Description

Paul Lafargue’s famous pamphlet *The Right to Be Lazy* (*Le droit à la paresse*) in a new translation by Marie Berthelius, with an afterword by Sven-Eric Liedman.

Paul Lafargue (1842–1911) trained as a doctor but hardly practised medicine at all, instead working primarily as a political activist and socialist writer. He was the son-in-law of Karl Marx, married to Marx’s daughter Laura. Today he is chiefly remembered for his both lucid and radical pamphlet *The Right to Be Lazy*.

Lafargue challenges the contemporary view of work. It is sheer madness, he argues, that people are fighting for the right to an eight-hour working day. In other words, eight hours of servitude, exploitation and suffering, when it is leisure, joy and self-fulfilment that one ought to be fighting for – and as few hours of slavery as possible.

Automation, which had already come a long way in Lafargue’s time, could easily reduce working hours to three or four hours a day. This would leave a large part of the day for the things we actually want to do – socialising with friends, relaxing, enjoying life, indulging in idleness.

“In order to realise their own strength, the proletarians must reject the prejudices of Christian, economic, free-thinking morality. They must rediscover their natural instincts and proclaim the Right to Idleness – a thousand times nobler and holier than the short-sighted ‘human rights’ concocted by the ethereal advocates of the bourgeois revolution. They must refrain from more than three hours’ daily labour, so that for the rest of the day they may laze about and revel.”

"Aristotle’s dream is our reality. Our fire-breathing machines with arms of steel tirelessly and obediently fulfil, for the sake of a marvellous and inexhaustible fertility, their sacred task of their own accord. And yet the minds of capitalism’s great philosophers remain steeped in the prejudice against wage labour: the worst form of slavery.”

The machine is humanity’s saviour, argues Lafargue, but only if the working time it frees up becomes leisure time. That is how it could be, how it ought to be, but that is rarely how it has turned out. The time that is freed up is usually converted into further hours of work, further hours of drudgery and toil. Working too many hours a day is often debilitating; working relatively few hours can be highly invigorating and enriching, leading to general self-improvement, health, joy and satisfaction.

Lafargue’s reflections were interesting and controversial then, and are even more thought-provoking today, when the possibilities for realising them are even greater. The resources are there; all that is needed is for the political will to awaken.

Paul Lafargue is a writer for our times. His eternally youthful pamphlet *The Right to Be Lazy* has perhaps never struck quite so squarely at the solar plexus as it does right now