A Black Social Theorist? Reading The Right to Be Lazy by Paul Lafargue

Abstract

The article provides a fresh reading of The Right to be Lazy by Paul Lafargue (1842–1911). Lafargue’s text, first published in 1880, has recently been republished. The article examines the resurgent interest in Lafargue in light of current debates about retirement age and shortened working days. It points to the shaping of Lafargue’s essay by his experience of a kin-based organization of intellectual production: Lafargue was a son-in-law of Karl Marx and was configured in the Marx circle as a mixed-race Creole. Changes in the reception of Lafargue’s critique of the “dogma of work” are noted, and the article argues that the double suicide of Lafargue and his wife sheds its own light upon his famous essay.

The publication of a new edition of The Right to be Lazy by Paul Lafargue (1842–1911) prods a fresh reading of this famous essay in light of the current debates about retirement age, shortened working days, and guaranteed basic income.¹ By drawing attention to Lafargue’s life, this discussion also affords an occasion for renewed scrutiny of the Marx-Engels circle of which Lafargue was a member, and of some implications of kin-based nineteenth century intellectual production in which spouses, adult children, and in-laws played essential roles. Ultimately, Lafargue’s text enhances awareness of risks, illusions, and ironies attendant upon all intellectual and political striving. But we may do well to begin by recalling a song that topped the charts of popular music sales in France nearly a century after initial publication of this book’s eponymous essay.

Silences and Singing Praise

In 1974, the French immigrant and Egyptian-Greek-Jew, Georges Moustaki (1934–2013), whose surprise number one 1969 hit, “Le Métèque,” opened with the words, “Avec ma gueule de Métèque, de Juif errant,... de different,”² released another song that topped the charts in France: “Le Droit à la Paresse” (The Right to Be Lazy). The second hit offers homage to a “master of wisdom” who “died by his own choice, neither too old nor ill.” “He was not among those who enter History,” the song, which never names Lafargue, continues, “But in dreaming of a life that... didn’t have to be earned in battle, wasn’t crippled by prostration before a machine—in seeking before us ‘le bonheur et la fête,’ he was “perhaps revolutionary.”

Moustaki’s first-person plural highlights a line of cultural descent Lafargue and his associates could not have anticipated. After long receiving only cursory attention as a minor figure in the history of French socialism and the Internationals, and as a founder of a small, short-lived sectarian political party who introduced Marxism to the French Left, Lafargue was destined to be rediscovered not in Marxist or Internationalist milieux but by the French avant-garde of the 1920s and 1930s, and sympathizers of the youth revolt of the 1960s, who began to conceive “refusal of work” as a form of revolutionary action. It was for the French public, and especially for the generation of 1968, that the one essay that was always Lafargue’s best known, the only one of Lafargue’s texts to have resisted falling into oblivion, was first brought out by a major publisher (Maspero) and began to catch the attention of an expanded readership.

Conceived in the 1870s, when Lafargue was living most of the time in London, Le Droit à la Paresse: Réfutation du Droit au Travail de 1848 was serialized in 1880 over the course of six issues of L’Égalité, a socialist weekly edited by Lafargue, with a print run of around 5000. Republished as a sparsely distributed pamphlet in 1881, it appeared in a German translation by Eduard Bernstein in the Sozialdemokrat the same year. A revised version, completed in 1883 during the author’s imprisonment in France as a political agitator, was translated into several languages and published over the following half century by minor libertarian presses. An English translation published in Chicago in 1907 received dismissive mention in the American Journal of Sociology,³ and by omitting the subtitle of the French original established a precedent for some subsequent translations, such as the 2023 NYRB Classic, that in seeking to gild the text with an air of timeless contemporaneity obscures its origins.⁴

While never out of print, until the mid-twentieth century Lafargue’s essay was available only in small editions from relatively unknown publishers.⁵ Though translated into Russian even before The Communist Manifesto, it was never available in the Soviet satellite countries or in the GDR, whose encyclopedias presented Lafargue as a straightforward missionary of state-approved Marxism.⁶ Other than oblique remarks, no mention of the essay is to be found in an English language edition of correspondence between Paul and Laura Lafargue and Friedrich Engels published in Moscow in 1959, and it is not known whether Marx ever read it.⁷ (Bertrand Russell’s 1932 essay “In Praise of Idleness” made no mention of Lafargue but cited the “Marxist” USSR as a prime example of exploitative idealization of labor.⁸) Even in France, a substantial entry on Lafargue in the multi-tome French biographical dictionary of the French Worker’s Movement published in 1969 mentions the essay only once, merely to note without further comment that it led to attacks upon its author.⁹ This blackout in Soviet and in some Western Marxist and socialist spheres continued, even as the self-identified “revolutionary” generation of 1968, turning its back upon Old Left parties and creeds and discovering a new Marx in newly translated writings,¹⁰ began (literally) singing the praises of the essay and its author.

