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Comment by mjfl | Hacker News Reader

What an ironically privileged position, considering how much he calls out the bourgeoisie.

> Automation, which had already come a long way in Lafargue's time, could easily reduce working hours to three or four hours a day. This would leave a large part of the day for the things we really want to do, such as to spend time with friends, relax, enjoy life, and be lazy. Lafargue argues the machine is the saviour of humanity but only if the working time it frees up becomes leisure time. The time that is freed up is usually converted into more hours of work, which he compares to more hours of toil and drudgery. Working too many hours a day is often degrading, while working very few hours can be very refreshing and enriching, leading to general advancement, health, joy, and satisfaction.

Doesn't seem like a privileged argument. If the needs of a society can be met with 3-4 hours of work a day and automation for the rest, fighting to work only 8 hours a day does seem to miss the mark. Whether 3-4 hours of work a day is actually enough is a separate discussion worth having. There is good evidence supporting the idea that with more free time employees could get done in 30 hours a week what they are currently doing in 40. But he's been demonstrated to be absolutely right with regards to where the spoils of increased productivity go. It rarely if ever materializes as less work or better pay for the masses and always seem to be funneled to the moneyed class instead. I hardly think it's privileged to believe that the progress and advancements made in a society should benefit everyone instead of a handful of already extremely wealthy people.

https://cepr.org/voxeu/columns/teams-become-more-productive-...

> If the needs of a society can be met with 3-4 hours of work a day

That's a very subjective question. Suppose we could have maintained a 19th century standard of living for everyone with reduced work, but without the scientific and technological advancements that we got by using that time to do even more work. Would you prefer a society where everyone works 15 hr weeks but the internet was never invented?

> Would you prefer a society where everyone works 15 hr weeks but the internet was never invented?

How is that even a question have you seen the internet recently. Slamming YES so hard the button breaks.

You also wouldn't get anything else that has been invented or understood since then. I'm pretty sure you can have the equivalent quality (and length) of life of the average 19th century person with very few hours of work in a week. In Germany, it requires zero hours, welfare here will make you live like a king compared to the 19th century -- it's only relative to today's standards that you wouldn't be rich.

Ah, yes who doesn't know about the famous German welfare recipients living in lavish palaces with their 10 comely mattresses and their stable full of fast horses, which will pull their gold-encrusted carriage to the hunting lodge a few times per month, and a small group of life guards to keep them safe.

It is highly misleading to compare lifestyles between different centuries like that.

And their 21st century health care, their high life expectancy, their unlimited access to information etc etc. Would you prefer to live in the 19th century with the average life expectancy at 35 and your 10 shitty mattresses (there's a reason they had 10) instead of living today and get to live 75 years and sleep on your one modern mattress that's of higher quality than those 10 19th century mattresses combined? Palaces 150 years ago sucked in comparison to modern apartments with isolation so good you barely have to heat, modern plumbing, hot water on demand, showers and electric toothbrushes.

> It is highly misleading to compare lifestyles between different centuries like that.

Not really, there are measurable facts. What it seems you are doing is comparing relative wealth. A king is richer than a peasant, therefore his life is better than a welfare-recipient 150 years later, because there are kings in 2022 richer than the welfare-recipient.

Because of course, 5 > 1, and 50 > 10, therefore 5 > 10. It's all relative etc etc. People quickly forget how much worse everything was even decades ago, much less centuries.

That should have read maitresses (autocorrect can be a bitch), and the average life expectancy for a 19th century king was more like 70.

> Palaces 150 years ago sucked in comparison to modern apartments with isolation so good you barely have to heat, modern plumbing, hot water on demand, showers and electric toothbrushes.

I'd much rather live in Versailles or Neuschwanstein in their then-valid state than in an 1960s-era social-built flat, thank you very much.

Okay how about modern medicine then? If you got a cancer that only became treatable in the last ten years, would you trade your life away so that everyone in the last century could work 15 hour weeks and most likely never discover the treatment which was the cumulative result of a century of people working 40 hour weeks?

I would be dead if i was born 20 years before. Also, working gives hobby a meaning. I don’t know a translation for this: El ocio es la madre/padre de todos los vicios. Too many free time would kill us. We are a specie which evolve through work. But it shouldnt mean: bad job = ugly death

> El ocio es la madre/padre de todos los vicios

I really don’t like this, because it is a moral view with no real justification (someone gets to decide what a vice is, which is historically a tool of oppression). For example, not that long ago lower-class people having outrageous hobbies such as reading or participating in politics was considered morally unacceptable.

