Most workers, he states, are dissatisfied with work (as evidenced by petty deviance on the job), so that. Because of work, people become accustomed to rigidity and regularity, and do not have the time for friendship or meaningful activity. Subordination in work, Black alleges, makes people stupid and creates fear of freedom. The essay argues that “no-one should ever work”, because work – defined as compulsory productive activity enforced by economic or political means – is the source of most of the misery in the world. .He views the subordination enacted in workplaces as “a mockery of freedom”, and denounces as hypocrites the various theorists who support freedom while supporting work.
Cure for freeter free#
Instead turning necessary subsistence tasks into free play done voluntarily – an approach referred to as “ludic”.
Attacking Marxist state socialism as much as market capitalism, Black argues that the only way for humans to be free is to reclaim their time from jobs and employment. In it he argues for the abolition of the producer- and consumer-based society, where, Black contends, all of life is devoted to the production and consumption of commodities. The Abolition of Work, Bob Black’s most widely read essay, draws upon the ideas of Charles Fourier, William Morris, Herbert Marcuse, Paul Goodman, and Marshall Sahlins. Autonomy is the self-regulation of the social body in its independence and in its interaction with the disciplinary norm.”Īndré Gorz .His central theme was wage labour issues such as liberation from work, the just distribution of work, social alienation, and a guaranteed basic income. But this laziness is the source of intelligence, of technology, of progress. If you are not resigned to dying of disgust, then you will be happy enough to rid your life of the odious need to work, to give orders (and obey them), to lose and to win, to keep up appearances, and to judge and be judged.”Īutonomist philosopher Bifo defines refusal of work as not “so much the obvious fact that workers do not like to be exploited, but something more. More simply he states “Refusal of work means … I don’t want to go to work because I prefer to sleep. In it he says that “ You reverse the perspective of power by returning to pleasure the energies stolen by work and constraint … As sure as work kills pleasure, pleasure kills work. Raoul Vaneigem, important theorist of the post-surrealist Situationist International which was influential in the May 68 events in France, wrote The Book of Pleasures. …And so he says “Proletarians, brutalized by the dogma of work, listen to the voice of these philosophers, which has been concealed from you with jealous care: A citizen who gives his labor for money degrades himself to the rank of slaves.” (The last sentence a quote from Cicero.) Situationist International Lafargue criticizes these ideas from a Marxist perspective as dogmatic and ultimately false by portraying the degeneration and enslavement of human existence when being subsumed under the primacy of the “right to work”, and argues that laziness, combined with human creativity, is an important source of human progress. The essay polemicizes heavily against then-contemporary liberal, conservative, Christian and even socialist ideas of work.
The Right to be Lazy is an essay by Cuban-born French revolutionary MarxistPaul Lafargue, written from his London exile in 1880.
….Historically, some labor organizations and individual social activists, have espoused workers’ self-management or worker cooperatives as possible alternatives to wage labor.Ĭoop ness Paul Lafargue and The Right to be Lazy Similarities between wage labor and slavery were noted at least as early as Cicero. working for a wage not only under threat of starvation or poverty, but also of social stigma or status diminution). in sweatshops), and the latter as a lack of workers’ self-management. The criticism of social stratification covers a wider range of employment choices bound by the pressures of a hierarchical social environment (i.e. The term ‘wage slavery’ has been used to criticize economic exploitation and social stratification, with the former seen primarily as unequal bargaining power between labor and capital (particularly when workers are paid comparatively low wages, e.g. It is a negatively connoted term used to draw an analogy between slavery and wage labor, and to highlight similarities between owning and employing a person. Wage slavery refers to a situation where a person’s livelihood depends on wages, especially when the dependence is total and immediate.
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