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Home > Products > The Right to Be Lazy
The Right to Be Lazy

Additional Book Information

Series: NYRB Classics
ISBN: 9781681376820
Pages: 136
Publication Date: November 15, 2022

The Right to Be Lazy

by Paul Lafargue, translated from the French by Alex Andriesse,
introduction by Lucy Sante

Available as E-BookEssays & CriticismFrench LiteraturePolitics &
Current Affairs
Paperback
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An NYRB Classics Original

Exuberant, provocative, and as controversial as when it first
appeared in 1880, Paul Lafargue's The Right to Be Lazy is a call for
the workers of the world to unite--and stop working so much! Lafargue,
Karl Marx's son-in-law (about whom Marx once said, "If he is a
Marxist, then I am clearly not") wrote his pamphlet on the virtues of
laziness while in prison for giving a socialist speech. At once a
timely argument for a three-hour workday and a classical defense of
leisure, The Right to Be Lazy shifted the course of European thought,
going through seventeen editions in Russia during the Revolution of
1905 and helping shape John Maynard Keynes's ideas about
overproduction. Published here with a selection of Lafargue's other
writings--including an essay on Victor Hugo and a memoir of Marx--The
Right to Be Lazy reminds us that the urge to work is not always
beneficial, let alone necessary. It can also be a "strange madness"
consuming human lives.

Praise

These piercing essays from socialist Lafargue offer a valuable window
into early Marxist thinking. . . . these pieces speak to the present
moment, when pandemic-related disruptions have provoked
reconsiderations of where, how, and why people work. Readers will
relish this incendiary blast from the past.
--Publishers Weekly

The writing is vivid, pointed, hilarious. To paraphrase Elizabeth
Bishop, Lafargue is scathing, but cheerful.
--Michael Autrey, Booklist

With scathing wit, Lafargue takes aim at the ideological
underpinnings of late-stage capitalism. . . . A sly, irreverent
sibling to The Communist Manifesto, Lafargue's argument against our
willing servitude to what we'd now call hustle culture and
growth-at-all-costs is as trenchant and necessary as the day it was
written, if not more so.
--David Wright, Library Journal

The writing is vivid, pointed, hilarious. To paraphrase Elizabeth
Bishop, Lafargue is scathing, but cheerful.
-- Michael Autrey, Booklist

[Lafargue's] ideas are even more relevant to today's enslaved
societies than they were when they were first written.
--Tom Hodgkinson, editor of The Idler
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Paul Lafargue

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