Fun is something that, by its very essence, should be free. Marx states that the worker should be able to do their work in several hours, leaving the rest of their day to hunt, fish, or otherwise enjoy their time, but in this current capitalist paradigm, the gatekeeping of leisure from the proletariat has become even more severe. The commodification of fun runs rampant throughout Capitalist society, and this is a major problem. Gone are the days of free (or even affordable) fun, where we could entertain ourselves without having to pay a figurative arm and a leg. We must examine what has happened within society that brought us to this point, where we must pay our hard earned wages to simply enjoy ourselves. It may come as a surprise to some, but not all, that fun itself has been limited by the Capitalist system we live in. 

Firstly, we must examine how the time spent by workers has shifted to this backbreaking, monotonous schema. It is the peak of irony that if we were to look at the lives of the pre-industrial peasant, we would see a combination of rigorous work as well as the paradoxical ease of play. The peasant would have a large amount of free time, especially once the work day was over, to enjoy themselves in many free ways. While it would be remiss to idealize the life of a medieval peasant, it shows how intensely focused on commodities and profits the system of Capitalism is required to be in order to maintain profits. The peasant would, so the saying goes, have as many holidays as they would have work days. While this isn’t exactly true, it shows how much free time the peasant was allowed to have under the feudal mode of production. Peasants were expected to work hard to make the lives of the aristocracy easier, but the aristocracy knew that if they were to create a system where there would be no free time for the peasant, the entire feudal system would fall apart in rebellion.

This, however, was not due to the charitable nature of the aristocracy. The nobles of Europe knew that, along with the very obvious reason that backbreaking work would simply kill their serfs, that the allowance for fun would provide distractions and diversions for the peasant, which would give the illusion of freedom. Fun is, for all intents and purposes, a distraction from the pain felt through work. Work itself, especially work done to profit someone else and not society as a whole (including the worker themselves) tends to require some variety of punishment in order to see it done. This punishment came in the form of taxes and literal imprisonment, where the peasant would be forced to work, else they would become destitute and confined in a dungeon, where they would rot away until they were convinced that their work must be done. This isn’t even to mention the torture often involved, simply because a worker would want a break from the work they’re forced to do.

This system of punishment was broken up, however, by the very real implementation of cultural rest periods, or the siesta, which was a Catholic practice that was lost in the conversion of much of Europe to the Protestant persuasion. Siestas were, and still are, popular in much of the Catholic world, but they are fading fast, as the modern Capitalist system forces workers to sacrifice their, quite literal, God-given rests in the name of making a larger profit for their corporate overlords. The tendency of profits to fall over time requires capitalist firms to squeeze their workers for ever more productivity, to the point where any sort of rest is intolerable. Even in Spain, the origin and bastion of the siesta, the practice is dying out in favor of the minimal lunch break.

With the advent of Protestantism, and further, the bourgeois revolutions, the concept of the God-given break had gone to the wayside. No longer would the peasant be allowed to spend an hour or two napping to break up the monotony of work. Now they were expected to work throughout the day to fulfill their new God’s desire for more profits. Calvinism, and in turn, the rest of the Protestant varieties, would put emphasis on the godly work ethic in service of worldly masters (it should be noted that the word “boss” comes from the Dutch word for master), which would put an end to sanctioned rest, something that was now sinful idleness. It comes to no surprise that this shift would also coincide with the increase of production seen during this time. Protestant states would develop much quicker than the Catholic ones, who would still keep true to the siesta. This would coalesce into the Bourgeois revolutions. These revolutions would be championed by the business owners of society, who would rather see the Capitalist system which enriched them become paramount over the feudal system which left them as secondary actors in the economy. Fun would become secondary as well, as this new mode of production would see to it that all, Bourgeois elements as well as the new-founded proletarian elements, would work for God’s favor.

