Black History Month; Paul Lafargue

For Black History Month I will look at some of the historically obscure but influential black intellectuals of the 19th Century.

Today I feature Paul Lafargue, Karl Marx's son in law who was a Mulatto and faced racial discrimination as well as being subjected to antisemitism.

Paul Lafargue was born in Cuba in 1842. As he would later boast, he was an “international[ist] of blood before [he] was one of ideology.” By which he meant that of his four grandparents, only one was a Christian French citizen – one of his grandmothers was an Indian from Jamaica and one was a mulatto refugee from Haiti, and his maternal grandfather was a French Jew. He also liked to say that “the blood of three oppressed races runs in my veins” and when Daniel DeLeon asked him about his origins, he promptly replied, “I am proudest of my Negro extraction.”

Despite his family ties to Marx and his friendship and patronage by Engels we was no Marxist, he was a follower of Proudhon and an avowed anarchist/libertarian socialist.

He is known for his famous exhortation to the working class to struggle against work; The Right To Be Lazy (1883)

This would be the inspiration for the polemical proto-situationist text; The Right to Be Greedy and later Bob Blacks popular consumer version;The Abolition of Work

Lafargue's critique that workers under capitalism were no better off than slaves rings true even today. He applied the term wage-slave literally, and literarily. He exhorts workers to not to demand the right to work but to demand the right to leisure. Something capitalism of his time could not provide, though today it is all around us in modern consumer society of the G8 countries.

Capitalism, controlling the means of production and directing the social and political life of a century of science and industry, has become bankrupt. The capitalists have not even proved competent, like the owners of chattel slaves, to guarantee to their toilers the work to provide their miserable livelihood; capitalism massacred them when they dared demand the right to work -- a slave's right.

His tongue in cheek sarcasm and ridicule makes his writing humorous, accessible and pointed. In this case he points out that those who advocate for the morality of animal rights would do well to advocate for the ultimate pack horse of capitalism, the worker.

THE RIGHTS OF THE HORSE AND THE RIGHTS OF MAN

Capitalist Civilization has endowed the wage-worker with the metaphysical Rights of Man, but this is only to rivet him more closely and more firmly to his economic duty.

"I make you free," so speak the Rights of Man to the laborer, "free to earn a wretched living and turn your employer into a millionaire; free to sell him your liberty for a mouthful of bread. He will imprison you ten hours or twelve hours in his workshops; he will not let you go till you are wearied to the marrow of your bones, till you have just enough strength left to gulp down pour soup and sink into a heavy sleep. You have but one of your rights that you may not sell, and that is the right to pay taxes.

Progress and Civilization may be hard on wage-working humanity but they have all a mother's tenderness for the animals which stupid bipeds call "lower."

Civilization has especially favored the equine race: it would be too great a task to go through the longs list of its benefactions; I will name but a few, of general notoriety, that I may awaken and inflame the passionate desires of the workers, now torpid in their misery.

Horses are divided into distinct classes. The equine aristocracy enjoys so many and so oppressive privileges, that if the human-faced brutes which serve them as jockeys, trainers, stable valets and grooms were not morally degraded to the point of not feeling their shame, they would have rebelled against their lords and masters, whom they rub down, groom, brush and comb, also making their beds, cleaning up their excrements and receiving bites and kicks by way of thanks.

Aristocratic horses, like capitalists, do not work; and when they exercise themselves in the fields they look disdainfully, with a contempt, upon the human animals which plow and seed the lands, mow and rake the meadows, to provide them with oats, clover, timothy and other succulent plants.

These four-footed favorites of Civilization command such social influence that they impose their wills upon the capitalists, their brothers in privilege; they force the loftiest of them to come with their beautiful ladies and take tea in the stables, inhaling the acrid perfumes of their solid and liquid evacuations. And when these lords consent to parade in public, they require from ten to twenty thousand men and women to stack themselves up on uncomfortable seats, under the broiling sun, to admire their exquisitely chiseled forms and their feats of running and leaping They respect none of the social dignities before which the votaries of the Rights of Man bow in reverence. At Chantilly not long ago one of the favorites for the grand prize launched a kick at the king of Belgium, because it did not like the looks of his head. His royal majesty, who adores horses, murmured an apology and withdrew.

It is fortunate that these horses, who can count more authentic ancestors than the houses of Orleans and Hohenzollern, have not been corrupted by their high social station; had they taken it into their heads to rival the capitalists in aesthetic pretentions, profligate luxury and depraved tastes, such as wearing- lace and diamonds, and drinking champagne and Chateau-Margaux, a blacker misery and more overwhelming drudgery would he impending over the class of wage-workers.

Thrice happy is it for proletarian humanity that these equine aristocrats have not taken the fancy of feeding upon human flesh, like the old Bengal tigers which rove around the villages of India to carry off women and children; if unhappily the horses had been man-eaters, the capitalists, who can refuse them nothing, would have built slaughter-houses for wage-workers, where they could carve out and dress boy sirloins, woman hams and girl roasts to satisfy their anthropophagic tastes.

