"The trouble with socialism is
that it takes up too many evenings."
— Oscar Wilde
There's no escaping socialism's
"interminable meetings."
A democratic socialist society would not run itself. It would require each citizen to contribute their time and labor to the operation of the socialist state.
So explains celebrated socialist thinker Ernest Mandel[1]—an important influence on Che Guevara.[2] Mandel also answers the question of how much time running a democratic socialist society would take. He writes that each workday, the typical socialist citizen would need to spend
four hours attending meetings or performing administrative labour.[3]
These four hours every workday would be separate and distinct from normal work. That's twenty hours a week on top of a regular job—twenty hours spent in public meetings and carrying out administrative tasks for society.[4] This contribution from each citizen is essential to keep the gears of a democratic socialist society turning.
Yes, creating an actual democratic socialist society would require each of us to attend countless hours of meetings.
Although most socialist thinkers avoid discussing this reality (since it doesn't exactly help their sales pitch), it's a problem that socialists have long recognized. Well over a century ago, poet and socialist Oscar Wilde famously quipped:
The trouble with socialism is that it takes up too many evenings.[5]
Any number of socialist thinkers since have admitted that socialism entails too many meetings, even referencing Wilde when they do. For example, Michel Walzer, editor emeritus of Dissent, quotes Wilde and writes that his point about socialism consuming too much of our free time is
one of the most significant criticisms of socialist theory that has ever been made.[6]
And, Michael Harrington, the founder of the Democratic Socialists of America, similarly writes:
One of the most effective arguments against socialism, as Oscar Wilde realized long ago, is that it would create a society with interminable meetings.[7]
But even socialist thinkers who fess up about socialism's risk of "interminable meetings" invariably shy away from estimating how much time these meetings would require of the typical person.
They know they would end up with estimates like Mandel's of four hours a day—a figure that shows that democratic socialism is a practical impossibility and a figure that shows one of socialism's key promises is empty.
Does Socialism Really
Save Work Time?
Socialists have long sold their philosophy as the pathway to a dramatically shortened workweek. Many socialist thinkers even argue that socialism would cut the workday in half.[8]
This claim is a byproduct of the socialist belief that capitalist society is brimming with "social parasites"—not only "slackers" who shirk work but also diligent workers who perform tasks that socialism deems "socially useless."
As Che Guevara puts it, socialism calls for
drastic measures to eliminate the parasites.[9]
Similarly, democratic socialist icon Eugene Debs (who attacked "parasites" dozens of times[10]) explains that
in socialism, the parasites and grafters would have to go to work.[11]
Socialist theory says that by forcing all supposed parasites to perform work approved as "socially useful," socialism could dramatically reduce the work hours required of each citizen.[12] In one example, French socialist Georges Renard writes
It [work time] will be reduced to the minimum by the sole fact that everyone will take part in the work and that the parasites and the useless will have returned to the ranks of the laboring army.[13]
But the claim that socialism would mean a radically reduced workday is deceitful. It has not proven itself to be true. And it also fails to account for the hours upon hours of meetings necessary to keep a socialist society afloat.
Socialist nations have engaged in widespread suppression of alleged "parasites."[14] Yet none of them has delivered on the promise to drastically reduce work hours or come anywhere close to doing so.
The average workday in socialist nations has been as long or longer than the workday in capitalist ones.[15] Socialist governments have also forced their citizens to perform millions of hours of unpaid "volunteer" work harvesting crops, laboring on construction projects, and toiling at other tasks, all in addition to their regular workweek.[16]
But even if suppressing supposed parasites could reduce the average workweek, it's still completely misleading to pitch socialism as a means to a lighter workload. The hours saved would not be for our leisure.
No, to have any chance of creating an actual democratic socialist society, your hours of regular work must be reduced so that you will have the time to attend the hours of meetings democratic socialism requires.
The need to reduce traditional work hours so that socialist citizens have time to attend meetings and perform administrative tasks isn't some new socialist concept. Socialist superstar Friedrich Engels wrote on this topic over 150 years ago, saying that under socialism it would become
possible to distribute labor among all members of society without exception, and thereby to limit the labor-time of each individual member to such an extent that all have enough free time left to take part in the general—both theoretical and practical—affairs of society.[17]
In other words, for one the founders of socialist theory, the goal of reducing traditional work time is so that people would have the time to perform the work required to run a socialist society.
