France has been rocked by serial strikes and demonstrations for weeks to force the Macron government to reconsider its electoral commitment to push retirement from 62 to 64.
Despite having above-average labor productivity, the French are often perceived abroad as idlers, addicts to ‘free time’ and ‘paid holidays’. Back in 2017, Macron attacked the “lazybones” who opposed his labor law reform.
Lazy people and smugglers
On the left, in France, idleness has a long ideological tradition. What happens there is reminiscent of the famous pamphlet Le droit à la paresse by agitator Paul Lafargue from 1880.
A Socialist Party activist and close to the anarchist Pierre Joseph Property is Proudhon, Lafargue himself depended on Friedrich Engels for financial support. Like his stepfather Karl Marx.
The current social crisis shows that Lafargue still has imitators and supporters in France, including Green MEP Sandrine Rousseau. She is an ardent “intersectionalist” who proposes that the left combines all social struggles: egalitarianism, environmentalism, feminism and anti-racism. Quebec solidaire, here we come!
For her, work is a “right value” that leftists and greens must fight by championing a “right to be lazy,” by fighting – believe it or not – property, wealth and growth.
The Dawn of the “Old Man Days”
The average retirement age in European countries is 65 years. France (62) is very far behind Italy and Iceland (67). In the UK you can retire at 66.
The accelerated aging of the population associated with increasing life expectancy will inevitably force those who are able to do so to stay in the labor force. Unless we support the accelerated entry of millions of young people from Africa and the Middle East.
Countries where people retire early will inevitably raise retirement ages to catch up with and exceed retirement ages where people retire at 67. In Belgium, this age will drop from 65 to 67 by 2030 (66 in 2025). In Denmark, it will gradually increase to 69 in 2035.
Holland, as socially progressive as ever, goes much further and links retirement age to life expectancy. From 2024, the Dutch will have to be 67 to retire, and from 2025 the retirement age will increase by 8 months for each year of increased life expectancy.
The unproductivity of those who claim the right to be lazy obliges those who “have the heart to work” to work more in order to live. The “right to be lazy” is the exploitation by idlers of the toiling feverishness of the socially most useful.
