The Right to Be Lazy and Other Writings
Paul LaFargue (1842-1911)
Selected and translated by Alex Andriesee
Introduction by Lucy Sante
New York Review Books, 2023
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Slim handsome volume, instantly recognizable design (understated, crisp, self-assured, sans serif, earth tones, God I love NYRB).
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Instantly recognizable title, too, without ever having heard of it: a title one has known and loved avant la lettre.
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Oh wait this is, like, a real political theory book not dreamy light charming philosophical meditations?
Even if it’s satirical, I don’t know, man. I’m going to die someday. Do I really want to take the time read this?
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Paul LaFargue was Karl Marx’s son-in-law?!?! Trip out.
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“If [Paul LaFargue] is a a Marxist, then I am clearly not.”
—Karl Marx, quoted on the jacket copy
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“If there’s one thing for certain, it’s that I am not a Marxist.”
—Karl Marx, quoted in Sante’s introduction
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Well, which is it?
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LaFargue’s bio, per Sante, is cray. I can’t even.
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In 1911, when the money from Engels finally ran out, the LaFargues killed themselves with injections of cyanide in a “rational suicide pact.” Paul was not quite seventy; Laura sixty-six; both were healthy. The suicide pact provoked furious controversy in the international socialist community, but Lenin told Krupskaya, “If one cannot work for the Party any longer, one must be able to look truth in the face and die like the LaFargues.”
—Sante
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Inadvertently seething with race and racism.
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LaFargue’s text is… sometimes engaging in witticisms that unfortunately include anti-Semitic jibes—fully in tune with his times, when ‘Rothschild’ was conceived as a universal boogeyman for the European gentile working class, but odd for someone who is a quarter Jewish.
—Sante
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(It should be noted that Marx and Engels both repeatedly employ the N-word when referring to LaFargue in their correspondence.)
—Sante
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On the very first page of The Right to be Lazy:
In capitalist society, work is the cause of every intellectual degeneration and every physical deformation. Compare the thoroughbred in Rothschild’s stables, waited on hand and foot by a retinue of bipeds, with the clomping beast of the Norman farms, who turns the earth, carts in the manure, and hauls in the crops.
—LaFargue
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Oh boy. This reads as proto-Nazism.
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Next sentence: “noble savage” (LaFargue).
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“For the Spaniard, in whom the primitive animal has not atrophied, work is the worst sort of slavery” (LaFargue).
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OK pal I’m running out of steam and stomach. Say something better than this or I’m done.
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“Jehovah, the bearded and rebarbative god, gave his worshippers the supreme example of ideal laziness: after six days of work, he rested for eternity.”
OK that is legit hilarious. I’ll read a little longer.
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Twelve-hour workdays were the ideal of the eighteenth-century philanthropists and moralists. How far beyond this ne plus ultra we’ve gone! Modern workhouses have become superlative houses of correction, where the working masses are incarcerated and sentenced to forced labor for twelve or fourteen hours a day—and not only men but women and children!
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Vivid scenes of 19th c./Industrial Revolution squalor and misery.
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Instead of taking advantage of periods of crisis to demand a general distribution of projects and an all-around good time, the starving workers go beat their heads against the factory doors. With gaunt faces, cadaverous bodies, and piteous words, they assail the manufacturers: ‘Good Monsieur Chagot, dear Monsieur Schneider, give us work, it isn’t hunger but passion for work that torments us!’ And these poor people, who hardly have the strength to stand, sell twelve or fourteen hours of labor for half as much as they did when they had food on the table.
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More on quote-unquote “Rothschilds.”
More of this: “they are shivering in cotton dresses so patched and tattered they would bring a tear to the eye of a Jew.”
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Skimming.
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OK, OK, I get the point.
Work = capitalistic exploitation with diminishing returns for the worker.
The proletariat must reject the indoctrination of work to be free.
Got it.
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Going back to the intro, Sante situates LaFargue and the capital-L Left in opposition to “Napoleon III and the peasant anarchism of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon.”
That’s nice.
When one considers Proudhon’s virulent antisemitism, one is left to conclude that to be an influential 19th-century leftist intellectual is to be very probably a piece of shit.
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Jacket copy:
At once a timely argument for a three-hour workday and 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 and helping shape John Maynard Keynes’s ideas about overproduction.
Um, guys?
Thanks N. A thorny subject even for Protestant-work-ethic based societies, when said ethic used as scold & for subjugation. Contrast with Bertrand Russell’s ‘In Praise of Idleness’… ? Less provocation to skim...