Contradictions of Status, Qualifications of Belonging

Who was Paul Lafargue? He was one of those for whom the question must remain ever salient. Described by his mother-in-law, political associates, and police informants alike as elegantly dressed and of “dark complexion,” he was born in Cuba, the only child of a slave-owning coffee planter. His paternal grandmother, as no biographical sketch fails to point out, was a “mulatto” from a French colony corresponding to present day Haiti; his paternal grandfather, a Frenchman born in Bordeaux, probably not married to the grandmother, either disappeared or was killed, leaving the grandmother to raise Lafargue’s father alone. Lafargue’s mother was the child of a free union between a French Jew and a woman who claimed to be Carib (the original indigenous people of the French Caribbean). Lafargue’s father was rich enough to own a plantation in Cuba and property in New Orleans, retaining portions of both after emigrating to France in 1851 with his wife and son. (There is a record of his father ordering the release of a slave still held in Cuba in 1866.)¹¹

By the age of nine, Lafargue was attending school in Bordeaux, where his father was a propertied wine merchant and where Paul was known among schoolmates as “The Creole” and “The Jew.” Throughout his life, Lafargue’s status as a revolutionary was sometimes embellished with the observation that the “blood” of three oppressed peoples—Jews, Blacks, and Caribs—ran in his veins, though this never inhibited his repeated pandering to popular anti-semitism in speeches and in print.¹² As a member of the General Council of the First International, Lafargue was welcomed as an homme de couleur and representative of the black “race.” An 1866 article on racial conflict in the USA published in a newspaper aligned with the International, was signed “Paul Lafargue, Mulatto.” It urged: “[I]t is up to us, revolutionary mulattoes, to take up the phrase that is thrown in our faces as an insult and become worthy of it. Radicals of America, let ‘Mulatto’ be your rallying cry!”.¹³

Even if Lafargue had not adopted this defiant stance, neither his political opponents, nor those who were to become his closest revolutionary associates and family (life-long patron Friedrich Engels, father-in-law Karl Marx, wife Laura Marx) would have permitted him to shed his persona as a mixed-race exotic. Intimate correspondence is full of references to his “Creole temperament,” to “the emotional excesses of such Creoles,” and to him as a “negrillo,” “gorilla,” “the African,” “child of nature,” etc.¹⁴ This diction, frequently evoked as reprimand, or explanation for tolerated emotional excess, frivolity, lack of work discipline or perceived relapses into anarchism exasperating to English and German kin and associates, was evoked in the familial context in coarse attempts at humor, transgressive familiarity or, though rarely, in an expression of admiration. Thus, Engels urged Lafargue to “control his Negro blood,” complained to others that his “blood” was getting the upper hand,” and concluded a letter to Lafargue’s wife Laura, (using a word now politely referred to as the N word) by asking her to give his “love to the N…….”¹⁵ In a moment of satisfaction with his son-in-law, who was sending him books from Paris, Marx praising the kindness of the young man wrote that he “must belong to a better than the European race.”¹⁶ And Lafargue once reminded Engels that he had claimed that his “African impudence goes through where European prudence would not see the way.”¹⁷

Lafargue’s participation in a student movement of opposition to Napoleon III while studying medicine in Paris, his publications in La Rive Gauche (a Left bank paper), and militant initiatives during an International student congress in Liège resulted in his being barred from the University of Paris for life. Seeking refuge in London in the hope of completing his medical studies, he became one of several refugees who frequented the household of Marx, a hub of revolutionary association, seeking opportunities for prolonged conversation with the great man (on which he took notes) and courting one of Marx’s daughters.¹⁸ As Marx claimed in a letter to Engels, “my medical Creole… first attached himself to me, but soon transferred his attraction from the Old Man to the daughter.”¹⁹

