The Right To Be Lazy

The Right
To Be Lazy
By Paul Lafargue
Published Online by
Socialist Labor Party of America
www.slp.org
Uploaded October 2005
Updated September 2006
The Right
To Be Lazy
BEING A REPUDIATION OF THE
RIGHT TO WORK OF 1848
By Paul Lafargue
Translated and adapted from the French
by Dr. Harriet Lothrop.
Published by the
INTERNATIONAL PUBLISHING CO.,
23 Duane Street, New York
PAUL LAFARGUE (18411911)
1898
AUTHORS PREFACE.
In 1849, Thiers, as member of the Commission on Instruction in Elementary
Schools, said: I believe in making the influence of the clergy general, because I
count upon it to spread that healthy philosophy which teaches man that he is here
to suffer, and not that other philosophy which in direct opposition says to him:
enjoy!
When bourgeoisdom fought against the nobility which was supported by the
clergy, it planted the banner of free investigation and atheism. Scarcely had it
attained its aim before it changed its tone and attitude; and to-day we see it
endeavoring to uphold its economic and political supremacy by religion. In the
fifteenth and sixteenth centuries it merrily attacked the remnant of heathenism
and glorified the flesh and its passions, this horror in the eyes of Christian
morality.
To-day, on the other hand, when it is almost suffocated by wealth and pleasures
of all kind, it does not care to know anything of the teachings of its thinkers, of
Soc ialist Labor Party
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The Right to Be Lazy
Rabelais and Diderot, Lessing and Goethe, but preaches the doctrines of abstinence
to the wage workers. Capitalist morality, a pitiable copy of Christian morality,
curses the flesh of the worker by a solemn ban; its ideal consists in reducing the
needs of the producer (i.e. of the real producer) to the lowest minimum, to smother
his pleasures and his passions, and to condemn him to play the part of a machine
out of which work is exploited ad libitum, without rest and without thanks.
To the revolutionary Socialists, therefore, is assigned the task of again taking
up the fight which the philosophists and the satirists of bourgeoisdom once fought.
The revolutionary Socialists have to mount to the assault against the morality and
social teachings of capitalism and eradicate prejudice from the brains of the class
which is summoned to action; prejudice, the seeds of which have been sown by the
ruling class. It is for the revolutionary Socialists, in opposition to all hypocritical
moralists, to proclaim that the earth will cease to be a valley of tears for the
workers, that in the Co-operative Commonwealth which we shall build up, human
passions will have free play, since all, as Descartes has already said, are by nature
good, we have merely to avoid their false and excessive use. This will be
accomplished by the free counterplay of the passions and the harmonious
development of the human organism, for, says Dr. Beddoe: Only when a race has
attained the maximum of its physical development, does it also attain the highest
degree of moral strength and energy.1 This was also the opinion of the great
naturalist, Charles Darwin.2
1 Memoirs of Anthropological Society.

2 Descent of Man.
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THE RIGHT TO BE LAZY

(A REFUTATION OF THE RIGHT TO WORK OF 1848.)
CHAPTER I.
A PERNICIOUS DOGMA.
A strange mania governs the working class of
all countries in which capitalist civilization rules, a
mania that results in the individual and collective
misery that prevails in modern society. This is the
love of work, the furious mania for work, extending
to the exhaustion of the individual and his
descendants. The parsons, the political economists,
and the moralists, instead of contending against
this mental aberration, have canonized work. Blind
and limited human beings, they have wished to be
wiser than their God; weak and unworthy
creatures, they have sought to honor what their
God has damned.
(FACSIMILE)
I who make no boast of being either Christian,
COVER TO THE FIRST AMERICAN EDITION,
economist or moralist, I appeal from their
PUBLISHED IN 1898 BY THE
INTERNATIONAL PUBLISHING COMPANY.
declaration to that of their God; from the precepts
of their religious, economic or free thinkers morality to the horrible consequences of
work in capitalist society.
In capitalist society, work is the cause of mental deterioration and physical
deformity. Compare the full-blooded steeds in the stables of a Rothschild or a
Vanderbilt, served by a whole flock of stable boys, with the heavy beasts of
Normandy or Pomerania that must plow the land, pull the fertilizing wagons, and
drag in the harvest. Contemplate the wild savage, before missionaries of commerce
and the traveling salesman for articles of faith have yet corrupted him with
Christianity, syphilis, and the dogma of work, and then compare our strained
machine slaves with him.3
3 European scientists are often much amazed at the physical beauty and proud bearing of the
members of the primitive races who are as yet unpolluted by the poisoned beauty of civilization, to
speak in the language of the poet.
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The Right To Be Lazy
If we wish to find a trace of the primitive beauty of man in our civilized Europe,
it is necessary to go to the nations in which politico-economic prejudice has not yet
eradicated the hatred of work. Spain, which, to be sure is now degenerating, may
yet be proud of possessing fewer factories than we have prisons and barracks; and
the eye of the artist tarries admiringly upon the daring, chestnut brown
Andalusians, elastic as steel; and our heart beats stronger when we hear the beggar
majestically draped in his ragged Capa, address a duke of Ossuna as Amigo
(friend). To the Spaniard, in whom the primitive animal has not yet been killed,
work is the worst slavery. The Greeks also, during the period of their greatest
bloom, had but disdain for work; the slave alone was permitted to labor, the free
man knew but physical exercise and play of the intellect. That was the time of an
Aristotle, a Phidias, an Aristophanes; the time when a handful of braves destroyed
the hordes of Asia at Marathon which Alexander soon conquered.
The ancient philosophers taught contempt of work, this derogation of the free
man; the poets sang of laziness, this gift of the Gods; Melibaeus, a God, gave us
this idleness, sings Virgil. In the Sermon on the Mount, Christ teaches: Consider
the lilies of the field, how they grow; they toil not, neither do they spin, yet I say
unto ye that Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these. Matthew
Lord George Campbell writes of the aborigines of the Australian islands: No race in the world, is
more striking at first sight. Their bronze or copper-colored, shining skin; their curly, golden hair;
their beautiful and graceful figuresin a word their whole personality{}presents a new and
brilliant specimen of the genus man; their physical appearance gives the impression of a race
superior to ours.
With not a little admiration, did the old Romans, a Csar and Tacitus, regard the Germans of the
communist tribes who penetrated into the Roman Empire. Like Tacitus, Salvianus, Teacher of the
Bishops, held the barbarians up as an example to the Christian and to the civilized world of the fifth
century. We are unchaste in the midst of barbarians who are more virtuous than we are. Still more;
the barbarians take offence at our lewdness. The Goths suffered no profligate of their own tribe to
remain among them; only the Romans among them have the right to be unclean, thanks to the sad
privilege of their name and their nationality; the oppressed go to the barbarians to seek human
kindness and protection. (De Gubernatione Dei.)
