The

Right
to be
Lazy
The
Right
to be
Lazy
paul
lafargue
Anti-copyright 1883 - 2020
No rights reserved. This books is encouraged
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ble by any means necessary.

Print ISBN: 978-0-2889-7466-8

A Radical Reprint
contents
Preface vii
1. A Disastrous Dogma 1
2. Blessings of Work 11
3. The Consequences of 35
Overproduction
4. New Songs to New Music 61
Appendix 75
O
prefix
M. Thiers, at a private session of
the commission on primary education of
1849, said: “I wish to make the influence
of the clergy all powerful because I count
upon it to propagate that good philos
ophy which teaches man that he is here
below to suffer, and not that other philos
ophy which on the contrary bids man to
enjoy.” M. Thiers was stating the ethics of
the capitalist class, whose fierce egoism
and narrow intelligence he incarnated.

The Bourgeoisie, when it was

viii The Right To Be Lazy
struggling against the nobility sustained by
the clergy, hoisted the flag of free thought
and atheism; but once triumphant, it
changed its tone and manner and today it
uses religion to support its economic and
political supremacy. In the fifteenth and
sixteenth centuries, it had joyfully taken
up the pagan tradition and glorified the
flesh and its passions, reproved by Chris
tianity; in our days, gorged with goods
and with pleasures, it denies the teachings
of its thinkers like Rabelais and Diderot,
and preaches abstinence to the wagework
ers. Capitalist ethics, a pitiful parody on
Christian ethics, strikes with its anathema
the flesh of the laborer; its ideal is to re
duce the producer to the smallest num
ber of needs, to suppress his joys and his
passions and to condemn him to play the
part of a machine turning out work with
out respite and without thanks.

The revolutionary socialists must

take up again the battle fought by the phi
losophers and pamphleteers of the bour
geoisie; they must march up to the as
Paul Lafargue ix

sault of the ethics and the social theories

of capitalism; they must demolish in the
heads of the class which they call to action
the prejudices sown in them by the ruling
class; they must proclaim in the faces of
the hypocrites of all ethical systems that
the earth shall cease to be the vale of tears
for the laborer; that in the communist so
ciety of the future, which we shall estab
lish “peaceably if we may, forcibly if we
must,” the impulses of men will be given
a free rein, for “all these impulses are by
nature good, we have nothing to avoid but
their misuse and their excesses,” and they
will not be avoided except by their mutu
al counter-balancing, by the harmonious
development of the human organism, for
as Dr. Beddoe says, “It is only when a race
reaches its maximum of physical develop
ment, that it arrives at its highest point
of energy and moral vigor.” Such was also
the opinion of the great naturalist Charles
Darwin.

This refutation of the “Right to

Work” which I am republishing with some
x The Right To Be Lazy

additional notes appeared in the weekly

Egalité, 1880, second series.

P. L.
1
Let us be lazy in everything, except in lov
ing and drinking, except in being lazy. –
Lessing
A
Disastrous
Dogma
A strange delusion possesses the
working classes of the nations where capi
talist civilization holds its sway. This delu
sion drags in its train the individual and
social woes which for two centuries have
tortured sad humanity. This delusion is
the love of work, the furious passion for
work, pushed even to the exhaustion of
the vital force of the individual and his
progeny. Instead of opposing this men
tal aberration, the priests, the economists
and the moralists have cast a sacred halo
over work. Blind and finite men, they
2 The Right To Be Lazy

have wished to be wiser than their God;

weak and contemptible men, they have
presumed to rehabilitate what their God
had cursed. I, who do not profess to be
a Christian, an economist or a moralist,
I appeal from their judgement to that of
their God; from the preachings of their
religious, economics or free thought eth
ics, to the frightful consequences of work
in capitalist society.

In capitalist society work is the

cause of all intellectual degeneracy, of
all organic deformity. Compare the thor
ough-bred in Rothschild’s stables, served
by a retinue of bipeds, with the heavy
brute of the Norman farms which plows
the earth, carts the manure, hauls the
crops. Look at the noble savage whom the
missionaries of trade and the traders of re
ligion have not yet corrupted with Chris
tianity, syphilis and the dogma of work,
and then look at our miserable slaves of
machines. [1]

When, in our civilized Europe,

Paul Lafargue 3
we would find a trace of the native beau
ty of man, we must go seek it in the na
tions where economic prejudices have not
vet uprooted the hatred of work. Spain,
which, alas, is degenerating, may still
boast of possessing fewer factories than we
have of prisons and barracks; but the art
ist rejoices in his admiration of the hardy
Andalusian, brown as his native chestnuts,
straight and flexible as a steel rod; and the
heart leaps at hearing the beggar, superb
ly draped in his ragged capa, parleying on
terms of equality with the duke of Ossuna.
For the Spaniard, in whom the primitive
animal has not been atrophied, work is
the worst sort of slavery. [2] The Greeks in
their era of greatness had only contempt
for work: their slaves alone were permit
ted to labor: the free man knew only exer
cises for the body and mind. And so it was
in this era that men like Aristotle, Phidias,
Aristophanes moved and breathed among
the people; it was the time when a handful
of heroes at Marathon crushed the hordes
of Asia, soon to be subdued by Alexander.
The philosophers of antiquity taught con
4 The Right To Be Lazy

tempt for work, that degradation of the

free man, the poets sang of idleness, that
gift from the Gods:

O Melibae Deus nobis haec otia fecit.

Jesus, in his sermon on the Mount,

preached idleness: “Consider the lilies of
the field, how they grow: they toil not, nei
ther do they spin: and yet I say unto you
that even Solomon in all his glory was not
arrayed like one of these.” Jehovah the
bearded and angry god, gave his worship
ers the supreme example of ideal laziness;
after six days of work, he rests for all eter
nity.

On the other hand, what are the

races for which work is an organic neces
sity? The Auvergnians; the Scotch, those
Auvergnians of the British Isles; the Gali
cians, those Auvergnians of Spain; the
Pomeranians, those Auvergnians of Ger
many; the Chinese, those Auvergnians of
Asia. In our society which are the classes
that love work for work’s sake. The peas
Paul Lafargue 5
ant proprietors, the little shopkeepers;
the former bent double over their fields,
the latter crouched in their shops, burrow
like the mole in his subterranean passage
and never stand up to look at nature lei
surely.

And meanwhile the proletariat, the

great class embracing all the producers of
civilized nations, the class which in free
ing itself will free humanity from servile
toil and will make of the human animal
a free being, – the proletariat, betraying
its instincts, despising its historic mission,
has let itself be perverted by the dogma of
work. Rude and terrible has been its pun
ishment. All its individual and social woes
are born of its passion for work.
6 The Right To Be Lazy

Footnotes
[1] European explorers pause in wonder be
fore the physical beauty and the proud bear
ing of the men of primitive races, not soiled
by what Paeppig calls “the poisonous breath
of civilization.” Speaking of the aborigines of
the oceanic Islands, Lord George Campbell
writes: “There is not a people in the world
which strikes one more favorably at first sight.
Their smooth skin of a light copper tint, their
hair golden and curly, their beautiful and
happy faces, in a word. their whole person
formed a new and splendid specimen of the
‘genus homo’; their physical appearance gave
the impression of a race superior to ours.”
The civilized men of ancient Rome, witness
Caesar and Tacitus, regarded with the same
admiration the Germans of the communist
tribes which invaded the Roman empire. Fol
lowing Tacitus, Salvien, the priest of the fifth
century who received the surname of master
of the Bishops, held up the barbarians as an
example to civilized Christians: “We are im
modest before the barbarians, who are more
chaste than we. Even more, the barbarians are
wounded at our lack of modesty; the Goths
do not permit debauchees of their own nation
Paul Lafargue 7
to remain among them; alone in the midst of
them, by the sad privilege of their nationality
and their name, the Romans have the right
to be impure. (Pederasty was then the height
of the fashion among both pagans and Chris
tians.) The oppressed fly to the barbarians to
seek for mercy and a shelter.” (De Gubernatione
Dei) The old civilization and the rising Chris
tianity corrupted the barbarians of the ancient
world, as the old Christianity and the modern
capitalist civilization are corrupting the savag
es of the new world.

