Abstract
This chapter delves into The Right to Laziness by, Marx’s son-in-law, Paul Lafargue. It situates the publication of the work in the context of contemporary debates among socialists about the significance of the Paris Commune of 1871 and its meaning for the future direction of the workers’ movement in France. The chapter goes on to explore the critique of work put forward by Lafargue. It focuses especially on the way in which Lafargue criticises the negative portrayals of life in the pre-modern, pre-capitalist, world and how he insists upon the historical specificity of the cultural valorisation of labour. It concludes by examining his conception of economic crisis as the result of overproduction and his proposals for how to solve it.
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Notes
- 1.
Letter from Karl Marx to Paul Lafargue, 13 August 1866, MECW, v. 42, pp. 307–309.
- 2.
Letter from Karl Marx to Friedrich Engels, 23 August 1866, MECW, v. 42, pp. 310–311.
- 3.
Leslie Derfler, Paul Lafargue and the Founding of French Marxism 1842–1882 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991), p. 153. Derfler provides a brilliant personal and political biography of Lafargue in two volumes.
- 4.
Ibid., p. 14.
- 5.
Derfler does note, however, that Lafargue took his title and some of his empirical information from a book found in Marx’s library: The Right to Idleness and the Organisation of Servile Labour in the Greek and Roman Republics by Louis Moreau-Christophe (1849). Ibid., pp. 178, 183–184.
- 6.
Ibid., p. 181, and Kristin Ross, The Emergence of Social Space: Rimbaud and the Paris Commune (London: Verso, 2008), p. 60.
- 7.
Despite his otherwise excellent biography, Derfler provides quite a reductive reading of the text as an ‘essay on the working population’s need for leisure time’. Indeed, Derfler actively admonishes readings of the text that understand it as an attack on labour: ‘Rather than a denial of work or an affirmation of leisure as an end in itself, The Right to Be Lazy was a celebration of life, or rather of what life could be: not merely recuperation from labour, but the essence of life itself. Far from advocating a hedonist philosophy, it condemned only excessive and abusive labour.’ He therefore passes over some of the more esoteric implications of the text. Derfler, Lafargue, pp. 177, 180–181.
- 8.
Claire White, Work and Leisure in Late 19th-Century French Literature and Visual Culture: Time, Politics and Class (New York: Palgrave, 2014), p. 24.
- 9.
Ibid., p. 26.
- 10.
Ross, Social Space, p. 61.
- 11.
Ibid., p. 62.
- 12.
Ibid.
- 13.
Ibid., p. 61.
- 14.
L’ Egalité was the primary organ for the diffusion of Marxian ideas in France in the first few decades of the Third Republic, thanks in no small part to the didactic role played by Lafargue among French-speaking collectivists. Lafargue informally mediated between the Marx-Engels collaboration and the group around Guesde in France. He put forward many core Marxian arguments in the paper in both anonymous and named articles. Neither Marx nor Engels, however, had much direct contact with the editors of the paper. Nevertheless, although they felt no direct ownership over it, their correspondence makes clear that they felt it was the best of the French socialist newspapers.
- 15.
Perhaps one of the reasons the original dedication is so often overlooked is that, in the later complete edition published in 1883, Lafargue thanks the French government for putting him in prison and thereby allowing him the leisure time to edit the book.
- 16.
For a detailed account of these debates, see Arnaud Coutant, ‘La réaction républicaine contre le socialisme: les droits sociaux’, 1848, Quand la république combattait la démocratie: recherche (Paris: Mare et Martin, 2009), pp. 92–133.
- 17.
‘Le 18 mars’, L’ Egalité , 18/3/1880, pp. 1–2.
- 18.
‘Une lettre de M. Louis Blanc’, L’ Egalité , 28/1/1880, pp. 2–3.
- 19.
Confusingly, the term ‘valeur-travail’ can also be used in French, though less commonly, to refer to the labour theory of value.
- 20.
Paul Lafargue, trans. Charles Kerr, The Right to Be Lazy and Other Studies (Chicago: Kerr & Co., 1907), p. 9. This English translation renders the phrase as ‘a disastrous dogma’. Lafargue was fond in his writing of referring to capitalism as a whole as a kind of religion. See, for example, his The Religion of Capital (1886) a satirical piece which purports to contain minutes from a meeting of capitalists on how to advance capitalism and includes liturgies and credos. It must be said, however, that this particular text has an unfortunate ‘conspiracy theory’ feel to it, even if it does take the form of a satire.
- 21.
Ibid., p. 3.
- 22.
Ibid.
- 23.
Ibid., p. 4.
- 24.
Ibid., pp. 12–13.
- 25.
Ibid., pp. 9–10.
- 26.
This does not mean, however, that Fourier and Lafargue, any more than the thinkers and politicians that they criticise, properly understand that pre-modern ‘labour’ and modern ‘labour’ (i.e. abstract labour) are fundamentally different.
- 27.
Lafargue , Lazy, p. 15.
- 28.
Ibid., p. 14.
- 29.
Ibid., p. 15.
