Paul Lafargue (/ləˈfɑːrɡ/;French:[lafaʁg]; 15 January 1842 – 25 November 1911) was a Cuban-born French^[1] political writer, economist, journalist,literary critic, andactivist; he wasKarl Marx's son-in-law, having married his second daughter,Laura. His best known work isThe Right to Be Lazy. Born in Cuba to French andCreole parents, Lafargue spent most of his life in France, with periods in England and Spain. At the age of 69, he and 66-year-old Laura died together by asuicide pact.

Paul Lafargue
Born	(1842-01-15)15 January 1842 Santiago de Cuba,Spanish Cuba
Died	25 November 1911(1911-11-25) (aged 69) Draveil,Paris,France
Cause of death	Suicide
Occupation	Physician
Spouse	Laura Marx ​ (m. 1868)​
Children	3

Lafargue was the subject of a famous quotation byKarl Marx. Soon before Marx died in 1883, he wrote a letter to Lafargue and theFrench Workers' Party organizerJules Guesde, both of whom already claimed to represent "Marxist" principles. Marx accused them of "revolutionary phrase-mongering" and of denying the value ofreformist struggles.^[2] This exchange is the source of Marx's remark, reported byFriedrich Engels, "ce qu'il y a de certain c'est que moi, je ne suis pas Marxiste" ("If one thing is certain, I am not a Marxist").

Lafargue was born in 1842 inSantiago de Cuba. His father was the owner ofcoffee plantations inCuba, and the family's wealth allowed Lafargue to study in Santiago and then in France. Each of Lafargue's grandparents was of a different ethno-religious origin. His paternal grandfather was a French Christian from the region ofBordeaux. His paternal grandmother was amulatto fromSaint-Domingue who had fled to Cuba following theHaitian Revolution. Lafargue's maternal grandparents were also refugees from Saint-Domingue. His maternal grandfather was aFrench Jew, and his maternal grandmother was a Jamaican woman who claimed to be of indigenousTaíno ancestry. Lafargue has remarked that he was an "international[ist] of blood before [he] was one of ideology" and that "the blood of three oppressed races runs in my veins". WhenDaniel De Leon asked him about his origins, he promptly replied, "I am proudest of my Negro extraction."^[3][4][5]

Karl Marx in various correspondence referred to him as "descendant of a gorilla",^[6] "Negro" and "Negrillo".^[7]

In 1851, the Lafargue family relocated back to its hometown ofBordeaux, where Paul attended secondary school. Later he studied medicine inParis. It was there that Lafargue started hisintellectual and political career, endorsingPositivist philosophy, and communicating with theRepublican groups that opposedNapoleon III. The work ofPierre-Joseph Proudhon seems to have particularly influenced him during this phase. As a Proudhoniananarchist, Lafargue joined the French section of theInternational Workingmen's Association (theFirst International). Nevertheless, he soon began communicating with two of the most prominent revolutionists: Marx andAuguste Blanqui, whose influence largely ended the anarchist tendencies of the young Lafargue.

In 1865, after participating in the International Students' Congress inLiège, Lafargue was banned from all French universities, and had to leave forLondon in order to start a career. It was there that he became a frequent visitor to Marx's house, meeting his second daughter Laura, whom he married atSt Pancras registry office in April 1868. During their first three-years of marriage they had three children, two boys and a girl, all of whom died in infancy. They had no other children.^[8]

Lafargue was chosen as a member of the General Council of the First International, then appointed corresponding secretary for Spain, although he does not seem to have succeeded in establishing any serious communication with workers' groups in that country—Spain joined the international congress only after theCantonalist Revolution of 1868, while events such as the arrival of theItalian anarchistGiuseppe Fanelli caused it to be influenced strongly by anarchism (and not the Marxism that Lafargue chose to represent).

Lafargue's opposition to anarchism became notorious when, after his return to France, he wrote several articles criticizing theBakuninist tendencies that were very influential with some French workers' groups; this series of articles began a long career as a political journalist.

After the revolutionary episode of theParis Commune during 1871, political repression forced him to flee to Spain. He finally settled inMadrid, where he contacted some members of theInternational's Spanish chapter (FRE-AIT).