M.F. LePlay, whose talent for observation must

be recognized, even if we reject his sociolog
ical conclusions, tainted with philanthropic
and Christian pharisaism, says in his hook
Les Ouvriers Europeans (1885): “The Propensity
of the Bachkirs for laziness (the Bachkirs are
semi-nomadic shepherds of the Asiatic slope
of the Ural mountains); the leisure of nomadic
life, the habit of meditation which this engen
ders in the best endowed individuals – all this
often gives them a distinction of manner, a
fineness of intelligence and judgement which
is rarely to be observed on the same social
level in a more developed civilization ... The
thing most repugnant to them is agricultural
8 The Right To Be Lazy

labor: they will do anything rather than accept

the trade of a farmer.” Agriculture is in fact
the first example of servile labor in the histo
ry of man. According to biblical tradition, the
first criminal, Cain, is a farmer.

[2] The Spanish proverb says: Descanzar es sa

lud. (Rest is healthful.)
2
Blessings
of Work
In 1770 at London, an anonymous
pamphlet appeared under the title, An Es
say on Trade and Commerce. It made some
stir in its time. The author, a great philan
thropist, was indignant that “the factory
population of England had taken into its
head the fixed idea that in their quality of
Englishmen all the individuals composing
it have by right of birth the privilege of be
ing freer and more independent than the
laborers of any country in Europe. This
idea may have its usefulness for soldiers,
since it stimulates their valor, but the less
12 The Right To Be Lazy
the factory workers are imbued with it
the better for themselves and the state.
Laborers ought never to look on them
selves as independent of their superiors.
It is extremely dangerous to encourage
such infatuations in a commercial state
like ours, where perhaps seven-eighths of
the population have little or no property.
The cure will not be complete until our
industrial laborers are contented to work
six days for the same sum which they now
earn in four.” Thus, nearly a century be
fore Guizot, work was openly preached in
London as a curb to the noble passions of
man. “The more my people work, the less
vices they will have”, wrote Napoleon on
May 5th, 1807, from Osterod. “I am the
authority ... and I should be disposed to
order that on Sunday after the hour of ser
vice be past, the shops be opened and the
laborers return to their work.” To root out
laziness and curb the sentiments of pride
and independence which arise from it, the
author of the Essay on Trade proposed to
imprison the poor in ideal “work-houses”,
which should become “houses of terror,
Paul Lafargue 13

where they should work fourteen hours a

day in such fashion that when meal time
was deducted there should remain twelve
hours of work full and complete”

Twelve hours of work a day, that is

the ideal of the philanthropists and mor
alists of the eighteenth century. How have
we outdone this nec plus ultra! Modern
factories have become ideal houses of cor
rection in which the toiling masses are im
prisoned, in which they are condemned
to compulsory work for twelve or fourteen
hours, not the men only but also women
and children. [1] And to think that the sons
of the heroes of the Terror have allowed
themselves to be degraded by the religion
of work, to the point of accepting, since
1848, as a revolutionary conquest, the
law limiting factory labor to twelve hours.
They proclaim as a revolutionary principle
the Right to Work. Shame to the French
proletariat! Only slaves would have been
capable of such baseness. A Greek of the
heroic times would have required twenty
years of capitalist civilization before he
14 The Right To Be Lazy

could have conceived such vileness.

And if the miseries of compulso

ry work and the tortures of hunger have
descended upon the proletariat more in
number than the locusts of the Bible, it is
because the proletariat itself invited them.
This work, which in June 1848 the labor
ers demanded with arms in their hands,
this they have imposed on their families;
they have delivered up to the barons of
industry their wives and children. With
their own hands they have demolished
their domestic hearths. With their own
hands they have dried up the milk of their
wives. The unhappy women carrying and
nursing their babes have been obliged to
go into the mines and factories to bend
their backs and exhaust their nerves. With
their own hands they have broken the life
and the vigor of their children. Shame on
the proletarians! Where are those neigh
borly housewives told of in our fables and
in our old tales, bold and frank of speech,
lovers of Bacchus. Where are those buxom
girls, always on the move, always cooking,
Paul Lafargue 15

always singing, always spreading life, en

gendering life’s joy, giving painless birth
to healthy and vigorous children? ... To
day we have factory girls and women,
pale drooping flowers, with impoverished
blood, with disordered stomachs, with
languid limbs ... They have never known
the pleasure of a healthful passion, nor
would they be capable of telling of it mer
rily! And the children? Twelve hours of
work for children! 0, misery. But not all
the Jules Simon of the Academy of Mor
al and Political Science, not all the Ger
manys of jesuitism, could have invented
a vice more degrading to the intelligence
of the children, more corrupting of their
instincts, more destructive of their organ
ism than work in the vitiated atmosphere
of the capitalist factory.

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 philoso

phers, the bourgeois economists – from
16 The Right To Be Lazy
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 hon
or 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 per
ceived. They rummaged in the dust of
past centuries to bring back feudal mis
eries to serve as a somber contrast to the
delights of the present times. Have they
wearied us, these satisfied people, yester
day pensioners at the table of the nobility,
today pen-valets of the capitalist class and
fatly paid? Have they reckoned us weary
of the peasant, such as La Bruyere de
scribed him? Well, here is the brilliant pic
ture of proletarian delights in the year of
capitalist progress 1840, Penned by one of
their own men, Dr. Villermé, member of
the Institute, the same who in 1848 was a
member of that scientific society (Thiers,
Cousin, Passy, Blanqui, the academician,
Paul Lafargue 17

were in it), which disseminated among

the masses the nonsense of bourgeois eco
nomics and ethics.

It is of manufacturing Alsace that

Dr. Villermé speaks, – the Alsace of Kes
tner and Dollfus, those flowers of indus
trial philanthropy and republicanism. But
before the doctor raises up before us his
picture of proletarian miseries, let us lis
ten to an Alsatian manufacturer, Mr. Th.
Mieg, of the house of Dollfus, Mieg & Co.,
depicting the condition of the old-time
artisan: “At Mulhouse fifty years ago (in
1813, when modern mechanical industry
was just arising) the laborers were all chil
dren of the soil, inhabiting the town and
the surrounding villages, and almost all
owning a house and often a little field.” [2]
It was the golden age of the laborer. But at
that time Alsatian industry did not deluge
the world with its cottons, nor make mil
lionaires out of its Dollfus and Koechlin.
But twenty-five years after, when Villermé
visited Alsace, the modern Minotaur, the
capitalist workshop, had conquered the
18 The Right To Be Lazy

country; in its insatiable appetite for hu

man labor it had dragged the workmen
from their hearths, the better to wring
them and press out the labor which they
contained. It was by thousands that the
workers flocked together at the signal of
the steam whistle.
A great number, – says Viller
mé – five thousand out of seventeen
thousand, were obliged by high rents
to lodge in neighboring villages. Some
of them lived three or four miles from
the factory where they worked.

At Mulhouse in Dornach,
work began at five o’clock in the morn
ing and ended at eight o’clock in the
evening, summer and winter. It was a
sight to watch them arrive each morn
ing into the city and depart each eve
ning. Among them were a multitude of
women, pale, often walking bare-foot
ed through the mud, and who for lack
of umbrellas when the rain or snow fell,
wore their aprons or skirts turned up
over their heads. There was a still larg
er number of young children, equally
dirty, equally pale, covered with rags,
greasy from the machine oil which
Paul Lafargue 19

drops on them while they work. They

were better protected from the rain
because their clothes shed water; but
unlike the women just mentioned, they
did not carry their day’s provisions in a
basket, but they carried in their hands
or hid under their clothing as best they
might, the morsel of bread which must
serve them as food until time for them
to return home.

Thus to the strain of an in

sufferably long day – at least fifteen
hours – is added for these wretches the
fatigue of the painful daily journeys.
Consequently they reach home over
whelmed by the need of sleep, and next
day they rise before they are completely
rested in order to reach the factory by
the opening time.

Now, look at the holes in which

were packed those who lodge in the town:
“I saw at Mulhouse in Dornach, and the
neighboring houses, some of those mis
erable lodgings where two families slept
each in its corner on straw thrown on the
floor and kept in its place by two planks
... This wretchedness among the laborers
20 The Right To Be Lazy

of the cotton industry in the department

of the upper Rhine is so extreme that it
produces this sad result, that while in the
families of the manufacturers, merchants,
shop-keepers or factory superintendents,
half of the children reach their twenty-first
year, this same half ceases to exist before
the lapse of two years in the families of
weavers and cotton spinners.”

