ABSTRACT
Future legislation is equally unlikely to extend to improvements in the quality of work, even though variety and choice in one’s job are known to have positive effects on one’s leisure. The politics of free-time legislation is inextricably caught up in the struggle between labor and capital for a share of expanding productivity and for security during economic slowdown. Two leisure trends, much debated in the postwar period because their continuance promises to have profound effects on the relation between politics and leisure. In the ‘command economies’ of the modern communist world, the future of the relation between leisure and politics is equally hard to anticipate: Communist regimes such as those in Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia and, more recently, the Soviet Union oscillate between the poles of extreme repression and cautious tolerance when it comes to cultural expression.
