Comment on The pipeline
UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world 3 days agoen.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eight-hour_day_movement
The eight-hour day movement (also known as the 40-hour week movement or the short-time movement) was a social movement to regulate the length of a working day, preventing excesses and abuses of working time.
Just for starters. The modern concept of “Retirement” is also tied to socialist policy and politics. One of the first major reforms states implement after a socialist election or Marxist revolution is the implementation of retirement age. And those countries with the strongest socialist histories tend to have the lowest retirement ages and most generous pensions. Fully socialist states like Vietnam and China and South Africa have retirement in the 55-62 range. More socialist-leaning European/East Asian states like France, Denmark, Korea, and Japan have a retirement age in the 63-67 range. And fully captured capitalist systems like Uganda or Bangladesh or the undocumented worker pools of the Americas have no retirement for private workers whatsoever, working people to death.
Kusimulkku@lemm.ee 3 days ago
That movement is not at all specific to socialist states. If you read a bit further it even says how it originated in industrial revolution Britain and happened all over the world.
UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world 3 days ago
Industrial Britian had an enormous activist labor movement. A slew of left wing thinkers and agitators emerged from the British academic scene, including Marx, Engels, Lenin, and Ghandi.
How are you defining “Capitalist Country” if you ignore all the socialist policies a country has implemented?
Hell, how do you define Socialist Country, if you exclude every one that’s undergone Capitalist accumulation?
8-hour work week is a socialist policy, espoused by socialist parties and implemented in governments with socialist majorities. Same with pensions and other public retirement funds.
The more socialists you have setting policy, the shorter your work week and the earlier your retirement.
Kusimulkku@lemm.ee 2 days ago
Yeah because of how mega capitalist it was
Worker ownership of means of production, usually. Let’s say Eastern Block, China, you get the picture.
UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world 2 days ago
Capital accumulation is a predicate for the surpluses needed to build a socialist economy.
Public pensions and union shops lay claim to the surplus profits of capital. The UK’s union membership peaked in the 1970s, as did its wages/pensions. After Thatcher, that share declined rapidly, as did the supply of council housing, the access to public health care and education, and the various other amenities common to socialist economies.
The maoist uprising against the landlords was the largest and most comprehensive proletarian revolution in history, and led to almost totally-equal redistribution of land among the peasantry
Don’t get much more “worker ownership of means of production” than that.