Ken,
I agree in part with what you write but at the same time feel this is
a profoundly wrong way to think about this.
First, my view is that a reduction in working time should be with no
loss in pay. The income distribution in the US, at least, must be
(for reasons I won't get to here) corrected. One step toward that
would be a simple one -- shorter hours with the same pay.
I agree with your remark that some, with shorter hours, would add a
second job. That's their choice, and aren't we all in favor of choice?
But to get to my point: All the toys -- take an I-pod as an example
-- are things we have to learn to want. Any new consumer item must be
learned to be desired. We learn from each other, and mainly learn
from those higher on the income scale than ourselves. After all,
those with higher incomes already have everything we have and are
looking for something new. 30 inch TVs look pretty good at the
neighbor's house down the block. But if the boss invites us over and
we see his 50 inch TV, our aspirations grow.
For consumer goods, we have the opportunity to learn -- from
neighbors, work mates, bosses, and from advertisers and most
particularly from TV programs showing us desirable things. So we can
learn to want things, having all this exposure to these things. We
can buy the things, furthermore, and enjoy them, even if we don't have
the cash to buy them. We can borrow for the big TV, we can borrow for
the car one (or more) grades up from what we are driving. Once we get
them we enjoy them -- and it is hard to go back. Going back to a
black & white TV after a year of having color TV would be a real
hardship. Doing dishes by hand after having a dishwasher would seem
burdensome. We learn to consume and then have the habit of our new
station in life. Steve Marglin and others have writtin about this.
You have to LEARN to consume. You start smoking cigarettes by
watching others smoke. You don't walk down the street one day, never
having had a martini, and say to yourself "I'd love a martini right
now." Look at all the Wall Street types of 15 years ago. Suddenly,
all at once, individually, the started smoking cigars. Was that an
epiphany that struck each of them? Or did they LEARN that a good
cigar is a smoke? (And what about the suspenders?)
But what about for leisure? We don't have the opportunity to learn
the joys of leisure. The choice between stuff and leisure is not an
even one.
You mention the experience of the strikers in northern Manitoba.
They had the opportunity to learn about leisure. But how to pay the
rent after the strike? We don't have a debit card for one day a
week. I.e. we can't put leisure on the never-never.
As for the four day week, there might be a learning period when we
learn what to do with the extra day. Certainly we'd catch up on a lot
of things that need doing. But it would take quite a while -- a year
or two perhaps -- before we made a habit of pleasurable things to do
with that day. Takes time to learn what to do with that day.
So when you say "Surely many do not want reduction working time" I
agree with you, but now that the five day week is in place, very, very
few would be willing to go back to the six day week that was standard
not so long ago. If we have the four day week for a decade or two, no
one will be willing to give it up for five days even with more pay.
And for those that would, I say "go ahead."
On Jun 3, 2008, at 6:15 AM, ken hanly wrote:
Surely many do not want reduction in working time.
They are hooked on the American dream, now become
globalised, on more and more material wealth and are
willing to work longer in attempts to attain it. The
infinite consumer is hardly obsolete. Those who die
with the most toys win the game.
People would certainly opt for shorter hours with
the same pay but then many would then opt to work part
time on another job to increase income even further or
to payoff some of their debt.
Certainly many also feel alienated during the
workday but are conditioned to put up with this as a
means to amassing more material goods, the good life.
I recall some workers during a strike in northern
Manitoba commenting in an interview that they were
surprised how pleasant it was to be able to go fishing
or work in the garden or around the house according to
their own schedule and just to enjoy the Spring
weather. But then the strike was over and things
returned to "normal"!
Cheers, Ken Hanly
--- Sandwichman <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
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
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