r daily relations with other
citizens. You will be looked upon as a ghost of bourgeois society,
unless some friends of yours, discovering you to be a talent, kindly
free you from all moral obligation towards society by doing all the
necessary work for you.

"And finally, if it does not please you, go and look for other
conditions elsewhere in the wide world, or else seek adherents and
organize with them on novel principles. We prefer our own."

This is what could be done in a communal society in order to turn away
sluggards if they became too numerous.

IV

We very much doubt that we need fear this contingency in a society
really based on the entire freedom of the individual.

In fact, in spite of the premium on idleness offered by the private
ownership of capital, the really lazy man is comparatively rare, unless
his laziness be due to illness.

Among workmen it is often said that the bourgeois are idlers. There are
certainly enough of them, but they, too, are the exception. On the
contrary, in every industrial enterprise, you are sure to find one or
more bourgeois who work very hard. It is true that the majority of
bourgeois profit by their privileged position to award themselves the
least unpleasant tasks, and that they work under hygienic conditions of
air, food, etc., which permits them to do their business without too
much fatigue. But these are precisely the conditions which we claim for
all workers, without exception.

It must also be said that if, thanks to their privileged position, rich
people often perform absolutely useless or even harmful work in society,
nevertheless the Ministers, Heads of Departments, factory owners,
traders, bankers, etc., subject themselves for a number of hours every
day to work which they find more or less tiresome, all preferring their
hours of leisure to this obligatory work. And if in nine cases out of
ten this work is a harmful work, they find it none the less tiring for
that. But it is precisely because the middle class put forth a great
energy, even in doing harm (knowingly or not) and defending their
privileged position, that they have succeeded in defeating the landed
nobility, and that they continue to rule the masses. If they were
idlers, they would long since have ceased to exist, and would have
disappeared like the aristocracy. In a society that would expect only
four or five hours a day of useful, pleasant, and hygienic work, these
same middle-class people wo