The old civilization and young Christianity corrupted the barbarians of the old world exactly as
Christianity in its senile debility and the modern capitalist civilization corrupt the savages of the
new world. The well-known Catholic writer, Mons. F. Le Play, whose talent of observation must be
acknowledged even if his sociological conclusions filled with philanthropical and Christian sophistry
be thrown aside, says in his book The European Workman (1855): The propensity of the Baschkins
to laziness (the Baschkins are half-nomadic shepherds in the Ural), together with the leisure
consequent upon a nomadic life and the habit of meditation which the former call forth in the more
gifted individuals, often results with these people in a refinement of manners, a sharpening of
intelligence and judgement, such as is seldom found in the social plane in a higher
civilization. . . . Nothing is more disagreeable to them than agriculture; they prefer to do anything
else than to make up their minds to the calling of husbandman.
In fact, agriculture is the first appearance of servile work among mankind.
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Paul Lafargue
VI, 2829. Jehova, the Old Testament God of the Jews, sets his worshippers the
most sublime example: after six days work, he rests for all eternity.
Which, on the other hand, are the races to whom work is an organic necessity?
The Auvergnanes of France; the Scotch, the Auvergnanes of the British Isles; the
Gallegos, the Auvergnanes of Spain; the Upper Silesians, the Auvergnanes of
Germany; the Chinese, the Auvergnanes of Asia. Which{,} in our society, are the
classes that love work for the sake of work? The small farmers and the small
tradesmen, who, the former, bent over their fields, the latter, busied in their shops,
resemble the mole grubbing about in his hole, never raising themselves to take a
leisurely look at nature.
And the proletariat, the great producing class of all civilized nations, the class
which by its emancipation will release mankind from servile work, and will create a
free being out of the human animal; the proletariat, too, mistaking its historical
calling, has allowed itself to be seduced by the dogma of work. Its chastisement is
hard and terrible. All individual and society misery takes its origin in the passion of
the proletariat for work.
CHAPTER II.
THE BLESSING OF WORK.
In the year 1770, an anonymous pamphlet appeared in London, entitled, An
Essay on Trade and Commerce, which at that time created a certain sensation. The
author, a great philanthropist, was exasperated that the English factory hand had
got it into his head that, as Englishman, he had the privilege by right of birth, to be
freer and more independent than the working people of any other European nation
whatever. Now, continues the worthy man, this idea, in so far as it affects the
bravery of our soldiers, may be of some use; but the less the factory workers have of
it, the better for them themselves and for the state. Workingmen ought never to
consider themselves as independent of their superiors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . it is
exceedingly dangerous to encourage mobs in a commercial state like our own, where
perhaps seven parts of the whole population are persons with little or no
property . . . . . . . . . . . . . . the cure will not be complete until the industrial armies
are satisfied to work six days for the same amount they now earn in four days.
Thus already a hundred years before Guizot, and more than a hundred years before
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Atkinson and Depew, the doctrine of work as a bridle for the nobler human passions
was preached.
The more my people work, the less vice will there be, wrote Napoleon on the
5th of May, 1807, from Osterode. (Did the condition of the land slaves inspire him to
this declaration?) I am the authority . . . . and I feel inclined that on Sunday, after
religious services are over, all business be re-opened, and that the workmen apply
themselves to their occupations.
In order to eradicate laziness and to bend the pride, and sense of independence,
the author of The Essays on Industry, etc., proposed to confine the poor in ideal
workhouses, which must have been houses of terror, and in which work should be
performed fourteen hours a day, in such a manner that, after the deduction for
meals, twelve full hours of work should remain. Twelve hours of work a day, the
ideal of philanthropists and moralists of the eighteenth century. How far beyond
this non plus ultra are we!
The modern workshops have become ideal houses of correction, in which the
tolling masses are confined, and in which not only the men, but the women and
children also, are condemned to twelve and fourteen hours of compulsory labor.4
And the descendants of the Terrorist heroes have so far permitted themselves
to be degraded by the religion of work, that in 1848 they accepted the law limiting
work in factories to twelve hours a day as a revolutionary conquest; they
proclaimed the right to work as a revolutionary principle!
Shame upon the French proletariat! Slaves only are capable of such
humiliation. Twenty years of capitalist civilization would have been necessary to
make such a humiliation conceivable to a Greek of ancient times! And if the
sufferings resulting from compulsory work have closed upon the proletariat, more
numerous than the locusts of the Bible, it is the proletariat itself who have conjured
them up.
The same work which the proletarians demanded, weapon in hand, they have
laid upon their families; they have handed their wives and children over to the
factory barons. With their own hands they have destroyed their household hearths;
4 At the first European Congress of Charity, (Brussels 1857) a Mr. Scrive, one of the wealthiest
manufacturers of Marquette, near Lille, France, said amidst applause of the members of the
Congress, and with the satisfaction of fulfilled duty: We have introduced some means of distraction
for the children. We teach them to sing and to count during their work. It entertains them and
induces them to enter bravely upon the twelve hours work necessary to procure them a livelihood.
Twelve hours work and what work! Materialists will lament eternally that there is no hell into
which these Christians, these philanthropists, these executioners of childhood can be expedited.
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Paul Lafargue
with their own hands dried up the breasts of the women. They have allowed
pregnant and nursing women to go into the factories, into the mines where they
shattered their nerves and tortured their spine; with their own hands have they
undermined the life and the vitality of their children. Shame upon you,
proletarians! Whither are gone those women with playful speech and fresh humor,
of whom our old legends and tales relate? Whither are gone those vivacious women,
who, always cooking, always tripping about, scattering life, brought healthy and
strong children into the world when they gave themselves the pleasure. To-day we
have women and girls in the factory, stunted flowers with pale complexion, colorless
blood, poor stomachs and exhausted limbs. A healthy pleasure is unknown to them.
And the children? Twelve hours work for the children!
O, Misery! All the Jules Simons of the Academy of Moral Sciences; all the
Stoeckers and Morgan Dixes of the clergy could have devised no evil more
stupefying to the mind of the children, more injurious to their disposition, more
ruinous to their organism than work in the pestiferous atmosphere of capitalist
workshops! Our century is called the century of work; actually it is the century of
pain, of misery, of corruption!
And yet the bourgeois political economists and philosophers, from the
tiresomely confused August Comte to the ridiculously clear Leroy Beaulieu, the
bourgeois author, from the charlatanly romantic Victor Hugo to the ingenuously
silly Paul de Kock,all individually and collectively have sung loathsome songs of
praise to the God Progress, the oldest son of work.
To listen to them, it would seem as if happiness must rule upon earth, and as
even now its presence might be felt. They have meandered through the centuries of
earlier ages, burrowing through the dust and misery of feudalism in order that the
sun of the present day may shine more brightly. These satiated peopleonly lately
retainers of the nobles, to-day fat-salaried press servants of the bourgeoisiehow
they have bored us with their boors of orators, La Bruyre and Cabot Lodge!
Now, we wish to show them that brilliant picture of proletarian pleasures in the
year of progress 1841, as portrayed by one of their own writers, the Academician de
Villerm, who in 1848 belonged to that group of literati who tried to instill into the
masses the platitudes of bourgeois morality and bourgeois political economy.
