Paul Lafargue - The Right to Be Lazy

 

Paul Lafargue

I never really liked the slogan that was used by the International Socialist (I.S.), demanding the right to work. It always sounded to me like a defence of wage slavery and the right to be exploited. In the 1970s the I.S. used to organise right to work marches.

Nor do I think there's any dignity in labouring for others in order to enrich them. Keir Starmer's Labour government are obsessed with the cult of work and glorifying labour. What underpins Labour's obsession with work, is the Puritan work ethic.

The Cuban-born socialist, Paul Lafargue, who was the son-in-law of Karl Marx, wrote a book called 'The Right to Be Lazy'. Lafargue argued in his book that if you insist on the right to work, you would be still be under the yoke of having to earn a wage. He wrote that the proletariat "must proclaim the Rights of Laziness, a hundred thousand times nobler and holier than the Rights of Man cooked up by the philosophizing lawyers of the bourgeois revolution.”