Speaking of the labor of the work

shop, Villermé adds: “It is not a work, a
task, it is a torture and it is inflicted on
children of six to eight years. It is this
long torture day after day which wastes
away the laborers in the cotton spinning
factories”. And as to the duration of the
work Villermé observes, that the convicts
in prisons work but ten hours, the slaves
in the west Indies work but nine hours,
while there existed in France after its Rev
olution of 1789, which had proclaimed
the pompous Rights of Man “factories
where the day was sixteen hours, out of
which the laborers were allowed only an
hour and a half for meals.” [3]
Paul Lafargue 21

What a miserable abortion of the

revolutionary principles of the bourgeoi
sie! What woeful gifts from its god Prog
ress! The philanthropists hail as benefac
tors of humanity those who having done
nothing to become rich, give work to the
poor. Far better were it to scatter pesti
lence and to poison the springs than to
erect a capitalist factory in the midst of a
rural population. Introduce factory work,
and farewell joy, health and liberty; fare
well to all that makes life beautiful and
worth living. [4]

And the economists go on repeat

ing to the laborers, “Work, to increase so
cial wealth”, and nevertheless an econo
mist, Destutt de Tracy, answers: “It is in
poor nations that people are comfortable,
in rich nations they are ordinarily poor”;
and his disciple Cherbuliez continues:
“The laborers themselves in co-operat
ing toward the accumulation of produc
tive capital contribute to the event which
sooner or later must deprive them of a
part of their wages”. But deafened and
22 The Right To Be Lazy

stupefied by their own howlings, the econ

omists answer: “Work, always work, to
create your prosperity”, and in the name
of Christian meekness a priest of the An
glican Church, the Rev. Mr. Townshend,
intones: Work, work, night and day. By
working you make your poverty increase
and your poverty releases us from impos
ing work upon you by force of law. The
legal imposition of work “gives too much
trouble, requires too much violence and
makes too much noise. Hunger, on the
contrary, is not only a pressure which is
peaceful, silent and incessant, but as it is
the most natural motive for work and in
dustry, it also provokes to the most power
ful efforts.” Work, work, proletarians, to
increase social wealth and your individual
poverty; work, work, in order that becom
ing poorer, you may have more reason to
work and become miserable. Such is the
inexorable law of capitalist production.

Because, lending ear to the falla

cious words of the economists, the prole
tarians have given themselves up body and
Paul Lafargue 23
soul to the vice of work; they precipitate
the whole of society into these industrial
crises of over-production which convulse
the social organism. Then because there
is a plethora of merchandise and a dearth
of purchasers, the shops are closed and
hunger scourges the working people with
its whip of a thousand lashes. The prole
tarians, brutalized by the dogma of work,
not understanding that the over-work
which they have inflicted upon them
selves during the time of pretended pros
perity is the cause of their present misery,
do not run to the granaries of wheat and
cry: “We are hungry, we wish to eat. True
we have not a red cent, but beggars as we
are, it is we, nevertheless, who harvested
the wheat and gathered the grapes.” They
do not besiege the warehouse of Bonnet,
or Jujurieux, the inventor of industrial
convents, and cry out: “M. Bonnet, here
are your working women, silk workers,
spinners, weavers; they are shivering piti
fully under their patched cotton dresses,
yet it is they who have spun and woven
the silk robes of the fashionable women
24 The Right To Be Lazy

of all Christendom. The poor creatures

working thirteen hours a day had no time
to think of their toilet. Now, they are out
of work and have time to rustle in the silks
they have made. Ever since they lost their
milk teeth they have devoted themselves
to your fortune and have lived in absti
nence. Now they are at leisure and wish
to enjoy a little of the fruits of their labor.
Come, M. Bonnet, give them your silks,
M. Harmel shall furnish his muslins, M.
Pouyer-Quertier his calicos, M. Pinet his
boots for their dear little feet, cold and
damp. Clad from top to toe and gleeful,
they will be delightful to look at. Come, no
evasions, you are a friend of humanity, are
you not, and a Christian into the bargain?
Put at the disposal of your working girls
the fortune they have built up for you out
of their flesh; you want to help business,
get your goods into circulation, – here are
consumers ready at hand. Give them un
limited credit. You are simply compelled
to give credit to merchants whom you do
not know from Adam or Eve, who have
given you nothing, not even a glass of wa
Paul Lafargue 25

ter. Your working women will pay the debt

the best they can. If at maturity they let
their notes go to protest, and if they have
nothing to attach, you can demand that
they pay you in
prayers. They will send
you to paradise better than your black
gowned priests steeped in tobacco.”

Instead of taking advantage of pe

riods of crisis, for a general distribution
of their products and a universal holiday,
the laborers, perishing with hunger, go
and beat their heads against the doors of
the workshops. With pale faces, emaciat
ed bodies, pitiful speeches they assail the
manufacturers: “Good M. Chagot, sweet
M. Schneider, give us work, it is not hun
ger, but the passion for work which tor
ments us”. And these wretches, who have
scarcely the strength to stand upright, sell
twelve and fourteen hours of work twice
as cheap as when they had bread on the
table. And the philanthropists of industry
profit by their lockouts to manufacture at
lower cost.
26 The Right To Be Lazy

If industrial crises follow periods

of overwork as inevitably as night follows
day, bringing after them lockouts and
poverty without end, they also lead to in
evitable bankruptcy. So long as the manu
facturer has credit he gives free rein to the
rage for work. He borrows, and borrows
again, to furnish raw material to his labor
ers, and goes on producing without con
sidering that the market is becoming sa
tiated and that if his goods don’t happen
to be sold, his notes will still come due.
At his wits’ end, he implores the banker;
he throws himself at his feet, offering his
blood, his honor. “A little gold will do my
business better”, answers the Rothschild.
“You have 20,000 pairs of hose in your
warehouse; they are worth 20c. I will take
them at 4c.” The banker gets possession of
the goods and sells them at 6c or 8c, and
pockets certain frisky dollars which owe
nothing to anybody: but the manufactur
er has stepped back for a better leap. At
last the crash comes and the warehouses
disgorge. Then so much merchandise is
thrown out of the window that you cannot
Paul Lafargue 27
imagine how it came in by the door. Hun
dreds of millions are required to figure
the value of the goods that are destroyed.
In the last century they were burned or
thrown into the water. [5]

But before reaching this decision,

the manufacturers travel the world over in
search of markets for the goods which are
heaping up. They force their government
to annex Congo, to seize on Tonquin, to
batter down the Chinese Wall with cannon
shots to make an outlet for their cotton
goods. In previous centuries it was a duel
to the death between France and England
as to which should have the exclusive priv
ilege of selling to America and the Indies.
Thousands of young and vigorous men
reddened the seas with their blood during
the colonial wars of the sixteenth, seven
teenth and eighteenth centuries.

There is a surplus of capital as

well as of goods. The financiers no lon
ger know where to place it. Then they go
among the happy nations who are leafing
28 The Right To Be Lazy
in the sun smoking cigarettes and they lay
down railroads, erect factories and import
the curse of work. And this exportation of
French capital ends one fine morning in
diplomatic complications. In Egypt, for
example, France, England and Germany
were on the point of hair-pulling to de
cide which usurers shall be paid first. Or
it ends with wars like that in Mexico where
French soldiers are sent to play the part of
constables to collect bad debts. [6]

These individual and social miser

ies, however great and innumerable they
may be, however eternal they appear,
will vanish like hyenas and jackals at the
approach of the lion, when the proletar
iat shall say “I will”. But to arrive at the
realization of its strength the proletariat
must trample under foot the prejudices
of Christian ethics, economic ethics and
free-thought ethics. It must return to its
natural instincts, it must proclaim the
Rights of Laziness, a thousand times more
noble and more sacred than the anaemic
Rights of Man concocted by the metaphys
Paul Lafargue 29
ical lawyers of the bourgeois revolution. It
must accustom itself to working but three
hours a day, reserving the rest of the day
and night for leisure and feasting.

