Editorial: The Right to Work. (1905)

Editorial from the December 1905 issue of the Socialist Standard

The very latest is a ”Right to Work Committee” upon which, a number of middle-class persons and some who have discovered that labour “leadering” is more easy and profitable than work have elected themselves. The “right” they clamour for is not for themselves but for others. They “appeal” to the working-class to “demand” from the dominant class more work, when already too much is performed. They would perpetuate the capitalist system by shewing the wealthy shirkers how they may stave off the day of reckoning and save their skins for awhile if they will accept their proposals and make work. For our part we say To Hell with the “Right” to Work; we claim our Right to Live and to live right well. Let us scorn these middle class decoy ducks and organise to bring about the common ownership of the means of life, which alone will enable us to secure the only Right we are concerned about. Then and not till then shall we recognise our obligation to perform our share of the necessary work. In the meantime, our Right to work is the Right of the wealthy idlers to organise our labour as their wage slaves. The “demand” for that Right we will leave to the agents of the capitalists, whether in the guise of middle class sympathisers or well paid labour “leaders.”

Being Lazy (2023)

Book Review from the March 2023 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Right to be Lazy and Other Writings. By Paul Lafargue. Selected and translated by Alex Andriesse. New York Review of Books. 2023.

Paul Lafargue’s classic satire on the obsession with work and the working class’s demand that they should be given work as a ‘right’ was first translated into English by the left-wing publisher Charles Kerr in 1907, so a modern translation is not out of place. This one, by Alex Andriesse, reads better in general than Kerr’s, if only because today is 2023 and language changes.

Not all the changes are improvements. Why, for instance, ‘preachings’ into ‘preachments’, ‘idleness’ into ‘otium’? Other changes reflect a lack of understanding of socialist terminology as when ‘wages’ is changed to ‘salaries’ and, on two occasions ‘working class’ to ‘working classes’ (Lafargue wrote ‘classe ouvrière’). While Andriesse’s ‘peacefully if possible, violently if not’ is the more literal, Kerr’s ‘peacefully if we may, forcibly if we must’ reflects how this view was expressed in the English-speaking working-class movement.

The Right to be Lazy is a pamphlet and only takes up 39 pages of this 120-page book. The rest is made up of A Capitalist Catechism, a skit based on the Catholic church’s catechism, The Legend of Victor Hugo, a demolition job on the author of Les Misérables who at the time seems to have been known just as much for his poetry as for his prose writing, and Memoires of Karl Marx (Lafargue was married to one of Marx’s daughters and so knew Marx well).

As this edition is published by the prestigious New York Review of Books it should reach a new audience and have a wider circulation than versions and selections (such as ours) published by small radical or socialist groups. Which can’t be bad.

Adam Buick

Tang Ping, the new China virus? (2021)

From the December 2021 issue of the Socialist Standard

Usually it’s only Christmas, and maybe a week or two in summer, when more fortunate workers get to stay home for a while and put their feet up, though the break from the rat race is always too short to ever get used to.

But then we got the pandemic. Richer capitalist states collectively took a huge hit – the cost equivalent of a world war – by paying their workers to stay at home with furlough schemes. This might look like paternalistic generosity but in reality they didn’t have much of a choice. Capitalism has to have an available workforce, even when there’s no work, because workers producing wealth is how profits recover after a downturn. That’s why there’s a welfare system and why, historically, the British capitalist class tried to prevent the emigration of workers even during famines. So it was either a question of continuing to pay wages for nothing and probably bankrupting themselves in the process, or get the state – the executive committee of the capitalist class – to borrow the money and do it for them. From the government’s perspective, the enormous furlough bill was certainly more politically survivable than presiding over the wholesale economic and social destruction that would otherwise have occurred, even though it will very likely take generations to pay off the debt.

For workers this has been a true black-swan event, an unprecedented opportunity to stay at home and, basically, find out what it feels like not to be a worker, ie, not be forced to slave away in some dull and shitty job for 40 hours a week just to earn the price of their rent, food and bills.

What was the result? Well of course workers loved it, and now a lot of them don’t want to go back to work, or at least not the same work. When hotels, pubs and restaurants opened up after the lockdowns they found they couldn’t get staff, which may be because the hospitality sector is traditionally the least unionised and so generally has the worst pay and conditions. But it’s not just hospitality that’s suffering. The UK is seeing a record shortage of workers which economists are struggling to explain with a mixed bag of reasons including a spate of early retirements, Brexit, and people living on savings or starting their own micro-businesses. It’s not just the UK either, there’s a global labour shortage, estimated by the US government to be around 40 million, which is causing massive supply chain disruptions just as food and energy prices are hitting the roof. Capitalism has rarely looked so close to coming apart at the seams, though there’s no doubt it will recover in the fullness of time if workers stand by and let it.

