Paul Lafargue and the Right to Be Lazy

The purpose of this paper is to consider the utopia of one forgotten classic of the left, namely Paul Lafargue's pamphlet, The Right to Be Lazy. What is remarkable about this short book is its genre, which is both Marxist and utopian. For many good reasons, Karl Marx and Frederick Engels avoided that sort of writing themselves. In the 1840s, when they were first won to socialism, the workers' movement suffered from a surfeit of utopian schemes. It was not that Marx or Engels had anything against utopias, per se. But thinking of themselves as practical men, both were embarrassed by the disjunction between the glorious visions of William Weitling, Charles Fourier and Robert Owen among others, and the naïveté with which they planned to get there. The results are scorned in Engels's Anti-Dühring:

If pure reason and justice have not hitherto ruled the world, it is only because they have not been rightly understood. What was missing was only the individual man of genius, who has now arisen and who has recognised the truth. The fact that he has now arisen, that the truth has been recognised precisely at this moment, is not an inevitable event following of necessity in the chain of historical development, but a happy accident. He might just as well have been born 500 years earlier and he might then have spared humanity 500 years of error, strife and suffering.

Engels' response to the utopian socialists was clear - no utopia mattered to him, unless its author knew which group in society was supposed to bring it into being. In this sense the Marxism of the founding fathers was very much a transitional theory. Contrary to Rosa Luxemburg, what mattered to Karl Marx and Frederick Engels above all was the means of how to get to the new society, rather than the end of what to do when they got there.

Similar tastes have been carried into the labour movement since. Marx hinted at the nature of the future Communist society in passages from his German Ideology and The Civil War in France. Then, in the middle of the Russian revolution of 1917, Lenin considered the future of the state after a successful workers' uprising. His pamphlet, The State and Revolution, predicted that the revolution would abolish the coercive apparatus of the state. Without inequality there would be no class divisions, and without classes who would be left to police? In addition to this important example of utopian theory, scientific socialists have made do with a few short pamphlets, several Marxist utopias in the form of fiction, and as far as I can see … not much more than that. We have no Marx 'On Socialism', no Engels, no Lenin, no Sartre, no Trotsky, no Serge. The literature which exists is not much of a guide, when labour activists attempt to think of a post-capitalist society, and perhaps this absence of discussion is one reason why so few socialists make that imaginative leap today.

The absence of utopian writing in the Marxist tradition helps to explain the appeal of Paul Lafargue's book. Certainly in the last two decades of the nineteenth century, his pamphlet was one of the three or four most popular books to be sold within the Second International. First published in summer 1880 as a series of articles in the newspaper L'Égalité (Equality), Le droit á la paresse came out as a short book in 1881, with new editions following in 1883, 1898 and 1900. 'According to Alexandre Bracke, the longtime socialist deputy, it was the socialist pamphlet most extensively translated after the Communist Manifesto and was translated into Russian before the Manifesto.' A first English translation was made by Charles Kerr of Chicago, based on the 1883 edition. Since then the pamphlet has continued in print, with the most recent French editions appearing in 1975 (Maspero) and 1994 (Mille et une Nuits), and English editions in 1989 (Charles Kerr) and 1999 (Fifth Season). The Right to Be Lazy was an important and widely-read pamphlet, but Lafargue's has suffered as much any of the socialist classics from the pessimism which has descended on the left since the fall of the Berlin Wall. For most of the past dozen years, there has been no English edition in print. Fifth Season must therefore be congratulated for their recent republication of The Right to Be Lazy, complete with a new translation by Len Bracken.

This paper will consider first, the life and career of Paul Lafargue, next, the argument of his pamphlet, its source, and then its reception since. One question is answered at the end of the article: How useful is Lafargue's pamphlet, how relevant is this utopia to labour movement activists, one hundred and twenty years after it was first produced?

