The Right to Be Lazy, and Other Studies
1883
The Right to Be Lazy, and Other Studies
1883
Translated by Charles H. Kerr
The Right to Be Lazy, written by Paul Lafargue in 1883, critiques the capitalist glorification of labor and advocates for the value of leisure. Lafargue argues that work is a source of misery for the working class, contrasting modern labor ethics with historical perspectives that valued idleness. This treatise played a significant role in inspiring movements for the eight-hour workday and equal pay. The new translation by Len Bracken includes Lafargue's lesser-known talk on The Intellectuals, enhancing the original text's impact.
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“Work, work, proletarians, to increase social wealth and your individual poverty; work, work, in order that becoming poorer, you may have more reason to work and become miserable. Such is the inexorable law of capitalist production.””
— Paul Lafargue
“O Laziness, mother of the arts and noble virtues, be thou the balm of human anguish.””
— Paul Lafargue
“Confronted with this double madness of the labourers killing themselves with over-production and vegetating in abstinence, the great problem of capitalist production is no longer to find producers and to multiply their powers but to discover consumers, to excite their appetites and create in them fictitious needs.””
— Paul Lafargue
“In proportion as the machine is improved and performs man's work with an ever increasing rapidity and exactness, the labourer, instead of prolonging his former rest times, redoubles his ardour, as if he wished to rival the machine. O, absurd and murderous competition!””
— Paul Lafargue
“The bourgeoisie, when it was struggling against the nobility sustained by the clergy, hoisted the flag of free thought and atheism; but once triumphant, it changed its tone and manner and today it uses religion to support its economic and political supremacy””
— Paul Lafargue
“Our epoch has been called the century of work. It is in fact the century of pain, misery and corruption.””
— Paul Lafargue
“İçinde bulunduğumuz çağın çalışma asrı olduğu söyleniyor.Fakat aslında bu acı,sefalet ve yozlaşma asrıdır!””
— Paul Lafargue
“Yoksul uluslarda halkın rahatı yerindedir.Zengin uluslardaysa, halk, genellikle yoksuldur.””
— Paul Lafargue
“They imagine that their poverty is transitory, and that they only need a stroke of good luck to transform them into capitalists.Education, they think, is the lucky number in the social lottery, and it will bring them the grand prize. They do not perceive that this ticket given them by the capitalist class is a fraud, that labor, whether manual or intellectual, has no other chance than to earn its daily pittance, that it has nothing to hope for but to be exploited, and that the more capitalism goes on developing, the more do the chances of an individual raising himself out of his class go on diminishing.””
— Paul Lafargue
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<a href="https://lex-books.com/book/the-right-to-be-lazy-and-other-studies-7a249c21-9071-4096-9705-21823fa0d915"><img src="https://lex-books.com/badges/read-on-lex.svg" alt="Read The Right to Be Lazy, and Other Studies by Paul Lafargue free on Lex" width="160" height="40"></a>[](https://lex-books.com/book/the-right-to-be-lazy-and-other-studies-7a249c21-9071-4096-9705-21823fa0d915)[url=https://lex-books.com/book/the-right-to-be-lazy-and-other-studies-7a249c21-9071-4096-9705-21823fa0d915][img]https://lex-books.com/badges/read-on-lex.svg[/img][/url]Read The Right to Be Lazy, and Other Studies by Paul Lafargue free on Lex: https://lex-books.com/book/the-right-to-be-lazy-and-other-studies-7a249c21-9071-4096-9705-21823fa0d915Cite this book
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Lafargue, Paul. The Right to Be Lazy, and Other Studies. Lex, lex-books.com/book/the-right-to-be-lazy-and-other-studies-7a249c21-9071-4096-9705-21823fa0d915.Lafargue, P. (1883). The Right to Be Lazy, and Other Studies. Lex. https://lex-books.com/book/the-right-to-be-lazy-and-other-studies-7a249c21-9071-4096-9705-21823fa0d915Lafargue, Paul. The Right to Be Lazy, and Other Studies. Lex. https://lex-books.com/book/the-right-to-be-lazy-and-other-studies-7a249c21-9071-4096-9705-21823fa0d915.
