BY
PAUL LAFARGUE
Translated by CHARLES H. KERR
CHICAGO
CHARLES H. KERR & COMPANY
Copyright, 1907
By Charles H. Kerr & Company
PREFACE
M. Thiers, at a private session of the commissionon primary education of 1849, said: "Iwish to make the influence of the clergy all-powerfulbecause I count upon it to propagatethat good philosophy which teaches man that heis here below to suffer, and not that other philosophywhich on the contrary bids man to enjoy."M. Thiers was stating the ethics of the capitalistclass, whose fierce egoism and narrow intelligencehe incarnated.
The Bourgeoisie, when it was strugglingagainst the nobility sustained by the clergy,hoisted the flag of free thought and atheism; butonce triumphant, it changed its tone and mannerand today it uses religion to support its economicand political supremacy. In the fifteenth and sixteenthcenturies, it had joyfully taken up thepagan tradition and glorified the flesh and itspassions, reproved by Christianity; in our days,gorged with goods and with pleasures, it denies[Pg 4]the teachings of its thinkers like Rabelais andDiderot, and preaches abstinence to the wage-workers.Capitalist ethics, a pitiful parody onChristian ethics, strikes with its anathema theflesh of the laborer; its ideal is to reduce theproducer to the smallest number of needs, tosuppress his joys and his passions and to condemnhim to play the part of a machine turningout work without respite and without thanks.
The revolutionary socialists must take upagain the battle fought by the philosophers andpamphleteers of the bourgeoisie; they mustmarch up to the assault of the ethics and thesocial theories of capitalism; they must demolishin the heads of the class which they call to actionthe prejudices sown in them by the rulingclass; they must proclaim in the faces of thehypocrites of all ethical systems that the earthshall cease to be the vale of tears for the laborer;that in the communist society of the future,which we shall establish "peaceably if we may,forcibly if we must," the impulses of men willbe given a free rein, for "all these impulses areby nature good, we have nothing to avoid buttheir misuse and their excesses,[1]" and they willnot be avoided except by their mutual counter-balancing,[Pg 5]balancing, by the harmonious development ofthe human organism, for as Dr. Beddoe says,"It is only when a race reaches its maximumof physical development, that it arrives at itshighest point of energy and moral vigor.[2]" Suchwas also the opinion of the great naturalistCharles Darwin.[3]
This refutation of the "Right to Work" whichI am republishing with some additional notes appearedin the weekly "Egalité", 1880, secondseries.
P. L.
Sainte-Pélagie Prison, 1883.
[1]Descartes. "Les Passions de l'âme."