16 ms·

The Right to Be Lazy (1883)

134 points by mitchbob 4y ago

vt85 4y ago
draw_down 4y ago
spacKingChamath 4y ago
Some additional info.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Right_to_Be_Lazy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Right_to_Be_Lazy Definitely an interesting way to look at the world.
- mjfl 4y ago
  What an ironically privileged position, considering how much he calls out the bourgeoisie.
  - tstrimple 4y ago
    > Automation, which had already come a long way in Lafargue's time, could easily reduce working hours to three or four hours a day. This would leave a large part of the day for the things we really want to do, such as to spend time with friends, relax, enjoy life, and be lazy. Lafargue argues the machine is the saviour of humanity but only if the working time it frees up becomes leisure time. The time that is freed up is usually converted into more hours of work, which he compares to more hours of toil and drudgery. Working too many hours a day is often degrading, while working very few hours can be very refreshing and enriching, leading to general advancement, health, joy, and satisfaction. Doesn't seem like a privileged argument. If the needs of a society can be met with 3-4 hours of work a day and automation for the rest, fighting to work only 8 hours a day does seem to miss the mark. Whether 3-4 hours of work a day is actually enough is a separate discussion worth having. There is good evidence supporting the idea that with more free time employees could get done in 30 hours a week what they are currently doing in 40. But he's been demonstrated to be absolutely right with regards to where the spoils of increased productivity go. It rarely if ever materializes as less work or better pay for the masses and always seem to be funneled to the moneyed class instead. I hardly think it's privileged to believe that the progress and advancements made in a society should benefit everyone instead of a handful of already extremely wealthy people. https://cepr.org/voxeu/columns/teams-become-more-productive-when-their-hours-are-shorter https://cepr.org/voxeu/columns/teams-become-more-productive-...
    - klipt 4y ago
      > If the needs of a society can be met with 3-4 hours of work a day That's a very subjective question. Suppose we could have maintained a 19th century standard of living for everyone with reduced work, but without the scientific and technological advancements that we got by using that time to do even more work. Would you prefer a society where everyone works 15 hr weeks but the internet was never invented?
      - giraffe_lady 4y ago
        > Would you prefer a society where everyone works 15 hr weeks but the internet was never invented? How is that even a question have you seen the internet recently. Slamming YES so hard the button breaks.
        luckylion 4y ago
        You also wouldn't get anything else that has been invented or understood since then. I'm pretty sure you can have the equivalent quality (and length) of life of the average 19th century person with very few hours of work in a week. In Germany, it requires zero hours, welfare here will make you live like a king compared to the 19th century -- it's only relative to today's standards that you wouldn't be rich.
        DocTomoe 4y ago
        Ah, yes who doesn't know about the famous German welfare recipients living in lavish palaces with their 10 comely mattresses and their stable full of fast horses, which will pull their gold-encrusted carriage to the hunting lodge a few times per month, and a small group of life guards to keep them safe. It is highly misleading to compare lifestyles between different centuries like that.
        luckylion 4y ago
        And their 21st century health care, their high life expectancy, their unlimited access to information etc etc. Would you prefer to live in the 19th century with the average life expectancy at 35 and your 10 shitty mattresses (there's a reason they had 10) instead of living today and get to live 75 years and sleep on your one modern mattress that's of higher quality than those 10 19th century mattresses combined? Palaces 150 years ago sucked in comparison to modern apartments with isolation so good you barely have to heat, modern plumbing, hot water on demand, showers and electric toothbrushes. > It is highly misleading to compare lifestyles between different centuries like that. Not really, there are measurable facts. What it seems you are doing is comparing relative wealth. A king is richer than a peasant, therefore his life is better than a welfare-recipient 150 years later, because there are kings in 2022 richer than the welfare-recipient. Because of course, 5 > 1, and 50 > 10, therefore 5 > 10. It's all relative etc etc. People quickly forget how much worse everything was even decades ago, much less centuries.
  - giraffe_lady 4y ago
    It is consistent with the meaning of bourgeoisie then, which transposed to modern systems means more like "the owner class" than the contemporary social connotation of well-compensated professionals. Owners benefit from more/harder work, both their own and that of others, and so it (reasonably) becomes a class value for them. A non-owner worker doesn't benefit in the same way, but many still value work in the same way the bourgeoisie do. Workers don't benefit like owners do and so they shouldn't want to work like owners do. That's the point being made.
    - mjfl 4y ago
      so you're saying he's bourgeoisie. Yeah that's the irony. The irony is that he's rich enough to have that lifestyle and still have food, while poor people would not.
      - balsam 4y ago
        Nope, according to the wikipedia linked, the only time Lafargue came close to being an owner (i.e. petit bourgeois) was when he tried running that photolithography workshop.
        drekipus 4y ago
        Sounds a little bit like the fox and grapes.
      - cassepipe 4y ago
        You are trying very hard not to think out of your box. First Lafargue was by no means rich nor a capitalist. Then this is not about promoting a "lifestyle", it is basically a proposal to have everyone work less by sharing the workload. Think of it what you will but do not misrepresent it. I suggest you actually read the book.
    - RobotToaster 4y ago