As a medical student, and son of a wine merchant with properties in Bordeaux, Cuba, and Louisiana, Lafargue was a promising suitor for a family that, despite Marx’s wife’s Protestant aristocratic ancestry, Jewish banking relatives on Marx’s side, and multi-lingual, bourgeois high culture, was living in penury. When Lafargue began to court Laura, Marx and his wife pawned family silver, cut down on food and fuel, and sought Engels’ help in mounting an appearance of middle class respectability.²⁰ The Marx family were atheists, and the daughters would have been seen racially as Jews in England; Laura’s mother expressed hope that with Lafargue, her daughter would be spared difficulties of a religious character she might otherwise face.²¹ But Lafargue’s status too, even as an “outsider,” was ambiguous: he was a French citizen, born in the colonies, whose official documents could be required in response to the public question, “Est-il Français?” While he was the sole son and heir of a family that at one time owned slaves, his “mulatto” paternal grandmother, who may have been an ex-slave, ensured his life-long identification as a “mixed race” Creole.²² A “revolutionary” son of rentier parents with whom he was not on good terms, his inheritance was understood to be ever at risk. An inveterate “wanderer,” journalist, propagandist, and militant who ran for office in local French elections, published in German, English, French, and Spanish, and upon occasion formally represented Portuguese, Spanish, and French working men’s groups in International Congresses, Lafargue would never belong without qualification or challenge to any social category. In the words of Moustaki’s 1969 hit that points to reasons for the métèque singer’s identification with the “revolutionary” proclaimed as his “first and only master,” Paul Lafargue was “un different.”

Family Production: Dependency and Resistance

While Marx, hoping his daughter might be spared the economic hardship suffered by his wife, was prepared to accept her suitor, he sought (and received) written assurance from Lafargue’s father that the marriage would be adequately funded (which turned out not to be the case). He also wrote to the young man, stating, “observation has convinced me that you are not by nature diligent, despite bouts of feverish activity and good intentions. In these circumstances you will need help from others to set out in life with my daughter.”²³ Insisting the engagement must be long, and aware of the sexual discipline required, Marx took the further precaution of informing Lafargue that unless he restrained his “Creole temperament” enough to love Laura “in a manner that conforms with the latitude of London” he would be forced to love her from a distance. Tellingly, even after Marx’s assent was secured, Laura insisted that formal announcement of the engagement remain conditional upon Engels’ approval. And Engels, effectively the economic “head” of an extended, multi-household blended family (the unflagging long-term source of monetary support for Marx, his wife, Marx’s servant, his illegitimate son, adult children, and grandchildren), was to support Lafargue and Laura Marx for the rest of their lives. Engels paid for their 1868 wedding and honeymoon. And correspondence over the following decades, in which Engels offers advice, assigns tasks, and is addressed (by Laura) as “Dear General,” is replete with urgent requests by both Lafargues for money. Though Lafargue wrote to Engels late in life that he didn’t wish to be a “burden,” the couple’s economic dependency ended only in 1895 when Engels died, leaving roughly a third of his estate to Laura.²⁴

Though coded in memoir and correspondence as a relationship of friendship, discipleship, kinship, and quasi-military camaraderie, the relationship of Paul Lafargue and Laura Marx to Engels and the family Engels supported must also be recognized as a life-long patron/client relationship in which political direction, translations, research assistance, and other intellectual and political services were exchanged for economic support and social patronage—the whole governed by a code not of salaried contract but of diffuse, trans-generational care, deference, and obligation.

The multi-lingual cultural literacy of the Marx/Engels family, and with it, a division of labor permitting simultaneous representation in multiple national and linguistic spheres, is striking, especially in comparison to the bleak cultural poverty of later generations of Marxists. Marx’s wife read, discussed, and copied his manuscripts. The youngest daughter, Eleanor, carried out research in the British Library for others, played a decisive role in the early composition and later translation into English of Lissagary’s Histoire de la Commune, translated Flaubert’s Madame Bovary and Ibsen’s Nora into English from the French and the Norwegian, and performed in plays written by her partner (Edward Aveling), in addition to representing the family’s brand of socialism in International Congresses, workingmen’s demonstrations, and trade union venues. Lafargue and his wife, with combined fluency in English, French, German, Spanish, and Italian, translated Capital, The Communist Manifesto, and other writings of Engels and Marx, as well as publishing a host of essays in Lafargue’s name alone. (Laura’s refusal to add her name to collaborative work makes it impossible to determine with precision the role she was known to have taken in her husband’s writings.) Lafargue wrote a novel (never published), plays for the theater, and hosts of other pieces, from satirical works of imagination to literary and cultural criticism, treatises on the woman question, the stock market, American trusts, etc. But he and his wife were never able to earn a living by this work.²⁵

Marx and Engels worked with Lafargue on drawing up a program for the POF, a short-lived French Worker’s Party founded by Lafargue and Jules Guesde for the very purpose of representing Marx’s ideas in France.²⁶ Lafargue was tasked by Marx and Engels with battling the influence of Bakunin, Proudhon, and other anarchists in International Congresses, and with introducing forms of socialism dominant in Germany into France. But Lafargue, first drawn to cultures of revolution that held sway among the jeunesse of the Left Bank in his student days, would have remained acutely aware of the hostility of French (as well as Spanish and Italian) socialists to “ultramontane” conceptions of socialism directed by the two German “popes” in London.²⁷

