Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The Right to Be Lazy (1883)

marxists.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 222 posts

Re: The Right to Be Lazy (1883)

#31

Post by least »

mgrthrow wrote: post #15
matkoniecz wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> According to Lafargue, wage labour is tantamount to slavery It does seem to be quite useless way to look at the world. It seems that they are unaware of what slavery actually means or deliberately mislead. Or Wikipedia is inaccurate.

Slavery means lots of things. Chattel slavery, yes, but also forced labor like in us prisons. Indentured labor, child soldiers, forced marriage, etc etc. The concept of "wage slavery" is basically, "you are not free to not earn a wage because you will starve". It's also easy to draw parallels between the commodification of ones labor and slavery. It's a term that is not new, is widely used, and debated plenty. The in…

> The concept of "wage slavery" is basically, "you are not free to not earn a wage because you will starve".

This is the baseline for basically pretty much all life on earth. You will die unless you perform labor to interrupt death. Your body itself must perform labor in order to generate the energy and to allocate the resources you provide it to survive as well. If you expand the definition of slavery to encompass labor, then all living things are inherently enslaved until they die. Philosophically that might be interesting in its own right but it's not actually a very cogent critique of labor nor does it justify the use of the word, "slavery."

Re: The Right to Be Lazy (1883)

#33

Post by armchairhacker »

Roughly how much "work" does every person in the world need to do so that every person in the world can live a minimal but decent lifestyle?

Of course, some people will want and take more than "decent", some people are disabled so its unreasonable to expect and unfair to demand for them to contribute the same amount, some people genuinely like to work all sorts of jobs (including hard labor), and speaking of, there are different jobs and no one way to quantify their "work".

But this is a good starting point to answer the question: how much work is "enough"? With modern knowledge and medium-scale factories, can people spend 15-hour weeks producing enough to live comfortably, or do you need the average person to work 20-hour weeks of hard labor (or have 1/3 of the population work 60-hour weeks)?

Re: The Right to Be Lazy (1883)

#35

Post by AnimalMuppet »

matkoniecz wrote: post #5
spacKingChamath wrote: post #3

Some additional info. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Right_to_Be_Lazy Definitely an interesting way to look at the world.

> According to Lafargue, wage labour is tantamount to slavery It does seem to be quite useless way to look at the world. It seems that they are unaware of what slavery actually means or deliberately mislead. Or Wikipedia is inaccurate.

I've seen that as a meme and/or talking point, here on HN, far too many times.

Your alternatives are to be independently wealthy, own your own business, to be a subsistence farmer, to work in a co-op, to be on welfare, or to work for wages. Those who trot out this line never specify which option they think is better. Either they haven't thought that far, or they're thinking we're all going to work in co-ops, or they're thinking the rest of us should support them. But that just turns into more slavery for everyone else...

(I will give the more thoughtful ones the credit that they seem to want co-ops, or full-on communism, which could be considered co-ops on a larger scale.)

Re: The Right to Be Lazy (1883)

#36

Post by rootusrootus »

archarios wrote: post #24

IDK about y'all, but being lazy generally makes me feel horrible. I love getting things done. I hate having to labor simply to enrich others and for me to survive. But I love doing work that I think is meaningful and makes a difference so much more than chilling all day. Chilling needs to happen, but not all the time!

> being lazy generally makes me feel horrible

Yes, very much agree. If I get sucked into HN and blow a big chunk of the day on stuff like this, I feel quite terrible at the end. I feel so much better when I can look back on my day and see accomplishments.

Re: The Right to Be Lazy (1883)

#38

Post by mjfl »

giraffe_lady wrote: post #9
mjfl wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What an ironically privileged position, considering how much he calls out the bourgeoisie.

It is consistent with the meaning of bourgeoisie then, which transposed to modern systems means more like "the owner class" than the contemporary social connotation of well-compensated professionals. Owners benefit from more/harder work, both their own and that of others, and so it (reasonably) becomes a class value for them. A non-owner worker doesn't benefit in the same way, but many still value work in the same wa…

so you're saying he's bourgeoisie. Yeah that's the irony. The irony is that he's rich enough to have that lifestyle and still have food, while poor people would not.

Re: The Right to Be Lazy (1883)

#39

Post by balsam »

giraffe_lady wrote: post #22
RobotToaster wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>It is consistent with the meaning of bourgeoisie then, which transposed to modern systems means more like "the owner class" than the contemporary social connotation of well-compensated professionals. That's still the definition used in Marxist circles today.

I know but HN is pretty far from a marxist circle in my experience. And it does also have, at least in american english, a connotation very similar to that of yuppie eg more about social class than relationship to the means of production.

Lafargue totally reminds me of the arch-contrarian Oscar Wilde —- who was not bourgeois in any sense of the word, but also a (“lifestyle”) anarcho-socialist

Re: The Right to Be Lazy (1883)

#40

Post by AnimalMuppet »

heavyset_go wrote: post #27
kazinator wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Struggle slavery; you're not free not to struggle on the face of the Earth, otherwise you will not survive. Man, how dare the universe spring forth creatures, yet foist that on them.

Wage labor is an imposition on people by people with power, wage labor is not a natural law or state of being. It is not unlike feudalism in that respect.

Wage labor was a deal that many, many people freely accepted, because on net it was better than subsistence farming.

Serious question: If you aren't doing wage labor, how are you going to live? Subsistence farming? Welfare? How?

Post reply on HN