This Labor Day, let’s celebrate “the right to be lazy.”

Let’s look to Paul Lafargue, whose short book bearing that phrase, written from a French prison in 1883, argues that workers have been bamboozled by the church, the bourgeoisie, and politicians to believe that their back-breaking labor is virtuous and unavoidable. It’s a conviction that is literally killing them and civilization.

Lafargue denounces capitalism’s values as a “pitiful parody on Christian ethics.” Capitalists strive to suppress the worker’s “joys and his passions and to condemn him to play the part of a machine turning out work without respite and without thanks.”