Leisure to Attend to Our Spiritual Business (updated to include link to published article)

 Abstract (pdf available here)

Time is central to Martin Hägglund’s discussion of secular faith and spiritual freedom. Time is precisely what is finite in this life and presides over the relationships we value and our risk of losing them. Hägglund adopted the notion of disposable time from Karl Marx’s Grundrisse and reframed it as the more descriptive socially available free time. Following Marx, Hägglund advocates the revaluation of values so that socially available free time would become the measure of value rather than socially necessary labour time.

A close examination of the origin of Marx’s analysis of disposable time suggests that questions of faith and freedom were inherent in the concept as it was expressed in the 1821 pamphlet, The Source and Remedy of the National Difficulties that influenced Marx, in the writings of William Godwin that inspired the 1821 pamphlet, and ultimately in theological views on the doctrine of the calling that Godwin secularized in his pioneering advocacy of leisure as a universal human right.

Marx’s innovation was to show that the creation of disposable time is the basis of all wealth. Under capitalism, disposable time is expropriated in the form of surplus labour time, thereby inverting the relationship between necessary and superfluous labour time — the superfluous becomes necessary (for capital) and the necessary superfluous. Marx’s analysis of the inversion of necessary and superfluous labour time bears close resemblance to Ludwig Feuerbach’s critique in The Essence of Christianity, which had influenced the early Marx, of the inversion of collective humanity and the divine.

Book proposal: Marx’s Fetters and the Realm of Freedom: a remedial reading -- part 3

Marx revealed the dark secret of classical political economy: that the writers in that tradition assumed the ubiquity of a distinctive economic sphere that was, in fact, unique to and characteristic of capital. To them capitalism was eternal and earlier forms of society were simply incomplete in their striving toward the absolute. By breaking with that tradition, Marx was able to more completely grasp the dynamic of capital accumulation and crisis.

Marx had a theory of crisis and of the dynamics of capital accumulation already in the late 1840s but his mature theory hinges on the distinction between labour and labour power or capacity that he didn't develop until the next decade. When his "Wage Labour and Capital" was republished by Friedrich Engels in 1891, Engels "updated" it by altering Marx's references to the sale of labour to conform with his later distinction of labour power. But Marx's 1847 critique was not the same as his mature critique of political economy, which only fully materialized in his Grundrisse notebooks.

Here's where Sandwichman's focus on The Source and Remedy comes into play. My contention is that Marx's 1857 understanding of labour capacity and surplus value owes a good deal to Dilke's discussion from 1821, with one crucial distinction that Marx outlined in his 1862-63 notebooks, published posthumously as Theories of Surplus Value: 

Our pamphleteer [Dilke] overlooks two things:

As a result of the introduction of machinery, a mass of workers is constantly being thrown out of employment, a section of the population is thus made redundant; the surplus product therefore finds fresh labour for which it can be exchanged without any increase in population and without any need to extend the absolute working-time. 

Two things: 1. machinery creates a redundant population of workers; 2. this surplus population supplies the labour power for new investments of capital. Machinery thus creates "new" labour power by throwing people out of work. Voila!

In the Grundrisse, Marx presented this same argument in more detail on pages 398-99 (Penguin edition) after having prefaced it with a composite quote from The Source and Remedy on page 397.

Just as capital on one side creates surplus labour, surplus labour is at the same time equally the presupposition of the existence of capital. The whole development of wealth rests on the creation of disposable time. The relation of necessary labour time to the superfluous (such it is, initially, from the standpoint of necessary labour) changes with the different stages in the development of the productive forces. In the less productive stages of exchange, people exchange nothing more than their superfluous labour time; this is the measure of their exchange, which therefore extends only to superfluous products. In production resting on capital, the existence of necessary labour time is conditional on the creation of superfluous labour time. …