Ernest Mandel also addresses the requirement for normal work hours to be reduced so that socialist citizens have the time to work for society. He writes that if our daily hours of traditional work could be cut in half, to four hours, we would then have the time to attend four hours of socialist meetings without the total exceeding eight hours.[18]
Thus, a fifty-percent reduction of regular labor hours (a goal no socialist society has come anywhere close to achieving) results not in an actual reduction of the average workday but in the same eight-hour workday most have now.
And since, in Mandel's reckoning, four hours of daily administrative labor and meetings is necessary to keep a democratic socialist society running, those four hours will be necessary no matter how long our regular work takes.
If a future socialist society somehow succeeded in cutting traditional work time to six hours a day, the combined workday would be ten hours. That's no reduction in work compared to what's typical under capitalism; it's 20 percent increase.
The total work hours socialism requires stand in stark contrast to the promises socialists make. Frankly, it's unethical. Socialists want to sell us their product as a path to reduced work without explaining that socialism has plans for how any saved time would be used: making us perform another kind of work in meeting after meeting.
Tens of Thousands
of Public Debates
Why does democratic socialism require so many meetings? Because it calls for countless issues to be decided by society-wide debates. Choices that today are made independently by individuals and organizations would instead become public matters that everyone would decide jointly.
In Ecology and Socialism, Chris Williams provides an example of the types of issues that socialism expects the "whole community to democratically decide":
Everyone will be involved in decisions about manufacturing methods, energy techniques, use of chemicals, and so on.[19]
How many manufacturing methods, energy techniques, chemicals, and so on are in use in an industrial society? How many decisions would need to be made about these things? How many hours would it take for everyone to say their piece and cast their votes? It's hard to even imagine.
But Williams's examples don't even begin to scratch the surface of the kinds of issues socialists expect us to attend meetings about. For example, as Paul D'Amato explains, it's also the plan that in a democratic socialist society, goods will be
produced because they are socially necessary, and their production and distribution is carried out according to a democratically worked-out plan.[20]
Fulfilling this requirement would require two waves of meetings. First, socialist citizens would have to debate which products should qualify as "socially necessary," and which should become illegal because they fail this test. A mindboggling number of meetings would be required to determine the fate of the millions of products currently available in our capitalist society.[21]
Next, a second round of meetings would be needed to create the "democratically worked-out plan" for the production and distribution of those items approved as "socially necessary." Again, we're speaking of an unimaginably complex question being resolved by open public debate.
And this plan would have to be continuously updated via ongoing sessions, not only to account for changing desires of the populace but also to determine what to do when the plan goes awry (for example, due to production shortfalls).
Countless decisions about countless issues being debated for countless hours. It's no wonder that in his recent book Socialism … Seriously, Danny Katch admits
it can be tedious for every major decision to be democratically decided, especially when there are no easy answers.[22]
No kidding! Yet, as Katch's thinking demonstrates, even the examples cited above fail to encompass the full range of issues that socialists expect us to spend time quarreling about come socialism.
Consider his illustration of a "major decision" socialist society would decide by debate: whether convenience stores and stores of other types should be open twenty-four hours a day.[23]
It would no longer be up to store owners or managers to determine operating hours. Instead, socialist citizens would meet to argue over the tradeoff between consumer convenience and worker inconvenience and—eventually—determine the hours for each type of store.
Yes, issues that socialists expect socialist society to answer by community debate are limitless.
Worse still, as Katch explains, the results of these sessions would not be final. You could spend dozens of hours in meetings resolving a particular issue only to have the topic reopened at any time.
Katch's example of socialist society determining store operating hours addresses this point. He imagines the decision being
reversed multiple times over the years.[24]
In other words, the number of issues requiring meetings doesn't decrease as time goes on. Instead, no question is truly fully resolved.
Given the number of issues to be debated (and then re-debated and re-re-debated), Ernest Mandel's estimate of four hours of meetings each workday would seem to be, if anything, too low.
The Duty to MeeT
Just how would a socialist society get us to attend countless hours of meetings?
It would compel us. Participating in these sessions would be a social duty.
Socialism is founded on the belief that we owe our time and talents to society, as is reflected in the socialist axiom "from each according to their ability." This duty morphs our time into what socialism treats as society's time—society's property to control.[25] And one use for that time is meetings.