To skip to the Industrial Revolution, we as a society saw the advent of the timed shift, and the rising need for labor not bound by any annual cycle of seasons. Work was no longer regulated by the time of day, or any natural phenomenon that did not bow to bourgeois demands for labor. Instead, work done by the hour, minute, and second would take primacy. The shift clock would all but destroy the concept of free time, where the worker was expected to work, to the very second, the entire waking day (yes, the whole day-the 8 hour shift being a relatively novel gain for the workers). This would see massive increases of profit for the bourgeoisie, but held very little benefit for the workers themselves, as they were paid an extremely small amount compared to the massively increased labor they would provide to the capitalist. This would, ultimately, cut into the free time of the worker in the most diabolical of ways. Workers would spend roughly half, if not more, of their days working, leaving almost no time for their families, their leisure, or anything else in the name of the capitalist’s coin purse.

It was in replication of the feudal system that breaks and leisure time were added back into the days of the worker, but this was not something many capitalists took as a good thing. Many robber barons would decry this lessening of time worked as detrimental to their bottom line, begrudging the worker their small moments of unprofitable idleness. They fought against this development with tooth and nail, but, in the slow crawl of progressive liberalism which held back the biting threat of Socialism, the work days would be shortened. Despite themselves, the capitalist would ultimately learn that this allowance would stymie the ever-growing desire for Socialism, again, through distractions and diversions. Slowly but surely, the threat of this ever-looming Socialist specter would push the work day to shorter and shorter durations.

This would bring us to the introduction and primacy of automation, which, as we have covered before, is something that should not, but is, feared by the worker under this capitalist paradigm. Automation should be the force that drives the work day ever-shorter, but instead of this, it is only forcing workers to work even harder to either keep up with the tide of machines or find oneself in the dangerous uncertainty of unemployment, ultimately to the point of obsolescence for many workers in the industrial sector. The push for automation should have lowered the amount of work that a laborer must do to produce the same amount of goods, which would, in turn, give them more time to enjoy their lives, but this is simply not the case. Even in the middle of the 20^th century, Amadeo Bordiga, in his essay Who’s Afraid of Automation?, speaks on this, saying that the correct Marxist view on the automation process should be to cheer, but in actuality, the process is only causing more strife for the worker. It, instead of making life easier, is only making the working class’s life more difficult to find work.

This brings us to the present day, where the very idea of fun is being commodified and sold back to the working class at ever-expanding prices. Take, for example, the festivals and fairs that were once free to all. They are now exorbitantly expensive to attend, just to listen to live music or partake in a paltry carnival game. It was once expected that the bread and circuses of ancient Rome would be free to all who attended, and the costs be absorbed by the state, something which kept plebeian agitation at bay. But now, we see distractions and diversions being sold to us, just like other necessary goods, like food and water. Another example of this would be the ever-present video game, which were once easily affordable for all, at the price of one quarter, to play in a communal space, where people would meet and enjoy themselves together. Now, we see the video game cost upwards of an entire day’s, if not more, worth of wages for many, and many of these public spaces either shut down or heavily policed to deliberately prevent younger people from enjoying them. Not only this, but the very idea of paying even more for “deluxe editions” and other small perks, from cosmetic skins to play-to-win abilities, is now the norm as capitalist game studios have striven to perfect the drip-feed extraction of the worker’s money through “live service” games.

We must also speak on the third space, or a place where people would meet to socialize and enjoy themselves in a low-cost way. These spaces have evaporated from society, leaving only empty malls, arcades, and other places where people once met to have fun. The third space is now but only a pipe dream, with cheap, no, expensive ghosts to take their place. We see events billed for the community that cost hundreds, if not thousands in rare cases, of dollars to attend. Take the humble block party, for example. They have all but disappeared from the American cultural giest, replaced by almost nothing, besides perhaps the useless and counter-productive attempts at fusing activism with fun, such as the numerous protests we’ve seen against the current Trump Regime.

In the end, we will prevail, and fun will once again be in the hands of the people. It would be all for naught if Communism was without the circuses and festivals we as humans are accustomed to. Every distraction and diversion present in the human past will be available under a worker’s regime, and we welcome it with open arms. It would be a useless endeavor if Communism was to be boring, or worse, filled solely with work. It might be the call of many of Capitalism’s supporters that Socialism has been nothing but a bore, but we fight against this. We will bring the joy of the world back to it, one festival and fair at a time.