Book of the Week: The Right to Be Lazy

The false doctrine that work is good has perverted our humanity, argued Paul Lafargue

Let us be lazy in everything except in
loving and drinking, except in being lazy. Lessing

A strange madness has taken hold of the working class in nations where capitalist civilisation reigns. This madness drags in its wake the individual and social sufferings that, for two centuries now, have tormented poor humanity. This madness is the love of work, the moribund passion for work, pushed to the point where the vital forces of the individual and his progeny are exhausted.

Instead of taking action against this mental aberration, priests, economists, and moralists have declared work sacrosanct. Hidebound and blind, these men have sought to be wiser than their God; weak and contemptible, they have tried to rehabilitate what their God has cursed.

I, who do not profess to be Christian, economical, or moral – I appeal against their judgment to the judgment of their God. I ask you to turn a deaf ear to the preachments of their religious, economic, freethinking morality and consider the appalling consequences of work in capitalist society.

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 the manure, and hauls in the crops. Consider the noble savage whom the missionaries of business and the businessmen of religion have not yet corrupted with Christianity, syphilis, and the dogma of work, and then consider our own miserable servants of the machine.

If, in our civilised Europe, you want to find some trace of man’s native beauty, you have to go looking for it in nations where economic prejudices have not yet eradicated the hatred of work. Spain, which, alas, is degenerating, can still boast of having fewer factories than prisons and barracks; but the artist rejoices at the sight of the hardy Andalusian, brown as a chestnut, lithe and straight-backed as a steel rod; and man’s heart thrills at hearing the beggar, superbly draped in his threadbare capa, speaking as an amigo with the dukes of Osuna. For the Spaniard, in whom the primitive animal has not atrophied, work is the worst sort of slavery.

The Greeks, too, in their great era, had nothing but contempt for work. Slaves alone were permitted to work. A free man knew only exercises for the body and games for the mind. These were also the days when Aristotle, Phidias, and Aristophanes walked and breathed among the people; they were the days when a handful of warriors in Marathon crushed the hordes of Asia, soon to be conquered by Alexander. The philosophers of antiquity taught contempt for work, that degradation of free humanity, and the poets sang of laziness, that gift of the gods:

“O Meliboe, Deus nobis haec otia fecit” (Virgil, Eclogues, “O Meliboeus, a god gave me this otium.”)

Christ, in his Sermon on the Mount, preached laziness:

“Consider the lilies how they grow: they toil not, they spin not; and yet I say unto you, that Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these.”

Jehovah, the bearded and rebarbative god, gave his worshippers the supreme example of ideal laziness: after six days of work, he rested for eternity.

Who, on the other hand, considers work an organic necessity? The Auvergnese; the Scots, those Auvergnese of the British Isles; the Gallegos, the Auvergnese of Spain; the Pomeranians, the Auvergnese of Germany; the Chinese, the Auvergnese of Asia. And in our society, what classes love work for work’s sake? The peasant proprietors hunched over their fields and the petits bourgeois besotted with their shops, wriggling around like moles in their underground tunnels, never poking their heads out to take a leisurely look at nature.

And meanwhile the proletariat, the great class embracing all the producers of the civilised 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. Its punishment has been cruel and horrible. All individual and social miseries arise from its passion for work.

This extract is from The Right to Be Lazy and Other Writings by Paul Lafargue. Translated from the French by Alex Andriesse and introduced by Lucy Sante. Price: £13.99, NYRB Classics.

We’ll be discussing Paul Lafargue’s The Right to Be Lazy on “A Drink with the Idler” on Thursday 19 January 2023, 6pm London time. Book your tickets here. Free to subscribers.

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