The proletarian horses, not so well endowed, have to work for their peck of oats, but the capitalist class, through deference for the aristocrats of the equine race, concedes to the working horses rights that are far more solid and real than those inscribed in the "Rights of Man." The first of rights, the right to existence, which no civilized society will recognize for laborers, is possessed by horses.

The colt, even before his birth, while still in the fetus state, begins to enjoy the right to existence; his mother, when her pregnancy has scarcely begun, is discharged from all work and sent into the country to fashion the new being in peace and comfort; she remains near him to suckle him and teach him to choose the delicious grasses of the meadow, in which he gambols until he is grown.

The moralists and politicians of the "Rights of Man" think it would be monstrous to grant such rights to the laborers; I raised a tempest in the Chamber of Deputies when I asked that women, two months before and two months after confinement, should have the right and the means to absent themselves from the factory. My proposition upset the ethics of civilization and shook the capitalist order. What an abominable abomination -- to demand for babies the rights of colts.

As for the young proletarians, they can scarcely trot on their little toes before they are condemned to hard labor in the prisons of capitalism, while the colts develop freely under kindly Nature; care is taken that they be completely formed before they are set to work. and their tasks are proportioned to their strength with a tender care.

This care on the part of the capitalists follows them all through their lives. We may still recall the noble indignation of the bourgeois press when it learned that the omnibus company was using peat and tannery waste in its stalls as a substitute for straw: to think of the unhappy horses having such poor litters! The more delicate souls of the bourgeoisie have in every capitalist country organized societies for the protection of animals, in order to prove that they can not be excited by the fate of the small victims of industry. Schopenhauer, the bourgeois philosopher, in whom was incarnated so perfectly the gross egoism of the philistine, could not hear the cracking of a whip without his heart being torn by it.

This same omnibus company, which works its laborers from fourteen to sixteen hours a day, requires from its dear horses only five to seven hours. It has bought green meadows in which they may recuperate from fatigue or indisposition. Its policy is to expend more for the entertainment of a quadrupled than for paying the wages of a biped. It has never occurred to any legislator nor to any fanatical advocate of the "Rights of Man" to reduce the horse's daily pittance in order to assure him a retreat that would be of service to him only after his death.

The Rights of Horses have not been posted up; they are "unwritten rights," as Socrates called the laws implanted by Nature in the consciousness of all men.

The horse has shown his wisdom in contenting himself with these rights, with no thought of demanding those of the citizen; he has judged that he would have been as stupid as man if he had sacrificed his mess of lentils for the metaphysical banquet of Rights to Revolt, to Equality, to Liberty, and other trivialities which to the proletariat are about as useful as a cautery on a wooden leg.

Civilization, though partial to the equine race, has not shown herself indifferent to the fate of the other animals. Sheep, like canons, pass their days in pleasant and plentiful idleness; they are fed in the stable on barley, lucerne, rutabagas and other roots, raised by wage-workers; shepherds conduct them to feed in fat pastures, and when the sun parches the plain, they are carried to where they can browse on the tender grass of the mountains.

The Church, which has burned her heretics, and regrets that she can not again bring up her faithful sons in the love of "mutton," represents Jesus, under the form of a kind shepherd, bearing upon his shoulders a weary lamb.

True, the love for the ram and the ewe is in the last analysis only the love for the leg of mutton and the cutlet, just as the Liberty of the Rights of Man is nothing but the slavery of the wage-worker, since our jesuitical Civilization always disguises capitalist exploitation in eternal principles and bourgeois egoism in noble sentiments; yet at least the bourgeois tends and fattens the sheep up to the day of the sacrifice, while he seizes the laborer still warm from the workshop and lean from toil to send him to the shambels of Tonquin or Madagascar.

Laborers of all crafts, you who toil so hard to create your poverty in producing the wealth of the capitalists, arise, arise! Since the buffoons of parliament unfurl the Rights of Man, do you boldly demand for yourselves, your wives and your children the Rights of the Horse.

Also See:

Black Herstory Month: Lucy Parsons




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Working was pointless at best and 'degrading, humiliating and exploitative' at worst, says Reddit moderator behind the influential 'antiwork'

sjones@insider.com (Stephen Jones)

© Provided by Business Insider The reasons driving the Great Resignation transcend much more than simply a desire to work less. SrdjanPav/Getty Images

The moderator of a viral, "anti-work" Reddit thread said most work is pointless, and humiliating.
Doreen Ford is a moderator of r/antiwork, which has gained 1.4 million users since October 2020.
"There's a lot of positions that just don't make any sense," Ford told the FT.

A moderator of a viral "anti-work" Reddit thread has said she left traditional employment because much of her work was "degrading, humiliating and exploitative."

