I heard that back in the days, people used to just go when their work was done on the farms and there was no concept of 9-5 (these days seem 24 hours work). There used to be a lot of holidays. Is that true? If it is, then given the abundance in technology, why our work hours increased and why do we have such weird lives that we live to work?
A lot of it is cultural. Capitalism continues to exploit people not just because of the machinations of a few people at the top, but also because there are many people who have so deeply internalised the logic of capitalism that they are reinforce and perpetuate their own oppression.
A phrase that I’ve found really useful in understanding this is “cultural hegemony”. This theory was originally developed in the early 1900s by the Marxist philosopher, Antonio Gramsci. It’s a pretty dense bit of political theory that I don’t feel like I understand well enough to explain well, but I’ll attempt to give the gist of it
The key thing about cultural hegemony is that it makes the dominant political ideology seem like it’s natural and inevitable. We see this when people recognise the awfulness of their working or living conditions, but then shrug it off by saying “that’s just life”. They can’t imagine any alternative. I see it a lot in my daily life when people see the crafts I make and say “wow, that’s so good, you should sell those” — people are conditioned to only see value in terms of monetary value.
To sum up hegemony, the latent ideas of society, or “common sense,” is ruling class ideology. Ideology is presented and maintained through bourgeois intellectuals, such as the education system, media, etc. Gramsci’s counter is the development of a proletarian party, which creates proletarian intellectuals that can disseminate proletarian ideology, Marxism-Leninism (Gramsci was ML).
To expand, the greater idea is that we are all philosophers, whether we understand our own philosophy, or world outlook, or not. Common sense is a world outlook, and living in capitalism without consciously understanding that how we live in it shapes what we actually believe leads to upholding capitalism. This is the importance of dialectical materialism, it eliminates the bourgeois-friendly idealism and mechanical materialism that plague modern thought, and logically leads to proletarian emancipation.
I am South Asian and that “that’s just life or fate” attitude is common where I live.