      >It is consistent with the meaning of bourgeoisie then, which transposed to modern systems means more like "the owner class" than the contemporary social connotation of well-compensated professionals. That's still the definition used in Marxist circles today.
  - kergonath 4y ago
    This is a fallacious position. The modern attitude of “you’re not one of us, therefore you cannot possibly have a valid opinion” is wrong on many levels. It is not logically consistent (a variation of ad hominem arguments). It is counter productive because having a range of opinions helps avoiding echo chambers and have a broader outlook and understanding, and ultimately find better solutions and strategies. It opens the door to no true Scotsman sterile arguments that are very easy to use in bad faith against people you disagree with. It creates counter-productive dissent when people who actually agree on an idea or policy don’t work together for ideological reasons. Don’t do it.
- matkoniecz 4y ago
  > According to Lafargue, wage labour is tantamount to slavery It does seem to be quite useless way to look at the world. It seems that they are unaware of what slavery actually means or deliberately mislead. Or Wikipedia is inaccurate.
  - giraffe_lady 4y ago
    It's meant in the sense of "coerced into working." Eg if you don't have a viable alternative to working, did you choose work freely? Everyone using this comparison from that time period knows it's an extreme metaphor and is using it at least partially for the shock value of the comparison, to jar people into seeing the everyday pressures in a different way. They aren't comparing the conditions of slavery to the conditions of wage labor, just that the force that compels a proletarian worker to work is on the same continuum with the force that compels a slave to work.
    - tstrimple 4y ago
      I suspect calling it slavery is more shocking today than it would have been at the time when slavery was still an acceptable practice in major countries. Certainly people have a more visceral reaction to the term in general today than at that time.
    - _jal 4y ago
      Adding to this, there are employers who do what they can to ramp up the coercive aspect. This happens mainly in low-wage jobs where there is lots of usually low-quality labor. The usual dynamic is to seek out job hunters with family or other commitments to employ, and then constantly threaten them with all the people who apply. Make them feel trapped and precarious by threatening their ability to feed kids, and that can go a long way. Obviously, the legal system no longer supports outright slavery outside of prison, and the tactics and conditions are consequently less severe than historic chattel slavery in the US. But the opposite conclusion - that all labor is voluntary - has to use a specific sense of the word 'voluntary', more similar to the IRS definition than the picking-from-a-menu sense.
    - matkoniecz 4y ago
whateveracct 4y ago
Love this. I tend to be lazy at least every Thursday+Friday. I did a little work during that Argentina WC game just now and am now logged off for the day after two hours of distracted work. Luckily, I'm stretching some work from Wednesday with sawdust ;) so no worries Remote work really has been a game-changer this last decade. I've gotten effectively paid to have fun more than to work. I think I'll go work on an art project I've been putting off now..
laurentoget 4y ago
https://www.marxists.org/archive/lafargue/1883/lazy/ https://www.marxists.org/archive/lafargue/1883/lazy/ not to undermine the NYRB, but this is in the public domain, for anybody interested
FooBarBizBazz 4y ago
You're in debt if your liabilities exceed your assets. Your liabilities include rent, food, and clothing. In the assets column, include various sources of income or capital gains, like dividend stocks. In a HCOL place like the United States, the columns balance around $1 million, which is effectively "zero". That's the point where you start being able to afford a frugal lifestyle in that built/social environment, without work. And that's not without sacrifices. So in that sense, most people are debt-slaves for most of their lives.
archarios 4y ago
IDK about y'all, but being lazy generally makes me feel horrible. I love getting things done. I hate having to labor simply to enrich others and for me to survive. But I love doing work that I think is meaningful and makes a difference so much more than chilling all day. Chilling needs to happen, but not all the time!
- rootusrootus 4y ago
  > being lazy generally makes me feel horrible Yes, very much agree. If I get sucked into HN and blow a big chunk of the day on stuff like this, I feel quite terrible at the end. I feel so much better when I can look back on my day and see accomplishments.
  - kilbuz 4y ago
    What accomplishments are you most proud of this year?
- nonrandomstring 4y ago
  Me too. As a 'victim' of the Protestant Work Ethic, or maybe personality traits of the industrious/conscientious type, I find it the struggle is fighting for my right to be active in a world that increasingly lionises a passive, convenient and dependent life-stance. I just want to shake people sometimes. Look around you and see what needs to be done and the duty life demands of you!
  - archarios 4y ago
    Yeah I suppose if we had fully automated space communism already I may have a different viewpoint..
    - nonrandomstring 4y ago
      Makes me wonder. If we did have automated luxury communism, would people like me just not be satisfied and struggle to find new "problems"? Alexis De Toqueville described the "American Spirit" as one of "restiveness"... itching to change and move (FWIW I'm British but tarn with the same brush). There's a funny line in "Analyse This" where Bully Crystal's character says innocently to Robert De Niro... "What are you going to do this summer?" And the Mafioso gangster (De Niro) replies; "About What?!"
verdenti 4y ago
BitwiseFool 4y ago
>"The Right to Be Lazy reminds us that the urge to work is not always beneficial, let alone necessary. It can also be a “strange madness” consuming human lives." To me, this is one of those things that is designed to be provocative while employing weasel words to great effect. In trying to type out a critique of it, I realize that "not always" and "let alone necessary" can be used to dismiss claims that this is anti-work. Despite the fact that it is highly critical of the "need" to for work.
