By launching a new controversy opposing “left of work” and “left of the allowances”, the national secretary of the Communist Party woke up the old demons of the left, torn between workers’ defense and historical emancipation of labor. The controversy thus reveals a historical fracture of the left between capitalist compromise and communist rupture.
simple invective, ad hominem attacks, ego wars, strategic differences or deep fracture? The successive jousts between Fabien Roussel and the environmental deputy Sandrine Rousseau, which they relate to carnivorous virilism or the relationship to work, are not just the confrontation of a communist and reactionary folklore with the leftist ultra-modernity, Because they have a story.
Isn’t the right to work, with the opening of the national workshops, the great (ephemeral) victory of the socialist Louis Blanc (1811-1882) at his entrance to the government, in 1848? Already, Louis Blanc opposed a simple “right to assistance”, since the “right to life” was to base the right to work as productive conservation of life (socialism. Law to work, 1849).
The “historical” status of work
How can we then accuse Fabien Roussel to bend right by claiming to be the left of work? The historical fight of the Marxist left is that of the wrestling of living work against dead labor, of workers against capital. However, Karl Marx explains in his manuscripts from 1844 that communism was carried out through “the positive abolition of private property”. The power of the work dominated by the alienating oppression of capital would be abolished as long as the property of the means of production is socialized, and therefore shared work, just like the eliminated capitalist idleness.
This conception of work, however, faces ambiguous in the history of Marxism. The right to laziness claimed by Sandrine Rousseau indeed refers to the famous work of Paul Lafargue of 1880. The son -in -law of Karl Marx then sounded the charge against the right to work.
“Work, work, proletarians, to enlarge social fortune and your individual miseries.” Here is the injunction of capitalism -of the right, it would be said today -which seeks to accumulate wealth by increasing Always more survail, that is to say the exploitation of workers.
Paul Lafargue was, like Sandrine Rousseau, a contradictor of communism? As early as 1880, he asked workers to resist the overwhelming imperative of work. The difficulty here rests in the “historical” status of work: under capitalism, it is still alienating, since it is rehearsed by a raw effort under the control of capital, but it must become doubly liberating under communism. Doubly, because it is now an element of the democratic life of the defeated societies of the capitalist tutelage, but also a way to free up available social time. By trying to refute the right to work, Paul Lafargue reveals the historical ambiguity of Marxism: if, in the present, work is alienating under capitalist domination, it is however a necessary element of a communist society aiming for emancipation social.
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