The Sale of an Appetite

The Sale of an Appetite is a satirical short fiction by Paul Lafargue (1842-1911), the French socialist writer and son-in-law of Karl Marx. Lafargue produced a small body of literary and satirical work alongside his major political polemics including The Right to Be Lazy of 1880 and the various essays and pamphlets he produced as a leading figure of the French Marxist movement.

The story uses the satirical conceit of a person selling their appetite as the device for a critique of capitalist social relations. The basic Marxist argument that capitalism reduces human capacities to commodities to be bought and sold reaches a particular logical extreme when the appetite itself becomes commercialized. Lafargue draws out the absurd and disturbing implications of this thought experiment with the polemical wit that characterized his broader work.

The story belongs to the broad nineteenth century socialist literary tradition that used satirical fiction to make political arguments about industrial capitalism. It pairs with William Morris’s News from Nowhere, with various of Edward Bellamy’s American utopian works, and with the broader continental European socialist fiction of the period.