Thus far my task has been easy;

I have had but to describe real evils well
known, alas, by all of us; but to convince
the proletariat that the ethics inoculated
into it is wicked, that the unbridled work
to which it has given itself up for the last
hundred years is the most terrible scourge
that has ever struck humanity, that work
will become a mere condiment to the
pleasures of idleness, a beneficial exercise
to the human organism, a passion useful
to the social organism only when wisely
regulated and limited to a maximum of
three hours a day; this is an arduous task
beyond my strength. Only communist
physiologists, hygienists and economists
could undertake it. In the following pages
I shall merely try to show that given the
modern means of production and their
unlimited reproductive power it is neces
sary to curb the extravagant passion of the
30 The Right To Be Lazy

laborers for work and to oblige them to

consume the goods which they produce.

Footnotes
[1] At the first Congress of Charities held at
Brussels in 1817 one of the richest manufac
turers of Marquette, near Lille, M. Scrive, to
the plaudits of the members of the congress
declared with the noble satisfaction of a duty
performed: “We have introduced certain
methods of diversion for the children. We
teach them to sing during their work, also
to count while working.” That distracts them
and makes them accept bravely “those twelve
hours of labor which are necessary to procure
their means of existence.” Twelve hours of la
bor, and such labor, imposed on children less
than twelve years old! The materialists will al
ways regret that there is no hell in which to
confine these Christian philanthropic mur
derers of childhood.

[2] Speech delivered before the International

Society of Practical Studies in Social Econom
ics, at Paris in May 1863, and published in the
French Economist or the same epoch.

[3] L.R. Villermé. Tableau de L’état physique

Paul Lafargue 31
et moral des ouvriers dans les fabriques de coton, de
laine et de soie (1840). It is not because Doll
fus, Koechlin and other Alsacian manufactur
ers were republicans, patriots and protestant
philanthropists that they treated their labor
ers in this way, for Blanqui, the academician,
Reybaud, the prototype of Jerome Paturot,
and Jules Simon have observed the same
amenities for the working class among the
very catholic and monarchical manufacturers
of Lille and Lyons. These are capitalist virtues
which harmonize delightfully with all political
and religious convictions.

[4] The Indians of the warlike tribes of Brazil

kill their invalids and old people; they show
their affection for them by putting an end to
a life which is no longer enlivened by com
bats, feasts and dances. All primitive peoples
have given these proofs of affection to their
relatives: the Massagetae of the Caspian Sea
(Herodotus), as well as the Wens of Germa
ny and the Celts of Gaul. In the churches of
Sweden even lately they preserved clubs called
family clubs which served to deliver parents
from the sorrows of old age. How degenerate
are the modern proletarians to accept with
patience the terrible miseries of factory labor!
32 The Right To Be Lazy

[5] At the Industrial Congress held in Berlin

in Jan. 21st, 1879 the losses in the iron indus
try of Germany during the last crisis were esti
mated at $109,056,000.

[6] M. Clemenceau’s Justice said on April 6.

1880 in its financial department: “We have
heard this opinion maintained, that even with
out pressure the billions of the war of 1870
would have been equally lost for France, that
is under the form of loans periodically put out
to balance the budgets of foreign countries;
this is also our opinion.” The loss of English
capital on loans of South American Republics
is estimated at a billion dollars. The French
laborers not only produced the billion dollars
paid Bismarck, but they continued to pay in
terest on the war indemnity to Ollivier, Girar
din, Bazaine and other income drawers, who
brought on the war and the rout. Nevertheless
they still have one shred of consolation: these
billions will not bring on a war of reprisal.
62
The
Conse
quences
of Over
production
A Greek poet of Cicero’s time, An
tiparos, thus sang of the invention of the
water-mill (for grinding grain), which was
to free the slave women and bring back
the Golden Age: “Spare the arm which
turns the mill, 0, millers, and sleep peace
fully. Let the cock warn you in vain that
day is breaking. Demeter has imposed
upon the nymphs the labor of the slaves,
and behold them leaping merrily over the
wheel, and behold the axle tree, shaken,
turning with it’s spokes and making the
heavy rolling stone revolve. Let us live
36 The Right To Be Lazy

the life of our fathers, and let us rejoice

in idleness over the gifts that the goddess
grants us.” Alas! The leisure, which the
pagan poet announced, has not come.
The blind, perverse and murderous pas
sion for work transforms the liberating
machine into an instrument for the en
slavement of free men. Its productiveness
impoverishes them.

A good working woman makes

with her needles only five meshes a min
ute, while certain circular knitting ma
chines make 30,000 in the same time.
Every minute of the machine is thus equiv
alent to a hundred hours of the working
women’s labor, or again, every minute of
the machine’s labor, gives the working
women ten days of rest. What is true for
the knitting industry is more or less true
for all industries reconstructed by modern
machinery. But what do we see? In pro
portion as the machine is improved and
performs man’s work with an ever increas
ing rapidity and exactness, the laborer, in
stead of prolonging his former rest times,
Paul Lafargue 37

redoubles his ardor, as if he wished to rival

the machine. O, absurd and murderous
competition!

That the competition of man and

the machine might have free course, the
proletarians have abolished wise laws
which limited the labor of the artisans of
the ancient guilds; they have suppressed
the holidays. [1] Because the producers of
that time worked but five days out of sev
en, are we to believe the stories told by
lying economists that they lived on noth
ing but air and fresh water? Not so, they
had leisure to taste the joys of earth, to
make love and to frolic, to banquet joy
ously in honor of the jovial god of idle
ness. Gloomy England, immersed in
protestantism, was then called “Merrie
England.” Rabelais, Quevedo, Cervantes,
and the unknown authors of the romances
make our mouths water with their pictures
of those monumental feasts [2] with which
the men of that time regaled themselves
between two battles and two devastations,
in which everything “went by the barrel”
38 The Right To Be Lazy

Jordaens and the Flemish School have

told the story of these feasts in their de
lightful pictures. Where, O, where, are the
sublime gargantuan stomachs of those
days; where are the sublime brains encir
cling all human thought? We have indeed
grown puny and degenerate. Embalmed
beef, potatoes, doctored wine and Prus
sian schnaps, judiciously combined with
compulsory labor have weakened our
bodies and narrowed our minds. And the
times when man cramps his stomach and
the machine enlarges its out-put are the
very times when the economists preach to
us the Malthusian theory, the religion of
abstinence and the dogma of work. Re
ally it would be better to pluck out such
tongues and throw them to the dogs.

Because the working class, with its

simple good faith, has allowed itself to be
thus indoctrinated, because with its native
impetuosity it has blindly hurled itself
into work and abstinence, the capitalist
class has found itself condemned to lazi
ness and forced enjoyment, to unproduc
Paul Lafargue 39

tiveness and over consumption. But if the

over-work of the laborer bruises his flesh
and tortures his nerves, it is also fertile in
griefs for the capitalist.

The abstinence to which the pro

ductive class condemns itself obliges the
capitalists to devote themselves to the
over-consumption of the products turned
out so riotously by the laborers. At the be
ginning of capitalist production a centu
ry or two ago, the capitalist was a steady
man of reasonable and peaceable habits.
He contented himself with one wife or
thereabouts. He drank only when he was
thirsty and ate only when he was hungry.
He left to the lords and ladies of the court
the noble virtues of debauchery. Today ev
ery son of the newly rich makes it incum
bent upon himself to cultivate the disease
for which quicksilver is a specific in order
to justify the labors imposed upon the
workmen in quicksilver mines; every cap
italist crams himself with capons stuffed
with truffles and with the choicest brands
of wine in order to encourage the breed
40 The Right To Be Lazy

ers of blooded poultry and the growers of

Bordelais. In this occupation the organ
ism rapidly becomes shattered, the hair
falls out, the gums shrink away from the
teeth, the body becomes deformed, the
stomach obtrudes abnormally, respiration
becomes difficult, the motions become
labored, the joints become stiff, the fin
gers knotted. Others, too feeble in body
to endure the fatigues of debauchery, but
endowed with the bump of philanthropic
discrimination, dry up their brains over
political economy, or juridical philoso
phy in elaborating thick soporific books
to employ the leisure hours of composi
tors and pressmen. The women of fashion
live a life of martyrdom, in trying on and
showing off the fairy-like toilets which the
seamstresses die in making. They shift like
shuttles from morning until night from
one gown into another. For hours togeth
er they give up their hollow heads to the
artists in hair, who at any cost insist on as
suaging their passion for the construction
of false chignons. Bound in their corsets,
pinched in their boots, decollette to make
Paul Lafargue 41

a coal-miner blush, they whirl around the

whole night through at their charity balls
in order to pick up a few cents for poor
people, – sanctified souls!

