A Dismodernist Reading of Paul Lafargue’s ‘The Right to Be Lazy’: For Monstrous Anti-Capitalist Modes of Resistance and Solidarity – Arianna Introna

Author: Arianna Introna

Abstract: As Compagna and Steinhart suggest, ‘Monsters simultaneously cross borders and demarcate them’ according to exclusionary paradigms entangled with conceptions of good and evil, normal and abnormal entertained vis-à-vis a specific community (2020, p.ix). My paper will develop a dismodernist reading of Paul Lafargue’s refutation of the Right to Work, contained in ‘The Right to Be Lazy’ and other essays, to explore how disability politics can be generative of ‘monstrous’ modes of anti-capitalist resistance and solidarity. In order to do so, it will put into conversation Lafargue’s theorization of the ways in which capitalist morality ‘anathematizes the flesh of the worker’, in an attempt to sentence him to fulfil ‘the role of a machine, turning out work without respite or thanks’, with the concept of ‘dismodernism’ developed by disability theorist Lennard Davis. The latter, I will argue, supports Lafargue’s refutation of the Right to Work in a two-fold manner: first, by highlighting the multitudinous ways in which non-normative bodyminds materially frustrate capital’s ability to control workers’ bodyminds; secondly, by providing a standpoint from which to challenge the anathematization of the ‘flesh of the worker’ and the normative framework it produces. This framework positions subjects which entertain a non-relation to the sphere of production as ‘monstrous others’ of the capital – labour relation and, most importantly, of the working class itself. A dismodernist engagement with Lafargue’s ‘right to be lazy’ expands to the whole of the working class the condition of material and symbolic marginalization vis-à-vis capitalist relations of production that disabled people embody. It does so, I will contend, by demonstrating how life at ‘the edges of capitalism’ materialises collective survival through ‘relations of mutual aid instead of market competition’ (O’Hearn and Grubačić 2016, p.147). My paper will conclude by proposing that disability politics can be entangled with, and contribute to, a ‘monstrous’ anti-capitalist politics of resistance and solidarity grounded in the fight for the ‘right to be lazy’ through a double process: by originating from outside the working class, and by working to ‘dismodernize’ the working class itself through the symbolic universalization of disability.

Author bio: Arianna Introna (she/they/none) got her Mlitt and PhD in Scottish Literature from the University of Stirling and is now Associate Lecturer with the Open University (Scotland). Arianna researchers and writes about Scottish literature, Marxist theory and disability studies. Their first book, Autonomist Narratives of Disability in Scottish Writing: Crip Enchantments, engages the intersection between representations of disability and class in Scottish literature from the start of the twentieth century to the present.