Three Hours

In 1880 a physician born in Santiago de Cuba, writing in a Paris socialist newspaper, called the love of work a delusion and proposed that the working class pass a law forbidding itself to do more than three hours of it a day. The newspaper was L’Égalité. The physician was Paul Lafargue. The working class declined, and has been declining for a hundred and forty-six years, with a loyalty to its own overwork that he would have found either touching or diagnostic, depending on the hour.¹

His pamphlet, The Right to Be Lazy, is one of the very few political tracts that is still funny, and one of the very few that is wrong in ways that are instructive. It argues that the glorification of work is a creed that serves people who live off other people’s work. It argues that machines should have ended toil and instead extended it. It argues that overwork and unemployment are two faces of the same arrangement. And it ends with a prayer to Laziness, which is not a thing the labor movement usually gets around to.

I want to do with it what I do with everything, which is to put the other side’s best argument on the table first. There are good critics of Lafargue, and the best of them are not defenders of bosses. They think work is where a human life gets some of its meaning, and they suspect that a world with three hours of it would be a world with nothing to do. I think they are partly right, and partly describing a world that does not exist: the one in which the available work is dignified, chosen and fairly paid.

The house rule

An empirical claim says what happened or what is true: a count, a rate, a finding. I source those, date them and flag the thin ones. A moral premise says what matters, and I state it as a premise so that you can reject it without hunting for an error in my footnotes. Rhetorical force is the adjective and the dry joke, and when a paragraph is mostly force I will say so.

The boundary is the usual one. This essay is about a dogma, a set of institutions and a managerial culture. It is not about workers, who are doing the best they can with the arrangement they were handed, and it is not about any people, nation or faith. Lafargue’s pamphlet contains passages about “races” and about religions that I do not repeat as my own view, and I flag them where they come up. I quote the English text hosted by the Marxists Internet Archive, which is the 1907 translation by Charles H. Kerr.²

The man

Paul Lafargue was born on January 15, 1842, in Santiago de Cuba, and moved with his parents to Bordeaux at the age of nine.³ (The Marxists Internet Archive’s index gives 1841. I use 1842, which the other two biographical sources I read agree on.⁴) He studied medicine in Paris, his student politics cost him his place in the French university system, and he finished his training in London, where he met Karl Marx’s family. In 1868 he married Marx’s second daughter, and the couple had three sons, all of whom died in infancy or early childhood.⁵

He wrote the first version of The Right to Be Lazy in 1880 as a series of articles in L’Égalité, and it appeared as a pamphlet in the early 1880s. (Sources disagree on whether the first pamphlet was 1881 or the revised edition of 1883, the date the Marxists Internet Archive uses.)⁶ By 1882 he was back in France, working for an insurance company and, according to the biographical summary I read, helping to direct the French Workers’ Party with Jules Guesde.⁷ In 1891 he was elected to the Chamber of Deputies for Lille.⁸

Two facts belong in any honest sketch. The first is that he was of mixed ancestry and thought of himself as such: the sources describe a family that included French colonists, people of African descent from Saint-Domingue and a Jewish grandfather, and describe Lafargue writing to Engels in terms that identified him with his African ancestry.⁹ Marx, in private letters, wrote of him in language I am not going to reproduce, and that the biographers I read do not excuse.¹⁰ I mention it because this essay is going to criticize a passage of Lafargue’s own about “races,” and it would be dishonest to do so while pretending that the movement he belonged to was free of the thing itself.

The second is the famous remark. You will have seen it quoted as: Marx said he was not a Marxist. The primary record is more modest and more interesting. In a letter to Eduard Bernstein of November 2-3, 1882, Engels writes about “what is known as ‘Marxism’ in France,” calls it “an altogether peculiar product,” and adds, in the same sentence, that Marx once said to Lafargue: “Ce qu’il y a de certain c’est que moi, je ne suis pas Marxiste.” The edition supplies a translation in brackets: “If anything is certain, it is that I myself am not a Marxist.”¹¹ In a letter to Conrad Schmidt of August 5, 1890, Engels repeats it, in the context of “the French ‘Marxists’ of the late [18]70s”: “All I know is that I am not a Marxist.”¹² The scholar Maximilien Rubel lists those two letters and a further one to Lafargue himself, and notes that Marx, writing to Engels in the autumn of 1882 about the rival French socialist factions, complained that “the Marxists and the anti-Marxists” had both done their best to ruin his trip to France.¹³

So the remark is reported by Engels, twice, and it is about the French party that Lafargue helped to lead. It is not a renunciation of Marx’s own theory. It is the sound of a man declining to sign for the version of his ideas being sold in a country he was only visiting. That matters here because Lafargue’s best-known work is not exactly orthodox. Marx’s own discussion of freedom, in a passage of Capital that Engels edited and published in 1894, eleven years after Marx’s death, says that “the realm of freedom actually begins only where labour which is determined by necessity and mundane considerations ceases,” and that “[t]he shortening of the working-day is its basic prerequisite.”¹⁴ Lafargue’s pamphlet, written earlier and in a very different register, is an extended joke on that sentence. I claim no influence in either direction. I claim that father-in-law and son-in-law arrived, by different roads, at the same door.