Unlike in other parts of Europe where Marxism came to have a dominant part, the FRE-AIT were mostly devotees of the International'sanarchist faction (they were to remain very strong until theSpanish Civil War of the 1930s, and thesubsequent dictatorship). Lafargue became involved with propagating Marxism, an activity that was directed largely byFriedrich Engels, and one that became intertwined with the struggles that both tendencies had internationally—as the Spanish federation of the International was one of the main endorsers of the anarchist group.

The task given to Lafargue consisted mainly of gathering a Marxist leadership inMadrid, while exercising an ideological influence through unsigned articles in the newspaperLa Emancipación (where he defended the need to create apolitical party of theworking class, one of the main topics opposed by the anarchists). At the same time, Lafargue took initiative through some of his articles, expressing his own ideas about a radical reduction of theworking day (a concept which was not entirely alien to the original thought of Marx).

In 1872, after public criticism ofLa Emancipación against the new anarchist Federal Council of the FRE-AIT, the Federation of Madrid expelled the signatories of that article, who soon initiated theNew Madrid Federation [es], a group of limited influence. The last activity of Lafargue as a Spanish activist was to represent this Marxist minority group in the 1872Hague Congress which marked the end of First International as a united group of all communists.

Between 1873 and 1882, Paul Lafargue lived in London, and avoided practising medicine as he had lost faith in it after the death in infancy of his and Laura's three children.^[9] He opened aphotolithography workshop, but its limited income forced him to request money from Engels (whose family co-owned the textile companyBaumwollspinnerei Ermen & Engels) on several occasions. Thanks to Engels' assistance, he again began communicating with the French workers' movement from London, after it had started to regain popularity lost as a result of thereactionary repression underAdolphe Thiers during the first years of theThird Republic.

From 1880, he again worked as editor of the French socialist newspaperL'Égalité. During that same year, and in that publication, Lafargue began publishing the first draft ofThe Right to Be Lazy. In 1882, he started working in aninsurance company, which allowed him to relocate back to Paris and become more involved with French socialist politics. Together withJules Guesde andGabriel Deville, he began directing the activities of the newly initiatedFrench Workers' Party (Parti Ouvrier Français; POF), which he caused to conflict with other majorleft-wing trends: anarchism, as well as theJacobinRadicals andBlanquists.

From then until his death, Lafargue remained the most respected theorist of the POF, not just extending the original Marxist doctrines, but also adding original ideas of his own. He also participated with public activities such asstrikes and elections, and was imprisoned several times.

In 1891, despite being in police custody, he was elected to theFrench Parliament forLille in a by-election, being the first-ever French Socialist to occupy such an office. His success would encourage the POF to remain engaged in electoral activities, and largely abandon theinsurrectionist policies of its previous period.^[10]: 41

Nevertheless, Lafargue continued his defence of Marxist orthodoxy against anyreformist tendency, as shown by his conflict withJean Jaurès, as well as his refusal to participate with any "bourgeois" government.

In 1908, after a Congress inToulouse, the different socialist tendencies were unified in the form of a single party. Lafargue opposed thesocial democratic reformism defended by Jaurès.

During these later years, Lafargue had already begun neglecting politics, living on the outskirts of Paris in the village ofDraveil, limiting his contributions to a number of articles and essays, as well as occasional communication with some of the better-known socialist activists of the time, such asKarl Kautsky andHjalmar Branting of the older generation, andKarl Liebknecht orVladimir Lenin of the younger generation. It was in Draveil that Lafargue and his wife Laura Marx ended their lives together,^[11] to the surprise and even outrage of French and European socialists.^[12]

In his suicide letter, Lafargue explained:^[13]

Healthy in body and mind, I end my life before pitiless old age which has taken from me my pleasures and joys one after another; and which has been stripping me of my physical and mental powers, can paralyse my energy and break my will, making me a burden to myself and to others.

For some years I had promised myself not to live beyond 70; and I fixed the exact year for my departure from life. I prepared the method for the execution of our resolution, it was a hypodermic of cyanide acid.

I die with the supreme joy of knowing that at some future time, the cause to which I have been devoted for forty-five years will triumph.

Long live Communism! Long live the international socialism!