Every “go-between” easily arouses distrust on both sides. Lafargue, tasked with championing Marx’s and Engels’ theories and political positions in France, began life in the Caribbean and came of age in milieux shaped by the popular culture of Gallic Catholicism, admiration for eighteenth century philosophes, and nineteenth century anarchists. Crucially, whether as journalist, revolutionary propagandist and agitator, or two-time candidate for electoral offices in France, he addressed French publics. And indeed, his actions and writings periodically eluded the discipline and expectations of his London-based patron and his father-in-law, as well as of English, German, and Russian socialist “comrades”—leading to charges that the “Creole” was a “fantaisiste”: clever, exaggerated, too poetical, with a “touch of the bizarre.” In vain did Engels strive to remind Lafargue that writings published in France had to pass muster in Germany!²⁸ Even one twentieth century French socialist editor, primly taking distance from Le Droit à la Paresse by referring to its “gross” and “shocking” style, asserted it was not Lafargue’s best work, and had led some to think he had more in common with “chansonniers” (popular balladeers) than with “socialists.”²⁹

Upon occasion, Marx complained to Engels that his French sons-in-law (Charles Longuet as well as Lafargue), “ridiculous disciples of Proudhon,” were incorrigibly prone to anarchist sympathies. Referring to Lafargue’s “infantile idiocies,” due perhaps to “the stigma of his Negro heritage,” Marx mocked the man delegated with ensuring the expulsion of Bakunin from the International as “the last student of Bakunin.”³⁰ In retrospect, it is striking that, as recorded by Laura, in the course of a family parlour game early in their courtship Lafargue (criticized by Marx as insufficiently diligent) cited “laziness” as “the vice he was most ready to excuse.” With respect to some of the norms upheld by the family he married into, Lafargue signalled his reservations; and as with the Mulatto sobriquet, he would eventually have multiple motivations for challenging the denigration of “laziness” and defiantly claiming it as a right.

The Refutation

In the 1870s, Lafargue began work on Le Droit à la Paresse: Réfutation du Droit au Travail de 1848. The subtitle, omitted in the NYRB Classics translation though not, to this day, in French or German language editions, is significant. As is the fact that its initial publication in 1880 coincided with international mobilization for an eight-hour workday. At a time when the working day for many was 13–14 h long, and some workers went on strike to demand 12 h pay for 11 h work, the eight-hour day movement became a site of struggle between avowed revolutionaries and reformist trade unionists, as well as of debate over whether it was legitimate for socialists to seek elected office or accept non-elective ministerial positions to improve working conditions through legal avenues. The right to laziness (rest, leisure) claimed in the title of Lafargue’s work, and the “refutation” announced in its subtitle, glossed by some as a satirical, frivolous effort to entertain,³¹ was designed to outflank competing claimants to revolutionary leadership. As a journalist and aspiring politician, Lafargue was better versed in some aspects of French intellectual and popular culture, including the deft deployment of “ridicule,” than his critics.

A lycée education focussed on classics, and a Parisian medical curriculum that, despite a new emphasis upon observation, was still textually based in Greek and Latin, acquainted Lafargue with the value writers of the ancient world placed upon Otium, time freed from labor or care. Eighteenth century philosophes admired by Lafargue, still imbued with an aristocratic ethos, idealized the “nobility” of “savage” peoples, imagined as living without degrading toil. A family history in the Caribbean surely sensitized Lafargue to associations of resistance to work with slave revolt, and to colonial articulations of the problem of resecuring the labor of freed slaves that glossed them as racially “lazy.” (With respect to the first part of his title, it is known that Lafargue was familiar with a book in Marx’s library entitled Du droit à l’oisiveté et de l’organisation du travail servile dans les républiques grecques et romaines by Louis Moreau Christophe [1849].) And as an aspiring homme de lettres, Lafargue may even have picked up something “in the air” during the period when, still living in London, he was composing Le Droit à la Paresse: Robert Louis Stevenson’s “Apology for Idlers” was published in England’s premier literary journal, The Cornhill Magazine, in 1877.

