The Right to Be Lazy

Answers

• Q14SUCCESSION

  Would machines becoming more capable than humans necessarily place humans in a subordinate position?

  No. machines can free humans. Quotes Aristotle's self-weaving shuttles and calls the machine the redeemer of humanity that could free workers into leisure, if not for capitalist overwork.

  "The prejudice of slavery dominated the minds of Pythagoras and Aristotle,"—this has been written disdainfully; and yet Aristotle foresaw: "that if every tool could by itself execute its proper function, as the masterpieces of Daedalus moved themselves or as the tripods of Vulcan set themselves spontaneously at their sacred work; if for example the shuttles of the weavers did their own weaving, the foreman of the workshop would have no more need of helpers, nor the master of slaves." Aristotle's dream is our reality. Our machines, with breath of fire, with limbs of unwearying steel, with fruitfulness, wonderful inexhaustible, accomplish by themselves with docility their sacred labor. And nevertheless the genius of the great philosophers of capitalism remains dominated by the prejudice of the wage system, worst of slaveries. They do not yet understand that the machine is the saviour of humanity, the god who shall redeem man from the sordidae artes and from working for hire, the god who shall give him leisure and liberty.

  Aristotle quotation and 'rédempteur de l'humanité' confirmed in search results; Gutenberg page opened. First serialized 1880, book 1883.

• Q19LABOR

  Who should receive the benefits when machinery increases the amount a worker can produce?

  The workers, as leisure. As machines improve, workers work harder instead of resting; machine productivity should be taken as leisure by limiting work to three hours a day.

  Alas!, the leisure which the pagan poet announced has not come. The blind, perverse and murderous passion for work transforms the liberating machine into an instrument for the enslavement of free men. Its productiveness impoverishes them. A good workingwoman makes with her needles only five meshes a minute, while certain circular knitting machines make 30,000 in the same time. Every minute of the machine is thus equivalent to a hundred hours of the workingwomen's labor, or again, every minute of the machine's labor, gives the workingwomen ten days of rest. What is true for the knitting industry is more or less true for all industries reconstructed by modern machinery. But what do we see? In proportion as the machine is improved and performs man's work with an ever increasing rapidity and exactness, the laborer, instead of prolonging his former rest times, redoubles his ardor, as if he wished to rival the machine. O, absurd and murderous competition! That the competition of man and the machine might have free course, the proletarians have abolished wise laws which limited the labor of the artisans of the ancient guilds; they have suppressed the holidays.

  III. The Consequences of Over-Production · Downloaded Gutenberg #52984 (Kerr translation); confirmed contents and machine passage.