It is of the industrious Alsace that the Monsieur Villerm speaks, of these
flowers of philanthropy and of bourgeois republicanism. Before giving him the
platform, let us first hear how an Alsatian manufacturer, Mr. Thomas Mieg, of the
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firm Dolfuss, Mieg & Co., describes the situation of the manual worker under the
earlier system of industry: Fifty years ago (1813), when modern industry was in its
infancy, all workmen in Muehlhausen were native to the country; they lived in the
city and the surrounding villages, and almost every one had a little house and a bit
of land.5
That was the golden age of the workmen. At that time, however, Alsatian
industry had not flooded the world with its cottons and had not yet made its Dolfuss
and Koechlin millionaires. But twenty-five years later, when Dr. Villerm visited
Alsace, the capitalist factory, the modern Minotaur, had already conquered the
country; in its greed for human labor, it had snatched the workmen from their
homes that it might the more easily exploit them, and the more successfully press
out the labor-power embodied in them. The workmen ran by thousands to the
whistle of the machine. A great number, five to seventeen thousand, says
Villerm, were obliged to live in the neighboring villages in consequence of the high
rents. Some live two hours, yes, even two and a quarter hours distant from the
factory in which they work.
In Muehlhausen, in Dornach, work began at five oclock in the morning and
ended at eight oclock in the evening, summer and winter.It is a sight to see the
workers coming into the city every morning. Among them are a lot of thin, pale
women who run barefooted through the dirt, and when it rains or snows, for lack of
an umbrella{,} pull their aprons or skirts over their heads in order to protect neck
and face; and there is still a greater number of children not less dirty and
emaciated, wrapped in rags all greasy with the oil that drips down upon them from
the machines they tend. These children{,} who are better protected from the rain by
the imperviousness of their clothing, have not even a basket of provisions for the
day upon their arms like the women, but carry in their hand or hidden in their
smock the bit of bread upon which they must live until they return home.
Thus these unhappy human beings, in addition to the fatigue of an excessively
long working day (for it amounts to at least fifteen hours) have added a long and
oftimes very laborious walk. Consequently, they reach home over-fatigued and leave
in the morning before they have had the proper amount of sleep, in order that they
may reach the factory punctually.
5 Speech delivered in May, 1863, before the Parisian International Society for the practical study of
political economy, and published in the French Economist of the same year.
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And as to the quarters, into which those who live in the city must impen6
themselves: In Muehlhausen, in Dornach and suburbs, I have seen those miserable
rooms in which two families slept, each in a corner upon straw which was spread
out on the floor and held together by a couple of boards. . . . The wretchedness in
which the workers in the cotton industry in the department of Oberheim live, is so
great that while fifty per cent. of the children of the manufacturers, merchants,
superintendents, etc., attain the twenty-first year, the same percentage from the
families of the weavers and spinners die even before the completion of the second
year of age.
In respect to the labor done in workshops, Villerm says: It is no work, no daywork, it is a torture, and it is saddled upon children of six and eight years.It is
chiefly this long daily torture that enervates the worker in the cotton and spinning
industry; and in respect to the length of work, Villerm remarks, that the convicts
in the bagnos (prisons) work on the average ten hours, the slaves in the Antilles but
nine hours, while in France, that has produced the revolution of 1789, and has
proclaimed the pompous Right{s} of Man, there are factories in which the working
day consists of sixteen hours, only one and a half of which are granted to the
workers for their meals.7
O, the sorrowful miscarriage of the revolutionary principles of the bourgeoisie!
O, the pitiful gift of its idolprogress! Philanthropists call those men who build
factories and suffer workers to toil for them that they may enrich themselves
benefactors of mankind; it were better to poison the springs, to spread pest than to
erect capitalist factories in the midst of a country population.
Whenever they have entrance it means good-bye to joy, health and freedom;
good-bye to everything that makes life beautiful, that makes it worth living.
The political economists never tire of calling out to the laborers: Work, work
that the national wealth may be increased! And yet it was one of themselves,
Destutt de Tracy, who said: It is in the poor nations that the mass of the people
find themselves well off; in rich nations they are generally poor; and his pupil,
6 [impen is given as lodge in the Kerr translationR.B.]
7 L. R. Villerm: A picture of the physical and moral condition of the silk, woolen and cotton
operatives (1840). It was not because the Dollfus {Dolfuss?}, the Koechlin {Koeschlin?} and other
Alsatian manufacturers were Republican patriots and Protestant philanthropists that they thus
treated their employees; for the Messrs. Blanqui, the Academicians Reyboud and Jules Simon have
verified a similar merry life among the employees of the very Catholic and very monarchial
manufacturers of Lille and Lyons; these are capitalist virtues which harmonize in delightful manner
with every political tendency, with every religion.
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Cherbuliez, adds: Inasmuch as the workers assist in the accumulation of

productive capital, they themselves father the factor which sooner or later will rob
them of a portion of their wages. But the political economists, deafened and made
stupid by their own croaking, reply: Work, work for your welfare!, and in the name
of Christian mercy a minister of the Anglican Church, Townsend (he might as well
be called Talmage, Dr. Hall, or otherwise), preached: Work, work day and night; by
working you increase your sufferings; and your misery releases us from the task of
legally compelling you to work. Legal compulsion of work causes too much trouble,
requires too much force and too much excitement; hunger on the other hand is not
only a peaceful, noiseless, indefatigable incentive to work, it also, as the most
natural motive of work and industrial activity, secures the most powerful effort.
Work, work, ye proletarians, multiply the national wealth, and, thereby, your
own personal misery! Work, that you, growing steadily poorer, may have still more
reason to work and be wretched. This is the inexorable law of capitalist production!
The workers themselves, by believing the illusory phrases of political
economists and by selling body and soul to the demon WORK, contribute to the
industrial crises in which overproduction sets the social organism into convulsion.
The factories are closed because of a superabundance of goods and a lack of
consumers, and hunger scourges the laboring population with a thousand-skeined
whip.
Fooled by the dogma of work, the proletarians fail to perceive that the extra
labor to which they have submitted themselves during the ostensibly good time of
business is the cause of their present misery. Instead of marching up and down
before the granaries and crying: We are hungry, we want to eat;to be sure we
have not a red cent, but, even if we are poor devils, it is we who have harvested the
grain! instead of laying siege to the storehouses of the Armours, Havemeyers,
Leiters, Pillsburys, and others, and cry: Here, you gentlemen, are your reelers,
twiners, spinners and weavers in their patched cotton rags, shivering so with cold
that a Shylock could shed tears over them, and yet, they it is who have spun and
woven the silken robes of the mistresses of all Christendom. The poor things, with
their thirteen hours work, could not think of their own toilet; now that they are in
enforced idleness they have time, themselves to rustle in the silks they have
produced. They have created riches for you ever since they cut their second teeth,
and at the same time starved themselves; now that they are idle they also wish to
enjoy a little of the fruits of their toil. This way, Messrs. Cheney, your silks, the
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Paul Lafargue
Messrs. Stark will unpack their cottons, Mr. Macy his small wares, Mr. Plant his
pretty little boots for their cold and damp feet. Arrayed from head to foot, and merry
with joy, they will afford a sight better than could be desired. Only no evasions,
gentlemen; are you not Christians and philanthropists as they are pictured in the
books? Place at the disposal of your wage slaves the wealth which they have
obtained for you at the cost of their own starvation. You are friends of trade?
