Friends of mine are working so hard to protect the forests from logging and Gumbaynggirr Country from mining. But working inside the capitalist production line is another matter. Paul Lafargue’s ‘The Right to Be Lazy’ from 1883 calls for the workers of the world to unite and stop working so hard.
Australia has one of the highest rates of overtime in the OECD, particularly for ‘very long hours’ (over 50 hours per week), and work a significant amount of unpaid overtime. The laid-back country I discovered in 1979 has changed.
Chapter One begins: ‘A strange delusion possesses the working classes of the nations where capitalist civilization holds its sway. This delusion drags in its train the individual and social woes which for two centuries have tortured sad humanity. 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. Instead of opposing this mental aberration, the priests, the economists and the moralists have cast a sacred halo over work.’ [i]
The Cuban-born French philosopher was Karl Marx’s son-in-law and wrote this pamphlet while in prison for giving a socialist speech. Marcel Duchamp read ‘The Right to Be Lazy’, before he came up with the idea of the readymade, and never liked to work hard as an artist, or as anything else. Chess was his life.
Songs about avoiding work, or finishing work.
Butcher Brown, Unwind Feat. Melanie Charles, 2025, Quintet from Richmond, Virginia.
‘Work is done it’s time to unwind.’
4hero, Another Day ft. Jill Scott, Creating Patterns, 2001. 4hero are producers Mark “Marc Mac” Clair & Denis “Dego” McFarlane, from Dollis Hill, London.
‘I don’t want to go to work today.’
AfroMan, Because I Got High (Uncensored), 2000.
‘You know what, dude? I made this tape for all my homeboys. I didn’t think I’d be talking to Time magazine. I’m a little worried about Rush Limbaugh and Newt Gingrich. I don’t want to get anybody riled up. I just figured, since I’m ‘a pothead, why can’t me and the other potheads have a little joke between ourselves.’ [ii]
‘I wasn’t gonna run from the cops, but I was high.’
Gong, ‘The Pot Head Pixies’, Flying Teapot, 1973.
Gong were an ear opening fusion band I listened to a lot at university. Formed in Paris in 1967 by the Australian Daevid Allen, poet, perofmance artits and a founder member of Soft Machine. I first heard Gong with Camembert Electrique (1971).
‘The work of musical group Gong illustrates the connection be-tween drugs and utopian thought following the failure of the protests of 1968. In their lyrics and interviews, Gong suggested the transformative and revolutionary power of drug use to overturn Western society. More than a political statement, drug use was preached as a method of mental liberation.’ [iii]
[i] The Right to Be Lazy and Other Writings by Paul Lafargue, Trans. Charles Kerr, Charles Kerr and Co., Co-operative, 1883.
[ii] Time, August 20, 2001. AfroMan is Joseph Edgar Foreman. The comedy hip hop song was written in only a few minutes.
[iii] Jonathyne Briggs, ‘The Pot Head Pixies: Drug Utopias in the Music of Gong, 1968–1974’, The Social History of Alcohol and Drugs, Vol 23:1
