THE RIGHT TO BE LAZY

...This, Aristotle would say had he lived to see it, is as Nature would have it...

...Calvin never married and he forbade his followers all pleasures, luxuries, and, above all, idleness, which gives a man ideas...

...The remedy is trade union action which gets for the worker as much out of the proceeds as the market will carry THE RIGHT TO BE LAZY 195 —a remedy that does not remedy the situation, but makes it less obnoxious...

...In the English language (and in none other, so far as I know), the word "job" can be set aside to name the social and economic relationship between the worker and his working place...

...He develops his personality only when he throws off the thraldom of labor...

...The satisfaction is not in creating the product...

...We have to insist on our right to be lazy and just human...

...for it is debatable whether those who do the menial work have a soul, whereas those who have leisure to enjoy the pleasures of life must of necessity have richer experience and a larger scope of soul...

...If capitalism were to be criticized only because it is wasteful and inefficient, I would have little quarrel with it...

...198 HENRY PACHTER...

...It is difficult to explain Calling if you can't say it's another word for work...

...it imagines Heaven as the absence of pain and effort...

...A maker of foam rubber tells us to "rest efficiently" on his mattresses...

...he also admonished the princes to keep the peasants in their place, and if failing, to quarter, wheelbreak, blind, whip, and hang them...

...Sportsmanlike nations can be persuaded to stage productivity competitions, warlike nations can be asked to outproduce the enemy...

...Much as he welcomed this opportunity, he also saw the danger of man's enslavement by the machines...

...The price of better working conditions was the division of labor, or the acceptance of, and acquiescence in, the conditions of factory work by the worker, his integration into a huge organization of well-laid-out production processes, his subservience to the requirements of machine production...

...and he honestly expected them to sacrifice their consumer interests to the beauties of the socialist society of pure producers...

...the devices of personnel management only help to underline the basic fact that labor is measured by its disutility to the worker, that he strives to exert himself less, to spend less time inside the factory, has no pride in his work and gets little satisfaction out of a job well done—except perhaps the promotion which enables him to spend more time outside the factory and enjoy it better...

...Those who might find some of his suggestions strange are asked to consider that he believed in play, too...

...The worker often does not even see his product...

...but when his employers later used it, they did so to save "labor...

...All he knows is that for the time being he "has a job" requiring him to supply a specified amount of labor and to cooperate in the production of some merchandise his boss thinks he can sell...

...We have become slaves of Progress...

...he fulfills himself only when he has no "job" to do...

...even an entirely state-controlled or cooperative enterprise cannot escape it...

...Therefore they invented Calling...

...Doing one's job well was satisfaction in itself...

...he connected the various faucets with rods which later were attached to the flywheel, and thus invented the feedback...

...it is in productivity...

...There was neither proof in theory for such possibilities, nor did experiment bear these hones out, except where communities were founded on a strictly religious basis...

...He will muse upon the sorry fate of the Devil, busily running the world, rushing hither and thither to aggrandize his little kingdom and really leading one hell of an existence...

...This invention really was meant to save "work...

...Lafargue was 30 years younger than Marx, and in the meantime two more generations have passed...

...An even gloomier chap was Calvin...

...least of all can I accept the ideal of a docile labor force, bent on furiously fulfilling its duty toward the socialist fatherland and enthusiastically improving its productivity...

...He felt that man needed very much to be redeemed from the obligation to work, and saw that industrial machinery might help him to get rid of the drudgery...

...they had to organize their ideas of socialism around man the producer...

...Foundations please take note...

...We never got over that first and most effective of all curses which was the punishment for the first sin...

...The founding fathers all imaginedthat socialist production habits would create community spirit and other virtues which would prevent the recurrence of acquisitiveness and of war...

...But the wisdom of the people has never forgotten...

...The worker is completely estranged from his product, and opinion research probing a little beneath the surface will reveal that workers love their machines but are indifferent to what they produce...

...He cannot possibly feel the satisfaction of an artisan looking at his work...

...If we succeed, however, in substituting a religion of laziness for the worship of industriousness, the acquisitive instincts, while they still cannot be killed, might find no cultural and social nourishment and no economic sphere in which they could become active...

...he sent the spiritual and terrestrial police into every household to make sure every man was working...

...The Americans are only slightly behind the Germans...

...the employer, on the other hand, holds the union responsible for the delivery of an honest day's work...

...If he does rest, it is to restore his energy for work...

...he quit, even in his last action 196 HENRY PACHTER asserting a man's right to take his life into his own hands...

...By contrast, we say "labor" for the expenditure of human energy and for the supply of same...

...I suspect it might even be shown that the idea of totalitarian dictatorship is inherent in their conception of productivity...

...That terrible revolution did happen, though the exact time of its happening is not quite clear...

...The nihilistic, fascist ideologist Ernst Binger went as far as to "suggest the question, whether workers are not of a third sex...

