From the Archives: “The Right to Be Lazy”

From the Archives: “The Right to Be Lazy”

From the Archives: “The Right to Be Lazy”

In 1883, Paul Lafargue, Karl Marx?s son-in-law, wrote ?The Right to Be Lazy,? a political pamphlet that argued for liberation from the obligation to work?a fight he considered commensurate with workers? struggle for a more humane workplace. ?Still,? writes Henri Rabasierre in the Winter 1956 issue of Dissent, ?we are even more deeply entangled in the basic contradiction?that work and leisure are two very different things.? Rabasierre draws on Lafargue?s pamphlet to question the notion that leisure is a right reserved only for the rich and for the gods, arguing that the ?right to work? and the ?right to be lazy? do not present a contradiction in terms:

Our problem is rather to increase our ability to enjoy our leisure time. We need to develop our creative ranges of play; we need to learn what it means to be free from the drudgery of work. Up to now our play has been modeled after the image of our work; even in consuming we maintained producer attitudes, or even worse?the dull and dutiful attitudes of factory work. We have to forget, to un-learn the producer attitudes; we have to renounce efficiency and productivity as human attributes. We have to insist on our right to be lazy and just human.

?Now we can make the Copernican turn,? writes Rabasierre, toward a dream of utopia that is not built simply upon a foundation of ?eternal harmony? and a ?docile labor force,? but one that acknowledges the ?human ability to enjoy life?:

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. 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. 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. 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.

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