The Biopolitics of Laziness: Marx, Lafargue, and the Laboring Body

Abstract

In Capital Vol. 1 Marx situates the body of the worker and its labor power at the center of his critique of work. In the context of nineteenth-century industrial society, the need for a functioning and willing labor force becomes a biopolitical issue, regulated by the state and its legal system. Against the biopolitics of labor, which Marx eloquently discusses, Paul Lafargue, in The Right to Be Lazy, proposed a biopolitics of laziness, centered on the figure of the worker’s body at rest and at pleasure. Lafargue’s critique resonates with, and anticipates, the ideas of some historical avant-gardes (Surrealists and Situationists), the social and cultural experimentations of the 1960s, as well as current discussions of refusal and nonwork. Read together with the work of Lafargue, Marx’s thought makes visible the pitfalls of utopian forms of materialism, by showing the darker and more ominous side of “laziness”: through his discussion of the image of the “reserve army of the unemployed” Marx demonstrates that nonwork is not simply, and not always, a choice or an antagonistic gesture of resistance. In fact, as both Marx and Engels affirm, nonwork is a structural condition of capital, that provides a constant flow of labor, a captive and coerced audience of exploitable people ready to work under almost any conditions. This scenario persists today: the “reserve army of the unemployed” has become the contemporary precariat, and the body, contrary to Lafargue’s vision, has become fully subsumed into capital.