j7ake 4y ago
Being too lazy seems like a waste of potential. Not being lazy enough is also not good; you burn out or lose perspective.
armchairhacker 4y ago
Roughly how much "work" does every person in the world need to do so that every person in the world can live a minimal but decent lifestyle? Of course, some people will want and take more than "decent", some people are disabled so its unreasonable to expect and unfair to demand for them to contribute the same amount, some people genuinely like to work all sorts of jobs (including hard labor), and speaking of, there are different jobs and no one way to quantify their "work". But this is a good starting point to answer the question: how much work is "enough"? With modern knowledge and medium-scale factories, can people spend 15-hour weeks producing enough to live comfortably, or do you need the average person to work 20-hour weeks of hard labor (or have 1/3 of the population work 60-hour weeks)?
- BitwiseFool 4y ago
  I think this is a question with an impossible answer. Life on Earth is far to varied and chaotic for any baseline value. Just like an ecosystem, everything is in constant flux.
- nradov 4y ago
  You're asking the wrong question. Regardless of the specific number of work hours that would be necessary to live a minimal but decent lifestyle (however you choose to define that), some people will always choose to work longer and harder in order to raise their social status. That status is often denominated in money but it can also take the form of possession of scarce resources, athletic skills, physical appearance, or fame. Most people are very status conscious and will then work harder themselves in order to keep up with the competition (or at least not fall too far behind). You might claim that this status seeking is irrational or unhealthy or whatever, but that's a moot point. It's fundamental human nature and will never change.
  - janef0421 4y ago
    Even if humans would continue to attempt to gain social status by training to become buff pole-vaulters, I think it would be a massive improvement if that status seeking was decoupled from the economic system.
  - 4y ago
Mizza 4y ago
Related classic, Bertrand Russel's 1932 'In Praise of Idleness': https://harpers.org/archive/1932/10/in-praise-of-idleness/ https://harpers.org/archive/1932/10/in-praise-of-idleness/
- I_complete_me 4y ago
  "An Apology for Idlers" by R.L. Stevenson is also worth reading for the beautiful way it is written if for no other reason.
dang 4y ago
We changed the URL from https://www.nyrb.com/products/the-right-to-be-lazy https://www.nyrb.com/products/the-right-to-be-lazy, which doesn't have the text, to a page that does.
tayo42 4y ago
I wonder what these anti working writers and philosophers would say about doing nothing in our modern day. Where nothing is still frequently capitalist driven consumption, scrolling through our phones endlessly getting advertised to, watching tv/streaming, engagement traps of social media etc... It's almost like it isn't safe to be lazy now, your downtime attention is fought for so hard by groups with so much resources then you can ever fight back with.
cauefcr 4y ago
That's one reason why co-operatives are interesting, same as unions, they change the balance of power to favor the oppressed by capital, relative to their size.
elefanten 4y ago
Funny this guy was arguing, in 1883, that automation could reduce the average workday to 4 hours. Good example to consider when reasoning about the current AI wave
- quickthrower2 4y ago
  The thing that will reduce the workday is everyone deciding to do it. Imagine the silly meetings and pointless work that just can’t be done when you starve the machine of humute (human compute) hours. Innovation would be the result. Entire businesses may be untenable and rightly so. Few things need long work days if we are happy to sacrifice some convenience. Supermarket hours can be fewer for example. Jobs like police, doctors etc. maybe not but we should probably reward them more accordingly.
  - nathan_compton 4y ago
    When your solution to a problem is "everyone spontaneously decides to do it" what you really want is _regulation_.
geenew 4y ago
I'm lazy, so I'll just post this, from Office Space. I'm sure most people here can guess what quote it is. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rQ-bp_A61MI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rQ-bp_A61MI
mrtweetyhack 4y ago
throwaquestion5 4y ago
This is from 140 years ago but feel very modern "The manufacturers have lost their bearings and know not which way to turn. They can no longer find the raw material to satisfy the lawless depraved passion of their laborers for work. In our woolen districts dirty and half rotten rags are raveled out to use in making certain cloths sold under the name of renaissance, which have about the same durability as the promises made to voters. At Lyons, instead of leaving the silk fiber in its natural simplicity and suppleness, it is loaded down with mineral salts, which while increasing its weight, make it friable and far from durable. All our products are adulterated to aid in their sale and shorten their life. Our epoch will be called the “Age of adulteration” just as the first epochs of humanity received the names of “The Age of Stone”, “The Age of Bronze”, from the character of their production"
- eternityforest 4y ago
  On the other had, we are a lot better at making things out of cheap materials. Clothes from Target are relatively durable considering the price, especially if you do basic repairs like they would have back then. Even the food is probably better now. It's not perfect, but modern products are pretty amazing. A shirt can sell for $2 and last 20 years in some cases. Of course sweatshops and pollution are still awful.
  - Broken_Hippo 4y ago
