The Weaver Reads reviewed The Right to Be Lazy by Paul Lafargue
Goodreads Review of The Right to Be Lazy
4 stars
I picked up this little Marxist pamphlet because I don’t want to work. Lafargue makes the point here that workers are immiserated at a much higher rate under industrial capitalism than in previous modes of production and that leisure time gets hollowed out. At the time he’s writing, workers often put in 12-13 hrs per day, and many employers found better production with less hours.
At least we have the eight hour workday now, right?
Wrong.
Enter the knowledge economy: you have to be always on, all the time. Even if your employer doesn’t expect you to be “on,” you have to still be “on,” because you never know.
No wonder we all are suffering so heavily from burnout.
To make matters worse, as Graeber points out in Bullshit Jobs, we have higher productivity than ever, and we don’t NEED to put in as much time as we do. Even …
I picked up this little Marxist pamphlet because I don’t want to work. Lafargue makes the point here that workers are immiserated at a much higher rate under industrial capitalism than in previous modes of production and that leisure time gets hollowed out. At the time he’s writing, workers often put in 12-13 hrs per day, and many employers found better production with less hours.
At least we have the eight hour workday now, right?
Wrong.
Enter the knowledge economy: you have to be always on, all the time. Even if your employer doesn’t expect you to be “on,” you have to still be “on,” because you never know.
No wonder we all are suffering so heavily from burnout.
To make matters worse, as Graeber points out in Bullshit Jobs, we have higher productivity than ever, and we don’t NEED to put in as much time as we do. Even so, we create work as if it’s some sort of moral standard, but so many of our jobs are meaningless.
This feels especially significant now, as it feels like everything will be automated within the next three or four years. People said this in past decades, and they’re often criticized for being wrong. But they weren’t. Why does the US pump out agricultural produce like a machine? Because it’s mechanization. Why has factory labor collapsed in the US? Partially from outsourcing, but also mechanization.
It’s coming for all of us now, and it might be worth going back to claims for UBI. Lafargue speaks to these concerns as they were 160 years ago. You might even make the claim that he’s left-accelerationist, although I wouldn’t go quite as far as that.
Anyways, this short piece is as significant as ever. Flip out the details, and it could have been written today.
Please God, just allow us to take away the moralism associated with work and welfare, make us redundant, and pay us with the surplus. I don’t want to work anymore, and I’m sure most are in the same boat as me.
I just want to read and write and enjoy nature. Is that too much to ask