Further the exchange of wares; you have consumers here in plenty; open unlimited
credit to them. You have to do this for business people whom you have never seen in
your life, who have given you absolutely nothing, not even a drop of water!Stead
of that, instead of demanding a distribution of products and general recuperation
during periods of crises, the workers run their heads in vain against the doors of the
factories. With sunken cheeks and emaciated bodies they importune the
manufacturers with plaintiff appeals: Dear Mr. Pierce, good Mr. Hanna, only give
us work, it is not hunger that tortures us but simply the love of work! And, scarcely
able to stand erect, the wretches sell twelve to fourteen hours of work half as
cheaply as they would do at a time when they still have some bread on handand
the Messrs. Industrial Philanthropists make use of the lack of work to produce still
more cheaply.
If industrial crises succeed periods of overwork with the same necessity as
night does day, and drag in their train compulsory stagnation with boundless
misery; they also bring inexorable bankruptcy. So long as the manufacturer has
credit he gives reins to the mania for work; he borrows and borrows in order to
provide raw material for his employees. He suffers them to produce and produce
without reflecting that the market will be overstocked and that if he cannot sell his
goods he also cannot redeem his paper. Then, at last, he gets into trouble and runs
to the usurer; beseeches him, throws himself at his feet, places blood and honor at
his disposal. I should prefer a little gold; the Rothschild replies: You have in stock
twenty thousand pair of stockings at the price of twenty cents a pair. I will take
them in payment at five cents a pair. If the bargain be completed, the good man
sells at ten or twelve cents a pair and pockets jingling dollars, for which he is
indebted to no one. The manufacturer, on the other hand, has gained time only to
succumb to a more complete bankruptcy. Finally the general crash comes just at the
moment when the storehouses are packed full to the ceiling. Then so many goods
are thrown out of the windows that it is impossible to conceive how they came in
through the door. The value of the destroyed property can be reckoned by hundreds
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of millions; in the previous century they were burnt or cast into the water.8
But before they decide upon such a regulation, the manufacturers search the
world through for markets in which to unload the goods they have accumulated;
they clamor for trading colonies in Congoland; they demand the conquest of Tonkin;
they compel their government to destroy the walls of China merely that they may be
able to sell their cotton goods. During the last centuries, England and France
duelled for life to determine which should have the exclusive privilege of American
and Indian markets. The colonial wars of the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries forced thousands of strong youths to stain the ocean with their blood.
As superfluity of wares prevails, so also does superfluity of capitalof course
not for those who need it. The financiers no longer know where to place their money
and therefore set about building railroads, erecting manufacturies and introducing
the curse of work among those happy people who still lie in the sunshine smoking
cigarettes. And one beautiful day, this exportation of capital terminates in
diplomatic complications: England and France nearly tore each others hair out in
Egypt in order to make sure whose usurers should be paid first; and in wars la
Mexico, where French soldiers were sent to play the part of an executor of the law in
the collection of bad debts.9
CHAPTER III.
A SEQUENCE OF OVERPRODUCTION.
Until now, my task was easy. It was simply to describe actual evils, which
unhappily are only too well known to us all. But to convince the proletarian that the
8 At the congress of German manufacturers, held in Berlin, February 21, 1878, the loss suffered
alone by the iron industry of Germany was estimated at 455,000,000 marks ($113,750,000.)
9 The newspaper of Monsieur Clemenceau, Justice, said in the financial column of its issue of April
5, 1885: We have beard the opinion expressed that the billions of the war of 1870 would have been
lost to France just the same, if Prussia had not taken them. This loss would then have been in the
form of a loan, imposed from time to time, to balance the budget of foreign states; that is also our
view.
The loss that English capital suffered in the South American Republics is reckoned at five billions;
the French laborers not only have worked out the five billions paid to Mr. Bismarck, they have also
to raise the large interest which is gathered in by those who were to blame for the war and the
debaclethe Oliviers, Girandins, Bazaines and other possessors of titles and of bonds.
However, there remains one consolation to them; the five billions will have no war of re-annexation
as a sequel.
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Paul Lafargue
morality, with which he has been inoculated, is topsy-turvy; that work without
moderation and without aim, as work has been, since the beginning of the century,
is the worst frightful scourge which mankind has ever known; that only then when
work is regulated according to reason, and is limited to a maximum corresponding
to the social needs will it be a spice to the pleasure of idleness, a useful exercise to
the human organism;that is a difficult task which exceeds my power. Only
physiologists, hygienic scientists and social political economists can undertake it. I
shall limit myself to the proof that, in consideration of the modern means of
production and their enormous possibility of multiplication, the exaggeration of
labor must be checked, and it must be made a duty of the working class to consume
the wares they produce.
* * *
Autiparos, a Greek poet of the time of Cicero, thus sang of the invention of the
water mill (for grinding grain) as an emancipator of slaves and as establishing the
golden age:
Spare the hand that grinds the corn, miller girls, and softly sleep. Let
chanticleer announce the morn in vain!
Dea has commanded the work of the girls to be done by the Nymphs;
and now these skip lightly over the wheels, so that the shaken axles
revolve with the spokes and pull round the load of the revolving stones. Let
us live the life of our fathers, and let us rest from work, and enjoy the gifts
that the goddess has sent us.
Alas! the age of leisure, prophesied by the heathen poets, has not come to pass;
the blind, insane and homicidal mania for work has transformed the machine, from
an instrument of emancipation, into an instrument of enslavement for free beings:
the productive power of the machine has become the cause of the pauperization of
the masses.
With the hand-bobbin, a good workman finishes five meshes a minute; certain
bobbin machines finish thirty thousand meshes in the same time. Every minute of
the machine then, is equal to one hundred working hours of the workman or,
preferably, every minute of machine-work affords the workman ten days rest. What
holds good for the lace industry, applies more or less to all industries which have
been transformed by modern machinery. But what do we see? The more the
machine is perfected, and, by constantly improved speed and safety, displaces
human labor, the more the workman, instead of increasing his rest, redoubles his
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efforts, as though he would run a race with the machine.

Oh! Foolish, destructive competition! The laws limiting work to the members of
the old guilds were abolished, holidays were suppressed, that there might be free
course to the competition between man and machine. 10
But does any one believe that, because the toilers of that time worked five days
out of seven in a week, they lived upon air and water only, as the deluding political
economists tell us? Go to! They had leisure to taste of earthly pleasure, to cherish
love, to make and to keep open house in honor of the great God,LEISURE. In
those days, that morose, hypocritically Protestant England was called Merrie
England. Rabelais, Quevedo, Cervantes, the unknown authors of the spicy novels of
those days, make our mouths water with their descriptions of those enormous
feasts, at which the peoples of that time regaled themselves and towards which
nothing was spared.11 Jordns and the Dutch school of painters have portrayed
them for us, in their pictures of jovial life. Noble, giant stomachs, what has become
10 In the middle ages, the laws of the church guaranteed ninety days of rest to the toilers (52
Sundays and 38 holidays); work on these days was strictly prohibited; that was the great crime of
Catholicism, the chief cause of the irreligiousness of the industrial and commercial bourgeoisie.
