A strange delusion possesses the working classes of the nations where capitalist civilization holds its sway […] 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.
— Paul Lafargue, The Right to Be Lazy
THE AUTHOR OF these lines, Paul Lafargue, who happened to be Karl Marx's son-in-law, was certainly speaking from experience. He and his wife, Laura, sponged a living from Friedrich Engels, who earned his money from Manchester cotton manufacturing.
In his polemic The Right to Be Lazy, published in 1883, Lafargue laments: “They [i.e. factory workers] have never known the pleasure of a healthful passion, nor would they be capable of telling of it merrily! And the children? Twelve hours of work for children! O, misery.”
Arguably much of the social and digital infrastructure for creating a society without work exists today. Given that so many of the goods we buy and sell rely on capital-intensive industries and assembly-line production, how long will it be before the machines that have instrumentalized us as mere units of production finally submit to our needs?
In Fully Automated Luxury Communism, Aaron Bastani sketches what he calls “the three disruptions,” or the evolutionary tipping points that have brought humans to the brink of this work-free utopia. Following the Neolithic Revolution, which enabled agriculture and human settlements to establish themselves at the end of the last ice age, humankind embarked upon the Industrial Revolution and “technological innovation.” As for the third disruption, that of digital information and artificial systems, we are already there. The challenge is to harness them toward the common good.
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