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Paul Lafargue

Paul Lafargue Books

Journalist

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“Οι κοσμικές κυρίες ζουν μια ζωή μάρτυρα. Για να προβάρουν και να δώσουν αξία στις νεραϊδένιες τουαλέτες που οι μοδίστρες σκοτώνονται για να ράψουν, αλλάζουν το ένα φόρεμα μετά το άλλο από το βράδυ ώς το πρωί' παραδίδουν επί ώρες το κούφιο το κεφάλι τους στους καλλιτέχνες των τριχών, οι οποίοι θέλουν πάση θυσία να χορτάσουν το μάταιο πάθος τους για τους ψεύτικους κότσους. Σφιγμένες μέσα στους κορσέδες τους, ριμωγμένες μέσα στα μποτάκια τους, με ντεκολτέ τόσο ανοιχτό που να κοκκινίζει ακόμα κι ένας σκαφτιάς, στοβιλίζονται ολόκληρες νύχτες στους φιλανθρωπικούς τους χορούς με σκοπό να συγκεντρώσουν κάποιες δεκάρες για τη φτωχολογιά. Άγιες ψυχές!”

“Under the ancien régime, the laws of the Church guaranteed workers ninety days of rest (fifty-two Sundays and thirty-eight public holidays), during which they were strictly prohibited from working. This was the great crime of Catholicism and the principle cause of irreligion among the industrial and commercial bourgeoisie.... Protestantism, which is the Christian religion adapted to the new industrial and commercial needs of the bourgeoisie, was less concerned with days of rest for the people. It banished the saints from heaven in order to do away with their feast days on earth.”

“The oppressed class, although the ideology of the oppressing class is imposed upon it, nevertheless elaborates religious, ethical and political ideas corresponding to its condition of life; vague and secret at first, they gain in precision and force in proportion as the oppressed class takes definite form and acquires the consciousness of its social utility and of its strength; and the hour of its emancipation is near when its conception of nature and of society opposes itself openly and boldly to that of the ruling class.”

“The militant socialists, following the example of the encyclopedists of the eighteenth century, have to make a merciless criticism of the economic, political, historical, philosophical, moral and religious ideas of the capitalist class in order to prepare in all spheres of thought the triumph of the new ideology which the proletariat introduces into the world.”

“They imagine that their poverty is transitory, and that they only need a stroke of good luck to transform them into capitalists. Education, they think, is the lucky number in the social lottery, and it will bring them the grand prize. They do not perceive that this ticket given them by the capitalist class is a fraud, that labor, whether manual or intellectual, has no other chance than to earn its daily pittance, that it has nothing to hope for but to be exploited, and that the more capitalism goes on developing, the more do the chances of an individual raising himself out of his class go on diminishing.”

“Si, déracinant de son coeur le vice qui la domine et avilit sa nature, la classe ouvrière se levait dans sa force terrible, non pour réclamer les Droits de l’homme, qui ne sont que les droits de l’exploitation capitaliste, non pour réclamer le Droit au travail, qui n’est que le droit à la misère, mais pour forger une loi d’airain, défendant à tout homme de travailler plus de trois heures par jour, la Terre, la vieille Terre, frémissant d’allégresse, sentirait bondir en elle un nouvel univers…”

“Confronted with this double madness of the labourers killing themselves with over-production and vegetating in abstinence, the great problem of capitalist production is no longer to find producers and to multiply their powers but to discover consumers, to excite their appetites and create in them fictitious needs.”