The American International's Revolutionary Theory of the Eight-Hour Demand

• In Event: Democracy and Economic Inequality

Abstract

Democracy is consistently re-imagined in social movements, partly through the act of making demands. Yet when workers make economic demands, they are often interpreted narrowly, as the pursuit of material self-interest. In dialogue with contemporary political theories of demand-making, this essay examines the history of the eight-hours movement that emerged after the American Civil War and culminated in a strike wave on May 1st, 1886, the first May Day. Drawing especially on writing by descendants of the First International – a set of trade unionists, socialists, and anarchists who were central actors in the May Day mobilization – I argue that the demand for reduced hours not only spoke to workers’ material interest in less work and more leisure, but that it was a centerpiece of the Internationalists’ revolutionary theory of democracy. In a post-Civil War political culture where anti-slavery had been defined by the ideal of republican independence through free soil, Internationalists argued that foregrounding the eight-hours demand could encourage a transformation of working-class culture by disclosing the roots of their exploitation, staging an “irrepressible conflict” between the freedom to work less and the institutions of private property and the market, and calling on workers to mobilize their political sovereignty to build an alternative economy, a “cooperative commonwealth.” Today, the fight for free time remains an important site of demand-making, whether in struggles against precarious labor, in experiments with a four-day week, and in the climate movement’s search for equitable methods of reducing energy use. These efforts to re-imagine democracy can still take inspiration from the economic battles and cultural innovations that define working-class history.

The Eight-Hour Leagues that emerged in the 1860's often advocated for reduced hours to improve republican citizenship. American Internationalists also drew on the legacies of anti-slavery and abolition – as one author argued, the fight for the “normal workday” would empower workers to “resist the spread of wage slavery by trades unions” just as “the free-soil settlements in Kansas” had resisted extending slavery into the territories – but they pushed their arguments beyond traditional civic republican claims to advocate both political and social revolution. Putting the trade-union fight for free time in the place of the ideal of free soil promised a transformation in the cultural logic of emancipation. For propertyless workers, republican independence could not be achieved by becoming petty capitalists, whether on the land or in small workshops, nor could it be achieved by marginal wage increases. Instead, Internationalists argued that workers’ domination was primarily rooted in the imperative of their exploitation and that fighting for a reduction in hours was the best way to illuminate the source of that exploitation and cultivate the motivation to oppose it. If workers could win a reduction of hours with no loss in wages, they could see that their wage was not determined by hours worked, but rather by the requirements of their subsistence. By practically exposing that workers are forced to work longer than it took to produce the value of their wage, the eight-hour demand promised to politicize workers against the wage system at the same time that it encouraged an existential reckoning with the value of one’s own time, theirs and that of their fellow workers.

To win control over their time, workers had to begin by making a winnable demand that they could communicate to their employer and use to re-negotiate their labor contracts. Yet Internationalists also argued that if, “The first inch of the lever with which to lift the masses from wage slavery is a reduction of the hours of labor” the true “climax, the consummation of all social liberty” would be “co-operation,” the cooperative commonwealth. To democratically control working time, workers needed to divest capital of the power to exploit by claiming ownership of their means of labor. For Internationalists, the United States’ tradition of popular sovereignty can license that act of expropriation, if “the people” as the supreme lawmaker could develop the will and the capacity to claim and cooperatively reorganize the use of property.

The 1886 strikes did not rise to the level of a revolution, where led by a worker’s party analogous to the Republican Party during the Civil War, wage slavery could be abolished. Even so, there is an inexhaustible vitality to the demand to lay claim to the time of one’s life with others, a desire that cannot be truly satisfied in a society structured by exploitation and competition. As long as our democracies are premised on those economic imperatives, the demand to liberate one’s time will carry the potential to mobilize action, set winnable goals, and point beyond those goals toward a cooperative way of life.

Author

• Ed Quish, Hobart and William Smith Colleges