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The Right to Be Lazy (1883)

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Re: The Right to Be Lazy (1883)

#41

Post by heavyset_go »

least wrote: post #31
mgrthrow wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 l…

Wage labor isn't a natural baseline, though. It's an arbitrary system that benefits certain people at the expense of others, and is just as natural as feudalism, monarchism, etc.

If you want to make an argument from history and nature, you can't ignore that early human societies didn't have wage labor, nor were there asset owning classes that didn't work and depended on the labor of others. Those kind of relations eventually erupted with the advent of agriculture that allowed people to settle and accumulate assets.

Re: The Right to Be Lazy (1883)

#42

Post by kazinator »

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.

People engage in wage labor because they find it preferable to alternatives like hunting and gathering berries.

However meager is their lifestyle, it's better than what it would be under the alternatives. That's what people are slaves of: consumption. People engage in wage labor because it sustains a certain level of consumption that alternative activities wouldn't.

Re: The Right to Be Lazy (1883)

#43

Post by tayo42 »

I wonder what these anti working writers and philosophers would say about doing nothing in our modern day. Where nothing is still frequently capitalist driven consumption, scrolling through our phones endlessly getting advertised to, watching tv/streaming, engagement traps of social media etc...

It's almost like it isn't safe to be lazy now, your downtime attention is fought for so hard by groups with so much resources then you can ever fight back with.

Re: The Right to Be Lazy (1883)

#44

Post by kilbuz »

rootusrootus wrote: post #36
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.

What accomplishments are you most proud of this year?

Re: The Right to Be Lazy (1883)

#45

Post by balsam »

mjfl wrote: post #38
giraffe_lady wrote: post #9

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. 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.

Nope, according to the wikipedia linked, the only time Lafargue came close to being an owner (i.e. petit bourgeois) was when he tried running that photolithography workshop.

Re: The Right to Be Lazy (1883)

#46

Post by nonrandomstring »

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!

Me too. As a 'victim' of the Protestant Work Ethic, or maybe personality traits of the industrious/conscientious type, I find it the struggle is fighting for my right to be active in a world that increasingly lionises a passive, convenient and dependent life-stance. I just want to shake people sometimes. Look around you and see what needs to be done and the duty life demands of you!

Re: The Right to Be Lazy (1883)

#47

Post by BitwiseFool »

armchairhacker wrote: post #33

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 a…

I think this is a question with an impossible answer. Life on Earth is far to varied and chaotic for any baseline value. Just like an ecosystem, everything is in constant flux.

Re: The Right to Be Lazy (1883)

#48

Post by heavyset_go »

AnimalMuppet wrote: post #40
heavyset_go wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Worker ownership is not the same thing as wage labor. Wage labor bifurcates people into an asset owning class and laborers who don't own the assets they're forced to depend on to eat. Wage labor divorces workers from owning the fruit of their labor in place of wages, whereas worker ownership doesn't.

Wage labor was imposed upon people hundreds of years ago with the enclosure and privatization of common lands that people had relied on for centuries to provide for themselves. It was imposed because people voluntarily chose not to become wage laborers, as they preferred their lifestyles as is. To rectify this, a landless class of people was created, that could only rely on selling their labor to survive, through the enclosure of the land they had relied on in the past. People did not freely accept becoming factory workers, for example, they were forced into situations where it was the only option, and in many places, those that chose not to work were arrested and forced to work anyway.

Re: The Right to Be Lazy (1883)

#49

Post by ok_dad »

AnimalMuppet wrote: post #40
heavyset_go wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

There lies the problem: in todays society, I’m not free to choose how I live outside of a pre-approved selection of careers due to a small portion of people deciding they wanted this specific setup.
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