The Right to Be Lazy
And Other Writings
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
Now in a new translation, a classic nineteenth-century defense for the cause of idleness by a revolutionary writer and activist (and Karl Marx's son-in law) that reshaped European ideas of labor and production.
Exuberant, provocative, and as controversial as when it first appeared in 1880, Paul Lafargue’s The Right to Be Lazy is a call for the workers of the world to unite—and stop working so much! Lafargue, Karl Marx’s son-in-law (about whom Marx once said, “If he is a Marxist, then I am clearly not”) wrote his pamphlet on the virtues of laziness while in prison for giving a socialist speech. At once a timely argument for a three-hour workday and a classical defense of leisure, The Right to Be Lazy shifted the course of European thought, going through seventeen editions in Russia during the Revolution of 1905 and helping shape John Maynard Keynes’s ideas about overproduction. Published here with a selection of Lafargue’s other writings—including an essay on Victor Hugo and a memoir of Marx—The Right to Be Lazy reminds us that the urge to work is not always beneficial, let alone necessary. It can also be a “strange madness” consuming human lives.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
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.