But it is the reference to 1848 in the subtitle, dropped in the NYRB Classics publication, that merits attention. In the course of the 1848 Revolution that deposed Louis Phillippe and set up a Provisional government, Parisian workers, with fresh experience of unemployment, bankruptcies, and failures of payment, demanded government funded jobs. Upon debate in the National Assembly, which included calls to place a legal limit of twelve hours on the working day, a decree was drawn up proclaiming a Droit de Travail, or Right to Work and remuneration for labor in national workshops. According to Marx, it was the inability of the Provisional Government to deliver on that right that led to disillusion, insurrection, and the substitution of revolutionary aims for earlier reformist hopes.³² Thus, in “refuting” the Right to Work demanded in 1848, Lafargue was reaffirming Marx’s criticism of the demand as naively misconceived. But Lafargue took the critique further.

In a dedication to the first serialized 1880 edition of the essay, and in the Prologue to the later 1883 edition, Lafargue declared war on what later theorists would dub the “hegemonic culture” of a ruling class. The bourgeoisie, he claimed, degenerate heirs of Rabelais, Diderot, and materialists of the eighteenth century, had now re-allied with the clergy to preach abstinence for others, and to sacralize life-impoverishing labor. Capitalist morality aimed to transform workers into machines of production, while reserving the pleasures of consumption for a bloated few.³³ A pitiful parody of Christianity in its denial of the flesh, a new “dogma of work,” had established its reign over the working classes. Poets of the classical age, Jehovah in a seventh day of rest, even Christ, Lafargue pointed out, had affirmed the value, even inviolable command, of time freed from labor. But the Proletariat, in a pathetic misunderstanding of its historical mission to free humanity from labor, had allowed itself to be perverted to the extent of proclaiming their “right to work” and imagining a twelve- or eight-hour day as a revolutionary conquest. Shame on the French proletariat, and on intellectual “valets of the bourgeoisie” such as Victor Hugo, with their “nauseating hymns to its god of progress.”

It’s worth noting that despite this essay Lafargue supported the movement for an eight-hour workday. A series of articles published in 1882 soberly laid out the case for it, and in 1891 Lafargue was still giving speeches in support of workers demanding an eleven-hour day, as well as exhortations in support of the eight-hour movement.³⁴ But even Engels complained that the “eight hours enthusiasm” had a “reactionary” character if workers failed to go beyond trade unionist demands for higher wages and shorter working hours. Hence, Lafargue, insisting in The Right to Be Lazy that potentially unlimited forces of production were already capable of supporting enhanced domestic consumption and a reduction of the working day to a maximum of three hours, adopted a mocking tone to outflank insufficiently revolutionary “reformists.” Workers must be weaned off their “extravagant passion for work,” forced to “violate their taste for abstinence,” and “obliged to consume”³⁵ the products they produced—which otherwise led to surplus consumption of a parasitic few and a drive to secure export markets. It is striking that the English translation of the NYRB classic, “encourage them to consume” (p. 18), fails to convey the satirical note of constraint in “obliger” and “s’astreigner.”

Critically observing the reduction of public holy days and festivals after the French Revolution, the essay’s first edition ends with evocations of restored Rabelaisian pleasures, expressions of contempt for a Proletariat corrupted by a new Religion of Capitalism, and a prayer that “paresse” (laziness), mother of arts and noble virtues, might become the balm of human anguish.³⁶ An Appendix, added in 1883, appealed to the authority of Greek and Roman writers, contrasting their disdain for servile labor to Christian “Tartufferie” and Capitalist utilitarianism. In conclusion, Lafargue claimed that Aristotle’s dream of tools tirelessly accomplishing their “sacred tasks” without human aid was already a potential reality. But the “great Capitalist philosophers…dominated by the prejudice of wage labor” had yet to recognize the machine as the Redeemer, come to ransom humanity from sordidae artes and give leisure and liberty.

The dream depicted invites comparison to a now famous passage on the transformation of the human subject once labor time has been freed by machinery in Marx’s (at the time unpublished) notebooks, The Grundrisse. Marx’s 1857–1861 notebooks, published for the first time, in German, only in 1939, contain references to reduced working hours, to the freeing of producers from salaried labor as machinery steps into their place, and to the consequent transformation of human bodies and minds. The availability of the Grundrisse to us now shows that Lafargue’s formulation was inspired less by any dream of Aristotle than by ideas assimilated in the course of early walks and talks with Marx (who died in 1883)—talks on which Lafargue took notes.³⁷ The conclusion of The Right to Be Lazy would thus represent an initial oral transmission of Marx’s thought, in the context of familial relations, that would have remained unfamiliar and unavailable to other Marxists until the mid-twentieth century.³⁸ As for Lafargue’s own imagination of how time freed from alienated labor might be spent, a 1900 speech delivered to a student audience advocated less a refusal of work than liberation for intrinsically satisfying work, including pleasures of intellectual labor, from a life harnessed to hours of commodified, even stupefying work organized for sale and profit. (Of Marx’s “passion” for exhausting intellectual work, Lafargue wrote in 1890, “Thinking was his greatest joy.”).³⁹

