Pablo Lafargue Armagnac

Cuban, son-in-law of Karl Marx and introducer and disseminator of Marxist theory in Spain.

He was born in Santiago de Cuba, in 1842. Only son of a French colonist of Jewish origin. His genealogy portrays miscegenation: grandson on his paternal side of a Haitian mulatto woman and on his maternal side of a Cuban indigenous woman; his grandfathers, Jean Lafargue and Abraham Armanagc, were French.

While a medical student in Paris (1862-65) he became a revolutionary activist influenced by the ideas of Proudhon, Blanqui, and Bakunin. When the authorities expelled him from the university he moved to London to continue his studies. There he joined the First International (the AIT) and met Karl Marx as well as his daughter Laura, whom he married in 1868, thus becoming related to the founder of Marxism.

Lafargue assumed Marx's thinking without completely abandoning his previous anarchist ideas (stemming from Proudhon and Bakunin). Back in France, he participates in the Paris Commune revolution (1871), whose defeat forced him to flee to Spain. He remained there during the Revolutionary Sexenio (1868-74), playing an important role in introducing Marxist ideas in Spain, as well as in the conflicts that pitted the Marxist minority against the majority Bakuninist current within the Spanish Regional Federation of the AIT.

In 1880 he met the main representative of Marxism in France, Jules Guesde, with whom he founded the French Workers' Party; his rigid, radical, and intransigent Marxism immediately clashed with the "possibilist" current, producing the split of French socialism in 1882.

After his father-in-law's death in 1883 he continued to play a leading role as an organizer, propagandist, and theorist of socialism. It was his initiative to adopt May First as a day of workers' demands on a global scale (Congress of 1889 of the Socialist International). Following the reunification of French socialists in 1905, the weight of the "Guesdists" was reduced against the moral and intellectual leadership of Jaurès, with whom Lafargue held an ideological debate. Lafargue and his wife committed suicide together in Draveil, Paris, in 1911.

WORKS

The Right to Be Lazy (1880)

Socialism and the Conquest of Public Powers, 1899