…

It is a law of capital, as we saw, to create surplus labour, disposable time; it can do this only by setting necessary labour in motion - i.e. entering into exchange with the worker. It is its tendency, therefore, to create as much labour as possible; just as it is equally its tendency to reduce necessary labour to a minimum. It is therefore equally a tendency of capital to increase the labouring population, as well as constantly to posit a part of it as surplus population - population which is useless until such time as capital can utilize it. (Hence the correctness of the theory of surplus population and surplus capital.) It is equally a tendency of capital to make human labour (relatively) superfluous, so as to drive it, as human labour, towards infinity. Value is nothing but objectified labour, and surplus value (realization of capital) is only the excess above that part of objectified labour which is necessary for the reproduction of labouring capacity. But labour as such is and remains the presupposition, and surplus labour exists only in relation with the necessary, hence only in so far as the latter exists. Capital must therefore constantly posit necessary labour in order to posit surplus labour; it has to multiply it (namely the simultaneous working days) in order to multiply the surplus; but at the same time it must suspend them as necessary, in order to posit them as surplus labour. 

Two spreads in my pop-up book, Marx's Fetters, encompass the theory of crisis Marx developed in his Grundrisse notebook IV. Page Five incorporates two quotes from page 398 of the Grundrisse:

On pages 415-416 of the Grundrisse, Marx enumerated the limits to the accumulation of surplus value that capital repeatedly runs up against, overcomes, forgets, and then encounters again in the successive cycles of prosperity, boom, crisis, and depression. Page Eight of Marx's Fetters quotes from page 415 of the Grundrisse:

Marx's discussion continues on until page 423 but the climax description of the crisis is on pages 415-416. These four points were the "rather cryptic theses" that Martin Nicolaus wrote it "would require a book" to present "a proper analysis of the implications of..." and that "represent no more than different aspects of the contradiction between ‘forces of production’ and ‘social relations of production’."

In Capital, Marx described the relationship between surplus population and crisis succinctly, reiterating those "two things" our pamphleteer overlooked:

The path characteristically described by modern industry, which takes the form of a decennial cycle (interrupted by smaller oscillations) of periods of average activity, production at high pressure, crisis, and stagnation, depends on the constant formation, the greater or less absorption, and the re-formation of the industrial reserve army or surplus population. In their turn, the varying phases of the industrial cycle recruit the surplus population, and become one of the most energetic agencies for its reproduction.

A funny thing happened to "disposable time" on the way from Grundrisse to Capital -- it became, sarcastically, the rightful property of the capitalist:

If the worker consumes his disposable time for himself, he robs the capitalist.

... 

Hence it is self-evident that the worker is nothing other than labour-power for the duration of his whole life, and that therefore all his disposable time is by nature and by right labour-time, to be devoted to the self-valorization of capital.

...just as a surplus population also "belongs to capital" in the form of a disposable industrial reserve:

But a surplus population of workers is a necessary product of accumulation or of the development of wealth on a capitalist basis, this surplus population also becomes, conversely, the lever of capitalist accumulation, indeed it becomes a condition for the existence of the capitalist mode of production. It forms a disposable industrial reserve army, which belongs to capital just as absolutely as if the latter had bred it at its own cost.

And guess what. This is pretty much what Uno Kōzō argued was Marx's theory in The Theory of Crisis! Recall that I left off the previous post with the following paragraph:

This is true, for example, of "socially necessary labour time," which incorporates within itself the inversion of the necessary and the superfluous, so that "socially necessary" is at once both "necessary" and "superfluous." That is to say it expresses the essential contradiction of the concept.

Necessary and superfluous? One might as well say indispensable and disposable as Gavin Walker and Ken Kawashima termed it in their essay "Surplus Alongside Excess: Uno Kōzō, Imperialism, and the Theory of Crisis" reproduced (with the order of the authors reversed) as a supplementary essay, "Uno Kōzō’s Theory of Crisis Today" in Kawashima's translation of The Theory of Crisis. I have copied that section below:

Labor-power as the “Indispensably Disposable” Commodity

One of the most important problems that characterizes and distinguishes Uno’s theory of crisis from the broad field of texts in the history of Marxist theory devoted to the issue of crisis, is his insistence on the meaning and complexity behind the phrase “the commodification of labor-power.” For Uno, this phrase is the key to the entirety of Marx’s work, but also the pivotal element in a capitalist commodity economy itself. Around this phrase an entire series of problems and relations are concentrated: the logic of capital and history of capitalist development, the origin of capital and its repetition, the inside and outside of capital as a social relation, and the peculiar dynamics by which these instances are inverted into each other. But Uno also adds to this phrase a singularly complex concept, one that is deceptive in its apparent simplicity. This is what Uno referred to as the muri, the (im)possibility, the impasse, the excess, the irrationality, the absence of reason, the forced nature of the commodification of labor-power.