However, there is a kernel of truth in that we need to have some meaning in our lives otherwise we just wither psychologically and then physically. Sometimes being forced to do something (“work”) helps us getting some of that. But the amount of stuff we need to do to live somewhat happy lives varies from person to person. Ultimately, this should be the absolute criterion: the right amount of activity is that which makes us live satisfying lives. Some people need a lot, some do not.

I just learned that this quote is attributed to Jostein Gaarder, author of Sophie's world.

I think "ocio"/being idle is some older quotes has a meaning of doing absolutely nothing with oneself (not working, not studying, not having any interests). Interpreted in this light it makes more sense, to me at least.

An English equivalent is “idle hands are the devil’s workshop”

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/idle_hands_are_the_devil%27s_...

This argument is too broad. Why set the number at 40? Maybe if we all worked 80 hour weeks devising new algorithms to target people with ads and bussing tables in fast food chains, we'd all be immortal by now! Time spent in labor does not linearly correlate with production, especially in high cognitive demand fields like research. Not only that, labor unions and the like had to fight to get work weeks reduced to just 40 hours. Why not ask if we don't need it to be so high? The number is arbitrary, after all.

Innovation doesn't require 40 hour work weeks or labor relations that divorce workers from the fruit of their own labor and the democratic decision making that's afforded to owners, but not workers. It's not a dichotomy.

Unpopular opinion in the startup community. I'm always shocked to see how inefficiently business chases efficiency.

he asserts that it can be met with 3-4 hours of work per day, he doesn't prove it or demonstrate it.

I work a 3-4 workday because I'm able to maintain the standards I've set.

Obviously, this is just my personal experience.

It is consistent with the meaning of bourgeoisie then, which transposed to modern systems means more like "the owner class" than the contemporary social connotation of well-compensated professionals. Owners benefit from more/harder work, both their own and that of others, and so it (reasonably) becomes a class value for them.

A non-owner worker doesn't benefit in the same way, but many still value work in the same way the bourgeoisie do. Workers don't benefit like owners do and so they shouldn't want to work like owners do. That's the point being made.

>It is consistent with the meaning of bourgeoisie then, which transposed to modern systems means more like "the owner class" than the contemporary social connotation of well-compensated professionals.

That's still the definition used in Marxist circles today.

I know but HN is pretty far from a marxist circle in my experience. And it does also have, at least in american english, a connotation very similar to that of yuppie eg more about social class than relationship to the means of production.

Lafargue totally reminds me of the arch-contrarian Oscar Wilde —- who was not bourgeois in any sense of the word, but also a (“lifestyle”) anarcho-socialist

HN skews pretty neo liberal. A lot of holy-than-thou proselytizing of Western exceptionalism, as if Western culture actually earned it's place as the dominant culture on Earth through the virtue of simply being better than everyone else, who I guess just didn't want it bad enough, rather than a combination of luck, ruthless exploitation, and general disregard for the well-being of their fellow man.

Yikes, someone has a chip on their shoulder.

Think it may be helpful to point out how the term evolved over time.

Before Marx, the bourgeoisie only meant the middle, or upper-middle, class as opposed to the proletariat on the one side (which, despite its contemporary Marxist connotations, dates from Ancient Rome's proletarii) and the nobility on the other.

After the rapid industrialization and social displacement of the 19th century that saw the middle class' rise, it was Marx who coopted the term to mean the owner class.

Outside of Marxist circles today, I think the original upwardly mobile meaning is still more common, as in bougie.

so you're saying he's bourgeoisie. Yeah that's the irony. The irony is that he's rich enough to have that lifestyle and still have food, while poor people would not.

Nope, according to the wikipedia linked, the only time Lafargue came close to being an owner (i.e. petit bourgeois) was when he tried running that photolithography workshop.

Sounds a little bit like the fox and grapes.

You are trying very hard not to think out of your box. First Lafargue was by no means rich nor a capitalist. Then this is not about promoting a "lifestyle", it is basically a proposal to have everyone work less by sharing the workload. Think of it what you will but do not misrepresent it. I suggest you actually read the book.

This is a fallacious position. The modern attitude of “you’re not one of us, therefore you cannot possibly have a valid opinion” is wrong on many levels.

It is not logically consistent (a variation of ad hominem arguments).

It is counter productive because having a range of opinions helps avoiding echo chambers and have a broader outlook and understanding, and ultimately find better solutions and strategies.

It opens the door to no true Scotsman sterile arguments that are very easy to use in bad faith against people you disagree with.

It creates counter-productive dissent when people who actually agree on an idea or policy don’t work together for ideological reasons.

Don’t do it.

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