What might not recover though is workers’ attitudes to employment after their recent prolonged holiday. For months the western media has been talking in gleeful tones about the phenomenon in China of tang ping, or ‘lying flat’. Just as the Chinese economy is set to overtake the US to become the most dominant global force, Chinese youth is apparently staging a quiet revolt against the ‘996’ turbo-capitalist culture of working non-stop, from 9am to 9pm, 6 days a week, to get ahead at any price. Instead, young people are proposing the less stressful and more humane option of taking it easy and doing the least amount of work possible to get by, aka ‘lying flat’ or, as we would call it, being a slacker. Naturally this has alarmed the Chinese ‘Communist’ Party and is one reason why it is currently cracking down on everything from karaoke to computer games to combat what it sees as a dangerously westernising trend (bloom.bg/3HyhGNd).

What would wipe the schadenfreude off the faces of western employers is if tang ping inspires workers to start spreading a new global ‘lazy virus’. And many post-pandemic workers are just in the mood to do so. Elle Hunt argues in a recent Guardian article that people should quit their job and join something called the ‘anti-work movement’, which questions ‘careerist values and the erosion of workers’ rights, while celebrating idleness’. Naturally Bertrand Russell’s well-known essay In praise of idleness gets a mention, although Hunt seems strangely unaware of the even-better-known The Right to be Lazy, by Marx’s son-in-law Paul Lafargue. At any rate, the argument is one that’s familiar to any socialist: what’s the point of flogging your life away solely for the benefit of the rich, when we should all be free to enjoy life and do whatever we want, just as the rich are? Now there is an ‘anti-work forum’ devoted to discussing the viability or otherwise of such a lifestyle choice in capitalism, as well as the reactions of employers to it (reddit.com/r/antiwork/). The forum has ‘gone vertical’ in the past year, with subscribers growing by 400 percent to around 900,000. Here you can find a big reading list from the likes of Bob Black, Fredi Perlman and David Graeber, plus little gems like ‘The idea of having to earn a living implies that, by default, you don’t actually deserve to be alive’. But it also includes opportunistic PC game adverts as well as dubious comments like: ‘you shouldn’t worry about your career. The world will be completely unliveable within 20 years. Just try and have a good time while you can.’ Such millennial fatalism is partly fuelled by climate change anxiety, but is also seen among today’s UK students, many of whom are spending their student loans with gay abandon on the assumption that they’ll probably never get a job earning more than the minimum £27,295 threshold which triggers loan repayments – which is undoubtedly why the government is proposing to lower the threshold to £23,000. That’s right, Rishi, kick the kids when they’re down!

On the other hand, the current labour shortages are driving up pay rates, as employers are faced with a seller’s market and forced to be a little less Scrooge-like, along with the UK government also raising the minimum wage again, this time by a comparatively whopping 60p to £9.50 an hour. All this ought to be great news for workers but unfortunately in many cases the gain on the swings is being offset by the losses on the roundabouts through the highest rate of inflation in the UK for a decade and in the US for thirty years, leading to a US net decline in wages of 1.2 percent (cnb.cx/3clYFiK).

Even so, employers are currently on the back foot as they try to increase profits with a workforce that stubbornly won’t play ball, so we should expect an epidemic of strikes in the next year or so as workers organise to press their collective advantage.

Elle Hunt does not tell us whether she’s planning to ditch her job as a journalist, however she does end with ‘The key, at this crucial juncture, is for all workers to align as a class of people’. Unfortunately she envisages this emerging class consciousness as serving only to ‘keep up the pressure on employers to make work work for us’. This is neither ambitious nor even realistic given that all profit derives from the exploitation of workers’ unpaid labour, so capitalist employment can never be made to ‘work for us’ but only for the bosses. While capitalism exists, workers are always going to be hamsters on a wheel, turning over profits as fast as they can.

So what are we to make of tang ping, anti-work and the mutterings of workers who sense they are in a strong position for once? Well, it’s a long way from revolutionary class consciousness. They’re not generally talking about getting off the hamster wheels for good, just about turning them a tad more slowly, or insisting on nicer-looking wheels and maybe better quality hamster food. And it may only be temporary. Once capitalism swings back into full operation, employers will return to grinding down workers’ pay, undermining class solidarity and stepping up their state and media propaganda against unions and opposition to capitalism. Meanwhile in China, anyone ‘lying flat’ may well find a tank rolling over them at some point.

But it’s all a step in the right direction. Workers need to be doing this, questioning their miserable existence in capitalism and asking what is the point of it all. And the fact that young people are doing just that is evidence for what socialists have always said, which is that, despite what you might think from the propaganda-wash of the movies and the media and the ‘official discourse’, capitalism never really wins the argument for capitalism because the everyday experience of it is viscerally hated by workers, even if they don’t always recognise or acknowledge the fact and they often have a tendency to blame the wrong things.

