The Right to Be Lazy

<b>Now in a new translation a classic nineteenth-century defense for the cause of idleness by a revolutionary writer and activist (and Karl Marx's son-in law) that reshaped European ideas of labor and production.</b><br><br>Exuberant provocative and as controversial as when it first appeared in 1880 Paul Lafargue&#146;s <i>The Right to Be Lazy</i> is a call for the workers of the world to unite&#151;and stop working so much! Lafargue Karl Marx&#146;s son-in-law (about whom Marx once said &#147;If he is a Marxist then I am clearly not&#148;) wrote his pamphlet on the virtues of laziness while in prison for giving a socialist speech. At once a timely argument for a three-hour workday and a classical defense of leisure <i>The Right to Be Lazy</i> shifted the course of European thought going through seventeen editions in Russia during the Revolution of 1905 and helping shape John Maynard Keynes&#146;s ideas about overproduction. Published here with a selection of Lafargue&#146;s other writings&#151;including an essay on Victor Hugo and a memoir of Marx&#151;<i>The Right to Be Lazy</i> reminds us that the urge to work is not always beneficial let alone necessary. It can also be a &#147;strange madness&#148; consuming human lives.