    Sure, clothes from Target might be relatively durable considering the price. But you need more clothing now. In a lot of places, it is socially unacceptable to wear the same thing for days in a row, even if you change your undergarments. You also don't have a realistic choice to make your own clothing. Cloth, thread, buttons and zippers aren't cheap and it became more out of reach in the late 80s and through the 90's (my mother sews and has for decades). That's not even considering things like a sewing machine, fabric scissors, and the fact that you might look like your clothes are homemade (which doesn't always fare well). Your Target clothing also won't be usable when it is worn, so you can't piece it together to make a new garment or even a blanket even if the stretchy material was easier to work with. You really can't do basic repairs like they used to do. I'm not sure this is cheaper.
supriyo-biswas 4y ago
While the article definitely speaks to me, I don't see how being lazy can be practically ingrained in society, as some amount of labor is required for basic human needs, even in a hunter-gatherer lifestyle. From there, a hierarchy of power would also be nice-to-have, since it can help with conflict resolution and efficient organization of resources, but we could argue at that point, it's starting to resemble capitalism somewhat.
musha68k 4y ago
Josef Pieper's "Leisure, the basis of culture" [1] comes to mind. Nothing we seemingly can do too easily, at least I can't so that's why I regularly try to re-read it. [1] https://archive.org/details/leisurebasisofcu0000piep https://archive.org/details/leisurebasisofcu0000piep
Ste_Evans 4y ago
biglost 4y ago
Mmm the good place or at least it’s last season. Just that.
Georgelemental 4y ago
The working class gets its power from its ability to choose whether or not to work. Without work, there is no workers' movement
Aunche 4y ago
I wonder how many people who think that everyone would be better if they worked half the hours were laughing at Elon Musk for laying off what he though was deadweight and having to rehire them.
zozbot234 4y ago
Paul Graham has a very nice perspective on this: https://www.paulgraham.com/opensource.html https://www.paulgraham.com/opensource.html (2005) "I think the most important of the new principles business has to learn is that people work a lot harder on stuff they like. Well, that's news to no one. So how can I claim business has to learn it? When I say business doesn't know this, I mean the structure of business doesn't reflect it. Business still reflects an older model, exemplified by the French word for working: travailler. It has an English cousin, travail, and what it means is torture. This turns out not to be the last word on work, however. As societies get richer, they learn something about work that's a lot like what they learn about diet. We know now that the healthiest diet is the one our peasant ancestors were forced to eat because they were poor. Like rich food, idleness only seems desirable when you don't get enough of it. I think we were designed to work, just as we were designed to eat a certain amount of fiber, and we feel bad if we don't."
- agalunar 4y ago
  > Like rich food, idleness only seems desirable when you don't get enough of it. I think we were designed to work, just as we were designed to eat a certain amount of fiber, and we feel bad if we don't. This is certainly not a new perspective; it's what I was taught growing up. It sounds profound, but I take some umbrage with it, because it stops short. What kind of work? How much? For whom? It's a terribly convenient thing to promulgate the idea that "we were designed to work" without further clarification when you own capital and reap the value of others' labor, and it's an easy thing to say when you derive healthfulness from the work that you personally happen to do. By "work" do you mean activity that's deemed productive to modern society? Otherwise, why not say people need to spend some time being focused, exerting mental effort, being creative, having long-term goals or engaging in long-term endeavours, &c, if that's what you really mean? I don't mean to sound suspicious or to insinuate some dark motivation on PG's part, but it (ironically) seems lazy to not bother to scrutinize the modern conception of work – to take something for granted because it's all that most of us living have ever known. We need exercise, but we can get that running for our lives or playing a sport, and the latter is less dangerous (and preferable unless you're a thrill seeker). We need work, but do we need to get that by doing the things that we call "work" today? (As a total aside: this reminded me of [1], shared some time ago on HN, which tenuously suggests that we were also designed to be idle. I took "designed" in PG's comment to mean "evolved", and my assumption is that small, pre-industrial societies are more representative of the conditions of the past few hundred thousand years in which modern humans evolved.) Edit: @kergonath also replied to the idea of too much idleness elsewhere in this thread [2]. [1] https://twitter.com/mnvrsngh/status/1510978995269029888 https://twitter.com/mnvrsngh/status/1510978995269029888 [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33931427 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33931427
8bitsrule 4y ago
The best work is indistinguishable from play. The word's too often associated with what children do ... 'merely' do. But remember how you threw your energies into it? It's great fun. The best work is the adult form of that; you return to it daily and it keeps rewarding: you and those you play with. When the going gets hard hard, solving it is the best.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
throwayyy479087 4y ago
The famous r/antiwork interview is all a fantastic example of where this attitude gets you. https://youtu.be/3yUMIFYBMnc https://youtu.be/3yUMIFYBMnc Honestly, being Doreen seems like a nightmare and we should aspire to be better.
- wbazant 4y ago
  I was really puzzled by the comments under the video - people acting as if Doreen really set himself on fire somehow - while to me he seems to have set himself up quite well. He walks dogs for a few hours a day, and it lets him do other stuff he cares about, like reading people's arguments on the internet!
  - 4gotunameagain 4y ago
    I think it was because he was the worst possible poster child for that "movement", and made it seem like a joke from immature, psychologically troubled hermits.
  - heavyset_go 4y ago
    Some people don't like it when "those people" complain about anything.
westcort 4y ago
The whole book is available here on Project Gutenberg: https://gutenberg.org/ebooks/52984 https://gutenberg.org/ebooks/52984

