@thesotiris 1 May 2026 more from that month

The Labour Day Lie - 1st of May: Socialist/statist gaslighting that forges the chains of slavery

Every 1st of May, you’ll hear some socialist tool squeal with deluded entitlement: “*You owe us for your 8-hour workday!*” And the right-wing isn’t any better. Hear me out. ***“I know there’s no free lunch. But as long as others pay more for it than I do, I’m fine with that.” — The socialist’s mindset*** Statist indoctrination camps preach to their brainwashed pawns that “worker rights” are supposedly the result of the socialist movement. This insane belief carries many disturbing nuances: that the state is somehow this supernatural entity capable of granting us rights, that groveling and praying to this god-state in the form of socialist protests can somehow make it change its mind to our favour, and that the mandatory eight hours for a minimum survival pay are somehow a free man’s privilege, not a slave’s duty. Because, if you’ve ever held a proper job, you’d see that, out of the minimum eight hour the state forces you to stay with your employer — plus expected unpaid overtime the state allows employers to get away with, plus wasteful unpaid lunch breaks, and plus needless commuting for tasks you can easily carry out remotely (so much for the “climate change” scam) — your actual productive time is but a small fraction of that. I understand that in some positions, you are required to cover a shift and stand by. But the 8-hour workday is not the ceiling they gaslight you to think it is — the 8-hour workday is a slave’s bare minimum, with no limit to unpaid overtime and other non-compensated demands by employers. But don’t blame employers; blame their enabler, the apparatus of the state. For all the socialist drivel about “workers’ rights”, one would expect unpaid overtime to be completely extinct. But it isn’t; it actually increases the more the state regulates. Because the more the state intervenes in the economy, the more it suppresses it, the more closures of small competitors occur, the more unemployment and inflation this creates, and the more desperate employees become. Desperate employees are employees who are willing to sell themselves into slavery. This is what employee exploitation is: employees taking a raw deal in a crippled economy. And you can thank the state’s socialist/interventionist policies for employee exploitation. Then socialists have the gall to expect thanks for your chains! Without this rigid, arbitrary number of hours wasted in a day, the free market would get to spontaneously dictate the number of hours and the hourly rate for each job, whether your job is shift-based or task-based. Wasting your whole day for two hours of productive work you could easily perform from home is a monumental waste of life. **The reason you spend most of your life in an office is because of the 8-hour scam, the slaves’ delusion that their chains are a privilege because they could have been even heavier. This is why blind gratitude is a devilish manipulation tactic. Save your gratitude for the few cases that warrant it, not for sweet-talking tyrants.** Oh? I already hear you object: “*Without the 8-hour workday, employers would exploit employees!*” Right? This typical socialist drivel suggests that, without the all-powerful, unaccountable monopoly of the state, then monopolies would rise, and they would somehow exploit employees and customers, the latter of which get to choose not to buy. https://sotiris.substack.com/p/the-dumbest-objections-against-statelessness-4 First off, the more the state regulates, the more markets are monopolised and oligopolised — just look around you. And second, you can’t choose not to pay your taxes when the monopoly of the state abuses you. So how socialists/statists believe the state will look out for them is beyond me. “*Oh, but we control the state through our voting!*” they add. Really? So you accept the free-market dynamic of competition, even more so when you “vote” with your every free transaction, choosing between a multitude of competing vendors. If you believe you control the state through voting between identical candidates already chosen for you in a rigged election every few years, then you accept you can control any business by boycotting, buycotting, and reviewing. Twitter mobs have made the biggest corporations bend the knee, and you still think you need a corrupt state to somehow “control monopolies”? Monopolies exist *because* of the state, which is an apparatus for rent to the highest bidder to regulate in favour of monopolies at the expense of smaller competitors and the economy as a whole. No, in a free competitive market, it’s impossible to exploit your employees or your customers because competition would immediately punish you. If you’ve ever been in the recruiter’s position trying to find good staff to help you make money, you’d know how daunting it is to stalk your competitors’ LinkedIn and perv over their staff — staff that is too good for you. And this occurs even in the tiny amount of free market we have left under these “democratic” socialist governments. The only reason behind employee exploitation is the state itself. You don’t owe anything to the state for your supposed “workers’ rights”. These aren’t workers’ rights; these are slaves’ orders. On Labour Day, you observe and admire the socialists’ psychopathy, celebrating their enslavement and alpha-slave status, expecting unearned gratitude from the rest of us, supposedly for “workers’ rights” and “the 8-hour slave-day”. **Employers see the 8-hour workday as an entitlement, not as a limit**. Even if you finish your daily tasks before 10 am, make tons of money for the company, and there’s nothing else for you to do on that day due to the time-sensitive pipelines, your employer still demands that you stay in the workplace. This is not because you are supposed