Work for Socialism

Radicals  have been known to summarise the demands of reformists as “longer chains, bigger cages.” If you start by asking for crumbs, at best you’ll get small crumbs. Given the immensity of problems the world faces, including declining living standards, surely we deserve much more.

Economists, intellectuals and trade union leaders were once united in the belief that a shorter working day was fast approaching. The machines would shoulder more and more of the toil, they believed, leaving lots of time off for workers. A three- or four-day week would be ample to procure the necessities of life. The increase in leisure would be spent pursuing healthy recreations.

This was the view of John Maynard Keynes, who wrote in 1930 that by 2030 all economic problems would have been solved and the only issue left to deal with would be how to enjoy doing nothing without having a nervous breakdown. He was an opponent of the work ethic. “We have been trained too long to strive and not to enjoy,” he wrote in “Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren”, predicting that in 100 years’ time, “We shall honour those who can teach us how to pluck the hour and the day virtuously and well, the delightful people who are capable of taking direct enjoyment in things, the lilies of the field who toil not, neither do they spin.”

Bertrand Russell shared this disdain for striving and argued for the four-hour day. Oscar Wilde had also predicted that the machine would be the saviour of man and would lead everyone to enjoy the life. His contemporary, Walt Whitman, wrote of the ideal he called “higher progress”, in other words the liberation of human beings from wage slavery. The second United States president, John Adams, forecast that his grandchildren would have the time to study “painting, poetry, music, architecture” and the other liberal arts, in short, that everyday life would be organised to allow the “pursuit of happiness”.

Things didn’t quite turn out like that. In the hands of a capitalist élite, supported by governments in most cases, the machine became an instrument for the creation of huge profits for a few, while the majority toiled long hours. Trades unions forgot about shorter hours and quality of life and instead concentrated on wages and conditions.  Long-hours culture has become the norm.

 The Jimmy Reid Foundation, named after the late trade union activist released a report titled “Time for Life”, recommending that Scotland reduce the working week. Work should be more evenly spread out, says the report.

The New Economics Foundation (NEF), also campaigns for a shorter workweek. In 2013 it published a pamphlet called Time on Our Side: Why We All Need a Shorter Working Week. The authors say that the UK has the longest working hours of any European country. They also claim that productivity does not suffer when the working week is shortened because work is carried out more efficiently (the three-day week in the 1970s, for example, led to a drop of only 6 per cent in productivity.)  In 2012, the NEF published a charming pamphlet also calling for a shorter working week. National Gardening Leave: Why Britain Would Be Better Off if We All Spent Less Time at the Office.

The city council at Gothenburg, Sweden’s second-largest city, has announced that it is to begin a year-long 30-hour week trial for city workers. “We hope to get the staff members taking fewer sick days and feeling better mentally and physically after they’ve worked shorter days,” said Mats Pilhem, the deputy mayor.

In the early 20th century, workers across the world campaigned for the eight-hour day. In the US Kellogg’s introduced a six-hour day on 1 December 1930 which lasted till 1985. The State of Utah introduced a four-day workweek in 2008.

The Socialist Party pursues a vision of a society ruled by use value rather than exchange value, a society beyond money, the market and prices, an actively democratic society of producer-citizens, a society that overcomes the dualism of leaders and the led. Parliamentary action is at times useful, but in proportion as it also makes for economic emancipation of the workers. Socialist men and women in Parliament can only do effective work there in proportion to economic and social organisation of the majority outside. The politicians of today attaches so much importance to ‘getting elected’ that their chief concern has become that of getting votes, thereby neglecting what used to be the main endeavour, the education of the worker. The purpose of socialism is to educate and organise the worker to the extent that he or she will see and feel the necessity for the fullest share of economic freedom.

The Socialist Party declines to prescribe the arrangements and institutions of the future society. This would actually constrain free movement and deny human agency. It is the reality of shaping their own practice by the proletariat, on the basis of actual relations and an actual class struggle which matters, not any abstract model of revolutionary organisation or future society. What matters is class movement. What we can – and do - is to provide a clear set of principles to orient action and organisation. Thus we  argue for proletarian self-emancipation, workers control of the production process, rational organisation and democratic planning for the common good, distribution according to need. The Socialist Party does not wish to direct the workers movement: it wants the workers  movement to relearn to direct itself.