The thread – r/antiwork – has nearly 1.6 million members and is part of a movement towards the "antiwork" rejection of the traditional idea of a nine-to-five job in favor of more leisure and fulfilment.

"I think there's a lot of positions that just don't make any sense, that do not have to exist," Doreen Ford, a moderator of the channel, told the FT.

"You're just pushing around papers for no good reason. It doesn't really help anybody," she said.

Ford, 30, spent 10 years working in retail, but left her job in 2017 after her grandmother advised her to follow her passion for dogs.

She now walks dogs part time and has never been happier, she told the FT.

"Usually, at best, [working was] pointless," said Ford. "And at worst it was degrading, humiliating and exploitative."

She added: "Most of us are just normal people. We have jobs that we don't like, which is the whole point of why we're in the movement to begin with."

The thread, whose the full name is "Antiwork: Unemployment for all, not just the rich!", was started in 2013.

For years its membership numbered in the low thousands, before growing exponentially since the onset of the pandemic, which fueled a reassessment of work and its value and prompted a "Great Resignation" of resignations.

The Reddit thread now receives an average of 1,500 posts a day, in which members – so-called "Idlers" – share accounts of bad bosses and encourage each other to quit, similar to the Tang ping movement in China.

 

© Subreddit Stats Membership of r/antiwork has grown exponentially since the beginning of the pandemic. Subreddit Stats

Insider's Hilary Hoffower reported how Gen Z and millennial workers were leading the way by trading in bad jobs for careers that offer greater purpose and meaning — while many older workers are choosing to switch to self-employment or early retirement.

A record 4.5 million Americans quit their job in November.

The reasons driving the great resignation transcend much more than simply a desire to work less.

Kentuckians, whose state is at the epicenter of America's Great Resignation, outlined fears over the Omicron variant, a dearth of accessible childcare and social inequalities as among the reasons to Insider's Juliana Kaplan, Hillary Hoffower, and Madison Hoff.

The Right To Be Lazy - The People
www.slp.org/pdf/others/lazy_pl.pdf · PDF file
The Right To Be Lazy BEING A REPUDIATION OF THE “RIGHT TO WORK” OF 1848 By Paul Lafargue Translated and adapted from the French by Dr. Harriet Lothrop. Published by the

By work we mean what Bob Black says in his classic essay, The Abolition of Work, “Work is production enforced by economic or political means, by the carrot or the stick.” In other words, we are against the notion that people should be structurally limited and optioned out of a better, more peaceful and playful life by the powers that be.
About - Abolish Work
abolishwork.com/about/

The Abolition of Work - The Anarchist Library

https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/bob-black-the-abolition-of-work

2020-11-28 · Bob Black The Abolition of Work No one should ever work. Work is the source of nearly all the misery in the world. Almost any evil you’d care to name comes from working or from

The Right to Be Greedy: Theses on the Practical Necessity of Demanding Everything

by For Ourselves: Council for Generalized Self-Management

Publication date 1974The Right To Be Greedy: Theses On The Practical Necessity Of Demanding Everything is a book published in 1974 by an American Situationist collective called "For Ourselves: Council for Generalized Self-Management". 

Post-left anarchist Bob Black describes it in its preface as an "audacious attempt to synthesize a collectivist social vision of left-wing origin with an individualistic (for lack of a better word) ethic usually articulated on the right".

Its authors say that "[t]he positive conception of egoism, the perspective of communist egoism, is the very heart and unity of our theoretical and practical coherence". It is highly influenced by the work of Max Stirner. A reprinting of the work in the eighties was done by Loompanics Unlimited with the involvement of Bob Black who also wrote the preface to it.

Most libertarians think of themselves as in some sense egoists. If they believe in rights, they believe these rights belong to them as individuals. If not, they nonetheless look to themselves and others as so many individuals possessed of power to be reckoned with. Either way, they assume that the opposite of egoism is altruism. The altruists, Christian or Maoist, agree. A cozy accomodation; and, I submit, a suspicious one. What if this antagonistic intedependence, this reciprocal reliance reflects and conceals an accord? Could egoism be altruism's loyal opposition? Yes, according to the authors of this text. What's more, they insist that an egoism which knows itself and refuses every limit to its own realization is communism.

Contents:
Preface by Bob Black
1. Wealth
2. Individualism and Collectivism
3. The Dialectic of Egoism
4. The Resonance of Egoisms
5. Communist Society
6. Radical Subjectivity
7. Pleasure
8. Sexuality
9. Authority
10. Morality
11. Revolution
Appendix: Preamble to The Founding Agreements of For Ourselves: Council for Generalized Self-Management

THE RIGHT TO BE LAZY ABOLISH WORK!
Some Chinese shun grueling careers for

 'low-desire life'

FROM FUEDALISM TO LATE CAPITALI$M IN 100 YEARS

People walk across an intersection during rush hour in Beijing. (AP)

Updated: 04 Jul 2021, 

Beijing needs skilled professionals to develop technology and other industries

BEIJING : Fed up with work stress, Guo Jianlong quit a newspaper job in Beijing and moved to China's mountain southwest to “lie flat."

