Scam Watch - Episode 1: The 5 Day Work Week

The Industrial Revolution promised a tantalizing bargain. If we restructure our society, culture, daily lives, work hours and vocations around its schema of specialization (and the utter dehumanization which accompanies it) the dividend would be the emergence of a leisure class for all. Well we got the dehumanization but never saw the leisure class emerge. But we are at the point now that the mechanization of our industry is so advanced that the idea of the 5 day work week is a thoroughly outdated construct - a vestigial remnant of a past which no longer applies to the present. Capital's only consistency throughout the years is its ability to deliver the dehumanization. Its other consistency was claims its critics leveled, that a leisure class would never materialize. The only thing between the Industrial Revolution's promise of a leisure class and its delivery of a leisure class is the massive accumulation of capital to those who have marshaled not the mechanisms of industry as described by Marx but but the new industries which are not material but social - containing almost no innovation yet residing at the apotheosis of our so called consumer culture.

The five day work week is not necessary - three days at most is all the man needs to fulfill his thirst for industry, the majority of our days needs to be ours. But we will never get there unless we start talking about it.