- 30.
Ibid.
- 31.
Ibid.
- 32.
Ibid., pp. 15–16
- 33.
Derfler notes that Lafargue was ‘writing as a physician’, Lafargue, p. 179. Ross, likewise, states that ‘much time is spent detailing the grotesque physicality and degradation of both worker and bourgeois resulting from the inscription on their bodies of the division of labour’, Social Space, p. 60); ‘Lafargue’s medical training can be seen in the precise anatomical vocabulary he uses to depict the bourgeoisie […] in their absolute laziness’, ibid., p. 61; White makes a similar point, ‘Lafargue’s dystopian vision is, then, rooted in a corporeal politics; he reveals how the body under modernity is inscribed with the marks of a strict division of labour, which is upheld by a political discourse complicit with capitalist ends’, Work and Leisure, pp. 25–26.
- 34.
Lafargue , Lazy, p. 38.
- 35.
Ibid., pp. 44, 9.
- 36.
Ibid., p. 5.
- 37.
Ibid., p. 10.
- 38.
Ibid., p. 10.
- 39.
Ibid., p. 22.
- 40.
Ibid.
- 41.
Ibid., p. 30.
- 42.
Ibid., pp. 29–30.
- 43.
Ibid., p. 18.
- 44.
Ibid. Lafargue was especially unimpressed with the personality cult around Hugo. See, Paul Lafargue, ‘La Légende de Victor Hugo’ (1885) in Paresse et révolution, écrits 1880–1911 (Paris: Tallandier, 2009), pp. 156–210.
- 45.
Ibid., p. 32.
- 46.
Ibid., pp. 32–33.
- 47.
Morris himself did not discover Marx until 1883 and his anti-work utopian novel News from Nowhere appeared a little under a decade later in 1890. Morris was, however, certainly familiar with Lafargue in later life as he would go on to publish several translations of his work, though not The Right to Laziness, in issues of his socialist newspaper, The Commonweal. Morris would also become friendly with Engels and he would equally publish articles by Eleanor Marx. (Morris was apparently very pleased to see Engels reading the Poetic Edda when he came to visit him in Manchester.) Moreover, Morris shared a fascination with the writing of Fourier, especially around the theme of work. It would be strange, given the many connections and shared themes, if The Right to Laziness did not eventually exert some influence on Morris’s own anti-work positions.
- 48.
Lafargue , Lazy, p. 12.
- 49.
Ibid., pp. 57–58.
- 50.
Ibid., p. 59.
- 51.
Ibid., pp. 59–60.
- 52.
Ibid., p. 60.
- 53.
Ibid., p. 58.
- 54.
Ibid., p. 61.
- 55.
Ibid.
- 56.
Ibid., p. 32.
- 57.
Ibid.
- 58.
Ibid.
- 59.
Ibid.
- 60.
Ibid.
- 61.
Ibid., p. 18.
- 62.
Ibid., p. 12.
- 63.
Ibid.
- 64.
Ibid., p. 16.
- 65.
Ibid., p. 38.
- 66.
Ibid., pp. 38–39.
- 67.
Ibid., p. 50.
- 68.
Ibid., pp. 50–51.
- 69.
Ibid., pp. 16–17.
- 70.
Though he is likely joking (or at least one would hope so), Lafargue praises cultures that practise euthanasia on the old and the infirm, and condemns workers, in light of such ‘proofs of affection’, for not putting an end to themselves and their families: ‘How degenerate are the modern proletarians to accept with patience the terrible miseries of factory labour!’ Ibid., pp. 22–23.
- 71.
Ibid., p. 32.
- 72.
Ibid., pp. 9, 44.
- 73.
Ibid.
- 74.
Ibid., pp. 43–44.
- 75.
Cited in Oscar Wilde, The Major Works (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), p. vii.
- 76.
Derfler notes that the theory of crisis found in The Right to Laziness is similar to that of Rosa Luxembourg. Derfler, Lafargue, p. 179.
- 77.
Lafargue , Lazy, p. 44.
- 78.
Ibid., pp. 22–23.
- 79.
Ibid., p. 23.
- 80.
Destutt de Tracy cited in ibid.
- 81.
Cherbuliez cited in ibid.
- 82.
Lafargue , Lazy, pp. 27–28.
- 83.
Ibid., p. 26.
- 84.
Ibid., pp. 36–37. Lafargue, like Fourier, albeit to a far, far lesser extent, does frequently employ the discourse of ‘parasites’. Moreover, despite his ethnic background, there are whiffs of anti-Jewish bigotry in his references to the Rothschilds and in his conspiratorialist satirical writings such as The Religion of Capitalism.
- 85.
Ibid. pp. 47–48.
- 86.
Ibid., p. 48.
- 87.
Ibid., p. 62.
- 88.
Ibid.
- 89.
Ibid., p. 17.
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Hemmens, A. (2019). Paul Lafargue, Early French Marxism and the Right to Laziness. In: The Critique of Work in Modern French Thought. Studies in Revolution and Literature. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-12586-8_3
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