5-hours day - Theses on reduction in working hours

6-10

6

We speak of the "revolution of the 5-hour day" because it can only be fought for by revolutionary means on a world scale and then fully realised under the conditions of world socialism.

The 5-hour day must be conquered by the world proletariat itself.

The working class must therefore firstly oppose those forces that spread the reformist illusions that the realisation of the 5-hour day is already possible under world capitalism.

Secondly, the working class regards as harmful the view that it is supposedly not worth fighting for the 5-hour day under capitalism and that we need only wait for world socialism instead.

Nothing has ever fallen into the lap of the working class on its own. Without the sweat and blood of the workers - without sacrifices in the struggle - there will be no 5-hour day.

7

The application of Lenin's tactics and forms of struggle to the 5-hour day:

It is not enough to be a revolutionary fighter for the 5-hour day or for the reduction of working time in general.

"One must know how to find at every moment that particular link in the chain which must be grasped with all one's strength in order to hold the whole chain and prepare the transition to the next link with a firm hand, whereby the order of the links, their form, their concatenation, their difference from one another in the historical chain of events are not as simple and not as simple as in an ordinary chain made by a blacksmith." (Lenin Werke, Volume 27, page 265, German edition)

It is not for nothing that the world proletariat goes through the daily hard school of an exhausting, long working day. It is not a question of what this or that proletarian or even the whole proletariat imagines for the time being as the goal of the reduction of labour time. It is rather a question of what it is and what it will be forced to do historically in accordance with this being.

(according Marx, MEW, Volume 2, page 38, German edition)

Without a reduction of labour time there can be no liberation of the world proletariat from the fetters of world capitalism.

8

The control of disposal over our working time is not limited to individual countries. That is why we must get it into our hands on a global scale.

Without the struggle of the sections for the 5-hour day in their own country, there will be no 5-hour day on a global scale.

It is the duty of the sections to draw practical conclusions from the theses on the 5-hour day and to fight for the 5-hour day in their own countries in co-operation with the Red Trade Union International.

9

We include the lower working hours in the Soviet Union and Albania here because they were an expression of the superiority of socialism over the capitalist countries. World socialism as we plan it, however, is a restoration of the historically first period of socialism on a higher scale.

The reduction in working hours of the 5-hour day in world socialism therefore goes far beyond the working hours of socialism in "one" country, which were laid down by law at the time.