Do we really have to work more creatively?

• Jurisdiction: Australia
• Date: 22 March 2007
• Author: Magee, Paul

... did not Marx's own son-in-law write a book called The Right to be Lazy? Fredric Jameson

A Moribund Left

To say the Left is in crisis is not only a cliche, it is an unwarranted optimism. Crisis implies the necessity, and thereby also the possibility, of decisive action and change. I think it would be far truer to say the Left is in a state of paralysis. It has nowhere to go, no way to take. Since the fall of 'actually existing socialism', the possibility of an alternative to capitalism has all but disappeared from the public sphere, in which I include the university. As Fredric Jameson has remarked so incisively, 'people find it easier today to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism'. (1) Hence the fundamentally reactive nature of the Left's current demands.

Being of the Left in the present climate means something like having a commitment--against a raft of corporate aggressors--to welfarism, to the environment, and to the sovereignty of poorer nations. In other words, it is something like a commitment to the amelioration of global capitalism. That's not a positive program.

In the absence of any cogent alternative to it, our criticisms of the current global polity will always have an element of bad faith about them. Take the question of contemporary trade unionism. The moment you accept the inevitability of capitalism--and you do so whenever you are incapable of imagining an alternative--you find yourself, as a leftist, in a highly ambivalent position. On the one hand, unions protect the rights of workers in a world of mass unemployment and insecurity. That is clearly a leftist position. On the other hand, that same protection seems to bar others from the workforce through the restrictions higher labour costs are said to place upon growth. Support for unionism, in other words, seems directly to contribute to the 'dualization of society', (2) that characteristic modern split between those full citizens who work and those 'non-citizens' who do not. Shouldn't the Left support the rights of the unemployed? Are we really meant just to dump them in the interests of those who have jobs to defend? There are of course other ways of thinking through the relation between trade unions and the unemployed (in fact, the cliches I have just rehearsed are quite dubious). My point is that these arguments are not being made public, explicit and clear. In this context it is very easy to split the Left for the contradictory entity that it seems to be. We appear to be for workers, but against giving them jobs. That's not a positive program, or even a leg to stand on. It is a state of paralysis.

A Neo-liberal Left?

It is in this light--the malaise of the contemporary Left--that we need to approach the nascent Creative Industries, a development that is nothing if not positive in its positing of future goals and directions. A policy initiative intimately related to the rise of New Labour in Britain, 'Creative Industries' is basically an attempt to draw artists away from their traditional role as both critics and victims of capitalism and into the embrace of the economy--as its new leaders. Compare what artists currently rely on: an increasingly untenable welfare system and a demoralizing, unpredictable and unremunerative grants system. Art may well be about freedom, but in contemporary capitalist societies it involves 'a condition of dependent beggary that is the very opposite of freedom'. (3)I am quoting John Hartley, Dean of Creative Industries at Queensland University of Technology (QUT). This is in his introduction to Creative Industries, a new Blackwell collection of essays on the topic. Hartley himself quotes Richard Florida, Professor of Public Policy at George Mason University and author of the celebrated The Rise of the Creative Class. For Florida, new economic developments put artists in a position to turn their traditional situation on its head. 'Creativity,' Florida writes, 'is now the decisive source of competitive advantage'. (4) In effect, what people like Hartley and Florida are claiming is that the massive global rise of service and communication industries over the past two decades has led to a situation where creative communication ('easy to replicate but hard to imitate' (5)) is at a premium. We have all this new media--now we need to fill it with words. Making the argument that creative content provision will become the economic focus of the future, institutions like QUT have managed to attract government funding back into the arts and humanities (to the tune, in QUT's case, of fifteen million Beattie government dollars for its new Creative Industries Precinct). This is clearly a discourse that works!

