The Shock of the Anthropocene by Christophe Bonneuil & Jean-Baptiste Fressoz

Author:Christophe Bonneuil & Jean-Baptiste Fressoz
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Verso Books

Time rather than money

Consumerism is not simply an economic order. It also defines a temporal order organized around work. Its triumph eclipsed powerful social movements for a drastic reduction in working hours. These alternative voices scarcely had a chance, trapped between crisis and war.

The trade-off between consumption and leisure was fiercely debated during the whole first half of the twentieth century. Alfred Marshall, the most influential economist of his generation, had already explained in ‘The Future of the Working Classes’ (1873) that productivity gains would increasingly have to be allocated to leisure, given that material needs were not infinitely extendable. He proposed a working day of six hours, and even four hours for unpleasant work.32 The eight-hour day was the common demand of all European and American trade unions. For the generation of 1910–30, the spectacular increase in productivity had necessarily to lead to a massive reduction in working time. Leisure, rather than consumption, was seen by economists and intellectuals (such as John Maynard Keynes and Bertrand Russell in England, Charles Gide and Gabriel Tarde in France) as the variable that would bring about economic equilibrium and win the struggle against overproduction and unemployment.

The First World War and the massive application of Taylorist methods visibly showed the productivity gains being made in the factories. At the end of the war, the British industrialist Lord Leverhulme (founder of Lever Brothers, eventually Unilever) argued for a six-hour day. In the 1920s, the European left supported the scientific organization of work, as this would make possible an increase in free time. The unions recycled the traditional pride of the worker in his trade into a collective affirmation of mass production and productivity.33 Free time was an important political issue both in the democracies and under the fascist regimes, with the expectation that it would become the centre of social life. Holiday camps, discussion groups and the practice of sports were encouraged by government. In France, Léo Lagrange symbolized these concerns.34

In an initial period, the crisis of the 1930s reinforced this movement for a reduction in working hours. In Europe, trade unions demanded the forty-hour week, which was voted into law in France in 1936. In 1932, the American Federation of Labor called for a thirty-hour week with reduction of wages. A law imposing a thirty-hour week was even adopted by the US Senate in April 1933 but rejected by the House of Representatives.35 The world crisis seemed to have discredited the hymn to consumption of the 1920s.

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