Immanent Critique

Those who make the fallacy claim neglect to offer specific evidence of the supposed belief in a fixed amount of work.

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What's Wrong with the Case AGAINST Shorter Working Time? I

1. The proposition accused of being false Every day many strangers came to town, and among them one day came two swindlers. They let it be known they were weavers, and they said they could weave the most magnificent fabrics imaginable. Not only were their colors and patterns uncommonly fine, but clothes made of this cloth had a wonderful way of becoming invisible to anyone who was unfit for his office, or who was unusually stupid… One of the more peculiar and puzzling responses to the New Economics Foundation's 21 Hours report was the charge that the authors committed a " lump-of-labour fallacy " – that their policy proposals were based on the assumption that the amount of work to be done is a fixed quantity. This complaint needs to be taken seriously, not because it has substance – it doesn't – but because of the extraordinary resilience of the fallacy myth despite its anachronism and incoherence. The case for shorter working time is based on a cluster of core pr
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What's Wrong with the Case AGAINST Shorter Working Time? V

5. Conclusion They tell us sometimes that if we had only kept quiet, all these desirable things would have come about of themselves. I am reminded of the Greek clown who, having seen an archer bring down a flying bird, remarked, sagely: 'You might have saved your arrow, for the bird anyway would have been killed by the fall.' – Elizabeth Cady Stanton So how does an archaic, incoherent and unauthenticated textbook homily succeed in discrediting contemporary efforts to move towards a shorter working week? As with the "magnificent fabric" in the story of the Emperor's new clothes, the counterintuitive, esoteric subtlety of the fallacy is said to be invisible to fools. The real message of the fallacy claim is "this is an issue of such dazzling complexity that it can only be comprehended by mathematically-rigorous adepts (and 'free-market' think-tank snake-oil salesmen). Keep your mouths shut and your noses to the grindstones, you fools. We're in cha
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