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). There used to be a lot of holidays. Is that true? 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?
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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.
Because the people who own everything aren’t being slaughtered in the streets.
Are you South Asian? This extreme mentality I only found in South Asians being a South Asian myself.
eat the rich? I think it’s getting fame all around the world
Not that but the way you are eating rich. The slaughter thing is quite brutal and against human rights.
The daily systemic violence of capitalism and imperialism is far worse than the revolutionary means to end it.
But it will never happen cuz you know whenever a country tries to be a socialist economy, Uncle Sam buys people from that country and always make sure to not let that happen. As long as there is Uncle Sam, world can never have a socialist economy.
There are several socialist countries already. The US’s time as the unipolar hegemon are quickly fading, the US cannot even win against Iran. As the global south develops economically and gains its own footing, and the US gradually decays, we see more openings for additional socialist countries. No system is ever static, no empire lasts forever.
for example? USSR is no more China is state capitalist Scandinavian countries are welfare states?
Lemmy people are their own very specific kind of person.
indeed. If I were not banned on Reddit, I would not come here.
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.
To sum up hegemony, the latent ideas of society, or “common sense,” is ruling class ideology. Ideology is presented and maintained through bourgeois intellectuals, such as the education system, media, etc. Gramsci’s counter is the development of a proletarian party, which creates proletarian intellectuals that can disseminate proletarian ideology, Marxism-Leninism (Gramsci was ML).
To expand, the greater idea is that we are all philosophers, whether we understand our own philosophy, or world outlook, or not. Common sense is a world outlook, and living in capitalism without consciously understanding that how we live in it shapes what we actually believe leads to upholding capitalism. This is the importance of dialectical materialism, it eliminates the bourgeois-friendly idealism and mechanical materialism that plague modern thought, and logically leads to proletarian emancipation.
I am South Asian and that “that’s just life or fate” attitude is common where I live.
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.
can you tho? land/barn/… are not free
I still don’t understand what the cons are. Maybe there are some arguments? In my country, a hectare of fertile black soil costs $1,000. Is this an unbearable amount? I’m sure the world is full of such countries.
And yes, buildings can be built independently. If you buy absolutely everything, then you are not a farmer, but a farm owner. The same capitalsit that half of the comments are against. =)
In France it’s not legal to build anything on agricultural land, and the lands you can build on are much more expensive, and you’ll need permits and to pay taxes. So I really don’t see how one could really isolated himself like you said
You can usually build agricultural buildings just not houses.
Why is that? there are places in the world where a land costs almost nothing, and you can build a barn yourself. Like… a farmer from the past. =)
By the way, there are really a lot of holidays, but do you know what a harvest is? When the wheat ripens, you can’t tell it, “Wait, wait, my shift is over.” You collect it around the clock. And if we’re talking about the present past, then you assemble it with your hands, without automation.
UPD: And then, after standing with a sickle for 9 hours, you get to the house (which you also built yourself), take care of the livestock, have a hearty dinner, smoke a pipe to ease the pain in your whole body, lie down on the bed and instantly fall asleep from fatigue. Then you sleep without dreams, wake up and return to the field. My grandfather led this way of life until his death. I’m sure you wouldn’t like it very much. But in general, as already mentioned, he really did not use the money, except in rare cases. Usually.
I am kinda like this except that I care about my skincare and Internet. So without my sunscreen and laptop with Internet connection, I am not happy. If I have access to these things plus fruits(or any other cheap vegan alternate), water, and a room to shit and sleep, I want nothing else.
I don’t know about you, but for me, work is the side-quest.
I did not get any work yet but yeah, my main quest is knowledge to prove myself wrong
Back then all you had was the clothes on your back an half a sack of grain at the store. There’s more free time if you don’t produce anything.
And an onion tied to your belt, which was the fashion at the time
I used to be with it, but then they changed what it was. Now what I’m with ain’t it and what it is scares me.
It will happen to you too.
After I hit 40 hours I’m gone. I acknowledge there is a certain amount of privlege required to do that. It took me 20 years to get to that point but Im proud of it and I wanted to brag.
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Because living is more expensive now than before. In medieval times, you had a 30m² wooden house on your farm that you probably built yourself, no heater, no car, no brand clothes, no washing machine, no electricity at all, no water pipes, etc.
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Because when you work on a farm for yourself, you keep 100% of your work. When you work for a company, it keeps most of your work for itself and gives you some compensation in return that depends on a combination of “how much do you need for living” and “how easily could you find another job”.
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I’m so glad I work at a place where there are no late night calls, no overtime, and no time tracking. It’s all about the results you bring to the table while you’re working.
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)
We? Sucks to be you but that doesn’t apply everywhere.
What other choice is there?
Let all our work given to AI and we be sitting like rulers on it. When bored, make some music or skit and put it online or just watch AI cartoons. (A pretty naive take which I think many of the “tech-bros” have)
Capitalism
A handy word that means so little it’s never wrong.
Bingo. Sort of. It includes a lot, to go with the massive breadth that the question entails.
An interesting response, thank you.
So you feel like it’s worth pointing out, even if it’s that massively broad? You could have used a few more words, if you wanted.