To fulfill his double social func

tion of non-producer and over-consumer,
the capitalist was not only obliged to vio
late his modest taste, to lose his laborious
habits of two centuries ago and to give
himself up to unbounded luxury, spicy in
digestibles and syphilitic debauches, but
also to withdraw from productive labor an
enormous mass of men in order to enlist
them as his assistants.

Here are a few figures to prove

how colossal is this waste of productive
forces. According to the census of 1861,
the population of England and Wales
comprised 20,066,244 persons, 9,776,259
male and 10,289,965 female. If we deduct
those too old of too young to work, the
unproductive women, boys and girls, then
the “ideological professions”, such as gov
ernors, policemen, clergy, magistrates,
42 The Right To Be Lazy
soldiers, prostitutes, artists, scientists, etc.,
next the people exclusively occupied with
eating the labor of others under the form
of land-rent, interest, dividends, etc. ...
there remains a total of eight million in
dividuals of both sexes and of every age,
including the capitalists who function in
production, commerce, finance, etc. Out
of these eight millions the figures run:

Agricultural servants
herdsmen, and including
laborers, farmers’ 1,098,261

daughters living at home

Factory Workers in cotton, wool, 642,607

hemp, linen silk, knitting

Mine Workers 565,835

Metal Workers (blast furnaces, roll 396,998

ing mills, etc.)

Domestics 1,208,648

“If we add together the textile

workers and the miners, we obtain the
figures of 2,208,442; if to the former we
add the metal workers, we have a total of
Paul Lafargue 43
1,039,605 persons; that is to say, in each
case a number below that of the modern
domestic slaves. Behold the magnificent
result of the capitalist exploitation of ma
chines.” [3] To this class of domestics, the
size of which indicates the stage attained
by capitalist civilization, must still be add
ed the enormous class of unfortunates de
voted exclusively to satisfying the vain and
expensive tastes of the rich dasses: dia
mond cutters, lace-makers, embroiderers,
binders of luxurious books, seamstresses
employed on expensive gowns decorators
of villas, etc. [4]

Once settled down into absolute

laziness and demoralized by enforced
enjoyment, the capitalist class in spite
of the injury involved in its new kind of
life, adapted itself to it. Soon it began to
look upon any change with horror. The
sight of the miserable conditions of life
resignedly accepted by the working class
and the sight of the organic degradation
engendered by the depraved passion for
work increased its aversion for all com
44 The Right To Be Lazy

pulsory labor and all restrictions of its

pleasures. It is precisely at that time that,
without taking into account the demor
alization which the capitalist class had
imposed upon itself as a social duty, the
proletarians took it into their heads to in
flict work on the capitalists Artless as they
were, they took seriously the theories of
work proclaimed by the economists and
moralists, and girded up their loins to in
flict the practice of these theories upon
the capitalists. The proletariat hoisted the
banner, “He who will not work Neither
shall he Eat”. Lyons in 1831 rose up for
bullets or work. The federated laborers
of March 1871 called their uprising “The
Revolution of Work”. To these outbreaks
of barbarous fury destructive of all capi
talist joy and laziness, the capitalists had
no other answer than ferocious repres
sion, but they know that if they have been
able to repress these revolutionary explo
sions, they have not drowned in the blood
of these gigantic massacres the absurd
idea of the proletariat wishing to inflict
work upon the idle and reputable classes,
Paul Lafargue 45
and it is to avert this misfortune that they
surround themselves with guards, police
men, magistrates and jailors, supported
in laborious unprodutiveness. There is no
more room for illusion as to the function
of modern, armies. They are permanent
ly maintained only to suppress the “en
emy within”. Thus the forts of Paris and
Lyons have not been built to defend the
city against the foreigner, but to crush it in
case of revolt. And if an unanswerable ex
ample be called for, we mention the army
of Belgium, that paradise of capitalism.
Its neutrality is guaranteed by the Euro
pean powers, and nevertheless its army
is one of the strongest in proportion to
its population. The glorious battlefields
of the brave Belgian army are the plains
of the Borinage and of Charleroi. It is
in the blood of the unarmed miners and
laborers that the Belgian officers tem
per their swords and win their epaulets.
The nations of Europe have not national
armies but mercenary armies. They pro
tect the capitalists against the popular
fury which would condemn them to ten
46 The Right To Be Lazy
hours of mining or spinning. Again, while
compressing its own stomach the working
class has developed abnormally the stom
ach of the capitalist class, condemned to
over-consumption.

For alleviation of its painful labor

the capitalist class has withdrawn from the
working class a mass of men far superior
to those still devoted to useful production
and has condemned them in their turn to
unproductiveness and over-consumption.
But this troop of useless mouths in spite
of its insatiable voracity, does not suffice
to consume all the goods which the la
borers, brutalized by the dogma of work,
produce like madmen, without wishing to
consume them and without even thinking
whether people will be found to consume
them.

Confronted with this double mad

ness of the laborers killing themselves
with over-production and vegetating in
abstinence, the great problem of capitalist
production is no longer to find producers
Paul Lafargue 47
and to multiply their powers but to dis
cover consumers, to excite their appetites
and create in them fictitious needs. Since
the European laborers, shivering with
cold and hunger, refuse to near the stuffs
they weave, to drink the wines from the
vineyards they tend, the poor manufac
turers in their goodness of heart must run
to the ends of the earth to find people to
wear the clothes and drink the wines: Eu
rope exports every year goods amounting
to billions of dollars to the four corners
of the earth, to nations that have no need
of them. [5] But the explored continents
are no longer vast enough. Virgin coun
tries are needed. European manufactur
ers dream night and day of Africa, of a
lake in the Saharan desert, of a railroad
to the Soudan. They anxiously follow the
progress of Livingston, Stanley, Du Chail
lu; they listen open-mouthed to the mar
velous tales of these brave travelers. What
unknown wonders are contained in the
“dark continent”! Fields are sown with el
ephants’ teeth, rivers of cocoanut oil are
dotted with gold, millions of backsides, as
48 The Right To Be Lazy

bare as the faces of Dufaure and Girardin,

are awaiting cotton goods to teach them
decency, and bottles of schnaps and bibles
from which they may learn the virtues of
civilization.

But all to no purpose: the over

fed capitalist, the servant class greater in
numbers than the productive class, the
foreign and barbarous nations, gorged
with European goods; nothing, nothing
can melt away the mountains of products
heaped up higher and more enormous
than the pyramids of Egypt. The produc
tiveness of European laborers defies all
consumption, all waste.

The manufacturers have lost their

bearings and know not which way to turn.
They can no longer find the raw materi
al to satisfy the lawless depraved passion
of their laborers for work. In our woolen
districts dirty and half rotten rags are rav
eled out to use in making certain cloths
sold under the name of renaissance,
which have about the same durability as
Paul Lafargue 49
the promises made to voters. At Lyons,
instead of leaving the silk fiber in its nat
ural simplicity and suppleness, it is load
ed down with mineral salts, which while
increasing its weight, make it friable and
far from durable. All our products are
adulterated to aid in their sale and short
en their life. Our epoch will be called the
“Age of adulteration” just as the first ep
ochs of humanity received the names of
“The Age of Stone”, “The Age of Bronze”,
from the character of their production.
Certain ignorant people accuse our pious
manufacturers of fraud, while in reality
the thought which animates them is to
furnish work to their laborers, who cannot
resign themselves to living with their arms
folded. These adulterations, whose sole
motive is a humanitarian sentiment, but
which bring splendid profits to the man
ufacturers who practice them, if they are
disastrous for the quality of the goods, if
they are an inexhaustible source of waste
in human labor, nevertheless prove the
ingenuous philanthropy of the capital
ists, and the horrible perversion of the la
50 The Right To Be Lazy

borers, who to gratify their vice for work

oblige the manufacturers to stifle the cries
of their conscience and to violate even the
laws of commercial honesty.

