The Right to be Idle (2011)

Book Review from the October 2011 issue of the Socialist Standard

How to be Idle. By Tom Hodgkinson. Penguin.

Here is a handbook for any would-be socialist wondering what life could really be like in a post-capitalist society. Of course it’s not possible to be living a socialist way of life in a non-socialist world, but this book is full of the pleasures to be had from a way of living totally different from the one we see all around us now. Hodgkinson has an insightful grasp of the iniquities of the capitalist system, its stranglehold on working conditions and its tight control of most areas of our lives. He succinctly identifies many of its outstanding features and, with his own particular brand of humour, hands out lots of good advice for the work-weary, enabling us to open our eyes and see more clearly the life we should be living. Are we to live an onerous life created for us by this current controlling system or should we choose how we build and live our own individual lives? Do we live by our rules or theirs?

One clue to Hodgkinson’s outlook on being an idler is found in a description of his routine: he works in the morning, reading and writing; spends the afternoon in the garden chopping logs and suchlike; and gives the evening over to eating, drinking and talking. ‘When work is freely chosen and creative, then it’s not really work at all.’ He claims not to know much about Marx, but having thought that work was at the centre of his philosophy’ he now says he is beginning to understand that Marx’s motivation came from ‘the boredom and misery caused by the Industrial Revolution and by his own dream to replace that system with something more humane.’  

The first step to being idle is to understand our 250 years of indoctrination into the work ethic – a topic Hodgkinson expands on. Understanding that this work ethic is based on guilt enables us to get rid of that guilt and get on with the dreaming. ‘Dreams are not about money – they are about you and about your quality of life and imagination.’  

Co-founder of the ‘Idler’ magazine (www.idler.co.uk) and the Idler Academy, Hodgkinson has spent nearly twenty years attempting (working hard?) to perfect the art of idling. He draws on the work of a host of writers, poets, philosophers and sociologists to support his ideas:  Paul Lafargue, Bertrand Russell, Nietzsche, Tom Paine, Oscar Wilde and Lao Tzu, to name but a few.

Janet Surman

Taking it easy (2011)

Book Review from the December 2011 issue of the Socialist Standard

In Praise of Slow. By Carl Honoré. Orion Books.
How To Be Free. By Tom Hodgkinson. Penguin Books.

Honoré’s book is hard to pigeon-hole. Part self-help manual, part commentary, part investigation and part a downshifting guide book, it looks into some fundamental questions about how we in the West particularly live our modern lives.

So much of today is rushed, pushed on by rabid consumerism and overbearing industrial culture that we are in danger of losing ourselves, our perspectives and our direction as individuals as well as a species. The pace of modern living continually re-enforces the ‘speed is good’ culture, the work harder, work longer, live faster ethic. In this book Honoré looks at what drives this insanity and the growing rejection of it by ever larger numbers of people. Although mainly anecdotal and sometimes trivial even, the light style is easy to read. He investigates various ways in which individuals and groups are rejecting the constant work-earn-spend cycle and taking time to live a little, before going on to suggest ways in which you can adopt a slower lifestyle.

Reading this as a socialist, I found some of the arguments obvious and some a little woolly, but to be fair to the author I don’t think he set out to tear into the cause behind what he refers to as the ‘cult of speed’. We know that capitalism is the driving force that creates many, if not all, the problems referred to in the book. The solutions proposed and, indeed, being implemented by some groups clearly have merit, but are not available to all and never will be without wholesale revolutionary change.

However, the reasoning behind acting, thinking and generally taking life a bit slower is something we can all aspire to and provides a topic to engage people in discussing the shortfalls of modern life and how things can be better under a different system.

Hodgkinson’s first book, How To Be Idle was reviewed here last month.  I read his How To Be Free on the recommendation of a friend. It had inspired him to leave behind London for Sussex and adopt a ‘good-life’ complete with chickens. Must be some book I thought!

Hodgkinson’s writing style is very readable. Each chapter is a short guide to breaking free from the chains modern society binds us with. Railing against supermarkets, the nine-to-five culture, careerism, mass-production, and pensions, amongst others, with humour, literary references, quotes from songs and poems, fascinating historical anecdotes and large slices of real life, he explains how each of us can be ‘free’.

Although the book is written with some tongue in cheek, it does make for a great read and emphasises some salient points about the way we live under capitalism and how and why it could and should be much better. The ideas are rooted in doing something with your own life now as individuals rather than through any collective action, although conversely much is made of the advantages of being in a group.

Whilst much of the book gives good ideas and can sow the seeds of rebellion, most assume a position of some luxury to start with (I don’t think Hodgkinson has come from a council estate in Manchester). I enjoyed reading it and have even gone so far as trying out some of the ideas, but kept coming back to the fact that for most people taking up some of the suggestions would be very impractical. However, as a book that questions the ethos behind consumerism and urges the reader to take personal action to stop buying ‘stuff’, it is a great read.

David Humphries

Idle Idols: Paul Lafargue

From the issue 7 1994 of the Idler Magazine:

The French labour activist dreamed of a three hour day for everyone, was thrown in prison for subversion and in 1883 wrote a searing attack on the work ethic called The Right to be Lazy.

