The Right To Be Lazy

The Right to Be Lazy (Le Droit à la paresse) is a 1883 polemic by French anarchist Paul Lafargue. In it, he argues that the labor movement's fight for shorter workdays and better conditions is a fight for the extension of wage-slavery rather than its abolition, and satirizes the bourgeois work ethic and the tactics of trade unions. Lafargue's central thesis is that the right to be lazy is a radical alternative to the prevailing ideology of constant productivity, and that the fight for the right to work is a fight for the right to be enslaved. A classic of anarchist theory, the book remains a sharp critique of the commodification of human time and the dehumanizing effects of industrial capitalism.