Something else we always say, which any aspiring slackers should note, is that work is not the same thing as employment. Employment in capitalism is, largely speaking, a useless waste of our lives in which, if we have any sense, we do as much slacking as we can. Bosses want as much work out of you for as little money as they can get away with paying. It’s only logical that you should aim to do the opposite. The class war exists whether you like it or not, and if you’re not actively fighting it, you’re passively losing it.

But work that you like and choose to do is a very different matter. Humans are not made to be idle. We’d get bored far too quickly. Idleness would be like a prison sentence. Anyone so jaded as to believe that humans hate work should see how eager young children are to help adults by doing whatever little jobs they can. In socialism there would be no lazy attitudes because ‘laziness’ is a construct of property societies that rely on forced labour and pour judgmental scorn on anyone who resists. And there would be no tang ping either, except at the end of the day when you’re lying down for a relaxing snooze after a nice day doing exactly what you wanted.

Paddy Shannon

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

Too Much Work (1976)

Book Review from the April 1976 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Right to be Lazy, by Paul Lafargue. Charles H. Kerr, Chicago. New edition. $1.25.

Many people will be delighted that The Right to be Lazy has at last been reprinted. It appears at a time when “the Right to Work” is being demanded again. This was the slogan, put in currency in 1848 and persistent ever after, that Lafargue satirized. He urged the workers to raise their sights and demand something better: the right to take life easy.

The essay is part humane vision, part anger. Economists, philosophers, politicians and priests united in preaching the capitalist doctrine of “work, work, night and day”. Lafargue quotes them — and lashes the working class for acquiescing and making work its be-all. He describes the consequences the workers have brought on themselves.

Because, lending ear to the fallacious words of the economists, the proletarians have given themselves up body and soul to the vice of work, they precipitate the whole of society into these industrial crises of over-production which convulse the social organism. Then because there is a plethora of merchandise and a dearth of purchasers, the shops are closed and hunger scourges the working people with its whip of a thousand lashes . . . With pale faces, emaciated bodies, pitiful speeches they assail the manufacturers: ‘Good M. Chagot, sweet M. Schneider, give us work, it is not hunger, but the passion for work which torments us'.

The first version of The Right to be Lazy appeared in Guesde’s paper L’Egalité in 1880. In 1883 Lafargue, with Guesde and Dormoy, was sent to prison for six months for advocating social seizure of industries; and in prison he re-wrote it. It is not explicitly a plea for Socialism, though in the conclusion Lafargue says: “A citizen who gives his labour for money degrades himself to the rank of slaves.” He urged that the machine was “the saviour of humanity” and “the god who shall give him leisure and liberty”.

It is important to realize this view of Lafargue’s. Some commentators, uneasy at a possible gift to opponents of Socialism in the word “lazy”, have claimed that the title in its original French meant “the right to leisure”. This is not so: the title is “Le Droit à la Paresse” — idleness — and when Lafargue means “leisure” he uses the word “loisirs”. His argument was essentially the same as Wilde’s in The Soul of Man Under Socialism, that machinery could and should do all the work. He says in The Right to be Lazy (somewhat optimistically):

Ploughing, so painful and so crippling to the labourer in our glorious France, is in the American West an agreeable open-air pastime, which he practises in a sitting posture, smoking his pipe nonchalantly.

He believed that conditions would improve for the working class if they did not, by their willingness to toil, make the human machine the cheapest one: “O, idiots, it is because you work too much that the industrial equipment develops slowly.” His assumptions about “labour-saving” under capitalism were mistaken, but that does not diminish the strength of his appeal for man to live more fully. The Right to be Lazy remains a lively attack on the mentality of capitalism, and a pointer to a future of fun and freedom.

This new edition is rather utilitarian in its production, but that is a sign of the publishing times. It has a useful historical introduction by Fred Thompson, giving an account of Lafargue’s life and the political background in nineteenth-century France. The introduction has also some interesting material about leisure in history and in the present-day world. The English price of the pamphlet (82 pages in all) is not yet known.

Robert Barltrop

Editorial: The Curse of Work: The Right to Live (1907)

Editorial from the July 1907 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Labour Party will soon need to cry “Save us from our friends”! The other “Leaders” who failed to secure election are turning upon them.

Mr. Russell Smart, in the columns of the Labour Leader, asserts that, since the General Election, they have lost ground because of the “tame and unheroic policy the Labour Party has followed in the House of Commons; in the eyes of the electorate it has scarcely justified its existence.”

But what does Mr. Smart expect? The Labour members cannot go beyond the people who elected them. As these people were not Socialists, in some cases as at Leicester, Halifax, etc., avowedly Liberals, the Labour members can do no more than ordinary Liberals would do. Surely Mr. Smart does not expect them to sacrifice any of their respectability by making themselves unpleasant in the House of Commons. It’s much more to their liking to stump the country telling the people how they “love” the Liberal Leader and how "gratified" they are at the measures which the Government introduce.

