To the co-authors of “Post-growth: the science of wellbeing within planetary boundaries,” published in The Lancet Planetary Health:
Thank you so much for the valuable work you have all done surveying the field of post-growth research. In the conclusion of your article, you observe "...we still know little about the politics that could make post-growth transitions possible in reality." I would like to address that issue here. While I don't presume to have all the answers, I believe I can help identify some of the most urgent questions.
There are several references to work-time reduction and one mention of leisure in the article. Leisure is mentioned, however, only as one item in a list of domains of life in a post-growth world. The references to work-time reduction are instrumental and address the use of reduced hours of work to maintain levels of employment in the face of productivity gains. Another issue addressed is the positive correlation between working time and carbon emissions, with the caveat that in the absence of a robust causal model it is uncertain whether shorter hours would be effective in reducing carbon emissions. There is no mention of the potential for transforming consciousness that has animated much philosophical discussion of leisure.
The proposed reductions are intended to offset or even reverse presumed geometric progressions – either of productivity or carbon emissions. Both of those computations, however, are results of an underlying dynamic that remains unspecified, perhaps implicit. Focusing exclusively on the instrumental applications of work-time reduction invites pro forma rebuttal, such as Basil Oberdorfer’s “Post-growth transition, working time reduction, and the question of profits” that appeared in the April 2023 issue of Ecological Economics.
Oberdorfer’s article inadvertently reiterates a comment by the Victorian factory inspector, Alexander Redgrave, that Karl Marx quoted in Capital, “Moments are the elements of profit.” Both productivity increases and carbon emissions are consequences of capital’s drive for expanded accumulation, just as the spectre of “overpopulation” that Thomas Malthus raised in his famous essay was not an immutable fact of human nature but a contingent result of capital’s insatiable hunger for surplus value.
Malthus’s strictures on population are embedded in mainstream economics through the medium of Leon Walras’s general equilibrium analysis. Walras was explicit, “Condition for progress: increase in the amount of capital goods properly speaking that precedes and exceeds the increase in the numbers of persons. Malthus’s theory of population and subsistence.” Conveniently overlooked, however, is the fact that overpopulation was not Malthus’s primary concern. Malthus had set out to refute William Godwin’s philosophical radicalism and he used speculation about population taken out of context from Godwin’s Political Justice to do so. This rhetorical strategy has proven effective for over two centuries in changing the subject from the consequences of prevailing property relations to the spectre of overpopulation. To keep the conversation about post-growth on track, it is imperative to counter the Malthusian red herring used to derail it.
William Godwin should rightly be considered the great-great grandfather of post-growth political thought. In his Enquiry Concerning Political Justice, he introduced his discussion of the system of property as "the key stone that completes the fabric of political justice." In his subsequent essay "Of Avarice and Profusion" he wrote,
The commodities that substantially contribute to the subsistence of the human species, form a very short catalogue. They demand from us but a slender portion of industry. If these only were produced, and sufficiently produced, the species of man would be continued. If the labour necessarily required to produce them were equitably divided among the poor, and still more, if it were equitably divided among all, each man's share of labour would be light, and his portion of leisure would be ample.
Thomas Malthus wrote his Essay on the Principle of Population as a rebuttal to the radicalism of Godwin’s essay, as Malthus’s first sentence attests, “The following Essay owes its origin to a conversation with a friend, on the subject of Mr. Godwin's Essay on avarice and profusion, in his Enquirer.” Percy Shelley quoted a passage from Godwin’s essay – including the lines quoted above – in the notes for his “philosophical poem,” Queen Mab. In her Society in America, Harriet Martineau credited Godwin’s Inquirer [sic] as “the first attempt to advocate leisure as the birthright of every human being.” Martineau, who was friends with both Godwin and Malthus, achieved literary success with her popularizations of Malthus’s political economy. Her surprisingly Godwinian argument in favour of leisure is worth quoting in full:
Leisure, some degree of it, is necessary to the health of every man's spirit. Not only intellectual production, but peace of mind cannot flourish without it. It may be had under the present system, but it is not. With community of property, it would be secured to every one. The requisite amount of work would bear a very small proportion to that of disposable time.