In this peculiar turn of phrase, Uno specifies that capitalist production, which attempts to form a pure circle of inputs and outputs, always contains this muri as something that is “passing through” the entire circuit. But this muri is also an exceptionally polyvalent term: the commodification of labor-power is also treated by Uno as itself the particularly (im)possible phenomenon of capitalism, because as Nagahara Yutaka and others have suggested, capital requires certain degrees of force or forcing in order to undertake the “indirect” production of this thing that marks capital’s fundamental Achilles’ Heel and allows it to compensate for it. Therefore, we should immediately note something important – this muri identified by Uno in no way suggests that somehow capitalism is grounded in something “truly impossible” or that it secretly “doesn’t work.” It means, in fact, the exact opposite. Capital works because of the dynamism and tension that exists in this peculiar space, wherein labor-power cannot be directly produced (a barrier that should be absolute) and yet this Achilles’ Heel tends to be overcome by means of the form of population.

We have attempted on a number of other occasions to develop this concept of muri, a term that indicates a deep and complex field of problems. For the time being we will simply note that this term points toward crucial linkages between the theory of crisis and the general broad concerns of Marxist theory. It indicates, for instance, the (im)possible closure of Marx’s theoretical exposition of the logic of capitalist accumulation, signifying the possibility and impossibility to assume the closure of the logical circle that capitalist reproduction represents; it reveals the necessary historical contamination of the logic, a structure in which capital must foreclose itself as a sphere of rationality, only paradoxically, on the basis of a “nihil of reason” on – and through –  which the fundamental principles of capitalist commodity economy rest and cannot but dwell.

Further, when we think of labor-power as a commodity in relation to the cyclical nature of capitalist crisis, we are presented with its double and contradictory nature. In the phase of prosperity, labor-power is the most indispensable commodity, for no other commodity can produce new values within capitalist production. Yet, once this indispensable commodity is consumed in the course of capital’s circuit-process, capitalist production is already on the way towards an outbreak of crisis at the zenith of prosperity, which is also to say that once labor-power is consumed in production as the most indispensable commodity, capitalist prosperity is already moving in the direction of capitalist recession, during which labor-power now transforms into the opposite phenomenon, namely into the most disposable commodity in the phase of recession. This is why labor-power appears as the contradictory embodiment of being indispensably disposable. What Uno calls the muri is a formulation that expresses the conceptual dynamics of how labor-power could exist as both indispensable and disposable in the same space and time.

Ken Kawashima gives an introduction to Uno's theory in the following video: o

 

Book proposal: Marx’s Fetters and the Realm of Freedom: a remedial reading -- part 2.9

The return of disposable time: time filled with the presence of the now

Framing the revolution as being about disposable time brings Marx closer to Walter Benjamin’s remark about revolution being “the act by which the human race traveling in the train applies the emergency brake.” Benjamin’s “On the concept of history” was composed in the wake of Benjamin’s despair at the Hitler-Stalin pact that sealed his disillusionment with the Soviet Union along with the interpretation of historical materialism as a story of progress. “Why should we be the very generation with the luck to experience redemption?” Benjamin asked his friend Soma Morgenstern in 1939. 

One of Benjamin’s draft theses that didn’t make it to his final draft, the notion of revolution as an emergency brake to stop the runaway locomotive of history, has become axiomatic. In the subsequent omitted thesis, Benjamin criticized Marx’s notion that the classless society would come as the result of historical progress: “But classless society is not to be conceived as the endpoint of historical development. From this erroneous conception Marx's epigones have derived (among other things) the notion of the ‘revolutionary situation,’ which, as we know, has always refused to arrive.” 