Lafargue: A Rebel Life

Paul Lafargue was born in Santiago, Cuba, on 16 June 1842. Among his grandparents, Lafargue counted a French republican, a French Jew, a mulatto and a Caribbean Indian. In the words of the American syndicalist Daniel De Leon, 'Paul Lafargue had a constitutional affinity with the oppressed.' Originally a supporter of the French socialist Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, Lafargue settled in London, and was acquainted with one of Proudhon's rivals within the First International, namely Karl Marx. Eventually won over to Marx's vision of socialism, Lafargue married the Old Moor's daughter Laura in 1865. Working as a political activist in Spain and France, Paul Lafargue helped to found the French Workers Party, which was led by his friend Jules Guesde. He and his wide corresponded with Engels until his death in 1895. The loss of three children caused Laura and Paul to devote themselves solely to political work. Their partnership ended only in 1911, with their joint suicide. Given that most socialists were suspicious of even voluntary euthanasia, it is appropriate to quote from Paul Lafargue's final note, which sets out his reason for ending his life in this way:

Healthy in body and mind, I end my life before pitiless old age which has taken from me my pleasures and joys one after another; and which has been stripping me of my physical and mental powers, can paralyse my energy and break my will, making me a burden to myself and to others. For some years I had promised myself not to live beyond 70; and I fixed the exact year for my departure from life. I prepared the method for the execution of our resolution, it was a hypodermic of cyanide acid. I die with the supreme joy of knowing that at some future time, the cause will triumph to which I have been devoted for forty-five years. Long live Communism! Long Live the Second International.

This short biographical summary highlights several themes which would be important in the genesis of The Right to Be Lazy, including Lafargue's relationship with Karl Marx, the distinctive and unfinished character of his Marxism, and the relationship between the personal and the political, as it shaped Paul Lafargue's life.

Lafargue met Karl Marx at a session of the International Working Men's Association (IWMA, or First International) in spring 1866. Marx was not very much impressed with his young co-conspirator. The problem once again was utopianism. Lafargue held to the Proudhonist doctrine that all 'nationalist' politicians whether romantic (Mazzini), reactionary (Bismarck) or revolutionary (Garibaldi) were fundamentally the same. Such a characteristically-French lumpen Communism drew Marx's scorn. This is how he described one meeting of the International in a letter addressed to Frederick Engels in June 1866:

The English laughed heartily when I began my SPEECH with the observation that our friend Lafargue, and others, who had abolished nationalities, had addressed us in 'French', i.e. in a language which 9/10 of the audience did not understand. I went on to suggest that by his denial of nationalities he seemed quite unconsciously to imply their absorption by the model French nation.

Lafargue slowly adopted Marxist doctrines through conversations held during strolls on Hampstead Heath. By the time of the 1867 Congress of the International, Lafargue was in a position to second Marx's suggestion that the Association should become 'a common centre of action for the working class'. The following year, Lafargue married Laura Marx, thus placing himself near the centre of the family. Both he and his wife corresponded with Marx and Engels, and both took on to defend the substance of Marx's socialism. Certainly when the French Socialist Workers Party split in 1881, Lafargue played the role of defending Marxist orthodoxy. Paul Brousse's party, the 'Possibilists', came out in favour of municipal reform, theoretical diversity and national defence; while Paul Lafargue and Jules Guesde's 'Impossibilists' stood for revolution, Marxism and international solidarity. The content of Lafargue's internationalism had developed, from a naïve belief in the 1860s that nations were a thing of the past, to his revolutionary claim of the 1880s that nationalism had to be fought.

