The Right to Be Lazy
Rabassiere, Henri
What the Lord did on the eighth day the Bible does not state; it is permitted to speculate that He continued to rest and, for all that the last million years' record shows, never returned to...
...If capitalism were to be criticized only because it is wasteful and inefficient, I would have little quarrel with it...
...it is characteristic of all industrial societies, including a socialist economy based on industrial production...
...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...
...Groundhogs must be paid higher wages or given longer vacations after the first enthusiasm of exerting themselves for their own government has worn off...
...But there is a Marx quotation for every occasion, and overlooking the whole trend of his thinking, I would agree with Erich Fromm that Marx more than other socialist writers was influenced by the ideas of his time...
...If I feel that even in my sleep I am being efficient I don't enjoy it any more...
...Sportsmanlike nations can be persuaded to stage productivity competitions, warlike nations can be asked to outproduce the enemy...
...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...
...Incidentally, I regret a difference of terminology with Fromm's fine discussion of the same problem in his new book The Sane Society...
...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...
...Up to now our play has been modeled after the image of our work...
...We love efficiency, paradoxically, for two reasons: it saves "labor," but on the other hand it makes working more efficient...
...And He will take pity on the damned —Sisyphus rolling his stone up hill, Tantalus hopping for his apples, the Danaides pouring water into the bottomless barrel...
...Doing one's job well was satisfaction in itself...
...In their place we have enthroned the religion of Efficiency...
...he poked fun at Lassalle's suggestion that the workers ought to increase their desiderata...
...But the wisdom of the peoples has never forgotten...
...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...
...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 by resolutely acknowledging his human ability to enjoy life and to act creatively in purposeless play...
...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...
...When he governed Geneva he declared it a sin against God and a burden on the city's treasury if any man were idle...
...Sociologists generally credit the Reformation with bringing about a complete change in people's attitudes toward work...
...when the philosophers speak of homo faber, they mean the inventor, the creator, the playful explorer, the craftsman perhaps, but never the industrial worker...
...This, Aristotle would say had he lived to see it, is as Nature would have it...
...Much as he welcomed this opportunity, he also saw the danger of man's enslavement by the machines...
...however, as is fitting, our example comes not from government propaganda but from commercial advertising...
...they have won recog nition for their desire to rest and play beyond the call of duty, while at the same time they have stretched the need for labor...
...The curse has worked well indeed...
...The condition, however, also is inherent in modern mass production as such...
...Calling means work as a crusade...
...this mentality had been there all along waiting to be topped off with the usual German instinct for turning all-too-seriousness into ridicule...
...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...
...in things of life, the laborer is most like to, God...
...they had to organize their ideas of socialism around man the producer...
...his recreation, too, must be usefully employed...
...We have become slaves of Progress...
...This condition transcends capitalism...
...The Americans are only slightly behind the Germans...
...seems less orthodox, from the standpoint of alienated philosophy, than I suspected, while I seem less heretical, from the Marxian point of view, than I fondly believed...
...he taught that the rich and mighty would go to heaven despite their bad works and the poor and humble for their good works...
...But this is not the case at all, or very rarely so...
...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...
...Not that I believe in these silly devices...
...There was a time when "monopolies" were accused of sabotaging technological progress for the sake of profit...
...This unpleasantness is overcome by morale-building ideologies, such as "work ennobles the worker," "common interest goes before self-interest," "duty before pleasure," "there is a war on...
...still, we are even more deeply entangled in the basic contradiction—that work and leisure are two very different things...
...in neither capacity did he understand the workers...
...they never believed that wealth makes no man happy...
...and even if done in cooperation with others, he still had insight into the whole process...
...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...
...I simply do not believe that "socialist conscience" will drive anybody to volunteer for the job of a groundhog...
...Before Freud he discovered that frustration can be converted into furious work...
...If he does rest, it is to restore his energy for work...
...He believed in work as man's salvation from exploitation...
...On the other hand, the most effective slogan of revolutionary class hatred has been: he that does not toil neither shall he eat...
...The myth of Productivity has driven out the friendly gods of old...
...he is not asked to be "creative" and has very little chance even to show ingenuity...
...labor service or some other form of forced labor...
...as representatives of the gods on earth—clearly because leisure is the measure of distinction and pleasure is divine...
...but just to fill one's place as ordained from on-high...
...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...
...His participation in management is only vicarious...
...Marx was right against the Luddites: industrialism and capitalism could not be arrested but had to be digested...
...Some people's Calling did not call them to great deeds, nor to great riches either...
...So deeply was he steeped in the idea of productivity that he even proposed labor service, and his idea of progressive educa tion was to merge the factories with the schoolroom...
...this is a really worthwhile project which also might be interesting to management) . Marxist critics of capitalism first considered "alienation" as a purely economic estrangement of the worker from his product...
...he sent the spiritual and terrestrial police into every household to make sure every man was working...
...To him, it was just as important to fight for the right not to work...
...He was one of the first churchmen to condone a modest amount of usury (by calling it interest...
...Under state socialism or state capitalism, the worker's interest in his "job" is supposed to wax to enthusiastic proportions...