As soon as that bourgeoisie took the helm in the French Revolution, it abolished the holidays, and
displaced the seven-day week by the ten-day week, so that the people had but one day rest in ten. It
liberated the workers from the yoke of the church, in order to place them under the much more
severe yoke of work.
Hatred of holidays is first noticeable at the moment in which the modern industrial and commercial
bourgeoisie appears upon the scene, that is, in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.
Henry IV. demanded a reduction in the number of holidays from the Pope, who refused because
one of the heresies appearing at this time, concerns the holidays. (Letter of Cardinal DOssat.) But
in 1666, Perefixus, Archbishop of Paris, forbade seventeen of them. Protestantism, that form of
church adapted to the new commercial and industrial needs of the bourgeoisie, troubles itself but
little about the recuperation of the people; it dethroned the saints in heaven in order to abolish their
festivals upon earth.
11 These gigantic festivals lasted whole weeks. Don Rodrigo de Lara won his bride by driving the
Moors out of Calarava, and the romance relates that
Las bodas fueron en Burgos
Las tornabodas en Salas;
En bodas y tornabodas
Pasaron siete semanas;
Tantas vienan de las gentes
Que non caben por las plazas.
(The wedding took place in Burgos; home-coming was celebrated in Salas; thus seven weeks were
passed in wedding and home festivals; so many people came thereto, the halls could not contain
them.)
The participants at this wedding festival of seven weeks duration were the heroic soldiers of the
wars of independence.
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of you? Exalted spirits, ye who comprehended the whole of human thought, whither
are ye gone? We are thoroughly degenerated and dwarfed. Tubercular cows,
potatoes, wine made with fuchsine, beer from saffron and Prussian whiskey in wise
conjunction with compulsory labor have weakened our bodies and dulled our
intellects. And at the same time that mankind ties up its stomach and the
productivity of the machine goes on the increase day by day, do the political
economists wish to preach Malthusian doctrine, the religion of abstinence and the
dogma of work to us?
Nevertheless since the working class in its simplicity and ingenuousness has
allowed its head to be turned, and with congenital impetuosity has been blindly
entrapped by the motto work and abstinence, the Capitalist class on the other
hand, finds itself sentenced to compulsory laziness and luxury, to unproductivity
and overconsumption. If the overwork of the proletarian tortures his body and
shatters his nerves, it is not less fruitful of suffering for the bourgeois.
The abstinence to which the producing class has allowed itself to be condemned,
makes it the duty of the bourgeoisie to dedicate itself to the overconsumption of the
wares produced in surplus by the proletariat. At the beginning of capitalist
production, one or two hundred years ago, the bourgeois was still an honorable man
of orderly and peaceful habits; he was contented with his own wife, at least usually;
he drank only when he was thirsty, and ate only when he was hungry. The
fashionable passion of excess he left to the gentlemen and ladies of the court. To-day
there is no bourgeois who does not lard himself with capon and mushrooms, and
fills up with Chateau Lafitte, in order to promote the breeding of poultry and the
cultivation of the vine; no son of an upstart who does not consider himself duty
bound to increase prostitution, and to mercurify12 his body, merely in order that the
death bringing work in the quicksilver mines may have an object. In this trade, the
body is quickly destroyed, the hair becomes thin, the, teeth fall out, the abdomen
swells, the chest becomes asthmatic, the movements more cumbrous, the joints stiff,
the limbs gouty. Others, too weak to endure the strain of dissipation, but equipped
with the exquisite dose of philistine-pseudo intelligence, dry up their brains like Mr.
Lazarus von Hellenbach, the man without prejudice, and hatch out thick, soporific
books in order to provide occupation for the typesetters and book publishers.
The ladies of the fashionable world lead the life of martyrs. They spend the
whole day in changing gowns, that they may test and display their fairy-like
12 mercurify translated as quicksilver in Kerr editionR.B.]
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wardrobes, in the preparation of which dressmakers toil till they bring on

consumption. For hours they place their heads at the disposition of hair-dressers
who are paid large sums of money to build up the most impossible coiffures for
them. Tightly laced, so decollet that a lieutenant of the guard might blush, and
their feet forced into narrow little boots, they spin themselves around at their
charity balls the whole night through, in order to get a few dollars together for the
poor.O, ye saintly sufferers!
The bourgeoisie, in order to fulfill its two-fold calling as non-producer and
overconsumer, must not only do violence to its modest needs of old, wean itself from
the industriousness to which it has been accustomed for a hundred years, and give
itself up to unbridled luxury, to gorging with mushrooms as well as to lewdness and
dissipation, it must also withdraw an enormous mass of people from productive
work in order to create messmates for itself,hence an enormous increase of
lackeys, servants and menials. To this servant class, the enormousness of whose
numbers characterizes the high water mark of capitalist civilization, must,
furthermore, be added the large class occupied solely in satisfying the costly and
senseless desires of the wealthy class: diamond cutters, lace makers, fancy
embroiderers, jewelers, fashionable tailors, etc., etc.
The bourgeoisie soon accustomed itself to its parasitical life, despite the evils
that grow out of the same, and it now regards any alteration of the status quo with
terror. Yet, in sight of the pitiful mode of life to which the working class resignedly
subjected itself, and to the arrest of physical development, the consequence of the
unnatural mania for work, did its aversion increase still more to any imposition of
work, and to any limitation of its pleasures. And just at that season, without in the
least heeding the demoralization which the bourgeoisie had imposed upon itself as a
social duty, the proletariat got into his head the notion to compel the capitalists to
work! In their simple-mindedness, they accepted as good cash the theories of work
promulgated by political economists, and girded up their loins to make capitalists
practice this duty. The proletariat proclaimed the watchword: Who does not work,
shall not eat. In the year 1813 Lyons arose for Work or Lead; the June insurgents
of 1848 claimed the Right to Work, and the Federations of March 1871 designated
their uprising as the Revolution of Work.
To these barbaric attacks upon bourgeoisie comfort and all bourgeoisie laziness,
the Messrs. Capitalists could answer only with suppression by force; but even if
they do oppress these revolutionary outbreaks, they know withal that the absurd
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idea of the proletariat of imposing work upon the satiated idlers has not been
drowned in the ocean of spilt blood. In order to avoid this calamity, they surround
themselves with soldiers, police, magistrates and jails, who all together perform
unproductive work. To-day the character of modern armies can no longer be
doubted; they are standing only for the holding down of the industrial enemy.
Belgium, the modern land of capitalism, is an instance of this, that cannot be
contradicted; its neutrality is guaranteed by the European powers, nevertheless its
army is one of the most powerful in proportion to its population. But its glorious
battlefields are the plains of the Borinage and of Charleroi. The Belgian officer is
accustomed to baptize his sword and to fish for his epaulettes in the blood of the
unarmed laborers and miners. The European nations have no militia but paid
armies for the protection of the capitalist against the people who would condemn
them to ten hours of mine or factory work.
