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People were working this much before workers organized and won concessions.
All of that to be working more or less the same amount of hours a decade later in some places.
Yes, Marx has huge portions of Capital Vol I dedicated to “the working day” and the history, up to his time, of labor’s working day, child labor/conditions for child labor, destruction of the family due to the length and intensity of the working day, etc.
Obligatory “read Marx” to anyone who hasn’t for some reason.
The Condition of the Working Class in England by Friedrich Engels is arguably better when it comes to simply showing what conditions were like. Easy read too, cannot recommend it enough.
I mean, who invented the weekend? There's no real reason we couldn't all be working every day besides, you know, the misery and suicides and stuff (minor quibbles). If there's one thing I'll thank (western? Abrahamic?) religion for, it's an official day off work. Guess the evolution of some of that culture is how we ended up with all this other shit so maybe I'm a little mixed.
Did they have weekends or official off days in China and other eastern cultures before globalization/internationalization? Guess not. China began the two-day Saturday–Sunday weekend on May 1, 1995
Other interesting things there: Ancient Romans had 1 out of 9 days as a market day that at least kids were out of school for, and the French Revolutionary Calendar had 1 of their 10 day weeks off. The French sure have changed! I envy their dedication to not working every minute of their lives.
There are also lots of cultures who had long rest breaks right after lunch, which have been getting eroded by global capitalism for a while now. But days off are much more valuable with the alienation from labour because now we spend most of our time selling labour force, and then have our free time dedicated to equally hard but unpaid household labour.
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this post was submitted on 12 Jul 2023
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