GoKawiilAs I type these words, I worry over the day when I will no longer be commissioned to write them. The day, to be specific, that The American Scholar asks Claude (the moniker for Anthropic’s AI) and not Robert (the name of Max and Roslyn Zaretsky’s son) to create an essay on, say, AI and the future of work.
Not surprisingly, I am not alone to worry: Not many subjects stir greater fear and dread among Americans than the seemingly irresistible rise of AI. According to a recent Pew Research Center survey, 64 percent of the public believes that AI will translate into fewer jobs. Small wonder, then, that only 17 percent of the same respondents expect that AI, even when humanized by names like Claude, will make their future brighter.
Were he alive today, Paul Lafargue would be among that 17 percent, and his voice would be both loud and funny. Born in Cuba in 1842 to parents of mixed race—part Jewish and part Creole—Lafargue was married to Laura Marx, one of Karl Marx’s four daughters. Even before this marriage, though, Lafargue, who had studied medicine in Paris, had thrown over a secure future as a doctor to devote (and pauperize) himself and his family to working on behalf of the shining (and classless) future glimpsed by his father-in-law.
Knocking out polemical and theoretical essays while striving to launch France’s first workers’ party, the Parti ouvrier français, Lafargue was a well-known figure on the radical left in fin-de-siècle Paris. Predictably, his activities also made him well-known to the French police, who repeatedly arrested him, including on one evening in 1883 when he was taking home a salad to his wife. (He managed to find a passerby to deliver the salad before the police hauled him away.)
Making wine from this bunch of grapes, Lafargue used his time behind bars at Saint Pélagie—a forbidding Parisian prison where many of the century’s most notorious writers, artists, and thinkers found themselves from time to time—to draft his most famous work, Le Droit à la paresse, or The Right to Be Lazy, translated into English by Alex Andriesse. Though he dashed off this pamphlet nearly 150 years ago, Lafargue asked questions that remain most pertinent to our current anxieties over the future of work.
During Lafargue’s own lifetime, the nature of work was undergoing a traumatic transformation. The seismic effect of the first and second industrial revolutions, as well as the quickening pace of globalization, proved an extinction event for traditional forms of production. “The gods and kings of the past,” declared the historian Eric Hobsbawm, “were powerless before the businessmen and steam engines of the present.” As factory workers and unskilled laborers replaced ateliers and artisans, the former struggled to organize themselves, a struggle into which Lafargue threw himself body and soul.
Or, perhaps, not his entire soul. His essay’s title reveals a dramatic divergence of goals he and union leaders held. He bemoans the demand of workers for shorter workdays (which often lasted as long as 12 hours), insisting that curtailing work hours did not represent victory but defeat: “Shame on the proletariat, only slaves would have been capable of such baseness” to have sought such an outcome. On the contrary, he declaims, workers should oppose the very notion of work.
If you are puzzled, don’t worry—so, too, were nearly all of Lafargue’s contemporaries on the left. How could they not be? Here was a committed Marxist—and the great man’s son-in-law, to boot—asserting that workers, rather than strike for the right to work, should instead protest for the right to be lazy. Machines, he believed, could become “humanity’s savior, the god who will redeem man from the sordidae artes [manual labor] and give him leisure and liberty.”
And yet, Lafargue exclaims, “the blind passion and perverse murderousness of work have transformed the machine from an instrument of emancipation into an instrument that enslaves free beings.” The reason workers spend so many hours shackled to their machines, he contended, was not from economic necessity. Instead, it was imposed upon them by their superiors, the captains of industry and finance, who were wedded to “the dogma of work and diabolically drilled the vice of work into the heads of workers.”
Of course, Lafargue never called for the eradication of work. The necessities of life, after all, would always require the labor of women and men to produce and provide. But he did press for the rationalization of work. Given the efficiency of machines, fewer hours were needed to provide the necessities of life. Maintaining the same excessive number of work hours inevitably flooded the market with superfluities and the era’s repeated economic crises stretching from 1873 to the end of the century.
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