On Sat, Nov 8, 2008 at 10:20 AM, Jim Devine <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Back in the 1970s, there were people who responded to every event in > the same way: "oh, the cat had kittens! we need to build the Party!" > That should be criticized; it should have been criticized more. Now, > I'm responding to what I interpret as a similar attitude from a quite > different segment of the lefts, that says "oh, the cat had kittens! we > need to restrict hours of work!"
Here's what that's about: when there's an elephant in the room and no one can mention it, someone has to say "hey, there's an elephant in this room." The elephant is that the demand for limitation of the hours of work played a key role in the growth of the labor movement and the left up until the late 1950s and early 1960s and plays no role today. What is that about? The elephant is that the history of the movement for shorter hours and of the arguments behind that movement seems entirely forgotten by most people on the left and in labor. What happened? Is it a coincidence that "The Working Day" in placed in the center of Volume I of Marx's Capital? Was it intended as mere rhetorical flourish when Marx drafted a resolution for the first congress of the International Workingmen's Association stating that the limitation of the working day was "a preliminary condition without which all further attempts at improvement and emancipation MUST prove abortive." (emphasis added)? I quote the above resolution time and time again. But that doesn't mean my analysis comes from or is restricted to the one quotation (from the "Great Man"). My interpretation of Marx's theory closely parallels Moishe Postone's, which emphasizes the importance of the analysis of working time in Marx's theory. But my position is not thereby "marxist". Rather, I have spent considerable time and effort researching explicitly non-marxist sources that in some respect corroborate the key focus on working time. Thus the pre-Marx pamphlet by Dilke, Sydney Chapman's neoclassical confirmation of the dynamic between the extensive, intensive and value-defining dimensions of working time, Ira Steward's very American, pragmatic and impressively independent (of European socialist ideas) eight-hour theory. Put simply (albeit metaphorically) working time (or labor-power) is the pulse of the capitalist economy. Any theory of medicine that didn't recognize that the pulse expresses the beating of the heart and that the beating heart circulates the blood would not be worthy of being called a theory of medicine. Condescending remarks about the "cat has kittens, we need to restrict the hours of work" aside, as you know, I have been daily serializing lengthy theoretical and historical discussion of the hours of work question on our blog EconoSpeak. It's a big topic and I don't have all the answers. Nor do I have the luxury of pontificating on the matter from an an academic ivory tower. I'm a clerk/cashier in a small grocery store. But you know, if I did have an academic appointment I would feel a moral compulsion to listen respectfully to non-tenured scholars rather than insulting them with unwarranted comments about cats and kittens. I guess that's just a matter of temperament. -- Sandwichman _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
