This book has been introduced before, by a man better qualified to do it than we are, and the introduction was never printed.
In 1971 Sam Gordon sat down to write a preface for an English selection of Paul Lafargue’s essays, built around The Right to Be Lazy. Gordon was then sixty-one. He had joined the Communist League of America after hearing James P. Cannon speak on internationalism; he had been in Germany before Hitler took power, and his reports there were part of the raw material of Trotsky’s writings on Germany, many of which he translated; he had been emergency secretary of the Fourth International at the special conference held in New York in May 1940, when the International’s European centre had been overrun. He wrote his introduction. The selection was never published. Gordon died in 1982, and the piece surfaced only afterwards, in the first issue of Revolutionary History, with a one-line editorial note recording that the book it was written for had not appeared.
We begin there because it tells you most of what you need to know about this pamphlet’s strange career. The Right to Be Lazy is the most famous thing Lafargue wrote, and one of the most quoted texts in the history of socialism. It has also been, for a century, oddly homeless: too funny for the theoretical journals, too heretical for the labour movement’s official catechisms, too obviously right to be forgotten. It keeps being rediscovered, and the rediscoveries keep not quite arriving.
Lafargue wrote it as a run of articles in the French workers’ weekly L’Égalité in 1880, and gave it its finished shape, with the preface printed here, in 1883, while serving a sentence in the Sainte-Pélagie gaol in Paris for agitating among workers. Its target is named in its subtitle: the droit au travail, the right to work, the demand the revolutionaries of 1848 had carved on their banners. Against it Lafargue set the right to idleness, and he meant it. He was no bohemian outsider. Born in Santiago de Cuba of mixed Caribbean, Creole and French descent, he became with Jules Guesde a founder of the Parti Ouvrier, the first organised Marxist party in France; he married Laura, Marx’s second daughter; and he and Laura ended their lives together in 1911, on the reasoning that they had given what they could and would not outlive their usefulness. It was of Lafargue’s French disciples that Marx made his weary remark that, whatever else was certain, he himself was not a Marxist.
What the book gets right, it gets right very early. Its real subject is not laziness at all but the manufacture of the work ethic, the way the compulsion to labour has been dressed by priests, professors and newspaper moralists as a law of nature and a duty of the soul. Lafargue opens on the diagnosis:
A strange delusion possesses the working classes of the nations where capitalist civilisation holds its sway.
The delusion is
the love of work, the furious passion for work, pushed even to the exhaustion of the vital force of the individual and his progeny,
and the trick that sustains it is a moral one. He catches the arch-conservative Thiers in an unguarded moment recommending the clergy as a tool of government precisely because religion teaches man that he is here below to suffer, and from that confession builds his case: that
the priests, the economists and the moralists have cast a sacred halo over work.
This is a genuinely Marxist argument, applied to the one place socialists of his day were least likely to look, the dignity of labour itself. And the economics behind the joke is serious. The same machines that could shorten every working life are used to lengthen it, throwing some into overwork and others onto the street, and then flooding a world of impoverished producers with goods they cannot buy. The machine, Lafargue writes, might have been
the saviour of humanity, the god who shall redeem man from the sordidae artes and from working for hire, the god who shall give him leisure and liberty,
and has been made an instrument of misery instead. His remedy is deliberately outrageous:
a brazen law forbidding any man to work more than three hours a day.
The three hours are a provocation, not a plan. But the thought behind them runs straight into Marx’s own: that the measure of a free society is how little compulsory labour it demands, and that machinery ought to buy leisure rather than sell more toil.
Sam Gordon’s unprinted introduction is the best short defence of that argument the movement produced, and it is worth rescuing because of when it was written. Gordon was answering 1971, not 1883. He pointed out that Lafargue’s slashing attacks on capitalist hypocrisy about the sacredness of toil were still apropos, and that they read almost as a direct riposte to the hand-wringing of the press over the “man-hours wantonly lost” to strikes, alongside its complete silence about the greater number lost to industrial accident and illness. He noted what the three-hour day had meant when it was proposed: a time when women and children, let alone men, worked more than ten hours a day and often more than seventy hours a week. He saw in the automation of the “third industrial revolution” the realisation of Lafargue’s forecast, and in the guaranteed income the concrete form the right might take. And he read the youth revolt of his own decade as a warning rather than a symptom: the bell, he wrote, is tolling for wage slavery.
