Site icon Youth Ki Awaaz

Labour Day And 4-Hour Workday: Continuing The Radical Legacy Of 1st May

The history of May Day is associated with the Haymarket affair of 1886 in Chicago, which took place during the movement for an eight-hour work day, the average working day at that time being 10+ hours. The absolutely unjust judicial murder of Adolph Fischer, Albert Parsons, August Spies, George Engel, and Louis Lingg, five of the leading anarchist labor organizers of this movement, in the aftermath of the Haymarket affair, was a catalyst in the 8-hour workday movement. It was evident to the entire world that the State conspired to arrest, proceed with a mockery of a trial, and finally judicially murder these five anarchists — along with two more, Michael Schwab and Samuel Fielden, whose death sentences were commuted to life imprisonment, and another, Oscar Neebe, sentenced to 15 years’ imprisonment — not because they were guilty of any crime but simply for their radicalism, for their will and determination to fight for a better world, for a world in which everyone will have true freedom and everyone’s well-being assured.

But an eight-hour workday was not the final goal of the workers’ movement. The workers aimed for further shorter working hours, for a four-hour workday. And over a century after the eight-hour workday was won by the working class after great struggles, we have to take that struggle and legacy forward and demand a 4-hour workday. That is right! We have to demand it because it is our right. With all the advances in technology and productivity in the last one hundred years, we deserve a shorter workweek, a shorter workday. Not only is it feasible but is necessary, necessary for the improvement of the civilization, for the well-being of the people, and necessary for the planet.

Let us not be in the illusion that a four-hour workday is not feasible or that it’s a crazy idea. Some of the world’s greatest minds were already convinced that four hours of work a day was more than enough, even over a century ago. And of what use would be all the great technological advances since then, if they couldn’t reduce our working hours significantly? In fact they can, we already have sufficient technology for that — nay, a four-hour workday was possible even a century ago, then think of how shorter working hours could be now, but that’s a topic for another day.

The renowned British philosopher and mathematician Bertrand Russell wrote back in 1932, i.e., 90 years ago, that four hours of work a day was more than enough to achieve sufficient prosperity for all, and that this was proven during the First World War itself. Russell wrote:

“If the ordinary wage-earner worked four hours a day, there would be enough for everybody and no unemployment”

Russell wrote in 1935, mentioning that one hour of work a day could also be sufficient, but assuming a more conservative estimate just to be “on the safe side”:

“Owing to the productivity of machines, much less work than was formerly necessary is now needed to maintain a tolerable standard of comfort in the human race. Some careful writers maintain that one hour’s work a day would suffice, but perhaps this estimate does not take sufficient account of Asia. I shall assume, in order to be quite sure of being on the safe side, that four hours’ work a day on the part of all adults would suffice to produce as much material comfort as reasonable people ought to desire.”²

However, it has to be noted that, since then, a very significant technological advancement has taken place and has extended to almost all countries in the world, including “Asia”. However, owing to the miserably inefficient and irrational character of the capitalist economy. the working hours have—for the most part—remained stagnant since then, in spite of all the great advances in technology and productivity.

The prominent economist John Maynard Keynes said 90 years ago that a 15-hour work-week (3 hours a day, 5 days a week) would be more than sufficient by the turn of the 21st century. Keynes wrote:

“We shall endeavour to spread the bread thin on the butter – to make what work there is still to be done to be as widely shared as possible. Three-hour shifts or a fifteen-hour week may put off the problem for a great while. For three hours a day is quite enough to satisfy the old Adam in most of us!”³

The philosopher, architect, inventor, futurist and systems theorist R. Buckminster Fuller declared 50 years ago that the concept of “earning a living” was superfluous even by then. Fuller said:

“We must do away with the specious notion that everybody has to earn a living. It is a fact today that one in ten thousand of us can make a technological breakthrough capable of supporting all the rest. The youth of today are right in recognizing this nonsense of earning a living. We keep inventing jobs because of this false idea that everybody has to be employed at some kind of drudgery because, according to Malthusian-Darwinian theory, he must justify his right to exist. So we have inspectors of inspectors and people making instruments for inspectors to inspect inspectors. The true business of people should be to go back to school and think about whatever it was they were thinking about before somebody came along and told them they had to earn a living.”

The scientist, economist and anarchist revolutionary Peter Kropotkin wrote 130 years ago that working 4 hours a day was more than enough, arriving at this conclusion based on elaborate calculations which he presented in his book The Conquest of Bread. Kropotkin wrote:

“Work could be reduced to four or even three hours a day, to produce all the goods that are produced now.”

