as they were 140 years ago.

So yeah, perspective. Your take seems to defend companies, my take wants people to have more leisure time. Guess you already picked your poison.

kergonath5• 4 years ago

This is from 140 years ago but feel very modern

The world has not changed that much since then. We are still the same apes and are still motivated by the same things (getting food, status, power, or accomplishment, in various orders of priority depending on your social position).

nick889996544• 4 years ago

"the lawless depraved passion of their laborers for work"... what in the f**?

checkyoursudo• 4 years ago

In a similar vein, every once in a while I feel like the Luddites were onto something.

supriyo-biswas• 4 years ago

While the article definitely speaks to me, I don't see how being lazy can be practically ingrained in society, as some amount of labor is required for basic human needs, even in a hunter-gatherer lifestyle.

From there, a hierarchy of power would also be nice-to-have, since it can help with conflict resolution and efficient organization of resources, but we could argue at that point, it's starting to resemble capitalism somewhat.

musha68k• 4 years ago

Josef Pieper's "Leisure, the basis of culture" [1] comes to mind. Nothing we seemingly can do too easily, at least I can't so that's why I regularly try to re-read it.

[1] https://archive.org/details/leisurebasisofcu0000piep

biglost2• 4 years ago

Mmm the good place or at least it’s last season. Just that.

Georgelemental• 4 years ago

The working class gets its power from its ability to choose whether or not to work. Without work, there is no workers' movement

Aunche2• 4 years ago

I wonder how many people who think that everyone would be better if they worked half the hours were laughing at Elon Musk for laying off what he though was deadweight and having to rehire them.

zozbot2343• 4 years ago

Paul Graham has a very nice perspective on this: https://www.paulgraham.com/opensource.html (2005)

"I think the most important of the new principles business has to learn is that people work a lot harder on stuff they like. Well, that's news to no one. So how can I claim business has to learn it? When I say business doesn't know this, I mean the structure of business doesn't reflect it.

Business still reflects an older model, exemplified by the French word for working: travailler. It has an English cousin, travail, and what it means is torture.

This turns out not to be the last word on work, however. As societies get richer, they learn something about work that's a lot like what they learn about diet. We know now that the healthiest diet is the one our peasant ancestors were forced to eat because they were poor. Like rich food, idleness only seems desirable when you don't get enough of it. I think we were designed to work, just as we were designed to eat a certain amount of fiber, and we feel bad if we don't."

agalunar2• 4 years ago

Like rich food, idleness only seems desirable when you don't get enough of it. I think we were designed to work, just as we were designed to eat a certain amount of fiber, and we feel bad if we don't.

This is certainly not a new perspective; it's what I was taught growing up.

It sounds profound, but I take some umbrage with it, because it stops short. What kind of work? How much? For whom? It's a terribly convenient thing to promulgate the idea that "we were designed to work" without further clarification when you own capital and reap the value of others' labor, and it's an easy thing to say when you derive healthfulness from the work that you personally happen to do. By "work" do you mean activity that's deemed productive to modern society? Otherwise, why not say people need to spend some time being focused, exerting mental effort, being creative, having long-term goals or engaging in long-term endeavours, &c, if that's what you really mean?

I don't mean to sound suspicious or to insinuate some dark motivation on PG's part, but it (ironically) seems lazy to not bother to scrutinize the modern conception of work – to take something for granted because it's all that most of us living have ever known.

We need exercise, but we can get that running for our lives or playing a sport, and the latter is less dangerous (and preferable unless you're a thrill seeker). We need work, but do we need to get that by doing the things that we call "work" today?

(As a total aside: this reminded me of [1], shared some time ago on HN, which tenuously suggests that we were also designed to be idle. I took "designed" in PG's comment to mean "evolved", and my assumption is that small, pre-industrial societies are more representative of the conditions of the past few hundred thousand years in which modern humans evolved.)

Edit: @kergonath also replied to the idea of too much idleness elsewhere in this thread [2].

[1] https://twitter.com/mnvrsngh/status/1510978995269029888 [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33931427

zozbot2343• 4 years ago

What's the point of "being focused, exerting mental effort, being creative, having long-term goals or engaging in long-term endeavours, &c." if it's not beneficial to society in some way? Also, PG is explicitly talking about people doing things that they enjoy at least to some extent. That's what motivates them to stay active. Not very different from your example of sports - except that sports are rarely helpful to others, and then only as simple-minded entertainment.

8bitsrule• 4 years ago

The best work is indistinguishable from play. The word's too often associated with what children do ... 'merely' do. But remember how you threw your energies into it? It's great fun. The best work is the adult form of that; you return to it daily and it keeps rewarding: you and those you play with. When the going gets hard hard, solving it is the best.

throwayyy4790872• 4 years ago

The famous r/antiwork interview is all a fantastic example of where this attitude gets you.

https://youtu.be/3yUMIFYBMnc

Honestly, being Doreen seems like a nightmare and we should aspire to be better.

wbazant• 4 years ago

I was really puzzled by the comments under the video - people acting as if Doreen really set himself on fire somehow - while to me he seems to have set himself up quite well. He walks dogs for a few hours a day, and it lets him do other stuff he cares about, like reading people's arguments on the internet!

4gotunameagain• 4 years ago

I think it was because he was the worst possible poster child for that "movement", and made it seem like a joke from immature, psychologically troubled hermits.

heavyset_go12• 4 years ago

Some people don't like it when "those people" complain about anything.

westcort• 4 years ago

The whole book is available here on Project Gutenberg: https://gutenberg.org/ebooks/52984

The Right to Be Lazy (1883)

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