The Right to Be Lazy and Other Writings

Exuberant, provocative, & 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 & 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 & 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 & 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.

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Paul Lafargue (1842–1911) was born in Santiago, Cuba, & lived there until the age of nine, when his family returned to their hometown of Bordeaux, France. In his early twenties, Lafargue began studying medicine in Paris, but after participating in a socialist gathering was barred from the French university system & left the country to continue his studies in London. There, he served as Karl Marx’s secretary & married Marx’s daughter Laura. In 1882 Lafargue gained notoriety as a writer of pamphlets & articles on politics & literature, founded the country’s first Marxist labor party, & earned his law degree. On the night of November 26, 1911, he committed “rational suicide” with Laura at their home near Paris. Lenin spoke at their funeral.