A Right to Be Lazy?: Busyness in Retrospective

Gary Cross A Right to Be Lazy? Busyness in Retrospective I RECALL AN OLD MAN SELLING PAUL LAFARGUE’S RIGHT TO BE LAZY ON a busy street in the Latin Quarter in the 1980s. At the time Iwas writing my first book on the history o f work time and leisure and felt by seeing this strange and grumpy man so energetically promoting the nearly forgotten work o f Marx’s son-in-law somehow vindicated in my efforts. Paul Lafargue’s pamphlet (1989 [1883]) makes an interesting assump­ tion: the “natural” state o f human being was relaxation and that only a century or so o f propaganda convinced the naive worker and labor movement to embrace the doctrine ofthe “right”to work. The Industrial Revolution had produced the craziness o f workers’ overproduction and legions of savants and servants for the small utterly unbusy rich. Once freed from the illusion of the right to work, machines, Lafargue insisted, would liberate us all from the drudgery o f labor and let us live as the ancient Greek philosophers had dreamed—but without the dependence upon slaves. Lafargue’s view was hardly unique for its day. Many in the late nineteenth centuiy believed that overwork caused production gluts and the irrational excesses o f the rich. Busyness was a false doctrine of modem capitalism, which was devoted to endlessly extending and intensifying work. Before and after him, many fought to win freedom from busyness with the reduction of work time. But Lafargue’s dream that mechanical progress would liberate humanity from labor did not happen. Instead, the “overproduction” that ceaseless toil created was “absorbed” by mass consumption. Even the “wastefulness” of the rich social research Vol 72 : No 2 : Summer 2005 263 and their minions came to be seen merely as indifferent contributions to the gross domestic product. So what happened? BUSYNESS AND INDUSTRIALIZATION Lafargue’s instincts were right that capitalism was in part built on increasing output by increasing labor time. Repeatedly, governments tried to restrict holidays (for example, reducing them to 27 per year in 1552 in England) or even impose a minimum workday (in 1495, in England to 12 hours per day). During the English Puritan revolu­ tion, authorities attempted to eliminate traditional religious festivals and impose instead a strict observance o f a Sabbath rest. This not only was supposed to increase the number of workdays but to create greater regularity in the habits ofworkers. Similarly, during the French Revolution, employers were given authority to set work time and the state imposed a 10-day week hoping to best the output ofthe traditional Judeo-Christian seven-day week. These efforts had mixed results and the new revolutionary calendar disappeared within a decade. Moreover, when eighteenth-century English and European merchants tried to tap “underutilized” rural labor by putting farmers to work in the winter at spinning yam or weaving cloth, they were often frustrated because the episodic and slow pace of agricultural work made these part-time peas­ ant artisans undisciplined and unreliable producers. When pay rates were increased, merchants complained, they produced less. Apparently, these cottage workers were content with a fixed income and preferred time free from work (at least from weaving) to more money. They also preferred to interrupt work with other activities—tending to family and farm needs or even diversions of conversation, sport, gambling, and daily drams of drink. One solution, advocated by economists of the age, was to lower pay to cottage workers to force them to work harder and longer to earn the money they needed and expected. An obviously more effective means o f quickening the pace and lengthen­ ing the hours of the workday was to mechanize the job and centralize management of the work that came with the new textile mills. One of the main advantages of the factory was that it removed the worker’s 264 social research choice about whether to be busy or not. Only those who accepted the employer’s hours ofwork were able to work, and only those submitting to the employer’s efforts to mechanize tasks and remove play from the workroom kept their jobs. By the 1820s, mechanization, especially...