Guo joined a small but visible handful of Chinese urban professionals who are rattling the ruling Communist Party by rejecting gruelling careers for a “low-desire life." That is clashing with the party's message of success and consumerism as its celebrates the 100th anniversary of its founding.

Guo, 44, became a freelance writer in Dali, a town in Yunnan province known for its traditional architecture and picturesque scenery. He married a woman he met there.

“Work was OK, but I didn't like it much," Guo said.

“What is wrong with doing your own thing, not just looking at the money?"

“Lying flat" is a “resistance movement" to a “cycle of horror" from high-pressure Chinese schools to jobs with seemingly endless work hours, novelist Liao Zenghu wrote in Caixin, the country's most prominent business magazine.

“In today's society, our every move is monitored and every action criticized," Liao wrote. “Is there any more rebellious act than to simply lie flat?'"

It isn't clear how many people have gone so far as to quit their jobs or move out of major cities. Judging by packed rush hour subways in Beijing and Shanghai, most young Chinese slog away at the best jobs they can get.



Still, the ruling party is trying to discourage the trend. Beijing needs skilled professionals to develop technology and other industries. China's population is getting older and the pool of working-age people has shrunk by about 5 per cent from its 2011 peak.

“Struggle itself is a kind of happiness," the newspaper Southern Daily, published by the party, said in a commentary. “Choosing to lie flat' in the face of pressure is not only unjust but also shameful."

The trend echoes similar ones in Japan and other countries where young people have embraced anti-materialist lifestyles in response to bleak job prospects and bruising competition for shrinking economic rewards.

Official data show China's economic output per person doubled over the past decade, but many complain the gains went mostly to a handful of tycoons and state-owned companies. Professionals say their incomes are failing to keep up with soaring housing, child care and other costs.

In a sign of the issue's political sensitivity, four professors who were quoted by the Chinese press talking about “lying flat" declined to discuss it with a foreign reporter.

Another possible sign of official displeasure: T-shirts, mobile phone cases and other “Lie Flat"-themed products are disappearing from online sales platforms.

Urban employees complain that work hours have swelled to “9 9 6," or 9 am to 9 pm, six days a week.

“We generally believe slavery has died away. In fact, it has only adapted to the new economic era," a woman who writes under the name Xia Bingbao, or Summer Hailstones, said on the Douban social media service.

Some elite graduates in their 20s who should have the best job prospects say they are worn out from the “exam hell" of high school and university. They see no point in making more sacrifices.

“Chasing fame and fortune does not attract me. I am so tired," said Zhai Xiangyu, a 25-year-old graduate student.

Some professionals are cutting short their careers, which removes their experience from the job pool.

Xu Zhunjiong, a human resources manager in Shanghai, said she is quitting at 45, a decade before the legal minimum retirement age for women, to move with her Croatian-born husband to his homeland.

“I want to retire early. I don't want to fight any more," Xu said. “I'm going to other places."

Thousands vented frustration online after the Communist Party's announcement in May that official birth limits would be eased to allow all couples to have three children instead of two.

The party has enforced birth restrictions since 1980 to restrain population growth but worries China, with economic output per person still below the global average, needs more young workers.

Minutes after the announcement, websites were flooded with complaints that the move did nothing to help parents cope with child care costs, long work hours, cramped housing, job discrimination against mothers and a need to look after elderly parents.

Xia writes that she moved to a valley in Zhejiang province, south of Shanghai, for a “low-desire life" after working in Hong Kong. She said despite a high-status job as an English-language reporter, her rent devoured 60% of her income and she had no money at the end of each month.

She rejects the argument that young people who “lie flat" are giving up economic success when that's already is out of reach for many in an economy with a growing gulf between a wealthy elite and the majority.

“When resources are focused more and more on the few people at the head and their relatives, the workforce is cheap and replaceable," she wrote on Douban. “Is it sensible to entrust your destiny to small handouts from others?"

1. The Right To Be Lazy - SLP

   www.slp.org/pdf/others/lazy_pl.pdf · PDF file

   The Right To Be Lazy BEING A REPUDIATION OF THE “RIGHT TO WORK” OF 1848 By Paul Lafargue Translated and adapted from the French by Dr. Harriet Lothrop. Published by the INTERNATIONAL PUBLISHING CO., 23 Duane Street, New York 1898 PAUL LAFARGUE (1841–1911) AUTHOR’S PREFACE. In 1849, Thiers, as member of the Commission on Instruction in Elementary

2. 1. The Abolition of Work | The Anarchist Library

      https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/bob-black-the-abolition-of-work

      2020-11-28 · The Abolition of Work No one should ever work. Work is the source of nearly all the misery in the world. Almost any evil you’d care to name comes …

The Refusal of Work:
From the Post emancipation Caribbean

to Post-Fordist Empire

Christopher Taylor

https://tinyurl.com/ycgprstt

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 dened 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.