If you think you work too hard now, spare a thought for the French factory workers of the late 19th century. Despite the prevalence of new machines that the Industrial Revolution had produced, the workers - including women and children - slaved away for as long as 16 hours in hideous conditions for subsistence wages.

Onto this scene came the brilliant thinker and labour activist Paul Lafargue. The son of a Bordeaux landowner, he was born in Cuba in 1842 but grew up in a swiftly industrialising France. He became politically active in 1865 when a medical student in Paris. Following his involvement in the first ever International Congress of Students, he was banned from his studies for two years for "individual and collective insults to Church and Government". Trouble with the authorities would be a fact of life for Lafargue for many years.

In 1868, after completing his studies in England, Lafargue married Laura Marx, son of Karl, a man who, along with the French anarchist thinker Proudhon, was a great influence on Lafargue and his gang. Around this time Lafargue also became involved with the newly formed International Working Men's Association which campaigned tirelessly for a shorter working day.

In common with many who try to follow their own path, Lafargue was poor for years. His writings at this time were for underground periodicals and didn't bring in the cash. In 1872, he and Laura opened a photographic shop in London to try and earn some money. But for the next ten years it was only the financial support of their friend the wealthy Engels that kept them alive. When they returned to Paris in 1882, things got so bad that Lafargue had to take a McJob with an insurance firm. Luckily the firm folded after a few months and Lafargue was released from wage drudgery.

In 1883, his subversive activities landed him with a six - month jail stretch. But far from being an intolerable burden, Lafargue's months inside were relatively luxurious; he and his friend Guesde, a magazine editor, were given the best rooms and sent brimming hampers of food and wine by friends. Crucially, the sentence also gave him the time to finish a pamphlet he had been working on. It was called The Right to be Lazy (the title was a parody of the socialist plea for the "right to work") and argued passionately against the evils of work. Lafargue rallied against the capitalist system of production and consumption, which led people to believe that harder work led to greater prosperity. "Work, work, proletarians, to increase social wealth and your individual poverty," he wrote. "Work, work in order that by becoming poorer, you may have more reason to work and become miserable. Such is the inexorable law of capitalist production."

Lafargue noted that in England, the recent, shortening of the working day had not led to economic disaster. On the contrary, England was leading the way in production. "But if the miserable reduction of two hours has increased English productivity by almost one third in ten years, what breathless speed would be given to French production by a legal limitation of the working day to three hours?"

Lafargue even went so far as to recommend that we "forge a brazen law forbidding any man to work more than three hours a day".

What really troubled Lafargue was the lust for work which people seemed gripped by:

"Let a chance for work to present itself, thither they (the proletariat) will rush; then they demand 12 or 14 hours to glut their appetite for work, and the next day they are thrown out on the pavement with no more food for their vice." It was this masochistic drive, Lafargue believed, that robbed machines of their liberating potential. "The blind, perverse and murderous passion for work transforms the liberating machine into an instrument for the enslavement of free men. Its productiveness enslaves them."

As well as exposing the tyranny of work, Lafargue wrote eloquently on the nobility of idleness, calling on the ancient Greeks to bear witness. "The philosophers of antiquity taught contempt for work, that degradation of the free man, the poets sang of idleness, that gift from the Gods." He gleefully quoted from the poet Antiparos; "Let us live the life of our fathers, and let us rejoice in idleness over the gifts that the Goddess grants us."

Lafargue also used the Bible to add weight to his thesis: "Jesus, in his sermon on the mount, preached idleness; 'Consider the lillies of the field, how they grow; they toil not, neither do they spin: and yet I say unto you that even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these.'" God, said Lafargue, was the ultimate Idler: "After six days of work, he rests for all eternity."

The next ten years were a continuous round of trials, fines demonstrations, leaflets and jail stretches for Lafargue and his revolutionary friends. It was only in 1895, when Engels left Laura some money and Lafargue came into a little inheritance that life became a little easier for them.

Lafargue continued writing and campaigning into the early1900's. But he and Laura began to feel that they were too old to be of use to the campaign, and in 1912 each injected themselves with a lethal dose of potassium of cyanide.

There may be those on the left who feel that because the ideas of Lafargue and others like him contributed to the installation of the 40 hour week in this country - an unthinkable luxury in the 19th century when a 60 or 70 hour week was the norm - we can therefore forget his polemic. He has done his job. But today Major's government is bringing in yet tougher regulations to force people to take any crap job when they are on the dole or risk losing allowances. Currently, you are not allowed to claim the dole if you leave your job voluntarily. This is slavery by the back door, and it is inhuman and unjust. The ideas of people like Lafargue, therefore, are as relelvant as ever and deserve a rereading by as wide a public as possible.

Today we have inestimably more machines than in Lafargue's time: surely then we should share his rage that the capitalists "do not understand that the machine is the saviour of humanity, the God who shall redeem man from the sordidae artes and from working for hire, the god who shall give him leisure and liberty"

Further Reading:

Introduction to The Right To Be Lazy