What the pamphlet says

Here is the argument, in the order he makes it.

The delusion. The opening is the best known: “A strange delusion possesses the working classes of the nations where capitalist civilization holds its sway.” He defines it as “the love of work, the furious passion for work, pushed even to the exhaustion of the vital force of the individual and his progeny,” and blames not the workers but the priests, economists and moralists who “have cast a sacred halo over work.” He positions himself with a flourish: “I, who do not profess to be a Christian, an economist or a moralist, I appeal from their judgement to that of their God.”¹⁵ The joke is a real one. The Sermon on the Mount tells you to consider the lilies, which “toil not, neither do they spin,” and the God of Genesis, “after six days of work, he rests for all eternity.”¹⁶ It is an argument from inside the tradition, not from outside it.

What the factory does. The second chapter is the angriest. He quotes an anonymous pamphlet of 1770, An Essay on Trade and Commerce, whose author proposed that the poor be put in “houses of terror” and worked fourteen hours a day. He quotes an Anglican clergyman, the Rev. Mr. Townshend, on why hunger is better than law for making people work: legal compulsion “gives too much trouble, requires too much violence and makes too much noise,” whereas hunger “is not only a pressure which is peaceful, silent and incessant, but as it is the most natural motive for work and industry, it also provokes to the most powerful efforts.”¹⁷ That is one of the most clarifying things ever said about the labor market by a man who thought he was defending it, and Lafargue’s decision to give it a paragraph of its own is the best editorial choice in the pamphlet. He goes on to Dr. Villermé’s report, which he dates to 1840, on the textile workers of Mulhouse, including its finding that half the children of the manufacturers reached the age of twenty-one while the same half died before the age of two among the weavers and spinners.¹⁸ I have not independently checked Villermé’s figures. The point for Lafargue is moral and rhetorical: this is what “work” means to the people told to love it.

The machine paradox. The third chapter is the economic core. A Greek poet, Antiparos, greeted the water mill by telling the millers to sleep peacefully, because the nymphs had been put to work in their place. “Alas!” says Lafargue, “The leisure, which the pagan poet announced, has not come.”¹⁹ A knitting machine makes 30,000 meshes a minute against a hand-knitter’s five, and yet, as machines improve, “the laborer, instead of prolonging his former rest times, redoubles his ardor, as if he wished to rival the machine.”²⁰ The result is overproduction: workers make more than anyone can consume, a crisis follows, the shops close, and the workers, “brutalized by the dogma of work,” do not demand the goods they made but “go and beat their heads against the doors of the workshops.”²¹ The “great problem of capitalist production” becomes “to discover consumers, to excite their appetites and create in them fictitious needs.”²² That sentence describes the advertising industry, which in 1883 was not yet a profession.

The work-sharing proposal. If there is too much labor and too little to consume, share the work: “to have work for all it is necessary to apportion it like water on a ship in distress.” He quotes manufacturers who told an official commission that their own hours were too long, among them an Alsatian industrialist who said that four years of an eleven-hour day had left output higher, and a Belgian who said that spinners in England worked two hours a day less and still out-produced his own. He concludes: “what breathless speed would be given to French production by a legal limitation of the working day to three hours.”²³ Observe the structure. It is not only that shorter hours would be nicer. It is that they would be more productive, that they would employ more people, and that capitalists themselves have said so. We will test all three.

The three-hour law. The last chapter is the manifesto and the circus. The working class should rise “not to demand the Rights of Man, which are but the rights of capitalist exploitation, not to demand the Right to Work which is but the right to misery, but to forge a brazen law forbidding any man to work more than three hours a day.” And, in a sentence that sounds like a placard: “Work ought to be forbidden and not imposed.”²⁴ What follows is a satirical fantasy in which the rich are pensioned off, politicians are set to cleaning latrines, moralists are shut in great wheels to “grind wind,” and the liberated population consumes with abandon. It ends with an apostrophe: “O Laziness, mother of the arts and noble virtues, be thou the balm of human anguish!”²⁵

Work ought to be forbidden and not imposed.