SEE

https://plawiuk.blogspot.com/2007/02/black-history-month-paul-lafargue.html

BEIN VUE - ABOLISH WORK
French have got even lazier, study shows

Henry Samuel
Mon, November 14, 2022 

The French have lost the will to work, according to a new study - Marc Piasecki/Getty Images Europe

Famed for their marathon holidays, extended lunches and 35-hour working week, the French have long basked in the enviable image of enjoying life’s pleasures while, somehow, getting the job done.

But the Covid pandemic has taken the French view of a proper work-life balance to new extremes, with a new study claiming that France has succumbed to a “laziness epidemic” in which swathes of the country say they "can't be bothered" to work hard, go out or even socialise.

Many people in France are quite happy to work fewer hours even if that means earning less money, according to findings by Ifop and the Jean-Jaurès foundation.

In 1990, some 60 per cent of French people said work was “very important” in their life, compared to 31 per cent for leisure. Today, those who view work as a high priority has plummeted to 24 per cent while 41 per cent view leisure as very important.

Since the Covid pandemic subsided, 37 per cent of French say they are less motivated to work. The figures vary widely according to political persuasion, with supporters of Leftist leader Jean-Luc Mélenchon being more than twice as likely to say they have lost their will to work than supporters of Emmanuel Macron - 61 per cent to 28 per cent respectively.

Overall, two-thirds are happy to work less to earn less today. By comparison, in 2008 two-thirds of French said they were happy to “work more to earn more”, the presidential campaign slogan of conservative then French president Nicolas Sarkozy.

Many workers questioned the meaning of their professional lives when 11 million people were furloughed during the pandemic and benefited from one of the world’s most generous state Covid compensation schemes.

Home working

Home working exacerbated the problem, the study found, because it has entitled an “exhaustion and laziness epidemic when a part of the French want to slow down”.

This unwillingness to work at all costs has seen a huge shortage of labour in various sectors from hospitality to haulage but also teaching and nursing.

The report’s findings suggest many compatriots agree with recent controversial claims by Green MP Sandrine Rousseau that the French deserve a special “right to idleness”.

In September, the radical eco-feminist sparked a furore for claiming that working hard was “essentially a Right-wing value” and that taking breaks and being less productive was a far healthier objective for the Left.

'Right to idleness'

“We have the right to idleness. We have the right to change professions, we also have the right to take breaks in our life and, above all, we need to regain time, a sense of sharing and a four-day week,” she said.

That put her at loggerheads with France’s Communist Party leader, Fabien Roussel, who declared: “The Left must defend work and not be the Left of handouts and social welfare.”

Another recent Ifop study found that four out of ten people who voted Green or for Mr Mélenchon’s France Unbowed party define themselves as “rarely or not hard-working”, compared to a quarter of French of other political persuasions.

Dominique Seux, an economic commentator on France Inter radio, on Monday said that mass French lethargy posed a small “problem" as it risked cutting productivity at a time when the French “are unhappy with their purchasing power and the state of public services”.

He also pointed to one “massive paradox”, namely that “according to all the OECD’s indisputable data, France is the country that works the least, all ages combined”.

SEE THE RIGHT TO BE LAZY BY PAUL LAFARGUE

The lazy-worker test 

has arrived

Rick Newman

·Senior Columnist

YAHOO FINANCE

Tue, September 7, 2021,

If you believe Republican governors, some 11 million jobless Americans will now be racing to fill the many job openings businesses say they can’t fill. That’s on top of 3.5 million idle workers who were supposed to start clamoring for jobs during the last couple of months.

Nearly 15 million Americans have now lost federal jobless benefits that Congress initially established in the CARES Act of 2020. Several follow-on coronavirus relief bills extended those benefits, including the American Relief Plan, which Congress passed this past March. Most of those benefits expired on Sept. 6, including an extra $300 per week in traditional jobless aid and other amounts for gig workers and others who don’t have a regular employer. The Sept. 6 expiration affects 11.3 million Americans, according to Oxford Economics.

Republican governors in 25 states ended those federal benefits early during the summer, claiming they were hurting businesses by paying people more to stay home than to work. That took roughly two months’ of federal benefits away from another 3.5 million Americans or so.

The math suggests the disincentive to work could be legitimate. The average state unemployment payout is about $400 per week, or $1,700 per month. Add another $1,200 in monthly federal aid, and the two combined might equal nearly $3,000 in monthly income. That’s equivalent to roughly $19 per hour (for a 40-hour-per-week job). So somebody who could only find work paying less than that might be better off taking the benefits instead.

That simple accounting leaves out many other factors, however, such as the fact that all jobless aid ends and most workers will need a job eventually. Many potential workers still worry about getting COVID-19 on the job. Some working parents still have their hands full with kids doing remote or hybrid schooling. Some older workers have retired early instead of hassling with the workplace in the time of COVID.