...Even Calvin's universe had its rewards, however...
...I expect socialism to be rather wasteful with material resources but thrifty with unpleasantness imposed on human beings...
...We never got over that first and most effective of all curses which was the punishment for the first sin...
...The satisfaction is not in creating the product...
...I cannot imagine a socialist society in which all is eternal harmony...
...by nature it lies beyond the realm of material production proper...
...people under socialism must have some outlet for their natural aggressiveness) . If we rotate labor from town to coun• try, from manual to clerical, from executing to executive, out goes the expert and the efficiency...
...The worker is completely estranged from his product, and in fact, any opinion research probing a little beneath the surface will reveal that workers love their machines but are indifferent to what they produce...
...Martin Luther, it will be remembered, rejected "good works," apparently because they interfere with works tout court, good or bad...
...finally, the presence of a lower class or race whose members are prevented from rising to better positions...
...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...
...Professional prowess no longer lies in "creativeness" nor in anything that refers to the product...
...As a consumer and taxpayer, the worker certainly should tell himself, as his own employee, to work harder...
...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 which his boss thinks he can sell...
...Therefore they invented Calling...
...he boasts of his inventiveness in cutting corners, getting out more production in a given time, making more money to take home...
...I reject the last two and consider the second as too rare to be generalized...
...a robot need not be human...
...we have to renounce efficiency and productivity as human attributes...
...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...
...His friend Zwingli thought that "Labor is a thing so godlike...
...This applies notably to jobs which are dirty and demand great exertions, but give little or no satisfaction psychologically...
...it's "his" state he is working for and the benefit is supposed to accrue to all...
...Now, I like foam rubber and using it for rest should be a pleasure, but that ad man has spoiled it for me...
...it is in productivity...
...THAT WORKERS ARE PEOPLE was most forcefully asserted by Marx's son-in-law, Paul Lafargue, in his slogan "The Right to be Lazy...
...even an entirely state-controlled or cooperative enterprise cannot escape it...
...Mankind knew that even when it was very young...
...he transcends himself only when his work serves no purpose...
...even in consuming we maintained producer attitudes, or even worse—the dull and dutiful attitudes of factory work...
...Whatever he did was com pletely his own...
...productivity no longer is the measure of human contribution to the process of production...
...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...
...Only the top management has control of production and the sales manager has control of the product...
...We have to insist on our right to be lazy and just human...
...I read it after this essay had been set, otherwise it would have been easy to coordinate my language with his...
...Calvin never married and he forbade his followers all pleasures, luxuries and above all, idleness, which gives a man ideas...
...Isn't it significant that travelers to Utopia usually find themselves in garden cities suggesting a pre-capitalist society...
...I suspect it might even be shown that the idea of totalitarian dictatorship is inherent in their conception of productivity...
...Indeed, why efficiency...
...special honors and/or some sense of adventure that may be connected with them...
...Lowly jobs can be filled only by one of four devices: higher wages...
...The remedy is trade union action which gets for the worker as much out of the proceeds as the market will carry—a remedy which does not remedy the situation, but makes it less obnoxious...
...The most efficient, i.e., cost-saving, economical way of producing merchandise may not always be the best from the standpoint of the worker's comfort...
...Society may teach children that work never dishonors anybody, but when they grow up they would rather work less and receive higher honors...
...But in those days they could only think of making work more "humane...
...s s s P.S.: My attention is drawn to the following passage from Das Kapital, vol...
...He creates "works" only where he is not in the position of a "worker...
...The more leisure the higher the rank on the social scale...
...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...
...he is "class-conscious...
...To say that I disagree with Marx amounts to saying that today I can see where Marx was a child of his age...
...If efficiency were used only to speed up our working hours and extend our leisure time, it would be all to the good...
...At best, such verbalizations are the results of utter confusion...
...by the same token, the lesser breeds are eating their bread in the sweat of their brow...
...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...
...he quit, even in his last action asserting a man's right to take his life into his own hands...
...The worker often does not even see his product, he even may have little insight into the production process...
...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...
...but there was more to it...
...even under socialist planning, labor] always remains in the realm of necessity...
...An even gloomier chap was Calvin...
...Kraft durch Freude was not invented by the Nazis...
...By contrast, we say "labor" for the expenditure of human energy and for the supply of same...
...we can well afford to be inefficient wherever it suits us better...
...he connected the various faucets with rods which later were attached to the fly-wheel, and thus invented the feed-back...
...All his pride is concentrated on the work process, which he can speed up, even improve, but which never leads to any fulfillment or end...
...but unless he develops a split personality it does not happen that way...
...then, to follow one's Calling brought recognition among men...
...48: "The realm of freedom does not begin until work stops being determined by need and external necessity...
...Anyway, the people have always been wiser than the textbooks...
...Our language has retained a reminiscence of this bliss: we still say "work" for both, the act of creat ing and the product...
...His enemies were the leisure classes which were monopolizing consumption...
...we still think it's a sin to revive that blissful state which existed before the Fall...
...The nihilistic, fascist ideologist, Ernst Juenger, went as far as to "suggest the question, whether workers are not of a third sex...
