PAUL LAFARGUE

To force the capitalists to improve their machines of wood and iron it is necessary to raise wages and diminish the working hours of the machines of flesh and blood

“I make you free,” so speak the Rights of Man to the laborer, “free to earn a wretched living and turn your employer into a millionaire; free to sell him your liberty for a mouthful of bread. He will imprison you ten hours or twelve hours in his workshops; he will not let you go till you are wearied to the marrow of your bones, till you have just enough strength left to gulp down pour soup and sink into a heavy sleep. You have but one of your rights that you may not sell, and that is the right to pay taxes.

The boycott, which the bourgeoisie regards with sentimental tenderness when directed against the trade of its commercial rival, it considers as a crime when employed by the workers in defense of their livelihood.

Christianity from its origin … declared itself to be an international religion. The internationalism of the worship and the hierarchy of the clergy made the new religion a formidable weapon against the power of the emperors of the East and the West, and later a terrible instrument of oppression in the hands of the ruling classes who have taken the priests into their service.

The Socialists are no fomenters of strikes; they know too well that a strike is a two-edged weapon, wounding the proletariat more deeply and more grievously than the capitalist. But, when the strike is declared, they take their part in the fight. They organize and assist the workers, protecting them against the snares of the police and the brutality of the military, and giving them such moral and material support as is in their power

A strange delusion possesses the working classes of the nations where capitalist civilization holds its sway. This delusion drags in its train the individual and social woes which for two centuries have tortured sad humanity. This delusion is the love of work, the furious passion for work, pushed even to the exhaustion of the vital force of the individual and his progeny

And the children? Twelve hours of work for children! 0, misery. But not all the Jules Simon of the Academy of Moral and Political Science, not all the Germanys of Jesuitism, could have invented a vice more degrading to the intelligence of the children, more corrupting of their instincts, more destructive of their organism than work in the vitiated atmosphere of the capitalist factory

The philosophers and the moralists had the simplicity to believe that they would stop the woman movement by opposing to it the sacred interest of the family, which they declared could not survive without the subjection of woman to the labors of the household, the sewing on of shirt buttons, the mending of hose, etc., her duty was to devote herself to these obscure and thankless labors, in order that man might freely unfold and display his brilliant and superior faculties. These same philosophers, who lectured the rebellious ladies on the cult of the family, sang the praises of capitalist industry, which, by forcing the wife away from the domestic hearth and her child’s cradle to condemn her to the forced labor of the factory, destroys the working-class family.

It is to the interest of the workers’ party to embitter the conflicts which lacerate the capitalist class, instead of seeking to pacify them – these antagonisms quicken the disorganization of the ruling class

There is a surplus of capital as well as of goods. The financiers no longer know where to place it. Then they go among the happy nations who are leafing in the sun smoking cigarettes and they lay down railroads, erect factories and import the curse of work. And this exportation of French capital ends one fine morning in diplomatic complications

“I make you free,” so speak the Rights of Man to the laborer, “free to earn a wretched living and turn your employer into a millionaire; free to sell him your liberty for a mouthful of bread. He will imprison you ten hours or twelve hours in his workshops; he will not let you go till you are wearied to the marrow of your bones, till you have just enough strength left to gulp down pour soup and sink into a heavy sleep. You have but one of your rights that you may not sell, and that is the right to pay taxes.

A party is only revolutionary on condition of revolutionizing the heads of women and men.

A strange delusion possesses the working classes of the nations where capitalist civilization holds its sway. This delusion drags in its train the individual and social woes which for two centuries have tortured sad humanity. This delusion is the love of work, the furious passion for work, pushed even to the exhaustion of the vital force of the individual and his progeny

And the children? Twelve hours of work for children! 0, misery. But not all the Jules Simon of the Academy of Moral and Political Science, not all the Germanys of Jesuitism, could have invented a vice more degrading to the intelligence of the children, more corrupting of their instincts, more destructive of their organism than work in the vitiated atmosphere of the capitalist factory

Christianity from its origin … declared itself to be an international religion. The internationalism of the worship and the hierarchy of the clergy made the new religion a formidable weapon against the power of the emperors of the East and the West, and later a terrible instrument of oppression in the hands of the ruling classes who have taken the priests into their service.

