>Well, I guess I don't believe in communism: I am a market socialist.
I know you are a market socialist, but under market socialism, the market won't be the same as what it is under capitalism, right? The existence of markets in itself doesn't say much about the mode of production, since markets existed in pre-capitalist societies as well.
>I certainly do advocate reducing the working day so we have more
>time. I find it interesting how my essentially Marxisn point about
>taking care not to waste our time was transposed into a charge of
>neoclassical Gradgrindism. But this is my point. It is a fact of the
>human condition, indeed, a result of human nature as mortal, that we
>do not have infinite amounts of time. There are, therefore,
>opportunity costs with respect to time.
So, you think opportunity costs existed in pre-capitalist societies as well?
>Time I spend, yes spend, doing work I would not otherwise do because
>I have to make a living I cannot pass, or use otherwise. Therefore
>it would be a crime to organize the economy so that people have to
>do more of that soirt of thing than necessary.
***** JULIET SCHOR
The Overworked American:
The Unexpected Decline of Leisure
Harvard University, Cambridge Massachusetts, January 20, 1993
Interviewed by David Barsamian...
_What is known about work patterns in the pre-capitalist, the pre-industrial development age? There were no Bureaus of Labor Statistics to refer to. How did you go about assembling that data?_
I looked mainly at general histories of the period, because there are no specific histories of working hours. What you find are very fragmentary pieces of evidence. By going through those general histories and reading what was known about work time, I put together a picture in which I found the following: On the one hand, the work year was less than it came to be under capitalism because there were long periods in which very little work was done, and there were tremendous feasts and holy days, later to be known as holidays. Although people worked intensely at certain periods of the year, when the agricultural needs dictated that, there were other long periods, winter in particular, when very minimal amounts of work were done. The same goes for the work day. Although in the peak periods of harvest, for example, people would work a long work day, sunup to sundown, which might be a sixteen-hour day, in the winter the work day was short. Even with the long work day during the harvest, people had many breaks throughout the day. They had three meals a day and an afternoon nap which was customary for English agricultural workers, for example. What happened with capitalism was two things: one is the breaks within the day disappeared, so people were working more continuously. By the time you get to the peak of working hours, in the mid-nineteenth century, the industry where working hours were the longest, the textile industry, what you find is people working sixteen or eighteen hour days with very little time off within those days. The holidays throughout the calendar were taken away from workers, so that they were working more and more continuously the year round, with only a few days off officially. They might be unemployed some of that time, but for the worker who had worked throughout the year, they went from having maybe a third of the year spent in holidays or more, depending on the country and the period, to having only a few days....
<http://www.zmag.org/zmag/articles/barschor.htm> *****
In terms of time, capitalism is certainly a crime, representing decrease, not increase, in leisure, despite a tremendous increase in productivity.
>Moreover, if the effort is pure waste, if it does not benefit
>society, then the result is a dead loss. This should be avoided if
>it can be. The economy should not only minimize "necessary" labor,
>but it should make sure that this labor is _really_ necessary. Do
>you seriously disagree with any of this?
No, I don't disagree with you on the above, but if scarcity & unlimited wants are human conditions, as opposed to capitalist conditions, then, regardless of how much you minimize necessary labor, scarcity will still loom as large as ever, since there will be always new wants that could have been met (= opportunity costs). Especially if you take a view that the socialist relations of production remove the fetter on productive forces & hence remove the fetter on the production of wants as well, you might even argue that scarcity will be _a bigger problem_ under socialism than capitalism.
Once you begin to ask what is _really_ necessary labor, though, one moves beyond the calculation of opportunity costs, in that one leaves behind the idea of infinite substitutability. One enters into the realm of politics proper, instead of "economics."
>Maybe it is because I am getting older that at my back I always hear
>Time's winged chariot hurrying near.
Don't you think human beings can approach the question of aging in a different way than how we do now? In many pre-capitalist societies, elders enjoyed respect, power, & authority; capitalism, in contrast, puts a premium upon youth. Can't socialism bring about an attitude toward age different from both?
Yoshie