Productivity is tyranny

Today I was listening to Helen Lewis's programme about gurus - The New Gurus - on BBC Sounds. The show was about productivity gurus. How can you make the most of your time? You only have 4,000 weeks to live - yikes! It seems there is a guru industry out there with millions of followers on YouTube. Did I learn anything particularly useful about how to be productive? Er...no. Maybe other people did.

But then I have a problem with productivity, and a large part of that is what 'productivity' is really about. Let's go back in time 500 years or so to medieval England. In those days, before the enclosures, your actual 'peasant' didn't have such a bad life. It wasn't as nasty brutish and short as some would have us believe. Productivity then was seasonal, planting seeds, harvesting, grazing livestock, hunting,  and foraging. In midwinter, where we are now, days were short, and you couldn't plant or sow, so people had holidays and celebrated instead. This is their time of the year for wassailing and celebrating the beginning of a new year. It is reckoned that, in those days, they had 150 or so holidays a year, Saints Days, etc. Not bad compared with now eh?

Fast forward to the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the industrial revolution had begun, and the common land, used by those peasants had been enclosed by the ruling class. The industrial revolution had begun. People were forced out of the villages into the growing towns and cities, to work in the mills and factories. It was then that productivity, as we know it now was born, capitalists making workers toil for longer hours and fewer holidays to increase the surplus value of their labour.

Although organised labour brought us the eight-hour day, the weekend, and many other benefits we still live in that productivity trap. Although productivity is more than just about the hours we work it's key to making the wheels of capitalism turn. Of course, if you want to spend sixty hours a week chained to a keyboard as one of the gurus admitted he did that's up to you. Me I'd rather be a wassailing! A much better use of my time.😀 🍻🌲🍎