The Refusal of Work:
From the Post emancipation Caribbeanto Post-Fordist Empire
Christopher Taylor
The refusal of work and authority, or really the refusal of voluntary servitude, is the beginning of liberatory politics.—Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire
In 1880, the mixed-race Cuban Marxist Paul Lafargue published The Right to Be Lazy: Being a Refutation of the “Right to Work” of 1848
Lafargue’s witty and counterintuitive pamphlet argues that a “love” and “furious passion for work” has colonized revolutionary projects for liberation, leading revolutionaries to imagine “the worst sort of slavery” as the best kind of freedom.
Standing the “dogma of work” on its head, Lafargue asserts that freedom consists in expanding the time of nonwork, an expansion epitomized in the possibility of being lazy.
Although Lafargue’s radicalization of laziness had a precedent in Karl Marx’s own writing, and although Lafargue was himself Marx’s son-in-law, Lafargue’s “hedonist Marxism” failed to exert much influence on Lafargue’s father was the son of a Frenchman and a Haitian mulatto, Catalina Piron, who had sought refuge in Cuba during the Haitian Revolution. His maternal grandfather was a Jewish Frenchman, whose attempts to avoid the upheavals of revolution brought him from Haiti to France and from France to Jamaica. In Jamaica, he would have a daughter, Lafargue’s mother, with Maragarita Fripie, a Carib Indian. In his late teens Lafargue moved to Paris to study medicine, and he became involved with Lasallean and Proudhonist radicals and the burgeoning student movement of the time. Upon expulsion from medical school, Lafargue moved to London to continue his studies. There he met Karl Marx, whose daughter Laura he would marry.
The twenty-first century already promises to be kinder to Lafargue’s memory. Recent theorists of antiwork Marxism have positioned the creole’s pamphlet as a “precursor” to the politics of refusal and fight popularized in Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s Empire and theorized more robustly in Negri’s work of the past three decades.
Yet—despite the history of racial slavery that Lafargue embodied, despite the centrality of the figure of slavery to Lafargue’s pamphlet, despite the pamphlet’s intervention into a discursive environment that spawned both “right to work” revolutionary discourses in Paris and plutocratic discourses in the post emancipation Antilles—Lafargue’s critique of work is never put in relation to his Caribbean genealogy.
The reduction of Lafargue’s creole roots to an accidental biographical datum indexes a broader marginalization of Caribbean histories of slavery and emancipation in genealogies of
antiwork Marxism. Consider the epigraph to this essay: Hardt and Negri’s qualification of “work and authority” as a relation of “voluntary servitude” effectively distinguishes their antiwork politics from historical refusals of in voluntary servitude, from refusals of slavery. This hesitation over slavery, I suggest, amounts to a symptom of disavowal, an attempt to exorcise the specter of a Caribbean past that haunts the structures of rule and refusal constitutive of post-Fordist Empire. Caribbean histories of slavery and emancipation constitute the political unconscious of anti-work Marxism. If, as Kathi Weeks suggest, antiwork politics is “both a practical demand and a theoretical perspective,” creoles have always served as both subject and object of this gaze.
In contrast to productivist Marxisms, which celebrates labor and the laborer, antiwork Marxism describes labor itself as the site and source of human bondage.
While attending to the various ways laborers refuse work—strikes, slowdowns, walkouts, theft, demands for a basic guaranteed income, and so on—antiwork Marxism also articulates a vision of “a potential mode of life that challenges the mode of life now dened by and subordinated to work.”
This essay explores how Caribbean histories speak in and through radical imaginings of postwork forms of life. In the narrative that I offer, the Caribbean serves a crucial locale—a kind of “laboratory,” to borrow Hardt’s description of Italy—in which the epistemologies and practices of antiwork Marxism were first elaborated.
Yet the spatial and temporal scales adopted by antiwork theory typically elide the formative influence of Caribbean history: antiwork Marxism typically codes itself as a politics for, and the product of, the post-Fordist global North.
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