The Right To Be Lazy

December 5, 2022
These piercing essays from socialist Lafargue (1842–1911) offer a valuable window into early Marxist thinking. Revised in Sainte-Pélagie prison, where Lafargue was imprisoned several times for his activism, the selections include the title essay, in which the author argues that the working class is too swayed by the Christian and capitalist notions that work provides the best path to self-actualization. Instead, Lafargue argues, work is the site of humiliation, and the working classes should “rise up in all their terrible strength and call... for the passage of an ironclad law prohibiting any man from working more than three hours a day.” In “The Legend of Victor Hugo,” penned on the occasion of Hugo’s funeral in June 1885, Lafargue contends that the celebrated author was, no matter what his books professed, the personification of bourgeois values. Elsewhere, a tribute to Karl Marx, who was Lafargue’s father-in-law as well as his mentor, veers toward hagiography but provides keen insights into the subject’s character. Fluidly translated by Andriesse and introduced by Lucy Sante, these pieces speak to the present moment, when pandemic-related disruptions have provoked reconsiderations of where, how, and why people work. Readers will relish this incendiary blast from the past.