In yet another draft thesis, Benjamin praised Marx for secularizing “the idea of messianic time.” Benjamin could not have known of Marx’s discussion of disposable time in the Grundrisse. Benjamin was concerned with “time filled with the presence of the now” as opposed to the “homogeneous empty time” that characterized the concept of historical progress. This chapter will explore the possibility of a fruitful dialogue between Marx’s – and Dilke’s – disposable time and Benjamin’s now time (Jetztzeit).

Book proposal: Marx’s Fetters and the Realm of Freedom: a remedial reading -- part 2.8

A nation is really rich if the working day is 6 hours rather than twelve.

In “The Trinity Formula,” in chapter 48 of volume 3 of Capital, Marx returned to the contradiction between the forces and relations of production. This time, however, it was not to deplore or analyze the fetters but to examine the realm of freedom that would become possible when “socialized man, the associated producers, govern the human metabolism with nature in a rational way, bringing it under their collective control instead of being dominated by it as a blind power.” This governance of the metabolism with nature would constitute the realm of necessity upon which the true realm of freedom can flourish. “The reduction of the working day is the basic prerequisite.”

Marx’s “prerequisite” echoes his draft of the resolution on the limitation of the working day of the International Working Men’s Association and remarks on the Ten Hour Bill in his Inaugural Address to the International. It also resonates with the “fine statement” from The Source and Remedy that Marx lingered over fondly in Theories of Surplus Value:

…where men heretofore laboured twelve hours they would now labour six, and this is national wealth, this is national prosperity. After all their idle sophistry, there is, thank God! no means of adding to the wealth of a nation but by adding to the facilities of living: so that wealth is liberty-- liberty to seek recreation--liberty to enjoy life--liberty to improve the mind: it is disposable time, and nothing more. Whenever a society shall have arrived at this point, whether the individuals that compose it, shall, for these six hours, bask in the sun, or sleep in the shade, or idle, or play, or invest their labour in things with which it perishes, which last is a necessary consequence if they will labour at all, ought to be in the election of every man individually.

Book proposal: Marx’s Fetters and the Realm of Freedom: a remedial reading -- part 2.7

The revolutionary class

“The working class is either revolutionary or it is nothing,” Marx wrote to German politician J.B. von Schweitzer and copied “word for word” in a letter to Engels. In The Manifesto of the Communist Party, Marx and Engels wrote “the proletariat alone is a really revolutionary class.” Marx cited that statement in a footnote at the very end of the penultimate chapter of volume 1 of Capital. Without denying the plausibility of other, canonical, interpretation of the revolutionary working class, there is one clear definition given by Marx in the Grundrisse that has escaped notice as a definition of the revolutionary working class:

The more this contradiction develops, the more does it become evident that the growth of the forces of production can no longer be bound up with the appropriation of alien labour, but that the mass of workers must themselves appropriate their own surplus labour. Once they have done so – and disposable time thereby ceases to have an antithetical existence – then, on one side, necessary labour time will be measured by the needs of the social individual, and, on the other, the development of the power of social production will grow so rapidly that, even though production is now calculated for the wealth of all, disposable time will grow for all. (emphasis in original)

The first sentence is a compact version of Marx’s famous statement about fetters on the forces of production and reprises what he had said two pages earlier about the contradiction between the forces and relations of production. In Capital and in his work with the International, Marx repeatedly referred to the limitation of the working day as a preliminary condition or basic prerequisite for the emancipation of the working class.

Book proposal: Marx’s Fetters and the Realm of Freedom: a remedial reading -- part 2.6

From sufficiency to planned obsolescence… and back?

In the Grundrisse, Karl Marx argued that capital’s response to the barrier to increasing production posed by satiated consumption took three paths: promoting greater consumption of existing products, expanding markets for existing products to new territories, and creating new needs through the “discovery and creation of new use values.” In the twentieth century, with the help of advertising and marketing, capital has added a fourth method: create new needs through the premature destruction of old use values by planned obsolescence. These methods allow capital to “ideally get beyond” the barrier to production posed by consumption but can’t really overcome the fundamental contradiction that “real wealth has to take on a specific form distinct from itself, a form not absolutely identical with it, in order to become an object of production at all.”