And does Mr. Russell Smart know where he is? It would appear not. He rightly asserts that to get public support and enthusiasm the Party must have something worth fighting for (assuming they desire to fight, which we doubt). As he says “the people will rally to a ‘Cause’; they will remain cold to a policy.” What is the “Cause” that is to rally them? The Social Revolution? Oh, no! All that is suggested is that the Party could rally to its support the whole Labour world, organised and unorganised alike, by putting into concrete form the “great and inspiring idea" — the Right to Work !

No wonder Mr. Ramsay MacDonald describes Labour Party Politics as a “confused jumble of futilities.”

The God-given Curse.

The Right to Work ! In the sweat of thy face shall thou eat bread. So runs the “ God-given curse.” And in the twentieth century, “when Labour is awakening to a sense of its power and responsibility," its attention and efforts are to be concentrated on the Right to Work!

In the dining room of the House of Commons, in the luxurious saloons of the Carlton Restaurant, the Pavilion, the Popular, the Trocadero, and the Mansions of the West End, word is to be conveyed to those who “ toil not, neither do they spin,” that the Labour Party is anxious that the “right” of the wealth-producers to work shall be conceded by Act of Parliament; that the separation of the master class from the working class shall be even more legally recognised; that it shall be by law enacted that the working class have the "right" to work, as distinguished from the master class, which has the “right” to enjoy the good things of life without toil, and over the “apples and nuts,” over the wine and cigars, the master class and its parasites will smile the smile of smug satisfaction, and drink the health of that, from their point of view, beneficent institution, the Labour Party.

Many years ago when, at the behest of the “leaders” the unemployed were—as they are doing now— praying to spooks, following priests, petitioning kings, appealing to politicians, looking to leaders,—anything but relying upon themselves, a demonstration was held in Trafalgar Square. On the plinth was Mr. Ben Tillett, amongst others. With broad-brimmed hat covering the top of his face, with coat collar (it was winter) turned up and covering the bottom part of his face, he bellowed: “To day we demand the right to work, next year we will demand the right to live.” Why wait until next year, he was asked, but did not reply. And to-day, ten years after, the same old fraud is being put forward as a “Cause,”—the Right to Work.

The Evil of Compromise.

Could we have a better illustration of the evil of compromise? If the people have any right to live, they have it now, not next year or at any future time.

And what does the “Right to Work” mean, under Capitalism? The unemployed are to be put to work, in accordance with an Act of Parliament which the Labour Party is to get passed. Is there not already sufficient wealth produced to satisfy the needs of every member of the community? There is enough wasted every night to feed all who lack food. It is therefore evident that what is required is not more work, but a sensible distribution of present work and the wealth already produced. This fact, however, seems to be ignored by our “Right to Work’’"friends.”

If the “Right” of the working class to work is conceded by Act of Parliament, to what work are the unemployed to be put? Already there is produced not only as much as there is an effective demand for but in many cases more. If, therefore, those not required by the capitalist "organisers”of industry are put to work under the usual conditions as to hours, etc., their product must tend to glut the market and, competing with the product of other factories, involve some capitalists in loss and throw other men out of employment. Does Mr. Smart expect the capitalists to pass a measure providing for this?

If, on the other hand, they are to be put to work producing only those things which they require for their own use, the necessary hours of labour would be so very few that the working class would recognise the extent to which they are robbed by the master class and—the capitalists’ game would be up. The master class are quite aware of this, and are not to be caught in this direction.

Useless Work.

Work will only be provided by a capitalist government for those of the unemployed who make themselves objectionable, and menace capitalist property. When it is found, it will consist mainly of the useless kind digging holes and filling them up again.*

What the unemployed and all other folks want is food, and also clothing and shelter. That these can be obtained by some individuals without working for them no one can dispute. We object to any able-bodied person obtaining them without doing his share of the necessary labour, but seeing that they can be so obtained, the unemployed have as great a right to obtain them in that way as the members and parasites of the master class. Let the unemployed throw over the misleaders who urge them to appeal to their masters to find them work. Let them recognise that only the common ownership of the means of life will solve their problem and proceed to convert their fellows. Pending the conscious effort of the working class that shall establish the Socialist Commonwealth, let the unemployed determine that they will not starve.

When our Right to Live is conceded we are prepared to recognise our obligation to perform our share of the necessary labour, but not till then. Let our rallying cry be “Down with the ‘Right to Work’: Up with the ‘Right to Live.’ ”

* In his pamphlet, “The Right to Work,” Mr. Russell Smart urges that the unemployed should be set to stone-breaking as a labour test.

