1. A Disastrous Dogma

Paul Lafargue's
The Right To Be Lazy

Let us be lazy in everything, except in loving and drinking, except in
being lazy. - Lessing

Chapter I

A DISASTROUS DOGMA.

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 moralists have cast a sacred halo over work. Blind and
finite men, they have wished to be wiser than their God; weak and
contemptible men, they have presumed to rehabilitate what their God had
cursed. I, who do not profess to be a Christian, an economist or a
moralist, I appeal from their judgement to that of their God; from the
preachings of their religious, economics or free thought ethics, to the
frightful consequences of work in capitalist society.

In capitalist society work is the cause of all intellectual degeneracy, of
all organic deformity. Compare the thorough-bred in Rothschild's stables,
served by a retinue of bipeds, with the heavy brute of the Norman farms
which plows the earth, carts the manure, hauls the crops. Look at the noble
savage whom the missionaries of trade and the traders of religion have not
yet corrupted with Christianity, syphilis and the dogma of work, and then
look at our miserable slaves of machines.[1]

When, in our civilized Europe, we would find a trace of the native beauty
of man, we must go seek it in the nations where economic prejudices have
not vet uprooted the hatred of work. Spain, which, alas, is degenerating,
may still boast of possessing fewer factories than we have of prisons and
barracks; but the artist rejoices in his admiration of the hardy
Andalusian, brown as his native chestnuts, straight and flexible as a steel
rod; and the heart leaps at hearing the beggar, superbly draped in his
ragged capa, parleying on terms of equality with the duke of Ossuna. For
the Spaniard, in whom the primitive animal has not been atrophied, work is
the worst sort of slavery. [2] The Greeks in their era of greatness had
only contempt for work: their slaves alone were permitted to labor: the
free man knew only exercises for the body and mind. And so it was in this
era that men like Aristotle, Phidias, Aristophanes moved and breathed among
the people; it was the time when a handful of heroes at Marathon crushed
the hordes of Asia, soon to be subdued by Alexander. The philosophers of
antiquity taught contempt for work, that degradation of the free man, the
poets sang of idleness, that gift from the Gods:

O Melibae Deus nobis haec otia fecit.

Jesus, in his sermon on the Mount, preached idleness: "Consider the lilies
of the field, how they grow: they toil not, neither do they spin: and yet I
say unto you that even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of
these." Jehovah the bearded and angry god, gave his worshipers the supreme
example of ideal laziness; after six days of work, he rests for all
eternity.

On the other hand, what are the races for which work is an organic
necessity? The Auvergnians; the Scotch, those Auvergnians of the British
Isles; the Galicians, those Auvergnians of Spain; the Pomeranians, those
Auvergnians of Germany; the Chinese, those Auvergnians of Asia. In our
society which are the classes that love work for work's sake' The peasant
proprietors, the little shopkeepers; the former bent double over their
fields, the latter crouched in their shops, burrow like the mole in his
subterranean passage and never stand up to look at nature leisurely.

And meanwhile the proletariat, the great class embracing all the producers
of civilized nations, the class which in freeing itself will free humanity
from servile toil and will make of the human animal a free being,"”the
proletariat, betraying its instincts, despising its historic mission, has
let itself be perverted by the dogma of work. Rude and terrible has been
its punishment. All its individual and social woes are born of its passion
for work.

Footnotes

[1] European explorers pause in wonder before the physical beauty and the
proud bearing of the men of primitive races, not soiled by what Paeppig
calls "the poisonous breath of civilization." Speaking of the aborigines of
the oceanic Islands, Lord George Campbell writes: "There is not a people in
the world which strikes one more favorably at first sight. Their smooth
skin of a light copper tint, their hair golden and curly, their beautiful
and happy faces, in a word. their whole person formed a new and splendid
specimen of the 'genus homo'; their physical appearance gave the impression
of a race superior to ours." The civilized men of ancient Rome, witness
Caesar and Tacitus, regarded with the same admiration the Germans of the
communist tribes which invaded the Roman empire. Following Tacitus,
Salvien, the priest of the fifth century who received the surname of master
of the Bishops, held up the barbarians as an example to civilized
Christians: "We are immodest before the barbarians, who are more chaste
than we. Even more, the barbarians are wounded at our lack of modesty; the
Goths do not permit debauchees of their own nation to remain among them;
alone in the midst of them, by the sad privilege of their nationality and
their name, the Romans have the right to be impure. (Pederasty was then the
height of the fashion among both pagans and Christians.) The oppressed fly
to the barbarians to seek for mercy and a shelter." (De Gubernatione Dei.)
The old civilization and the rising Christianity corrupted the barbarians
of the ancient world, as the old Christianity and the modern capitalist
civilization are corrupting the savages of the new world.

M. F. LePlay, whose talent for observation must be recognized, even if we
reject his sociological conclusions, tainted with philanthropic and
Christian pharisaism, says in his hook "Les Ouvriers Europeans" (1885):
"The Propensity of the Bachkirs for laziness (the Bachkirs are semi-nomadic
shepherds of the Asiatic slope of the Ural mountains); the leisure of
nomadic life, the habit of meditation which this engenders in the best
endowed individuals.--all this often gives them a distinction of manner, a
fineness of intelligence and judgement which is rarely to be observed on
the same social level in a more developed civilization..... The thing most
repugnant to them is agricultural labor: they will do anything rather than
accept the trade of a farmer." Agriculture is in fact the first example of
servile labor in the history of man. According to biblical tradition, the
first criminal, Cain, is a farmer.

[2] The Spanish proverb says: Descanzar es salud. (Rest is healthful.)