My Historical Materialism journal debut (in a citation)

 Accumulating disposable time

by Alexis Moraitis

For Marx, the same historical dynamic that produces ever-greater levels of human superfluity, also grounds the possibility of organising life otherwise. Indeed, Marx notes a fundamental contradiction between the capitalist use of machinery and the possibility of harnessing past productivity gains to liberate people from the burden of ‘proletarian labor’. Compensation theorists completely obfuscate this possibility according to Marx. As he mockingly notes while in principle a machine is a labour-saving artefact, instead of liberating people from ‘drudgery’ it actually ‘creates new forms of it’. Productivity growth reduces the labour time necessary to produce the means of subsistence, yet people are still compelled to overlabour for the sake of survival. In capitalist society technology indeed develops wrongly as Horkheimer notes.

Productivity growth under capitalism is enabled by the growing preponderance of dead or past labour within the production process, that is work ‘already done and stored up for future use’. The more intensely science and technology is applied in production, the more the contribution of past labour to the total value of the product grows at the expense of direct labour time. Moishe Postone powerfully describes the developmental dynamic by which growing productivity renders the expenditure of labour time increasingly unnecessary as an ‘accumulation of historical time’. From the perspective of an alternative social order, historical time could constitute the springboard from which humanity liberates itself from the socially imposed necessity to overlabour. Though for individuals living in capitalism historical time is effectively a source of destitution, it could be collectively experienced as an increase in ‘disposable time…for all’ in a postcapitalist society. The increased surplus labour extracted by capital for the purpose of valorisation represents at the same time an accumulation of potentially disposable time that an emancipated community could mobilise for socially useful goals. Indeed, as Walker argues disposable time is simultaneously ‘an element of the explosive contradiction of capitalist accumulation and the prize of emancipation from capitalism.’ 135

135 Walker 2021, p.83.

Walker, Tom 2021. ‘The Ambivalence of Disposable Time: The Source and Remedy of the National Difficulties At Two Hundred’, Contributions to Political Economy, 40, 1: 80-90.

(preprint: https://eprints.lancs.ac.uk/id/eprint/233351/1/Secular_Immiseration_-_Alexis_Moraitis.pdf)