ON IDLENESS

By Rudolf Walther

[This article published in: Frankfurter Rundschau online 4/5/2005 is translated from the German on the World Wide Web, www.fr-aktuell.de/ressorts/kultur_und_medien/das_politische_ buch/?cnt=656895.]


“Uncontrolled capitalism proved to be a completely wrong track toward the end of the 19th century.” “The governing church of work does everything so people only have time and strength for two things in life: for work and job-hunting.”

The first sentence comes from the essay “On Idleness” of the conservative journalist and former FAZ [Frankfurter Allgemeiner Zeitung] editor Eberhard Straub. The second sentence is in the foreword to a book of leftist authors from the circle of the Krisis journal. The title of their anthology makes clear what is central: “Dead Men Working. Guide to Work Criticism and Social Criticism in Times of Capitalist Running Amok”. For whoever still needs proof after the success of Connie Maier’s “Guide to Laziness,” this agreement is evidence of the deep crisis enveloping the work society.

In their studies, the conservative and leftwing authors refer to Marx for whom the freedom of persons and the whole society were measured by their “disposable time” and not by how long and intensively they worked. Present-day capitalism only knows the impersonal freedom of the market.” It flows into a cul-de-sac. Whoever has work has no time and whoever has time is unemployed. For Straub, “the future of persons lies beyond work and performance,” because “the time of work is past.”

The belief that work, market and growth automatically guarantee freedom is relatively new. From antiquity to the early modern times, work was regarded as coercion unworthy of a free citizen. Education, life culture and taste only develop in leisure and beyond the pressures of economic efficiency and profit-maximization. For Aristotle, Schiller, Humboldt and Marx, these were the true guarantors of self-realization and freedom.

Straub’s analysis of the historical development is convincing. In that development, work was made the “magic word” of those “market radical apostles” who “took work away” from people and enriched themselves. His reflections on “regaining leisure in a world without work” are less original. Here he slides into cultural pessimism of the desolate kind, builds on the revival of Humboldt’s idea of education and discovers the unemployed as a “probably inexhaustible reservoir of humane education.” Straub expects “more crises and more helplessness” as the trailblazers in a world without work.

RADICAL SOCIAL CRITICISM

The leftist authors of the anthology are more realistic and concrete. They do not trust paid workers as the alleged revolutionary subjects and bearers of an “emancipative message.” They plead for “radical social criticism” – for enlightenment on the “dominant work- and competition mania.” Their criticism indicts “the unbearableness and intolerability” of the work- and commodity society” and support those critics who cannot come to terms with “a life as competition robots and self-marketers.”


Eberhard Straub: Vom Nichtstun. Life in a World without Work, Wis-Verlag, Berlin 2004

Ernst Lohoff/Norbert Trinkle/ Karl-Heinz Lewed/ Maria Wolflingseder (ed): Dead Men Working. Guide to Work Criticism and Social Criticism in the Times of Capitalist Running Amok, Unrast-Verlag, Munster 2004