The people who do work don’t keep the profits of work. People who “own” stuff do.
You have a guy who “owns” a factory. He pays some dudes to make widgets, market widgets, sell widgets. They all get $10 a day. They sell $200 of widgets a day. The guy who owns the operation, who’s probably just sitting at home, keeps all those profits. Capitalism.
The workers decide they want more rights. Get paid in real money. Sick time. 8 hour days. Owner says nah. Workers go on strike. Owner gets the police or the army to break the strike with violence. Arrest any leaders they survive. Historical context of capitalism.
Also the guy who owns the factory, maybe he just got it because his grand dad was friends with the king or something. Maybe they killed some natives and the state said the land is yours now.
Okay, so the classical Marxist definition. If we could be sure that’s what’s implied, there’d be more to talk about.
The problem being, there’s tons of other definitions with just as much currency. Big corporations (but not small businesses), having free markets, having anyone control a factory in any way, and just the act of thinking about things as commodities are all senses that it’s used in, as well.
Lots of working also applies, in some/many cases, to periods Marx would have called pre-capitalist, so the Marxist definition isn’t what OP meant.
You could say the same of history if you know nothing about it
That suggests the problem is people don’t have any experience with capitalism, doesn’t it? Whatever it means to the person using the word, it’s always a system we live in, or somewhat live in.
The issue is the term is meaningless if it isn’t grounded in history. If it simply means “the system you live in” then it says nothing of how it came to be and what can come after.
Sure, but there’s no historical context there whatsoever, or even a present-day framing to narrow it down. The main thing it achieves, as a one-word response, is declaring a kind of tribal allegiance.
If you’ve clearly defined you mean “any market-based system” or “a system which no longer has a landed aristocracy”, among the many other possibilities, then sure, it’s not worth being a pedant about the exact word used. (Although, any conversation is more likely to be productive if you just say what you mean, instead)
Yes, using the word “capitalism” is a signifier, but I wouldn’t say it’s counterproductive. Based on a person’s response you can quickly conclude whether they have the historical context to understand the critique. Defining capitalism as “a market-based” system is ahistorical , markets existed before capitalism. It is very hard to surface the critique while also writing a wall of text that describes how capitalism came to be and how it was later moderated
No, tribal signifiers are dumb and easy to fake. Ask anyone who’s infiltrated the far right.
the biggest evil
Are there any other systems, or point in history, where a country’s population could live without working?
I don’t know whether to assume this question is in good faith or not. Can you restate what you think the OP is asking? It’s not about whether there was ever a time when no work was needed.
I’m not interested in
wasting my time against a sealiondebating capitalism.I’m not coming from a defence of capitalism. I’m just pointing out that people have had to work in some capacity to live all throughout history. People would still need to work to live under any system.
I’m just pointing out that people have had to work in some capacity to live all throughout history. People would still need to work to live under any system.
Nobody said otherwise.
… the title in OP asked, “why do we live to work, rather than work to live?”
The response was “capitalism.”
So: precisely under (not-capitalism)… we could “work to live,” rather than “live to work.”
That’s true, but the point is in the current system we’re working a lot harder than necessary in order to benefit a few people at the top
Working in what context? There are native peoples all over the globe that work to live and not to enrich a single sociopath.
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.
Even the one who are not identified as labors like IT guys, xyz engineers, they have a lot of pressure and the shitty corporate culture.
We need to fix this definition because it is wrong. Labor is anyone who gets paid to work. As opposed to Capital who makes money off of owning stuff.
IT guys, engineers, doctors are labor unless they literally own the company.
unless they literally own the company
And even then, most of them are still labor. It’s shocking how many companies outsource to people who ‘own their own company’ to avoid labor laws. For example, Uber.
I agree. The legal definition of a labor must be encompassing of these people too.
IT is a fairly new concept and companies have rigorously resisted the creation of either a union of IT workers or a society of one like doctors and engineers enjoy
Why would companies have a say in this? Lol
Companies never like unions, it’s the workers who create them to protect ourselves
Because they intimidate people trying to organize, either subtly or with overt violence.
They will also go after fundraising to block it, they will shut down locations where it is getting traction, they will outsource until the issue is dead, they will encourage the 1-2 year employment cycle silicon valley employs to prevent the kind of bonds that lend themselves to organizing.
Edit: they will also just bribe the leaders and organizers. Everyone has a price.
I believe that for IT it was more the result of how the technology had increasing productivity and revenue that empowered IT employees to negotiate good contracts for themselves. Because of this they saw no need to organize and considered themselves in par with the owners of the company. Now LLMs are used to undermine IT work and that is partly why tables are turning.
The tables were already turning.
Silicon Valley pushed a completely insane concept of free overtime for pizza and beer. They normalized the industry working 3-4 hours a day extra for free.
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.
Not true. For most of human existence we worked on average like 4h a day. More on harvest and sowing season, practically nothing during the rest of the year.
And before agriculture, we didn’t really work like that. You did stuff all day, mixed in with a lot of socializing and resting. But no one had a job and people didn’t need to spend x amount of time doing y.
So not sure what you mean by this. The idea that humans live to work is exclusively a product of the Industrial Revolution.