During the period of the Second International, an orthodox socialist was someone who was loyal to that brand of Marxism which was developed in reading Marx, and through the interventions of Karl Marx himself, Frederick Engels and then Karl Kautsky. Lafargue's socialism was criticised by his rivals in France precisely for such fidelity - it was far too 'German'. A similar criticism is made by Leszek Kolakowski, the biographer of this generation. He maintains that Lafargue was an economic determinist whose philosophy was closer to the late Feuerbach than Marx, 'In short, it cannot be said that Lafargue enlarged or improved upon Marxist doctrine in any way.' Two responses come to mind. First, for the devotees of Marxist philosophy, it is true by definition that only philosophy matters. Such skills as the popularisation or development of existing theories do not count. Only originality is allowed. The best example of such creative thinking becomes that generation of Marxist philosophers, 'the children of Marx and Coca Cola', who have nicely reconciled Marxism with liberalism, every one of them announcing the same formula that 'grand narratives' (herds) are a thing of the past. Second, the judgement of the philosophers is unfair to the man himself. Lafargue was a much more interesting and diverse thinker. Having come to scientific socialism late, and through admiration for both Proudhon and especially Auguste Blanqui (who Paul Lafargue met as a student activist), our author retained some of his old libertarian background. It is this unusual combination of Marxism with pre-Marxist French socialism which makes The Right to Be Lazy such an interesting document to read.

As for the contradiction between the personal and the political, every socialist activist in history has encountered a tension between these two. This problem follows from the contradictions within the socialist project, which were raised at the very opening of this paper. The reason to become a socialist, is that people want to see a different, equal society, without inhumanity and want. But stuck in a racist, sexist and capitalist world, it is impossible for anyone to escape to the future, and emancipate themselves thereby from the pressures to conform to the dictates of the present. Different writers and activists have resolved this tension keeping more or less of their dignity intact. Frederick Engels worked as a factory-manager, while Karl Marx owned shares, and Paul Lafargue had no better answers to these problems than anyone else. Moving towards the contents of his pamphlet, was Lafargue indolent in the way that The Right to Be Lazy demands? Certainly, Paul Lafargue was not a disciplined student, and his natural indolence helps to explain his failure to qualify as a doctor, at least as much as the important distractions that he encountered on the revolutionary left. Yet liberated after 1870 by an inheritance from his father which rescued him from the need to find paid employment, Paul Lafargue settled down and became a hard-working and widely-published socialist activist. Our hero could be as disciplined as anyone else, when the task in question was something which he wanted to do.

Work: A Strange Madness

The Right to Be Lazy was a masterpiece of studied contempt. Lafargue relaxed his pen, and employed the satirist's skills of scorn and sarcasm, as he never had before. The structure of his first sentence owed something to the first line of the Communist Manifesto, 'A spectre is haunting Europe - the spectre of Communism'. The difference is that in Paul Lafargue's account, the monstrous danger was something to be avoided, and not praised:

A strange madness has taken possession of the working-classes of those nations in which capitalist civilisation dominates. This madness brings in its wake the individual and collective sufferings which for two centuries have tortured an unhappy humanity. This madness is the love of work, the destructive desire for labour, carried even to the extent of exhausting the vital forces of the individual and his offspring.

For his negative model, Lafargue took the seventy-hour working week which was practised by so many people in late nineteenth-century France: 'Work, work, proletarians to augment social wealth and your individual misery. Work, work, so that becoming poorer you will have more reasons to work and be miserable. This is the inexorable law of capitalist production.' In its place, Lafargue advocated leisure - not the wretched leisure industry of our day, but the emancipation of work through its re-integration into older patterns of short-work and frequent rest, 'The proletariat must constrain itself to work for no more than three hours a day and spend the rest of the day and night resting and banqueting.'

One of the most distinctive themes of Lafargue's argument was his frequent use of classical and sometimes even older sources to praise an earlier world in which leisure was seen as a higher virtue than permanent toil. The Bible was praised both for the Sermon on the Mount ('Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow: they toil not neither do they spin') and for the example given to everyone in Genesis, 'The bearded Jehovah gave his followers the supreme example of ideal laziness - after six day's work, he rested for eternity.' There were also references to Antipatros, Cicero, Arcadian parrots, Venus, Herodotus ('even women were not allowed to spin or weave so as not to detract from their nobility'), Brutus the Elder, Tarquin, Plato, Xenophon ('work steals time'), Plutarch, Lycurgus and Daedalus. Paul Lafargue praised to the skies the Greek ideal of civilised leisure:

The ancient Greeks had no more desire for work: free men practised only physical exercise and games of intelligence. This was the era when Aristotle, Phidias and Aristophanes moved and breathed among the people; when heroes at Marathon crushed the Asian hordes, who were also conquered by Alexander. The philosophers of Antiquity taught contempt for work - the degradation of the free man.