Paul Lafargue, The Right to Be Lazy

Two observations about what he wants the leisure for, because they matter later. It is largely consumption: his liberated proletarian eats “juicy beefsteaks of a pound or two” and drinks “broad and deep bumpers of Bordeaux and Burgundy.”²⁶ And it is largely entertainment: “to kill the time, which kills us second by second, there will be shows and theatrical performances always and always.”²⁷ That is a better sentence than the one it sits in, and more honest than he probably realized. It is where the pessimists and the dignity-of-work people turn out to have the same complaint.

The case against

The strongest criticisms come from five directions. I begin with the ones about his own text, because they are the easiest to check.

His own text

There are parts of the pamphlet I will not defend. The first chapter contains an ethnographic argument that I think is simply bad, and that a modern reader will find offensive. It sets a “noble savage” against “our miserable slaves of machines,” opposes “the races for which work is an organic necessity” to peoples who supposedly hate it, and assigns national characters to the Spanish, the Scots, the Chinese and others on the strength of a few stereotypes and some travelers’ reports.²⁸ It is the nineteenth-century anthropology of his day, in a pamphlet that otherwise prides itself on seeing through the received opinions of its day. A worker’s right to rest does not depend on whether some peoples are naturally lazier than others. The only complicating fact I can offer is that its author was himself of mixed Caribbean descent, which makes the passage stranger and does not excuse it.²⁹ I have left it out of everything that follows, and if you want to defend the pamphlet, I think you should do the same.

The second is the Greeks. He holds up classical Athens as a society that “had only contempt for work: their slaves alone were permitted to labor,” and treats the leisure of the free man as the condition of Aristotle, Phidias and Aristophanes.³⁰ It is an odd model for a socialist demand for universal leisure, since the idyll depends, as he says in the same sentence, on the people who were not permitted to be idle. The answer, which is the machine, comes two chapters later, and it is a good one. But the first chapter makes the problem sound like attitudes, not arrangements.

The third is the nostalgia. He says the old guilds’ artisans worked five days out of seven and that “Merrie England” was merry.³¹ He gives no source for the working week, and I have not found one I trust, so I treat it with the usual caution owed to pre-industrial golden ages. The pamphlet is a polemic, not a time-use survey, and I do not hold him to a standard he did not claim.

The lump of labor

The economist’s objection is the oldest. The work-sharing proposal assumes a fixed quantity of work, so that if each person does less, more people are employed. Economists call this the lump-of-labor fallacy, and they have been correcting it, with limited success, for a very long time. Batut, Garnero and Tondini, writing for VoxEU, say that the idea that a shorter work week could raise overall employment is “just a variation of the ‘lump-of-labour’ fallacy,” and then, which is better than asserting it, test it. They looked at working-time reductions in Portugal (1996), Italy (1997), France (1998), Belgium (2001) and Slovenia (2002), and found that the reforms cut hours without delivering anything like full work-sharing: employment, “if anything,” fell (though the estimates were not statistically different from zero), and total hours worked in the affected sectors fell significantly.³²

That is a clean result against half of Lafargue’s argument, and I accept it. Cut the hours and the work does not simply reappear as more jobs. His metaphor, “apportion it like water on a ship in distress,” is a good picture of a closed system, and a labor market is not one.

Unemployment is not leisure

The second objection is the most serious, because it is not about economics. It says: you think a person freed from work would play the lute. In practice a person freed from work, but not from need, sits down and fades.

The classic evidence is the Marienthal study. Marienthal was a village near Vienna whose textile factory shut its last workshops in February 1930, and which a team led by Paul Lazarsfeld, with Marie Jahoda as principal author, studied from November 1931 into the spring of 1932.³³ Its famous conclusion was “the weary community,” which the archive that maintains the study describes as “running counter to the popular notion held in the socialist parties of an unemployed person being a revolutionary.”³⁴ It did not fit the Lafargue picture of an unemployed person as a happy banqueter either. Summaries of the book, which I have not checked against the text, say that the men’s days lost their structure and that resignation and apathy, not a flowering of idleness, were the typical response; I flag that in the reviewer note.

This is a strong objection. Lafargue’s liberated worker is not an unemployed worker, since his needs are met and his hours are reduced by law, which is a very different thing. But the critic is entitled to ask how many of the goods people get from work are goods of wages, how many of structure, company and status, and how many of the activity itself. The pamphlet lumps them together as “toil” and says all of it is bad. That is certainly too simple.