A Jarring Note

With hindsight, a footnote added to the 1883 edition of The Right to Be Lazy—gratuitous and ill fitted to the argument—now leaps to attention for what it foreshadowed. Ostensibly a simple illustration of the claim that the introduction of a factory in a rural area signaled the end of “all that makes life worth living,” Lafargue added a footnote asserting that all primitive peoples kill their infirm and their old, giving “proof of their affection” by putting an end to lives no longer capable of combat, festival and dance. Until recently, he added, even the churches of Sweden housed “family bludgeons” to “deliver old relatives from the sorrows of old age.” How degenerate, by contrast, was the willingness of the proletariat to accept their miserable lives with forbearance. This paean to geronticide, even if calculated to amuse a youthful readership, was penned when Lafargue, forty-one years of age, estranged from his widowed mother and chronically worried about his inheritance, remained completely financially reliant upon Engels. (Lafargue’s mother was to live sixteen more years, dying in 1899 at age ninety-four, when Lafargue was fifty-seven.) Only after Engels died in 1895, twelve years after this footnote was published, leaving a third of his estate to Laura, would Lafargue at age 53 and Laura Marx at age 50 become for the first time in their lives financially independent.

Lafargue’s Last Words

The Lafargues used the money Engels bequeathed to Laura to buy a large, thirty-room mansion in Draveil, a fashionable suburb of Paris. In the period that followed, the Parti Ouvrier Francais founded by Lafargue and Guesde, now an isolated sect commanding only a fraction of the votes once received even when losing elections, was disbanded (1902). And Lafargue, increasingly marginalized by a new generation of French socialists who sometimes heckled him as “old Lafargue,” “the millionaire of Draveil,” withdrew from politics. On November 25, 1911, the gardener of the estate found Lafargue (aged 69) and his wife dead in adjoining rooms. At Lafargue’s side was a will, a telegram summoning Laura’s nephew, one of the Longuet progeny of her deceased sister Jenny, whose one-third portion of the Engels’ estate Lafargue had been appointed to administer, and (in English translation) the following note:

Healthy in body and mind, I end my life before pitiless old age, that takes away one by one the pleasures and joys of existence, and strips me of physical and intellectual force, can paralyse my energy and break my will, making me a burden to myself and to others.⁴⁰ For some years I promised myself not to live beyond 70; I fixed the exact year for my departure. I prepared the method for the execution of my resolution. It was a hypodermic of cyanide acid. I die with the supreme joy of knowing that at some future time the cause to which I have been devoted for forty-five years will triumph. Long live Communism! Long live international socialism!

The exclusive recourse to the first-person singular is striking. So much so in fact that some online translations of the suicide note “corrected” it to use the first-person plural in part or throughout!⁴¹ Laura Marx, collaborator in translations and publications for which she declined to claim co-authorship, left no note of her own. While Lafargue “promised himself” not to live beyond seventy, and killed himself before reaching that age, his wife was only sixty-six. The couple had no surviving children, two having died in infancy and a third before the age of four. Marx had been dead twenty-eight years, and Engels sixteen. Laura’s older sister, Jenny (whose husband, Charles Longuet, abandoned their children to Engels’ support after his wife’s death, and thereby to Lafargue’s guardianship) had been dead thirty years. Laura’s younger sister, Eleanor, after living in a proudly proclaimed “free union” as the wife of a man widely recognized as a scoundrel but tolerated by the family for his “usefulness to the Movement,”⁴² had committed suicide thirteen years earlier, aged forty-three, after discovering that her partner had stolen the money bequeathed to her by Engels and secretly married another woman. In short, at the time of the Lafargue deaths, the family and party (the POF), if not the cause to which they had devoted their lives, had long ceased to exist.