...We have to forget, to unlearn the producer -attitudes...

...The most efficient, i.e., costTHE RIGHT TO BE LAZY 197 saving, economical way of producing merchandise may not always be the best from the standpoint of the worker's comfort...

...even in consuming we maintained producer attitudes, or even worse—the dull and dutiful attitudes of factory work...

...193 When he governed Geneva he declared it a sin against God and a burden on the city's treasury if any man were idle...

...Man is free and creative only when he plays...

...So deeply was he steeped in the idea of productivity that he even proposed labor service, and his idea of progressive education was to merge the factories with the schoolroom...

...stinginess he called thrift, and hoarding—diligence...

...Sociologists generally credit the Reformation with bringing about a complete change in people's attitudes toward work...

...but just to fill one's place as ordained from on high...

...in neither capacity did he understand the workers...

...still, we are even more deeply entangled in the basic contradiction— that work and leisure are two very different things...

...But this is not the case at all, or very rarely so...

...It was only natural that they had to come to contradictory conclusions...

...the need for efficiency no longer worries us...

...In this organization, the worker no longer has control over his product...

...In their place we have enthroned the religion of efficiency...

...as an employee he had to fight hard not to be relieved entirely by the machine...

...For it's labor that is Hell and leisure that is Paradise...

...this mentality had been there all along waiting to be topped off with the usual German instinct for turning all-too-seriousness into ridicule...

...Up to now our play has been modeled after the image of our work...

...Mankind knewthat even when it was very young...

...he is not asked to be "creative" and has very little chance even to show ingenuity...

...If efficiency were used only to speed up our working hours and extend our leisure time, it would be all to the good...

...On the other hand, the most effective slogan of revolutionary class hatred has been: he that does not toil neither shall he eat...

...His pamphlet under this title tells the story of a hundred years' fight for shorter hours...

...he taught that the rich and mighty would go to heaven despite their bad works and the poor to hell for their good works...

...he boasts of his inventiveness in cutting corners, getting out more production in a given time, making more money to take home...

...Failure to increase production unfailingly results in a charge of "sabotage," but the most potent device of totalitarian imposition is the myth of Productivity which persuades the worker that his job is his duty, and that Duty, or one's job, stands higher in the hierarchy of values than one's personal needs...

...Here all the traditional notions of "workmanship," "pride in one's work," "calling," were voided of any meaning...

...He was a brave man who truly believed in freedom, and when he felt that his life had been played out, he allowed no duty to retain him...

...Before Freud he discovered that frustration can be converted into furious work...

...he did not deny that socialists should fight for "the right to work," but he was not so sure that they also should fight for the duty to work...

...it means that a man has been identified with his work so intimately that his life no longer consists of hours of work and hours of play or rest: it is all work...

...by the same token, the lesser breeds are eating their bread in the sweat of their brow...

...He had made himself such a high image of the ideal proletarian (with arms growing thinner and fists erected higher) that the specimens whom he met in real life usually annoyed him...

...Some people's Calling did not call them to great deeds, nor to great riches either...

...our needs can be filled by pushbutton operations...

...Now I like foam rubber and using it for rest should be a pleasure, but that ad man has spoiled it for me...

...a robot need not be human...

...He was one of the first churchmen to condone a modest amount of usury (by calling it interest...

...when the philosphers speak of homo faber, they mean the inventor, the creator, the playful explorer, the craftsman perhaps, but never the industrial worker...

...Fortunately, both flies could be caught with the same swatter—the long history of class strife in the 19th century is the story of a gradual shortening of the working day...

...The bold speculations of his eminent father-in-law on the all-pervasiveness of labor made him uneasy...

...To him, it was just as important to fight for the right not to work...

...His friend Zwingli thought that "labor is a thing so godlike . . . in things of life, the laborer is most like to God...

...I cannot imagine a socialist society in which all is eternal harmony...

...Philosophical materialist that he was, he liked them best when they were least concerned with the good life...

...Usually he specializes in some phase of production and has very little insight into the whole process...

...When the first news of the atomic bomb was published, the most shocking revelation, to me, was not its enormous power of destruction, but the report that thousands of people had been employed in its production without knowing what they were doing...

...And He will take pity on the damned—Sisyphus rolling his stone uphill, Tantalus hopping for his apples, the Danaides pouring water into the bottomless barrel...

...Anyway, the people have always been wiser than the textbooks...

...we need to learn what it means to be free from the drudgery of work...

...his own life was that of a zealot...

...he poked fun at Lassalle's suggestion that the workers ought to increase their desiderata...

...Groundhogs must be .paid higher wages or given longer vacations after the first enthusiasm of exerting themselves for their own government has worn off...

...Indeed, why efficiency...

...Experience shows that the harder the work, the less the pay...

...productivity no longer is the measure of human contribution to the process of production...