Editorial: Socialism and work (1986)

Editorial from the October 1986 issue of the Socialist Standard

When Paul Lafargue wrote his well-known pamphlet The Right to be Lazy he chose this title to parody the demand, still current today, for "the right to work", In one sense he was right. The "right" to be employed by a capitalist is not something worth fighting for (quite apart from being unachievable). Given the demeaning and exploitative nature of employment it would indeed be better to demand the right not to work, the right to be lazy. In another sense, however, this title is misleading in that it suggests social life could continue without work, not in the sense of employment but in the sense of productive activity.

The sixties and seventies saw the growth and circulation of the idea of "the abolition of work", of a work-less society in which production would be fully automated leaving human beings free to engage in "play" or "leisure" or "creative activity" as it was variously put. This was reflected not only in the number of books, pamphlets and articles on this theme but also in the extraordinary popularity, mainly on the strength of its title, of Lafargue's pamphlet which went through edition after edition in nearly every West European language.

The spread of the idea of the abolition of work was positive in that it reflected the rejection, in practice also, of the capitalist "work ethic" by an increasing number of people. But it eventually became clear that the idea had not been fully worked out. Was it work as such — the expenditure of human physical and mental energy — that was being objected to, or was not the objection rather to work as employment, to work for an employer, to wage-labour? Was it not possible that the exercise of humans physical and mental faculties might even be a basic human need? Was, in any event, a fully-automated society a desirable objective? Would it be compatible with the need to conserve resources and to maintain a sustainable balance between human society and nature?

These reflections led some to conclude that the objection was indeed to wage-labour rather than to human productive activity as such and that the aim should not be to automate all productive activity but rather to achieve a society in which productive activity would become enjoyable and "creative". This was in fact the position taken up by Lafargue's contemporary, William Morris. And of course Fourier too had argued that work could and should be made attractive and that this was the answer to the questions, aimed at advocates of a free society, "what will be the incentive to work?" and "why would anybody want to work?".

Some of those who came to this conclusion then went to the opposite extreme and rejected not just the aim of full-scale automation but all modern technology, suggesting that the solution was to go back to a "simple life" based on handicraft production. But this is to make a fetish of "machines" and "technology", to attribute to them a consciousness and a will which, as inanimate objects, they don't have. Machines and technology don't and can't do anything on their own. The type of machines that are constructed and the use to which they are put depend on the social context. Machines in a society geared to maximising profits will be used differently (and will tend to be different) than in a society geared to serving human needs, including the need to engage in satisfying, creative activity.

Achieving the goal of turning the necessary task of production into creative, enjoyable activity does not have to involve rejecting all modern machinery and industrial techniques; it will be attained if production, both its aims and its methods, is brought under full human control. This can only be done through the abolition of property (private and state), production for sale and profit, and working for wages. In other words, through the establishment of socialist society, which wiIl not have to abandon industrial production, but adapt it to serving human needs.

A strong case can be made out for seeing satisfying, creative work not just as a desirable aim but as a vital human need. In any event some kind of activity, some physical and mental exercise, is necessary from a purely biological point of view since the chemical energy we acquire in the form of food must be used up in ways other than merely maintaining body temperature. So it is in the nature of humans to expend their physical and mental energies, to exercise their faculties, to work.

There is another reason why humans must expend physical and mental energy and that is to obtain from nature the food, clothing and shelter they need to survive. Since transforming nature to satisfy needs is the definition of production, this activity is productive activity and is a necessary human activity in any system of society, socialist as well as capitalist.

Etymologically, productive and creative should mean the same: the transformation of materials found in nature into something useful to human life. When something is produced by transforming nature something new, that didn't exist before, is created. Productive activity and creative activity should therefore be synonyms but it is a measure of the extent to which productive activity has come to be debased that we should be raising the demand that it be converted from the unsatisfying, externally-imposed burden that it is for the great majority of people into a satisfying, freely-chosen activity, that productive activity should once again become "creative".

The term "once again" is appropriate in this context since the evidence from the anthropologists is that in the original propertyless, classless - communist - condition of humanity productive activity was creative in the sense of being a satisfying, freely-chosen activity. It only became the unsatisfying, externally-imposed burden it has been for most people throughout history with the corning of propertied, class society where it became forced labour, an activity imposed by ruling classes to serve their needs.

In the sense that this original situation with regard to productive activity can be regarded as being the natural human condition then satisfying, freely-chosen productive activity ('creative activity'') can be regarded as being just as much a human need which human society ought to satisfy as food, clothing and shelter are - and the various class societies of history, including existing capitalist society, which denied this need must be regarded as being contrary to human nature and the kind of productive activity they have imposed (slave labour, serf labour, wage-labour) as unnatural, alienated labour.