Such a critique of work and a call for shorter working hours was, however, not limited to just a few intellectuals. Among other such great minds, the poet and playwright Oscar Wilde and the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche were also critics of the “morality of work,” which Bertrand Russell referred to as “the morality of slaves.”¹

Regarding the automation of work, Oscar Wilde wrote:

“All unintellectual labour, all monotonous, dull labour, all labour that deals with dreadful things, and involves unpleasant conditions, must be done by machinery. Machinery must work for us in coal mines, and do all sanitary services, and be the stoker of steamers, and clean the streets, and run messages on wet days, and do anything tedious or distressing.”

Adding, regarding the evils of “the morality of work”:

“A great deal of nonsense is being written and talked nowadays about the dignity of manual labour. There is nothing necessarily dignified about manual labour at all, and most of it is degrading. It is mentally and morally injurious to man to do anything in which he does not find pleasure, and many forms of labour are quite pleasureless activities and should be regarded as such. To sweep a slushy crossing for eight hours on a day when the east wind is blowing is a disgusting occupation. To sweep it with mental, moral, or physical dignity seems to me to be impossible. To sweep it with joy would be appalling. Man is made for something better than disturbing dirt. All work of that kind should be done by a machine.”

Wilde concluded:

“On mechanical slavery, on the slavery of the machine, the future of the world depends.”

And Wilde was quite right in that! And that future he predicted is NOW and HERE! We have all the necessary technology for such a beautiful, marvellous age… we just have the wrong social organization! The current (capitalist) social organization causes nothing but misery for everyone, in every way.

Oscar Wilde felt that there is nothing dignified about manual labor. Instead, it was physically and morally injurious to a human being to waste their life in a livelihood they have no interest in. In the words of Wilde himself:

“Up to the present, man has been, to a certain extent, the slave of machinery, and there is something tragic in the fact that as soon as the man had invented the machine to do his work he began to starve. This, however, is, of course, the result of our property system and our system of competition. One man owns a machine that does the work of five hundred men. Five hundred men are, in consequence, thrown out of employment, and, having no work to do, become hungry and take to thieving. The one-man secures the produce of the machine and keeps it, and has five hundred times as much as he should have, and probably, which is of much more importance, a great deal more than he wants. Were that machine the property of all, everyone would benefit from it. It would be an immense advantage to the community.”

 

More recently, in our own century, the theoretical physicist and cosmologist Stephen Hawking, in a Reddit Ask Me Anything session, said something similar to what Oscar Wilde wrote 125 years earlier:

“If machines produce everything we need, the outcome will depend on how things are distributed. Everyone can enjoy a life of luxurious leisure if the machine-produced wealth is shared, or most people can end up miserably poor if the machine owners successfully lobby against wealth redistribution. So far, the trend seems to be toward the second option, with technology driving ever-increasing inequality.”

 

Friedrich Nietzsche was also a strong critic of work. Nietzsche wrote, for example:

“Today as always, men fall into two groups: slaves and free men. Whoever does not have two-thirds of his day for himself, is a slave, whatever he may be: a statesman, a businessman, an official, or a scholar.”

 

 

Henry David Thoreau, a naturalist, abolitionist, poet and philosopher, was also a critic of the capitalist economy and its work ethic, favoring shorter working hours for all. Thoreau, in his critique of the capitalist work ethic, wrote:

“There is no more fatal blunderer than he who consumes the greater part of his life getting his living. All great enterprises are self-supporting. The poet, for instance, must sustain his body by his poetry, as a steam planing-mill feeds its boilers with the shavings it makes. You must get your living by loving. To inherit property is not to be born — is to be still-born, rather.”

Given that the average workweek in India is even longer than in many other countries, i.e., around 50+ hours, we Indian workers have to be even more radical in our demand for shorter working hours, aiming at a 4-hour workday / 20-hour workweek. And we have to be in solidarity, not only with all the workers in India, regardless of distinctions such as blue-collar or white-collar, but also with all the workers of the world.

Workers of the world, unite! Onward! For a four-hour work day!

 

References:

1. Bertrand Russell. In Praise of Idleness and Other Essays (1935), “In Praise of Idleness” (1932).

2. Bertrand Russell. In Praise of Idleness and Other Essays (1935), “The Case for Socialism”.

3. John Maynard Keynes. Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren (1930).

4. Elizabeth Barlow. The New York Magazine Environmental Teach-In. New York Magazine (30 March 1970), p. 30.

5. Peter Kropotkin. The Conquest of Bread (1892).

6. Oscar Wilde. The Soul of Man Under Socialism (1891).

7. Stephen Hawking. Science AMA Series: Stephen Hawking AMA Answers! (2015). Reported in Huffpost: Stephen Hawking Says We Should Be Scared Of Capitalism, Not Robots.

8. Friedrich Nietzsche. Human, All Too Human (1878).

9. Henry David Thoreau. Life Without Principle (1854).

Exit mobile version