Creative Industries is a discourse that affiliates itself, however paradoxically, with a number of the traditional concerns of the Left. According to Hartley, it has produced affiliations with many of its traditional cadres as well:

[M]any on the Left who have been trained in Frankfurt-style critique have turned up working directly in the creative industries, and in the policy, educational and government support agencies that serve them. (6) For Hartley, such service represents 'not an abandonment of critique but its implementation'. (7) In making this assertion, Hartley is relying upon the arguments of people like Charles Leadbeater. Leadbeater believes that there is real potential for economic democratization in the shift Creative Industries heralds, as the focus of production turns from resource-intensive areas towards the relatively costless world of signs. As Leadbeater puts it, 'an economy which becomes more knowledge intensive has the potential to become more inclusive and meritocratic'. (8) Why? Because it means that '[e]veryone with an education can have a go'. (9) So there is a utopian dimension to all of this too.

How should we evaluate this Creative Industries phenomenon? There is something compelling--I have to say as an artist--about the idea that we do not have to cut off our own legs in order to stand up for ourselves. What is more, there is a certain marxist flavour to the idea of a future where work becomes more and more a matter of autonomous creative activity. However, I am going to attack it, at just this point, and I will rely on the works of Andre Gorz to do so. For this is precisely what Gorz criticizes about traditional marxism: the fantasy of a future in which all will work in a fun and free way. (10) What such visions lack, according to Gorz, is a recognition of the far more radical possibility that contemporary developments present us with: a future where we do not have to work at all. Creative Industries remains tied to what Marx noted was 'the absolutely necessary condition for capitalist production': the 'incessant reproduction, [the] perpetuation of the worker'. (11) The fantasy remains tied to the delusion that we still need to work.

Where Did All the Technology Go?

In what follows I am going to show why I think Creative Industries' embrace of capitalism, much as it might give a number of us something to do, is way too hasty. I think there is something very different that we could be doing with the energies that have supported the idea of the Left for some two hundred odd years of activism, agitation and revolution. I propose the following program for the Left: we should devote our energies to proclaiming the right to be lazy. In making this call I am borrowing the title of Paul Lafargue's classic marxist text. Lafargue wrote The Right to be Lazy in 1883 during a six-month gaol term in Saint Pelagie Prison. (12) Born in Santiago, Cuba, but educated in France, Lafargue married Marx's second daughter, Laura, and worked in close association with both his father-in-law and Engels. As for the text, it attacks those on the French Left ('only slaves would be capable of such baseness') who seek to proclaim a 'right to work'. (13) Lafargue insists that the proletariat's demands become far more radical:

[I]t must proclaim the Rights of Laziness, a thousand times more noble and more sacred than the anaemic Rights of Man concocted by the metaphysical lawyers of the bourgeois revolution. It must accustom itself to working but three hours a day, reserving the rest of the day and the night for leisure and feasting. (14) As you can perhaps tell, elements of Larfargue's text enter into the realm of magic realism, nowhere more so than when he proceeds to depict the joys to which this 'regime of idleness' will lead. (15) Nonetheless, there is something quite compelling in what he says, and that is for the simple fact that:

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 labour. (16) The reason is automation. Pointing to the obvious fact that capitalist accumulation has led to a vast array of labour-saving technology, Lafargue comes to the obvious conclusion: we should not have to work as much any more. We should be able to let the machines do it for us.

I will address the technological dimensions of the right to be lazy below, when I turn to unpacking the reasons why 500 years of technological development have not done one bit--it is an extraordinary fact, the moment you think about it--to dent our need to work.

More Holidays!

For the moment I simply want to show how easy it is to mount a case for the right to be lazy. Recall what I said above about the difficulty of maintaining left-wing positions in the contemporary public sphere. Well forget all that, it isn't true: we just have to stop regarding free time as a problem.

In a discussion paper titled 'The Double Dividend, An Analysis of the Job Creation Potential of Purchasing Additional Holiday Leave', (17) Richard Denniss proposes that the seven million (more or less) full-time employees in Australia sacrifice a projected 4 per cent wage rise in return for an extra...