Paul Lafargue's The Right to be Lazy
Bum bum ain't it great to be lazy...
In February 1848, the revolutionary political storm that was about seize Continental Europe began in Paris, with the working class insurrection against the the Orleanist Louis-Philippe, who sat upon a monarchy in the service of financial aristocrats. When the absolutist state fell—called the July Monarchy—a Provisional Government was organized.
The political thrust of this Provisional Government was essentially that of Louis Blanc’s petty-bourgeois socialism. Several decades from now, in a different epoch of capitalist history, V. I. Lenin would explain that the petty-bourgeoisie cannot struggle independently against the bourgeois dictatorship. They can only try to bargain a compromise with the big capital holders. And in the situation with the Provisional Government, that was the only thing that could practically be done.
Workers, peasants, small proprietors, Bourbon-supporters, and even some industrial capitalists—they all hated the king, and now that he’d fled to England, they had to work out their innumerable competing interests to maintain a unified Provisional Government.
The workers and poor peasants demanded universal suffrage and maximum employment—the right to work—and while they were armed in the revolutionary situation, they won those demands. But the bourgeoisie, returning to state power in France, immediately acted in their best interest to disarm the proletariat as soon as possible, while rehabilitating staffers of the old monarchy to keep the people in line.
Their next policy move was the national workshops scheme. Really they were just press-ganging the unemployed into hard manual labor for a pittance. This is what the right to work amounts to in capitalist society. Louis Blanc received all the blame for formulating such a demand to begin with, and socialism was discredited. Thus the ruling class, not for the first or the last time, pulled a fast one on a social justice movement basing itself on utopian ideals and moral indignation, rather than the economic facts.
When Paul Lafargue—a socialist writer, member of the French Worker’s Party, and Karl Marx’s son-in-law—published his 1880 satirical pamphlet on the labor movement, he called it The right to be lazy (Le Droit à la paresse), principally in response to this political sequence.
A strange madness has taken hold of the working class in nations where capitalist civilization reigns. This madness drags in its wake the individual and social sufferings that, for two centuries now, have tormented poor humanity.
So begins “The right to be lazy,” with a line that simultaneously riffs on the first line of the Manifesto and that of Capital.
But it is not the specter of Communism that is haunting the major capitalist countries. Nor is it the commodity that’s taken up as the basic starting point to analyze the capitalist mode of production.
In Lafargue’s satirical, inverted presentation, the first word to understanding capitalism is the madness of the working class’s devotion to work. It’s not the capitalists’ infinite quest for more surplus-value that’s the problem, it’s the proletariat’s passion for their own exploitation.
Lafargue uses dazzling imagery and literary stereotypes—including unfortunate references to the “noble savage” and Polynesian free love practices—that have a disarming effect that makes it hard to apply rigorous standards to his argument. But all the same, he actually makes a lot of good points!
Here is the conclusion of section 1:
And meanwhile the proletariat, the great class embracing all the producers of the civilized nations, the class that by emancipating itself will emancipate humanity from servile work and transform the human animal into a free creature—the proletariat, betraying its instincts and ignoring its historical mission, has let itself be perverted by the dogma of work.
That’s the accurate, orthodox Marxist view on the class struggle, with no ironical adornments.
Section 2, headed “The blessings of work,” follows the Manifesto’s structure in tracing the development of capitalist productive forces, up to workshop manufacturing, and includes these lines:
What a miserable abortion of the revolutionary principles of the bourgeoisie! What a lugubrious gift from their god Progress! People who get rich doing nothing, the philanthropists call '“benefactors of humanity,” because these people give work to the poor. I say it would be better to spread pestilence and poison the wells than to set up a factory in the midst of a rural population. Introduce factory work, and bid farewell to happiness, health, and liberty.
He’s making a genuine point here in reference to the social division of labor, including that of town and country. Pollution and destruction are inherent parts of the capitalist character of production. But at the same time, historical materialism recognizes the progressive aspects of all things in their context. The bourgeoisie once fought against clericalism, but now it uses a parody of Christianity to promote the dogma of work. Capital spreads its tendrils over the globe, but this also produces an international proletariat.