...he may be his boss in the abstract...
...He develops his personality only when he throws off the thraldom of labor...
...It is difficult to explain Calling if you can't say it's another word for work...
...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 produc tivity...
...but when his employers later used it, they did so to save "labor...
...A maker of foam rubber tells us to "rest efficiently" on his mattresses...
...We need to develop our creative ranges of play...
...he fulfills himself only when he has no "job" to do...
...Totalitarian governments particularly have developed techniques of combining war ideology with racing images...
...There was neither proof in theory for such possibilities, nor did experiment bear these hopes out, except where communities were founded on a strictly religious basis...
...Here all the traditional notions of "workmanship," "pride in one's work," "calling" were voided of any meaning...
...he also admonished the princes to keep the peasants in their place, and if failing, to quarter, wheelbreak, blind, whip and hang them...
...Lafargue had not been brought up in the Calvinist virtues and did not believe in the pseudosocialist philosophy that work alone redeems man from this vale of miseries...
...OUR PROBLEM IS RATHER to increase our ability to enjoy our leisure time...
...Philosophical materialist, he liked them best when they were least concerned with the good life...
...The atom, however, is right against Marx, and we have not digested its implications yet...
...The same, however, though less drastically demonstrable, is true of all government efforts to increase productivity...
...Marx was a Vic torian gentleman and a Prussian scholar, besides being an Apostle of Justice...
...A socialist government wishing to stay clear of compulsion must recognize the freedom of trade unions and cooperatives...
...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...
...Our technology has advanced efficiency to provide for everybody...
...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...
...He cannot possibly feel the satisfaction of an artisan looking at his work...
...In this organization, the worker no longer has control over his product...
...In the first place, work was pleasing to God...
...2, ch...
...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 repre sentatives (qua worker) with management as his representative (qua consumer...
...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...
...For it's labor that is Hell and leisure that is Paradise...
...By definition, anyone who can offer Himself such a long vacation must be God...
...the need for efficiency no longer worries us...
...Since language is pre-fabricated thought, a worker referring to his "job" is revealing a truth about modern society...
...Foundations please take note...
...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 which does not belong to him, second by his contract which deprives him of the fruit of his labor, third by the market...
...It was only natural that they had to come to ridiculous conclusions...
...the employer, on the other hand, holds the union responsible for the delivery of an honest day's work...
...What the Lord did on the eighth day the Bible does not state...
...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...
...it imagines Heaven as the absence of pain and effort...
...It is generally agreed that socialism will be a very cumbersome way of providing administration and planning...
...Usually he specializes in some phase of production and has very little insight into the whole process...
...our needs can be filled by push-button operations...
...stinginess he called thrift, and hoarding—diligence) . His defense of the usurer was repeated 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...
...THE MORE EFFICIENT THE WORKER is, qua worker, the greater his estrangement from his product...
...and he honestly expected them to sacrifice their consumer interests to the beauties of the socialist society of pure producers...
...The bold speculations of his eminent father-in-law on the all-pervasiveness of labor made him uneasy...
...his play must exercise his mental or physical powers...
...but it is wasteful with human happiness and economical only with material goods...
...We have to forget, to un-learn the producer attitudes...
...Under the conditions of capitalism, the worker tries to welsh on his contract and delivers less labor than he is expected to...
...Lafargue was 30 years younger than Marx, and in the meantime two more generations have passed...
...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 age of the robot is here...
...The founding fathers all imagined that socialist production habits would create community spirit and other virtues which would prevent the recurrence of acquisitiveness and of war...
...they constantly organize battles of the grain, battles of production, battles of the cradle, etc...
...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...
...Indeed, Fourier's paranoiac conjecture of a new animal might for the first time be rationally discussed...
...we need to learn what it means to be free from the drudgery of work...
...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...
...This invention really was meant to save "work...
...we have not dared to stop the development of atomic power as long as the nations cannot agree on disarmament...
...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...
...THAT TERRIBLE REVOLUTION DID HAPPEN, though the exact time of its happening is not quite clear...
...Those who might find some of his suggestions strange are asked to consider that he believed in play, too...
...Neither do they believe that riches are usually come by the hard way...
...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 streak of the Jewish prophet and chiliast in Marx blinded him to the virtues of luxury and pleasure...
...mankind can sit back and relax...
...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...
...So much of it passes over his work bench...
...his own life was that of a zealot...
...Man is free and creative only when he plays...
...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...
...With this device, workers have assured themselves a place among human beings...
...Beyond this begins that humane development of human energy which finds its end in itself, the true realm of freedom " Marx indeed here...
...at best, he may have control of his machine, but in most cases the machine will have control of him...
...III, pt...
...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...
...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...
...Second, they show how much they were aware of the problem of human values which I am discussing here...
...Finally, a man could look with pride at his work...
...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...
...His pamphlet under this title tells the story of a hundred years' fight for shorter hours...
...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...
...Experience shows that the harder the work, the less the pay...
...as an employee he had to fight hard not to be relieved entirely by the machine...
...it exalts royalty ("The king was in the counting house...
Vol. 3 • January 1956 • No. 1
