The Right To Be Lazy: And Other Writings

First published in 1883, this bracing anti-capitalist manifesto gets a fresh translation for the era of the Great Resignation. With scathing wit, LaFargue takes aim at the ideological underpinnings of late-stage capitalism, the “disastrous dogma of work,” calling with irresistible logic to free the “miserable servants of the machine” from boom-and-bust cycles of overproduction via the institution of a three-hour workday. Less persuasive is his lengthy takedown of Victor Hugo, a splenetic diatribe that calls out the beloved literary titan as a mercenary hypocrite with a tendentious rancor that, especially juxtaposed with the fawning hagiography of his father-in-law Karl Marx that follows, highlights the LaFargue’s rhetorical zeal over his more substantial but less showy critiques on women’s rights and socialism, not included here.