New Songs To New Music

I recently read Paul Lafargue's The Right to Be Lazy. It was an enjoyable, quick read. Lafargue was Marx's son-in-law, was financially supported for a large part of his life by Engels, and worked against Bakuninist tendencies in the First International, yet he still brought a more libertarian perspective to marxist thought and was sometimes compared to Bakunin. The Right to Be Lazy is his attack on the degrading capitalist work ethic. He believes "revolutionary socialists must...demolish in the heads of the class which they call to action the prejudices sown in them by the ruling class." (18) Of course, he points out how an ascetic work ethic is meant to destroy the desires and reduce the needs of producers in order to mold them into automatons for a system predicated upon production. The piece is also directed against workerist tendencies in the labor movement which call for the right to work and hence merely reproduce the "slaveholder ideology" of capitalism.

But while this is a seminal writing on the problem of work and must be commended as such, it still is highly flawed. For one, Lafargue has quite an awesome sense of humor, which makes me wonder about the seriousness and desiribility of some of his (hopeful) predictions. For example, he happily envisions "a brazen law forbidding any man to work more than three hours a day" (68) being enacted after rational technological automation of production makes the labor market swell. This is either a joke or is a highly unrealistic authoritarian dream.

Even more importantly, his call for the three hour work day contradicts his entire attitude about work. I would think a proponent of leisure so critical of the work ethic would recognize that fundamentally the two should not coexist. Even a mandatory 1 hour work day reduces the producer to...well, a producer. All free time is merely time for recuperation/reproduction of the worker, who still must have at least a tiny bit of that capitalist work ethic Lafargue rails against. So it may be an overly grand proposal, but it would make more sense to demand the abolition of work. Only in a leisure society (communism) can any true leisure be realized and the work ethic destroyed. The only solution to the problem posed by Lafargue is a communist society in which people freely produce however they so desire (and for some reason he doesn't just come out and say this.) After all, leisure is highly productive, a fact that Lafargue points out himself.