Three Fragments Rebooted: The Unfettering

Around three years ago I made a pop-up book titled Three Fragments on Machines, that contained a collection of quotes from the Grundrisse that illustrated some of the research I had been doing related to disposable time in Marx's theory. Last spring, I started work on another pop-up book showing the connection between the Grundrisse and Marx's more famous reference to forces of production, relations of production, and fetters from his Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy. I abandoned that project when the designs started to get too complicated.

Now I am coming back to that second project but with a less ambitions design and more sparing textual approach -- what I consider now as a "second edition" of Three Fragments. Central to this new edition is a mash-up of texts from the 1859 Preface and from notebook VII of the Grundrisse. Marx wrote the Preface in January, 1859; notebook VII was written between February and June of 1858. The Preface clearly reiterates arguments contained in the Grundrisse but leaves out important details that can be fleshed out by attention to similar phrasing in the latter work. 

I have finished the "flat" draft of my pop-up book, "Fetters on the Creation of Disposable Time." Now I move on to the mock up stage in which these images attain their third dimension -- 3-D! I have been wondering about how to get this project out to a wider public and this morning thought about the "thousand cranes" legend and Sadako Sasaki's enactment of the legend for peace. Both origami and pop-up books are made by folding paper. Masohiro Chatani wrote a series of pop-up how-to books that he called "origamic architecture." I will make 1000 copies of this book (which is a tall order).

As the project unfolds, I hope to recruit collaborators to cut, fold and paste the books and even automate parts of the process with die cutting and its own high-quality printer. I would like to give talks about what the book is trying to say and how it came about.

I have been working with the texts used in the book for over two decades and with photo-montage pop-ups for over four decades. The method of this work comes from Walter Benjamin's "N [Theoretics of Knowledge;Theory of Progress]" from his unfinished Arcades Project, the first thesis of which is "In the fields with which we are concerned, knowledge comes only in flashes. The text is the thunder rolling long afterward." 

What Benjamin called the "pedogigic side of this project" was, quoting Rudolf Borchardt, "'To train our image-making faculty to look stereoscopically into the depths of the shadows of history.'"

One more thesis from N: "The work must raise to the very highest level the art of quoting without quotation marks. Its theory is intimately linked to that of montage."

In my pop-up book, I am stereoscopically reading two texts by Marx -- written a few months apart in 1859 -- that I have combined into one. The "first" is from Marx's Preface to his Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (it is actually the later historically). This short summary by Marx of the principles that guided his research through the 1850s became the canonical statement of "historical materialism" in its "classical", "traditional", or "orthodox" formulation of the 2nd and 3rd Internationals.

The second text -- written around six months earlier -- is from Marx's manuscript notebook VII, published posthumously as the Grundrisse. Putting the two texts side by side reveals that they present, in fact, one continuous image with a depth of field that has been excluded from the canonical interpretation of historical materialism. Missing from that classical view is Marx's emphasis on disposable time, which was central to the Grundrisse text. I have added "footnotes" from notebook IV of the Grundrisse that emphasize the importance of disposable time and that explain what the "fetters on the development of the productive forces" are, specific to capital.

Marx's vision of "the realm of freedom," outlined in his 1864-65 draft for volume III of Capital, returned decisively to disposable time (without mentioning the word) in prescribing "The reduction of the working day [as] the basic prerequisite" for achieving the realm of freedom.

The text in black below is from the 1859 Preface. The text in red is from the Grundrisse.

In the social production of their existence, men inevitably enter into definite relations, which are independent of their will, namely relations of production appropriate to a given stage in the development of their material forces of production. The totality of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society, the real foundation, on which arises a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness. 

Forces of production and social relations - two different sides of the development of the social individual - appear to capital as mere means, and are merely means for it to produce on its limited foundation. In fact, however, they are the material conditions to blow this foundation sky-high. ‘Truly wealthy a nation, when the working day is 6 rather than 12 hours. Wealth is not command over surplus labour time’ (real wealth), ‘but rather, disposable time outside that needed in direct production, for every individual and the whole society.’ (The Source and Remedy etc. 1821, p. 6.)

The mode of production of material life conditions the general process of social, political and intellectual life. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness. At a certain stage of development, the material productive forces of society come into conflict with the existing relations of production or – this merely expresses the same thing in legal terms – with the property relations within the framework of which they have operated hitherto. From forms of development of the productive forces these relations turn into their fetters.

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. For real wealth is the developed productive power of all individuals. The measure of wealth is then not any longer, in any way, labour time, but rather disposable time

Then begins an era of social revolution. . The changes in the economic foundation lead sooner or later to the transformation of the whole immense superstructure.

My plan is to also have two "footnotes" from notebook IV of the Grundrisse elaborating on "fetters" and "disposable time." These two combined are almost as long as the main text, which is why I am subordinating them as footnotes. 

