Editing Refusal of work (section)

== Political views ==
[[File:Lafargue 1871.jpg|thumb|upright|[[Paul Lafargue]], author of book [[Critique of work|critical of work]] titled: ''The Right to Be Lazy'']]

''[[The Right to be Lazy]]'', an essay by Cuban-born [[France|French]] revolutionary [[Marxist]] [[Paul Lafargue]], manifests that "When, in our civilized Europe, we would find a trace of the native beauty of man, we must go seek it in the nations where economic prejudices have not yet uprooted the hatred of work&nbsp;... The Greeks in their era of greatness had only contempt for work: their slaves alone were permitted to labor: the free man knew only exercises for the body and mind&nbsp;... The philosophers of antiquity taught contempt for work, that degradation of the free man, the poets sang of idleness, that gift from the Gods."<ref name="theanarchistlibrary.org">{{Cite book|url=http://www.theanarchistlibrary.org/library/paul-lafargue-the-right-to-be-lazy|title=The Right To Be Lazy|via=www.theanarchistlibrary.org|access-date=2022-03-17|archive-date=2022-03-14|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20220314142505/https://www.theanarchistlibrary.org/library/paul-lafargue-the-right-to-be-lazy|url-status=live}}</ref> And so he says "Proletarians, brutalized by the dogma of work, listen to the voice of these philosophers, which has been concealed from you with jealous care: A citizen who gives his labor for money degrades himself to the rank of slaves." (The last sentence paraphrasing [[Cicero]].<ref name="cicero">"...vulgar are the means of livelihood of all hired workmen whom we pay for mere manual labor, not for artistic skill; for in their case the very wage they receive is a pledge of their slavery.''" – [[De Officiis]] [http://www.constitution.org/rom/de_officiis.htm] {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20171019141104/http://www.constitution.org/rom/de_officiis.htm|date=2017-10-19}}''</ref>)

[[Raoul Vaneigem]], theorist of the post-[[surrealist]] [[Situationist International]] which was influential in the [[May 68]] events in France, wrote ''The Book of Pleasures''. In it he says that "You reverse the perspective of power by returning to pleasure the energies stolen by work and constraint&nbsp;... As sure as work kills pleasure, pleasure kills work. If you are not resigned to dying of disgust, then you will be happy enough to rid your life of the odious need to work, to give orders (and obey them), to lose and to win, to keep up appearances, and to judge and be judged."<ref>[http://www.scenewash.org/lobbies/chainthinker/situationist/vaneigem/bop/bop.html ''The book of pleasures''] {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20200305202450/http://www.scenewash.org/lobbies/chainthinker/situationist/vaneigem/bop/bop.html |date=5 March 2020 }} by [[Raoul Vaneigem]]</ref>

[[Autonomism|Autonomist]] philosopher [[Bifo]] defines refusal of work as not "so much the obvious fact that workers do not like to be exploited, but something more. It means that the capitalist restructuring, the technological change, and the general transformation of social institutions are produced by the daily action of withdrawal from exploitation, of rejection of the obligation to produce surplus value, and to increase the value of capital, reducing the value of life."<ref name="republicart1"/> More simply he states "Refusal of work means&nbsp;... I don't want to go to work because I prefer to sleep. But this laziness is the source of intelligence, of technology, of progress. Autonomy is the self-regulation of the social body in its independence and in its interaction with the disciplinary norm."<ref name="republicart1"/>

As a social development Bifo remembers,<ref name="republicart1"/><blockquote>that one of the strong ideas of the movement of autonomy proletarians during the 70s was the idea "precariousness is good". Job precariousness is a form of autonomy from steady regular work, lasting an entire life. In the 1970s many people used to work for a few months, then to go away for a journey, then back to work for a while. This was possible in times of almost full employment and in times of egalitarian culture. This situation allowed people to work in their own interest and not in the interest of capitalists, but quite obviously this could not last forever, and the neoliberal offensive of the 1980s was aimed to reverse the rapport de force."</blockquote>As a response to these developments his view is that "the dissemination of self-organized knowledge can create a social framework containing infinite autonomous and self-reliant worlds."<ref name="republicart1" />

