"FOUR HOURS" ENDNOTES
[1]. Ernest Mandel (1923-1995) was a Belgian socialist philosopher and economist. Among his many noted works are Marxist Economic Theory (1962), Late Capitalism (1968), and Power and Money (1994). When he died, 1,200 socialist thinkers and leaders from around the world attended his funeral in Paris. Barry Healy, "Ernest Mandel: A Revolutionary Life," June 29, 2009, https://archive.ph/20120801165951/http://www.greenleft.org.au/2009/800/41200.
[2]. Che Guevara read Mandel's opus Marxist Economic Theory and invited Mandel to come to Cuba to work with him to plan the socialist economy. Healy, "Ernest Mandel."
[3]. Ernest Mandel, Power and Money: A Marxist Theory of Bureaucracy (New York: Verso, 1992), 202, emphasis added.
[4]. Mandel uses figures the figures of both four hours per weekday and twenty hours per week when describing the quantity of time each citizen would be expected to attend meetings and perform administrative tasks for socialist society. Mandel, Power and Money, 202, 204.
[5]. A version of this quote was first attributed to Oscar Wilde in Michael Walzer, "A Day in the Life of the Socialist Citizen," Dissent, May-June 1968.
[6]. Walzer, "A Day in the Life."
[7]. Michael Harrington, Socialism: Past and Future (New York: Little Brown, 1989), 242, emphasis added.
[8]. Below are four examples of socialist thinkers arguing that socialism would yield a four-hour workday (with emphasis added). Please note that in each instance, the reason these socialists believe a four-hour workday can be achieved is because they see capitalist society as filled with "parasites" (non-workers and people performing "useless" work) whom socialism will force to work.
"Even at the present stage of economic development, if everybody worked and there was no waste, a universal four-hour day would undoubtedly be enough to provide abundance for all in the advanced countries." James P. Cannon, America's Road to Socialism (New York: Pioneer, 1953), 66.
"Four hours of moderate and intelligent work, for every able-bodied man, would be enough to exploit and marvelously shape all its products, if the bulk of nations were not composed of so many parasites." Theodore Dézamy, "Question proposée par l'Académie des sciences morales et politiques: les nations avancent plus en connaissances, en lumières qu'en morale pratique" (Paris: L. E. Heran et Bimont, 1839), 37.
"It has been computed that if everybody now worked at some useful calling, everybody could live in comfort on four hours daily labor." Laurence Gronlund, The Cooperative Commonwealth: An Exposition of Modern Socialism (Boston: Lee and Shepard, 1884), 116.
"We are going to get rid of all non-workers, and busy-idle people; so that the working time of each member of our factory will be very short, say, to be much within the mark, four hours a day." William Morris, "Work in a Factory As It Might Be," in Political Writings: Contributions to Justice and Commonweal 1883–1890, ed. Nicolas Salmon (Bristol: Thoemmes Press, 1994), 40.
[9]. "Las medidas drásticas de eliminar al parasito, ya sea al que esconde en su actitud une enemistad profunda la sociedad socialista o al que esta irremediablemente reñido con el trabajo." Ernesto "Che" Guevara, "Contra El Burocratismo [February 1963]," in Obra revolucionaria (Mexico City: Ediciones ERA, 1971), 548.
[10]. See over two dozen example of Debs attacking alleged parasites here parasiteobsessed.org/learning-from-eugene-debs.
[11]. Eugene Debs, "Roosevelt's Stale and Silly Objections: An Answer to the Articles in The Outlook (May 1, 1909)," https://www.marxists.org/archive/debs/works/1909/090501-debs-rooseveltstaleandsilly.pdf. Originally published as "Debs' Reply to Roosevelt," Appeal to Reason, May 1, 1909. Debs attacks "parasites" three other times in this one article.
[12]. To learn the reasons for socialism's parasite fixation and how creating socialism hinges on suppressing alleged parasites, see the RFP paper "The Socialist Obsession: The Central Role of "Parasites" in Socialist Thought."
[13]. Georges Renard, Le régime socialiste: principes de son organisation économique et politique, 6th ed. (Paris: Felix Alcon, 1907), 48.
[14]. Every socialist nation has sought to root out alleged "parasites." This is hardly surprising, since socialist theory holds that eliminating parasites is the pathway to creating a socialist society. Take for example Fidel Castro's explanation of the plan regarding alleged parasites in socialist Cuba: "Our future society must be a society entirely of workers. Of parasites, let there not be even one per million. For if we have one parasite out of a million people, the revolution's work is not be considered finished." Fidel Castro, "Castrol Speech at CDR Anniversary Rally [September 29, 1967]," Castro Speech Database, accessed February 28, 2023, http://lanic.utexas.edu/project/castro/db/1967/19670929.html. See the RFP paper "The Socialist Obsession: The Central Role of 'Parasites' in Socialist Thought" for additional details.
[15]. For over 150 years, socialists have been promising that their philosophy would result in a dramatic reduction in working hours (see n. 8). No socialist nation has come close to delivering on this promise, much less to cutting the regular workday to four hours. For example, in the world's first socialist nation, the USSR, the workweek was forty-six hours until the 1950s and forty hours thereafter (Edmund Nash, "Hours of Work and Leave Provisions in the USSR," Monthly Labor Review 80, no. 9 [September 1957]: 1069–73). Moreover, these weekly totals don't include the millions of hours of mandatory "volunteer" work citizens of the USSR were made to perform (see n. 16).
[16]. Mandatory "voluntary" labor has been a standard feature in socialist regimes, including the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), the People's Republic of China, the German Democratic Republic, socialist Cuba, and so on.
