One of capitalism’s most durable myths is that it has reduced human toil. This myth is typically defended by a comparison of the modern forty-hour week with its seventy- or eighty-hour counterpart in the nineteenth century. The implicit – but rarely articulated – assumption is that the eighty-hour standard has prevailed for centuries. The comparison conjures up the dreary life of medieval peasants, toiling steadily from dawn to dusk. We are asked to imagine the journeyman artisan in a cold, damp garret, rising even before the sun, laboring by candlelight late into the night.
These images are backward projections of modern work patterns. And they are false. Before capitalism, most people did not work very long hours at all. The tempo of life was slow, even leisurely; the pace of work relaxed. Our ancestors may not have been rich, but they had an abundance of leisure. When capitalism raised their incomes, it also took away their time. Indeed, there is good reason to believe that working hours in the mid-nineteenth century constitute the most prodigious work effort in the entire history of humankind.
During the medieval period, work was intermittent – called to a halt for breakfast, lunch, the customary afternoon nap, and dinner. Depending on time and place, there were also midmorning and midafternoon refreshment breaks. These rest periods were the traditional rights of laborers, which they enjoyed even during peak harvest times. During slack periods, which accounted for a large part of the year, adherence to regular working hours was not usual. According to Oxford Professor James E. Thorold Rogers[1], the medieval workday was not more than eight hours. The worker participating in the eight-hour movements of the late nineteenth century was “simply striving to recover what his ancestor worked by four or five centuries ago.”
The contrast between capitalist and precapitalist work patterns is most striking in respect to the working year. The medieval calendar was filled with holidays. Official – that is, church – holidays included not only long “vacations” at Christmas, Easter, and midsummer but also numerous saints’ andrest days. These were spent both in sober churchgoing and in feasting, drinking and merrymaking. All told, holiday leisure time in medieval England took up probably about one-third of the year. And the English were apparently working harder than their neighbors. The ancien règime in France is reported to have guaranteed fifty-two Sundays, ninety rest days, and thirty-eight holidays. In Spain, travelers noted that holidays totaled five months per year.
A thirteenth-century estime finds that whole peasant families did not put in more than 150 days per year on their land. Manorial records from fourteenth-century England indicate an extremely short working year – 175 days – for servile laborers. Later evidence for farmer-miners, a group with control over their worktime, indicates they worked only 180 days a year.
The Overworked American: The Unexpected Decline of Leisure, by Juliet B. Schor
“So you want a return to medieval servitude?” NO. We’re simply pointing out that Capitalism bring unique forms of exploitation, one of them being a life where you have barely enough ‘free time’ to get ready for your next working day, and not at all enough to do any actual living that isn’t focussed on getting ready for work again. Our whole lives are stolen from us.
Tag: capitalism
Everyone’s like “when you stop being dirt poor you’ll start liking capitalism” and now that I’m actually able to survive and have some financial security I’m like, “nope still have long term memory and still want to Eat The Rich”
AKA: you don’t have to be the one suffering to want to end suffering
honestly now that i know what it’s like to have a few crumbs i’m even MORE mad about all the people that got nothing
now that i’m middle class, i feel like the sole skyhook lifting my friends out of the soup every time capitalism kicks them back in it. i see how capitalism tries to make me resent them for needing help, even though it’s capitalism’s fault they need it. i also see how sophomoric ‘radicalism’ tries to make them resent me for offering it, as if looking out for each other stopped being a good thing when one person in the friend group got a good income. i see how people with something to gain from conflict and division pit the poor against the getting-by to distract attention from the predatory rich.
no, i’m not any more fond of capitalism than i was when i was eating out of dumpsters. i’m just in a better position to see that some of the far left radicalism is nearly as predatory.
look for results, kiddos. don’t let people jerk you around by the emotions. capitalism is just as much of a shitbag as it ever was, but if all someone has to offer as an alternative is a ‘smash the state’ t-shirt, you don’t have to let them tell you what to do either.
organize. unionize. look for the helpers. we’re in this together.
Seriously, when i first got a decent salary – I have money left over EVERY MONTH after rent and bills, holy SHIT – I went through a not-great period of knee-jerk saying no. No, I can’t float you $10 for lunch. No, I can’t wait for your share of the [X] bill. Part of it was self-preservation instinct, the ‘your head is just above water finally don’t you dare risk going back under’ – but part of it was a little creeping voice in my head that said ‘they all know you’re doing well now, and they want a piece of you, and isn’t that unfair?’
That shit is insidious. I didn’t even realize I’d been doing it until one day, for some reason, I literally managed to ask myself why I hadn’t just floated a friend money for lunch the day before.
There wasn’t a single good reason.
Who knows when he’ll pay me back? I had extra; he was unemployed. I had extra enough that in the long run, even if I forgot I’d loaned him that money I’d probably never notice.
He’s taken advantage of your kindness before. Yeah, but who the fuck cares? It’s supposed to be kindness. And it’s food.
This isn’t my fault, this isn’t my job, I didn’t plan for this, it’s a pain in the ass. Excuses, motherfucker. Patently bullshit excuses.
I still have bad instincts with some folks. I still have bad instincts, full stop. But I’m getting better. And I know those instincts don’t come from a place of reason, they come from full-scale cultural indoctrination into Capitalism Is The Greatest and So Is Rugged Individualism. Shaking that is work, but it matters more that I do it now, when I’m in a position to get some real results.
i'll apple your turnover 