134 points by mitchbob 4y ago

vt85 4y ago

Some additional info.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Right_to_Be_Lazy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Right_to_Be_Lazy Definitely an interesting way to look at the world.

mjfl 4y ago
What an ironically privileged position, considering how much he calls out the bourgeoisie.
- tstrimple 4y ago
  > Automation, which had already come a long way in Lafargue's time, could easily reduce working hours to three or four hours a day. This would leave a large part of the day for the things we really want to do, such as to spend time with friends, relax, enjoy life, and be lazy. Lafargue argues the machine is the saviour of humanity but only if the working time it frees up becomes leisure time. The time that is freed up is usually converted into more hours of work, which he compares to more hours of toil and drudgery. Working too many hours a day is often degrading, while working very few hours can be very refreshing and enriching, leading to general advancement, health, joy, and satisfaction. Doesn't seem like a privileged argument. If the needs of a society can be met with 3-4 hours of work a day and automation for the rest, fighting to work only 8 hours a day does seem to miss the mark. Whether 3-4 hours of work a day is actually enough is a separate discussion worth having. There is good evidence supporting the idea that with more free time employees could get done in 30 hours a week what they are currently doing in 40. But he's been demonstrated to be absolutely right with regards to where the spoils of increased productivity go. It rarely if ever materializes as less work or better pay for the masses and always seem to be funneled to the moneyed class instead. I hardly think it's privileged to believe that the progress and advancements made in a society should benefit everyone instead of a handful of already extremely wealthy people. https://cepr.org/voxeu/columns/teams-become-more-productive-when-their-hours-are-shorter https://cepr.org/voxeu/columns/teams-become-more-productive-...
  - klipt 4y ago
    > If the needs of a society can be met with 3-4 hours of work a day That's a very subjective question. Suppose we could have maintained a 19th century standard of living for everyone with reduced work, but without the scientific and technological advancements that we got by using that time to do even more work. Would you prefer a society where everyone works 15 hr weeks but the internet was never invented?
    - giraffe_lady 4y ago
      > Would you prefer a society where everyone works 15 hr weeks but the internet was never invented? How is that even a question have you seen the internet recently. Slamming YES so hard the button breaks.
      - luckylion 4y ago
        You also wouldn't get anything else that has been invented or understood since then. I'm pretty sure you can have the equivalent quality (and length) of life of the average 19th century person with very few hours of work in a week. In Germany, it requires zero hours, welfare here will make you live like a king compared to the 19th century -- it's only relative to today's standards that you wouldn't be rich.
        DocTomoe 4y ago
        Ah, yes who doesn't know about the famous German welfare recipients living in lavish palaces with their 10 comely mattresses and their stable full of fast horses, which will pull their gold-encrusted carriage to the hunting lodge a few times per month, and a small group of life guards to keep them safe. It is highly misleading to compare lifestyles between different centuries like that.
        luckylion 4y ago
        And their 21st century health care, their high life expectancy, their unlimited access to information etc etc. Would you prefer to live in the 19th century with the average life expectancy at 35 and your 10 shitty mattresses (there's a reason they had 10) instead of living today and get to live 75 years and sleep on your one modern mattress that's of higher quality than those 10 19th century mattresses combined? Palaces 150 years ago sucked in comparison to modern apartments with isolation so good you barely have to heat, modern plumbing, hot water on demand, showers and electric toothbrushes. > It is highly misleading to compare lifestyles between different centuries like that. Not really, there are measurable facts. What it seems you are doing is comparing relative wealth. A king is richer than a peasant, therefore his life is better than a welfare-recipient 150 years later, because there are kings in 2022 richer than the welfare-recipient. Because of course, 5 > 1, and 50 > 10, therefore 5 > 10. It's all relative etc etc. People quickly forget how much worse everything was even decades ago, much less centuries.
- giraffe_lady 4y ago
  It is consistent with the meaning of bourgeoisie then, which transposed to modern systems means more like "the owner class" than the contemporary social connotation of well-compensated professionals. Owners benefit from more/harder work, both their own and that of others, and so it (reasonably) becomes a class value for them. A non-owner worker doesn't benefit in the same way, but many still value work in the same way the bourgeoisie do. Workers don't benefit like owners do and so they shouldn't want to work like owners do. That's the point being made.
  - mjfl 4y ago
    so you're saying he's bourgeoisie. Yeah that's the irony. The irony is that he's rich enough to have that lifestyle and still have food, while poor people would not.
    - balsam 4y ago
      Nope, according to the wikipedia linked, the only time Lafargue came close to being an owner (i.e. petit bourgeois) was when he tried running that photolithography workshop.
      - drekipus 4y ago
        Sounds a little bit like the fox and grapes.
    - cassepipe 4y ago
      You are trying very hard not to think out of your box. First Lafargue was by no means rich nor a capitalist. Then this is not about promoting a "lifestyle", it is basically a proposal to have everyone work less by sharing the workload. Think of it what you will but do not misrepresent it. I suggest you actually read the book.
  - RobotToaster 4y ago
    >It is consistent with the meaning of bourgeoisie then, which transposed to modern systems means more like "the owner class" than the contemporary social connotation of well-compensated professionals. That's still the definition used in Marxist circles today.
- kergonath 4y ago
  This is a fallacious position. The modern attitude of “you’re not one of us, therefore you cannot possibly have a valid opinion” is wrong on many levels. It is not logically consistent (a variation of ad hominem arguments). It is counter productive because having a range of opinions helps avoiding echo chambers and have a broader outlook and understanding, and ultimately find better solutions and strategies. It opens the door to no true Scotsman sterile arguments that are very easy to use in bad faith against people you disagree with. It creates counter-productive dissent when people who actually agree on an idea or policy don’t work together for ideological reasons. Don’t do it.
matkoniecz 4y ago
> According to Lafargue, wage labour is tantamount to slavery It does seem to be quite useless way to look at the world. It seems that they are unaware of what slavery actually means or deliberately mislead. Or Wikipedia is inaccurate.
- giraffe_lady 4y ago
  It's meant in the sense of "coerced into working." Eg if you don't have a viable alternative to working, did you choose work freely? Everyone using this comparison from that time period knows it's an extreme metaphor and is using it at least partially for the shock value of the comparison, to jar people into seeing the everyday pressures in a different way. They aren't comparing the conditions of slavery to the conditions of wage labor, just that the force that compels a proletarian worker to work is on the same continuum with the force that compels a slave to work.
  - tstrimple 4y ago
    I suspect calling it slavery is more shocking today than it would have been at the time when slavery was still an acceptable practice in major countries. Certainly people have a more visceral reaction to the term in general today than at that time.
  - _jal 4y ago
    Adding to this, there are employers who do what they can to ramp up the coercive aspect. This happens mainly in low-wage jobs where there is lots of usually low-quality labor. The usual dynamic is to seek out job hunters with family or other commitments to employ, and then constantly threaten them with all the people who apply. Make them feel trapped and precarious by threatening their ability to feed kids, and that can go a long way. Obviously, the legal system no longer supports outright slavery outside of prison, and the tactics and conditions are consequently less severe than historic chattel slavery in the US. But the opposite conclusion - that all labor is voluntary - has to use a specific sense of the word 'voluntary', more similar to the IRS definition than the picking-from-a-menu sense.
  - matkoniecz 4y ago

