The Surprisingly Radical Origins of the Eight-Hour Day and the Revolutionary Potential of Recreation
By: Writings On Anarchism
Tags: Anarchism, Socialism, Leisure, Politics, Work

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The length of the workday, and the often-alienating content that fills that length, fail to escape the notice of anyone who has ever worked for someone else. Workday alienation has been as much a theme of pop culture (e.g. movies like Office Space), and everyday conversation (e.g. “Someone’s got a case of the Mondays!”) as it has been a fixture of sociopolitical writing (from Karl Marx’s Capital in the 19th century to David Graeber’s Bullshit Jobs in recent years).

The “resting” time outside of this workday, on the other hand, is an afterthought for many — a time for respite from work that is taken up by transporting oneself to and from work (some commutes last hours), readying oneself to work (for women, this entails waking earlier than men to both make their appearance acceptable according to society’s raised expectations and to attend to childcare needs), showering and cleaning oneself up after work, shopping for groceries and attending to errands, preparing and consuming meals, going to the gym (while enjoyable for some, the motivation is often to appear the picture of perfect health), supporting one’s children if applicable, and, time and energy permitting, possibly indulging in a bit of entertainment before falling asleep to recover for the next day.

I want to briefly consider this rest/recreation time, and its meaningfulness to anti-capitalist/antiwork politics on the anarchist left, as this time is itself a product of how work is structured under capitalism, but also creates a space for anticapitalist study and activity.

In much of the world, eight hours is the standard workday, and forty hours is the standard workweek. Variations may exist, of course (e.g. France has a 35-hour workweek), and many people work many more hours, but 8/40 is the general standard.

Long workdays are a frequent theme in discourse on worker alienation. After all, surrendering the most energetic hours of your day to an authoritarian boss who owns the fruits of your labour on repeat for the most active years of your life is a good way to drain your interest in the wider world and in your own work. Yet unless we ever reach a stage of “fully-automated” production, work is unlikely to go away (or it will simply be shifted entirely to the Global South — as it has largely with manufacturing). If anything, advances in productivity (either technological or stemming from organizational/workflow tweaks) are leading to more hours at work to maximize output, even though we know that burnout and boredom undermine productivity.

How did the eight-hour workday become standard? The answer you will probably most likely encounter is that it became popularized by Henry Ford. And indeed, Ford made the eight-hour day palatable to industrialists and managers everywhere by demonstrating its effectiveness in the manufacturing world. Before Ford, longer (i.e. 12–16 hours) shifts staffed by virtual wage-slaves became the standard during the Industrial Revolution in order to keep factories running non-stop, leading to exhaustion, (sometimes deadly) mistakes, and the alienation of a nascent “working class” or “proletariat”. Thus, the Industrial Revolution exists in the popular imagination of even modern supporters of the capitalist order as a time of great misery, bleakness, and frequent workplace accidents and deaths.

Recognizing that assembly-line work was so alienating and numbing that it fed into turnover and discontentment, Ford raised wages and shortened the working day, thereby increasing worker satisfaction (and encouraging new customers for Ford cars) and discouraging labour radicalism. Ford’s “solution” was thus a simple one that may have saved capitalism from succumbing to its own contradictions, at least for a while, and it certainly inspired an arrangement between management and labour that lasted for much of the twentieth century.

Ironically, however, the roots of the eight-hour movement go back to the 19th century and the rise of socialist movements in Europe and America. Robert Owen, the Welsh textile manufacturer and Utopian Socialist who helped birth the co-operative movement, pressed for an eight-hour day with the slogan: “Eight hours’ labour, Eight hours’ recreation, Eight hours’ rest”. Workers’ struggles in the nineteenth century (which originated from a variety of tendencies such as Chartism or Marxism) often centred on the reduction of the working day as a goal, seeing it as a preliminary condition for the further emancipation of the working class. Marx, for example, wrote in Capital of how the length of the working day “usurp[ed] the time for growth, development and healthy maintenance of the body” and how only by threatening the profits of the capitalist class could workers win the right to their own time, as the working day itself was the result of struggle between the capitalist and the worker. In the U.S., for example, thousands took to the streets in Chicago, New York and elsewhere in the May Day parades of 1886 calling for an eight-hour day, leading to police repression and the executions of hundreds of labour activists, particularly following the bombing of Haymarket Square. While some jurisdictions did indeed see reductions to the working day (Melbourne workers achieved this as early as 1856) and other reforms, eight hours did not become standard in much of the world until the next century, particularly after the formation of the Soviet Union in 1917 found capitalist countries scrambling to placate their own unruly working classes.

