Does the Left Have a Problem with Work?

Paul Lafargue, Karl Marx's restless son-in-law, would have been greatly surprised if he had been told that his 1880 pamphlet, The Right to Be Lazy: A Refutation of the 1848 "Right to Work," would enjoy such a following, to the point of regularly cropping up in public debate. This was the case again last year, when Prime Minister Gabriel Attal rejected the country's "right to be lazy," while Green Party MP Sandrine Rousseau, on the contrary, demanded this right, particularly for the poorest and most vulnerable.

Such controversies are based on profound misunderstandings, both regarding the status of Paul Lafargue 's text and its context. Denouncing the "illness of work" to which the working class is prey, the author envisages a future where machines and productivity gains would lead to a drastic reduction in working hours (three hours per day). The freed-up time would be devoted to the pleasures of nature, food and celebration. But one should not give too theoretical or serious a status to this "Marxist-Rabelaisian" pamphlet, which clearly demonstrates Lafargue's taste for provocation and his desire to dynamite republican and bourgeois conventions (he would do the same two years later, with regard to Victor Hugo).

Nor is it the quintessence of the positions of the socialist left, in the broadest sense of the term, as it was built in the 19th century. A child of industrialization and a detractor of its injustices, this left undoubtedly denounces the appalling working conditions of workers (duration, salary, risks), and the alienation produced by mechanized work. However, it is not against work, quite the contrary.

From Marx to Jaurès, including Zola , thinkers and novelists celebrate creative work, the god of Work, producer of humanity and progress. And if the bourgeoisie is denounced, it is also because it represents in their eyes the class of the idle, the parasites, the lazy, opposed to that of the workers, the only bearers of the future.

At the end of the ^19th century, however, a shift began to emerge, the very same one that Lafargue refracted in his own way. While socialist and workers' struggles remained focused on labor issues, the idea emerged that free time, the kind that could be freed up, for example, by obtaining the "eight hours" a day (the great demand of the end of the century), might not be the preserve of the bourgeois lifestyle, but could become a time appropriated by all.

This democratic free time, however, has nothing to do with laziness. A time for rebuilding strength after work, a time for family life, a time for education, a time for collective leisure, for politicization, it is more akin to the old Roman otium , with added politics, than to any celebration of idleness. Léon Blum proudly demonstrated this before the Vichy judges at the Riom trial (1942). Faced with those who accused the Popular Front of having, with its paid holidays and leisure policy, encouraged laziness and led to the country's decadence, the socialist leader defended the idea that "leisure is not laziness." On the contrary, he said in magnificent phrases, it allows those whose lives are difficult and obscure to regain their dignity, to reconnect with nature, to cultivate their bodies and minds, and to imagine other collective works.

The Popular Front is now a thing of the past. The transformations of working time – shorter, but also more fragmented and unequal – have taken their toll. The imposition of consumer society has rendered the plans for educational and free leisure time obsolete, and the left, like the others, has found itself powerless in the face of "corporations creating idols and selling records" (Daniel Mayer, 1965).

The rise, finally, of ecological and anti-productivist thinking has called into question the centrality, and even the usefulness, of salaried work time. But even in the most radical formulations of these thoughts, for example that of André Gorz ( Adieux au prolétariat. Au-delà du socialisme, 1980), it is not laziness that is claimed. The future is rather conceived as a reappropriation of time, both individual and communal: free and reduced work, throughout the year as well as throughout life, reappropriation by all (and everyone?) of social and domestic work, time to live for collective and emancipatory activities.

Except for purposes of political stigmatization, or in gestures of artistic provocation, the right to be lazy is not a political project, no more on the left than elsewhere. But one can regret that Lafargue's pamphleteering verve has ultimately been too successful, and that it serves a certain... intellectual laziness, which prevents us from rethinking the question, a very serious one this time, of both work time and free time, and of the emancipatory potential that could once again be theirs.