Footnote 1, "fetters"

From the perspective of capital, the stages of production that precede it can be seen as imposing so many fetters upon the productive forces. But correctly understood, capital itself operates as the condition for the development of the forces of production only so long as they require an external spur, which, however, at the same time acts as their bridle. It is a discipline over them that becomes superfluous and burdensome at a certain level of their development, just like the guilds etc. These inherent limits 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 come up against the general tendency of capital to forget and abstract from: (1) necessary labour as limit of the exchange value of living labour capacity; (2) surplus value as the limit of surplus labour and development of the forces of production; (3) money as the limit of production; (4) the restriction of the production of use values by exchange value.

Footnote 2, "disposable time"

The whole development of wealth rests on the creation of disposable time. ... In production resting on capital, the existence of necessary labour time is conditional on the creation of superfluous labour time.

In the end papers, I will also be quoting the passage from volume III of Capital that addresses the "true realm of freedom" and prescribes reduction of the working day as the prerequisite. 

Basil Oberholzer's Last Hour

Nassau Senior

In Chapter 9 of Capital, "The Rate of Surplus Value," Marx included a satirical section 3, ridiculing Nassau Senior's dimwitted, unmistakably partisan argument that reducing the hours of work from 12 hours a day to 10 would destroy a factory's net profit. Another half hour of reduction would eliminate even the gross profit. Marx simply pointed out that the basis of profit, surplus value, was extracted from the labour process throughout the day and not entirely in the final hour of work.

One hundred and eighty-seven years after the learned professor Senior "was summoned from Oxford to Manchester, to learn in the latter place the political economy he taught in the former" the journal Ecological Economics published an article by Basil Oberholzer titled, "Post-growth transition, working time reduction, and the question of profits."

After a few pages of simple -- one might say simplistic -- mathematical modeling, Oberholzer concluded that working time reduction would collapse profits and thereby trigger macroeconomic instability. From the perspective of working time theory, there are several things wrong with Oberholzer's model. But perhaps the most glaring and elemental flaw is the pretense of building a quantitative model to represent what is fundamentally a highly qualitative process.

Equations such as "output (Y) equals labor input (L) times labor productivity (P)" and "labor input (L) equals number of workers (N) times hours worked (H)" assume what they purport to show -- that there is direct variation between hours worked and output. This is the relationship Thomas Brassey demonstrated to be empirically untenable in his 1872 Work and Wages. In his Fortnightly review of Brassey's book, Frederic Harrison characterized "the bitter pedantry which often usurps" the name of political economy as "usually assum[ing] its facts, after it has rounded off dogmas to suit its clients." 

Based on extensive analysis of accounting records from his father's vast railroad building enterprise, Brassey had found, quite simply, "that the hours of work are no criterion of the amount of work performed." But doesn't the factor of 'labor productivity' correct for that? No. Labor productivity is an ex post derivative from given hours and given output. It simply reintroduces the assumption of direct variation between hours and output.

Building on Brassey’s and other empirical observations, Sydney J. Chapman presented his theory of the hours of labour in his presidential address to the annual meeting of the Economics and Statistics Section of the British Academy for the Advancement of Science at Winnipeg in 1909. The paper, “Hours of Labour” was subsequently published in the Economic Journal. In it Chapman argued that the hours of work determined by market competition between workmen and between employers would be longer than optimal for worker welfare and even longer than optimal for output.

Chapman’s theory became canonical, at least for Cambridge and LSE economists, until it was passed over after the second world war for conventionally “simplified” assumptions that would be more amenable to macroeconomic modelling. To put it uncharitably, a theory consistent with empirical observation was replaced with assumptions that were empirically false but mathematically expedient.

Aside from the empirically and theoretically untenable assumption of direct variation between hours and output, Oberholzer's finding ignores what should be a truism of Marx's critique of political economy and Keynes's economics -- capitalism is inherently unstable. It doesn't need a reduction of working time to trigger it. Marx's Capital could be described as an extended discourse on that instability. In volume three, Marx summarized "three cardinal facts about capitalist production." The third fact, "establishment of the world market," also establishes the inevitability of crises in that the more rapid growth of productive power and capital values, relative to population, undermines the conditions for valorization of that expanding capital on a progressively narrower base.

In a 1934 BBC radio address, John Maynard Keynes addressed "the problem of poverty in the midst of potential plenty" and observed that views among economists on this question tended to diverge around the question of whether or not the economic system was "self-adjusting" in the long run, albeit "with creaks and groans and jerks, and interrupted by time-lags, outside interference and mistakes." "The strength of the self-adjusting school." Keynes observed, "depends on its having behind it almost the whole body of organized economic thinking and doctrine of the last hundred years." Curiously, Keynes included Marxism in this body of doctrine -- presumably viewing crises as a self-adjustment mechanism.