Most well-known socialists deplored his decision publicly or privately; a few, notably the Spanish anarchistAnselmo Lorenzo, who had been a major political rival of Lafargue during his Spanish period, accepted his decision with understanding. Lorenzo wrote after Lafargue's death:

The double, original and, whatever the routine response, even sympathetic suicide of Paul Lafargue and Laura Marx [in Spain, women keep theirmaiden surname after marriage], who knew and could live united and lovers until death, has awakened my memories. [...] Lafargue was my teacher: his memory is for me almost as important as that of Fanelli. [...] [I]n Lafargue were two different aspects that made him appear in constant contradiction: affiliated to socialism, he wasanarchist communist by intimate conviction; but enemy ofBakunin, by suggestion of Marx, he tried to damage Anarchism. Due to that double way of being, he caused different effect in those that had relations with him: the simple ones were comforted by hisoptimisms, but those touched by depressing passions changed friendship into hate and produced personal issues, divisions and created organizations that, because of original vice, will always give bitter fruit.

Adolf Abramovich Joffe, who later committed suicide to protest the expulsion ofLeon Trotsky from theCentral Committee of theSoviet Communist Party, noted in his final letter to Trotsky on the verge of committing suicide that he approved of the suicide pact of Lafargue and Marx in his youth:

When I was still an inexperienced youth, and the suicide of Paul Lafargue and his wife Laura Marx raised such an outcry in the socialist parties, I firmly defended the principled and correct nature of their positions. I recall that I vehemently objected to August Bebel, who was indignant over these suicides, that if one could argue against the age at which the Lafargues chose to die — for here we were dealing not with the number of years, but with the possible usefulness of a political figure — then one could by no means argue against the very principle of a political figure departing from this life at the moment when he felt that he would no longer bring any benefit to the cause to which he had devoted himself.

Vladimir Lenin, who was one of the speakers at the funeral as representative ofRSDLP,^[14] later told his wifeNadezhda Krupskaya:^[15]

If one cannot work for the Party any longer, one must be able to look truth in the face and die like the Lafargues."

Paul Lafargue and Laura Marx were buried at division 76 (near theCommunards' Wall) of thePère Lachaise Cemetery in Paris. Their nephewJean Longuet and his wife and two sons later were buried in the same grave.^[16]

• Bourgeois Sentimentalism,L'Égalité (1881)
• Le droit à la paresse, 1880 (revised 1883)
• The Right to Be Lazy, 1883 (the English translation ofLe droit à la paresse by Charles Kerr)^[17]
• Le matérialisme économique de Karl Marx, 1883
• Cours d'économie sociale, 1884
• —— (1887).La religion du capital. Paris: Bibliothèque socialiste de l'agglomération parisienne du parti ouvrier.OCLC 776826183 (all editions). (English translation:The religion of capital, 1918.^[18])
• —— (1890).The Evolution of Property from Savagery to Civilization. London: S. Sonnenschein.OCLC 3470448 (all editions). (many new editions)
• Le socialisme utopique, 1892
• Le communisme et l'évolution économique, 1892
• Le socialisme et la conquête des pouvoirs publics, 1899
• La question de la femme, 1904
• Le déterminisme économique de Karl Marx, 1909

• History of feminism
• Rational suicide
• Refusal of work
• Strike action

• Derfler, Leslie. “PAUL LAFARGUE: THE FIRST MARXIST LITERARY CRITIC.” Nineteenth-Century French Studies 17, no. 3/4 (1989): 369–84.http://www.jstor.org/stable/23532465.
• Derfler, Leslie. “Paul Lafargue and the Beginnings of Marxism in France.” Biography 14, no. 1 (1991): 25–38.http://www.jstor.org/stable/23539906.
• Derfler, Leslie. Paul Lafargue and the Flowering of French Socialism, 1882–1911. Harvard University Press, 1998.https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv1smjshs.
• Kołakowski, Leszek (2005).Main Currents of Marxism. New York:W. W. Norton & Company.ISBN 978-0-393-32943-8.

• Kredi Notu
• Works by Paul Lafargue atProject Gutenberg
• Paul Lafargue Internet Archive
• Libertarian Communist Library Paul LaFargue ArchiveArchived 12 October 2006 at theWayback Machine
• Translation of The legend of Victor Hugo by Paul Lafargue