On Antonio Negri's refusal of work and Karl Marx's disposable time: a Q&A with Michael Hardt

At the Columbia Center for Contemporary Critical Thought Marx 9/13 session on the Grundrisse last night, I asked a question from Zoom that cannot be heard on the Youtube video because of technical difficulties. I will try to reconstruct the jist of the question here along with a bit of context. I apologize if the reconstruction of my question is a bit more coherent than the original, which was made unintelligable by a time delay and apparent distractions in the audience.

In his presentation, Michael Hardt spoke about the Italian Autonomists' "refusal of work" strategy that Antonio Negri articulated in his book, Marx Beyond Marx. In talking about how the strategy related to the Grundrisse, Hardt referred to a parenthetical passage where Marx talked about "the worker’s participation in the higher, even cultural satisfactions...":

...the agitation for his own interests, newspaper subscriptions, attending lectures, educating his children, developing his taste etc., his only share of civilization which distinguishes him from the slave, is economically only possible by widening the sphere of his pleasures at the times when business is good, where saving is to a certain degree possible.

With reference to that refusal of work and widening the sphere of pleasure, I asked Hardt about Marx's discussion of disposable time and his remarkable sentence that "[t]he whole development of wealth rests on the creation of disposable time." I pointed out that Marx had cited the 1821 pamphlet, The Source and Remedy of the National Difficulties, on disposable time immediately before presenting his own statement and that William Godwin, who influenced the author of the pamphlet (Dilke), wrote something very similar to Marx's widening the sphere of pleasure:

Those hours which are not required for the production of the necessaries of life, may be devoted to the cultivation of the understanding, the enlarging our stock of knowledge, the refining our taste, and thus opening to us new and more exquisite sources of enjoyment.

Given these affinities, I asked if Hardt had given any thought to how a reading of the 1821 pamphlet and of Godwin's writings on leisure for all might illuminate Marx's thought on these topics.

Here is a clip of Michael Hardt's reply:

I would welcome the opportunity to engage further on this question as I believe it is crucial to an understanding of Marx's theory of surplus value and his theory of crisis, as I discussed in a previous post, 

The Theory of Crisis: Sandwichman's and Uno Kōzō's (both Marx's)

Just what is it that makes Marx's contribution so different, so appealing?

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

 

"Sandwichmann, would you consider yourself a follower of Dilke?"

Every few days I check my dormant eX-twitter account to see if there were any replies to old posts. A great series of questions showed up a couple of days ago.

Neon Nova asks:

Sandwichmann, would you consider yourself a follower of Dilke? What does Marx offer that Dilke doesn't? I know Marx revisits some of Dilke's ideas on leisure time, but do you think there are flaws in Marx's approach? Does Dilke ultimately surpass Marx in your view?

I've noticed you've traced Dilke's views on leisure time back to Godwin, and Godwin's ideas to Calvinism. But if Marx's "great ideas" are merely a rehash of Dilke or Godwin's thoughts, what makes Marx's contributions unique or great?

Yes, I would consider myself a follower of Dilke and of Godwin, in that they initiated a discourse that had greater theoretical consequences than they could have ever foreseen. What Marx offered that Dilke didn't is a theory of capital and of crisis that is far more substantial and consequential than Dilke's. There are indeed "flaws" in Marx's approach, most significantly related to how he resolved -- or didn't resolve -- the difficulty of presenting his conclusions. Whether those conclusions are ultimately "right" or "wrong" is another matter, which I am not qualified to judge.

No, Dilke does not ultimately surpass Marx but there is a sense in which readers of Capital arrive at an understanding that may be closer to Dilke's than to Marx's. This is a bit hard to explain but Dilke's presentation was more "common sense." People reading a non-intuitive, theoretical presentation tend to mentally translate it into common sense terms. 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.

Just what is it that makes Marx's contribution so different, so appealing?

I have moved that discussion to a separate post.

Hot off the press... and cut... and fold... and glue. It’s Amazing!

“It’s amazing.”

“It’s incredible!”

“Cool!”

“Best book of 2024.”

“This is an amazing and unique work of art.”

“Your book is a thing of beauty and will be my joy forever. There’s something wonderful about a pop-up book in 2025.”

“Excellent, Tom. Brilliant way to bring the text to life. Well done (as always)!”

“It is not only beautiful and ingenious but itself a theoretical contribution.”

“It's amazing, a lot of work!”

“I love it!  What a creative and penetrating way to communicate Marx's core message.”