whateveracct 4y ago

Love this. I tend to be lazy at least every Thursday+Friday. I did a little work during that Argentina WC game just now and am now logged off for the day after two hours of distracted work. Luckily, I'm stretching some work from Wednesday with sawdust ;) so no worries Remote work really has been a game-changer this last decade. I've gotten effectively paid to have fun more than to work. I think I'll go work on an art project I've been putting off now..

laurentoget 4y ago

https://www.marxists.org/archive/lafargue/1883/lazy/ https://www.marxists.org/archive/lafargue/1883/lazy/ not to undermine the NYRB, but this is in the public domain, for anybody interested

FooBarBizBazz 4y ago

You're in debt if your liabilities exceed your assets. Your liabilities include rent, food, and clothing. In the assets column, include various sources of income or capital gains, like dividend stocks. In a HCOL place like the United States, the columns balance around $1 million, which is effectively "zero". That's the point where you start being able to afford a frugal lifestyle in that built/social environment, without work. And that's not without sacrifices. So in that sense, most people are debt-slaves for most of their lives.

archarios 4y ago

IDK about y'all, but being lazy generally makes me feel horrible. I love getting things done. I hate having to labor simply to enrich others and for me to survive. But I love doing work that I think is meaningful and makes a difference so much more than chilling all day. Chilling needs to happen, but not all the time!

rootusrootus 4y ago
> being lazy generally makes me feel horrible Yes, very much agree. If I get sucked into HN and blow a big chunk of the day on stuff like this, I feel quite terrible at the end. I feel so much better when I can look back on my day and see accomplishments.
- kilbuz 4y ago
  What accomplishments are you most proud of this year?
nonrandomstring 4y ago
Me too. As a 'victim' of the Protestant Work Ethic, or maybe personality traits of the industrious/conscientious type, I find it the struggle is fighting for my right to be active in a world that increasingly lionises a passive, convenient and dependent life-stance. I just want to shake people sometimes. Look around you and see what needs to be done and the duty life demands of you!
- archarios 4y ago
  Yeah I suppose if we had fully automated space communism already I may have a different viewpoint..
  - nonrandomstring 4y ago
    Makes me wonder. If we did have automated luxury communism, would people like me just not be satisfied and struggle to find new "problems"? Alexis De Toqueville described the "American Spirit" as one of "restiveness"... itching to change and move (FWIW I'm British but tarn with the same brush). There's a funny line in "Analyse This" where Bully Crystal's character says innocently to Robert De Niro... "What are you going to do this summer?" And the Mafioso gangster (De Niro) replies; "About What?!"

verdenti 4y ago

BitwiseFool 4y ago

>"The Right to Be Lazy reminds us that the urge to work is not always beneficial, let alone necessary. It can also be a “strange madness” consuming human lives." To me, this is one of those things that is designed to be provocative while employing weasel words to great effect. In trying to type out a critique of it, I realize that "not always" and "let alone necessary" can be used to dismiss claims that this is anti-work. Despite the fact that it is highly critical of the "need" to for work.

