sam gindin wrote: > Only that the choice is > not to either put forth > demands that seem way out in the present context, or > giving up on doing > anything.
I would go one step further. There's no need to choose between defensive, practical demands and more radical proposals. In fact, the radical proposals can help to frame the defensive positions as a step forward rather than a temporary setback. The Work Less Party advocates a four-day, 32-hour workweek. We do that because of the historical resonance of the 32-hour demand. It was actually being discussed widely in the 1950s and 1960s. We also do it because it's part of a package with the three-day weekend that people enjoy talking about. Finally -- believe it or not -- there actually are lots of people now working a four-day week, some of them on a compressed workweek but others a straight 32-hour week. There is also an environmentalist dimension to this issue that wasn't present during the struggles for the eight-hour day or the 40-hour workweek or the 30 for 40 campaign of the 50s and 60s. It seems to me that environmentalist dimension has a much broader popular appeal than the traditional labour one. It addresses a desire of people to turn away from a commercially-driven, consumerist lifestyle to a simpler, more social and more conservationist way of life. I hate to sound like a petit bourgeois hippy dippy Pollyanna-Cassandra but people really don't need all the CRAP they buy at Walmart and the petrocarbons they burned to take them there. Obviously, this introduces complications as well as opportunities -- a lot of peoples' jobs depend on making and selling the "crap." But that's why they call it the dialectic. Ultimately what we're talking about is not a 35-hour week or a 32-hour week or the elimination of overtime. Ultimately what we are talking about is disengagement from a way of life dictated by the exigencies of the expanded accumulation of capital. As I am so fond of repeating, "The limitation of the working day is a preliminary condition without which all further attempts at improvement and emancipation must prove abortive..." Notice that it is heralded as a *preliminary condition*, not an end in itself. What is it a prelimary condition to? Improvement and emancipation. Not just a better deal; but also a better deal. Bread and roses. Bread AND roses. The Sandwichman __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around http://mail.yahoo.com