Gordon was not alone in reaching for the book in those years. In January 1970 Quatrième Internationale, the theoretical organ of the Fourth International’s leadership, logged Maspero’s post-1968 reissue of Le droit à la paresse on its books-received page, between Pierre Jalée on imperialism and Arghiri Emmanuel on unequal exchange. By 1972 the Ligue Communiste in France had gone further and named a front organisation after it: the training camps it ran for young workers in Paris that year were held, as a historian of the group records, under cover of an association called Le Droit à la Paresse, created by the Ligue. The title had become an organisational joke and an organisational programme at once. It is a fair measure of the book’s peculiar authority that a Leninist party building cadre schools chose to do it under Lafargue’s banner rather than Lenin’s.
Now say where the pamphlet falls short, because it does. Its worst pages romanticise so-called primitive peoples as innocents unspoiled by civilisation, a nineteenth-century sentimentality resting on bad anthropology. Its language of vital force and progeny drifts toward the crude biologism that disfigured much socialism of the 1880s. And there is an unclarity at its heart: Lafargue often writes as though the enemy were work as such, so that emancipation would mean simply less of it, where Marx’s quarrel was with alienated labour, work owned and commanded by another, and his hope was less that free people would work little than that their work would cease to be a curse.
The German party understood the provocation and did not enjoy it. As Iring Fetscher observes in the fullest modern edition of Lafargue’s cultural writings, the book unleashed a storm of protest among his German party friends, whose socialism was of the ascetic, disciplined, barrack-room type, and to whom his insistence that the aim of emancipation was a happy and satisfying life looked like hedonism. Fetscher’s reply is the right one: that this was wholly in the sense of Marx, since one fights the capitalist relations of production for the sake of a better life. The Lafargues’ own suicide note, explaining that ageing would strip away the joy of existence bit by bit, is the same argument carried to a conclusion most of us would not follow.
The tradition that later claimed Lafargue also knew his limits. When Christian Rakovsky rose at the Russian party’s Twelfth Congress in 1923 to warn against Great-Russian chauvinism, he reached for a letter Marx had written to Engels in April 1866, in which Marx recounted, with evident pleasure, that the English had laughed when he began his speech by observing that “our friend Lafargue” and the others who had finished with nationalities had addressed the meeting in French, a language incomprehensible to nine-tenths of those present. Rakovsky’s point was that the abolition of nations in theory tends to mean their absorption by one’s own in practice. He was telling the Bolsheviks that the prejudice they were indulging in 1923 was the prejudice Lafargue had indulged sixty years earlier. Lafargue is a founder of Marxism as an ism, with the vigour and the crudeness that go with building a catechism, and the movement always knew it.
Which brings us to the silence. Why did the state that turned Marxism into an official religion, and reprinted Lafargue’s more decorous essays, never give his most famous book an edition of its own?
Because the Soviet Union under Stalin built the most work-worshipping order in modern history, and in that world The Right to Be Lazy was close to unpublishable. This was the country of Stakhanovism, of socialist emulation, of the shock worker and the production target and the labour book that followed a worker from job to job; whose 1936 Constitution enthroned the Apostle Paul’s line about him who does not work neither shall he eat, borrowed by the Bolsheviks to aim at the expropriated rich and refitted as a disciplinary rule for the workers themselves; and where between 1938 and 1940 lateness and absence were made criminal offences. A funny little book demanding the right to be lazy was not a classic to be annotated there. Its absence from the Moscow catalogue is the most eloquent review it ever received.
Two qualifications, because this series insists on them. The productivism was not invented by Stalin from nothing: in the civil war years, with industry in ruins and the working class that made the revolution scattered or dead, Trotsky defended the militarisation of labour and Lenin turned the Apostle’s text against the propertied. Those were emergency measures in a besieged country, and it falsifies history to read them as the free choice of a healthy socialism. But there is all the difference in the world between emergency and apotheosis, and what the bureaucracy did was to take the grim necessity of a ruined economy and enthrone it as a permanent moral cult, then use the cult as a whip against the workers in whose name it ruled.
So the book lives, because both of the things it attacks are still with us: the capitalism of the hustle and the always-answered phone, which preaches self-fulfilment through overwork while the promised leisure of automation recedes; and the memory of a socialism that mistook maximum output for liberation, and that an ecological crisis has now shown to have been chasing the wrong god. Lafargue’s question keeps its edge, and it is Marx’s question too. What is all this labour for? Sam Gordon ended his unprinted introduction by saying he was sure a new generation of workers and students would feel the same joy in discovering Lafargue that his own generation had felt in the thirties. He was writing for a book that never came out. This is, at long last, that book.