...The automation, however, is right against Marx, and we have not digested its implications yet...

...So much of it passes over his work bench...

...Since language is prefabricated thought, a worker referring to his "job" is revealing a truth about modern society...

...Yet, even Calvin's universe had its rewards...

...But in those days they could only think of making work more "humane...

...The more leisure the higher the rank on the social scale...

...Indeed, Fourier's paranoiac conjecture of a new animal might for the first time be rationally discussed...

...finally, the presence of a lower class or race whose members are prevented from rising to better positions...

...Lowly jobs can be filled only by one of four devices: higher wages...

...but it is wasteful with human happiness and economical only with material goods...

...The enterprise can give the worker a very decent or even a very high (monopolistic) wage and make working conditions for him really pleasant with Muzak, air-conditioning, coffee break, and other devices of "human engineering," all justified as conducive to higher efficiency, of course...

...we have not dared to stop the development of atomic power as long as the nations cannot agree on disarmament...

...Society may teach children that work never dishonors anybody, but when they grow up they would rather work less and receive higher honors...

...The streak of the Jewish prophet and chiliast in Marx blinded him to the virtues of luxury and pleasure...

...they never believed that wealth makes no man happy...

...we can well afford to be inefficient wherever it suits us better...

...Only the top management has control of production and the sales manager has control of the product...

...Whatever he did was completely his own and even if done in cooperation with others, he still had insight into the whole process...

...A socialist government wishing to stay clear of compulsion must recognize the freedom of trade unions and cooperatives...

...but there was more to it...

...His enemies were the leisure classes which were monopolizing consumption...

...Marx was a Victorian gentleman and a Prussian scholar, besides being an Apostle of Justice...

...I reject the last two and consider the second as too rare to be generalized...

...By definition, anyone who can offer Himself such a long vacation must be God...

...My hero in technology always was that attendant boy who was too lazy to turn by hand all the valves on Newcomen's first primitive steam engine...

...Isn't it significant that travelers to Utopia usually find themselves in garden cities suggesting a preindustrialist society...

...We need to develop our creative ranges of play...

...This condition transcends capitalism...

...but unless he develops a split personality it does not happen that way...

...There was a time when "monopolies" were accused of sabotaging technological progress for the sake of profit...

...Lafargue (a West Indian mulatto) had not been brought up in the Calvinist virtues and did not believe in the pseudo-socialist philosphy that work alone redeems man from this vale of miseries...

...Management still will insist on labor-saving devices to cut costs, while the union will ask for work-saving devices even if they are costly...

...This applies notably to jobs which are dirty and demand great exertions but give little or no satisfaction psychologically...

...we have to renounce efficiency and productivity as human attributes...

...he is "class-conscious...

...they constantly organize battles of the grain, battles of production, battles of the cradle, etc...

...they have won recognition for their desire to rest and play beyond the call of duty, while at the same time they have stretched the need for labor...

...labor service or some other form of forced labor...

...The condition, however, also is inherent in modern mass production as such...

...We love efficiency, paradoxically, for two reasons: it saves "labor," but on the other hand it makes working more efficient...

...Our technology has advanced efficiency to provide for everybody...

...his recreation, too, must be usefully employed...

...Calling means work as a crusade...

...Second, they show how much they were aware of the problem of human values which I am discussing here...

...Today, automation is precipitating a new industrial revolution before society has made the necessary adjustments to use the new efficiency for the benefit of all mankind...

...The same, however, though less drastically demonstrable, is true of all government efforts to increase productivity...

...The myth of Productivity has driven out the friendly gods of old...

...Under the conditions of capitalism, the worker tries to welsh on his contract and delivers less labor than he is expected to...

...I expect socialism to be rather wasteful with material resources but thrifty with unpleasantness imposed on human beings...

...Not that I believe in these silly devices...

...Neither do they believe that riches are usually come by the hard way...

...Professional prowess no longer lies in "creativeness" nor in anything that refers to the product...

...Now we can make the Copernican turn: not by thinking of better devices of organizing homo Faber shall we liberate him from the realm of necessity, but resolutely acknowledging his human ability to enjoy life and to act creatively in purposeless play...

...Their later followers, however, found it difficult to persuade sensible .men that this could be true, if only because the Catholics were having a good time and still expected God's forgiveness...

...Marxist critics of capitalism first considered "alienation" as a purely economic estrangement of the worker from his product...

...His participation in management is only vicarious...

...All his pride is concen194 HENRY PACHTER trated on the work process, which he can speed up, even improve, but which never leads to any fulfillment or end...

...If we admit, with Engels, that the cook ought to have a go at ruling the state, I am afraid we shall not only eat less well but also have more serious reasons to gripe (by the way, I think this is absolutely necessary and healthy...

...The curse has worked well indeed...