You might from conclude this passage that Lafargue had been boning up on his classics - indeed, as I will show, he had been doing just this.

One less attractive theme of The Right to Be Lazy was its author's confusion of matters of class and race. This point was never made explicit, nor was Lafargue arguing in defence of racial privilege, but like several other nineteenth-century writers, Paul Lafargue found it easiest when looking for a capitalist, to name a Jew. There are three references to Rothschild in this fifteen-thousand word pamphlet, which is at least two more than any other banker or industrialist who came to Lafargue's mind. A similar disorder infects the following passage, harmless in itself, but odd to a twenty-first century ear, 'For which races is work an organic necessity? The Auvergnians; the Scots (Auvergnians of the British Isles); Galicians (Spanish Auvergnians); Pomeranians (German Auvergnians); the Chinese (Asian Auvergnians).' Was race really this important? - I doubt it. The pamphlet makes no racist argument, nor was Paul Lafargue a recognisably racist writer - either by the standards of his day, or our own. Yet there is something crude here, which does not impress.

Of more interest is Lafargue's attack on organised religion, as far as he was concerned, Christianity had justified slavery in antiquity and now it glorified alienated labour. Paul Lafargue had nothing bad to say against scripture, as we have seen. Yet our author had no good word to say for the work-ethic of Protestantism, bemoaning the death of feudal work-practices in eighteenth-century Britain. Before the industrial revolution, by contrast, everything was fine, 'Morose England, immersed in Protestantism, was then known as "Merrie England".' Catholicism received even shorter shrift from Paul Lafargue's pen: 'Christian hypocrisy and capitalist utilitarianism didn't pervert the philosophers of the ancient Republics … The Bastiats, Dupanloups, Beaulieus and co with their Christian and capitalist morality, these thinkers and their philosophers recommend slavery.' Such anti-clericalism was a common part of Paul Lafargue's socialism, certainly until the time of the Dreyfus affair, when it appears that secular intellectuals took over this target role.

In the final few paragraphs of The Right to Be Lazy, Lafargue reminded his reader of the Greek philosopher Aristotle's desire that machinery would user in a new era of human rest, 'if every tool could be used effortlessly, or move itself like the masterpieces of Daedalus or begin spontaneously their scared work like Vulcan's tripods; if, for example, the weaver's shuttles did their own weaving, the head of the shop would not need any assistant, nor the master, slaves.' Paul Lafargue wholeheartedly endorsed this vision of the future of technology, where human inventions could be used to secure the idleness people deserved, 'The genius of the great capitalist philosophers remains dominated by the prejudices of the salary, the worst slavery. They still don't understand that the machine is the redeemer of mankind, the God who will rescue humanity from the sordidae artes of wage slavery, the God who will give us leisure and liberty.' To this I add, Amen!

Origins of an Idea

The success of The Right to Be Lazy, and the general absence of footnotes in the pamphlet, have encouraged historians to look for earlier manuscripts which acted as source-material for it. One influence could be the philosophy of Epicurus. He has been associated with the idea that a good life is a happy life - or as this philosophy has been understood in English, 'eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow we die'. Indeed, Epicurus is no accidental figure to associate with the nineteenth-century left. Marx devoted his doctoral thesis to a comparison of the natural philosophies of Democritus and Epicurus, concluding heavily on the side of the latter. A second potential source could be Lafargue's long-term influence, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon. The introduction to his pamphlet Sunday, recommends leaving aside the 'discussion of work and wages, organisation and industry' in favour of the study of 'a law which would have at its basis a theory of rest'. Another influence may have been Charles Fourier, whose work includes its own passionate critique of toil. A fourth and most likely influence is Karl Marx. The message of Lafargue's pamphlet is close to the themes of Marx's earlier philosophical writings, including the German Ideology and his 1844 Manuscripts. Most of these remained unpublished until the twentieth century - but it is likely that some of the same themes recurred in those formative strolls along Hampstead Heath.