And nevertheless, in spite of the

over-production of goods, in spite of the
adulterations in manufacturing, the la
borers encumber the market in countless
numbers imploring: Work! Work! Their
super abundance ought to compel them
to bridle their passion; on the contrary it
carries it to the point of paroxysm. Let a
chance for work present itself, thither they
rush; then they demand twelve, fourteen
hours to glut their appetite for work, and
the next day they are again thrown out on
the pavement with no more food for their
vice. Every year in all industries lockouts
occur with the regularity of the seasons.
Over-work, destructive of the organism, is
succeeded by absolute rest during two or
four months, and when work ceases the
pittance ceases. Since the vice of work is
diabolically attached to the heart of the
laborers, since its requirements stifle all
Paul Lafargue 51

the other instincts of nature, since the

quantity of work required by society is
necessarily limited by consumption and
by the supply of raw materials, why de
vour in six months the work of a whole
year; why not distribute it uniformly over
the twelve months and force every work
ingman to content himself with six or five
hours a day throughout the year instead
of getting indigestion from twelve hours
during six months. Once assured of their
daily portion of work, the laborers will no
longer be jealous of each other, no longer
fight to snatch away work from each oth
er’s hands and bread from each other’s
mouths, and then, not exhausted in body
and mind, they will begin to practice the
virtues of laziness.

Brutalized by their vice, the labor

ers have been unable to rise to the concep
tion of this fact, that to have work for all it
is necessary to apportion it like water on
a ship in distress. Meanwhile certain man
ufacturers in the name of capitalist ex
ploitation have for a long time demanded
52 The Right To Be Lazy

a legal limitation of the work day. Before

the commission of 1860 on professional
education, one of the greatest manufac
turers of Alsace, M. Bourcart of Guebwill
er, declared: “The day of twelve hours is
excessive and ought to be reduced to elev
en, while work ought to be stopped at two
o’clock on Saturday. I advise the adoption
of this measure, although it may appear
onerous at first sight. We have tried it
in our industrial establishments for four
years and find ourselves the better for it,
while the average production, far from
having diminished, has increased.” In his
study of machines M.F. Passy quotes the
following letter from a great Belgian man
ufacturer M. Ottevaere: “Our machines,
although the same as those of the English
spinning mills, do not produce what they
ought to produce or what those same
machines would produce in England, al
though the spinners there work two hours
a day less. We all work two good hours too
much. I am convinced that if we worked
only eleven hours instead of thirteen we
should have the same product and we
Paul Lafargue 53
should consequently produce more eco
nomically.” Again, M. Leroy Beaulieu af
firms that it is a remark of a great Belgian
manufacturer that the weeks in which a
holiday falls result in a product not less
than ordinary weeks. [6]

An aristocratic government has

dared to do what a people, duped in their
simplicity by the moralists, never dared.
Despising the lofty and moral industrial
considerations of the economists, who like
the birds of ill omen, croaked that to re
duce by one hour the work in factories was
to decree the ruin of English industry, the
government of England has
forbidden by
a law strictly enforced to work more than
ten hours a day, and as before England
remains the first industrial nation of the
world.

The experiment tried on so great

a scale is on record; the experience of
certain intelligent capitalists is on re
cord. They prove beyond a doubt that to
strengthen human production it is nec
54 The Right To Be Lazy

essary to reduce the hours of labor and

multiply the pay days and feast days, yet
the French nation is not convinced. But if
the miserable reduction of two hours has
increased English production by almost
one-third in ten years, what breathless
speed would be given to French produc
tion by a legal limitation of the working
day to three hours. Cannot the laborers
understand that by over-working them
selves they exhaust their own strength
and that of their progeny, that they are
used up and long before their time come
to be incapable of any work at ail, that ab
sorbed and brutalized by this single vice
they are no longer men but pieces of men,
that they kill within themselves all beau
tiful faculties, to leave nothing alive and
flourishing except the furious madness
for work. Like Arcadian parrots, they re
peat the lesson of the economist: “Let us
work, let us work to increase the national
wealth.” O, idiots, it is because you work
too much that the industrial equipment
develops slowly. Stop braying and listen
to an economist, no other than M.L.Rey
Paul Lafargue 55
baud, whom we were fortunate enough to
lose a few months ago. “It is in general by
the conditions of hand-work that the rev
olution in methods of labor is regulated.
As long as handwork furnishes its services
at a low price, it is lavished, while efforts
are made to economize it when its services
become more costly.” [7]

To force the capitalists to improve

their machines of wood and iron it is nec
essary to raise wages and diminish the
working hours of the machines of flesh
and blood. Do you ask for proofs? They
can be furnished by the hundreds. In
spinning, the self-acting mule was invent
ed and applied at Manchester because the
spinners refused to work such long hours
as before. In America the machine is in
vading all branches of farm production,
from the making of butter to the weeding
of wheat. Why, because the American, free
and lazy, would prefer a thousand deaths
to the bovine life of the French peasant.
Plowing, so painful and so crippling to
the laborer in our glorious France, is in
56 The Right To Be Lazy

the American West an agreeable open-air

pastime, which he practices in a sitting
posture, smoking his pipe nonchalantly.

Footnotes
[1] Under the old regime, the laws of the
church guaranteed the laborer ninety rest
days, fifty-two Sundays and thirty-eight holi
days, during which he was strictly forbidden
to work. This was the great crime of catholi
cism, the principal cause of the irreligion of
the industrial and commercial bourgeoisie:
under the revolution, when once it was in the
saddle, it abolished the holidays and replaced
the week of seven days by that of ten, in order
that the people might no longer have more
than one rest day out of the ten. It emancipat
ed the laborers from the yoke of the church in
order the better to subjugate them under the
yoke of work.

The hatred against the holidays does not ap

pear until the modern industrial and commer
cial bourgeoisie takes definite form, between
the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Henry
IV asked of the Pope that they be reduced. He
refused because “one of the current heresies of
the day is regarding feasts” (Letters of Cardinal
Paul Lafargue 57
d’Ossat). But in 1666 Perefixus, archbishop of
Paris, suppressed seventeen of them in his di
ocese. Protestantism, which was the Christian
religion adapted to the new industrial and
commercial needs of the bourgeoisie, was less
solicitous for the people’s rest. It dethroned
the saints in heaven in order to abolish their
feast days on earth.

Religious reform and philosophical free

thought were but pretexts which permitted
the jesuitical and rapacious bourgeoisie to pil
fer the feast days of the people.

[2] These gigantic feasts lasted for weeks. Don

Rodrigo de Lara wins his bride by expelling
the Moors from old Calatrava, and the Ro
mancero relates the story:

les bodas fueron en Burgos

Las tornabodas en Salas:
En bodas y tornabodas
Pasaron slete semanas
Tantas vienen de las gentes
Que no caben por las plazas

(The wedding was at Bourges, the infaring at

Salas. In the wedding and the infaring seven
weeks were spent. So many people came that
58 The Right To Be Lazy

the town could not hold them ...)

The men of these seven-weeks weddings were

the heroic soldiers of the wars of indepen
dence.

[3] Karl Marx’s Capital.

[4] “The Proportion in which the population

of the country is employed as domestics in the
service of the wealthy class indicates its prog
ress in national wealth and civilization.” (R.M.
Martin, Ireland Before and After the Union, 1818).
Gambetta, who has denied that there was a so
cial question ever since he ceased to be the
poverty-stricken lawyer or the Cafe Procope,
undoubtedly alluded to this ever-increasing
domestic class when he announced the advent
of new social strata.

[5] Two examples: The English government

to satisfy the peasants of India, who in spite
of the periodical famines desolating their
country insist on cultivating poppies instead
of rice or wheat, has been obliged to under
take bloody wars in order to impose upon the
Chinese Government the free entry of Indi
an opium. The savages of Polynesia. in spite
Paul Lafargue 59
of the mortality resulting from it are obliged
to clothe themselves in the English fashion in
order to consume the products of the Scotch
distilleries and the Manchester cotton mills.

[6] Paul Leroy-Beaulieu, La Question Ouvrière

au XIX siècle, 1872.

