Paul Lafargue was a French revolutionary Marxist socialist journalist, literary critic, political writer and activist. His best known work is The Right To Be Lazy.
The essay polemicizes heavily against then-contemporary liberal, conservative, Christian and even socialist ideas of work. Lafargue criticizes these ideas from a Marxist perspective as dogmatic and ultimately false by portraying the degeneration and enslavement of human existence when being subsumed under the primacy of the "right to work", and argues that laziness, combined with human creativity, is an important source of human progress.
"Our epoch has been called the century of work. It is in fact the century of pain, misery and corruption.
And all the while the philosophers, the bourgeois economists – from the painfully confused August Comte to the ludicrously clear Leroy Beaulieu; the people of bourgeois literature – from the quackishly romantic Victor Hugo to the artlessly grotesque Paul de Kock, – all have intoned nauseating songs in honor of the god Progress, the eldest son of Work. Listen to them and you would think that happiness was soon to reign over the earth, that its coming was already perceived."
The essay polemicizes heavily against then-contemporary liberal, conservative, Christian and even socialist ideas of work. Lafargue criticizes these ideas from a Marxist perspective as dogmatic and ultimately false by portraying the degeneration and enslavement of human existence when being subsumed under the primacy of the "right to work", and argues that laziness, combined with human creativity, is an important source of human progress.
"Our epoch has been called the century of work. It is in fact the century of pain, misery and corruption.
And all the while the philosophers, the bourgeois economists – from the painfully confused August Comte to the ludicrously clear Leroy Beaulieu; the people of bourgeois literature – from the quackishly romantic Victor Hugo to the artlessly grotesque Paul de Kock, – all have intoned nauseating songs in honor of the god Progress, the eldest son of Work. Listen to them and you would think that happiness was soon to reign over the earth, that its coming was already perceived."