After news of the deaths broke, the responses registered in the social world of international socialism were, and remain, revealing. Some of these reported responses are best taken as lore. Lenin’s wife, Krupskaya, is reported to have recalled that during a stay with the Lafargues Laura had confided, “Paul will soon prove how sincere he is in his philosophical convictions,” upon which the couple exchanged “a look” which struck her as strange. Lenin, who spoke at the funeral, is reported to have told his wife, “If one cannot work for the Party any longer, one must be able to look truth in the face and die like the Lafargues.” But elsewhere he reportedly declared, “a socialist does not belong to himself but to his party. If he can still be useful…he has no right to commit suicide.”⁴³ One Russian revolutionary later evoked the “principled and correct nature” of the suicide before imitating it, in protest over the Russian Communist Party’s expulsion of Trotsky. Trotsky, declaring Lafargue an Epicurean disguised as a Stoic, asserted that a revolutionary should remain at his post, though later he too claimed to reserve the right to determine the moment of his own death. L’Humanité, a socialist daily, in full front-page coverage of the funeral, reportedly attended by a cortège of 18,000–20,000, summarized the speeches of an international bevy of Socialist leaders.⁴⁴ They expressed regret that the Lafargues had disappeared before their time, as they were still able to render service to the cause. Kautsky (who used the occasion to insist that German Marxism was NOT an artificial introduction to France) claimed that Laura had collaborated so powerfully with her husband, “penetrating him with her thought,” as to create a unity rendering them “inseparable in death as in life.” Jaurès, careful to stress that Lafargue was wrong in believing he was no longer useful, suggested that the words that “came to his lips in the shadow of death” (“Vive le Communisme, Vive le Socialisme International”) had thereby been endowed with a guarantee of authenticity. “These words of certitude,” pronounced on the threshold of death, claimed one of the orators, “will fill people with joy and enthusiasm.” Lafargue’s death was cast as “an act of grandeur that ennobles the cause.”

A weakly discernible hint of discomfort that Marx’s daughter died in such a manner is evident here and there. The Longuet family, children of Jenny Marx, who as a result of the deaths lost money Engels had placed in Lafargue’s guardianship for their care, reportedly refused at first to accept that Laura would have agreed to a suicide, before ceding to the prevailing view.⁴⁵ The 1934 novel Les Cloches de Bâle, by Communist surrealist Louis Aragon, protested the sacralization of death by the coverage in l’Humanité (“Why is it necessary for a daughter of Karl Marx to do that? To take from the revolution its force because of fear of illness or age? Believe me, if Lafargue killed himself it’s because one way or another he found himself separated from the working class”).⁴⁶ To this day, the written record of response suggests eagerness rather than hesitancy to classify the deaths as a double suicide.⁴⁷As a suicide, it drew expressions of enhanced “sympathy” even from Lafargue’s critics, and continued to elicit statements of respect for the “calm, firm Stoicism” or even extension of human “rights” the act is interpreted to convey.⁴⁸ The written record of response reveals little sign of revolt that a trained physician, a revolutionary who wrote on the “woman question,” on “bourgeois sentimentality,” and on the history of Romanticism, “promised himself” a death that apparently lured his wife into a sati or Liebestod, and killed her by lethal injection.

Human sacrifice, sacramental death, sacralized killing, reliably captivate human attention. Certainly in our own time we are witness to the readiness of believers to greet suicide/murder as an affirmation of faith, ennobling a cause. Lafargue, as a propagandist and journalist whose “Legend of Victor Hugo” opens with a reference to “the most magnificent funeral of the century,” would have anticipated the public response to his long planned last words and secretly anticipated final act. No commentary on Lafargue’s legacy now omits their mention. And that act, those words, cast lights of their own upon the essay for which Lafargue is best known, upon the life and social world of its author and, at furthest reach, upon ironies that dog movements for human liberation.

“Before pitiless old age”: a Right to Suicide or Solidarity?

Lafargue’s best known essay received no mention at his funeral. But its author and his assertion of the “right” to a wealth of time freed from labor were picked up in the 1920s and 1930s by French Surrealists, whose slogans linked rejection of salaried employment (“À bas le Travail!”) with youth revolt and defiant affirmations of suicide (if only of suicide of the artist as artist). Aragon’s Cloches de Bâle, with its exhaustive description of the Lafargue funeral, charted Lafargue’s unique appeal, and the lure to imitation of his suicide, among disaffected Left Bank youth. Guy Debord’s 1953 wall graffiti, “Never Work” and Surrealist and Situationist avant-garde proclamations promoting a “refusal of work” were republished and further expanded in the 1960s for the generation that saw the first major republication of Lafargue’s best known essay. In France “refusal of work” and a proclaimed right to enjoy life neither defined by nor sacrificed to salaried labor, became enduring features of avant-garde movements, of organized labor, and even, as we are reminded today, of proud public articulations of a distinctive national culture. To be noted however: the generational ground of an asserted “right” to laziness, and the rhetoric with which it is urged, has decisively shifted.

