Capitalism

The concept of 9-5, 5 days a week is exclusively from Unions and organized labour.

As are the ideas of workers rights, any kind of safety regulation, minimum wages, paid days off(holidays and vacation).

These ideas are going away because we forgot that Unions are critical to the idea of a middle class.

Because the people who own everything aren’t being slaughtered in the streets.

A lot of it is cultural. Capitalism continues to exploit people not just because of the machinations of a few people at the top, but also because there are many people who have so deeply internalised the logic of capitalism that they are reinforce and perpetuate their own oppression.

A phrase that I’ve found really useful in understanding this is “cultural hegemony”. This theory was originally developed in the early 1900s by the Marxist philosopher, Antonio Gramsci. It’s a pretty dense bit of political theory that I don’t feel like I understand well enough to explain well, but I’ll attempt to give the gist of it

The key thing about cultural hegemony is that it makes the dominant political ideology seem like it’s natural and inevitable. We see this when people recognise the awfulness of their working or living conditions, but then shrug it off by saying “that’s just life”. They can’t imagine any alternative. I see it a lot in my daily life when people see the crafts I make and say “wow, that’s so good, you should sell those” — people are conditioned to only see value in terms of monetary value.

I heard that back in the days, people used to just go when their work was done on the farms and there was no concept of 9-5 (these days seem 24 hours work).

Yup. In the ancient world, ascetics and monks would practice “having daily schedules” alongside various other harsh forms of penitence, like self-flagellation. One of the ancient Greek authors (Plato?) spoke about it unfavourably even in that context.

The flip side of that, is that if your animals or crops need something now, they need it now. There’s no maximum hours or work-life balance, either. Still, it’s fair to say most people that have experienced that much prefer it, if you put aside how uncomfortable the work itself is.

Because it’s kind of crazy, it’s also worth mentioning that people slept twice in a day, with some time spent up during the night.

There used to be a lot of holidays. Is that true?

Kind of.

Confining ourselves to Europe, there were a lot of public holidays in ancient Rome, and to a lesser extent lots of religious days and festivals in medieval Europe. The medieval holy days were more about fasting or similar than time off of work, though. And, in Rome, there were no weekends yet, so holidays basically served the same role.

Plus, most holidays were optional in both, so a deeply poor person or a slave with a tough master might work fairly continuously.

If it is, then given the abundance in technology, why our work hours increased and why do we have such weird lives that we live to work?

When industialisation came in, 12 hour days were fairly standard. Arguably, working hours have gone down.

As to why we work on schedules now, you basically just have to in a complex, highly specialised society. If you’re using tools you made and maybe a couple your friend the blacksmith made, and using them to produce food and housing from “your own” land, sure, it just all has to get done sometime. If you’re having a formal meeting or vote and show up 2 days late, like is recorded becoming a problem in medieval republics, it’s a bit disruptive.

Compared to pre-WW2 era, the work week and day has decreased from 12 hours/day, 6 days per week, thanks to the more militant labor movement.

In more recent decades, productivity has increased significantly, so we should be able to produce the same amount as before, with less labor: https://www.epi.org/productivity-pay-gap/

But I’ll let you guess who is cashing in the extra profit from your work. Tip: it’s not you.

Farms had a lot more work than just 9-5. Labor unions fought very hard, and many paid with their lives, to get work hours restricted to 9-5.

own only what is available to a farmer from the past (a piece of land and a couple of barns), desire only what is available to a farmer from the past (a hearty dinner and strong tobacco, not a new iPhone), and then you can live like a farmer from the past today.

I don’t know about you, but for me, work is the side-quest.

Subsistence farming is a lot of work. Apart from that, the wealthy have always acquired their wealth by theft, usually from the less wealthy. So we’ve always been living to work, because the ruling class needs us to steal from.

We “live to work” because our corporate overlords demand that we be productive for production’s sake.

Regarding work before industrialization, it’s more complicated than that. Slavery was abolished in the 19th century, so a lot of people, especially enslaved Africans, were literally worked to the death and received severe physical punishment if they didn’t work properly. For free people, they didn’t have to do the amount of work we do in order to afford food safety, though “worker rights” didn’t exist for them, either. Abusive boss? Shut up and fuck off. Stolen pay? Too bad.

One of the biggest differences, however, is that people tended to socialize a lot more, and having friends to watch your back when things get hard is one of the best survival mechanisms. Out of food? Good thing my neighbor is willing to spare some of his while I fix some boards on his home. Maybe he’s not asking for anything in return this time because he feels like this is paying back for a favor I did 3 months ago.

Interesting fact: the first indigenous tribes that the Spanish enslaved once they started colonizing Central America were completely unprepared to the European work brutality forced upon them and would often kill themselves if being captured for slave labor was inevitable. Before that, they had never needed to work so hard to sustain themselves.

Yeah, but the trade off was that you were bound to the land and social hierarchy was much more rigidly enforced. Your pay was mostly in food and accommodations unless you were in a trade, nobility, or the clergy.

Why do people work more? Because in an industrial setting, the methods of compensation and employer responsibilities are vastly different. Employers are incentivized to treat labor as any other good and will try to lower that cost where possible. In contrast, if you’re a form of bondage, your employer is more likely to treat you like capital.

Those are true, it’s the shift to capitalism. Before excess wealth could be gained through colonization. Once that was done it became about squeezing out as much as you can from your workers. However the good businessman would have squeezed everything they could out of their workers while colonizing. (Like the US in the Middle East since WW2 or more recently Venezuela)

Because our entire world and every system in it was designed not for us, but for the sole benefit of like 100-1000 people.

We work so that they can live.

The question is what do we do about it?

Being self employed helps. My workday doesn’t end at set time - it ends when I’m done. Sometimes that’s 10am, sometimes 7pm. Then if I feel like I’ve worked too much and could use a vacation I just don’t schedule any work for the rest of the week/next few weeks.

Now don’t get me wrong, I do work a lot but it doesn’t feel like work really because I have total control of everything I do and I’m doing exactly what I want to be doing. What also helps is that I manipulate the physical world - not bits on a computer. When I’m done I can see what I’ve built and on top of all that I get genuine gratitude for it. Lots of it actually - people are awesome.