The Catholic argument

In 1981 Pope John Paul II published the encyclical Laborem Exercens on human work, on the ninetieth anniversary of Rerum Novarum.³⁵ Its central claim is the one Lafargue denies: “Work is a good thing for man,” because through it man “achieves fulfilment as a human being and indeed, in a sense, becomes ‘more a human being’.” It grounds that claim in Genesis, in the instruction to “subdue the earth,” and says that from the beginning man “is called to work.”³⁶

It would be a mistake to read this as a defense of overwork, and a worse one to read it as a defense of the factory owner. The same document says that “in the final analysis it is always man who is the purpose of the work,” including “the most monotonous even the most alienating work.” It condemns the use of work as “a means for oppressing man.” It admits that all work “is inevitably linked with toil,” and reads the biblical “sweat of your face” as a consequence of the Fall that no Christian is entitled to deny. And it lists, among workers’ rights, “a regular weekly rest comprising at least Sunday” and “a longer period of rest, namely the holiday or vacation.”³⁷ The position is not that work is good and rest is waste. It is that work has two sides, the dignity of the person acting and the burden, and a just order protects the first and limits the second.

That is a much better opponent than “the Protestant ethic.” It says Lafargue is right about the rest, wrong about the delusion, and that the thing he calls a delusion is a real good his proposal would drain out of life. A Catholic philosopher, Josef Pieper, made a related point in 1948 from the other direction: a society of “total work” had lost the idea of leisure as anything but recovery for more work, and real leisure was something contemplative and festive, the basis of culture, not a vacation.³⁸ The second is closer to Lafargue’s complaint than the first. On this evidence the Church is not on the side of the three-hour day. It is also not on the side of the sixty-hour week.

Arendt

The most interesting objection is Hannah Arendt’s, because it accepts Lafargue’s premise, that modern society has become a society of labor, and says that is the problem and not the cure. In The Human Condition (1958) she distinguished three kinds of activity. Labor is tied to the biological cycle of life: producing what is needed to be consumed, consuming it, and starting again. Work is the making of durable things that build a lasting world. Action is what people do together in public, in speech and deed, to show who they are and begin something new.³⁹ She thought modernity had inverted the hierarchy. “Obsessed with life, productivity, and consumption, we have turned into a society of laborers and jobholders who no longer appreciate the values associated with work, nor those associated with action,” as the Stanford summary puts it.⁴⁰

Now watch what she does with Lafargue’s world. In the prologue she describes “the advent of automation, which in a few decades probably will empty the factories and liberate mankind from its oldest and most natural burden, the burden of laboring and the bondage to necessity.” She grants that the wish is ancient, and that freedom from labor “once belonged among the most firmly established privileges of the few,” which is Lafargue’s Greek point from the other side. But the fulfillment arrives at the wrong moment: “It is a society of laborers which is about to be liberated from the fetters of labor, and this society does no longer know of those other higher and more meaningful activities for the sake of which this freedom would deserve to be won.” Then the sentence everyone remembers: “What we are confronted with is the prospect of a society of laborers without labor, that is, without the only activity left to them. Surely, nothing could be worse.”⁴¹

That is the Marienthal objection in philosophical dress, and an objection to Lafargue’s idea of what the free hours are for. What does his liberated population do? It eats, drinks and watches plays. On her scheme that is labor’s cycle in the other gear, consumption in place of production. That application is mine, not a sentence of hers, and I say so because I do not want to put words in Arendt’s mouth. I think it is fair, and it is the best reply I know to the question “what would they do?”

She also quarreled with Marx on this ground. As I read the secondary literature, her objection is that Marx treats labor as the essential human activity and then looks forward to a “realm of freedom” in which labor is abolished, which leaves open what remains that is human.⁴² (Defenders of Marx reply that he meant the end of alienated, necessary labor, not of productive activity, which is consistent with the Capital passage quoted above.⁴³ I have not re-read her chapter, and I flag that.) Lafargue sits exactly on the fault line. He says labor is the problem, and does not say what comes next except a menu.

The dignity of work

The last objection is the contemporary one, and it comes from the secular, mildly left side of the table. The philosopher Michael Sandel, in The Tyranny of Merit (2020), argues that a society that sorts people by credentials and wages tells those at the bottom that their contribution is worth little, and that what is wanted is “contributive justice,” an order in which people can contribute to the common good and be recognized for it.⁴⁴ I am summarizing from secondary pieces I did not read in full, and I note that in the reviewer note. The logic is clear enough: the harm is not that people work too much but that they work without recognition, and the answer is to make work better and fairer, not rarer.