Lafargue’s vision of a life freed from labor and contemptuous rejection of a claimed “right to work” as misguided folly never involved any suggestion of a right to burden others. The rhetoric with which it was advanced suggested no right to generational solidarity between the young and the aged, and expressed no anxiety over how time freed from the discipline and social ties of work might be experienced and spent. To that extent, it never distanced itself from an identification of the value of life with individual, youthful independence, autonomy, and performance. The Rabelaisian Cockaigne Lafargue depicted as the “aim” of revolution was to “amuse oneself,” “to work the least possible and enjoy, intellectually and physically, the most possible.”⁴⁹ The vision of a proletariat of workers and their families liberated from toil reflected the structure of dependency of a nineteenth century European population. And that vision recalls our attention to that jarring footnote, in which life “worth living,” identified with combat, dance, and festival in the prime of life, is freed by geronticide from the drag of the aged.

As a medical student in Paris, Lafargue had been drawn to a youth movement he characterized as committed to atheism, materialism, and socialism. The generational aspect of a movement consistently identified with la jeunesse of the écoles stamped the character of its imagination. In one of his earliest publications, addressing the “new generation,” Lafargue praised the old revolutionary Blanqui for warning youth, “Never listen to the old. I am myself old…so don’t listen to me if I tell you things contrary to your aspirations.”⁵⁰ That dictum, repeated in the youth movement of the 1960s, with its refrain, “Don’t trust anyone over thirty”, infuses with its own significance the song that entranced Moustaki’s generation and began with admiration of a “philosophical” death “chosen” by someone neither sick nor “too old.” Such dicta entail an unstated corollary (betrayed by Lafargue’s 1883 footnote): pitiless conflict between generations and intolerability of aging. Lafargue’s final public communication—his suicide note—suggests a dark, understated side of the initial formulation of a “Right to be Lazy.” Lafargue’s satirical Pie IX au Paradis (1890), some of whose words were to be echoed in the suicide note penned twenty-three years later, evokes a horror of aging and desire for death to evade it. An old pope complains that “pitiless old age” has stripped away all pleasure in life, leaving only torpor, when what was wanted was eternal youth, “jouissance.” The form of God he encounters is a disgusting, decrepit, little old man, with an “enormous Jewish nose” who laments his inability to die. To be hoped: emptied skies, and the replacement of this contemptible senescent God by Pan.

While the title of Lafargue’s Right to be Lazy has lost none of its appeal, and its author is newly acknowledged for his critique of dogmatic faith in the gospel of work and championship of radically reduced working hours,⁵¹ it is instructive to consider that contemporary revolt⁵² against state efforts to raise the retirement age, and insistence upon a right to enjoy a healthy portion of life freed from the straitjacket of salaried labor, is not focussed on youth, but on the relatively aged. And this revolt is promoted with a call for solidarity between the generations—implying not a progression from a “right to laziness” to a “right to choose one’s death,” but a right of the aging to solidarity and support from the young, who thereby earn a right to comparable support as they age in turn. Such a reconceived “right to be lazy” implies both a willingness to bear the burden of dependencies now shifted to the far end of the life cycle, and a right to assert life worth living even while becoming a charge (burden and responsibility)—to oneself and to others (see footnote # 40).

It is striking that some more recent arguments for a guaranteed income and radical reduction of labor time, such as those advanced by Keynes in the 1930s⁵³ and—more expansively—by André Gorz in the 1980s, make no mention of Lafargue. Citations have a strategic dimension, and neither Keynes nor Gorz would have reason to claim kinship to Lafargue’s mocking tone or Marxist lineage. But they are separated from him by another difference as well. Both Keynes and Gorz express concern lest time freed from labor become empty time, and people freed from labor, “superfluous.” Thus, Gorz insists that though working hours should be reduced without loss of income, a “right to work” must still be guaranteed, not least because it is through work that people remain integrated into webs of mutual obligation. Right and duty, inextricably linked, are, he insists, the basis of citizenship. There is, and must be, no right to guaranteed income independent of social obligation. “My right is the duty of others toward me, and implies my duty towards them.” For Gorz, not only working time but time freed from labor requires collective organization and state support as a necessary foundation of social solidarity and belonging.⁵⁴ It is unlikely that Lafargue, by temperament an anarchist, would have taken pleasure in pursuing this line of thought.

The republication of Lafargue’s essay in the NYRB Classics series is timely. But no classic is timeless. In reading Lafargue today, we will do well to avoid falsifying him as our contemporary, rejecting any temptation to cull or ignore writings unsympathetic to readers of our own period. Both this author and his work are more usefully understood by registering his difference and our distance than by aspiring to sing the praises of a “maître de sagesse.” Only thus do admirable human achievements, as well as limitations of foresight and imagination, come to the fore.