...No amount of worker participation will overcome this condition, for the simple reason that even under the most favorable conditions, the employers don't have control over the verdict of the market either...

...he maybe his own boss in the abstract...

...this is a really worthwhile project which also might be interesting to management...

...Our problem is rather to increase our ability to enjoy our leisure time...

...His parlance beclouds the fact that under the conditions of industrial capitalism the worker is separated from his product, first by a huge apparatus of machinery that does not belong to him, second by his contract that deprives him of the fruit of his labor, third by the market...

...The more efficient the worker is, qua worker, the greater his estrangement from his product...

...His defense of the usurer was echoed by that staunch churchman Mellon, who never foreclosed properties unless the tenants were "weakened by bad habits and extravagant living"— which unfortunately he found to be the case fairly regularly...

...he transcends himself only when his work serves no purpose...

...Under state socialism or state capitalism, the worker's interest in his "job" is supposed to wax to enthusiastic proportions...

...But if he naively says "my work," forgetting that he neither owns his product nor controls the process of its production, he atavistically uses conceptions from the craftsman's age...

...If we rotate labor from town to country, from manual to clerical, from executing to executive, out goes the expert and the efficiency...

...it is characteristic of all industrial societies, including a socialist economy based on industrial production...

...This unpleasantness is overcome by moralebuilding ideologies, such as "work ennobles the worker," "common interest goes 'before self-interest," "duty before pleasure," "there is a war on...

...It is generally agreed that socialism will be a very cumbersome way of providing administration and planning...

...we still think it's a sin to revive that blissful state which existed before the Fall...

...With this device, workers have assured themselves a place among human beings...

...at best, he may have control of his machine, but in most cases the machine will have control of him...

...I only refer to them for two purposes: first, to show that even the fathers of socialist thought, who introduced them, must have been aware that socialism is not a way to organize society more efficiently...

...In the first place, work was pleasing to God...

...Now here is the paradox: as a human being, the worker should be glad that machinery was being invented to relieve him of (at least some of) the drudgery...

...He believed in work as man's salvation from exploitation...

...Finally, a man could look with pride at his work...

...but this abstract personality confronts him in the alienated shape of a supervisor, and the conflict can be resolved only by institutionalizing the split of personality—free trade unions must bargain as his representatives (qua worker) with management as his representative (qua consumer...

...To say that I disagree with Marx amounts to saying that today I can see where Marx was a child of his age...

...Martin Luther, it will be remembered, rejected "good works," apparently because they interfere with works tout court, good or bad...

...And when, after another million years, He will be sitting gloriously on His throne, with angels leisurely winging -around Him, He will behold His arrangement with satisfaction and say: All is as it should be...

...He creates "works" only where he is not in the position of a "worker...

...Under capitalistic conditions he had to fight on two fronts—on the one hand for his "right to work," on the other hand for his "right to leisure...

...That workers are people was most forcefully asserted by Marx's son-in-law, Paul Lafargue, in his slogan "The Right to be Lazy...

...Marx was right against the Luddites: industrialism and capitalism could not be arrested but had to be digested...

...it exalts royalty ("The king was in the counting house . . .") as representatives of the gods on earth—clearly because leisure is the measure of distinction and pleasure is divine...

...Totalitarian , governments particularly have developed techniques of combining war ideology with racing images...

...At best, such verbalizations are the results of utter confusion...

...If I feel that even in my sleep I am being efficient I don't enjoy it anymore...

...The dirtiest jobs are not paid in proportion to the marginal "disutility" or distaste of their execution, but in accordance with the disrepute in which a person stooping to them is held by his equals and betters...

...it's "his" state he is working for and the benefit is supposed to accrue to all...

...his play must exercise his mental or physical powers...

...however, as is fitting, our example comes not from government propaganda but from commercial advertising...

...The age of the robot is here...

...I simply do not believe that "socialist conscience" will drive anybody to volunteer for the job of groundhog, digging a tunnel under the Hudson River...

...then, to follow one's Calling brought recognition among men...

...Our language has retained a reminiscence of this bliss: we still say "work" for both the act of creating and the product...

...mankind can sit back and relax...

...Once labor has been recognized as something to get away from and leisure has been recognized as the legitimate and significant sphere of human endeavors, we even might expect those psychological changes which are just utopian dreams in the classical theory of socialism...

...As a consumer and taxpayer, the worker certainly should tell himself, as his own employee, to work harder...

...All the devices of human engineering and personnel relations are just so many acknowledgments of the fact that work generally is unpleasant, that office hours are a nuisance, and work discipline is degrading...

...it is permitted to speculate that He continued to rest and, for all that the last million years' record shows, never returned to the hectic working spree of the first six days...

...Kraft durch Freude was not invented by the Nazis...

...people under socialism must have some outlet for their natural aggressiveness...

...special honors and/or some sense of adventure that may be connected with them...