Several studies found that only a fraction of unemployed workers—probably no more than 15%—would rather accept benefits than work for a living. In July, Yahoo Finance interviewed a variety of workers in Republican states who lost federal aid early, and found a much more common problem was that people couldn’t find work in their field that paid enough to cover their bills. Some could have taken lower-paying, lesser-skilled jobs in other fields, but they viewed that as a career setback that might keep them from getting ahead indefinitely. 

Lazy-worker theory

Employment trends in the GOP states that cut off benefits now show that the lazy-worker theory is mostly misguided. There’s been no notable boost in hiring or employment in those states, compared with states that continued the benefits. The early cutoff may even have hurt those states a little, because they gave up federal money that boosted incomes and would have cost them nothing.

Congress has made no move to extend jobless benefits again. The Biden administration hasn’t asked for an extension, and polls show Americans generally think it’s time for supplemental jobless benefits to end. That removes one variable from a puzzling labor market in which joblessness remains high even though employers struggle to fill existing openings.

Muhlenberg, PA - August 26: A help wanted sign that reads "Now Hiring!" in the window of the PetSmart location along 5th Street Highway in Muhlenberg Twp. Thursday morning August 26, 2021. (Photo by Ben Hasty/MediaNews Group/Reading Eagle via Getty Images)

The latest data shows a record-high 10 million jobs available in the US economy. Half of small businesses say they have jobs they can’t fill, the largest portion on record. Yet 8.4 million Americans are out of work and millions more qualified for federal jobless aid because they lost gig work or income in ways that don’t officially count as “unemployed” in the fairly narrow way the Labor Dept. defines it.

Shouldn’t all those unemployed people be filling all those open jobs? It might seem like it, except there are many mismatches in the labor market. The open jobs aren’t always where the job seekers are. The open jobs require qualifications the unemployed don’t have. Some posted jobs are probably employers fishing for overqualified workers they can get for cheap. Some employers simply can't or won't raise pay: While some big companies say they’re boosting wages, other data shows no notable jump in pay for workers both staying in their current jobs and moving to new ones.

Job-market trends for the next few months will begin to clarify whether federal jobless aid was too generous or should have ended sooner. If hiring jumps and employers finally fill some of those 10 million open jobs, that will be good news, but it may lead to tighter benefits the next time around. It seems more likely we’ll continue to have a stutter-step recovery with big job gains in some months, and disappointment in others. If lazy workers are a problem, they're probably not the biggest one.

1. The Right To Be Lazy

   www.slp.org/pdf/others/lazy_pl.pdf · PDF file

   The Right To Be Lazy BEING A REPUDIATION OF THE “RIGHT TO WORK” OF 1848 By Paul Lafargue Translated and adapted from the French by Dr. Harriet Lothrop. Published by …

You’re Not Lazy — But Your Boss Wants You to Think You Are
BYCHUCK MCKEEVER

So many of us feel exhausted and inadequate, lacking joy in our work and beating ourselves up over our supposed laziness. But we’re not lazy — we just live under an economic system that wants to wring more and more work out of us.

In their new book Laziness Does Not Exist, social psychologist Dr Devon Price seeks to explain to readers that their exhaustion, their feelings of inadequacy, and their lack of joy in their work are not born of their own moral failings, but are the inevitable consequences of living and working under capitalism. (Sam Solomon / Unsplash)


Review of Laziness Does Not Exist, by Devon Price (Atria Books, 2021).

In George Saunders’ 2017 novel Lincoln in the Bardo, Abraham Lincoln’s son Willie has died and exists in a sort of purgatory alongside the souls of others who, like Willie, do not know or cannot admit that they are dead. The story culminates with Willie’s realization, having witnessed his own funeral and his father’s life-altering grief, that he has died. His brave refusal to hide from that fact ultimately sets him and all the other souls in limbo free.


You are not sick, [Willie] said.

Stop talking, Mr. Vollman said. You will kindly stop talking at once.

There is a name for what ails us, [Willie] said. Do you not know it? Do you really not know it? …Dead, the boy said. Everyone, we are dead!”

In the world of Willie Lincoln and the other tortured souls conjured by Saunders, it is only by recognizing and naming their condition that they can free themselves. If they can’t name what ails them, they will be stuck in an eternal, hopeless present.

For many workers under capitalism, the problem is the same. We lack the name for what ails us, believing ourselves temporarily stuck instead of perpetually exploited. Without being able to name and confront what ails us, we lack the first fundamental tool for freeing ourselves. Attempts to explain this problem to people have filled libraries’ worth of Marxist texts and serve as the raison d’être for publications like this one. Where you’d be less likely to find any such explanation is the self-help section of your local bookstore.

