Paul Lafargue
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Paul Lafargue (1842-1911) was a French socialist writer and political activist. His best known work is The Right to Be Lazy.
Lafargue was Karl Marx's son-in-law, having married Laura Marx.
He was born in Santiago, Cuba, and spent most of his life in France, with periods in England and Spain.
At the age of 70, he and Laura died together in a suicide pact.
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Early Life
Paul Lafargue was born in Santiago de Cuba in January-15-1842 in a mixed Franco-Caribbean family. His father was the accommodated owner of coffee plantations in Cuba, what allowed Paul to study in Santiago first and then in France.
In 1851, the Lafargue family moved to Bordeaux. Paul finished High-School in Toulouse and studied medicine in Paris.
First French and International period
It was in Paris where Paul Lafargue started his intellectual and political career, absorbing the Positivists currents of thought and contacting with the Republican groups that opposed Napoleon III. The work of Proudhon particularly seem to have influenced him strongly in this phase. As a Proudhonian (Anarchist), Lafargue joined the French section of the International Workers Association (IWA).
Nevertheless, soon he contacted two of the most prominent figures of revolutionary thought and action: Karl Marx and Auguste Blanqui, whose influx largely eclipsed the first Anarchist tendencies of the young Lafargue.
In 1865, after participating in the International Students' Congress at Liege, Lafargue was banned from all French universities and had to migrate to London to finish his career. It was there where he became a frequent visitor at Marx's home, where he met his second daughter Laura, who he married in 1868.
His political activity continued and he was chosen member of the General Council of the IWA and appointed secretary correspondent for Spain. Nevertheless he doesn't seem to have succeeded in establishing any serious contact with worker groups of Spain, where only after the cantonalist revolution of 1868 and the travel of the Italian anarchist Giuseppe Fanelli to the country would become enlisted in the International, though basically inside the Anarchist and not the Marxist current that Lafargue now represented.
This fact is notorious because, after his return to France, he wrote several articles attacking Proudhonian tendencies, still very influential in some workers groups of France. Lafargue started with those a long career as political journalist.
Spanish period
After the revolutionary episode of the Paris Commune in 1871, political repression forced him to flee to Spain. He finally settled in Madrid, where he contacted local members of the IWA, over whom his influence was going to be very important.
Unlike in other parts of Europe where the Marxist current were dominant, in Spain, the Anarchist faction of the IWA was clearly dominant and would remain very strong until the Civil War of 1936-39 and the subsequent fascist dictatorship (see: CNT).
Lafargue worked intensely to redirect this Anarchist trend of the Spanish federation toward the positions of Marxism. This activity, largely developed under the direction of Engels, was intermingled with the struggles that both currents had at the international level, because the Spanish federation of the IWA was one of the main pillars of the Anarchist faction.
His task consisted mainly in gathering a core of Marxist leaders in Madrid and working ideologically through unsigned articles in the newspaper La Emancipación, where he defended the need of creating a political party of the working class, something that the Anarchists couldn't accept.
Nevertheless, in some of his articles of this period, his ideas about a radical reduction of the working journey (not entirely alien to the original thought of Marx, it must be said) started to make presence.
In 1872, after a public attack of La Emancipación against the new Federal Council (Anarchist), the Federation of Madrid expelled the signatories of that article, who soon founded the New Federation of Madrid, of limited influence. The last activity of Lafargue as Spanish activist was to represent this Marxist minority group in the Hague Congress (1872), that marked the end of IWA as unitarian International of all socialists.
Second French period
Between 1873 and 1882 Paul Lafargue lived in London but he avoided exerting as physician because he lacked faith on that science. He opened a photolitography workshop but the limited income of this job forced him to request money from Engels (who was owner of industries) in several occasions. From London and thanks to the support of his father-in-law, he contacted again the French workers movement, that started to reorganize itself after the repression of Thiers.
Since 1880 he worked again as redactor in the newspaper L'Egalité. Precisely in this year and in this publication was when the first version of The Right to Be Lazy, his most famous book, came to light.
In 1882 he started working in an insurance company, what allowed him to return to Paris and jump again to the core of French socialist politics. Lafargue, Jules Guesde and Gabriel Deville would since then direct the activities of the newly founded French Workers Party (Parti Ouvrier Français - POF), again in continuous struggle against Anarchist and radical Jacobin currents.
Since then till his death, Lafargue is the most respected theorist of the POF, not just extending the original Marxist doctrines but also adding original ideas of his own. He also participates actively in public activities, like strikes and elections, spending some periods in jail as well.
In 1891, Lafargue was elected parliamentary in Lille, despite being imprisoned at that time, being the first socialist to achieve a seat in the French Parliament. This success would encourage the POF to persevere in the electoral activity and largely abandon the insurrectional policies of the previous period.
Nevertheless, Lafargue continued his defense of Marxist orthodoxy against any revisionist current, as his differences with Jean Jaures and his opposition to participate in a bourgeois government show clearly.
Last years and suicide
In 1908 took place the Congress of Tolousse, in which the different socialist currents got unified in a single party. Lafargue made his last stand in this congress, fighting fiercely against the reformism defended by Jaures. But in these late years Paul Lafargue was already quite apart of any political activity, living in the village of Draveil, not far from Paris, and his activity was limited to writing articles and essays, and occasional contacts with some of the most outstanding socialist activists of the time, like Liebknecht or Lenin.
It was in that house of Draveil where Paul and Laura Lafargue put end to their lives to the surprise and even outrage of French and European socialists.
He wrote for that occasion:
- Healthy of body and spirit, I give me death before the implacable old age, that has stealed me one after the other all pleasures and joys of existence, and has expoiled me from my physical and intellectual strength, paralizes my energy and ends with my willpower, making me a burden for myself and others.
- Since years ago I have promised myself not to surpass the age of seventy; I have fixed the season for my departure from this life and prepared the means to execute this decision: an hypodermic injection of cyanhydric acid.
- I die with the supreme happiness of having the certainty that very soon will triumph the cause to which I have given myself since 45 years ago.
Most socialist leaders rejected publicly or privately his decision. But a few, notably the Spanish Anarchist leader Anselmo Lorenzo, a major political rival of his Spanish period, accepted his decision with tenderness and understanding.
Lorenzo wrote after Lafargue's death:
- The double, original and, whatever the rutinarians say, even sympathetic suicide of Paul Lafargue and Laura Marx [in Spain women keep their maiden 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.
- (...) in Lafargue were two different aspects that made him appear in constant contradiction: affiliated to socialism, he was anarchist communist by intimate conviction; but enemy of Bakunin, 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 his optimisms, 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. (...)
External links
- Paul Lafargue Internet Archive (http://www.marxists.org/archive/lafargue/index.htm)