Process
Status Items Output None Questions None Claims None Highlights Done See section below
Highlights
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there exists an “alternate tradition of Marxism which wishes not to glorify labor and productivity, but to abolish it altogether,” and a genealogy of this “alternate tradition” takes us not to Marx but further down the family tree to his son-in-law, Paul Lafargue.
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If you insist on the right to work, he argues, you will inevitably still be yoked to the need to earn a wage. He suggests a radical reorientation of perspective, one that does not take the social arrangements of work as a given and instead sees its goal as the right not to work, the right to free time and leisure, the right to be lazy. Or, as he writes, the proletariat “must proclaim the Rights of Laziness, a hundred thousand times nobler and holier than the Rights of Man cooked up by the philosophizing lawyers of the bourgeois revolution.”
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places an excessive amount of faith in the possibilities of automation, believing that “to force capitalists to perfect their machines of wood and iron, we must raise the salaries and reduce the working hours of machines of flesh and bone.”
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Here we encounter the primary schism between Lafargue’s political program and that of much of the broader socialist movement: While the latter would strive to enshrine the productive worker as a heroic historical actor who should receive the hard-earned proceeds of their labor, Lafargue sought to demonstrate that the greatest gain of a social revolution would be the ability to collectively determine how to best use our waking hours in the service of anything but working.
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The rise of Taylorist efficiency protocols in the early 20th century would make Lafargue’s argument increasingly relevant to a litany of jobs in which companies sought to sweat out increasingly more work from workers by speeding up the pace.