The New Economics Foundation (NEF) has published a report calling for a large reduction on the working week – to around 21 hours. The report, 21 hours is worth a read, as it marshals evidence against the long hours culture of advanced capitalism and because it puts a number of good human and ecological arguments in favour of a much shorter working week.
The demand is prescient in today’s conditions of economic crisis and climate change. Twenty-one hours a week could be three, 7 hour days a week, or four hours a day for 5 days a week, or around 1,100 hours over a year. It is also a demand of very long-standing in the labour movement.
In August Bebel’s book Women and Socialism, first published in 1879 and revised continuously over the next 30 years, made the argument for a working day of between two and four hours a day under socialism. He referred to Robert Owen’s view (two hours a day) and to evidence from the time of what was necessary to meet basic needs.
Paul Lafargue wrote in the Right to be Lazy (1883) that a maximum limit of three hours a day should be made under socialism, with the rest of the time spent on “leisure and feasting”. And at the same time, William Morris wrote in the Manifesto of the Socialist League, (1885) expressed it, “the essential work of the world will be reduced to something like two or three hours…”
However NEF does not get to the bottom of why the demand is so important. The Marxist case for a shorter working week is premised on the argument that class societies exploit the direct producers – the ruling class pumps out surplus labour (i.e. extra hours) out of the workers, beyond the basic means of subsistence. Under capitalism this surplus takes the form of value, and is used to expand the production for profit (and to enrich the capitalists and their lackeys).
Socialism means taking democratic control over the surplus labour and collectively deciding what to do with it i.e. abolishing exploitation. Socialists want to reduce the working week so workers have the free time to live, freedom to make choices about how society is run, time for relationships and freedom for passions and interests.
So we agree on the fight for a much shorter working week, for all the human and ecological benefits it would bring. And we go further than the NEF by demanding that the capitalist class, not the workers, should pay for the transition. No loss of wages, more and better public services, public ownership and workers control are some of the corollaries of the call for 21 hours.
And that’s because shorter hours we have a clear social agency – the working class – and an organised movement – the labour movement – that can and should organise around the demand, to make it a reality. Socialism means the self-emancipation of the working class, as a step towards the universal emancipation of humanity from all exploitation, oppression and ecological degradation. Without the social force, and living under rapacious capitalism, the demand is largely utopian wishful thinking.