Victorian Trades Hall is the oldest continuously operating trades hall in the world. And even before it was constructed, in 1856, the stonemasons and building workers of Melbourne downed their tools and marched for the eight-hour day — eight hours of labor, eight hours of recreation, and eight hours of rest. For a while, this city was the closest thing the nineteenth century had to a model of what an organized working class could wring out of capital.

I mention it not to flatter you but because that slogan — eight, eight, and eight — is still relevant today. It wasn’t a basic reformist demand; it was a revolutionary claim about what a human life is for. And I want to argue that the whole socialist project is, in the end, a fight over that question.

Historically, our socialist movement could be said to have done three things within a broader workers’ movement. First, it gave an agitational account of the crimes of capitalism and imperialism, to remind people about the daily realities of the system we were confronting. Second, it gave us a vision of a world after capitalism. And third — the part that set the socialist movement apart from our anarchist comrades — it provided a compelling account of how to get from here to there.