Refusal of work
From within Marxism it has been advocated by Paul Lafargue and the Italian workerist/autonomists (e.g. Antonio Negri, Mario Tronti),[1] the French ultra-left (e.g. Échanges et Mouvement); and within anarchism (especially Bob Black and the post-left anarchy tendency).
[4][5] It is a negatively connoted term used to draw an analogy between slavery and wage labor, and to highlight similarities between owning and employing a person.
[14][15] With the advent of the Industrial Revolution, thinkers such as Proudhon[16][17] and Marx[18] elaborated the comparison between wage labor and slavery in the context of a critique of property not intended for active personal use.
[8][21] The Right to be Lazy, an essay by Cuban-born French revolutionary Marxist Paul Lafargue, manifests that "When, in our civilized Europe, we would find a trace of the native beauty of man, we must go seek it in the nations where economic prejudices have not yet uprooted the hatred of work ...
The Greeks in their era of greatness had only contempt for work: their slaves alone were permitted to labor: the free man knew only exercises for the body and mind ...
The philosophers of antiquity taught contempt for work, that degradation of the free man, the poets sang of idleness, that gift from the Gods.
"[23] And so he says "Proletarians, brutalized by the dogma of work, listen to the voice of these philosophers, which has been concealed from you with jealous care: A citizen who gives his labor for money degrades himself to the rank of slaves."
[13]) Raoul Vaneigem, theorist of the post-surrealist Situationist International which was influential in the May 68 events in France, wrote The Book of Pleasures.
"[24] Autonomist philosopher Bifo defines refusal of work as not "so much the obvious fact that workers do not like to be exploited, but something more.
"As a response to these developments his view is that "the dissemination of self-organized knowledge can create a social framework containing infinite autonomous and self-reliant worlds.
Thus, far from breaking with 'work', ... the workers maintained the practice of clocking-in, continued to organize themselves and the community around the needs of the factory, paid themselves from profits arising from the sale of watches, maintained determined relations between individual work done and wage, and continued to wear their work shirts throughout the process.
A supporter of Jean-Paul Sartre's existentialist version of Marxism after World War Two, in the aftermath of the May '68 student riots, he became more concerned with political ecology.
[28] In 2022, Green Theory & Praxis Journal published a Total Liberation Pathway which involved "an abolition of compulsory work for all beings."
This meant rejecting all conventional desires for wealth, power, health, and fame, and by living a simple life free from all possessions.
They believed that the world belonged equally to everyone, and that suffering was caused by false judgments of what was valuable and by the worthless customs and conventions which surrounded society.
The name Cynic derives from the Greek word κυνικός, kynikos, "dog-like" and that from κύων, kyôn, "dog" (genitive: kynos).
[32] It seems certain that the word dog was also thrown at the first Cynics as an insult for their shameless rejection of conventional manners, and their decision to live on the streets.
Freeter (フリーター, furītā) (other spellings below) is a Japanese expression for people between the age of 15 and 34 who lack full-time employment or are unemployed, excluding homemakers and students.
These people do not start a career after high school or university but instead usually live as so-called parasite singles with their parents and earn some money with low-skilled and low-paid jobs.
In Italy, 30-something singles still relying on their mothers are joked about, being called Bamboccioni (literally: grown-up babies) and in Germany they are known as Nesthocker (German for an altricial bird), who are still living at Hotel Mama [de].
