Paul Lafargue

Paul Lafargue (; 15 January 1842 – 25 November 1911) was a Cuban-born French revolutionary Marxist socialist, political writer, economist, journalist, literary critic, and activist; he was Karl Marx's son-in-law, having married his second daughter, Laura. His best known work is The Right to Be Lazy. Born in Cuba to French and Saint Dominican Creole 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 a suicide pact. Lafargue was the subject of a famous quotation by Karl Marx. Soon before Marx died in 1883, he wrote a letter to Lafargue and the French Workers' Party organizer Jules Guesde, both of whom already claimed to represent "Marxist" principles. Marx accused them of "revolutionary phrase-mongering" and of denying the value of reformist struggles. This exchange is the source of Marx's remark, reported by Friedrich Engels, "" ("If one thing is certain, I am not a Marxist"). Early life and ancestry Lafargue was born in 1842 in Santiago de Cuba. His father was the owner of coffee plantations in Cuba, 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 of Bordeaux. His paternal grandmother was a mulatto from Saint-Domingue who had fled to Cuba following the Haitian Revolution. Lafargue's maternal grandparents were also refugees from Saint-Domingue. His maternal grandfather was a French Jew, and his maternal grandmother was a Jamaican woman who claimed to be of indigenous Taíno 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.” When Daniel De Leon asked him about his origins, he promptly replied, “I am proudest of my Negro extraction.” First French period In 1851, the Lafargue family relocated back to its hometown of Bordeaux, where Paul attended secondary school. Later he studied medicine in Paris. It was there that Lafargue started his intellectual and political career, endorsing Positivist philosophy, and communicating with the Republican groups that opposed Napoleon III. The work of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon seems to have particularly influenced him during this phase.