Review of Russell's In Praise of Idleness

This is available online; if you want to understand the nonsensical lunacy of capitalist philosophy, read it. Honestly, this is one of the greatest works of capitalist critique I have read — and I read a lot of this shit. Read through Russell’s critique, the argon of humanity is to be goofy and cherubic, to just be silly and enjoy life.

On a personal note, I am in academia-ish now, but also a very silly boy. I feel like I kind of live the life he speaks about at the end. I have fun and work out of passion (most of the time) and thoroughly enjoy being comfortably unemployed. This is not a possibility for 99.99% of people, but it should be.

There are so many good quotes in this; I will only give a few, as you can just read it yourself — it takes 30 minutes and is easy to find online.

In view of the fact that the bulk of the public expenditure of most civilized Governments consists in payment for past wars or preparation for future wars, the man who lends his money to a Government is in the same position as the bad men in Shakespeare who hire murderers.

The morality of work is the morality of slaves, and the modern world has no need of slavery.

To this day, 99 per cent of British wage-earners would be genuinely shocked if it were proposed that the King should not have a larger income than a working man. The conception of duty, speaking historically, has been a means used by the holders of power to induce others to live for the interests of their masters rather than for their own. Of course the holders of power conceal this fact from themselves by managing to believe that their interests are identical with the larger interests of humanity.

In this way, it is insured that the unavoidable leisure shall cause misery all round instead of being a universal source of happiness. Can anything more insane be imagined?

There is no longer any reason why the bulk of the population should suffer this deprivation; only a foolish asceticism, usually vicarious, makes us continue to insist on work in excessive quantities now that the need no longer exists.

This essay is Marx without hate, and is incredibly important in our contemporary incarnation of Plutocratic Fascism. This is essentially Capital Volume 1 in 12 pages, but with the humour of Part 8 (the historical section) of Capital v1.

The later part of the essay also shows that if Lenin had just read Nietzsche he wouldn’t have fucked up so badly.

Industry, sobriety, willingness to work long hours for distant advantages, even submissiveness to authority, all these reappear; moreover authority still represents the will of the Ruler of the Universe, Who, however, is now called by a new name, Dialectical Materialism.

A similar thing has happened in Russia as regards manual work. For ages, the rich and their sycophants have written in praise of ‘honest toil’, have praised the simple life, have professed a religion which teaches that the poor are much more likely to go to heaven than the rich, and in general have tried to make manual workers believe that there is some special nobility about altering the position of matter in space, just as men tried to make women believe that they derived some special nobility from their sexual enslavement.

The fact is that moving matter about, while a certain amount of it is necessary to our existence, is emphatically not one of the ends of human life.

The modern man thinks that everything ought to be done for the sake of something else, and never for its own sake.

The butcher who provides you with meat and the baker who provides you with bread are praiseworthy, because they are making money; but when you enjoy the food they have provided, you are merely frivolous, unless you eat only to get strength for your work.