“I have just received your most interesting and delightful pop-up book. … I will study it carefully.”

“I really appreciate your book-art, a remarkable form of critique and practice at the same time.”

“Amazing pop up book: I love it!”

“It's great. I really like the way you brought together the ideas about disposable time as real wealth and the relations of production as fetters in such a creative way.”

“I have been thru' it without focusing (yet) on the words - just dwelling on how cunningly it is put together. The visual effect is amazing. It is a true labour of love. I shall read it with heightened awareness shortly."

“I thought that you couldn't top your first pop-up book, but I was wrong.”

On the politics that would make a post-growth transition possible

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.

A thing of beauty is a joy forever

Above, from On Biblical Subjects, by Robert Dodsley, a lift the flap illustrated manuscript circa 1720 (sold for £20,000 in 2021). Robert Dodsley's son - also named Robert Dodsley - published a volume of "Old English Plays" in 1744. 

In 1816, Charles Wentworth Dilke published volume two of his Old Plays, being a continuation of Dodsley's collection. Rodwell and Martin on Bond Street was the publisher. They also published Dilke's The Source and Remedy of the National Difficulties, deduced from principles of political economy, in a Letter to Lord John Russell. 

Included in volume two of Dilke's Old Plays  was "Endymion; or, The man in the moon," a comedy by John Lyly. Two years later, Dilke's dear friend and neighbour, John Keats published his poem, "Endymion," the famous first line of which is: "A thing of beauty is a joy forever."

Klaus Fuchs, Max Beer, and Our Anonymous Pamphleteer

Klaus Fuchs makes only a cameo appearance in this tale. But because he is far better known than Jürgen Kuczynski, his relationship to the latter helps establish the milieu in which our main character operated.

Fuchs is routinely referred to pejoratively as a "spy" who "stole" atomic secrets. A more nuanced view of his activities was offered by Sir Dick Goldsmith White, Director General of MI5 from 1953 to 1956, and Head of MI6 from 1956 to 1968: "He was a scientist who got cross at the Anglo-American ploy in withholding vital information from an ally fighting a common enemy."

In 1942, Fuchs met with Jürgen Kuczynski, who was then teaching at the London School of Economics. Kuczynski introduced him to the Soviet agent, Simon Kremer (codename: "Alexander"). After meeting with Kremer several times, Fuchs's intermediary was changed to Jürgen's sister, Ursula (codename: "Sonya"), so Fuchs wouldn't need to travel to London to hand over information. Biographies of both Klaus Fuchs and Ursula Kuczynski were published in 2020: Atomic Spy: The Dark Lives of Klaus Fuchs by Nancy Thorndike Greenspan and Agent Sonya: Lover, Mother, Soldier, Spy by Ben MacIntyre.

Although not as cinematic as his sister's or Fuchs's careers, Jürgen Kuczynski had his own moments of transnational intrigue, beginning in the mid 1920s with a stint as director of the American Federation of Labor's newly established statistical department. During his time with the AFL, Kuczynski developed new relative wage statistics and advised AFL president William Green on what Green proclaimed as Modern Wage Policy. In Labor Statistics and Class Struggle, Marc Linder described Kuczynski's contribution to AFL wage policy, characterizing him as "President Green's Marxist Ventriloquist." More on Kuczynski's eight-year sojourn in England can be found in "Jürgen Kuczynski: A German-Jewish Marxist Scholar in Exile" by Axel Fair-Schulz in German Scholars in Exile.

Kuczynski was a prolific writer, publishing over 4,000 articles and books during his career. In 1980, he wrote a piece for the Jahrbuch für Wirtschaftsgeschichte titled, "Das Verhältnis von Arbeit und Freizeit: Überlegungen zur Entwicklung vormarxscher Vorstellungen" ("The relationship between work and leisure: Reflections on the development of pre-Marxist ideas"). The last four and a half pages of the article consists mainly of long quotations from William Godwin and Karl Marx, interspersed with brief commentary, at a ratio of 3:1. Kuczynski's argument is not particularly original and, in fact, he credits Max Beer's Geschichte des Sozialismus in England (1913) for any original insights.

Like Kuczynski and Fuchs, Max Beer was a German émigré who was declared an enemy alien in England when war broke out between the two countries. In Beer's case, however, it was the First World War and he, a Jew, was safely deported back to Germany for the duration. After the war, he returned to England and published the greatly expanded History of British Socialism.

