mistmoonandheart:rainbowsnviolets: roswell-greyson:What really fucks me up about a 40 hour work week
mistmoonandheart:rainbowsnviolets: roswell-greyson:What really fucks me up about a 40 hour work week and I’ve tried to explain to people over and over is that like of you do the math you have maybe 3 hours every day to just like. Rest and be with your family. And that’s kind of it Like the average adult needs about 8 hours of sleep every night, so that cuts your 24 hours to 16 right off the bat.You’re working for 8 hours, so 8 left.But you actually work 8 to 5 at most offices, not 9 to 5, and that lunch is basically just long enough to retrieve food and eat. 7.It took you 20 minutes to shower this morning, 10 to get dressed, and 45 to make a bowl of oatmeal and eat it. We’ll say 15 to get your stuff together and out to your car. 5 and a half.You get home and have to cook dinner, 30 minutes min for that, probably more like an hour, so somewhere between 5 and 4.5 hrs left. And then you’ve got to eat it, 30 minutes if you’re being healthy about it.So at best you’ve MAYBE got 4/4.5 hours left every week day and that’s assuming you ran exactly zero errands, didn’t stop by the gym after work, didn’t have to stay late, have a wicked fast transition time between tasks AND a commute of like 5 minutes by car. If you have to go to the store after a quick run at the gym, pick your kids up from soccer across town, and you factor in a 30 minute commute both ways, you’ve got enough free time for like one episode of show Monday through Friday. And weekends have got to be for cleaning the house and going to visit your mom for a few hours.When do you write, or paint, or read or sew or go on hikes? When do you go on spur of the moment adventures with your wife and try to perfect your grandma’s soda bread? What happens when it rains on Saturday after being sunny all the rest of the week so you can’t go to the zoo that day and you don’t have enough money for the museum? Why are we all just content to postpone our whole lives, put off “happy” and “healthy” for a miniscule amount of extra value we’re producing for someone else?And it’s also a thing that fascinates me about hustle culture like. When do y'all rest? When do sleep and food happen? How do you make 3 different jobs work without dying?Idk idk like I said I’m real fucked up about it. It amazes me that more office workers aren’t great big socialists because we have this miserable job where we’re monitored constantly and just have to sit. Still. And maintain focus on ONE THING for EIGHT HOURS in a BORING GRAY ROOM with exactly two short breaks at designated times and I just?? How does that not suck for literally everyone else?? You said yourself, Angie, you’re useless after 3 pm so just?? Organize with me and negotiate for shorter days??? Like you’re literally already only producing 6 hours of value, you don’t need to be sitting there for longer than that. I agree with all of this and it’s incredibly important. But I’d like to add: “jobs aren’t designed for single people to do this, they are post-war relics that rely on the unpaid labour of a spouse for cooking, cleaning etc”. It relied on the unpaid labour of WOMEN. Not any spouses, WOMEN. That’s the point. The workload of capitalism always relied on working class women to do unpaid labour for working class men and to be property of men so the working class men could fulfill their immense workload for the benefit of the capitalist class. Women STILL hold just a fraction of the world populations wealth, most women are still not their own providers and need to rely on men, women who work are still mostly expected to give up their career for kids or to carry double the workload. Yes, it’s good that more women are able to provide for themselves now. But nothing changed about the workload that’s expected from the working class (as OP wrote). Which leads to resentment of feminism, women having to do double the work, a majority of women STILL not being able to provide for themselves even when they are working themselves etc. So as long as the workload and the expectations of the working class don’t change, there can be no liberation of women. This is why there is no liberation of women under capitalism. There is no feminism that’s pro-capitalist or liberal because that kind of feminism doesn’t achieve anything material. Any liberal and capitalist feminism is useless. Working class activism needs to be feminist and feminist activism needs to be working class activism. Marx and Engels actually wrote about this (see this article for example https://www.isreview.org/issues/02/engles_family.shtml ) and I highly recommend every feminist to educate themselves on class consciousness of the working class. One quote from Engels as an example: “The man took command in the home also; the woman was degraded and reduced to servitude; she became the slave of his lust and a mere instrument for the production of children… . In order to make certain of the wife’s fidelity and therefore the paternity of his children, she is delivered over unconditionally into the power of the husband; if he kills her, he is only exercising his rights.” Thoughts like these led me to pursue woman’s land. -- source link