In “Political Ecology: Expertocracy versus Self-Limitation,” André Gorz argued that capitalism has swept away everything “that might serve as anchorage for a common norm of sufficiency, and has abolished at the same time the prospect that choosing to work and consume less might give access to a better freer life.” Gorz viewed the obstacles to re-establishing a norm of sufficiency as not insurmountable if approached as a social project rather than an individual choice, “The norm of sufficiency, deprived of its traditional mooring, has to be defined politically.”

Book proposal: Marx’s Fetters and the Realm of Freedom: a remedial reading -- part 2.5

 Pauperism and “minus-labour”

“It is already contained in the concept of the free labourer, that he is a pauper…“

Pauperism and surplus population play brief but strategic roles in the Grundrisse, appearing in the three fragments on pages 397-423, 604-610, and 704-711, respectively, that all deal with the inverted relationship between necessary labour and the superfluous – the first and third fragments also revolving around disposable time. These two themes – or two moments of the same theme – return with a vengeance in the climactic chapter 25 of Capital, volume 1, “The General Law of Capitalist Accumulation.”

Closely related to pauperism, at least analytically, is unproductive labour, which Marx gives fleeting attention to in the Grundrisse and relegates to the unpublished “Chapter Six” of Capital. Marx’s “does not belong here” footnote, however, hints at a more prominent role for servant work as a companion to the reserve army, in that, “the creation of surplus labour on the one side corresponds to the creation of minus-labour, relative idleness (or not-productive labour at best), on the other.” In The Source and Remedy, Dilke identified the expansion of the “unproductive classes” as one of the two primary methods by which capital avoided a terminal reduction of the rate of return on investment. Thomas Chalmers celebrated the role of this “disposable population” as a measure of national prosperity. Marx, however, never fully articulated the relationship between the disposable population of servants and the disposable reserve army of the unemployed. Chapter 52 of volume 3 of Capital begins a discussion of classes that ends in the middle of the second page with the note from Engels, “At this point the manuscript breaks off.”

Book proposal: Marx’s Fetters and the Realm of Freedom: a remedial reading -- part 2.4

 Alienated labour and disposable time

Marx’s remarkable, yet largely neglected statement that “[t]he whole development of wealth rests on the creation of disposable time” and his subsequent analysis of the relationship between disposable time, superfluous products, and surplus value suggests an alternative analysis of alienation that identifies disposable time itself as that which is appropriated and confronts the labourer as alien property. Marx came close to making such an analysis explicit in a footnote that begins, “It does not belong here, but can already be recalled here…” and in which he noted “In relation to the whole of society, the creation of disposable time is then also creation of time for the production of science, art etc.,” anticipating his advocacy in notebook VII of, “the general reduction of the necessary labour to a minimum, which then corresponds to the artistic, scientific etc. development of the individuals in the time set free.” Disposable time is thus not an empty container to be filled with “pseudo-activities,” to use Adorno’s phrase, but the foundation for the full cultural, intellectual, physiological, and spiritual development of the individual.

Book proposal: Marx’s Fetters and the Realm of Freedom: a remedial reading -- part 2.3

 Inversion

Marx stated repeatedly in the Grundrisse that capital inverts the relationship between necessary and superfluous labour time. Capital both creates disposable time and expropriates it in the form of surplus value, reversing the nature-imposed priority of necessity before superfluity and making the performance of necessary labour conditional on the production of surplus value. Marx’s analysis of this inversion bears unmistakeable traces of Ludwig Feuerbach’s critique in The Essence of Christianity of the inversion of collective humanity and the divine, which had so influenced the young Marx. The theme of inversion returns in the first chapter of Capital in the section on the fetishism of the commodity, where in the first sentence Marx comments on the commodity’s abundant “theological niceties.” The table made of wood, “not only stands with its feet on the ground, but, in relation to all other commodities, it stands on its head, and evolves out of its wooden brain grotesque ideas.” A couple of pages later: “In order, therefore, to find an analogy we must take flight into the misty realm of religion.”