In its strongest form it goes like this. Lafargue wants three hours. The person who cleans the hospital, drives the bus, stocks the shelf or sits with the dying does not want to be told that her life’s labor is a delusion. She wants to be paid, thanked, and sent home. The way to respect her is to raise the floor, strengthen her bargaining power and honor what she does, not to wish she did not have to do it. That is a fair response to a pamphlet that scolds the proletariat for “betraying its instincts, despising its historic mission.”⁴⁵ A nurse reading it is entitled to ask what it has to say to her. The honest answer is: not much, directly. It has a lot to say to her employer.

What the evidence leaves standing

Now the audit. I take Lafargue’s claims one at a time and ask what has happened to them.

Did the hours fall?

Partly, and then they stopped. The Our World in Data series, which splices historical estimates with later national-accounts data and should be read as a rough shape and not a measurement, puts annual working hours per worker in the United States at about 3,100 in 1870, about 2,000 in 1950 and about 1,800 in 2023. For Germany the figures run from about 3,300 to about 1,300, and for France from about 3,200 to about 1,500.⁴⁶ That is a fall of more than a third in the American case and more than half in the German one. Nobody in 1883 was asking for that, and Lafargue would be entitled to call it a victory, since shortening the working day is exactly what the labor movement spent a century fighting for.

Then there is Keynes. In 1930 he published “Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren,” which predicted that in a hundred years the standard of living in progressive countries would be between four and eight times as high, and that the economic problem would turn out not to be “the permanent problem of the human race.” On hours he wrote something Lafargue could have signed: “Three-hour shifts or a fifteen-hour week may put off the problem for a great while. For three hours a day is quite enough to satisfy the old Adam in most of us!”⁴⁷ The most respectable economist of the twentieth century and a Cuban-born pamphleteer landed on the same number forty-seven years apart. I find that more suggestive than anything either said on the way there.

A fifteen-hour week is 780 hours a year, on my arithmetic. The Americans are at 1,789.⁴⁸ Keynes’s window runs to 2030, so he has four years left, and I have not audited the income half of his prediction. What I can say is that the hours half has not come true, and that he offered a reason it might not. He feared a general “nervous breakdown,” and compared it to the condition of well-off wives, “unfortunate women, many of them, who have been deprived by their wealth of their traditional tasks and occupations,” who found housework unamusing without “the spur of economic necessity” and could find nothing more amusing to put in its place.⁴⁹ Whatever one makes of the example, the worry is Arendt’s and Marienthal’s, stated in 1930.

Why the hours did not fall further I cannot settle. The economists have candidates, among them rising consumption and competition for status, and I do not have the evidence in front of me to choose between them. Lafargue’s answer was “the dogma.” That has the merit of being an answer and the demerit of being the only one he considered.

Bertrand Russell gave a neat version of it in 1932, in an essay that, in the text I read, does not mention Lafargue. Suppose an invention lets the same men make twice as many pins. “In a sensible world, everybody concerned in the manufacture of pins would take to working four hours instead of eight, and everything else would go on as before.” In the actual world the men go on working eight hours, there are too many pins, some employers go bankrupt, and half the men are thrown out of work, so that “there is, in the end, just as much leisure as on the other plan, but half the men are totally idle while half are still overworked.” His conclusion has the compression of Lafargue’s best: “The morality of work is the morality of slaves, and the modern world has no need of slavery.”⁵⁰ That is chapter three, distilled, and made more persuasive by the absence of the beefsteaks.

Is it making people unwell?

A pessimist should be careful here, because it is the claim the pamphlet most wants to be true and the one for which a clean test is hardest to find.

Start with the largest survey of workers. Gallup’s State of the Global Workplace report for 2026, using data collected through 2025, finds that 20 percent of employees worldwide are “engaged” at work, 64 percent are not engaged and 16 percent are actively disengaged, and that 40 percent say they experienced “a lot” of stress the previous day. The region with the highest share of engaged employees is the United States and Canada, at 31 percent; it also has the highest share reporting daily stress, at 50 percent. In Europe, 12 percent are engaged and 39 percent report daily stress.⁵¹ Managers are more stressed than the people they manage (45 percent against 39) and only slightly more engaged (22 against 19).⁵²

I would not build a philosophy on these numbers. “Engagement” is Gallup’s own construct, the data are self-reported, and nothing in them says what would happen to anyone’s mood if the hours were cut. What they do say is that most people who have jobs do not experience them as engaging, in any region. That is a finding for Lafargue, and at least as much a finding for his critics. If you believe, with Laborem Exercens, that work is where a person becomes “more a human being,” then four employees in five reporting that their work does not engage them is an indictment of the arrangement you are defending.