It’s important to note that many activists and antiwork/anticapitalist theorists envisioned (and many continue to envision) recreation/leisure as a time for self-education, the development of human faculties, and political organizing. The first two of these were not in the fashion that we might imagine nowadays, in which professional pressures, the hustling mindset and society’s puritanical contempt of idleness compel us to complete online courses, devour self-help books, and hit the (usually expensive) gym in our free time. Perhaps somewhat optimistically, 19th and 20th century socialist and anarchist thinkers such as Peter Kropotkin, William Morris, and Camillo Berneri argued that technological and productivity advances had already established a basis for work to be voluntary, distributed fairly, and of short duration — because a just society would direct production to the needs of producers and not toward providing an owning, non-working class with unneeded luxuries. The capitalist class’s fixation on mass production had helped demonstrate humanity’s ability to produce more than what was needed for survival and even pleasure — the problem was that the actual producing class did not own the fruits of its labour, and that the producers were subject to “the tyranny of the clock” and the need to perform repetitive tasks at high speed for twelve or more hours a day, often under the watchful eye of a foreman or a timekeeper, after which they could return to crowded slum apartments. It was no wonder that their typical (and perhaps only) escape was to spend their non-working hours in a drunken stupor at the local watering hole! In the ideal world, individuals would be free to spend their plentiful non-working hours creating art and engaging in their own pursuits at their own pace, and even work would become pleasurable, allowing for the kind of ornamentation and artistic licence that had characterized craftwork before the advent of standardized factory production.

We’re accustomed to thinking of recreation as a time for entertainment (e.g. movies, video games, etc.) — in other words, for consuming the products of other people’s labour. Working class people in the 19th century might gather in pubs, halls and local sports clubs just as they do now, but these public spaces also provided opportunity for labour organizing and discussion (football was and continues to be a source of working class radicalism), just as Europes’s coffee houses in the previous centuries provided a place (and stimulating drinks) for intellectual debate during The Enlightenment. With union membership now at all-time lows and individuals living in isolated apartments and suburban housing while working longer hours than before, few now have the time, energy, inclination, or space for reading political theory (while Marx’s Capital makes for dense reading, The Communist Manifesto was written by Marx and Engels as an accessible pamphlet for the lay worker) and organizing; instead, much political discussion takes place within the confines of social media, where it is often shaped by character limits and the need to dominate other participants with quips and black-and-white arguments, little of it (or at least, it’s likely impossible to measure) translating to real-world effects.

It’s a point worth pondering: activism becomes most noticeable to the broader public when particularly-marginalized groups feel their backs against the wall, such as after an inciting incident (e.g. the death of George Floyd). In other words, we understand activism primarily as a reaction to specific grievances rather than as part of an ongoing struggle against systems — grievances, after all, are simply symptoms of systemic issues (or intentional features of purposefully-designed systems).

Yet a tremendous amount of work goes on behind the scenes to make activism practicable; without organization and preparation, it is simply not sustainable (note: organization doesn’t necessarily imply leaders, as led movements can quickly fall apart when leaders are targeted or are simply incapable or corrupt — conversely, movements that happen spontaneously and with little forethought also fall apart, as happened with the Capitol Hill Occupied Protest in Seattle recently). Activism at this point becomes a careful choice: while strike-breakers may no longer shoot you dead as in the past (at least not when smartphones are out to record it happening), police and employer repression are growing ever more sophisticated while employment and income grow ever more precarious and tenuous, thus raising the costs of organizing against the system and increasing the attractiveness of “tuning out”. After all, it is counterproductive (if not ableist) to judge anyone for disengaging and finding their own means to cope: organizing is both exhausting and potentially deadly, and people have their own lives and families to protect.

This is why anarchists seek wage increases, the extensions of worker protection laws, and reductions to the working day — they understand that reforms are band-aid solutions but they are necessary steps on the road to the abolition of wage systems altogether.

It may seem counterintuitive — after all, a system with better wages and working conditions lessens the incentive to try to abolish that system, because you now have a stake in maintaining that system. Henry Ford of all people saw the value in such an arrangement, which persisted until the 1970s neoliberal shift to our modern-day precarity and austerity — hence the conservatism of Boomers who grew up in relative prosperity. We cannot ignore these implications, but we also cannot ignore the opportunities offered by leisure time to better our understandings of and engagements with the world — and thus we must continue to support reforms that allow people in all countries the time and energy to both survive and organize (and even simply attend union meetings) — just as in the spirit of the early socialist organizers.