Book proposal: Marx’s Fetters and the Realm of Freedom: a remedial reading -- part 2.2

Ambivalence

Published in 1821, The Source and Remedy of the National Difficulties was a major influence on Marx's analysis of ‘disposable time.’ In an 1851 notebook, Marx logged a 1000 word summary of the pamphlet. He also discussed it extensively in volume 3 of Theories of Surplus Value. His discussion of disposable time in a section of his Grundrisse notebooks that came to be known as the ‘fragment on machines’ has inspired rethinking of Marx's mature work by authors ranging from Raniero Panzieri, Antonio Negri, and Paolo Virno to Moishe Postone. Yet those re-evaluations do not acknowledge the decisive contribution of The Source and Remedy. This chapter examines Marx’s admiration, criticisms, and uses of the pamphlet, and the neglect of the pamphlet by subsequent writers, and offers suggestions about what might be gained by close attention to this seminal source and relying on it to perform a ‘remedial reading’ of Marx’s texts.

Book proposal: Marx’s Fetters and the Realm of Freedom: a remedial reading -- part 2.1

Der Gefesselte Marx

Karl Marx's preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy contains the best-known description of his theory of history. At some point contradiction between the relations of production and the forces of production become fetters on the latter, ushering in a period of social revolution. The traditional interpretation is that the social revolution will unleash technological advances that enable industrial production to expand by “leaps and bounds,” even as free time for workers also increases. Marx’s description, however, specifically referred to a general conclusion he had reached in the 1840s that “became the guiding principle of my studies.” He did not suggest it was a précis of those subsequent studies. In the Grundrisse, Marx had developed a much more detailed analysis of the fetters capital both posits and overcomes, based on the remarkable premise that “the development of all wealth rests on the creation of disposable time.” In that analysis, it is not a greater quantity of manufactured goods that is fettered by the capitalist relations of production but the emancipation of the social individual.

In the Grundrisse, Marx enumerated what the specifically capitalist fetters were:

These inherent limits have to coincide with the nature of capital, with the essential character of its very concept. These necessary limits are:

(1) Necessary labour as limit on the exchange value of living labour capacity or of the wages of the industrial population;

(2) Surplus value as limit on surplus labour time; and, in regard to relative surplus labour time, as barrier to the development of the forces of production;

(3) What is the same, the transformation into money, exchange value as such, as limit of production; or exchange founded on value, or value founded on exchange, as limit of production.

This is:

(4) again the same as restriction of the production of use values by exchange value; or that real wealth has to take on a specific form distinct from itself, a form not absolutely identical with it, in order to become an object of production at all.

“However, these limits,” Marx added, “come up against the general tendency of capital... to forget and abstract from…” these very same limits! The result is inevitably overproduction, not simply in the sense of an excess inventory but of a generalized industrial overcapacity of both means of production and labour power.

Book proposal: Marx’s Fetters and the Realm of Freedom: a remedial reading -- part 2.0

The second part of my book proposal is a chapter outline and summary. I will be doing that on the installment plan, one chapter at a time. Below is a table of contents:

1. Fetters/Der Gefesselte Marx
2. Ambivalence
3. Inversion
4. Alienated labour and disposable time
5. Pauperism and “minus-labour”
6. From sufficiency to planned obsolescence… and back?
7. The revolutionary class
8. A nation is really rich if the working day is 6 hours rather than twelve.
9. The return of disposable time: time filled with the presence of the now

Book proposal: Marx’s Fetters and the Realm of Freedom: a remedial reading part one.

Marx’s Fetters and the Realm of Freedom: a remedial reading

Tom Walker

Overview (chapter summaries will be presented in a future post)

This book proposes a remedial reading of the relationship in Marx’s critique of political economy between the forces and relations of production, real wealth, and value. It is remedial in two senses. First, it seeks to remedy the long-standing misconception of the 1859 preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy as Marx’s definitive statement on the contradiction between the forces and relations of production. Second, it does so by acknowledging the influence of the 1821 pamphlet, The Source and Remedy of the National Difficulties on Marx’s conception of disposable time as real wealth.

