Starting in 1956, the USSR begun reducing the total hours of labor, which had a deadline to meet by 1968. If this plan was successful, hours of labor would have went from 48 hours a week, to 30 hours a week, and the minimum wage would have went from 250 to more than 600 rubles.
In 1961, the CIA was worried as how the USSR could be reducing the workday, without reducing its efforts in the cold war.
CIA originally believed that if the USSR reduced work hours, then it would be harder for the USSR to maintain their defense. However, what they found was that USSR was able to solve many problems by reducing the hours worked. They were able to tap into a large reserve of labor.
The soviets forcing managers to reduce labor time in return led to higher automation, introduction of new technology, and more advanced production measures. Increasing output in light and heavy industry was achieved by increasing employment.
Reduction of labor hours in the USSR actually did what Marx predicted it would in volume 1 of capital. The density of the workday could be increased by reducing the workday. You could produce more by working less. The USSR proved Marx theory to be true.
https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/docs/CIA-RDP64B00346R000100200025-6.pdf
God damn, it’s Jehu. He’s the author of that blog. I haven’t talked to him in fucking years. I used to roll around with a bunch of people on Lefty Twitter under a different pseudonym and talk politics, got out for a few good reasons but miss some of them sometimes. I just recently looked him up and saw this blog. He made the same talking point back then too.
I only even bother to comment like this to provide context: dude is an accelerationist. You might want to take some of his POVs with a grain of salt. He talks insistently about how the USSR failed because of this very exact point and how this is all we need to accomplish for communism. In that strain of accelerationism, Nick Land comes up, an unfortunate fellow I also had ran into due to left accelerationists I followed engaging him. Nick Land is…a mess, and Jehu believes Land is the only one to actually promote any sort of useful accelerationism, that the left accelerationist theorists are stagnant and irrelevant. He abandons them as a result and promotes Land, and it borders uncomfortable on occasion.
Jehu is obsessive with killing the work week and obtaining ultimate free time; behind all that analysis is just the extreme desire of luxury communism and this fuels every post like this. Poke around for a while and you’ll see what I mean. It’s incredibly reductionist at its core.
Other than that, I found him extremely engaging albeit crochety (but so am I, so who cares). He’s very, very critical of the left and anyone who might share a different POV than him, and that’s something else worth mentioning. Also lots of hot takes, but as stated, nearly every one of them just end in “reduce the hours of labor.” Search “China” and skim a few to see what I mean.
At least he appears to still be kicking, he was an addition to the timeline back then.
“”“Land disputes the similarity between his ideas and fascism, claiming that “Fascism is a mass anti-capitalist movement,”[4] whereas he prefers that “[capitalist] corporate power should become the organizing force in society.”[4]”“”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Enlightenment#Relation_to_the_alt-right.
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Damn, gimme some of whatever this mofo smoking.He’s even more insufferable in direct interaction. Again, my incredible misfortune exposed me to him once or twice and I engaged him being unaware of just how important he was to some of the developments that were themselves radicalizing me the opposite direction.
Holy shit. Thanks for the heads up.
Didn’t know about Jehu, and a lot of that does sound pretty cringy.
That said, while fixating on simply killing the work week is obviously silly, I do think that reducing necessary work should be part of the goal for a socialist society. Necessary work should focus on providing for common needs, and people’s time for self directed development should be maximized.
Some people tend to have this idea that everyone would just turn into hedonist if they didn’t have to work, but in practice most people want to be productive in some way. So, the kind of society I would envision is one where people are provided with tools to do that. Some people will want to do research, others will want to make inventions, do art, study history, and so on. Ensuring people have the ability to do these things is a key part of having a socialist society in my opinion.
Clearly that’s not the kind of society that would be possible in the foreseeable future, but I do think it’s important to have a long term vision that we work towards.
Nah, I agree wholeheartedly. Hopefully didn’t appear to condemn that and fetishize work.
Really interesting, and food for thought for the future. But I wonder why China doesn’t encourage this nowadays
That is rather impressive. I think we should study the reforms that were happening after 1956.
I understand that not everyone likes Khruschev but he wasn’t the only one doing things at that time. Many ministers, many economists, and policy-makers.
(In general, I feel that the post-1956 era of the USSR is severely understudied.)
