💾 Archived View for library.inu.red › file › charles-fourier-attractive-labour.gmi captured on 2023-01-29 at 08:30:34. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Title: Attractive Labour Author: Charles Fourier Date: 1971 Language: en Topics: libertarian socialism, work, labor Source: https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/fourier/works/ch26.htm
In the civilized mechanism we find everywhere composite unhappiness
instead of composite charm. Let us judge of it by the case of labor. It
is, says the Scripture very justly, a punishment of man: Adam and his
issue are condemned to earn their bread by the sweat of their brow.
That, already, is an affliction; but this labor, this ungrateful labor
upon which depends the earning of our miserable bread, we cannot even
get it! a laborer lacks the labor upon which his maintenance depends –
he asks in vain for a tribulation! He suffers a second, that of
obtaining work at times whose fruit is his master’s and not his, or of
being employed in duties to which he is entirely unaccustomed.. . . The
civilized laborer suffers a third affliction through the maladies with
which he is generally stricken by the excess of labor demanded by his
master.
He suffers a fifth affliction, that of being despised and treated as a
beggar because he lacks those necessaries which he consents to purchase
by the anguish of repugnant labor. He suffers, finally, a sixth
affliction, in that he will obtain neither advancement nor sufficient
wages, and that to the vexation of present suffering is added the
perspective of future suffering, and of being sent to the gallows should
he demand that labor which he may lack to-morrow.
Labor, nevertheless, forms the delight of various creatures, such as
beavers, bees, wasps, ants, which are entirely at liberty to prefer
inertia: but God has provided them with a social mechanism which
attracts to industry, and causes happiness to be found in industry. Why
should he not have accorded us the same favor as these animals? What a
difference between their industrial condition and ours! A Russian, an
Algerian, work from fear of the lash or the bastinado; an Englishman, a
Frenchman, from fear of the famine which stalks close to his poor
household; the Greeks and the Romans, whose freedom has been vaunted to
us, worked as slaves, and from fear of punishment, like the Negroes in
the colonies to-day.
Associative labor, in order to exert a strong attraction upon people,
will have to differ in every particular from the repulsive conditions
which render it so odious in the existing state of things. It is
necessary, in order that it become attractive, that associative labor
fulfill the following seven conditions:
wages.
the three faculties, capital, labor, and talent.
being impossible to sustain enthusiasm longer than an hour and a half or
two hours in the exercise of agricultural or manufacturing labor.
interested and stimulated by very active rivalries.
elegance and cleanliness.
sex and age may devote itself to duties that are suited to it.
enjoyment of the right to labor or the right to engage in such branch of
labor as they may please to select, provided they give proof of
integrity and ability.
Finally, that, in this new order, people possess a guarantee of
well-being, of a minimum sufficient for the present and the future, and
that this guarantee free them from all uneasiness concerning themselves
and their families.
We find all these properties combined in the associative mechanism,
whose discovery I make public.
In order to attain happiness, it is necessary to introduce it into the
labors which engage the greater part of our lives. Life is a long
torment to one who pursues occupations without attraction. Morality
teaches us to love work: let it know, then, how to render work lovable,
and, first of all, let it introduce luxury into, husbandry and the
workshop. If the arrangements are poor, repulsive, how arouse industrial
attraction?
In work, as in pleasure, variety is evidently the desire of nature. Any
enjoyment prolonged, without interruption, beyond two hours, conduces to
satiety, to abuse, blunts our faculties, and exhausts pleasure. A repast
of four hours will not pass off without excess; an opera of four hours
will end by cloying the spectator. Periodical variety is a necessity of
the body and of the soul, a necessity in all nature; even the soil
requires alteration of seeds, and seed alteration of soil. The stomach
will soon reject the best dish if it be offered every day, and the soul
will be blunted in the exercise of any virtue if it be not relieved by
some other virtue.
If there is need of variety in pleasure after indulging in it for two
hours, so much the more does labor require this diversity, which is
continual in the associative state, and is guaranteed to the poor as
well as the rich.
The chief source of light-heartedness among Harmonians is the frequent
change of sessions. Life is a perpetual torment to our workmen, who are
obliged to spend twelve, and frequently fifteen, consecutive hours in
some tedious labor. Even ministers are not exempt; we find some of them
complain of having passed an entire day in the stupefying task of
affixing signatures to thousands of official vouchers. Such wearisome
duties are unknown in the associative order; the Harmonians, who devote
an hour, an hour and a half, or at most two hours, to the different
sessions, and who, in these short sessions, are sustained by cabalistic
impulses and by friendly union with selected associates, cannot fail to
bring and to find cheerfulness everywhere.
The radical evil of our industrial system is the employment of the
laborer in a single occupation, which runs the risk of coming to a
stand-still. The fifty thousand workmen of Lyons who are beggars to-day
(besides fifty thousand women and children), would be scattered over two
or three hundred phalanxes, which would make silk their principal
article of manufacture, and which would not be thrown out by a year or
two of stagnation in that branch of industry. If at the end of that time
their factory should fail completely, they would start one of a
different kind, without having stopped work, without ever making their
daily subsistence dependent upon a continuation or suspension of outside
orders.
In a progressive series all the groups acquire so much the more skill in
that their work is greatly subdivided, and that every member engages
only in the kind in which he professes to excel. The heads of the
Series, spurred on to study by rivalry, bring to their work the
knowledge of a student of the first rank. The subordinates are inspired
with an ardor which laughs at all obstacles, and with a fanaticism for
the maintenance of the honor of the Series against rival districts. In
the heat of action they accomplish what seems humanly impossible, like
the French grenadiers who scaled the rocks of Mahon, and who, upon the
day following, were unable, in cold blood, to clamber up the rock which
they had assailed under the fire of the enemy. Such are the progressive
Series in their work; every obstacle vanishes before the intense pride
which dominates them; they would grow angry at the word impossible, and
the most daunting kinds of labor, such as managing the soil, are to them
the lightest of sports. If we could to-day behold an organized district,
behold at early dawn thirty industrial groups issue in state from the
palace of the Phalanx, and spread themselves over the fields and the
workshops, waving their banners with cries of triumph and impatience, we
should think we were gazing at bands of madmen intent upon putting the
neighboring districts to fire and sword. Such will he the athletes who
will take the place of our mercenary and languid workmen, and who will
succeed in making ambrosia and nectar grow upon a soil which yields only
briers and tares to the feeble hands of the civilized.