One source we know for certain, even though Lafargue declined to provide a reference. The very name of Lafargue's pamphlet was plundered from an earlier book by Louis Moreau-Christophe, The Right to Idleness and the Organisation of Slavery in the Greek and Roman Republics. Lafargue gently tweaked the phrase, to give his title a more provocative edge. No doubt Moreau-Christophe also provided the classical references. Our author came across the earlier book in the private library of Karl Marx, and was later sent Marx's original copy, following the older man's death in 1883.

We cannot really know what Marx made of Moreau-Christophe's book, and still less can we know what opinions he passed on to his son-in-law. Yet Marx wrote several comments on his copy of this book. Many were aimed at Joseph Naudet, who wrote a critical after-word to Moreau-Christophe's original paper. Marx's marginal notes included a criticism of Naudet's belief that the law was a means to achieve justice, 'This proves that Naudet, although he cites the authors didn't understand the first word of Roman Law. Product, property - whose? That means law - whose? Force, armed theft or rapine.' Later Marx responded to Moreau-Christophe's defence of the duty to work, with a caustic aside worthy of Lafargue, work is … 'that which Christianity came to teach the world.' Although these comments are interesting in themselves, sadly they do not constitute any 'missing link' to Lafargue's pamphlet. They were not read by Paul Lafargue, and if he did read them, it was only after The Right to Be Lazy had already been published.

A Pamphlet and a Programme?

Part of the historical interest of Lafargue's pamphlet lies with the moment at which it was published. Over the past dozen years or so, several writers have sought a return to a pure set of left-wing values, a 'classical Marxism' unsullied by the defeat of the Russian Revolution. The phrase 'classical Marxism' is taken from the Polish revolutionary, Isaac Deutscher, who was a supporter of Trotsky in exile and later became an inspiration to the New Left that grew up in the 1960s. Deutscher was very much an enthusiast for the Marxism of Lafargue's day, talking of the 'striking, and to a Marxist often humiliating contrast between what I call classical Marxism - that is, the body of thought developed by Marx, Engels, their contemporaries and after them by Kautsky, Plekhanov, Lenin, Trotsky, Rosa Luxemburg - and the vulgar Marxism, the pseudo-Marxism of the different varieties of European social-democrats, Stalinists, Kruschevities, and their like.' Not everyone has been so friendly to the Marxists of the Second International. John Rees has condemned the lack of imaginative, dialectical thinking among several members of this generation, including especially Karl Kautsky. It is hard to fit Paul Lafargue's into this debate. His significance is uneven, his presence contradictory. His other translated works lack the wit of The Right to Be Lazy, are derivative, and generally confirm the negative judgements given above. Yet this pamphlet is Lafargue at his best. Its utopianism stands beyond the perspective of his contemporaries. The living essence of Marxism - the dialectical method - is there.

What about Lafargue's argument? In the one-hundred-plus years since the publication of Paul Lafargue's pamphlet, critical judgement has varied. The Right to Be Lazy has found unlikely enemies, and a few surprising champions as well. Among the unexpected critics, I would include the dissident Marxist Leszek Kolakowski, who was mentioned earlier. His claim is that Lafargue's socialism was a step backwards from classical Marxism. He suggests that the flaw of The Right to Be Lazy was that it described socialism purely in terms of consumption - 'resting and banqueting'. Such 'hedonistic Marxism', according to Kolakowski, fails to explain what will happen when labour is no longer alienated. Even after the revolution, we will still need hospitals, schools, food and power supplies. So how will these be established, if nobody is going to do any work? Lafargue gives two direct answers to this question in The Right to Be Lazy - the first is that the use of machinery should lead to greater leisure, the second is his acceptance of the need for a three-hour working day - yet both responses are insufficient as answers. On my reading of Paul Lafargue's pamphlet, a third and more compelling answer to Kolakowski's question is implied, although it is only lightly traced. I will say more about this in a moment.