That has changed with Laziness Does Not Exist, in which social psychologist Dr Devon Price seeks to explain to readers that their exhaustion, their feelings of inadequacy, and their lack of joy in their work are not born of their own moral failings, but are the inevitable consequences of living and working under capitalism. Self-help books, as a rule, exist to preach to readers that they can and should be doing more: more work, more exercise, more self-care, more self-advocacy. Our lives can be transformed, these books tell us, by making better individual choices.


Price takes a different approach, positing that the entire logic of self-help is backward. We aren’t miserable because we aren’t working hard enough at happiness, we’re miserable because we’re all working too hard at everything. What’s more, no one seems to believe it, including ourselves.

Price focuses specifically on one aspect of this phenomenon, what they call the “Laziness Lie.” According to Price, the Laziness Lie has three central tenets: our worth is our productivity, we cannot trust our own feelings and limits, and there is always more we could be doing.

We internalize this logic to such a degree that we learn to believe that “our skills and talents don’t really belong to us; they exist to be used. If we don’t gladly give our time, our talents, and even our lives to others, we aren’t heroic or good.” And we’re certainly more fireable.

From the Archives: "The Right to Be Lazy" | Dissent Magazine

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In 1883, Paul Lafargue, Karl Marx's son-in-law, wrote The Right to Be Lazy, a political pamphlet that argued for liberation from the obligation to work

The Birth of “Laziness”

Where does this belief system come from? Price (who, full disclosure, I have corresponded with about the ideas in the book over the years with but never met) traces the Laziness Lie across American history, unpacking its roots in the Christianity of the country’s settlers and its utility in rationalizing slavery, indentured servitude, and child labor. By the time of the industrial revolution, Price writes, “Laziness had officially become not only a personal failing but a social ill to be defeated — and it has remained that way ever since.”

It seems fitting that the United States just inaugurated a president who campaigned in part on the idea that millennials deserve no empathy for their generation’s immiseration, and who shut down a pointed political question from a town hall attendee by challenging him to a pushup contest. Obviously, the idea that struggling people deserve no sympathy is bullshit. That our new president scoffs at the people ruined by a debt crisis he helped engineer over a long, pro-banking Senate career is just extra cruelty sprinkled on top. But even the savviest Biden-hating socialist is not immune to the ways these attitudes seep into our lives and our attitudes toward ourselves and others.

Capitalism demands that we function in a constant state of “speed up” at work, needing to cram ever more into the waking hours of our days regardless of our actual efficiency or productivity. What Price calls the “Laziness Lie” is really this demand for “speed up” taken to its inevitable extreme, such that it permeates all aspects of one’s life on or off the clock.Self-help doesn’t just perpetuate capitalist ideology by peddling the myth that every individual is capable of and responsible for changing their own conditions. It does so by insisting that our very human desire to live for something other than work is simply a challenge to be overcome.

We repeat and reify the logic of our bosses in our own lives through social media and other avenues where the “hustle” is expected to be never-ending, even at home. Influencer culture, in Price’s view, has amplified the “Laziness Lie”: our meals must be Instagram-worthy, our living spaces minimalist and tidy, our bodies well-toned and well-dressed. As a result we treat fatness, tackiness, nonconformity, and other seeming imperfections as contemptible rather than default states of being.

Perversely, this phenomenon can even absorb its apparent opposite. No influencer’s Instagram grid is complete without a smattering of confessional posts. Look y’all, today was a hard day, I’m blessed by this life but it’s not as glamorous as it seems. Just gotta keep smiling… These humanizing offerings don’t dismantle the logic of hustle culture, they reinforce it — because the implicit conclusion to each of them is …and I’m still getting up and doing it every day, so why aren’t you?

The ceaseless demands put upon us by our own belief in this pernicious myth — and the attendant expectations of being an open and available friend, a politically and socially conscious member of society, a generous and committed romantic partner, and so forth — combine to put a crushing weight on just about everyone who works for a living.

Price relates anecdotes and data about the ways that particular populations, such as people with mental illnesses, are compoundingly harmed by our societal contempt for laziness. But their analysis also includes the harm done to those with no particularly remarkable barriers who still don’t rise to the occasion as students or employees or voters. In other words, the laziness myth hurts the vast majority of us.
Laziness Is Fake, Disenfranchisement Is Real

It is disenfranchisement, not laziness, Price argues, that makes even relatively healthy people step back from challenges and check out from the world. If we don’t see the point of our schoolwork or any meaning in the jobs we’ve considered applying to, we’re not likely to complete those tasks.

If we don’t vote even when shamed by others about doing our civic duty, we’re not too lazy to bother, we probably had to work that day and didn’t have the energy to go stand in line at the polls for a few extra hours (to say nothing of the pitiful options on offer, though Price doesn’t mention that).