This means that there cannot be any question of distinguishing in socialist society between a "realm of necessity" (of externally-imposed activity) and a "realm of freedom" (of freely-chosen activity), where the aim would be to reduce supposedly externally-imposed productive activity to a minimum in order to have a maximum of "free" time to engage in other activities. All time must be free, otherwise society will not have escaped from the tyranny of having to economise labour-time — which is precisely the economic logic of capitalism and what is meant by the term "externally-imposed". All productive activity, including the most routine, must become freely-chosen, work in a socialist society must be entirely voluntary.

In a society where humans are free to choose both the pace and the length of time they work, not only would the blind pressure to reduce to a minimum the labour-time needed to produce a product no longer exist, but it would become perfectly meaningless to measure the "value" or the "cost" of a product in terms of the labour-time socially necessary to make it. A society based on voluntary work would be free from such considerations. And if productive activity is enjoyable how can it be regarded as a cost?

Workers of the world wake up! (1977)

From the January 1977 issue of the Socialist Standard

The title of this article is by way of an apology to Marx. His grave at Highgate is only a few miles from Hyde Park and his remains must have been gravely disturbed by two demonstrations attended by many thousands of workers at the end of November, one being for The Right to Work and the other against racialism. The first one is the sadder event in the eyes of a Socialist and the one that really must have made Marx turn in his grave, although the second is outrageous for reasons we come to later.

If Marx could have come to see the first demo, he would have dropped dead again immediately to see the forest of banners against the cuts which the fake-socialist government are compelled to introduce, on the orders of British capitalism which must be obeyed, and in favour of "The Right to Work". After all, it is well over a century ago that he told the working class they should inscribe on their banners not this sort of tosh (which is merely demanding the right to be exploited by the capitalist class) but "The Abolition of the Wages System". Around a century ago Marx's son-in-law Paul Lafargue wrote a pamphlet directly opposing the parrot-cry of the Right to Work and called it The Right to be Lazy. Yet here we are, at the end of 1976, watching the descendants of those same workers, with all the bitter lessons that capitalism has taught them over the years (well, should have taught them, anyway), with the experience of being governed by a so-called workers' government, something that was unheard of in those days, hugging their chains and complaining that they were not bound and fettered tight enough to the task of making profits for their rulers.

When the slaves of Pharaoh were building the pyramids and groaning under the lash of the slave-drivers, when Uncle Tom's friends were being driven by the plantation owners in the Southern States, they may not have done much thinking about a free society but at least they did not organize demos demanding the right to be sweated and scourged by their rulers. Marx would have grounds for despair if he could see the antics of the wage-slaves of the oldest of all capitalist societies today.

The workers have really no excuse. Other considerations apart, they should be aware that unemployment is an integral feature of capitalism and always has been. When goods stop selling, then capitalism simply must lay off workers. No amount of exhortation by the Jarrow marchers in the '30s against a mainly-Tory government, or by these demonstrators now against a so-called Labour government, us going to make a scrap of difference to hard economic realities. One advantage was gained by thousands of workers, however, since the Socialist Party went into the park to hold our own meetings and sell our literature, and our speakers told those of the demonstrators who would listen that they were simply wasting their time and their energies in marching for the abandonment of the cuts.

Even if the Callaghans and the Foots are sincere people, there is just nothing they can do against the inexorable laws of the system. After all, does anyone suppose that the National Government in the '30s really enjoyed having nearly 3 million unemployed on their hands (who incidentally had to be fed, or at any rate only half-starved)? Is it not time that the working class woke up and decided they were ready to act on the advice of Marx and abolish the wages system which causes unemployment, among a host of other evils? Is it not time to have a system where not only unemployment would be abolished but employment, too? Where everyone will work freely instead of being employed by masters (that is, when the masters want you) for their — the masters' — profit?

It is perhaps a pity that workers don't, on the whole, read that ancient organ of British capitalism, The Times. The chap who runs the "Times Diary", a highly-paid worker who does not understand the first thing about capitalism or Socialism (he would be horrified to know that he too was a wage-slave) had a paragraph about the SPGB meeting in his description of the demo. As he has deigned to notice us a few times recently, that must be a strike in his favour. He mentioned that one of our speakers was lambasting a heckler and telling him not to bemuse himself with his right-to-work slogans. The heckler was one of the numerous Trotskyists of various splinters who were in the demo ("at least we are doing something" — no doubt they could make the same claim of they were merely banging their heads against a wall which, in essence, is what they were at). They were flogging their pamphlets, all replete with headlines of the reformist slogans which the demonstrators had on their banners. And these are the very people who have the nerve to attack Labour politicians because they are reformists. One heckler was carrying a paper with a headline which looked to say "Down with Capitalism": which was interesting to say the least. However, on closer inspection it read "Down with Capitalism's Cuts". The "revolutionary" idiot (who, like most of his ilk, was more intent on preventing our case being heard than taking part on a democratic argument; they carry banners denouncing fascism but of course are incipient fascists themselves) and the "Marxists", Maoists, Trotskyists, etc., really think you can keep capitalism intact but without its cuts. And its wounds and its scars and its deaths.