From this possibility of [[self-determination]] even the notion of [[workers' self-management]] is seen as problematic since "Far from the emergence of proletarian power,&nbsp;... this self-management as a moment of the self-harnessing of the workers to capitalist production in the period of real subsumption&nbsp;... Mistaking the individual capitalist (who, in real subsumption disappears into the collective body of share ownership on one side, and hired management on the other) rather than the enterprise as the problem,&nbsp;... the workers themselves became a collective capitalist, taking on responsibility for the exploitation of their own labor. Thus, far from breaking with 'work',&nbsp;... the workers maintained the practice of clocking-in, continued to organize themselves and the community around the needs of the factory, paid themselves from profits arising from the sale of watches, maintained determined relations between individual work done and wage, and continued to wear their work shirts throughout the process."<ref>{{cite web|url=http://libcom.org/library/deleuze-marx-politics-nicholas-thoburn-5|title=5. The Refusal of Work|website=libcom.org|access-date=2007-08-29|archive-date=2019-08-24|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20190824001837/http://libcom.org/library/deleuze-marx-politics-nicholas-thoburn-5|url-status=live}}</ref>

[[André Gorz]] was an [[Austria]]n and [[France|French]] [[Social philosophy|social philosopher]]. Also a [[journalist]], he co-founded ''[[Le Nouvel Observateur]]'' weekly in 1964. A supporter of [[Jean-Paul Sartre]]'s [[Existentialism|existentialist]] version of [[Marxism]] after World War Two, in the aftermath of the [[May 1968 events in France|May '68]] student riots, he became more concerned with [[political ecology]].<ref>Willy Gianinazzi, ''André Gorz: A life'', London: Seagull Books, 2022.</ref> His central theme was [[wage labour]] issues such as liberation from work, the just distribution of work, [[social alienation]], and a [[basic income|guaranteed basic income]].<ref>André Gorz, [http://societal.org/docs/55.htm Pour un revenu inconditionnel suffisant] {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20200426145421/http://societal.org/docs/55.htm |date=26 April 2020 }}, published in Transversales/Science-Culture (n° 3, 3e trimestre 2002) {{in lang|fr}}</ref>

=== Anarchism ===
{{Anarchism sidebar}}
[[Image:Bob Black (2011 BAAB).JPG|thumb|Bob Black, contemporary American anarchist associated with the [[post-left anarchy]] tendency]]

Bob Black's 1986 essay ''[[The Abolition of Work]]'' proposes a "life based on play" to replace work. He argues that work degrades workers through discipline and habituation, and equates work to social control and mass murder.<ref>{{Cite book |last1=Seyferth |first1=Peter |chapter=Anti-Work: A Stab in the Heart of Capitalism |title=Routledge Handbook of Radical Politics |date=2019 |isbn=978-1-315-61988-0 |publisher=Routledge |chapter-url=https://www.taylorfrancis.com/chapters/edit/10.4324/9781315619880-31/anti-work-peter-seyferth |page=384 |doi=10.4324/9781315619880-31 |s2cid=242759065 |access-date=2023-07-29 |archive-date=2023-01-18 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20230118052059/https://www.taylorfrancis.com/chapters/edit/10.4324/9781315619880-31/anti-work-peter-seyferth |url-status=live }}</ref>

In 2022, ''Green Theory & Praxis Journal'' published a Total Liberation Pathway which involved "an abolition of compulsory work for all beings." Building on scholar Jason Hribal's description of animals as part of the working class and industries' labels of "working ecosystems" and "energy slaves," the proposal sought to free all animals, ecosystems, plants, minerals, and the planet Earth from exploitation. As part of this transformation, humans would drastically reduce their workweek and transform it into voluntary and self-managed hobbies.<ref>{{cite journal|first=Dan|last=Fischer|title=Let Nature Play: A Possible Pathway of Total Liberation and Earth Restoration|journal=Green Theory & Praxis|date=3 April 2022|volume=14|issue=1|pages=8–29|url=http://greentheoryandpraxisjournal.org/gtpj-volume-14-issue-1-3-april-2022/|access-date=2022-04-12|archive-date=2022-04-04|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20220404160154/http://greentheoryandpraxisjournal.org/gtpj-volume-14-issue-1-3-april-2022/|url-status=dead}}.</ref>