Book//mark – The Right to Be Lazy | Paul Lafargue, 1883

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Paul Lafargue The Right to Be Lazy 1883

Paul Lafargue, The Right to Be Lazy, 1883 / Paul Lafargue, 1842-1911

“Confronted with this double madness of the labourers killing themselves with over-production and vegetating in abstinence, the great problem of capitalist production is no longer to find producers and to multiply their powers but to discover consumers, to excite their appetites and create in them fictitious needs.”

“In proportion as the machine is improved and performs man’s work with an ever increasing rapidity and exactness, the labourer, instead of prolonging his former rest times, redoubles his ardour, as if he wished to rival the machine. O, absurd and murderous competition!”

“Work, work, proletarians, to increase social wealth and your individual poverty; work, work, in order that becoming poorer, you may have more reason to work and become miserable. Such is the inexorable law of capitalist production.”

“The bourgeoisie, when it was struggling against the nobility sustained by the clergy, hoisted the flag of free thought and atheism; but once triumphant, it changed its tone and manner and today it uses religion to support its economic and political supremacy”

“You complain because you have been reduced to becoming nothing but a digestive apparatus; but all who earn their living by working are lodged at the same sign. They obtain their means of existence only by confining themselves to being nothing but an organ functioning to the profit of another; the mechanic is the arm which forges, taps, hammers, planes, digs, weaves; the singer is the larynx which vocalizes, warbles, spins out notes; the engineer is the brain which calculates, which arranges plans; the prostitute is the sexual organ which gives out venereal pleasure. Do you imagine that the clerks in my office use their intelligence, or that they reflect when they are copying papers? Oh, but they don’t; thinking is not their business; they are nothing but fingers which scribble. They perform in my offices for ten or twelve hours this work which is far from exhilarating, which gives them headaches, stomach disorders and hemorrhoids; and at evening they home writing to finish, that they may earn a few cents to pay their landlord. Console yourself, my dear sir, these young people suffer as well as you, and not one of them has the satisfaction of saying that he receives per year the sum that you draw for a single month of digestive labor.”

“Our epoch has been called the century of work. It is in fact the century of pain, misery and corruption.”

“Work takes all the time and with it one has no leisure for the republic and his friends.”

“O Laziness, mother of the arts and noble virtues, be thou the balm of human anguish.”

Paul Lafargue, The Right to Be Lazy, 1883

Also:
Persons [ ] Education / Labour / Management / Commerce | Karl Marx, 1867

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