The World Health Organization was more cautious, in prose that repays reading. In 2019 it included burn-out in the eleventh revision of the International Classification of Diseases as “an occupational phenomenon,” and said it “is not classified as a medical condition.” The definition: “Burn-out is a syndrome conceptualized as resulting from chronic workplace stress that has not been successfully managed,” characterized by “feelings of energy depletion or exhaustion; increased mental distance from one’s job, or feelings of negativism or cynicism related to one’s job; and reduced professional efficacy.”⁵³ I like it because it declines to say what Lafargue says. It does not say that work is poison. It says there is a recognizable syndrome that comes from work that is not well managed, and that it deserves a name. A pessimist can live with that, and it is a standard of its own: a workplace that is not managing its stress has a defect, whether or not you also think workplaces should be abolished.

Does a shorter week work?

This is the claim on which Lafargue was most ahead of his time, and the evidence is the best we have.

In the United Kingdom, between June and December 2022, 61 organizations with about 2,900 employees cut working time by 20 percent with no cut in pay, in what Cambridge’s sociologists called the world’s largest trial of a four-day week. They did the research with colleagues at Boston College and the think tank Autonomy. By the end, 71 percent of employees reported lower burnout and 39 percent reported being less stressed. Sick days fell by 65 percent and staff departures by 57 percent, against the same period a year earlier. Revenue “barely changed,” rising 1.4 percent on average among the 23 organizations that supplied data, and 56 of the 61, or 92 percent, said they meant to continue, with 18 making the change permanent.⁵⁴ A larger study in Nature Human Behaviour in 2025, covering six countries, found after a six-month trial that a four-day week without loss of pay reduced burnout, raised job satisfaction and improved mental and physical health.⁵⁵

I count that as support for the productivity half of Lafargue’s claim, the manufacturer’s observation he quotes with such relish that shorter days need not mean less output. The caveats deserve equal weight. The firms volunteered, which makes them the firms most likely to find it works. Much of the outcome data were self-reported. The cut was one day in five, not five hours in eight. And the economists who study these trials note that voluntary opt-in experiments may not provide the identification a policy decision would need.⁵⁶

The same economists add the most useful single result in this section. In the earlier legislated reductions in Europe, hours did fall and hourly wages rose, and the estimated productivity gains were positive but not statistically distinguishable from zero. On wellbeing the evidence is better: one study they cite found that satisfaction rose after the reforms in France and Portugal, and another found that work was intensified in France, meaning people did the same work in less time.⁵⁷ So Lafargue is right that fewer hours can be better for people. He is wrong that they will automatically employ more of them, and he did not consider that the same work might be squeezed into the shorter day, which is the first thing a union steward would have raised in 1883.

What a pessimist adds

Lafargue assumes that if you remove toil, what is left is joy. He never asks what the joy is made of. Schopenhauer asked, and his answer is the least comfortable on offer. Willing, he says in The World as Will and Representation, is rooted in “need, lack, and hence pain.” If the will lacks objects because it is “at once deprived of them again by too easy a satisfaction, a fearful emptiness and boredom come over it.” And so: “its life swings like a pendulum to and fro between pain and boredom, and these two are in fact its ultimate constituents.”⁵⁸ (I quote an English rendering reproduced in class notes whose translator the page does not name. The Stanford entry confirms the idea, with the phrase “unremitting oscillation between pain and boredom.”⁵⁹)

Lafargue assumes that if you remove toil, what is left is joy. He never asks what the joy is made of.

Notice what this does to the three-hour day. It does not say the day is a bad idea. It says that the pain of compulsion is one pole, and that what is left when you remove it is the other. Lafargue half knows this. His sentence about the future is that there will be shows “always and always,” to “kill the time, which kills us second by second.”⁶⁰ That is Schopenhauer in a theater seat. The man who wanted to abolish toil also knew that unoccupied time is a problem to be killed, and his solution was entertainment.

Schopenhauer’s own remedies are not banquets: the Stanford entry describes a path through aesthetic perception and, beyond it, an ascetic consciousness.⁶¹ I do not recommend the second. But three thinkers who agree on almost nothing else, a pessimist, a Catholic philosopher and a political theorist, converge on one observation: freedom from toil is only as good as what you put into the freed hours. Pieper says it has to be leisure in a real sense, not recovery.⁶² Arendt says it has to be “higher and more meaningful activities.”⁶³ Schopenhauer says it has to be something that is not just another desire. The three-hour law needs a second law, and Lafargue did not write it.