[7] Louis Reybaud, Le coton, son regime, ses prob

lèmes (1863).
4
New Songs
to New Music
We have seen that by diminishing
the hours of labor new mechanical forc
es will be conquered for social produc
tion. Furthermore, by obliging the labor
ers to consume their products the army
of workers will be immensely increased.
The capitalist class once relieved from its
function of universal consumer will has
ten to dismiss its train of soldiers, mag
istrates, journalists, procurers, which it
has withdrawn from useful labor to help
it in consuming and wasting. Then the la
bor market will overflow. Then will be re
62 The Right To Be Lazy

quired an iron law to put a limit on work.

It will be impossible to find employment
for that swarm of former unproductives,
more numerous than insect parasites, and
after them must be considered all those
who provide for their needs and their vain
and expensive tastes. When there are no
more lackeys and generals to decorate, no
more free and married prostitutes to be
covered with laces, no more cannons to
bore, no more palaces to build, there will
be need of severe laws to compel the work
ing women and working men who have
been employed on embroidered laces,
iron workings, buildings, to take the hy
gienic and calisthenic exercises requisite
to re-establish their health and improve
their race. When once we begin to con
sume European products at home instead
of sending them to the devil, it will be nec
essary that the sailors, dock handlers and
the draymen sit down and learn to twirl
their thumbs. The happy Polynesians may
then love as they like without fearing the
civilized Venus and the sermons of Euro
pean moralists.
Paul Lafargue 63

And that is not all: In order to

find work for all the non-producers of our
present society, in order to leave room for
the industrial equipment to go on devel
oping indefinitely, the working class will
be compelled, like the capitalist class, to
do violence to its taste for abstinence and
to develop indefinitely its consuming ca
pacities. Instead of eating an ounce or two
of gristly meat once a day, when it eats
any, it will eat juicy beefsteaks of a pound
or two; instead of drinking moderately of
bad wine, it will become more orthodox
than the pope and will drink broad and
deep bumpers of Bordeaux and Burgun
dy without commercial baptism and will
leave water to the beasts.

The proletarians have taken into

their heads to inflict upon the capital
ists ten hours of forge and factory; that
is their great mistake, because of social
antagonisms and civil wars. Work ought
to be forbidden and not imposed. The
Rothschilds and other capitalists should
be allowed to bring testimony to the fact
64 The Right To Be Lazy
that throughout their whole lives they
have been perfect vagabonds, and if they
swear they wish to continue to live as per
fect vagabonds in spite of the general ma
nia for work, they should be pensioned
and should receive every morning at the
city hall a five-dollar gold piece for their
pocket money. Social discords will vanish.
Bond holders and capitalists will be first
to rally to the popular party, once con
vinced that far from wishing them harm,
its purpose is rather to relieve them of
the labor of over-consumption and waste,
with which they have been overwhelmed
since their birth. As for the capitalists who
are incapable of proving their title to the
name of vagabond, they will be allowed to
follow their instincts. There are plenty of
disgusting occupations in which to place
them. Dufaure might be set at cleaning
public closets, Gallifet [1] might perform
surgical operations on diseased horses
and hogs. The members of the amnesty
commission might be sent to the stock
yards to pick out the oxen and the sheep
to be slaughtered. The senators might
Paul Lafargue 65

play the part of undertakers and lackeys

in funeral processions. As for the others,
occupations could be found for them on
a level with their intelligence. Lorgeril
and Eroglie could cork champagne bot
tles, only they would have to be muzzled
as a precaution against intoxication. Fer
ry, Freycinet and Tirard might destroy the
bugs and vermin in the departments of
state and other public houses. It would,
however, be necessary to put the public
funds out of the reach of the capitalists
out of due regard for their acquired hab
its.

But vengeance, harsh and pro

longed, will be heaped upon the moralists
who have perverted nature. The bigots,
the canters, the hypocrites, +and oth
er such sects of men who disguise them
selves like maskers to deceive the world.
For whilst they give the common people
to understand that they are busied about
nothing but contemplation and devotion
in fastings and maceration of their sensu
ality, – and that only to sustain and ali
66 The Right To Be Lazy

ment the small fraility of their humanity,

– it is so far otherwise that on the con
trary, God knows, what cheer they make;
et Curies simulant, sed Bacchanalia vi
vunt. [2] You may read it in great letters,
in the coloring of their red snouts, and
gulching bellies as big as a tun, unless it
be when they perfume themselves with
sulphur.+ [3] On the days of great popular
rejoicing, when instead of swallowing dust
as on the 15th of August and 14th of July
under capitalism, the communists and
collectivists will eat, drink and dance to
their hearts’ content, the members of the
Academy, of moral and political sciences,
the priests with long robes and short, of
the economic, catholic, protestant, jewish,
positivist and free-thought church; the
propagandists of Malthusianism, and of
Christian, altruistic, independent or de
pendent ethics, clothed in yellow, shall be
compelled to hold a candle until it bums
their fingers, shall starve in sight of tables
loaded with meats, fruits and flowers and
shall agonize with thirst in sight of flow
ing hogsheads. Four times a year with
Paul Lafargue 67
the changing seasons they shall be shut
up like the knife grinders’ dogs in great
wheels and condemned to grind wind for
ten hours.

The lawyers and legislators shall

suffer the same punishment. Under the
of
regime idleness, to kill the time, which
kills us second by second, there will be
shows and theatrical performances al
ways and always. And here we have the
very work for our bourgeois legislators.
We shall organize them into traveling
companies to go to the fairs and villages,
giving legislative exhibitions. The gener
als in riding boots, their breasts brilliantly
decorated with medals and crosses, shall
go through the streets and courts levying
recruits among the good people. Gambet
ta and his comrade Cassagnac shall tend
door. Cassagnac, in full duellist costume,
rolling his eyes and twisting his mustache,
spitting out burning tow, shall threaten
every one with his father’s pistol [4] and
sink into a hole as soon as they show him
Lullier’s portrait. Gambetta will discourse
68 The Right To Be Lazy
on foreign politics and on little Greece,
who makes a doctor of him and would set
Europe on fire to pilfer Turkey; on great
Russia that stultifies him with the mince
meat she promises to make of Prussia and
who would fain see mischief brewing in
the west of Europe so as to feather her
nest in the east and to strangle nihilism
at home; on Mr. Bismark who was good
enough to allow him to pronounce him
self on the amnesty ... then uncovering
his mountainous belly smeared over with
red and white and blue, the three national
colors, he will beat the tattoo on it, and
enumerate the delicate little ortolans, the
truffles and the glasses of Margaux and
Y’quem that it has gulped down to en
courage agriculture, and to keep his elec
tors of Belleville in good spirits.

In the barracks the entertainment

will open with the +Electoral Farce.+

In the presence of the voters with

wooden heads and asses’ ears, the bour
geois candidates, dressed as clowns, will
Paul Lafargue 69
dance the dance of political liberties,
wiping themselves fore and aft with their
freely promising electoral programs, and
talking with tears in their eyes of the mis
eries of the people and with copper in
their voices of the glories of France. Then
the heads of the voters will bray solidly in
chorus, hi han! hi han!

Then will start the great play, The

Theft of the Nation’s Goods.

Capitalist France, an enormous

female, hairy-faced and bald-headed, fat,
flabby, puffy and pale, with sunken eyes,
sleepy and yawning, is stretching herself
out on a velvet couch. At her feet Industri
al Capitalism, a gigantic organism of iron,
with an ape-like mask, is mechanically de
vouring men, women and children, whose
thrilling and heart-rending cries fill the
air; the bank with a marten’s muzzle; a
hyena’s body and harpy-hands, is nimbly
flipping coins out of his pocket. Hordes of
miserable, emaciated proletarians in rags,
escorted by gendarmes with drawn sabers,
70 The Right To Be Lazy

pursued by furies lashing them with whips

of hunger, are bringing to the feet of cap
italist France heaps of merchandise, casks
of wine, sacks of gold and wheat. Lan
glois, his nether garment in one hand, the
testament of Proudhon in the other and
the book of the national budget between
his teeth, is encamped at the head of the
defenders of national property and is
mounting guard. When the laborers, beat
en with gun stocks and pricked with bay
onets, have laid down their burdens, they
are driven away and the door is opened to
the manufacturers, merchants and bank
ers. They hurl themselves pell mell upon
the heap, devouring cotton goods, sacks
of wheat, ingots of gold, emptying casks
of wine. When they have devoured all they
can, they sink down, filthy and disgusting
objects in their ordure and vomitings.
Then the thunder bursts forth, the earth
shakes and opens, Historic Destiny arises,
with her iron foot she crushes the heads
of the capitalists, hiccoughing, stagger
ing, falling, unable to flee. With her broad
hand she overthrows capitalist France, as
Paul Lafargue 71

tounded and sweating with fear.