A few days later, we witnessed — and addressed — another crowd of demonstrators who, this time, were on about racialism, which is just another evil produced by capitalism. (You could have a demo a day for a whole year against a different evil and not exhaust the list. And still not get rid of one of them!) The real thing about this one — which apparently never occurred to most of the marchers — was that it was actually run by the Labour  Party and addressed by well-known leftist humbugs from the present government. Everyone was busy denouncing racialist legislation, quite oblivious to the fact that it's a Labour Government in power which could remove it if it wanted. In fact, under Wilson, they actually brought in some of the vilest racialist laws themselves. Need we say more?

L. E. Weidberg 

The Right to be Lazy (1971)

From the November 1971 issue of the Socialist Standard

In the course of the French revolution of 1848 the workers of Paris  went into the streets to demand "The Right to Work".  Ever since, whenever unemployment has grown, trade unionists have demanded the same "right". In fact the Clydeside shipworkers are supposed to be asserting it at this very moment

But what is this high-sounding Right to Work? To the average trade unionist it is probably the "right" to have a job and the pay packet that goes with it. It would, in other words, be more accurately called "The Right to Employment" or "The Right to Work for Wages"

It should not be necessary to argue that under capitalism no such right exists, nor could it. Capitalism is based on the ownership of means of production by a minority.  The rest have no alternative but to sell their ability to work — when they can — to one or other of these  employers.  But the employers are not philanthropists. They do not employ people in order to give these employees a living. They  only employ people when they have calculated that they themselves can make a profit from selling the goods the workers produce.

Production, and therefore employment, is determined under capitalism by the profit motive. The rule "no profit, no production" is the guiding economic principle. If those who own the means of production calculate — as many have done recently — that they cannot make a profit by selling the goods their factories could turn out, then they will run those factories below full capacity or even close them down altogether. The result is the mounting redundancies and growing unemployment we are now experiencing.

This is the normal way capitalism works and is one reason why the Right to Work is a completely unrealistic demand. It amounts to demanding that employers abandon the profit motive and operate their system on some other principle. But they could not do this even if they wanted to, since what they can do is limited by the working of capitalism's market forces. Nor could they be forced to do it even by the most militant trade union or political action. If pressed too far, they would merely shut up shop. The stark fact is that capitalism creates, and needs to create, rising unemployment from time to time.

So, our average trade unionist may now be thinking, are you saying that in order to get the Right to Work we must get rid of capitalism and establish Socialism? No, we are not! We are not in favour of the Right to Work in the first place. Remember the Right to Work is merely a fancy way of referring to the Right of Employment, the Right to Work for Wages. In our view, this is demanding the Right To Be Exploited. It involves accepting capitalism and its wages system. The employer/employee relationship is based on exploitation since, if the employer is to make a profit, the wages he pays his employees must be less than the value of what they produce. The system of employment for wages shows that human brain and muscle power has become a mere commodity, to be bought and sold like some object. It signifies that those who actually produce the wealth of society are excluded from ownership and control of the means of production and so have no choice but to operate them for the employers on the employers' terms — and at the employers' convenience. The wage packet is in fact a badge of slavery.

No, Socialists don't want the Right to Work. It would be more accurate to say that we want its opposite, the Right To Be Lazy. This isn't as way-out as might seem. Just think of developments in technology over the past hundred or so years, developments which  are still going on, and you will see that the bulk of the hard grind of production is now done, and could be done even more, by machines. Automation could now relieve human beings of the burden of boring toil. Nobody need do a job he doesn't like doing. The set working day could be reduced to two or three hours, freeing men to engage in the activities of their choice, including even producing useful things.

Of course, this will never happen as long as the means of production are the property of a minority. It could only happen in a society where the factories, farms and other places where wealth is produced are commonly owned by all the people. There would then be no employers, nor wage-earners. Instead everybody would be an equal member of a free community organised to produce an abundance of good-quality consumer goods for people to take freely according to their needs.

Actually, so long as it is enjoyable, work is a natural human activity, not to say need. In this sense to talk of the Right To Be Lazy can be misleading. But although men will always work, there is no reason for it take the form of boring toil. It could and should be interesting and so become like some of today's leisure-time activities — done for the fun of it.

To convert work from boring toil to creative activity is now possible. The ethic of hard work — necessary perhaps in the past to build up the means of production to the point where they can now turn out abundance — is outdated, and worse: it helps to keep capitalism going. No five words better sum up the Socialist's emphatic rejection of the dogma that boring toil must be the lot of mankind than the slogan "The Right To Be Lazy". Speed the day when trade unionists begin to demonstrate for this rather than some spurious Right to Work.