Among Paul Lafargue's surprising admirers can be counted the current French government. In 1999 Lionel Jospin's socialists passed a new law introducing the 35-hour week. French workers already benefit from five week's paid holiday, two month's summer vacation, and a range of public holidays to make their confreres in Britain and America weep. Indeed Jospin has dropped his own hints suggesting the influence of Paul Lafargue on the new law. Although Lafargue's general belief that shorter working hours could reduce unemployment may have influenced Lionel Jospin's coalition, the most compelling reason for introducing the law would have been to strengthen a Socialist Party challenged by no less than three electoral blocs to its left - the Trotskyists, the Greens, and the Communists, each of which achieved over 5 per cent of the vote in last year's Euro-elections.

Between the crude ultra-left criticised by Kolakowski and the mild-mannered reformist beloved of Jospin, is there any space for the real Paul Lafargue to make himself known? One point which occurs to me is that Lafargue's claims are really not that exceptional. Even the physicist Albert Einstein, on those rare occasions when he gave substance to his socialist politics, spoke of the need to reduce the working week: 'In each branch of industry the number of working hours per week ought to be reduced by law so that unemployment is systematically abolished. At the same time minimum wages must be fixed in such a way that the purchasing power of the workers keeps pace with production.' On this reading, the importance of Lafargue is that he reminds us of a basic truth which the left knew all along. The politics of Marx, the influence of Proudhon, the memory of the Paris Commune (during which Lafargue was a delegate-at-large in France), each of these influences can be traced in his book. The true originality of The Right to Be Lazy is that everyone else forget to make these points in their propaganda, and it was left to Lafargue to fill the gap.

Kolakowski's challenge remains unanswered. If work is to be abolished, then what (in socialist theory) should take its place? It seems to me that the answer implied in Lafargue is the traditional Marxist answer. Certainly people will continue to produce after the revolution, but their labour will be different from 'work' as we understand it now. For one thing, there will be no class of employers, and no class of the employed. Therefore work will not be alien, in the sense that it will belong to the worker. No-one will be expected to labour on tasks which they have not chosen. More fundamentally, the nature of employment will change. The one literature in which people have seriously considered what useful work will be like beyond the confines of the market, is in educational theory. Thirty years ago Paulo Freire wrote about education as a means to self-emancipation. More recently, the most widely-used concept has been 'play'. When educational writers use this word, they have in mind the unstructured learning which children develop in their first years. Rules are developed by individuals and groups, without external compulsion. Education without rules, self-development and unconstrained learning, these are the ideals that writers have in mind.

The one author I know who has attempted to marry The Right to Be Lazy to play-theory is an anarchist Bob Black. His web-tract, 'The Abolition of Work' follows closely the argument of Lafargue, 'Karl Marx's wayward son-in-law'. There are several unconvincing puns on 'ludic' game-playing, but the content of Black's argument provides a serious answer to Kolakowski's challenge, mentioned above. Bob Black includes a useful definition of work (as 'forced labour') as well as a mapped-out alternative to it:

What I really want to see is work turned into play. A first step is to discard the notions of a 'job' and an 'occupation'. Even activities that already have some ludic content lose most of it being reduced to jobs which certain people, and only those people, are forced to do to the exclusion of all else … Second, there are some things that people like to do from time to time, but not for too long, and certainly not all of the time … Third, other things being equal, some things are unsatisfying if done by yourself or in unpleasant surroundings or at the orders of an overlord, are enjoyable, at least for a while, if these circumstances are changed.

I don't think Lafargue would have cut a single word from this passage. I would restate his belief in mechanisation (democratically controlled by workers, not by managers), and his notion of a remaining transitional three-hour day. The picture becomes clearer then and more consistent, the future more worked-out and more real.