On top of all this, most other people we know are going through some version of these problems, too, meaning that the exhausting demands on our time don’t end when our professional or academic obligations do. We need help, and so do our friends and family, and we’re all using each other for it.(

Ben Blennerhassett / Unsplash)

A more explicitly socialist text would probably unpack these same phenomena as products of capitalist alienation, not just a general form of disenfranchisement. But Price has not leaned on the most obvious layers of the working class to make the bulk of their argument (though retail workers, health care workers, and bartenders do appear in their interviews).

Instead we get a diverse cross-section of people whose time is not their own, from people experiencing homelessness to overwhelmed grad students to semi-professional streamers to working moms still wondering if they can “have it all.”

While the stories and conditions vary, a single thread runs through them all: no one has really escaped the self-loathing and other harmful behaviors we have absorbed as we try to work and survive in a capitalist society. Price correctly describes the normalization of overwork as a public health crisis, and their interviews bear out this diagnosis — marriages, bright futures, and, in the case of one memorable interviewee who was so overworked that he began vomiting blood, internal organs all get damaged by workers’ inability to say no to the demands of a capitalist society.

In this regard, Laziness is something like a fox in the henhouse: Price tells readers that we are not alone in feeling profoundly ill-used and sick because of the demands of our economy and culture, and makes their radical arguments broadly appealing by casting such a wide net in their interview pool. (It also doesn’t hurt that the book’s title is ambiguous enough to disguise its intent. Were your boss to see you reading it, she might think you a particularly motivated employee looking for tips on how to quit slacking.)
Collective Action, Not “Self-Help”

This trick of Laziness — to exist as an anti-capitalist manifesto posing as a self-help book — gives Price a tough needle to thread. Self-help books are by nature dedicated to improving, well, the self. But the full-scale societal transformation required to liberate the overworked world from capitalism can only come through sustained, organized mass action.

Price is clearly aware of this contradiction, as one of the book’s currents is that precious few individuals are capable of maintaining anything resembling a decent life under the demands of capitalism, much less saving the world.

This is not a book designed to teach downtrodden Americans how to throw off the yoke of their exploiters, though Price does repeatedly plug collective workplace action and unionization as tools. Rather, Laziness Does Not exist tells its readers, perhaps for the first time in their lives, that they are being exploited, and there is a name for what ails them: capitalism. And while the book’s prescriptions for dismantling entire systems are thin, it is a useful compendium of anecdotes, insights, and data that might help more people survive under those systems.

“Sometimes,” Price opines, “the best thing good people can do is hunker down, care for one another, and survive.” Plain survival is not enough to change the world. But changing the world requires that masses of people understand their conditions more fully and have the time and energy to fight.Self-help books are by nature dedicated to improving, well, the self. But the full-scale societal transformation required to liberate the overworked world from capitalism can only come through sustained, organized mass action.

This is a drastic departure from the usual offerings in the self-help section, which often start in the same place — What you feel about your situation is okay to feel — but head in the opposite direction — and here’s how to push past those feelings to go produce, earn, and do more!

Self-help doesn’t just perpetuate capitalist ideology by peddling the myth that every individual is capable of and responsible for changing their own conditions. It does so by insisting that our very human desire to live for something other than work is simply a challenge to be overcome.

Contrast Price’s book with two recent self-help bestsellers by Rachel Hollis, Girl, Wash Your Face and Girl, Stop Apologizing, in which the author “encourages, entertains, and even kicks a little butt, all to convince you to do whatever it takes to get real… Because you really can live with passion and hustle.”


She “identifies the excuses to let go of, the behaviors to adopt, and the skills to acquire on the path to growth, confidence, and believing in yourself.” Hollis isn’t teaching her readers that their feelings and experiences matter simply because they are human beings with emotional needs, but that they matter because they can be catalogued for use or disposal in service of one’s ambition.

The ultimate irony of Laziness is that it could actually be a useful tool for employers, as it contains reams of research on the ways that making people work less actually makes them work better — if not on their boss’s terms, at least on workers’ own. Abolishing overwork and other abusive practices might increase many companies’ productivity, and certainly employee longevity.

But overwork is not just about profit or productivity, it’s about control. Companies are incentivized to own as much of an employee’s time as possible for what they’re paid, whether by extending the salaried work week into nights and weekends or reducing the break time of hourly wage-earners.

Laziness Does Not Exist is the rare self-help book that understands the basic truth that the majority of our problems are not of our individual making, and therefore cannot be solved individually. Accordingly, Price does not promise tools for salvation, but tools for survival, and permission to forgive oneself for not being able to change the world alone.

There can be no real “self-help” without collective work to understand and dismantle the system under which we all labor. Like Lincoln in the Bardo’s dead, we must be able to name what ails us before we can get free. It’s capitalism, not laziness.

  

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Chuck McKeever is a community college instructor and union organizer living in Seattle. He is the author of A Good Place for Maniacs: Dispatches from the Pacific Crest Trail.

FURTHER READING

We Need Five Days’ Pay for Four Days’ Work

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Americans Work Too Damn Much

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More Free Time — for Everyone

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Living, Not Just Surviving

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