The American workaholic culture cannot tolerate idle pursuits, and so when not at work Americans diligently pursue their leisure as strictly as a doctrine of faith. Gone are the late afternoons when saloons would fill with the local workforce having a drink or two and engaging in a chat with mates before heading home. Today there’s no chance to slip into casual conversation at the bar when a large screen sports program demands everyone’s attention. Spectatorship occupies those moments away from work as another form of production – the production of leisure time.
The sociopathic behavior of workaholics’ can be traced back, in America, to the early 19th century when popular agitation to reduce the working day, to a mere ten hours, prompted clergymen to decry the threat of idleness. One sympathetic minister, William Ellery Channing, while endorsing the shorter working day, cautioned against sloth and preached the “higher life” which required vigorous effort, not passive indulgence. This reference comes from a newly published book, Free Time: The Forgotten American Dream by Benjamin Kline Hunnicutt. (See Book Reviews page for more.)
It was a revelation to read in Michael Seidman’s Workers Against Work the sections on leisure and the proletarians in Barcelona and Paris. Minutes from meetings show that both the anarcho-syndicalist and the Communist militants characterized workers who hung out in bars and cafes as lazy. Some CNT activists wanted to close bars and music and dance halls by 10pm since they were unproductive activities. A more extremist current of this repressive tendency executed drug dealers and pimps. The ordinary workers, of course, were not oblivious to the privileges, and the hypocrisy, of the militants who managed to commandeer the few automobiles set aside, ostensibly for official work, for personal uses. On the more positive side, participation in sports appeared to be the major leisure time activity before the revolution and that continued afterwards with rival unions and factories sponsoring teams.
In France leisure developed, by the late 19th century, into a more diverse culture, encompassing sports, camping and family activities, often sponsored by religious institutions. The socialists, seeing that they could loose influence especially with youth, developed their own institutions, like sports teams, holiday camps and trips.
In 1936, when the Popular Front gained power they began to funnel municipal funds into sports facilities, community centers, evening schools and even art events.
What may have begun as an attempt to limit the political influence of the Church, morphed into a robust and enterprising sector of the economy that appealed to working class families, now that they had the weekend and the 40-hour week, as an outlet for their free time.
Though consumerism had a head start in Paris compared to Barcelona, the workers in both cities demanded security and good pay and refused to foreclose those demands for the militants’ moral vision of work. And likewise, the attractions of consumption – most notably in Paris – meant that when the prospects of loosing their shorter working day and their Saturday, the most rebellious workers were not the militants, but those workers generally considered apolitical. In other words, when it came to fighting for less work (and therefore more consumption, in its widest aspect) it was precisely those workers who had disabused themselves of the work ethic that fought the capitalists most ferociously.
Their rebelliousness supports James Livingston’s thesis in favor of consumption in his Against Thrift. (Preliminary notes on Against Thrift here) For him the sphere outside the job defined freedom and fulfillment for the proles. Livingston, as well as Seidman, share an assumption about the hierarchical arrangement of work despite the very different times and locations. This may seem odd given that the workers in Barcelona ostensibly ran their factories, but Seidman carefully documents the contradictory role of the technicians, and even managers, that the militants installed because of their expertise.
It would be a mistake to assume that shopping fulfills Livingston’s insights regarding “the realm of freedom,” just as it would be futile to decry democracy in the workplace as an illusion because the Catalans failed to achieve their lofty goals. To abolish wage slavery marks the first step to radically transform work, that is to abolish it. And to enjoy leisure when work is abolished cannot mean a day in the mall as anything other than an excursion into boredom.