But, however great this army of useless mouths, however insatiable its greed
might be, it is yet by no means sufficient to consume all the goods which the
workmen, stupefied by the dogma of work, produce without wishing to consume
them, without troubling themselves whether there be any one to consume them.
And so, in view of the double madness of the laborer to strain himself by overwork,
and to drag out his life in privations, the great problem of capitalist production does
not consist in finding producers and in increasing their strength but in discovering
consumers, in tickling their appetite and encouraging it by habit.
And since the workers, trembling with hunger and cold, refuse themselves to
wear the stuffs they weave, themselves to consume the grain they cultivate, the
poor manufacturers see themselves forced to run to the antipodes, and seek for
people who can use the creations of the flesh of their workmen. Hundreds of
millions and billions worth are exported annually to all four corners of the globe for
people who know not what to do with it all. The explored portions of the earth are
not extensive enough for them; therefore they require virgin soil.
The manufacturers dream day and night of Africa, of the Sahara Ocean, of the
Soudan Railroad, the Klondyke fields; with close attention do they follow the
journey of a Stanley, a De Brazza, of a Nachtigall to the miraculous and prophetic
tones of the courageous pioneers and discoverers. What unknown wonders are not
hidden in these dark portions of the earth, whole fields are sown with elephant
teeth, whole rivers of palm oil flow through beds of gold sand, whole mountains of
gold nuggets, millions of black backs, bare as Bismarcks skull, awaiting cotton in
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order to make the acquaintance of the properties of Prussian Whiskey and the
English Bible in order to learn the virtues of civilization.
But all this is still insufficient: the bourgeois who gorge themselves, the serving
class which is more numerous than the producing class, the savage tribes who are
killed with capitalist wares,13nothing, nothing avails to exhaust the mountains of
products, which grow higher and stronger than the pyramids of Egypt. The
productivity of the workers defies all consumption, all squandering. In their
anxiety, the manufacturers no longer know what to do, they cannot scare up enough
material to satisfy the crazy desire for work on the part of the employees. Certain
woolen manufacturers purchase dirty, half decayed woolen rags and therefrom
make a cloth which lasts as long as election-promises. In other industries the
conditions are similar: products are adulterated in order to make an easy sale and
shorten their period of life. Ignoramuses, therefore, accuse our pious manufacturers
of cheating while in truth they are animated merely by the thought of giving
employment to the workers who cannot bring themselves to the point of enjoying
life with folded arms. Yet these adulterations, which arise wholly and solely from
humanitarian considerations and yield enormous profits to the manufacturers who
practice them, have in truth the most pernicious effect upon the quality of the wares
and are an inexhaustible fountain of waste of human labor. They characterize the
philanthropic genius of our bourgeois and the frightful perverseness of the laborers,
who, in order to satisfy their sinful mania for work, cause the Messrs.
Manufacturers to smother the voice of conscience and even to break the laws of
mercantile honesty.
Yet despite all overproduction, all adulteration of goods, the workers overflow
the market in steadily increasing numbers and cry beseechingly: Work! Work!
Their excessive numbers ought to prompt them to bridle their passion; instead of
that, it drives them to fury. Whenever the mere prospect of work offers itself, they
swoop down upon it. They work twelve, fourteen hours, only to be able to flay
themselves right well; and the very next day they are out on the street and know
not how to satisfy their mania for work.
Year by year, with the regularity of the seasons, depressions appear in the
different industries; upon an overwork, deadly to the organism, follows absolute rest
13 Thus, for instance, the Australian savages, unconcerned that it is the cause of their extinction,
clothe themselves la England, intoxicate themselves la England, for the sole reason that the
Scotch distillers and the manufacturers of Manchester need consumers.
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for three to six months andno work, no bread!

Now, if the mania for work is rooted in the laborers, if it smothers all other
natural instincts, and if, on the other hand, the amount of work demanded by
society is necessarily limited by the consumption and the quantity of raw material,
why devour in six months the work of the whole year? Why not rather equalize it
during the whole twelve months, and compel every worker to content himself with
five or six hours daily work the year through, instead of getting indigestion by
working twelve hours daily for six months? When their daily portion of work is
secured to them, the workers will no longer be jealous of one another; no longer will
they tear the work out of each others hands and the bread from each others mouth;
then, no longer exhausted in body and soul, will they begin to practice the virtues of
laziness. What the workers themselves refuse to perceive manufacturers have
demanded in the interest of capitalist exploitation: a legal limitation of working
hours.
In the year 1860, the manufacturer Bourcard Gebweiler declared before the
Commission of Industrial Instruction that twelve hours work is excessive and
should be reduced to eleven hours, and on Saturdays work should cease at two
oclock. I recommend these regulations, although at first sight they may appear
oppressive: we have tried them in our establishments for the past four years and
find that they work well; the average production has risen instead of fallen. In his
article on machines, Mr. F. Passy quotes the following letter from a Belgium
merchant, Mr. Ottavaere:
Although our machines are the same as in the English spinning mills,
they do not produce as much as they should, and as the same machines
turn out in England, despite the fact that the working day there is two
hours shorter . . . we work two full hours too much; I am convinced that if
we worked but eleven hours instead of thirteen, we should produce just as
much and in consequence of this more economically.
On the other hand, the liberal political economist Mr. P. Leroy-Beaulieu
testifies that a great Belgium manufacturer has made the observation that the
weeks in which a holiday occurs show no smaller output than the ordinary weeks.
(The Labor Question in the Nineteenth Century. Paris, 1872.)
An aristocratic government has dared to do what the people, made fools by
the moralists, have not ventured. Unconcerned by the high moral and economical
arguments of the political economists, who croaked like raven-prophets of evil, that
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to shorten the factory time a single hour meant to decree the ruin of English
industry, the English government introduced the legal ten hours working day; yet
England remains the first industrial country of the world.
The great experience of England, the experience of intelligent capitalists{,} is
submitted; they prove it incontrovertibly that the working time must be shortened
and the days of rest must be multiplied in order to increase human production, yet
other nations do not comprehend it. Can the workers, then, not realize that by
overburdening themselves with work they exhaust their own vitality and that of
their descendants? That, worn out, they become prematurely incapable of work?
That they kill all lofty parts in themselves merely for the sake of the furious mania
for work?
Like parrots they prattle the preaching of the political economists: Let us work
to increase the national wealth. O ye idiots! Because you work too much the
technique of industry develops too slowly. Stop your cry and listen to a political
economist. He is no great light, only Mr. L. Reybaud: In general, the revolution in
the methods of work directs itself according to the condition of manual labor. So
long as manual labor is cheap, it is employed in excess; let it become dearer, an
effort is made to economize in it.14
In order to force the capitalists to perfect their machines of wood and iron, it is
necessary to raise the wages of the machine of flesh and blood and to shorten their
working day. Proofs of this? They can be brought by the hundreds. In the spinning
trade the self-acting mule was discovered and made use of in Manchester because
the spinners refused to work as long as formerly.
In America machines took possession of all branches of agricultural production,
from the manufacture of butter to the harvesting of the crops.
CHAPTER IV.
A NEW SONG, A BETTER SONG.