to work for a maximum of eight hours per day; this is because your employer owns you for a minimum of eight hours a day. This is what the 8-hour workday is. Dance monkeys, dance! People who actually work — unlike socialists on benefits — know that the productive time of most jobs out there is much less than 8 hours a day. Even shift jobs that need to cover a number of hours on standby are mostly that: standing by. Most office or corporate tasks can be done in six hours at the most, with most days requiring up to 2 hours in total to complete all actual tasks. The rest of the time is wasted on small-talk, useless meetings, trips to the office kitchen, and scrolling a screen pretending to work in fear of being made redundant. Labour-intensive jobs like gardening, deliveries, and plumbing are usually charged by the task, not by the hour, and they take either much more or much less than eight hours in a given day, depending on the task at hand. So what good is the 8-hour workweek other than socialist/statist hypocrisy, and a monumentally needless waste of time for jobs that require much, much less than eight hours each day of productivity? And the nature of the jobs is such that you can’t push more work into that 8-hour window. This is because there is downtime and the interdependence of tasks: waiting for customers to respond, colleagues to give you input, supervisors to give you feedforward and feedback, results to come in, meetings to be rescheduled, etc. When you’re part of a huge production network that is multidimensional, you can’t work alone and produce. Even farming, the most traditional hard-labour job, depends on the seasons, with months on end doing minimal labour while waiting for nature to take its course. It’s ridiculous to measure your labour by the time you’re physically in the workplace — the 80/20 rule proves again and again that productivity has nothing to do with time, effort, or even fatigue. You know who measures your output by the time you spend working? Those who are incapable of measuring your output, those who shouldn’t even be in managerial positions to begin with. You can’t produce more by working longer or harder with what you have. You can only produce more with your given resources by working smarter; this is the literal definition of technology from an economic perspective. Most jobs can be done in much, much fewer than eight hours a day. Yet employers force you to stick around because the government grants them this entitlement. They don’t even know why they need you in for a minimum of eight hours, plus a wasted hour each day on an awkward lunch break with people who never chose to be around. Not to mention pointless rush-hour commuting because everyone needs to start and finish work at around the same time. And since employees deludedly believe that the 8-hour workday is a concession by the employers, they gleefully accept eight hours and think this is a good thing. This is a classic case of the grateful slave, the one who is more guilty for enabling slavery in the first place. But is it only eight hours if you take the wasted lunch break in between the two 4-hour work sprints, and the 1-3 hours wasted commuting every day? And don’t forget the unpaid overtime you’re expected to waste just sticking around longer only because your idiotic, inconsiderate boss decided to plan a meeting 20 minutes before you get off work, since he had a 3-hour “business lunch” at 3 pm with his rich, trust-fund buddies. Nobody works only eight hours a day. So what is this 8-hour workday hypocrisy? I don’t know anyone who *only* works eight hours a day, except for useless government employees who brownnose their way to a cozy, useless position, leeching on taxpayers to offer less than zero value to society. If your job’s remuneration can only come from the threat of a gun in the form of forced taxation, then your job is useless: I’m looking at you, government employees. Otherwise, you would have been able to get that pay in the free market. Fact. Granted, the government forcibly takes over and artificially monopolises certain services, so we’re stuck with the state as the only unopposed provider of such services — then we pretend to wonder why everything the state provides is miserable, expensive, and wasteful. But if the 8-hour myth were true — that supposedly the government enforces a hard ceiling of eight hours worked only — then the expectation of unpaid overtime wouldn’t be the norm. Employers would have been terrified of asking or expecting employees to stay even a minute after eight hours of work were completed. **Yet employers aren’t afraid to break the 8-hour workday. Why? Because the 8-hour workday is their entitlement, not their limit.** Sure, some companies go with a 6-hour workweek or grant a certain afternoon off. This goes to show the power of free-market competition, even in a severely unfree market, and competition crippled by state interventionism. But the vast majority won’t think outside of the 8-hour box. Why? Because **the vast majority of employees are foolishly happy with the 8-hour arrangement they have (which is never only 8 hours). If your employee-slaves are happy with your flogging and think flogging is their right, why would you stop flogging them?