In opposition to this orthodoxy, Keynes aligned himself with a counter-tradition of "heretics and cranks" who "propose remedies prompted by instinct, by flair, by practical good sense, by experience of the world — half-right, most of them, and half-wrong." He explained his difference with the self-adjusting school in terms of a growing gap between income and expenditure as incomes increased and the fact that interest rates do not adjust automatically to compensate for that gap. Notwithstanding Keynes's assignment of Marx to the self-adjusting camp, his own explanation of macroeconomic instability differed mainly in terminology and emphasis from Marx's.

Growth economics, as developed by Harrod, Domar, Solow, et al., has always concerned itself with proposing remedies for the settled proposition that the economic system is not self-adjusting and that government fiscal policy and/or monetary intervention is required to manage economic cycles, stimulate growth and avoid or recover from crises. The instability rabbit was always already in the macroeconomic hat before Mr. Oberholzer waved the wand of working time reduction over it. In defense of Oberholzer, though, this was a peer-reviewed article. None of his peers seemed to notice the shortcomings I have highlighted. 

More ominously, the degrowth literature Oberholzer was criticizing in his article routinely commits the same quantification fallacy* that he did. Authors typically view work time reduction as instrumental rather than transformative, assuming that an increase in labor productivity can be offset -- or more than offset -- by a decrease in labor hours leaving output constant or even declining. But not only are the hours of work "no criterion of the amount of work performed" as in Brassey's analysis, increasingly there is no clear relationship between working time and output, particularly where people are performing work whose relationship to either social wellbeing or capital accumulation is questionable. André Gorz called attention to the increasing rupture between working time and productive output over 40 years ago. David Graeber described much employment as bullshit jobs. One side benefit of working time reduction could be to pare down the economy's reliance on such systemically useful parasitism.

The real, transformational purpose of work time reduction is not about how to produce less stuff with more people working fewer hours. It is about freeing us from the work/spend cycle of planned or "progressive" obsolescence. It is about creating ample free time to develop autonomous interests, skills, knowledge, and relationships that don't have to rely on and feed back into the work, borrow, spend, buy, waste, want, work cycle. What is the mathematical equation of a different outlook on life and what really matters? What value of 'Y' or 'L' equals freedom? This is how Marx envisioned the relationship between working time and freedom:

The realm of freedom begins only where labour determined by necessity and external expediency ends; it lies by its very nature beyond the sphere of material production proper. ... Freedom, in this sphere, can consist only in this, that 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; accomplishing it with the least expenditure of energy and in conditions most worthy and appropriate for their human nature. But this always remains a realm of necessity. The true realm of freedom, the development of human powers as an end in itself, begins beyond it, though it can only flourish with this realm of necessity as its basis. The reduction of the working day is the basic prerequisite. (emphasis added)

How To Save Free Enterprise

Who doesn't want to save free enterprise? In 1974 alone there were two books published with the title, How to Save Free Enterprise. One of them had the subtitle, "from BUREAUCRATS, AUTOCRATS, AND TECHNOCRATS." The other one, by Arthur O. Dahlberg, had no subtitle. Implicitly, then, "from ITSELF."

1974 was the high water mark for How to Save Free Enterprise books. There were none published in any other year, although the idea of saving free enterprise had its heyday in the 1940s. The antagonist then was frequently the New Deal, although Henry Wallace targeted monopoly in his Saturday Evening Post essay, "We Must Save Free Enterprise."

Dahlberg's prescription for saving free enterprise had two main parts. The first part was a scheme to discourage people from hoarding cash or demand deposits. The second was a throwback to his 1930's proposals for substantial reduction of working time to shift production to goods and services for which demand is spontaneous. I get the impression from how he talks about the latter, that it is his primary concern and that the monetary scheme was just a way to eliminate the fear of unemployment that in his view prevented people from choosing leisure over increased consumption of 'not spontaneously demanded' goods.

In his Introduction to How to Save Free Enterprise, John Chamberlain described Dahlberg as "a student of John Maynard Keynes who can both appreciate and see beyond the master." Chamberlain, incidentally, had also written the Foreword to the first U.S. edition of Friedrich Hayek's The Road to Serfdom and the Introduction to William F. Buckley's God and Man at Yale. Subsequently, he was a lifelong contributing editor to Buckley's National Review.

Dahlberg was not literally a student of Keynes. But he does tell of a discussion that he had with Keynes in Washington in which Keynes agreed with his contention about the theoretical soundness of a monetary instrument to discourage hoarding of money. Keynes doubted, however, that such an instrument could be devised. 

I have affectionately referred to Dahlberg as a crank regarding his elaborate chart art. In his radio talk, "Is the Economic System Self-Adjusting?" Keynes referred to the heretics from economic orthodoxy as surviving only in "isolated groups of cranks." He went on to affirm that he ranged himself with the heretics. 