When the shortening of the working day brings new mechanical forces to social
production, the duty of the workers to consume as well as to produce their products
will have as a consequence an enormous multiplication of the working forces.
14 Louis Reybaud, Cotton: Its Kingdom and its Questions, 1863.
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The bourgeoisie, rescued from its mission of being the consumer of the whole
world, will speedily set free the great number of soldiers, officials, middlemen, etc.,
whom it has withdrawn from useful work in order that they may assist it consume
and squander; that signifiesfree them for the labor market. This, when all social
forces are brought to it, will be so overfilled that it will be well-nigh a matter of
compulsion to forbid work: it will be almost impossible for this swarm of hitherto
unproductive human beings to find employment, for they are more numerous than
the locusts. Then some thought will be taken of those who had been compelled to
labor to supply the costly and useless wants of these people. When it is no longer to
adorn lackeys and Generals, to swathe married and unmarried prostitutes in laces,
and to cast cannon, then men and women in passementerie, lace, iron, etc., etc.,
will, in the interest of hygiene and the ennoblement of the race, be enjoined by
Draconic laws to rowing and dancing exercises to restore their undermined health.
From that moment when merchandise is no longer sent forth to the whole world,
the sailors, the porters, the watermen will begin to learn to twirl their thumbs.
Then the happy South Sea Islanders can give themselves up to love without need to
fear the footsteps of the civilized Venus and the sermons of the bourgeois moralists.
Still more. In order to find work for all the unproductive forces of the present
society and to promote still further the perfection of the instruments of work, the
working class, like the bourgeoisie, will have to place restraint upon its tendency to
abstinence and seek as much as possible to increase its capability of consumption.
Instead of eating from twenty to thirty grams of tough meat a day, if it ever does eat
meat at all, the working class will eat one or two pounds of juicy beef-steak. Instead
of drinking one modest glass of wine which is more catholic (i.e., baptized) than the
Pope, it will drink full glasses of Bordeaux and Burgundy, that has undergone no
industrial baptism and has left water to the cattle.
The proletarians have got it into their heads to hold the capitalists to ten hours
of factory workthat is the great mistake, the cause of social contrasts and internal
conflict. Work must be forbidden, not imposed. The Rothschilds, the Krupps, the
Astors will be allowed to furnish proof that they have been do-nothings their whole
life long; and if, despite the general bias for work, they promise to live as complete
do-nothings, they will be placed under supervision and every morning a five dollar
gold piece will be given them for their little pleasures. Social discord vanishes. Once
convinced that no evil will happen to them but that they will only be freed from the
trouble of being forced to be overconsumers and spendthrifts, the capitalists will be
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the first to make common cause with the people.

The bourgeois who are unable to prove their qualifications as perfected goodfor-nothings will be allowed to follow their instincts: there are callings enough to
provide for them all.
But bitter requittal is in store for the moralists who have perverted human
nature, for the hypocrites and canterers who openly preach water and secretly drink
wine. At the great peoples feasts, where glasses will circulate, savory roasts and
cakes invite enjoyment, the members of Boards of Education, the priests politicoeconomical,Catholic, Protestant, Jewish, or free thinking who wander about in
frock and robe, the propagandists of Malthusianism, of Christian or philosophic
morality, in yellow costume, will be forced to hold the candles until their fingers are
burnt; they will go hungry at heavily laden tables, served by arrogant women, they
will thirst near filled casks. Four times a year when the seasons change, they will
have to grind wind in the treadmills ten hours at a stretch. The same punishment
will be meted out to lawyers and barristers. In order to kill time, that kills us
second by second, theatricals of all kinds will be arrangedhealthy work for our
Messrs. Legislators. They will be organized into troops who will travel from village
to village and give exhibitions in law making.
Generals in riding boots, their breasts belaced, adorned with medals of
encounters and covered with orders of all possible beasts of prEy, will run through
the streets and invite the dear people to stare at them. Bismarck, Stoecker,
Cleveland, McKinley and Talmage will crack their little jokes in front of their
booths. Bismarck, costumed as Iron eater, will roll his eyes, curl his mustache,
expectorate burning tar, and threaten everybody with sword, revolver, beer Mug,
etc.; but as soon as he is shown the portrait of Herr von Muenchhausen, will throw
himself into a deep pit.
Stoecker, Dr. Hall and Talmage as apostles of brotherly love will preach the
weal of the workman and hatred of the exploiter, of Christian mildness and
Christian Socialism, of national manners andthen, suddenly dropping their robes
will stand there in black {and} white costume, in one hand a knot, in the other a
contribution box; around their necks will hang a placard: Agent for the land barons
and capitalist Princes.
Inside the booth, first the election trick will be performed. Bourgeois
candidates, in buffoon costumes{,} will execute the political-freedom dance before
electors with wooden skulls and donkeys ears, by wearing sandwich election
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programmes full of promises; with tears in their eyes will talk of the suffering of the
people, and with brazen voice will proclaim the glory of the country. Whereupon the
heads of the electors will roar in chorus an emphatic Yes! Yes!
Then begins the great drama: The Theft of the Property of the Nation:
Capitalist Germany, a monster of a woman with coarse face and bald skull,
ashy skin and fat bloated body, lies stretched out on a sofa yawning, and with
lustreless eyes. At her feet, Industrial Capitalism, a giant organism of iron with the
mask of a monkey, devours automatic men, women and children whose heartrending cries pierce the air. The bank with Martin Snout, hyena body and hawks
claws, steals one gold piece after another from his pocket. Whole armies of
miserable emaciated proletarians, wrapped in rags, escorted by policemen with
unsheathed blades, driven by Furies who lay on the whip of hunger, bring piles of
wares of all kinds, casks of wine and beer, whole sacksful of money or grain, and lay
them at the feet of Capitalist Germany. Mr. Adolph Wagner, in one hand the
writings of Rodbertus, in the other the address of thanks of the Anti-Semites, and in
his mouth the imperial message, places himself at the head of the defenders of the
property of the nation and stands guard. As soon as the burdens are laid down they
chase the workers with thrust of bayonet and club, and open the doors to the
dealers, manufacturers and bankers. In wild confusion they throw themselves upon
the objects of value, grab the manufactured goods, the bars of gold, the sacks of
grain, and empty the sacks. At last, they can consume no more and like cattle
wallow in their own mire. * * * Then the storm breaks, the earth trembles.
Historical Necessity steps forth. With iron foot she crushes the heads of those who
place themselves in the way, and with powerful hand she overthrows trembling
Capitalism covered with the sweat of terror.
* * *
When the working class shall have thoroughly liberated itself from the vice that
governs it and degrades its nature, and shall have arisen in its giant strength, not
to demand the famous Rights of Man which are but the rights of capitalist
exploitation, not to proclaim the Right to Work which is only the Right to
Misery, but to forge an iron law forbidding every one to work more than three
hours a day, will the old earth, trembling with bliss, feel a new world stir within it.
But how can a manly decision be expected from a proletariat corrupted by
capitalist morals!
Like Christ, the embodied suffering of the slavery of ancient times, our
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proletariat, men, women and children, for a century has climbed the rough Mount
Calvary of suffering. For a century compulsory work has broken their bones,
martyred their flesh, destroyed their nerves; for a century hunger has tormented
their stomachs and stupefied their brains.