In the USSR, this work was nicknamed "subbotnik" and "voskresnik" from the Russian words for Saturday and Sunday, the days on which most "voluntary" labor took place. Frank Kaplan describes the intent of these days. Rather than Saturday and Sunday being a holiday from labor, these days were meant to be "a day on which rest is put aside for the joy of labor." Frank Kaplan, "The Origin and Function of the Subbotniks and Voskresniks," Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas 13, no. 1 (April 1965): 30–39.
The sham nature of the "voluntary" aspect of this work is found in its organization from the top down; for example, the workforce of, say, an entire plant was "volunteered" by its managers. Individual workers did not make a choice; they were told what to do. The only way in which this work resembled volunteer work is that it was unpaid.
[17]. Friedrich Engels, Anti-Dühring: Herr Eugen Dühring's Revolution in Science, trans. Emile Burns, Marxist Library 18 (New York: International Publishers, 1947), 207.
[18]. Mandel, Power and Money, 204.
[19]. Chris Williams, Ecology and Socialism: Solutions to Capitalist Ecological Crisis (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2010), 228, Kindle.
[20]. Paul D'Amato, "To each according to their need," SocialistWorker.org, August 23, 2013, https://socialistworker.org/2013/08/23/to-each-according-to-their-need.
[21]. Socialist thinkers argue that a substantial portion of the products available today are "socially useless" and should be suppressed. For example, Fred Magdoff writes: "Socially useless, even harmful, products … utilize perhaps as great as half of the labor force." Fred Magdoff, "An Ecologically Sound and Socially Just Economy," Monthly Review, September 1, 2014, https://monthlyreview.org/2014/09/01/an-ecologically-sound-and-socially-just-economy.
[22]. Danny Katch, Socialism … Seriously: A Brief Guide to Human Liberation (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2015), 77.
[23]. Katch, Socialism … Seriously, 77.
[24]. Katch, Socialism . . . Seriously, 78, emphasis added.
[25]. See our paper "The Ripple Effects of Socialist Duty" to learn more.
[26]. Li Zhensheng, Red-Color News Soldier (London: Phaidon Press Limited, 2003), 44; Frank Dikötter, Mao's Great Famine: The History of China's Most Devastating Catastrophe, 1958–1962 (London: Bloomsbury, 2010), 292.
[27]. Dikötter, Mao's Great Famine, 291.
[28]. Xing Lu, "A Rhetorical Analysis of Types of Political Rituals," in Rhetoric of the Chinese Cultural Revolution: The Impact of Chinese Thought, Culture, and Communication (Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 2004).
[29]. Mao's Great Famine won the 2011 Samuel Johnson Prize for best non-fiction work.
[30]. Dikötter, Mao's Great Famine, 292–93.
[31]. Zhensheng, Red-Color News Soldier, 82–200; Lu, "Rhetorical Analysis."
[32]. In Rhetoric of the Chinese Cultural Revolution, Xing Lu cites a figure of over 200,000 who were "executed on false charges of counterrevolutionary crimes." Xing Lu, "My Family Caught in the Cultural Revolution," in Rhetoric.
[33]. Frank Dikötter writes that during the People Republic's Cultural Revolution period, the vast majority of China's two thousand counties experienced in excess of one hundred deaths by beatings or suicide and that in many counties "the body count reached four to five hundred victims." Frank Dikötter, The Cultural Revolution (New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2016), 189.
While the overall total is unclear, as well as the breakdown between beating deaths and suicides, there's no question that the number of suicides resulting from denunciation sessions across China were in the tens of thousands.
Dikötter's work is also full of specific examples of large numbers of individuals taking their own lives after being targeted during struggle sessions. For example, there were over a dozen suicides driven by denunciation at the Shanghai Conservatory of Music (186), twenty-three at Peking University (187), and six hundred in the first few weeks of denunciations in the Hubei province (238).
[34]. Zhensheng, Red-Color News Soldier, 204–206. Emphasis added.
[35]. Dikötter, Mao's Great Famine, 22.
[36]. Li Zhensheng's criticism session lasted over six hours. If we treat this as the typical length, the 190,000 criticism sessions in just one of China's two dozen provinces would have taken over 1,140,000 hours.
[37]. Daisha Lee Delano and J. David Knottnerus, "The Khmer Rouge, Ritual and Control," Asian Journal of Social Science 46, no. 1–2 (2018): 80.
[38]. Numerous Khmer Rouge leaders learned their socialism in France. Pol Pot ("Brother Number One"), Ieng Sary ("Brother Number Three"), Son Sen, Khieu Samphan, and others who became key players in the Khmer Rouge were students together in Paris. Like most of his future comrades, Pol Pot wasn't a socialist when he arrived in Paris, but he was when he went home. He morphed from high school teacher to revolutionary leader.
While living in Paris, Pol Pot and his pals received instruction in socialism from members of the PCF (Parti Communiste Francais), participated in "Marxist Circles" (socialist study groups), attended socialist demonstrations, made side trips to socialist Yugoslavia, and so on. If you've visited Paris, you've likely walked by one or more of the apartments where Pol Pot and the other mass murderers of the Khmer Rouge resided. Pol Pot lived at 28 rue Saint-Andre des Arts in the 6th arrondissement, a minute's walk from the Fountain of Saint Michael and the Seine.
To learn more about the atrocities of Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge and their time in Paris, see these sources: David Chandler, Brother Number One: A Political Biography of Pol Pot, rev. ed. (Boulder: Westview Press, 1999); Philip Short, Pol Pot: Anatomy of a Nightmare (New York: Henry Holt, 2004); Elizabeth Becker, When the War Was Over: Cambodia and the Khmer Rouge Revolution, rev. ed. (New York: Public Affairs, 1998).
[39]. Delano and Knottnerus, "Khmer Rouge," 94.