“The Right to be Lazy (Le droit a la paresse)” was written by Paul Lafargue in 1880. Lafargue is the son-in-law of Karl Marx and co-founder of the French Socialist Party. It is possible to see traces of socialism in his works.
The right to laziness sharply criticizes how the capitalist system condemns the working class to work while freeing the bourgeois class to idle. The book consists of five chapters. In the first chapter of the book, the author calls for the dire consequences of work in a capitalist society. According to Lafargue, in societies dominated by capitalist civilization, the working class is afflicted with insanity. This madness is the love for work, the passion for work. Moreover, this passion; is blessed rather than reacted by priests, economists, and moralists. The proletariat class also allowed itself to degenerate with the passion for work, and the punishment for this was the birth of all individuals and social poverty.
In the second chapter, ıt refers to the fact that work was historically blessed, in the 18th century, women, children, and men were sentenced to forced labor between 12 and 14 hours, and the right to work was seen as a revolutionary principle. In this section, Lafargue criticizes with reproachful language that the working class has become a part of this system with their own hands and cannot resist the system that condemns individuals to work. According to Lafargue, “This century is not the century of work, but the century of poverty and decay.” The hard-hearted law of capitalist production commands work; “to work, to work harder to become poorer”. According to the author, work should be wisely arranged for a maximum of three hours a day, “only in this way becomes a useful exercise for the human body, a useful passion for the social order”. According to Lafargue, the exploitation of the goodwill of the working class and throwing it into work and deprivation; led to the condemnation of the capitalist class to laziness and overconsumption, and the immeasurable enlargement of the bourgeoisie. The author wishes to be a mercy to the misery that does not end by appealing to laziness, to be the balm of human troubles.
In summary, this book is a reaction to the capitalist order's imposition of overwork. It is such that this order has become an order that makes people even more impoverished, enslaved, and unhappy. The author's aim is not to praise laziness, but rather as a metaphor for the imposition of work.