When Ernest Mandel estimates that each socialist citizen would spend twenty hours a week at meetings and administrative work, his unspoken assumption is that every citizen can be counted on for this labor because it's not optional. Some will attend the endless meetings out of their fervor for socialism or because they love hearing themselves talk. The rest of us will be made to attend whether we like it or not.
Michael Harrington's comment about socialism's risk of "interminable meetings" also reflects the hidden premise that attending meetings is mandatory. If socialist society treated your time as your own and not as society's time, socialist meetings would never become interminable. Why? Because you would simply stop attending.
The fact is that, if attending the meetings and performing the administrative work that a socialist society requires were optional, the system would soon collapse. When some citizens stopped performing these tasks, the tasks for those who persisted would increase. This would lead to more dropouts and, in turn, more work for those who kept at it.
The downward spiral would continue until the entire system imploded. Thus, attending meetings and performing other work for society must be a mandatory duty for socialism to function.
Socialism's foundation on compulsory duty—it lurks behind socialist plans for meetings galore, just as it does so many other aspects of this anti-liberal philosophy.
"Three or Four Hours" a Night
"of Numbing Speeches"
Coming to grips with the meeting-mania democratic socialism entails might make one wonder: would authoritarian socialism be a better path to achieving the theoretical benefits of socialism? At least it might spare us the meetings.
Alas, it wouldn't. All forms of socialism entail countless hours attending meetings.
For example, life in Mao Zedong's People's Republic of China featured many types of meetings and plenty of each variety. The fun was non-optional: anyone who failed to attend was sent for "reeducation."[26]
Daily gatherings of all the inhabitants of a town or village were common. These events often ran far into the evening and sometimes took multiple days.[27]
Such sessions were used to drill citizens in socialist principles and the teachings of Chairman Mao. Attendees listened to speech after speech and sang songs praising Mao and socialism. Verses from one popular tune have been translated:
Nothing is as good as socialism. Mao Zedong's Thoughts are the revolutionary treasure; Whoever is against those is our enemy.[28]
Meetings in which attendees were pressured to boost their industrial or agricultural production were another staple of socialist life in China. In the award-winning[29] Mao's Great Famine, Frank Dikötter writes that these sessions were the
site of intimidation where cadre [local socialist leaders] could lecture, bully, threaten and shout themselves hoarse for hours on end.[30]
"Denunciation rallies," also known as "struggle sessions," were a third common form of meeting in the Peoples' Republic. Citizens targeted for public shaming would wear signs detailing their alleged crimes, and often dunce caps as well. They were attacked for hours on end, cursed, spit on, and beaten.[31]
Tens of thousands of those condemned during these sessions were later executed without trial.[32] Tens of thousands more committed suicide.[33]
Photojournalist Li Zhensheng, whose images provide the foremost visual record of these events, describes his own struggle session:
I was put on stage, made to bow, and criticized for over six hours continuously in front of more than three hundred of my colleagues.[34]
Untold hundreds of thousands were denounced at rallies across the People's Republic. Over a period of three years in just one of China's two dozen provinces, some 190,000 people were publicly condemned in such meetings.[35] This required tens of thousands of meetings running hundreds of thousands of hours just to handle all the denouncing.[36]
"Propaganda-fueled nightly meetings"[37] were also standard in Democratic Kampuchea, as Cambodia was called when it was run by the Khmer Rouge.
("Rouge" is French for red, the official color of socialism, and the Khmer people are the prominent ethnic group in Cambodia. Cambodia had been a French colony, and the leaders of the Khmer Rouge learned their socialism while living in Paris.[38])
A Cambodian villager describes her reactions to these sessions this way:
I dreaded the nightly meetings where the entire village of several hundred people met for three or four hours of numbing speeches and confessions.
She continues:
I dared not be absent or let my head nod or my eyes droop. … Anyone could charge another with real or supposed failings. Old villagers had some opportunity to discuss their alleged crimes before being punished. New villagers were expected to "confess" without knowing the charges.[39]
Such experiences by citizens in actual socialist societies illustrate that authoritarian socialism also promises a life of "interminable meetings." But the headache of having to spend hours attending indoctrination and criticism sessions obviously pales by comparison to the extreme mental and physical cruelty experienced by victims of these events.
Yes, "the trouble with socialism" isn't simply that "it takes up too many evenings." A far greater threat is that these nightly gatherings have time and again ended up devoted not to tedious democratic decision-making but rather to terrifying public humiliation, indoctrination, beatings, and death.
Thank you for reading "Four Hours Every Weekday."