Lafargue goes on to argue that the working day, thanks to the productivity of modern machines, should be limited even beyond eight hours. With such a minimal necessary labor-time, there’s more hours free for socializing, resting, raising children, living the good life. The working day ought to be three or four hours.
The right to be lazy refers to a the specific struggle over the length of the working day, in the particular historical conditions after the destruction of the 1871 Paris Commune. In reality, capitalists extend the working day beyond even the physiological limits of human workers. Capitalists can’t and won’t treat their workers like human beings with dignity; paying a wage is no different than buying fuel for machines in their books. They don’t actually give workers enough time to sustain themselves, let alone live the good life. They have to extend the working day beyond the necessary labor-time to extract their surplus-value, the extra labor activity of the workforce taken without remuneration.
In their perspective, a legal limit on the working day is the state dictating how they can dispose of the commodity—a day’s worth of labor-power—they’d purchased.
That seems sensible. But consider the seller of this strange commodity for a moment, the worker. The capacity to labor commodity lives inside the worker’s body, where else could it be? And if this worker’s ground down, injured, or had their lifespan reduced by excessive working days, then the buyer has interfered with continuity of selling. It means the buyer reduced the total time the worker can sell their labor-power; the capitalist is buying labor-power at a reduced price.
The logic brings the question to the state and its laws, but it’s not an 8-hour law that determines the length of the working day. It’s the struggle between the two class forces itself.
“The right to be lazy” never struck me as a text that needs a new translation, but Alex Andriesse furnished a version with some updated verbiage that reads cleanly. “The Kerr translation isn’t bad at all,” Alex Andriesse says in an interview for Vol 1 Brooklyn, “just dusty,” which I think is right.
Out of the four pieces bound in this book, both “The right to be lazy” and “Memories of Karl Marx” can be found in the Marxist Internet Archive. Among the “rare” (to me) half, Andriesse included an extended essay on Victor Hugo that I found very interesting.
Lafargue published “The Legend of Victor Hugo” one month after the author had died in 1885, commemorated as a national hero. This kind of activity would be like publishing a massive attack on the late Cormac McCarthy, in a world where he’d also been a popular Senator from Tennessee as well as a great novelist.
In Lafargue’s deflation of the author of Les Misérables, Hugo was a careerist and a political opportunist, not a principled socialist. This is not to flatly identify the artist with the art. In Marxist criticism, when a socialist claims to be such, the critic must look to their concrete activity.
Lafargue moves on to a proper ideological critique of Hugo’s work, finding it to be entrenched in classical liberalism.
Hugo dared to take pity on a man sentenced to hard labor for stealing a loaf of bread and a poor girl prostituting herself to feed the bastard child of the bourgeois who’d knocked her up. It was indeed old-fashioned and childish stuff! But where Victor Hugo most coarsely shows his bourgeois mind is when he personifies those two preeminent institutions of bourgeois society, the police and exploitation, in two ridiculous types: Javert, the sneak who is a model of virtue, and Jean Valjean, the convict who rehabilitates himself by amassing a fortune, in a few years’ time, on the backs of his workmen. Wealth washes away all sins and takes the place of all virtues. Hugo, like every other bourgeois, cannot imagine the existence of a society without police or the exploitation of workers.
But Lafargue doesn’t stop at a practical critique of Hugo’s famous novel. Les Misérables is a product of social ideology like every other novel, and when Lafargue identifies to Hugo as a singular “bourgeois,” he is indicating a certain project of the ruling class, and Hugo’s novel itself is geared to that class’s political line.
The aesthetic style and movement that had the most utility for capital at this moment was romanticism, of which Hugo is a chief exponent, along with “Lamartine, Musset, Vigny, Banville, Baudelaire.”