Godwin's writing inspired a popular literature of journals and pamphlets in the early decades of the nineteenth century, the "farthest outpost" of which was the anonymous pamphlet published in 1821, The Source and Remedy of the National Difficulties, which, according to Friedrich Engels, "turned the Ricardian theory of value and surplus value against capitalist production in the interest of the proletariat." Engels prematurely credited Marx with having saved the pamphlet "from falling into oblivion," though the manuscripts in which he did so remained unpublished at the time Engels wrote.
For both Godwin and Marx, leisure, disposable time, or reduction of the working day represented a necessary precondition for emancipation. Godwin explicitly rejected political revolution and argued that the increased leisure time was necessary to develop the intellectual and cultural resources as the basis for a more just political system. Marx, of course, advocated revolution in the Communist Manifesto but by the 1860s had become evasive about what form a revolution would take. He did, however, repeatedly stress the need for a reduction of the working day as a basic prerequisite for achieving the “realm of freedom.” Rather than choosing between Godwin and Marx – reform or revolution – I would suggest that holding their respective positions in creative tension is more politically fruitful. On the question of leisure as wealth, however, they were in full accord. Both saw leisure as essential to the intellectual, political, and cultural education of the working classes and thus to their social emancipation.
Godwin had stated that, “The genuine wealth of man is leisure, when it meets with a disposition to improve it. All other riches are of petty and inconsiderable value.” That author of The Source and Remedy of the National Difficulties – now known to have been Charles Wentworth Dilke – amplified that as:
After all their idle sophistry [TW: he was referring to the political economists], 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.
Marx, delighted with Dilke’s statement, rendered his own version even more emphatically, "The whole development of wealth rests on the creation of disposable time" and went on to elaborate that "In production resting on capital, the existence of necessary labour time is conditional on the creation of superfluous labour time."
Fast forward a century and a third and we encounter André Gorz advocating “self-limitation as a social project” as his preferred alternative to prohibitions, regulations, taxes, subsidies, penalties, and fiscal and monetary policies administered by experts for the purpose of “conservation of the natural environment.” Such ‘expertocracy,’ Gorz contended, would entail the extension of techno-bureaucratic state power in the name of ecological imperatives and supposed enlightened authority. By contrast, the aim of self-limitation as a social project would be
…to restore politically the correlation between less work and less consumption on the one hand, and more autonomy and more existential security on the other, for everyone [italics in original]. … Self-limitation is thus shifted from the level of individual choice to the level of a social project. The norm of sufficiency, deprived of its traditional mooring, has to be defined politically.
In support of his proposal, Gorz cited “the anonymous Ricardoite whose 1821 pamphlet Marx so enjoyed quoting,” along with prominent economists such as John Maynard Keynes and Wassily Leontieff, who “have all held disposable time for activities ‘valued as an end in themselves’ to be ‘the true measure of wealth.’” The anonymous “Ricardoite” was, of course, Charles Wentworth Dilke, author of The Source and Remedy of the National Difficulties.
In volumes I and III of Capital, Marx inverted Malthus’s supposed law of overpopulation, proclaiming in chapter 25 of volume I:
The same causes which develop the expansive power of capital, also develop the labour-power at its disposal. The relative mass of the industrial reserve army thus increases with the potential energy of wealth. But the greater this reserve army in proportion to the active labour-army, the greater is the mass of a consolidated surplus population, whose misery is in inverse ratio to the amount of torture it has to undergo in the form of labour. The more extensive, finally, the pauperized sections of the working class and the industrial reserve army, the greater is official pauperism. This is the absolute general law of capitalist accumulation [emphasis in original].
This is the infamous immiseration hypothesis, purportedly refuted by post-World War II prosperity in the industrialized north. The little known complement to Marx’s inversion of Malthus on surplus population was his tacit endorsement in the Grundrisse of Godwin’s view of leisure as real wealth.
I have studied the influence on Marx’s thought of Dilke’s – and, circuitously, Godwin’s – writings intensely over the last four years and have summarized some of my findings in a pop-up book, Marx’s Fetters: a remedial reading, that challenges the traditional interpretation of Marx’s views on the contradictions that arise between the forces and relations of production, as expressed in his 1859 preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy.
