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| Another reason to like Karl Marx - his son-in-law Paul Lafarge, married to the brilliant Laura Marx, pictured above. |
The Right to be Lazy |
By Paul Lafargue |
(A well-known Socialist writer of France. He and his wife, finding themselves helpless from old age and penury, committed suicide together) |
| DOES any one
believe that, because the toilers of the time of the mediæval guilds
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.” Jordaens and the
Dutch school of painters have portrayed them for us, in their pictures
of jovial life. Noble, giant stomachs, what has become 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 increasing
day by day, the political economists wish to preach to us Malthusian
doctrine, the religion of abstinence and the dogma of work! ____ from: The Right to be Lazy, 1883, courtesy of the Marxists' Internet Archive. |
