The Politics of Laziness

Once again, my friend and co-inspirer Doc Searls has come up with a botheringly thought-worthy post, in a somewhat delayed meditation on Labor Day. He calls it "Leveraging Laziness. " He cites yet another post, "America’s Labor Day, The Right to Be Lazy, the Photocopy Shops of Istanbul, and the Democratization of Knowledge, " by another provokingly thought-worthy fellow named Stephen Lewis, who, in turn, muses on the 1883 essay by Paul Lafargue, called "The Right to be Lazy."

Doc quotes Lewis musing on Lafargue: "Forget about fighting for the right to work, Lafargue argues (while Lewis muses), one should struggle for the right to be lazy! Marx’s famed Communist Manifesto begins with the warning that the specter of class-based violence is haunting Europe, but the opening paragraph of Lafargue’s The Right to Be Lazy warns us against a more insidious danger from within, our own supposed industriousness..."

I love the web.


via Doc Searls

from Bernie DeKoven, funsmith