The most horrible thing about being in the USA is the lack of holidays. We are always working. They can’t have us traveling or having any time to think.

The contrast between capitalist and precapitalist work patterns is most striking in respect to the working year. The medieval calendar was filled with holidays. Official—that is, church—holidays included not only long ‘vacations’ at Christmas, Easter, and midsummer but also numerous saints’ and rest days. They were spent in sober churchgoing and in feasting, drinking, and merrymaking. In addition to official celebrations, there were often weeks’ worth of ales-to mark important life events (bride ales or wake ales) as well as less momentous occasions (scot ale, lamb ale, and hock ale). All told, holiday leisure time in medieval England took up probably about one third of the year. And the English were apparently working harder than their neighbors. The ancient regime in France is reported to have guaranteed fifty-two Sundays, ninety rest days, and thirty-eight holidays. In Spain, travelers noted that holidays totaled five months per year.

yet I’m told as a modern American that I should be happy to get 5 weeks of vacation a year.

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and theres this

The degradation which most workers experience on the job is the sum of assorted indignities which can be denominated as ‘discipline.’…Discipline consists of the totality of totalitarian controls at the workplace—surveillance, rotework, imposed work tempos, production quotas, punching-in and out, etc. Discipline is what the factory and the office and the store share with the prison and the school and the mental hospital. It is something historically original and horrible. It was beyond the capacities of such demonic dictators of yore as Nero and Genghis Khan and Ivan the Terrible. For all their bad intentions they just didn’t have the machinery to control their subjects as thoroughly as modern despots do.