Both Keynes and Dahlberg were concerned with the tendency of incomes to outpace consumption and investment and thus lead to slumps. Each conceived of a different technique for 'tweaking' the system to compensate for the imbalance; both saw the reduction of working time as the ultimate solution to it. 

Neither realized that Karl Marx had propounded similar positions about working time and about the failure of the economic system to self-adjust. He called it crisis tendencies. They also seem to have not been mindful of Michal Kalecki's analysis that big industry and big finance don't want to "save free enterprise."

Self-Limitation as a Social Project

The following passage is from a 1993 New Left Review essay, "Political Ecology: Expertocracy versus Self-Limitation," by André Gorz. It is an argument for regenerating a norm of sufficiency as a political project. How much is enough and how can we build a popular consensus and movement around such a determination? Of particular interest to me, in the final paragraph Gorz mentions the "anonymous Ricardoite" along with John Maynard Keynes and Wassily Leontieff as examples of those who have seen disposable time as "the true measure of wealth." That Ricardoite was, of course, Charles Wentworth Dilke who wrote the 1821 pamphlet, The Source and Remedy of the National Difficulites.

Self-Limitation as a Social Project

In complex industrial societies, it is impossible to obtain an eco-compatible restructuring of production and consumption simply by giving the workers the right to limit their effort voluntarily (in other words, the possibility of choosing their working time, the right to ‘chosen time’). There is in fact no evident correlation between the volume of production and the hours worked. Once mechanization has abolished this correlation by enabling more and more goods to be produced with less and less labour, ‘labour ceases to be the measure of production and working time the measure of labour’ (Marx). Moreover, the diminution in the volume of labour necessary does not benefit the potential active population in general, and does not confer emancipation or the hope of greater autonomy on either the employed or the unemployed. Finally there exists no commonly accepted norm of sufficiency that could serve as a reference for self-limitation. Nevertheless, self-limitation remains the only non-authoritarian, democratic way towards an eco-compatible industrial civilization.

This project is not absolutely insurmountable. Essentially, it signifies that capitalism has abolished everything in tradition, in the mode of life, in everyday civilization, 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. What has been abolished is not, however, impossible to re-establish. But this restoration cannot be based on existing traditions and correlations: it has to be instituted; it is a matter of politics, more exactly a matter of eco-politics and the eco-social project.

An eco-social politics, as debated at length by the German and other European Greens during the 1980s and now emerging in French political ecology, aims fundamentally 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. In other words, it involves providing individuals with institutional guarantees that a general reduction in working hours will offer everyone the advantages people formerly sought for themselves: a freer, more relaxed and richer life. 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.

Without going into detail on matters I have discussed at length elsewhere, I would recall here only that eco-social politics consists principally in giving a guarantee of sufficient income, independent of the duration of labour (which can only decrease), and perhaps independent of work itself; redistributing socially necessary labour in such a way that everyone can work (and work both better and less); creating areas of autonomy in which the time freed from labour could be used by individuals for activities of their own choice, including self-production of goods and services which would reduce their dependence on the market and on professional or administrative supervision, permitting them to reconstruct a tissue of known solidarities and social conviviality that would include mutual aid networks, the exchange of services, informal cooperatives, etc. The liberation of time, the liberation of individuals from heteronomous, functionally specialized labour, should be conceived as an overall politics that would also demand fundamental new thinking on architecture, town planning, public equipment and services, relations between town and country, and so on, in order to de-compartmentalize the different spheres of life and activity, and encourage self-organized exchange.

Political ecology thus uses ecologically necessary changes to the mode of production and consumption as a lever for normatively desirable changes in the mode of life and in social relations. Defence of the living environment in the ecological sense, and the reconstitution of a life-world, condition and support one another. Both require life and the living environment to be withdrawn from the domination of economics; both require the growth of spheres of activity to which economic rationality does not apply. This requirement, in truth, is as old as civilization. From the anonymous Ricardoite whose 1821 pamphlet Marx so enjoyed quoting to Keynes and Leontieff, the leading theoreticians of modern economics have all held disposable time for activities ‘valued as an end in themselves’ (die sich als Selbstzweck gilt, in Marx’s term from the Grundrisse) to be ‘the true measure of wealth’. This boils down to saying that economic activity has meaning only if it serves something other than itself. For economics is a clear example of ‘cognitive-instrumental reasoning’: a science for calculating the effectiveness of means, and selecting the most effective means to achieve a given end. It cannot be applied to ends which are not distinct from the means employed, and cannot in itself determine what ends should be pursued. When it is not supplied with an end, it chooses those ends for which it possesses the most effective means: it will adopt as a target the expansion of the sphere in which its own rationality applies, and will tend to subject to this sphere all others, including life and the natural foundations of life.

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 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