[2] Doctor Beddoe. "Memoirs of the Anthropological Society." [3] Charles Darwin. "Descent of Man." TABLE OF CONTENTS Page THE RIGHT TO BE LAZY— I. A Disastrous Dogma 9 II. Blessings of Work 14 III. The Consequences of Over-Production 30 IV. New Songs to New Music 48 Appendix 57 SOCIALISM AND THE INTELLECTUALS 63 THE BANKRUPTCY OF CAPITALISM 105 THE WOMAN QUESTION 111 THE SOCIALIST IDEAL 139 THE RIGHTS OF THE HORSE AND THE RIGHTS OF MAN 157 THE RIGHT TO BE LAZY Let us be lazy in everything, except in loving and drinking, except in being lazy. —Lessing. I. A DISASTROUS DOGMA. 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. Instead of opposing this mental aberration, the priests, the economists and the moralists have cast a sacred halo over work. Blind and finite men, they have wished to be wiser than their God; weak and contemptible men, they have presumed to rehabilitate what their God had cursed. I, who do not profess to be a Christian, an economist or a moralist, I appeal from their judgement to that of their God; from the preachings of their religious, economics or free-thought ethics, to the frightful consequences of work in capitalist society. In capitalist society work is the cause of all intellectual degeneracy, of all organic deformity. Compare the thorough-bred in Rothschild's stables, served by a retinue of bipeds, with the heavy brute of the Norman farms which plows the earth, carts the manure, hauls the crops. Look at the noble savage whom the missionaries of trade and the traders of religion have not yet corrupted with Christianity, syphilis and the dogma of work, and then look at our miserable slaves of machines.[4]