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[atlarge-discuss] Fwd: Street / Labor Day Reflections: Time as a Democracy Issue / Sep 03 - Part 2



[Continued from Part 1...]

>"Time to Fit Himself for Citizenship": the Curiously Neglected Issue of Democracy
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>One problem, however, is insufficiently appreciated, even in the work of sensitive and progressive scholars like Schor and Hochschild. It is the challenge that the vicious circle poses to peoples' ability to become reasonably informed about and meaningfully engaged in public affairs.
>
>It is a self-serving careerist myth of so-called "social scientists" and other members of the pontificating class that one needs special "expertise," meaning years of training (and indoctrination) in specialized fields of "higher education," to meaningfully grasp main currents of human social and political developments past and present. Still, such understanding does require a reasonable measure of free time, permitting one to read and reflect, to study and sort out the competing claims and subtle and often buried facts of policy, politics, and power. 
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>One does not develop the capacity to criticize US Middle Eastern or Nuclear or Environmental or Criminal Justice policy in a state of perpetual exhaustion and distraction, snatching only small pieces of time from an endless cycle of working, commuting, shopping, and, when possible, sleeping. 
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>Without time, brain-weary worker-citizens tend to become over-reliant on the often bad, generally biased, and heavily filtered information manufactured by those whose salaried task is to shape mass opinion in the interests of those who pay their salaries - the CEOS of an ever shrinking number of private media mega-corporations that are themselves pinnacle members of the nation's corporate plutocracy. 
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>Last September, this "mainstream" (really corporate) media used its incredibly powerful role, greatly enhanced by the decline of leisure, to idiotically inform America's time-starved masses that the 9-11 hijackers attacked America mainly because they hated our "freedom" and "democratic" way of life. 
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>Of course, forming organizations and holding meetings to mobilize democratic engagement and perhaps even to form "alternative" (non-corporate) media also takes increasingly scarce free time. 
>
>Neglect of the time squeeze's anti-democratic consequences by even labor-sympathetic analysts is ironic, historically speaking, for citizenship-enabling free time was arguably labor's first leading issue in the US. The loss of leisure to capital was, in the words of early labor historian Helen Sumner, the "cause of the first awakening of American wage-earners to their interests as a class" during the early 19th century. 
>
>At the start, when the labor movement was most closely linked to the legacy of the revolution, the reason those workers most commonly advanced for wanting more free time related directly to citizenship concerns. "They expressed," noted historian Benjamin Hunnicut, "the need for time to study and understand the democratic process, to discuss issues, to organize politically, and simply to vote." 
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>These concerns reflected and resonated strongly with the nation's republican tradition, garnering workers considerable popular support in their struggle for shorter hours through the rest of the century. An example is provided by the Report of the Special Commission on the Hours of Labor to the Massachusetts House of Representatives in 1866. "Overwork," the commission concluded, "stunts the mind, gives no time for culture, no opportunity for reading, study, or mental improvement. 
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>It leaves the system jaded and worn, with no ability to study. This," the commission added, expressing widespread sentiment at the time, "is the workingman's country. The welfare of the State and the Nation demand that time be given him to fit himself for worthy citizenship. A free country demands an intelligent as well as a free people." 
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>Without the time to actually cultivate and exercise the liberal freedoms won through revolution, early American wage-earners felt that they were "condemned to an inferior position in the state." They were little better off, many 19th century Americans felt, than America's own chattel slaves or the degraded proletariat of (supposedly more) reactionary Europe. "A laborer in the US," one eight-hour supporter told the Massachusetts legislature in 1867, "needs more leisure than one in the same position in Europe because he has the elective franchise and is part of the government." 
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>This short-hours enthusiast wrote and spoke in a time when American workers often designated (when possible) one of their work crew to read aloud from newspapers while the rest toiled, reflecting a determination not to let the commands of capital overwhelm their capacity to stay current on the issues of the time. He was the product of a country whose Founders expected artisans and farmers to follow complex (by modern standards) political and policy arguments (the Federalist Papers) that cause rebellions when assigned to increasingly time-squeezed contemporary college students who find the thoughts of Madison and Hamilton "too difficult" to read.  
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>Thomas Jefferson, who felt that democracy was impossible without an educated citizenry, would be appalled by modern American time poverty. Where, he would wonder, do the ancestors of his revolution find the time to be citizens in more than name? 
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>Where and when to they find the space to learn the ins and outs of current events and issues (say the current debate over American policy in the Middle East) when they spend the majority of their waking hours getting ready for, traveling to and returning and recovering from jobs whose performance commonly drains much if not most of their intellectual energy? What good, he might well ask, is his Declaration of Independence to America's teeming mass of wage, salary, and time slaves? 
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>Declining leisure is certainly not the only or even perhaps the major obstacle to democracy in the United States and the forces of corporate thought control have made than a few colonial incursions into the inner world of American leisure itself. Still, working hours and time squeeze deserve considerably more mention than they typically receive from those trying to understand and reverse America's dangerous democracy deficit - a  shortfall that has dark consequences for the entire planet At the same time, those who write and speak about the negative consequences of overly long working hours would do well to add disablement of democracy to their list of grievances
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>As the founders of both the nation and the nation's labor movement knew quite well, time is a democracy issue and the erosion of peoples' access to it does not bode well for the future of popular government in the "land of the free."  
>
>
>Paul Street is a social policy researcher, freelance writer, and onetime labor historian in Chicago, Illinois. He can be reached at pstreet@cul-chicago.org

>Date: Mon, 02 Sep 2002 17:42:20 -0700
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>Subject: Street / Labor Day Reflections: Time as a Democracy Issue / Sep 03
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