Paul Lafargue - The Right to Be Lazy (1883)
The socialist writer Paul Lafargue published his best-known essay, The Right to Be Lazy, in 1883. You can read in full on the Marxist Independent Archive; it’s a short piece but is worth poring over slowly.
Some background: in the 1880s, it was normal to work 12 hours a day (which was also the legal limit) in Europe. During the time Lafargue wrote this, labour unions were fighting to bring the work day down to 8 hours, considered revolutionary at the time.
Lafargue was critical of this movement largely because it aimed far too low. He thought it was dumb to "demand the Right to Work which is but the right to misery" and we ought to push instead for "a brazen law forbidding any man to work more than three hours a day". In short, why ask for 8 hours of wage slavery when 3 hours is already plenty?
After all these years, you'd think the 1883 tract would have become irrelevant. Think about all the technological and culture change that's happened in the last 14 decades. In light of that, it's strange how work culture in the developed world has remained the same (or gotten worse).
140 years later, 8 hours is still the norm
The 8-hour day has a certain seductive neatness. "Eight hours for work, eight hours for rest, eight hours for what we will" was the slogan of 19th century Welshman Robert Owen, one of those who fought for labour reform.
As anyone in a full-time job knows, you don't actually get a solid 16 hours of leisure and rest a day. You lose an hour to lunch, probably another two to your commute. Then another couple of hours on feeding, unwinding, and other bodily maintenance work excluding sleep. So that's 11 hours left. Assuming you sleep 8 hours that's only 3 hours left.
Maybe workers from 140 years ago rejoiced at the increased free time, but today? Why did we stop fighting for fewer hours? Why is the 8-hour work day still acceptable?
Workers still resist automation today
During Lafargue's time workers competed with machinery, even though there was no hope of competing:
A good working woman makes with her needles only five meshes a minute, while certain circular knitting machines make 30,000 in the same time. Every minute of the machine is thus equivalent to a hundred hours of the workingwomen’s labor, or again, every minute of the machine’s labor, gives the working women ten days of rest. What is true for the knitting industry is more or less true for all industries reconstructed by modern machinery. But what do we see? In proportion as the machine is improved and performs man’s work with an ever increasing rapidity and exactness, the laborer, instead of prolonging his former rest times, redoubles his ardor, as if he wished to rival the machine.
140 years later, it's pretty much the same. Last year, at JTC Launchpad, I saw a woman in a tech startup slogging away at a report. Her colleagues were playing basketball. One of the basketball bros said, "eh, you're still working on that? Why don't you use chatGPT?" And she demurred, fair bristling with pride in her work ethic.
The dogma of work still persists
I believe the two examples of resisting automation go beyond just retaining job security. To my eyes, they point to the underlying morality of work. Workers derived value out of labour then as much as now.
From The Right to Be Lazy's epic intro:
A strange delusion possesses the working classes of the nations where capitalist civilization holds its sway. This delusion drags in its train the individual and social woes which for two centuries have tortured sad humanity. This delusion is the love of work, the furious passion for work, pushed even to the exhaustion of the vital force of the individual and his progeny. Instead of opposing this mental aberration, the priests, the economists and the moralists have cast a sacred halo over work.
Doesn't that still ring true today?
Mass consumption has skyrocketed
Before the rise of the capital-owning class (factory owners and merchants) most luxuries were consumed by the gentle-born aristocrats. During Lafargue's time, the increased production of goods led to increased spending power of the capitalist class, who proceeded to develop increasingly debauched tastes.
To satisfy the capitalists’ taste for bigger houses, richer meals, and more fanciful clothing, there grew a new class of maids, jewellers, embroiderers, bookbinders, luxury tailors, home decorators, etc. Basically it spawned an entire industry of workers devoted to providing comforts to capitalists.
Lafargue wrote:
In order to find work for all the non-producers of our present society, in order to leave room for the industrial equipment to go on developing indefinitely, the working class will be compelled, like the capitalist class, to do violence to its taste for abstinence and to develop indefinitely its consuming capacities.
I just got chill down my spine realising we now live in that age Lafargue predicted...
Hm. Lafargue's writing seems even more urgent than ever.
Given our current fight for work-life balance, it's clear the 8-hour work day isn't sustainable. The cycle of overproduction and overconsumption hasn't only harmed us humans, it's also harming the earth. Our collective obsession with work has far from abated; "leisure" is endangered by the opportunity to monetise almost any non-work activity.
Despite the title, Lafargue isn't so much anti-work as he was pro-enjoying life. His objection is that we have given labour such status that we have let work crowd everything out, leaving with little bandwidth to simply enjoy being alive.
That's the reason we need the right to be lazy.