So my reading is this. The empirical half of his case is partly supported (hours, wellbeing, productivity) and partly refuted (job creation). The moral half, that the love of work is a delusion, is too strong, because the best evidence against him is not about bosses but about what joblessness does to people with no alternative structure. And the thing he did not see, in his hurry to be funny, is that leisure is a skill, an institution and a set of commitments, and a society that cannot teach it will fill the freed hours with whatever is cheapest. We have run that experiment, and the answer is on every phone. (That last sentence is mostly force.)

The unpromotable

Now the corollary, where I have to be careful, because the evidence is thinner than the feeling.

The dogma of work has a corollary Lafargue does not discuss: it is not enough to work, you must be seen to love it. The person who does the job well but declines to perform enthusiasm, who does not laugh at the senior person’s joke, who says at the meeting that the plan will not work, has a problem no performance review has a box for. I will call this person unpromotable, meaning that the formal criteria say one thing and the informal criteria another. Is there any evidence that the informal criteria reward what they seem to reward? There is some, and it is narrower than people who cite it usually make it.

The best-known study is by James Westphal of the University of Michigan and Ithai Stern, then at Northwestern, published in the Academy of Management Journal in 2007. Top managers who flattered their CEOs, agreed with their opinions and did them favors were more likely to receive board appointments at other firms where those CEOs served as directors. Women and minorities got less benefit from the same behaviors and were punished more for “monitoring senior management and offering constructive criticism.” Westphal added that the reluctance of outside directors to exercise control over management “has been implicated in a variety of negative organizational outcomes, including strategic inertia in the face of declining performance, ill-advised corporate acquisitions, accounting scandals and white-collar crime.”⁶⁴

I should be exact about what that shows. It is about corporate board seats, a special case of promotion in which the people who decide are the people you flatter. It does not show that flattery is how people get ahead in firms generally. A second study, by Milliken, Morrison and Hewlin in 2003, interviewed 40 employees and found that 34 of them, 85 percent, had at some point felt unable to raise an important issue with a supervisor.⁶⁵ Forty is a small sample and interviews are not a survey, but the finding is consistent with the board study and with what most people who have held a job will recognize without a citation.

Now the strongest case on the other side. Organizations need people who can cooperate. A person who is right about everything and cannot be worked with is not a truth-teller but a hazard, and some of the people who consider themselves victims of yes-man culture were wrong and disliked being told so. Loyalty to a team is not flattery, and a good manager may reasonably prefer the colleague who raises a problem with a solution to the one who raises it with a sneer. Deference to someone with more information is not servility. A great deal of what gets called sycophancy is manners. I take all of that seriously, and I do not think it dissolves the finding. It qualifies it: the line between tact and flattery is real, hard to draw and hard to audit, which is why organizations that fail to draw it end up with the scandals Westphal lists.

My moral premise, which is a premise and not a finding, is that a person is entitled to decline to flatter. Nobody owes the people above them a performance of delight. A firm that systematically rewards flattery will, in the long run, receive flattery, and will be surprised by what it fails to hear. And I note, without drawing a conclusion, that Gallup’s figures say managers are more stressed and barely more engaged than the people they manage.⁶⁶ A pessimist could take consolation in that: to be unpromotable is to be spared a job that does not seem to make anyone happier. I do not offer it as policy. I offer it as the sort of joke the data permit.

A firm that systematically rewards flattery will, in the long run, receive flattery, and will be surprised by what it fails to hear.

Draveil

I have left this to the end because it is the part of Lafargue’s story that people use to make him a martyr or a cautionary tale, and I think both uses are mistakes. I will give the facts, say what I think they do and do not show, and I will not describe the method, which is unnecessary to the argument and is the part that does harm.

In 1911 Lafargue was living in Draveil, a village outside Paris, with his wife, Marx’s daughter. On the night of November 25 of that year, by the date most sources give (a few say the 26th), the two of them died together, in a joint suicide. He was sixty-nine.⁶⁷ They left a note, reproduced in several English renderings that differ in pronouns and phrasing, so I paraphrase it. He wrote that he was healthy in body and mind and was ending his life before old age, which had been taking his pleasures and strength one by one, could paralyze his energy and break his will and make him a burden to himself and others. He wrote that for some years he had resolved not to live past seventy, and that he died knowing that the cause to which he had been devoted for forty-five years would one day triumph.⁶⁸ I have omitted the sentence in which the note describes the method.

