Everyone has the right to dispose of their time as they wish instead of becoming voluntarily enslaved to it. This is how Paul Lafargue establishes the argument for reducing working hours. Capitalists have convinced workers, with the help of the Church, that their life is their work, and thus they spend their time stealing from the workers' time. The latter should not claim the right to work – a masochistic blunder, according to Lafargue – but the right to laziness.

For it is precisely this "love for work" that has caused the greatest hardships for those who have nothing else but this. Not only was it extremely popular in its time, but it also contributed to achieving significant goals, inspiring the movement for the eight-hour workday and the establishment of equal pay for men and women.

The Right to Laziness calls upon the proletarians of the world to unite – and to stop working so much! An emblematic book, a manifesto for what human life means. One of the most inspired attacks on the concept of work ethic.

“In capitalist society, labor is the cause of every spiritual degeneration and every physical deformity […] The proletariat, the great class that includes all the producers of civilized nations, the class that, by liberating itself, will liberate humanity from servile labor and make the human animal a free being, the proletariat has precisely been allowed to be corrupted by the doctrine of labor, betraying its instincts and ignoring its historical mission. Harsh and terrible has been its punishment. All individual and social miseries have been born from its own passion for work.” Paul Lafargue