The book emerged out of conversations I had with Giorgos Kallis and Kohei Saito in the Fall of 2023 about the political implications of working time. It was originally conceived as a conventional book but after drafting a proposal and receiving a couple of rejections and one tentative expression of interest, I realized that what I really wanted to do was make a pop-up book.
In Marx in the Anthropocene, Saito proposed a "late Marx" who departed radically from an earlier "productivist" Marx. Marx's alleged productivism was typified, according to Saito, by his famous 1859 preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy. That interpretation of the vague and ambiguous preface, however, was a posthumous construction by theoreticians of the Second and Third Internationals. Mindful of Prussian censorship, Marx had omitted from his 1859 summary the politically consequential analysis he had developed in his 1857-58 notebooks, published nearly a century later as the Grundrisse.
My pop-up book reconstructs what Marx's ambiguous general conclusions likely refer to by interpolating passages from the Grundrisse with passages from the 1859 preface that they explain more fully. The book is a remedial reading of Marx’s 1859 preface in that it restores the historical and political context specific to capital and also emphasizes the influence of The Source and Remedy and thus indirectly of Godwin’s thought on Marx’s analysis of the forces and relations of production.
REFERENCES
Dilke, Charles Wentworth (2019). The Source and Remedy of the National Difficulties, deduced from principles of political economy in a letter to Lord John Russell [1821]. Reprinted in Contributions to Political Economy, 38: 31-58.
Engels, Friedrich (1971) Preface to Capital: A critique of political economy [1893]. Vol. 2. Moscow: Progress Publishers.
Godwin, William (1793). An Enquiry Concerning Political justice and its Influence on Morals and Happiness, Vol. 2. Dublin: Luke White.
Godwin, William (1823). The Enquirer. Reflections on Education, Manners, and Literature. In a Series of Essays [1797]. London: John Anderson.
Gorz, André (1993). “Political Ecology: Expertocracy versus Self-Limitation.” New Left Review, I (202): 55-67.
Kallis, Giorgos (2019). Limits: Why Malthus Was Wrong and Why Environmentalists Should Care. Redwood City, Ca.: Stanford University Press.
Kallis, Giorgos, et al. (2025). “Post-growth: the science of wellbeing within planetary boundaries.” Lancet Planetary Health, 9: 62-78.
Malthus, Thomas Robert (1798) An Essay on the Principle of Population, as it affects the future Improvement of Society, with Remarks on the Speculations of Mr. Godwin, M. Condorcet, and Other Writers. London: J. Johnson.
Martineau, Harriet (1837) Society in America, Vol. II. New York: Saunders and Otley.
Marx, Karl (1973a). Grundrisse. Foundations of the critique of political economy [1857-58]. Trans. Martin Nicolaus, Harmondsworth: Penguin.
Marx, Karl (1976). Capital, Vol. 1 [1867]. Trans. Ben Fowkes, Harmondsworth: Penguin.
Marx, Karl (1970). A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy [1859] Trans. S.W. Ryazanskaya, Moscow: Progress Publishers.
Oberdorfer, Basil (2023) "Post-growth transition, working time reduction, and the question of profits." Ecological Economics, 206: 107748.
Saito, Kohei (2023). Marx in the Anthropocene: Towards the Idea of Degrowth Communism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Walker, Tom (2000). “The ‘lump of labor’ case against work-sharing: populist fallacy or marginalist throwback?” in Working Time: International trends, theory and policy perspectives, Lonnie Golden and Deborah M. Figart, eds. London and New York: Routledge.
Walker, Tom (2007). “Why economists dislike a lump of labor.” Review of Social Economy, 65 (3): 279–291
Walker, Tom (2021). “The Ambivalence of Disposable Time: The Source and Remedy of the National Difficulties at Two Hundred.” Contributions to Political Economy, 40: 80–90.
Walker, Tom (2023). “Leisure to Attend to Our Spiritual Business.” Stasis, 11, 1-2: 44-61.
Walras, Leon (2014). Elements of Theoretical Economics or the Theory of Social Wealth [1896]. Trans. and ed. by Donald A. Walker and Jan van Daal, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
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