They were cremated at Père Lachaise on December 3, and their ashes were placed in a tomb there.⁶⁹ Lenin, who was in Paris, spoke at the funeral for the Russian Social-Democratic Labour Party on December 3, 1911 (new style), and praised Lafargue as one of the “most gifted and profound disseminators of the ideas of Marxism.”⁷⁰ Krupskaya’s memoir records Lenin saying that a person who could no longer work for the Party must “be able to face the truth and die like the Lafargues.”⁷¹

I want to say three things, and none is a verdict.

The first is that the death is not an argument. A pamphlet that says work is overvalued is neither confirmed nor refuted by the manner of its author’s death, and anyone who uses one to prove the other is treating a life as evidence. The pamphlet is true or false on its merits, and I have spent the rest of this essay on its merits.

The second is about the note, with the caveat that I am reading a short document by a man I did not know, in translation, and may be wrong. I see someone who judged his own life by its usefulness: what he feared about old age was becoming a burden to himself and to others, and what comforted him was that his cause would prevail. That is not a criticism of him. It is an observation that the measure of worth in the note is the very measure the pamphlet attacks, the idea that what a person is for is what a person can produce. The pamphlet says a human being is more than a worker. The note, in my reading, says a human being who can no longer be of use has no further claim. I think the pamphlet was right and the note was wrong, and that a person’s worth does not run out when their output does. John Paul II, from a very different place, put the same point in a sentence I quoted earlier: “it is always man who is the purpose of the work.”⁷² If there is something in this story that the three-hour day cannot fix, it is that.

The third is that Lenin’s remark, as Krupskaya reports it, is an endorsement, and I do not endorse it. It is a political leader telling an audience that a person without a function is obliged to leave. That is the dogma of work at its most naked, applied to the one place where it should never be applied. A certain kind of reader will be tempted to treat Draveil as an act of principled dignity and move on. I would ask that reader what it says about a movement that it had to reach for it.

If any of this is close to something in your own life, and you are in the United States, you can call or text 988, the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline, at any hour. It is free and confidential, and you do not have to be in crisis to use it.⁷³ If you are elsewhere, your local emergency number or crisis line will do the same job.

What I keep

I keep the diagnosis of the sacred halo. Lafargue is right that work has been given a moral glow no other activity gets, and that the glow is useful to people who benefit from other people’s hours. The sentence about hunger being “peaceful, silent and incessant” deserves framing over every labor economist’s desk. The best answer to it, which is the Catholic one, is not to deny it but to say that a just order is one in which the glow is earned.

I keep the claim that shorter hours can be good for people and not bad for firms. The evidence is not conclusive and the samples are self-selected, but it is the best-supported part of the argument.

I keep the question he did not answer. What are the hours for? Schopenhauer, Arendt and Pieper each ask it from a different end. They do not agree on the answer, but they agree it is the question.

And here is what I drop.

The race and national-character passages, without qualification: they are bad ethnography and worse politics, and the argument needs none of them. The claim that work-sharing creates jobs: the evidence is against it. The idea that the love of work is a delusion: too strong. A great many people do their work and are glad of it, and they are not deluded. The pamphlet’s real target is not the love of work but the compulsion to treat it as the only source of worth, and its real enemy is not the worker but the manager who thinks a person who is not visibly busy is not visibly valuable. That is a smaller claim than Lafargue made. I think it is a true one.

Where I could be wrong

A pessimist should audit his own pessimism.

I could be wrong about Marienthal. It is one village in the 1930s, in a depression, with no social insurance worth the name. A voluntary reduction of hours with income secured is a different condition, and the right comparison may be the four-day-week trials, not the unemployed. If so, the critics who lean on Marienthal are over-reading it and Lafargue is closer to right than I have allowed.

I could be wrong about Arendt. I took her view of Marx from secondary summaries and her own prologue, not from a fresh reading of the chapters, and a reader with the book open may find something that complicates my application of her scheme to Lafargue’s banquets.

I could be wrong about the board-seat study. I read a university summary, not the article, and a finding about corporate directors may not generalize to the office on the fourth floor. I used it because I could find nothing better in the time I had.

And I could be wrong about the biggest thing: whether any society could cut hours to anything like three a day without something going badly wrong that no study predicted. Keynes was cautious and Lafargue was not, and a pessimist’s instinct is to side with Keynes. I do. But Keynes, the cautious one, was the one who got hours wrong, and Lafargue, the reckless one, got the diagnosis nearer right. There is probably a lesson in that. I do not know what it is.