@Phil53 :
Obviously I made a shortcut /…
Everyone makes shortcuts, on a forum it is the necessity of the genre and it is true that it is sometimes difficult to avoid approximations, or worse, misinterpretations…
As for the workers, they destroyed the machines because they saw it as an unfair competitor who took their job.
That's exactly what I said, in another form.
To my knowledge there has been no revolt to say the machines work for us so we work less.
No, of course, since the machines don't work for workers ...
I followed your judicious advice and read (it's been a long time since I wanted to do it) "The right to laziness", a vigorous pamphlet which, despite a very marked historical context, retains a good part of its corrosive substance.
However, I regret an ambiguity when he evokes the vicious laziness of the bourgeois to oppose it to that, virtuous, of workers ...
His conclusion, with hindsight of experience, can also leave one dreamy when he proclaims that thanks to the machine human labor will be relieved (of course, it is from a socialist perspective, but the USSR that it does did not know, also celebrated the merits of intensive work [Cf.
Stakhanov]).
Sen-no-sen wrote :
It is not entirely wrong to speak of "wanted unemployment".
I would rather say "opportunistic unemployment", because at a high rate, it represents a form of fear for the employee, who even poorly paid, should not complain about his situation ...
Unemployment thus represents a form of unacknowledged repression of the economic system.
It seems to me that the first sentence is a delicate understatement; indeed, faced with a shrinking job market, there was another possible choice than to split society into two: those who have a job and who are forced (as you analyze it very well) to make an effort ever more intensive, and those who are rejected on the margins and condemned to no longer be able to live with dignity.
This choice was to distribute the work in the least inequitable way possible. But, here again, just as it was deemed preferable for private companies to increase their profits by offshoring, discarding on the public sector to subsidize the unemployed, the choice was quickly made ...