SUMMARY: According to the publisher’s abstract, “At once a masterpiece of critical theory and rip-roaring radical humor, this is one of the most spirited attacks on the notion of the “work ethic” ever to be published. Featuring a revised edition of the original English translation by Charles Hope Kerr, this collection also includes four of Paul Lafargue’s lesser-known critiques (including the ‘Catechism for Investors’), as well as a biographical sketch by longtime Wobbly organizer Fred Thompson and a new introduction. … Paul Lafargue (1842?–1911) was a Cuban-born socialist revolutionary.” In 1880 Paul Lafargue, the author of the popular essay “The Right to be Lazy,” characterized the love of work “a strange delusion” that acts as an excuse to denigrate proposals to separate income from jobs. A new anti-authoritarian and pleasurable culture awaits to be born, but the bosses everywhere (including in the heads of too many proletarian leaders) wish to abort it. The exact institutions that would separate income from jobs are not clearly spelled out in Lafargue’s, and so it is impossible to say the extent to which he is a forerunner of the basic income movement, but certainly the idea of the right to be lazy and the desire to separate income from work move in that direction.
Paul Lafargue (Author), Bernard Marszalek (Editor), The Right to Be Lazy: Essays by Paul Lafargue. AK Press, 2011
- The right to be lazy
