Paul Lafargue, "The Right to Be Lazy", 1883: appetite as an economical factor

akareyon (59)in #steemit • 8 years ago (edited)

What if I told you Karl Marx' brother-in-arms, doctor, translator and co-author was born to Creole and French parents on Cuba, became a famous speaker for the anarchist and marxist movements in Europe, married his second daughter Laura and wrote his most influential work, "The Right to Be Lazy", in jail?

he studied in Santiago de Cuba and Paris.

Originally, he wanted to become a pharmacist, then studied medicine, learned of Proudhon, became an anarchist, met Karl Marx, moved to London and treated Marx for an... affliction.

On long walks, Marx tries, with limited success, to beat the anarchist nonsense out of Paul. Of course Paul meets Laura, second of the three daughters. The Marx-Engels correspondence documents Marx' feelings towards "the Creole", as he initially calls him in his letters (in a letter to his daughter Jenny, he drops a "descendant of a gorilla" even), and his approaches towards Laura. Marx invites his friend and sponsor to be witness at the wedding: "I might as well ask two bums to do that, but I fear they might smell and cause an indigestion." After the marriage, he calls Paul "the Negro" and "the negrillo" in his letters to Engels.

Both Laura and Paul are multilingual and together translate the Manifesto to French and become household names of the revolution.

widely regarded as the hombre futuro,

screen for the projections of the Noble Savage, he becomes a 19th century model for how well the races mix if the conditions are right. In a letter to Laura, Marx opines: "He must belong to a better race than the European."

It is maybe from this viewpoint that The Right to Be Lazy is sometimes disregarded as merely a utopian daydream, an intelligent, but ultimately useless satire on the "right to work" as proclaimed by Louis Blanc by one from the peacefully pipe-smoking, beach-dwelling tribes himself.

with a Gotthold Ephraim Lessing quote it begins:

Lass uns faul in allen Sachen,
Nur nicht faul zu Lieb und Wein,
Nur nicht faul zur Faulheit sein.

Let us be lazy in everything, except in loving and drinking, except in being lazy.

lilies on the field

A strange delusion possesses the working classes of the nations where capitalist civilization holds its sway. This delusion drags in its train the individual and social woes which for two centuries have tortured sad humanity. This delusion is the love of work, the furious passion for work, pushed even to the exhaustion of the vital force of the individual and his progeny. Instead of opposing this mental aberration, the priests, the economists and the moralists have cast a sacred halo over work. Blind and finite men, they have wished to be wiser than their God; weak and contemptible men, they have presumed to rehabilitate what their God had cursed. I, who do not profess to be a Christian, an economist or a moralist, I appeal from their judgement to that of their God; from the preachings of their religious, economics or free thought ethics, to the frightful consequences of work in capitalist society ...

When, in our civilized Europe, we would find a trace of the native beauty of man, we must go seek it in the nations where economic prejudices have not yet uprooted the hatred of work ... The Greeks in their era of greatness had only contempt for work: their slaves alone were permitted to labor: the free man knew only exercises for the body and mind ... The philosophers of antiquity taught contempt for work, that degradation of the free man, the poets sang of idleness, that gift from the Gods.

battle a bot

A Greek poet of Cicero’s time, Antiparos, thus sang of the invention of the water-mill (for grinding grain), which was to free the slave women and bring back the Golden Age: “Spare the arm which turns the mill, 0, millers, and sleep peacefully. Let the cock warn you in vain that day is breaking. Demeter has imposed upon the nymphs the labor of the slaves, and behold them leaping merrily over the wheel, and behold the axle tree, shaken, turning with it's spokes and making the heavy rolling stone revolve. Let us live the life of our fathers, and let us rejoice in idleness over the gifts that the goddess grants us.” Alas! The leisure, which the pagan poet announced, has not come. The blind, perverse and murderous passion for work transforms the liberating machine into an instrument for the enslavement of free men. Its productiveness impoverishes them.