In his celebrated 1859 preface, Karl Marx stated the guiding principle of his studies to be the general conclusion he had reached in the 1840s that when the property relations of society come into conflict with the material productive forces, they become fetters on their further development. “Then begins an era of social revolution.” 

“Here we have before us,” wrote G. V. Plekhanov in 1907, “a genuine ‘algebra’ – and purely materialist at that – of social development.” Thirteen years earlier he had extoled Marx’s “completely materialist conception of history” as “one of the greatest discoveries of our century, so rich in scientific discoveries.” According to Plekhanov, Marx’s view of history gave sociology “a foundation as solid as natural science.” Already in 1908, though, Georges Sorel had warned of the extreme obscurity of the 1859 preface and the absence of any mention of class. It was not surprising to him that “many liberties have been taken with this preface, which so many men cite without ever having studied it seriously.”

Remnants of Plekhanov’s late 19th century interpretation of Marx’s 1859 preface survive in both socialist ecomodernist and degrowth communist arguments. The former embracing and the latter rejecting the interpretation’s inherent productivism but both accepting it as an accurate portrayal of Marx’s view (see, for example: Matt Huber, Climate Change as Class War: Building Socialism on a Warming Planet. Verso Books, 2022. Kohei Saito, Marx in the Anthropocene: Towards the Idea of Degrowth Communism. Cambridge University Press. 2022). While faithful adherence to the maestro’s thought is no guarantee of analytical success, dogmatic adherence to a faulty interpretation may impose unnecessary obstacles to fruitful inquiry.

A potential remedy for this predicament materialized in 1968 with the publication by the New Left Review of Martin Nicolaus’s “The Unknown Marx.” Two-thirds of the way through his essay, Nicolaus announced he would “proceed now to examine to what extent the text of the Grundrisse justifies the sweeping claims made for Marx’s new scientific achievements in his 1859 Preface.” He was particularly interested in ‘whether the Grundrisse provides further elucidation of the famous passage in the Preface about Revolution…” The examination did indeed elucidate the passage – to the extent that the passage could have been cast aside as a mere husk once the kernel of its truth content had been revealed.

“The Unknown Marx” was awarded the first Deutscher Memorial Prize. It led Moishe Postone to discover the Grundrisse and revise his view of Capital “as basically a book of Victorian positivism.” It was copied and distributed in a “bootleg” edition by student radicals at the Austin campus of the University of Texas. It reputedly secured Nicolaus a commission from New Left Books, subsequently Verso, to translate the full Grundrisse. But Nicolaus’s elucidation of the passage about fetters on the productive forces has had little lasting impact. In his 1973 Foreword to the Grundrisse, Nicolaus himself gave only brief and elusive mention to his earlier conclusion:

The famous 1859 Preface speaks of the contradiction between the forces of production and the relations of production. Relatively little is said in Capital about this question. The Grundrisse is one long extended commentary upon it; inversely, the 1859 formulation is a summary, in a word, of the Grundrisse.

“One could go on and on,” begins the next paragraph. But instead of saying anything further about the contradiction between the forces and relations of production, Nicolaus pivoted to speak of “the rich, all-sided individuality Marx was talking about.” This seeming non-sequitur may coyly allude to the fact that in the Grundrisse, the development of the forces of production in capitalism is revealed to be the development of “the rich, all-sided individuality” of the social individual -- a point Marx explicated on page 705, “…in a word, the development of the social individual which appears as the great foundation-stone of production and of wealth.”

Three pages later, Marx defined the revolution as appropriation of “their own surplus value” by “the mass of workers.” In Capital and in his work for the First International, Marx repeatedly referred to the limitation of the hours of work as the prerequisite for the emancipation of the working class. These statements are not incidental to Marx’s theory of history but are deeply embedded in his critique of political economy as developed over three sections of the Grundrisse (pp. 397-423, 604-610, 704-711). All three sections deal with the consequences of the contradictory drive of capital to both reduce necessary labour to a minimum while simultaneously maintaining labour time as the measure of value. In the first and last of these fragments, Marx paraphrased The Source and Remedy of the National Difficulty, several times to emphasize a point he was making. 

