“Free time is when we have the possibility to be fully human. That’s what we’re talking about.” What French protests against pension reform really want
We’re watching the French protests against the extension of working life/reduction of retirement with great interest. The tweet video above has a clip from one of the protest’s leaders, Jean-Luc Melenchon, speaking to Parisians in their thousands. Melanchon gives a grand and poetic justification for the unrest - the right for workers to benefit from their free time, to use as they see fit. His words are above, but also below:
The truth is, they haven’t understood why we’re here. We aren’t only standing for - though this would be enough - the right for a pause in existence. But above all we say: the time of life, the time which counts, isn’t only the time you believe useful—because it’s producing.
Time isn’t only the time under constraint—useful to society, the time spent working. It’s also free time. And free time is a time in life that’s not inactive. But time that’s left up to ourselves. Where we ourselves decide what we’ll do. [cheers]
That means living in a human, social way. To do not what others have decided. But what we ourselves have decided to do. To live, to love, to do nothing if we like. To attend to our loved ones, to read poetry, to do painting, to sing or do nothing. [cheers]
Free time is the time when we have the possibility to be fully human. That’s what we’re talking about. And they tell us: “you have to work more”. But we then ask - well, for what purpose? Why? When the general trend of the last century was to cut the necessary working time in half, and to increase what we call wealth fifty times over?
Why is it necessary to work more? Why is it necessary to produce more? No. The key to tomorrow, to the future, is not to produce more—for that is guaranteeing the death of the planet.
We retweeted the above, and then received a fascinating response from the Scottish-French poet/academic Paul Malgrati
Here’s the text in full:
Paul Malgrati: Paintit Room
wi reference tae Paul Lafargue, author o The Right To Be Lazy (1883)
Bairn-like, across Tesco Extra,
see them:
drap efter drap o their hert,
hatin themsels fir sellin
their lust an laze.
Cashin up their wrinkles
on the till o adultheid,
they ken time's up
an wheels hae parked on the playgroon.
Drap efter drap they
ken they've sold their efternoons
an their saund pehs
fir short nichts o plenty
an fast-faded dreams.
They ken they've sold the sun,
dart efter dart,
an lea lands that grew,
joy efter joy,
in their past rebellions.
Ah cam back tae the saundpit,
O'er late, weary efter extra
time. Ah found Paul Lafargue
in a dwam an shook his haund
san kent ma richt. Ah folded the auld sd
banner for the eicht-oor day eicht-
Oor rest an eicht-oor sleep
an speirt fir the day an grat.
“The right to leisure”, certainly, is something explored by one of the Alternative Global’s co-creators, Maria Dorthea Skov, in her forthcoming Huddlecraft course on “Living the Good Life”. As its blurb has it:
What happens when a dozen people place leisure, play and rest at the heart of their lives for 6 months?
Leisure is often reduced to the down-time we must have for the purpose of further work, whereas work is seen as the real point of existence. In this learning journey we will question and challenge that, through doing more of what brings us joy and makes us feel alive. We will discover the potential that lies in a society of more leisure. Together we will prototype ‘the good life’.
You can sign up here, from the end of April