Nineteenth Century Collections Online: British Politics and Society

The Right to be Lazy is an essay by Cuban-born French revolutionary Marxist Paul Lafargue, written from his London exile in 1880. The essay polemicizes heavily against then-contemporary liberal, conservative, Christian and even socialist ideas of work. Lafargue criticizes these ideas from a Marxist perspective as dogmatic and ultimately false by portraying the degeneration and enslavement of human existence when being subsumed under the primacy of the "right to work", and argues that laziness, combined with human creativity, is an important source of human progress. He manifests that "When, in our civilized Europe, we would find a trace of the native beauty of man, we must go seek it in the nations where economic prejudices have not yet uprooted the hatred of work … The Greeks in their era of greatness had only contempt for work: their slaves alone were permitted to labor: the free man knew only exercises for the body and mind ... The philosophers of antiquity taught contempt for work, that degradation of the free man, the poets sang of idleness, that gift from the Gods." And so he says "Proletarians, brutalized by the dogma of work, listen to the voice of these philosophers, which has been concealed from you with jealous care: A citizen who gives his labor for money degrades himself to the rank of slaves." (The last sentence paraphrasing Cicero.)

"What is religion? is one of those questions rarely asked by Christian theologians who engage in interreligious discourse. Nigel Kumar makes the case, however, that to answer the question is critical for Christian scholars attempting to negotiate multiple religious identities, as well as for those who want a clearer understanding of their own faith as religion. Kumar takes a historical approach to answering the question. He traces the development of the concept of religion and then formulates a theological answer, not only by looking at an Indian theologian, Chenchiah, but also by listening to other secular and theological voices." - Back Cover.

Marxiste orthodoxe, fondateur en 1883 avec Pavel Axelrod du groupe Emancipation du travail, première cellule marxiste de Russie, Georges Plekhanov (1856-1918) analyse dans Anarchisme et socialisme la généalogie et les enjeux de ces doctrines anarchistes qu'il tient pour un péril.