A good working woman makes with her needles only five meshes a minute, while certain circular knitting machines make 30,000 in the same time. Every minute of the machine is thus equivalent to a hundred hours of the workingwomen’s labor, or again, every minute of the machine’s labor, gives the working women ten days of rest. What is true for the knitting industry is more or less true for all industries reconstructed by modern machinery. But what do we see? In proportion as the machine is improved and performs man’s work with an ever increasing rapidity and exactness, the laborer, instead of prolonging his former rest times, redoubles his ardor, as if he wished to rival the machine. O, absurd and murderous competition!

planned obsolescence

At Lyons, instead of leaving the silk fiber in its natural simplicity and suppleness, it is loaded down with mineral salts, which while increasing its weight, make it friable and far from durable. All our products are adulterated to aid in their sale and shorten their life.

Work ought to be forbidden and not imposed.

A citizen who gives his labor for money degrades himself to the rank of slaves, he commits a crime which deserves years of imprisonment.

scifi

Our machines, with breath of fire, with limbs of unwearying steel, with fruitfulness, wonderful inexhaustible, accomplish by themselves with docility their sacred labor. And nevertheless the genius of the great philosophers of capitalism remains dominated by the prejudice of the wage system, worst of slaveries. They do not yet 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.

so why has history mostly forgotten about Paul and Laura Lafargue?

Some read his work as an unmasking of the marxist ideal as essentially a deeply religious, eschatological promise of salvation.

The true genius is hidden between the lines of his scathing stabs at religion, bankers, and the elite:

pointing out the absurd madness of the capitalistic growth paradigm, in which consumers must get paid for turning into gluttons to fulfill the appetite of others.

Cells in a Petri dish will not continue to multiply at a constant rate. There is a saturation function to natural growth.

There is simply no real value in producing for the trash bin. By producing and consuming truly economically, delegating as much as possible to the machines, and compensate volountaryists for at most three hours of manual labor a day much time is freed for doing what really needs to be done: to participate in a community of free humans committed to making the world a more beautiful place.

... as Xenophon observed, “Work takes all the time and with it one has no leisure for the republic and his friends.”

Paul Lafargue repeatedly points out how old these ideas are:

Aristotle foresaw: “that if every tool could by itself execute its proper function, as the masterpieces of Daedalus moved themselves or as the tripods of Vulcan set themselves spontaneously at their sacred work; if for example the shuttles of the weavers did their own weaving, the foreman of the workshop would have no more need of helpers, nor the master of slaves.”

But even he could not foresee the extent to which the machine golem would break over our lives, much less the blockchain.

what does appetite have to do with Steemit?

In a world of confusion due to the overabundance of data, important, reliable, and timely information has considerable value, and machines cannot provide for that demand in certain instances. Work/Manual labour needs to be done and rewarded. If all goes according to plan and the experiment succeeds, theoretically, the blockchain will enable to perform that function effortlessly, and make it part of everyday interaction with the global process of consensus-finding.

Like providing a city with electricity by means of all the heat generated in fitness studios.

november 25, 1911

Paul and Laura return home from a visit to the opera. They eat a little and go to bed.

Laura does not leave a suicide note. Pauls reads:

Healthy in body and mind, I end my life before pitiless old age which has taken from me my pleasures and joys one after another; and which has been stripping me of my physical and mental powers, can paralyse my energy and break my will, making me a burden to myself and to others. For some years I had promised myself not to live beyond 70; and I fixed the exact year for my departure from life. I prepared the method for the execution of our resolution, it was a hypodermic of cyanide acid. I die with the supreme joy of knowing that at some future time, the cause to which I have been devoted for forty-five years will triumph. Long live Communism! Long Live the Second International!

15,000 accompany the funeral march to the Cimetière du Père-Lachaise. Vladimir Ilyich is among the speakers.

sapiens omnia scit recte agere et lentes diligenter condire

Paul Lafargue: The Right To Be Lazy, 1883, marxists.org
V.I. Lenin: Speech Delivered in the Name of the R.S.D.L.P. at
The Funeral of Paul and Laura Lafargue, November 20 (December 3), 1911, Marxists Internet Archive
Fritz Keller: Paul Lafargue, marxists.org (de)
Paul Lafargue on Wikipedia.
Refusal of Work on Wikipedia.