I had other plans for today but then I received an email from the UK magazine The Idler. This isn’t a new phenomenon, or unwanted by any means. I’ve been happily getting their newsletter to keep up with all of their goings on for a few years now. And while Idler doesn’t always have pertinent…
Len Bracken is an interesting fellow. Bracken is something of a conspiracy theorist who digs the situationists, is anti-work and wants to reclaim conspiracies for the left. Conspiracy theories aren’t really my thing and I’m not so much interested (for now) in the situationists. But Bracken’s insistence on the importance of refusing and resisting work…
I’ve never read Viewpoint Magazine before and honestly, this interview didn’t leave with much of a solid impression. The text often relied on previous knowledge of certain thinkers, it used a lot of jargon (particularly Marxist jargon) and spoke with the confidence of someone who expects to be understood, yet isn’t saying much. As such,…
Taken from here and excerpted from Gorz’s Critique of Economic Reason: Summary for Trade Unionists and Other Left Activists. THE CRISIS OF WORK 1.1. The Ideology of Work Work for economic ends has not always been the dominant activity of mankind. It has only been dominant across the whole of society since the advent of…
(Taken from here) Preface M. Thiers, at a private session of the commission on primary education of 1849, said: “I wish to make the influence of the clergy all powerful because I count upon it to propagate that good philosophy which teaches man that he is here below to suffer, and not that other philosophy…
In order to dismiss the current philosophers who LaFargue disagrees with he uses a mix of history and philosophy against the “moralists”: Let us open the history of ancient peoples and the writings of their philosophers and law givers. “I could not affirm,” says the father of history, Herodotus, “whether the Creeks derived from the…
First off, I really like the title to this chapter. It invokes Spring and a certain freeness to me. The ability to structure not only new things but things in a new context to support these new things. It’s just a nice phrase in general, really. Lafargue builds off his latest conclusions that giving the laborer more time…
While I was planning to finish this series in a week things got in the way…okay mostly laziness and shitty internet. We are off to a good start with LaFargue considering promises of the Greek poet Antiparos who more or less claimed that new technology would liberate us from work. That it would give us…
What would this series be without a few delays? Hopefully this much longer post makes up for it! First, just look at the passage that Lagargue quotes at the beginning from a pamphlet entitled An Essay on Trade and Commerce: …the factory population of England had taken into its head the fixed idea that in their quality…
There is always a bit of contradictions or weirdness with the pro-lazy position and it’s really well emphasized in the quote LaFargue puts at the top of this chapter: Let us be lazy in everything, except in loving and drinking, except in being lazy. – Lessing People always want to make fun of the pro-lazy position,…