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The Right to be Lazy is an essay by Cuban-born French revolutionary Marxist Paul Lafargue, written from his London exile in 1880. The essay polemicizes heavily against then-contemporary liberal, conservative, Christian and even socialist ideas of work. Lafargue criticizes these ideas from a Marxist perspective as dogmatic and ultimately false by portraying the degeneration and enslavement of human existence when being subsumed under the primacy of the "right to work", and argues that laziness, combined with human creativity, is an important source of human progress.
He manifests that "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 yet uprooted the hatred of work … 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 ... The philosophers of antiquity taught contempt for work, that degradation of the free man, the poets sang of idleness, that gift from the Gods." And so he says "Proletarians, brutalized by the dogma of work, listen to the voice of these philosophers, which has been concealed from you with jealous care: A citizen who gives his labor for money degrades himself to the rank of slaves." (The last sentence paraphrasing Cicero.)
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Subjects
Work, Marxism, Laziness, Working class, Hours of labor, Conditions sociales, Labor movement, Socialism, LaborTimes
19th centuryShowing 5 featured editions. View all 50 editions?
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Le droit à la paresse: réfutation du "droit du travail" de 1848
2010, La Découverte
Texte imprimé :
in French
2707159492 9782707159496
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- Created August 30, 2008
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April 19, 2020 | Edited by lisaBot | moving edition(s) to primary work |
July 14, 2019 | Edited by Gustav-Landauer-Bibliothek Witten | work |
August 14, 2010 | Edited by WorkBot | merge works |
December 8, 2009 | Edited by ImportBot | link works |
August 30, 2008 | Created by ImportBot | Imported from Talis record |