In order to find work for all the non-producers of our present society, in order to leave room for the industrial equipment to go on developing indefinitely, the working class will be compelled, like the capitalist class, to do violence to its taste for abstinence and to develop indefinitely its consuming capacities. Instead of eating an ounce or two of gristly meat once a day, when it eats any, it will eat juicy beefsteaks of a pound or two; instead of drinking moderately of bad wine, it will become more orthodox than the pope and will drink broad and deep bumpers of Bordeaux and Burgundy without commercial baptism and will leave water to the beasts

It is to the interest of the workers’ party to embitter the conflicts which lacerate the capitalist class, instead of seeking to pacify them – these antagonisms quicken the disorganization of the ruling class

State services become a means to politicians for placing their tools or dependants, and for giving good, fat sinecures …

The boycott, which the bourgeoisie regards with sentimental tenderness when directed against the trade of its commercial rival, it considers as a crime when employed by the workers in defense of their livelihood.

The philosophers and the moralists had the simplicity to believe that they would stop the woman movement by opposing to it the sacred interest of the family, which they declared could not survive without the subjection of woman to the labors of the household, the sewing on of shirt buttons, the mending of hose, etc., her duty was to devote herself to these obscure and thankless labors, in order that man might freely unfold and display his brilliant and superior faculties. These same philosophers, who lectured the rebellious ladies on the cult of the family, sang the praises of capitalist industry, which, by forcing the wife away from the domestic hearth and her child’s cradle to condemn her to the forced labor of the factory, destroys the working-class family.

The railway monopoly is so exorbitant that a company can ruin at will an industry or a town by differential or preferential tariffs. The danger to which society is exposed by the private ownership of the means of transport is so keenly felt that in France, England and the United States, many capitalists in their own interests demand the nationalization of the railways

The Socialists are no fomenters of strikes; they know too well that a strike is a two-edged weapon, wounding the proletariat more deeply and more grievously than the capitalist. But, when the strike is declared, they take their part in the fight. They organize and assist the workers, protecting them against the snares of the police and the brutality of the military, and giving them such moral and material support as is in their power

The toilers are more greedily exploited in them [government run nationalized services] than in private enterprise; they are bent beneath an authority that is more powerfully hierarchic; they can neither combine nor strike.

There is a surplus of capital as well as of goods. The financiers no longer know where to place it. Then they go among the happy nations who are leafing in the sun smoking cigarettes and they lay down railroads, erect factories and import the curse of work. And this exportation of French capital ends one fine morning in diplomatic complications

To force the capitalists to improve their machines of wood and iron it is necessary to raise wages and diminish the working hours of the machines of flesh and blood

To fulfill his double social function of non-producer and over-consumer, the capitalist was not only obliged to violate his modest taste, to lose his laborious habits of two centuries ago and to give himself up to unbounded luxury, spicy indigestibles and syphilitic debauches, but also to withdraw from productive labor an enormous mass of men in order to enlist them as his assistants.

Our epoch has been called the century of work. It is in fact the century of pain, misery and corruption.

The philosophers of antiquity taught contempt for work, that degradation of the free man, the poets sang of idleness, that gift from the Gods.

Confronted with this double madness of the labourers killing themselves with over-production and vegetating in abstinence, the great problem of capitalist production is no longer to find producers and to multiply their powers but to discover consumers, to excite their appetites and create in them fictitious needs.

Work, work, proletarians, to increase social wealth and your individual poverty; work, work, in order that becoming poorer, you may have more reason to work and become miserable. Such is the inexorable law of capitalist production.

In proportion as the machine is improved and performs man's work with an ever increasing rapidity and exactness, the labourer, instead of prolonging his former rest times, redoubles his ardour, as if he wished to rival the machine. O, absurd and murderous competition!

O Laziness, mother of the arts and noble virtues, be thou the balm of human anguish.