• In the past people worked around 10 or even 12 hours a day (or more, but it is hard to believe that a human could work more than 12 hours for some time), so many coutries, especially the socialist ones, determined that a worker could work at the most 8 hours a day. However it was already a long time ago when the technology was much inferior and there was very few or no automation in the producition, at that time there is no computers and advanced technologies (robots, artificial intelligence etc.) of the, so known, “4th industrial revolution”.

  • Nowadays we could automatize almost all. On the other hand, in capitalism it finds contradictions, because if the capitalist automatize the whole production, it will be benificial to him and most workers will lose their jobs. Structurally, if the most capitalists automatize their production, great part of population will have no job, no lose their buying power and then the capitalists wouldn’t sell their products much it could conduce to a crisis due to “overproduction”.

  • Only in socialism could be benificial to automatize everything what would be possible and nowadays with this kind of technologies the socialism could easier be applied and hold high productions without using much human working.

Consider it in a capitalist context. What do you guys think about the 8-hours working a day?

I think the working day of 8 hours is overhidden. It should be at most 6 hour a day and 35 a week, especially in physical labour.

  • PolandIsAStateOfMind
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    2 years ago

    There are research, made in capitalist countries, from a capitalist perspective, for capitalists, showing people are most productive working around 4-5 hours a day and that reducing the work time to that time will not even significantly lessen the productivity.

    Read Marx about profit rate, how it’s generated and about machines.

    About longer workhours: people working (including commute etc.) 12 hours a day don’t have time to be people basically at all. People woking even more are just physically exterminated. For example, russian cottage workers around 1900 worked even 17 hours per day and they lived up to 30. Marx and Engels also wrote about this, in England at some point just sheer number of people worked to death endangered the labour force reproduction, even with the crazy birth ratio they had back then (minus child mortality).