** Labour Day celebrations are simply a psyop to make slaves believe that their slavery is the best they can get. And it’s working. If the government had not imposed the 8-hour workday entitlement for employers, then there would be no minimum number of hours worked in a day. There wouldn’t be a maximum either, but this is the case now: people work insane numbers of hours per day, and no government steps in. And with a free market allowed to be self-regulated by competition (without government stifling it), there would be no exploitation. Socialist propaganda about employee exploitation isn’t convincing anymore. Employee exploitation is the result of government interventionism and favouritism. Pretty rich for socialists to claim to speak for employees with fully **socialist states always descend into gulags, prison camps, and paranoid secret “services”**. Without the delusion of the 8-hour workday as the minimum for a survival wage, employees would be asking for less time and more money. Try to ask for a couple of hours less a week than a raise, and see what happens. It’s like we’re all stuck like a broken record — 8 hours! This is paralysis by government Oh? You object? Don’t give me the Oliver Twist and David Copperfield straw man fallacy, and how employers used to exploit desperate workers and orphans for slave work. Yes, exploitation will always exist. But the reason governments stepped in to “regulate” the workforce in the first place was the fact that there was already public outcry. And the free market was already beginning to punish those who exploited workers. The fact that those Charles Dickens and others’ novels were written and were embraced by audiences serves as a testament to the public’s sentiment on the matter. But the state always steps in to take the credit when the free market already begins to work, so that the government takes the credit to stay relevant. Environmental policy, the indoor smoking ban, and health standards like HACCP are all recent examples of the free market beginning to regulate itself *before* government steps in to take all the credit: credit for spontaneous order that had already emerged in a free, decentralised manner. This is most infuriating. And it’s not like government regulation is effective or manages to regulate all participants in the economy. You only need to look at the drug ban for that. Because when drugs are banned, they retreat into the black market, and thus, private standards cannot emerge. This is why street drugs are low quality and full of contaminants that are the main cause of drug overdoses. Didn’t we learn anything from the prohibition era when people died from moonshine? And then there are the drug gangs that exist solely because of reckless government intervention. Black markets mean risk, so fewer suppliers ask for high prices. Since they are already operating in the dark without leveraging social standing and reputation, they are free to use violence against each other and against innocent people. Thank the government for drug-related violence. Instead, just like when the alcohol prohibition was lifted in the States, crime will drastically be reduced when drugs become legal. Yes, all drugs. Some people just need to be high. It’s their choice. If a free market, regulated by free-market competition alone, can provide better quality, better-controlled, more accessible drugs, then users will do their thing and leave us all alone. Most importantly, drug legalisation will protect children. No legal drug business would be willing to sell to children and aggravate their community and clientele. This is how private standards emerge spontaneously: competition. And there would be no street dealers trying to spike children, just like you don’t see street dealers selling cigarettes, alcohol, or candy to children. This is because cigarettes, alcohol, and candy are legal. If it’s legal and available, but not for children, there is little incentive for anyone to sell through a black market to children. And good parents can easily protect their children from those bad influences, as long as the parents aren’t forced to abandon their children to the child-prison of state schooling, where innocent kids are forced to mingle with the traumatised, anti-social kids of the worst people in society. https://sotiris.substack.com/p/how-school-damaged-your-mental-health-f86 The takeaway here is not to mistake your slavery for privilege. When you’re on welfare, and you thank your slave master for the scraps he throws at you from the wealth of labour and opportunity it stole from you, you become a willing participant in slavery. Similarly, when you think the 8-hour workday is somehow a “right” and not oppression, then again, you are consenting to being enslaved. And this would have been fine if you weren’t complaining about how bad your life was. Complaining means you have higher standards, and you don’t really want to be a slave. **You are just so hopelessly brainwashed that you can’t differentiate between a chain holding you down and a rope leading you to freedom; you only need to grab it and pull.** A quick economics lesson: The more the state intervenes in the economy, the less optimal the economy becomes. State interventionism decelerates money velocity and thus suppresses the economy below its potential capacity, given its available means of production. This means less aggregate demand, fewer jobs, and greater wealth gaps. The economy can never achieve its full potential under statism. Unemployment and inflation are inalienable symptoms of centralised government (the state). Only through the organic self-regulation of a free market can the resources of a given community reach their full economic output. https://sotiris.substack.com/p/the-most-tragic-misunderstanding https://sotiris.substack.com/p/reading-lists What’s worse is the state regulating the labour market, with supposedly “labour rights” making it **harder for employers to fire, but also to hire**. Let’s not forget how **“licensing” deliberately creates artificial oligopolies and monopolies, killing competition, causing economic inefficiency (unemployment and inflation), and deliberately creating wealth gaps**: But this is why we want the state in the first place, right?.. to hijack it to help us walk over others. https://sotiris.substack.com/p/the-corrupt-voter **The only regulation of the economy we need is an even playing field where anyone can compete fairly, and where consumers and employees alike have many options to choose from.**