> Carrol: 'The Right to Laziness, must be the slogans of the struggle
> for freedom.'
>
> This doesn't make me think of Lafargue, so much as Bukharin, for whom
> the 'economic theory of the leisure class' meant the economic theory
> of the capitalist class.
>
> Leisure, idle consumption, is the life of the parasitic, exploiting
> classes. Creativity is the goal for me, which is not the abolition of
> work, but its reappropriation.
That's putting it well. Anyone who's ever done the painstaking work of trying to learn a foreign language, or master a piece of music, or solve a difficult math problem, knows that such endeavors are deeply satisfying and that it's precisely the difficulty and effort involved that make them so. Of course, usually the above-mentioned are self-directed activities, not alienated labor. But for better or worse, I think it's an empirical fact that the same kind of satisfaction is not infrequently derived by people from their wage-work. This kind of satisfaction from work (I mean any kind of work, not necessarily wage work) is a deep human need; or, at least, those who enjoy it tend to feel their lives would be impoverished without it.
One aspect of American right-wing ideology, it seems, is the promotion of a symbolic association between this constellation of emotions and the notion of of "market discipline." In other words, "market discipline" is what forces us to develop "self-discipline," where "self-discipline" is understood as the effort and satisfaction of purposeful work. Since such effort and satisfaction represent an elemental part of people's day-to-day reality, of their lifeworlds, it should be obvious how politically powerful such an association can be.
It shouldn't be too difficult to convince people that the reality we live in today is one of intense market discipline and its most apparent results seem to be not the promotion of satisfaction from work, but rather an all-consuming materialism and status anxiety (at the top especially), along with constant external pressures on the individual that tend to replace intrinsic with extrinsic motivation, sapping pleasure from both work and leisure, representing an endemic form of unfreedom. Or something to that effect.
But the point I find significant is that the right-wing's view of these issues is familiar to everyone -- a politician need only utter the words "personal responsibility" and a flood of symbolic associations come to mind, not only to conservatives but to liberals, radicals, or whomever. Yet there is no widely familiar, parallel structure of language/thought on these issues coming from the left.
SA