The "right to laziness": let us thank the appalling Sandrine Rousseau for having put back in fashion the expression of Paul Lafargue, Marx's son-in-law, during the debates on the pension reform. It was an opportunity to rediscover this iconoclastic text published in 1880 in a social and political context diametrically opposed to that of the France of 2023.
Reading this brilliant and provocative little pamphlet shows us a first thing: that outrage and caricature are not characteristic of contemporary debates. Indeed, the communard and socialist does not go there with a dead hand when he castigates "the France female capitalist, enormous; hairy of the face and bald of the skull, with puffy flabby flesh". Obviously, Paul was not very deconstructed. What does it tell us in this text? That "a strange madness possesses the working classes of nations where capitalist civilization reigns": the "love of work", this "mental aberration". The Greeks despised him, Christ considered him secondary, but...
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