On 6/2/08, Sandwichman <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > May Day -- The capitalist workday, the socialist workday > http://links.org.au/node/374 > > By Michael A. Lebowitz > > This article was > presented as initiating remarks to the "Roundtable Discussion on the > Reduction of the Workday" held on April 24, 2008, at the Centro > International Miranda, Caracas, Venezuela.
Oh, how I would love to hear a report on what transpired at the roundtable discussion! Maybe I can track Mike L. down at UBC this week. Meanwhile, I'd like to offer the Sandwichman's uninvited contribution to the roundtable discussion. First, as important as the distinction Mike makes between the capitalist and the socialist workday may be, I think it is a mistake to conceptualize the contemporary workday as either thoroughly capitalist or unremittingly alienated and miserable. People do derive some degree of "satisfaction" (that is to say an inherent "use value" aside from the exchange value of remuneration) from their work. If you tell them that work under capitalism is unrelievedly painful then they will begin to think you don't know what you're talking about. The trick is that what is "joyful" about work is not capitalist and what is capitalist about it is not joyful. The smart manager or clever propagandist will be eager to blur that distinction. Meanwhile, painting the contemporary workday in such bleak greys has the unfortunate tendency of making the projected "comes the revolution" socialist workday seem like either a Utopian fantasy or a Stakhovinite delusion. The question for me, really, is what part of life, as it is actually lived -- now, do we want to augment, what part do we want to diminish? Second, is Marx's analysis of surplus value really the first and last word on the reduction of the workday? I think not. Marx's analysis is indeed central but it is not indispensible. A "bourgeois auto-critique" every bit as thoroughgoing as Marx's could be cobbled together starting from the scraps of non-Marxist worktime thought: that is from the "anonymous" pamphlet, The Source and Remedy of the National Difficulties, the Ira Steward/George Gunton shorter workday philosophy of the AF of L and Sydney Chapman's neoclassical theory of the hours of labour. Not solely *from* those but also from a historical examination of what has happened to those contributions -- namely why (and how) have they "disappeared" or fallen silent. "There will come a time when our silence will be more powerful than the voices you strangle today!" Haymarket martyr, August Spies proclaimed from the gallows. Those words could be either futile bravado or programmatic. The silence of the dead attains its power through acts of remembrance by the living. That is, not through memorial rituals but through the construction of images linking those forgotten words and deeds with contemporary events. "No student of American labor history can fail to be struck with the extraordinary importance of the eight-hour issue in union thinking during the formative years of the American Federation of Labor." wrote economist and Nation editor Henry Mussey in 1927. Taking that statement as a baseline, no observer of contemporary North American organized labor could fail to be astounded by the extraordinary *absence* of the issue of the reduction of working time from union thinking. -- Sandwichman _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