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

The Right To Be Lazy (2004)

From the January 2004 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Socialist Party has just republished this classic pamphlet by Paul Lafargue together with some of his other writings. Below is the introduction.

Paul Lafargue's classic socialist critique of the capitalist work ethic (applicable only to the working class) dates from 1883. This means that some of the bourgeois politicians and ideologues mentioned in the pamphlet have long since been, deservedly, forgotten, but it remains a powerful presentation of the case that what workers should be demanding is not the "right to work" under capitalism but the "right to leisure" in a socialist society, where machines could be used to lighten labour and free people to engage in activities of their choice.

In this sense the pamphlet is a criticism not just of the capitalist work ethic but also of reformists. Its original subtitle was 'Refutation of the Right to Work of 1848', a reference to a demand raised by certain left-wing politicians under the Second French republic set up after the overthrow of King Louis Philippe in 1848. There is of course no such thing as the "right" to work under capitalism the number of jobs on offer to workers depends on the ups and downs of the capitalist business cycle but, as Lafargue points out, even if there were it would be a "slave's right", the right to be exploited. This has not prevented Trotskyists and other reformists, as in Britain in the 1970s and 1980s, launching campaigns demanding the "Right to Work". To which we in the Socialist Party responded, in true Lafargue tradition, by demanding "full unemployment". To the extent that "Right to Work" campaigns receive the support of some workers this is not so much because they particularly want to work in a capitalist factory or office as because they want the higher income that usually comes from being employed rather than unemployed. It is a reflection of the fact that, in capitalist society, everybody has to have some means of obtaining money as this is required in order to get access to food, clothing, shelter and the other necessities of life. These have to bought, and to buy them you need money; which most of us can only obtain by selling our mental and physical energies to some employer for a wage or a salary, a state of affairs Lafargue did not hesitate to denounce as "wage-slavery".

The alternative, as Lafargue realised, made a practicable possibility thanks to the development of the forces of production, was for the wages system to be abolished and for both production and consumption to be free within the framework of a propertyless, classless, stateless and moneyless society which he called interchangeably communism or socialism.

Lafargue's approach to work in a socialist society - that it should be minimised - is only one of two possible socialist approaches to the question. While Lafargue emphasised the "Right to be Lazy" (or, less provocatively, the "Right to Leisure"), his contemporary fellow Socialist across the Channel, William Morris, was arguing that what workers should be demanding was what might be called the "Right to Attractive Work". As he put it:

"I claim that work in a duly ordered community should be made attractive by the consciousness of usefulness, by its being carried on with intelligent interest, by variety, and by its being exercised amidst pleasurable surroundings" (Useful Work versus Useless Toil, 1884).

The two different approaches suggest two different policies that might be pursued in a socialist society: maximum automatisation so as to minimise working time or making as much work as possible attractive and personally rewarding. Lafargue writes here of reducing the working day to 2 or 3 hours. Morris would not have seen the point of this even if he went on to claim above that "the day's work should not be wearisomely long" : if people were getting some enjoyment out of their work surely, on his view, they would want to engage in it for longer than a couple of hours or so a day. As this is not an issue that can be resolved in the abstract, all we can do is to leave the matter to be settled in socialist society in the light of the preferences of those living in it.

Today, Lafargue is known mainly for this particular pamphlet which enjoyed a huge revival in the 1960s and 70s when the capitalistic work ethic came under attack again. Before the First World War, however, he was more widely known as a Marxist thinker and populariser of Marx's views. When Charles H. Kerr of Chicago published an English translation of the pamphlet in 1907 they did so together with some other articles of his on other, different topics. They also published as separate books his The Evolution of Property and Social and Philosophical Studies. But even before these were published in English Lafargue was known to English-speaking opponents of capitalism as an intransigent revolutionary Socialist on the anti-reformist, anti-Revisionist wing of the international Social Democratic movement. It was as such that a number of articles of his were published at the time in the Socialist Standard, the journal of the Socialist Party of Great Britain. We are republishing these here as the second part of this pamphlet. All except the one on the Nineteenth Century (which was reprinted from the Socialist Herald of Milwaukee and which also appeared with a different title as one of the other article in the Kerr publication The Right to be Lazy and Other Studies) were original translations by members of the Socialist Party and have up to now not been readily available.

We have used the 1907 translation by Charles Kerr himself but have restored the original subtitle of 'Refutation of the Right to Work of 1848' and corrected some of the footnotes. We have also added the letter, translated here into English for the first time, that Lafargue wrote to the L'Egalite where an earlier version of the text of the pamphlet first appeared as a series of articles in 1880.

Copies of the pamphlet can be obtained by sending a cheque for 1 pound 30 pence, made payable to 'The Socialist Party of Great Britain', to: The Socialist Party, 52 Clapham High St, London, SW4 7UN.