In his 1885 preface to volume 2 of Capital, Friedrich Engels told of Marx’s high regard for The Source and Remedy. Until recently, very little has been written about the influence of the pamphlet on Marx’s critique of political economy. In 2021, I wrote an article to commemorate the bicentennial of the pamphlet’s publication and give some background on its author, who has since been identified as Charles Wentworth Dilke. Subsequently, I scoured the Grundrisse, Capital, Theories of Surplus Value, and A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy for further evidence of the pamphlet’s influence on Marx’s thought. I documented what I found here on EconoSpeak.

What I found has led me to an unconventional interpretation of Marx’s theory of revolution. My interpretation focuses on the role of disposable time as both the foundation and measure of real wealth. Reading those passages from the Grundrisse through the lens of The Source and Remedy reveals the intimate relationship of Marx’s analyses of surplus value, forces of production, and socially necessary labour time with the pamphlet’s corresponding, albeit non-identical, analyses. Such a reading highlights how Marx’s theoretical contribution brilliantly goes beyond the pamphlet’s radical liberal insights and serves as a corrective to a radical liberal misreading of Marx. Although novel, my interpretation is not without some precedent in the writings of André Gorz, Moishe Postone, Martin Hägglund, and others. With the exception of Gorz, though, these writers treat disposable time as the desirable end of social revolution rather than as both means and end.

Since translations of the Grundrisse became available in the 1960s and 1970s, the “fragment on machines” has been lauded by Herbert Marcuse as Marx’s “most realistic, his most amazing insight,” and by Moishe Postone as containing a key to interpretation of Marx’s analysis in Capital. But those rightly famous passages in notebook VII recapitulate and amplify themes whose exposition and development came in the earlier notebook IV. Although the recapitulation is itself compelling, it gains much needed coherence in context of the earlier discussion. For Postone, for example, Marx “characterizes a possible postcapitalist society in terms of the category of ‘disposable’ time.” But Marx’s category of disposable time went much deeper than that. “The whole development of wealth,” he wrote in notebook IV, “rests on the creation of disposable time.” In earlier stages of development, people exchanged only their superfluous products. In capitalism, the spontaneous order between necessity and superfluity is inverted: “In production resting on capital, the existence of necessary labour time is conditional on the creation of superfluous labour time.”

The relations of production and productive forces make a dramatic return in chapter 48, near the end of volume 3 of Capital, “The Trinity Formula.” Marx’s explanation here of why individuals enter into these relations of production echoes the narrative of the 1859 preface. In place of the relations of production turning into fetters on the productive forces and beginning an era of social revolution, Marx offers a disquisition on the “realm of freedom [which] begins only when labour determined by necessity and external expediency comes to an end…” and the disclosure that “[t]he reduction of the working day is the basic prerequisite.” 

This latter statement may seem to come out of the blue unless one is familiar with Marx’s Inaugural Address to the International Working Men’s Association, in which he upheld the Ten Hours’ Bill as “not only a great practical success; it was the victory of a principle; it was the first time that in broad daylight the political economy of the middle class succumbed to the political economy of the working class.” In his address, Marx had defined the political economy of the working class as “social production controlled by social foresight” in contrast to bourgeois political economy which relied of “the blind rule of the supply and demand laws.” In the passage in chapter 48 of volume 3, Marx “socialized man, the associated producers, govern the human metabolism with nature in a rational way, bringing it under their collective control instead of being dominated by it as a blind power.”

"Part 2" chapter summaries are presented in nine installments:

2.1 Fetters/Der Gefesselte Marx

2.2 Ambivalence

2.3 Inversion

2.4 Alienated labour and disposable time

2.5 Pauperism and “minus-labour”

2.6 From sufficiency to planned obsolescence… and back?

2.7 The revolutionary class

2.8 A nation is really rich if the working day is 6 hours rather than twelve.

2.9 The return of disposable time: time filled with the presence of the now