The Right to Be Lazy (French: Le Droit à la paresse) is a book by Paul Lafargue, published in 1883. In it, Lafargue, a French socialist, opposes the labour movement's fight to expand wage labour rather than abolish or at least limit it. According to Lafargue, wage labour is tantamount to slavery, and to fight as a labour movement for the extension of slavery is preposterous. In the book Lafargue proposes the right to be lazy, in contrast to the right to work, which he deems bourgeois.
Introduction
After an initial quote from Gotthold Ephraim Lessing ("Let us be lazy in everything, except in loving and drinking, except in being lazy"), the book's introduction reads: "A strange delusion possesses the working classes of the nations where capitalist civilization holds its sway. This delusion drags in its train the individual and social woes which for two centuries have tortured sad humanity. This 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. Instead of opposing this mental aberration, the priests, the economists and the...
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