Greetings Prof. Zaretsky,

7th April, 2026 — Charles Fourier’s birthday 1772

Many years ago we had a brief exchange. I can’t recall the circumstances. Maybe it was in response to your book on Weil. I was introduced to her via Gordan Zahn who was a Prof at Loyola U in Chgo and a Catholic pacifist who wrote a damning book on the German hierarchy and the Pope during WW II.

In any case I just read your statement in opposition to the UH Dean’s request that you genuflect before the altar of the State. Bravo! Let me know if you need funds to take UH to court to defend your First Amendment Rights.

I am writing to you today because Curtis White sent your essay on Lafargue. I read it with gusto. And I have a few comments.

Firstly, I should say that I am glad that NYRB published the essay. It was a timely decision. My minuscule, though legendary, publisher C.H. Kerr (in alliance with AK Press, the anarchist collective publisher) could not muster the funds to reprint my edition of Lafargue’s satiric articles along with Right to be Lazy. NYRB had to commisssion a new translation to make the whole venture somewhat lucrative, however the Kerr translation is perfectly useful. In fact, it might be better! I’m not fluent in French, but when I  read Andriesse’s first sentence: “A strange madness has taken hold of the working class . . . . ” I groaned. Kerr’s rendition: “A strange delusion possesses the working classes . . . .”

I rest my case. I have been told that the NYRB edition reads more agreeably to a modern reader. Oh hum.

Now whether Paul would find himself comfortable with the 17% who believe that AI will make for a “brighter future” is unclear to me. I can see him endorsing the robotization of an Amazon warehouse to alleviate the strain and abuse of the current work force, though I think he would see Amazon an abominable waste of resources.

And come to think of it… why same day delivery? 

While Paul knocked out polemics, he was also an expert practitioner of the short satiric story. I published several in my book to demonstrate his marvelous sense of humor, all in the service of ridiculing power. And further, as Leslie Derfler’s definitive biography states, which I referred to in my short bio, Lafargue wrote both scientific papers and many literary essays. He was an expansive cultural critic before that job became commonplace and boring as practiced by the toads of the publishing industry.

Regarding the first generation of factory workers: they were the artisans and commoners thrown out of their employment. It was their sons and daughters who became the great unwashed, unskilled and increasingly revolutionary factory hands.

“If you are puzzled, don’t worry—so, too, were nearly all of Lafargue’s contemporaries on the left.”

Yes, some self-righteous politicians on both the Left and Right dismissed his essay as “not serious”. However, The Right to be Lazy was generally recognized to be the most popular radical text just behind the serious Communist Manifesto. Guess who read it.

Lafargue, I believe, opposed toil and believed work could be again pleasurable in an artisanal way if not constrained by time and beholden to profit.

My latest book, among other themes, delves into the nature of work and posits that the aim of a truly free society would see work placed on a continuum with play. The aim of radical hedonism, which I endorse, is simply the desire to make all work as pleasurable as possible. My two decades in a worker cooperative print shop supports that “Rabelaisian” ideal.

One last comment. I find it totally disgusting Dario Amodei’s reference to “machines of loving grace.”  He should be publicly pilloried for using Brautigan’s poem for his greedy ends. Granted, the irony of Brautigan’s utopia was that it was stolen from him by a previous generation of grubby ghouls. Some of us, however, still retain the vision of the founders of Berkeley’s Community Memory: to quote Lee Felsenstein: “If work is to become play, then tools must become toys.”

Thanks Robert for bringing Lafargue to a wider audience with grace and wit.

-bernard

60s pamphlet we published, Solidarity Bookshop, Chicago, Tor Faegre, Illustrator

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The post The Last Archive: How AI Is Erasing What We Know—And Why Patent Attorneys Are Humanity’s Last Line of Defense  appeared first on IPWatchdog.com | Patents & Intellectual Property Law.