O, Laziness, have thou mercy upon this eternal misery! O, Laziness, mother of
the arts and the noble virtues, be thou balsam for the pains of mankind!
APPENDIX.
A WORD TO THE MORALISTS.
Our moralists are very modest people. Even if they have devised the Dogma of
work, they are nevertheless not quite clear as to its influence upon the
tranquilization of the soul, the elevation of the spirit, and the healthy functions of
the nerves and of the rest of the organs. They wish first to test it upon the masses,
to make the experiment in anima vile (upon a lower soul) before they apply it to
the capitalists; for it is the mission of the moralists to excuse and to defend as
virtuous the vices of the capitalists.
But ye philosophers at five cents a dozen, why then so torment your brains in
working out morality, the practice of which you dare not recommend to your bread
givers? Do you wish to see your Dogma of Work, which you see as a means for
benefiting yourselves, scorned and damned? If so, turn to the history of the
ancients, to the writings of their philosophers and law givers: I cannot say, writes
the Father of History, Herodotus, if the Greeks have copied the Egyptians in their
disdain for work, because I find the same contempt spread among the Scythians,
Persians and Lydians; in a word, because among most barbarians (non Greeks)
those who learn trades and even their children are regarded as the lowest of
citizens * * * all Greeks, especially the Lacedemonians, are educated in these
principles.
In Athens only those citizens who occupied themselves in the defence and
administration of the community were real nobles, like the savage warriors, from
whom they traced their descent. As it was essential for them to have free disposal of
their whole time that they might devote their intellectual and physical powers to
caring for the interests of the Republic, they assigned all work to the slaves. Thus in
Lacedemonia the women were not allowed even to spin or weave for fear of
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degrading their noble rank. (Biot: De Labolition de lesclavage ancien en Occident.

1840.)
The Romans recognized but two noble and free callings: agriculture and
military service. All citizens had the right to live at the expense of the State
Treasury and could not be compelled to depend for a living upon one of the sordid
artes (dirty arts as they termed the trades) which by right fell to the lot of the
slaves.
When Brutus the Elder wished to incite the people, he accused Tarquinius, the
tyrant, in particular of converting free citizens into artisans and masons. (Titus
Livius, book 1.)
The ancient philosophers wrangled over the origin of ideas, but when it came to
the horror of work they were a unit. Nature, writes Plato in his utopian society, in
his ideal republic, has created neither shoemaker nor smith; such occupations
degrade the people who practise them: low workers, miserable nameless beings who
by their position are already debarred from political rights. The tradesmen being
accustomed to lies and deception will be considered only as a necessary evil in the
community, the citizen who degrades himself by commercial business shall be
punished for such transgression. If convicted, he shall be sentenced to one year in
prison. For every repetition of the offence his punishment shall be doubled. (Plato:
The Republic, book 5.)
In his political economy, Xenophon writes: The people who devote themselves
to handicrafts are never promoted to higher positions, and rightly. Compelled to sit
all day long, some even to endure a continual fire, the majority of them cannot
prevent their bodies becoming deformed, and it is hardly possible that this does not
also reach up to the mind.
Can anything honorable come out of a shop?, declares Cicero, and can
commerce bring forth anything lofty? Everything called shop is unworthy an
honorable man * * * since merchants can make nothing without lying (and what is
more shameful than a lie?), therefore the calling of those who sell their labor and
skill must be considered as low and vulgar; for whosoever gives his work for money
sells himself and places himself upon the same plane as the slave. (Cicero: Duties
1, tit. 8, chapter xviii.)
Proletarians, made stupid by the Dogma of Work, do you hear the language of
these philosophers, which is hidden away from you with jealous care? A citizen who
gives his work for money lowers himself to the rank of slavery; he commits a crime
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that deserves a whole years imprisonment!!

The Christian hypocrisy and capitalist utilitarianism (creed of usefulness) had
not yet corrupted these philosophers of ancient times; as they lectured for free men,
they uttered their thoughts without bias. Plato and Aristotle, these giant intellects,
to whose knees even our fashionable philosophers could not reach, even if they were
to stand on tip-toe, desired the citizens of their ideal republics to enjoy the greatest
leisure, for, adds Xenophon, work requires the whole time, and whoever works has
no time for the republic or his friends. According to Plutarch, Lycurgus, the wisest
of all men, has the greatest claim upon the admiration of posterity, because he
promised leisure to the citizens of the republic by forbidding them to practice any
handicraft.15
But the Talmages, Windthorsts, Treitschkes and Wanamakers of Christian and
capitalist morality will reply: These thinkers, these philosophers preached
slavery! Quite so, but could it be otherwise under the economic and political
conditions of their epoch? War was the normal condition of ancient society; the free
man had to dedicate his time to formulating laws and caring for the defence of the
state; handicrafts were then too undeveloped and too laborious for a man to be able
to follow his calling as citizen and soldier in addition to the practice of a trade; in
order to have warriors and citizens, the philosophers and law givers were compelled
to tolerate slavery in their heroic republics.
But do not the moralists and political economists of capitalism preach the
modern slavery, the wage system? And what kind of people are they for whom the
capitalist slave creates leisure? The Rothschilds, Astors, Bradley-Martins,
Marlboroughsuseless and harmful parasites, slaves of their vices and servitors.
Pro-slavery prejudice controlled the minds of Aristotle and Pythagoras has been
scornfully written, yet Aristotle dreamed: If every tool could perform its proper
work at command or by presentiment, as Daedalus works of art, move by
themselves, or the tripod of Hephaestus performed holy work by its own impulse, if
the shuttles move by themselves, neither helpers for the master workmen nor
slaves for the gentlemen would be necessary.16
15 Plato: The Republic, V., The Laws, VIII.; Aristotle: Politics, II. and VII.; Xenophon:
Economics, IV. and VI.; Plutarch: The Life of Lycurgus.
16 Oh, those heathens! They understood, as the learned Bastiat, and, before him, the still wiser
McCulloch, have discovered, nothing of political economy and Christianity. They did not, for
example, comprehend that machinery is the surest means of lengthening the work-day. They,
perhaps, excused the slavery of one on the ground that it was a means to the full development of
another. But to preach slavery to the masses, in order that a few crude and half-educated parvenus
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Paul Lafargue
To-day the dream of Aristotle has become a reality. Our machines with fiery
breath, indefatigable limbs of steel, wonderful, inexhaustible power of creation,
perform their holy work by themselves; yet the spirit of the great philosophers is
governed, now as heretofore, by prejudice in favor of the wage system, the worst of
all slaveries. They do not yet comprehend that the machine is the emancipator of
mankind, the God who will liberate men from sordid artes (the dirty arts) and
from wage labor, the God who will bring them leisure and freedom.
THE END.
Transcribed and edited by Robert Bills for the official Web site of the Socialist Labor Party of America.
Uploaded October 2005
might become eminent spinners, extensive sausage makers, and influential shoeblack
dealers,to do this, they lacked the bump of Christianity. Karl Marx, Capital.
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