As milliners and seamstresses adorn the mannequins in their shopwindows with the brightest clothes to catch the eyes of passersby, so Victor Hugo costumed the ideas and feelings that the bourgeois supplied him with a dizzying phraseology calculated to stun and bewilder—
These are the social implications of style in Marxist practical literary criticism. Lafargue even appears to approach a critique of modernist aesthetics at the end of this passage:
[Hugo] genuflected before romanticism’s sacramental slogan “art for art’s sake,” but like any bourgeois thinking of nothing except how to make a bundle, he dedicated his talent to flattering the tastes of the paying public and, depending on the circumstances, celebrated royalty or the Republic, trumpeted freedom or approved gagging the press; and when it was necessary to arouse the public’s attention, he fired pistol shots: “The beautiful is the ugly” is the loudest of them.
This essay is a rich example of what orthodox Marxist criticism of the arts could look like, including the dense polemical references that would require more study.
I was curious about the reception of NYRB’s reissue of Lafargue, and it seems his pamphlet’s resonance with populism, utopianism, and libertarianism is still going strong.
An informative and insightful piece for Jewish Currents by Charlie Tyson ultimately locates Lafargue’s text in the utopian camp:
In lampooning the present and fantasizing about the past, Lafargue engages in acts of selection and distortion, magnifying some features and erasing others in his quest to imagine a better future.
Novelist Garth Miró for the Southwest Review makes an effective comparison between Lafargue’s satire with the horrendous reality of modern hustle culture in imperialist society:
Well, fuck. It seems we’ve made quite the huge mistake. Lafargue describes the capitalist class preaching the righteousness of abstinence, self-denial, jobs as we, the pious, good-natured employees of the underclass, promptly snuff all indulgence that might get in the way of our devotion to the Church of Work. And, by goddamn, we’ve become such strict perfect followers. We don’t even allow ourselves a sit at the end (currently there is no end, we’ll get to that) of a hard shift, to enjoy the inventions our work spits out. Instead, Lafargue argues, we view them as rivals, giving ourselves slipped discs and heart attacks and gonorrhea in our absurd murderous competition with these metal arms and legs and cocks. Are we stupid?
Tom Hodgkinson for The Idler boldly claims Lafargue for the anti-work anarchists, and also says
Less successful and of far less interest is a rambling attack on Victor Hugo for being rich which, I admit, I didn’t quite “get”.
Thanks for your honesty!
Lafargue’s pamphlet may be a crossover hit with anarchist readers, but in the period in which he wrote it, he was staunchly defending orthodox Marxism alongside Jules Guesde. His literary flair makes the message palatable for anarchist individualism, since “the right to be lazy” taken at face value is a license to put your own interests before others’.
Another possible reason is that Lafargue doesn’t really address the question of state power beyond its direct role in compelling the capitalists to curb their excesses by shortening the working day, lest they destroy their own working class, thereby saving the capitalist class from its own collective stupidity.
Lucy Sante wrote a very good introduction for this reissue that contains all the biographical info on Lafargue that you need—including his suicide pact with Laura Marx and the one time Lenin and Krupskaya paid them a visit in France—as well as some concluding thoughts that considers Lafargue’s perspective on power to be a limitation.
Of course, it’s a limitation imposed by orthodox Marxism: “communism demands” the perspective that “rationality will prevail.”
“If humans have not been freed from drudgery,” she goes on to assert,
that is largely because drudgery is the most effective way of keeping populations in line. Why do they need to be kept in line? To maintain the power of the powerful. Why do the powerful need power? Why would anyone need to be a billionaire? Why do so many people, some of them powerless, resist the concept of equality? These are questions that cannot be answered by political theory.
But what is this power as such? Lafargue speaks only of state power. That’s correct. The state’s effective command on violence and coercion is the essence of this power. To do this postmodernist move into just power in any context of any scale is to make the problem more abstract—abstracted from the role played by social classes—not more concrete and attuned to “our experience.”
“Why would anyone need to be a billionaire” indeed, but that question is a nonstarter. To follow this path is to go back to the moralism of petty-bourgeois socialism that began this letter.
If anyone’s been lazy around here, it’s me! My apologies for the extended delay in posting. I’ve been catching up with professional reading and writing, it’s true, but to be honest, the death of Cormac McCarthy actually did get me down a bit.