j7ake 4y ago

Being too lazy seems like a waste of potential. Not being lazy enough is also not good; you burn out or lose perspective.

armchairhacker 4y ago

Roughly how much "work" does every person in the world need to do so that every person in the world can live a minimal but decent lifestyle? Of course, some people will want and take more than "decent", some people are disabled so its unreasonable to expect and unfair to demand for them to contribute the same amount, some people genuinely like to work all sorts of jobs (including hard labor), and speaking of, there are different jobs and no one way to quantify their "work". But this is a good starting point to answer the question: how much work is "enough"? With modern knowledge and medium-scale factories, can people spend 15-hour weeks producing enough to live comfortably, or do you need the average person to work 20-hour weeks of hard labor (or have 1/3 of the population work 60-hour weeks)?

BitwiseFool 4y ago
I think this is a question with an impossible answer. Life on Earth is far to varied and chaotic for any baseline value. Just like an ecosystem, everything is in constant flux.
nradov 4y ago
You're asking the wrong question. Regardless of the specific number of work hours that would be necessary to live a minimal but decent lifestyle (however you choose to define that), some people will always choose to work longer and harder in order to raise their social status. That status is often denominated in money but it can also take the form of possession of scarce resources, athletic skills, physical appearance, or fame. Most people are very status conscious and will then work harder themselves in order to keep up with the competition (or at least not fall too far behind). You might claim that this status seeking is irrational or unhealthy or whatever, but that's a moot point. It's fundamental human nature and will never change.
- janef0421 4y ago
  Even if humans would continue to attempt to gain social status by training to become buff pole-vaulters, I think it would be a massive improvement if that status seeking was decoupled from the economic system.
- 4y ago

Mizza 4y ago

Related classic, Bertrand Russel's 1932 'In Praise of Idleness': https://harpers.org/archive/1932/10/in-praise-of-idleness/ https://harpers.org/archive/1932/10/in-praise-of-idleness/

I_complete_me 4y ago
"An Apology for Idlers" by R.L. Stevenson is also worth reading for the beautiful way it is written if for no other reason.

dang 4y ago

We changed the URL from https://www.nyrb.com/products/the-right-to-be-lazy https://www.nyrb.com/products/the-right-to-be-lazy, which doesn't have the text, to a page that does.

tayo42 4y ago

I wonder what these anti working writers and philosophers would say about doing nothing in our modern day. Where nothing is still frequently capitalist driven consumption, scrolling through our phones endlessly getting advertised to, watching tv/streaming, engagement traps of social media etc... It's almost like it isn't safe to be lazy now, your downtime attention is fought for so hard by groups with so much resources then you can ever fight back with.

cauefcr 4y ago

That's one reason why co-operatives are interesting, same as unions, they change the balance of power to favor the oppressed by capital, relative to their size.

elefanten 4y ago

Funny this guy was arguing, in 1883, that automation could reduce the average workday to 4 hours. Good example to consider when reasoning about the current AI wave

quickthrower2 4y ago
The thing that will reduce the workday is everyone deciding to do it. Imagine the silly meetings and pointless work that just can’t be done when you starve the machine of humute (human compute) hours. Innovation would be the result. Entire businesses may be untenable and rightly so. Few things need long work days if we are happy to sacrifice some convenience. Supermarket hours can be fewer for example. Jobs like police, doctors etc. maybe not but we should probably reward them more accordingly.
- nathan_compton 4y ago
  When your solution to a problem is "everyone spontaneously decides to do it" what you really want is _regulation_.

geenew 4y ago

I'm lazy, so I'll just post this, from Office Space. I'm sure most people here can guess what quote it is. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rQ-bp_A61MI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rQ-bp_A61MI

mrtweetyhack 4y ago

throwaquestion5 4y ago

This is from 140 years ago but feel very modern "The manufacturers have lost their bearings and know not which way to turn. They can no longer find the raw material to satisfy the lawless depraved passion of their laborers for work. In our woolen districts dirty and half rotten rags are raveled out to use in making certain cloths sold under the name of renaissance, which have about the same durability as the promises made to voters. At Lyons, instead of leaving the silk fiber in its natural simplicity and suppleness, it is loaded down with mineral salts, which while increasing its weight, make it friable and far from durable. All our products are adulterated to aid in their sale and shorten their life. Our epoch will be called the “Age of adulteration” just as the first epochs of humanity received the names of “The Age of Stone”, “The Age of Bronze”, from the character of their production"

eternityforest 4y ago
On the other had, we are a lot better at making things out of cheap materials. Clothes from Target are relatively durable considering the price, especially if you do basic repairs like they would have back then. Even the food is probably better now. It's not perfect, but modern products are pretty amazing. A shirt can sell for $2 and last 20 years in some cases. Of course sweatshops and pollution are still awful.
- Broken_Hippo 4y ago
  Sure, clothes from Target might be relatively durable considering the price. But you need more clothing now. In a lot of places, it is socially unacceptable to wear the same thing for days in a row, even if you change your undergarments. You also don't have a realistic choice to make your own clothing. Cloth, thread, buttons and zippers aren't cheap and it became more out of reach in the late 80s and through the 90's (my mother sews and has for decades). That's not even considering things like a sewing machine, fabric scissors, and the fact that you might look like your clothes are homemade (which doesn't always fare well). Your Target clothing also won't be usable when it is worn, so you can't piece it together to make a new garment or even a blanket even if the stretchy material was easier to work with. You really can't do basic repairs like they used to do. I'm not sure this is cheaper.

