Nietzsche

Nietzsche, one of the earliest proponents of an anti-work ethic, critiqued primarily the morality of the work ethic. For him the morality of the duty of work was operated as a means of control, which subjugated the development of the individual in favour of the impersonal needs of society. While his specific critique of work may appear as an unremarkable call for unrestrained individualism, his critique of work must be viewed in the context of his wider critique of morality and the values that govern a society. Modern society’s values and moral judgements he deemed insufficient and reactive, he hoped for a society which went beyond the slave morality of fear and resentment, and instead sought its own overcoming. It is this critique of society’s values that we must consider Nietzsche’s anti-work sentiment. Although Nietzsche was not explicitly political, the distinction between atomised individualism, as it is promoted in contemporary consumer culture, and autonomism worthy of a mention here. Both Nietzsche and autonomism rejected the platonic idea that there was a defined place for everyone in society, suited to their work or profession. This notion stunted personal self-discovery and led to an impoverished society, centred on control and slave morality. In autonomism, and many Marxian accounts of worker struggle, the shared problems faced by the workers, which they all felt individually, led to a sense of collectivity in struggle.

 

Lafargue

Paul Lafargue is one of the first to argue for the intelligence of laziness, how aristocratic societies in the classical era despised work and relegated it to slaves. It is interesting to draw parallels to past aristocratic societies and their attitude towards work with the rise of what Piketty terms the super-managers, those who are essentially the modern-day aristocrats, but now do not claim hereditary status for their positions but rather their value as senior leadership. Nietzsche would be cracking a wry smile at this turn of events, today even aristocrats no longer claim the right be above work, but instead pretend to be valuable workers.

 

Russell

Bertrand Russell’s 1935 essay ‘In praise of idleness’, remains very relevant today. In it, Russell examines the incongruence of the view of the moral goodness of productive activity coupled with the moral unsoundness of consumption, or unrestrained enjoyment, noting that consumption and production were closely linked. He questions why if someone were to make an investment in a business activity which proved unsuccessful, this person would be seen differently to one who spent all their money on pleasure and enjoyment. The desirability of work Russell argues comes from pre-industrial society, when there was a class of idle landowners who most certainly did not want their peasants following in their example. Only in industrial society do we have enough wealth and technology to allow greater leisure time. Importantly, Russell raises the feminist issue of unpaid reproductive and household labour, as well as noting that it was finance that allowed us to create this present state of industrial innovation by borrowing against the future.

Ranciere

Before moving from theoretical positions against work to political movements such as autonomism that made the refusal of work central to their claims – interestingly the Italian autonomist movement was a spontaneous worker revolt that rejected the worker demands made for them by unions and traditional left political parties – I will mention the work of Jacques Ranciere. Ranciere’s early works, which would go on to provide the basis for themes that would remain central to his career – democracy, the equality of intelligences and worker autonomy – focus on an alternate account of historical worker struggles where workers demonstrated an autonomous capacity to understand their exploitative situation, to formulate their own demands (which many times involved a rejection of work), and to express their needs for intellectual and artistic expression which revealed them to be much more than just the exploited working class. Their identity as manual wage labourers was only due to material necessity, it was not an identity they wore with pride nor could it circumscribe them as a class: their needs, their labour value, their right to speak, to express their demands and be treated as democratic equals in society.

 

Italian Operaismo

Although Ranciere’s work does not explicitly take up Italian Operaismo or autonomism, this political movement reflects some of the key concerns of his that have been previously outlined. The most important aspect being the spontaneous worker struggles and demands of this movement during the ‘autunno caldo’ of 1969. It is important to note that Operaismo was not a clearly defined movement, as it is comprised both of specific historical worker struggles as well as a group of intellectuals who were either directly part of these struggles or made them the object of study. What is of interest is that these struggles happened in a time where forms of factory labour were changing and would successively be termed post-Fordist. Factory work was still prevalent but three main tendencies can be identified that are of interest for this research. Firstly, the rise of unskilled precarious labour thanks largely to industrial innovation in automation. Secondly, the rise of knowledge and technical labour which involved less and less physical labour whose labour value was not in physical output in the assembly line but in implicit and explicit technical knowledge. This last tendency is linked with the rise of the cybernetic factory and information-driven management and control.
The workers in these worker struggles did not identify with the extant unions and radical left political parties, such as the Partito Communisti Italiani (PCI), as these workers were precarious migrant workers from the under-developed south of Italy, not the established skilled factory workers of the industrial north. These workers, unlike the PCI or the unions, explicitly rejected the intrinsic value of work, and demanded less work for more pay. They also attempted to unify all factory workers in their struggles to include clerical and technical workers, who were also a relatively new evolution and did not find themselves represented by the party or the unions.
The intellectuals of note who were deeply involved with Operaismo rejected work because per them the wage labour relationship was inherently exploitative and the pay structure of the worker – focused on piece-work and productivity bonuses in addition to a paltry base salary – merely assisted the bosses in their accumulation of much more at their expense. Arguing for a better salary or better work conditions in the factory, without fundamentally questioning the wage labour relationship and the amount of hours worked, failed to reflect how undesirable wage labour was. It should be noted that in Italy, whose very constitution begins with ‘Italy is a democratic republic founded on labour’, the gospel of hard labour was sacrosanct, this open rejection of labour itself was nothing short of revolutionary at the time.

 

Left-Accelerationism

A contemporary movement which has taken up the refusal of work is often termed left-accelerationism. These thinkers lament the stagnation in innovation and the promised science fiction futures of a post-work and post-scarcity society which have not materialised. Key to thinkers within this movement is to situate the refusal of work, beginning with demanding a three-day weekend, as a key factor in the creation of a post-capitalist world, which although apparently a mild demand, could have cascading effects given how much of today’s society operates on an unquestioning opinion of the sanctity of work. They are termed accelerationists since they agree that innovation has stagnated and it is necessary to accelerate this innovation to bring about a more equitable world, and to re-position the left as the progressive political wing once again, in contrast to the left as the political force which resists and negates the injustices of the present system. To argue that capitalism is conservative and stagnant places the left once again at the vanguard of political futurism.