Laziness and Labor: Variations on a Malevich Theme

Abstract

What idleness, leisure, and free time have in common is that they are the opposite of labor; all three are linked with the cessation or interruption of labor. The article takes Kazimir Malevich’s provocative essay Laziness as the Truth of Mankind (1921) as the starting point for an examination of the complex and fraught issue of the balance between idleness and labor. Malevich redefines idleness as grace, as the point of labor and its peer, and as something that is not only a release from hard labor but that also leads to peace and God. The author proposes a reading of Malevich’s apologetics of idleness in juxtaposition with Marx’s early focus on the issues of human freedom and on alleviating alienation in a newly arranged society, and with Paul Lafargue’s argument that workers would do better to fight for the right to be idle than for the right to work. The comparison with Marx and Lafargue reveals a fundamental flaw in their socialist program of heroic labor, which preserved the exploitation of labor but had the state rather than the capitalists appropriate it. Malevich’s argument comes close to certain insights of John Maynard Keynes in which he envisaged science and technology resolving economic problems by enabling humanity to enter an age of idleness and plenty. Giorgio Agamben’s philosophical deliberations round out the contemporary understanding of the relationship between labor and idleness. From this point of view, laziness and idleness become essential elements of meaningful labor. The option to remain idle, to reject work, to prolong it or to delay its completion are becoming the sine qua non of creative labor worthy of a free person.