The End of History

«The Marxist realm of freedom is, in effect, the four-hour working day: that is, a society so productive that man's labor in the morning can satisfy all of his natural needs and those of his family and fellows, leaving him the afternoon and evening to be a hunter, or a poet, or a critic. In a way, real-world communist societies like the Soviet Union or the forme r German Democratic Republic achieved this realm of freedom, since few people put in more than four hours of honest work a day. But the remainder of their time was seldom spent writing poems or criticism, since this could promptly land them in jail; it was spent waiting on line, drinking, or scheming for the opportunity to take a vacation in a crowded sanitarium on a polluted beach. But if the "necessary labor time" required to satisfy basic physical needs was four hours on average for workers in socialist societies, it was on the orde r of an hour or two for corresponding capitalist societies, and the six or seven hours of "surplus labor" time that rounded out the working day did not go only into the pockets of capitalists, but allowed workers to buy cars and washing machines, barbecues and campers. Whethe r this constituted a "realm of freedom" in any meaningful sense was another matter, but an American worker was far more fully liberated from the "realm of necessity" than his Soviet counterpart.»

Francis Fukuyama (The End of History and the Last Man, 1992)