If, uprooting from its heart the

vice which dominates it and degrades its
nature, the working class were to arise in
its terrible strength, not to demand the
Rights of Man, which are but the rights
of capitalist exploitation, not to demand
the Right to Work which is but the right
to misery, but to forge a brazen law for
bidding any man to work more than three
hours a day, the earth, the old earth, trem
bling with joy would feel a new universe
leaping within her. But how should we ask
a proletariat corrupted by capitalist eth
ics, to take a manly resolution ...

Like Christ, the doleful person

ification of ancient slavery, the men, the
women and the children of the proletariat
have been climbing painfully for a cen
tury up the hard Calvary of pain; for a
century compulsory toil has broken their
bones, bruised their flesh, tortured their
nerves; for a century hunger has torn
72 The Right To Be Lazy

their entrails and their brains. O Laziness,

have pity on our long misery! O Laziness,
mother of the arts and noble virtues, be
thou the balm of human anguish!

Footnotes
[1] Gallifet was the general who was directly
responsible for the massacre of thousands or
French workingmen at the closing days of the
Paris Commune.

[2] They simulate Curius but live like Baccha

nals. (Juvenal.)

[3] Rabelais, Pantagruel, Book II, Chapter

XXXIV. Translation or Urquhart and Mot
teux.

[4] Paul de Cassagnac, like his father, Orsni

er, was prominent as a conservative politician,
journalist and duellist.
O
appendix
Our moralists are very modest
people. If they invented the dogma of
work, they still have doubts of its effica
cy in tranquilizing the soul, rejoicing the
spirit, and maintaining the proper func
tioning of the entrails and other organs.
They wish to try its workings on the pop
ulace, in animca vili, before turning it
against the capitalists, to excuse and au
thorize whose vices is their peculiar mis
sion.

But, you, three-for-a-cent philos

76 The Right To Be Lazy

ophers, why thus cudgel your brains to

work out an ethics the practice of which
you dare not counsel to your masters?
Your dogma of work, of which you are so
proud, do you wish to see it scoffed at,
dishonored? Let us open the history of
ancient peoples and the writings of their
philosophers and law givers. “I could not
affirm,” says the father of history, Herodo
tus, “whether the Creeks derived from the
Egyptians the contempt which they have
for work, because I find the same con
tempt established among the Thracians,
the Cythians, the Persians, the Lydians; in
a word, because among most barbarians,
those who learn mechanical arts and even
their children are regarded as the mean
est of their citizens. All the Greeks have
been nurtured in this principle, particu
larly the Lacedaemonians.” [1]

“At Athens the citizens were ver

itable nobles who had to concern them
selves but with the defense and the ad
ministration of the community, like the
savage warriors from whom they descend
Paul Lafargue 77
ed. Since they must thus have all their
time free to watch over the interests of
the republic, with their mental and bodi
ly strength, they laid all labor upon the
slaves. Likewise at Lacedaemon, even the
women were not allowed to spin or weave
that they might not detract from their no
bility.” [2]

The Romans recognized but two

noble and free professions, agriculture
and arms. All the citizens by right lived at
the expense of the treasury without being
constrained to provide for their living by
any of the sordid arts (thus, they designat
ed the trades), which rightfully belonged
to slaves. The elder Brutus to arouse the
people, accused Tarquin, the tyrant, of
the special outrage of having converted
free citizens into artisans and masons. [3]

The ancient philosophers had

their disputes upon the origin of ideas but
they agreed when it came to the abhor
rence of work. “Nature,” said Plato in his
social utopia, his model republic, “Nature
78 The Right To Be Lazy

has made no shoemaker nor smith. Such

occupations degrade the people who ex
ercise them. Vile mercenaries, nameless
wretches, who are by their very condition
excluded from political rights. As for the
merchants accustomed to lying and de
ceiving, they will be allowed in the city
only as a necessary evil. The citizen who
shall have degraded himself by the com
merce of the shop shall be prosecuted for
this offense. If he is convicted, he shall be
condemned to a year in prison; the pun
ishment shall be doubled for each repeat
ed offense.” [4]

In his Economics, Xenophon

writes, “The people who give themselves
up to manual labor are never promoted
to public offices, and with good reason.
The greater part of them, condemned to
be seated the whole day long, some even
to endure the heat of the fire continually,
cannot fail to be changed in body, and it is
almost inevitable that the mind be affect
ed.” “What honorable thing can come out
of a shop?” asks Cicero. “What can com
Paul Lafargue 79

merce produce in the way of honor? Ev

erything called shop is unworthy an hon
orable man. Merchants can gain no profit
without lying, and what is more shameful
than falsehood? Again, we must regard as
something base and vile the trade of those
who sell their toil and industry, for whoev
er gives his labor for money sells himself
and puts himself in the rank of slaves.” [5]

Proletarians, brutalized by the

dogma of work, listen to the voice of these
philosophers, which has been concealed
from you with jealous care: A citizen who
gives his labor for money degrades him
self to the rank of slaves, he commits a
crime which deserves years of imprison
ment.

Christian hypocrisy and capital

ist utilitarianism had not perverted these
philosophers of the ancient republics.
Speaking for free men, they expressed
their thought naively. Plato, Aristotle,
those intellectual giants, beside whom our
latter day philosophers are but pygmies,
80 The Right To Be Lazy

wish the citizens of their ideal republics

to live in the most complete leisure, for
as Xenophon observed, “Work takes all
the time and with it one has no leisure for
the republic and his friends.” According
to Plutarch, the great claim of Lycurgus,
wisest of men, to the admiration of pos
terity, was that he had granted leisure to
the citizens of Sparta by forbidding to
them any trade whatever. But our mor
alists of Christianity and capitalism will
answer, “These thinkers and philosophers
praised the institution of slavery.” Perfect
ly true, but could it have been otherwise,
granted the economic and political con
ditions of their epoch? War was the nor
mal state of ancient societies. The free
man was obliged to devote his time to
discussing the affairs of state and watch
ing over its defense. The trades were then
too primitive and clumsy for those prac
ticing them to exercise their birth-right
of soldier and citizen; thus the philoso
phers and law-givers, if they wished to
have warriors and citizens in their heroic
republics, were obliged to tolerate slaves.
Paul Lafargue 81

But do not the moralists and economists

of capitalism praise wage labor, the mod
ern slavery; and to what men does the
capitalist slavery give leisure? To people
like Rothschild, Schneider, and Madame
Boucicaut, useless and harmful slaves of
their vices and of their domestic servants.
“The prejudice of slavery dominated the
minds of Pythagoras and Aristotle,” – this
has been written disdainfully; and yet Ar
istotle foresaw: “that if every tool could by
itself execute its proper function, as the
masterpieces of Daedalus moved them
selves or as the tripods of Vulcan set them
selves spontaneously at their sacred work;
if for example the shuttles of the weavers
did their own weaving, the foreman of the
workshop would have no more need of
helpers, nor the master of slaves.”

Aristotle’s dream is our reality.

Our machines, with breath of fire, with
limbs of unwearying steel, with fruitful
ness, wonderful inexhaustible, accom
plish by themselves with docility their
sacred labor. And nevertheless the genius
82 The Right To Be Lazy
of the great philosophers of capitalism re
mains dominated by the prejudice of the
wage system, worst of slaveries. They do
not yet understand that the machine is
the saviour of humanity, the god who shall
redeem man from the sordidae artes and
from working for hire, the god who shall
give him leisure and liberty.

Footnotes
[1] Herodotus. Book II.

[2] Biot. De l’abolition de l’esclavage ancien en Oc

cident, 1840.

[3] Livy, Book I.

[4] Plato’s Republic, Book V.

[5] Cicero’s De Officilis, I, 42.

The
Right
to be
Lazy