I got an involuntary [citation needed] mental response at this. Anyone know if this is a quote from the book, or the author's opinion?
It was under capitalism that we got a 40-hour week. In fact, the history of capitalism over the last 150 years shows a trend of decreasing time working. So I'm not buying this point in the argument.
"Over the 20th century, work hours shortened by almost half, mostly due to rising wages brought about by renewed economic growth, with a supporting role from trade unions, collective bargaining, and progressive legislation. The workweek, in most of the industrialized world, dropped steadily, to about 40 hours after World War II."
(From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Working_time#History )
"Mostly due to rising wages brought about by economic growth." Without the economic growth, we're left with the choice of longer hours or a painfully reduced standard of living.
That just means giving up on more consumption, or funding one's own retirement. It's evident though that most people prefer consuming over anything else. They buy shiny things, go into debt for it, then are forced to work off the debt.
Thinkers like Marx may feel different about the whole thing, they need their time off to do what fulfills them. Most workers, even those performing hard manual labor, feel empty if they don't work.
"Savagely compressed, Hägglund’s argument goes something like this: If what makes our lives meaningful is that time ends, then what defines us is what Marx called “an economy of time.” Marx is, in this sense, probably the most secular thinker who ever lived, the one most deeply engaged with the question of what we do with our time. He divided life into what he called the realm of necessity and the realm of freedom. Hägglund adopts these categories: the realm of necessity involves socially necessary labor and the realm of freedom involves socially available free time. Rationally, Hägglund says, we should strive to reduce the realm of necessity and increase the realm of freedom. But capitalism is systemically committed to exploiting most of us, and to steadily increasing the amount of labor at the expense of our freedom. Capitalism treats the means of economic life, labor, as though it were the purpose of life. But, if we are to cherish this life, we have to treat what we do as an end in itself. “The real measure of value,” Hägglund says, “is not how much work we have done or have to do (quantity of labor time) but how much disposable time we have to pursue and explore what matters to us (quality of free time).”