The Right to Be Lazy

Description

Essays by Paul LaFargue 

By Paul Lafargue
Contributions by Fred Thompson
Charles H. Kerr Publishing

A radical best-seller during the free-wheeling heyday of the Wobblies, Gene Debs, and Emma Goldman in the 1910s, when workers by the million were demanding not only shorter hours but “the whole pie,” The Right to Be Lazy was largely disowned by the straitlaced “official Left” of later years, but survived as an underground classic.

Paul Lafargue (1842-1912), Karl Marx’s flamboyant Cuban-born son-in-law, wrote this essay for a workers’ paper in 1880, and revised it for book-publication while he was a political prisoner in France three years later. At once a masterpiece of critical theory and of riproaring radical humor, Lafargue’s militant defense of the proletariat’s right to laziness is directed not only to the “right to work” but against the entire slaveholders’ ideology known as the “work ethic.”