Paul Lafargue, the son-in-law of Karl Marx, starts by writing about the Christian dogma of work that served capitalist interests turning rural peasants of leisure into factory workers who slaved away at machines for 12 hours a day and spent 4 hours walking between work and home.

Meanwhile the capitalists of the 19th century were forced to over-consume themselves into ill health and be constantly in search of new markets for their overflowing and unnecessary goods. There were as many domestic workers serving the capitalist class as they were industrial workers in England.

He then sees a transformation of society where the proletariat recognizes their rights, punishes those who pushed harmful ideologies on them and restricts work to 3 hours a day.

The author also mentions ancient Greek civilization, where despite having slaves the citizens and soldiers of democracies didn't engage in shop work or mercantile trade. They despised wage slavery most of all, with anyone engaging in it punishable by imprisonment.

The conditions described by Lafargue in France closely resemble the sweat-shop work done by people of poor third-world countries in service of multi-national corporations (refer to No Logo by Naomi Klein). Wage slavery still exists. We no longer seem to have the citizens of ancient Greece who didn't do such shop work.

It's a sign of shame on modern human civilization that many of the evils mentioned by Lafargue in early stage industrial capitalism are prevalent to this day.