supriyo-biswas 4y ago

While the article definitely speaks to me, I don't see how being lazy can be practically ingrained in society, as some amount of labor is required for basic human needs, even in a hunter-gatherer lifestyle. From there, a hierarchy of power would also be nice-to-have, since it can help with conflict resolution and efficient organization of resources, but we could argue at that point, it's starting to resemble capitalism somewhat.

musha68k 4y ago

Josef Pieper's "Leisure, the basis of culture" [1] comes to mind. Nothing we seemingly can do too easily, at least I can't so that's why I regularly try to re-read it. [1] https://archive.org/details/leisurebasisofcu0000piep https://archive.org/details/leisurebasisofcu0000piep

Ste_Evans 4y ago

biglost 4y ago

Mmm the good place or at least it’s last season. Just that.

Georgelemental 4y ago

The working class gets its power from its ability to choose whether or not to work. Without work, there is no workers' movement

Aunche 4y ago

I wonder how many people who think that everyone would be better if they worked half the hours were laughing at Elon Musk for laying off what he though was deadweight and having to rehire them.

zozbot234 4y ago

Paul Graham has a very nice perspective on this: https://www.paulgraham.com/opensource.html https://www.paulgraham.com/opensource.html (2005) "I think the most important of the new principles business has to learn is that people work a lot harder on stuff they like. Well, that's news to no one. So how can I claim business has to learn it? When I say business doesn't know this, I mean the structure of business doesn't reflect it. Business still reflects an older model, exemplified by the French word for working: travailler. It has an English cousin, travail, and what it means is torture. This turns out not to be the last word on work, however. As societies get richer, they learn something about work that's a lot like what they learn about diet. We know now that the healthiest diet is the one our peasant ancestors were forced to eat because they were poor. Like rich food, idleness only seems desirable when you don't get enough of it. I think we were designed to work, just as we were designed to eat a certain amount of fiber, and we feel bad if we don't."

agalunar 4y ago
> Like rich food, idleness only seems desirable when you don't get enough of it. I think we were designed to work, just as we were designed to eat a certain amount of fiber, and we feel bad if we don't. This is certainly not a new perspective; it's what I was taught growing up. It sounds profound, but I take some umbrage with it, because it stops short. What kind of work? How much? For whom? It's a terribly convenient thing to promulgate the idea that "we were designed to work" without further clarification when you own capital and reap the value of others' labor, and it's an easy thing to say when you derive healthfulness from the work that you personally happen to do. By "work" do you mean activity that's deemed productive to modern society? Otherwise, why not say people need to spend some time being focused, exerting mental effort, being creative, having long-term goals or engaging in long-term endeavours, &c, if that's what you really mean? I don't mean to sound suspicious or to insinuate some dark motivation on PG's part, but it (ironically) seems lazy to not bother to scrutinize the modern conception of work – to take something for granted because it's all that most of us living have ever known. We need exercise, but we can get that running for our lives or playing a sport, and the latter is less dangerous (and preferable unless you're a thrill seeker). We need work, but do we need to get that by doing the things that we call "work" today? (As a total aside: this reminded me of [1], shared some time ago on HN, which tenuously suggests that we were also designed to be idle. I took "designed" in PG's comment to mean "evolved", and my assumption is that small, pre-industrial societies are more representative of the conditions of the past few hundred thousand years in which modern humans evolved.) Edit: @kergonath also replied to the idea of too much idleness elsewhere in this thread [2]. [1] https://twitter.com/mnvrsngh/status/1510978995269029888 https://twitter.com/mnvrsngh/status/1510978995269029888 [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33931427 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33931427

8bitsrule 4y ago

The best work is indistinguishable from play. The word's too often associated with what children do ... 'merely' do. But remember how you threw your energies into it? It's great fun. The best work is the adult form of that; you return to it daily and it keeps rewarding: you and those you play with. When the going gets hard hard, solving it is the best.

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throwayyy479087 4y ago

The famous r/antiwork interview is all a fantastic example of where this attitude gets you. https://youtu.be/3yUMIFYBMnc https://youtu.be/3yUMIFYBMnc Honestly, being Doreen seems like a nightmare and we should aspire to be better.

wbazant 4y ago
I was really puzzled by the comments under the video - people acting as if Doreen really set himself on fire somehow - while to me he seems to have set himself up quite well. He walks dogs for a few hours a day, and it lets him do other stuff he cares about, like reading people's arguments on the internet!
- 4gotunameagain 4y ago
  I think it was because he was the worst possible poster child for that "movement", and made it seem like a joke from immature, psychologically troubled hermits.
- heavyset_go 4y ago
  Some people don't like it when "those people" complain about anything.

westcort 4y ago

The whole book is available here on Project Gutenberg: https://gutenberg.org/ebooks/52984 https://gutenberg.org/ebooks/52984