Unintentionally, Kucyzinski's gloss on Beer's interpretation reveals a subtle but significant difference between the German and English versions. In the English version, Beer greatly expanded his discussion of The Source and Remedy of the National Difficulties, from slightly less than a page to six full pages. But the German version contained a footnote in its section on William Godwin that was not replicated in the English version. Translated, that footnote read, "This sentence was later used by the pamphleteer. See Karl Marx, Theories of Surplus Value. III. 303." The sentence in question was, roughly, "the true wealth of man is leisure."

In the English version, Beer paraphrased Godwin's statement as "Real wealth was leisure." The pamphleteer's "beautiful" statement, "Wealth is disposable time, and nothing more" appears 128 pages later with no commentary linking it back to Godwin's idea or forward to Marx's appreciation. 

Of course, Beer's footnote was incredibly opaque unless one had a copy of Theories of Surplus Value on hand to explain who "Pamphletisten" referred to. Kuczynski's gloss on Beer's cryptic footnote was, I believe, correct:

Industrious leisure as wealth is indeed a wonderful idea that has been achieved by the [imaginative] flights of humanity into the future, an idea that Marx also happily adopted as an inheritance from the past. 

Not directly from Godwin, however, but from an anonymous pamphleteer who wrote a generation later and who, as Beer rightly suspects, adopted the idea of leisure as the wealth of the nation from Godwin. 

I suspect (that ol' hermeneutics of suspicion) that both Beer and Kuczynski were avoiding something, probably unconsciously, that would be unflattering to Karl Marx. For Beer, the clues are more explicit. Instead of expanding on an idea hinted at in a footnote, he eliminated it. For Kuczynski, Marx's "happy adoption" of the "wonderful idea" as "an inheritance from the past" elides the uncomfortable conclusion that Marx credited the pamphlet's "wealth is disposable time" nowhere in his published work but effusively in his unpublished writings. 

I don't mean this as crying foul. Marx made an analytical contribution that far surpassed Godwin's and Dilke's boldly-stated convictions. The standards for crediting sources are not written in stone. And, presumably, Marx fully intended to publish Theories of Surplus Value, which contained an extensive review of the pamphlet. He just never got around to finishing it.

The spectre of "plagiarism" haunts Marx's appropriation of the idea that wealth is disposable time for several reasons. First, Friedrich Engels brought up the matter of the pamphlet that "Marx saved from falling into oblivion" in the context of refuting accusations of plagiarism from Karl Rodbertus and his acolyte. Later, along with Karl Kautsky, Engels again refuted Anton Menger's charges that Marx was deliberately deficient in citing his sources. Oddly enough, Engels and Kautsky ignored Menger's disparagement of Engels's earlier claim that Marx's views on surplus value had been influenced by the pamphlet "which," according to Menger, "contains only faint hints of the theory."

Beer was ambivalent about Herbert Foxwell's introduction to Menger's book. In 1913, he wrote, "As a result of the author's passionate anti-Marxianism, I was thrown into a polemical mood during the lecture, which seemed to me to be a poor preparation for scientific research. I therefore soon put the book down..." Six years later, he referred to Foxwell's introduction as the only "adequate exposition" of the writings of Gray, Thompson, Hodgskin, and Bray, whose works were "almost unattainable."  Beer had little else to say about Menger's The Right to the Whole Produce of Labour other than to complain that Menger spread the exaggerated view of William Thompson's importance he received from Adolf Held's  Zwei Bucher Zur Socialen Geschichte Englands.

Giancarlo de Vivo said back in 2019 that The Source and Remedy "has not received the attention it deserves" considering Marx's own claims. Having immersed myself in Marx's appropriation and elaboration on the pamphlet's themes, I would put the case much stronger. Close attention to the pamphlet's influence on Marx fundamentally transforms what we know about the development of Marx's thought and what he meant by the contradiction between the forces and relations of production.

The more this contradiction develops...

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. 

 

Behind the Billboards

IMOGEN CUNNINGHAM: Roi had to restrain himself on art because after the birth of the twins he was at Foster and Kleiser, billboard advertising. Because they knew that I had a camera and was a photographer, they asked him to do billboards. You know, to go out and photograph them. He did very good shots. And all I could see of it was from Twin Peaks. He would tell me in what direction the light was. I guessed at the exposure. He did it on 4 x 7 film and he did a darned good job. He took it downtown to a place for development. One day he came home and said, "You know, there's a new girl at Marshios now, and she comes halfway across the counter." Guess who that was. Dorthea [sic] Lange. And we became acquainted with Dorthea Lange. He then introduced Dorthea to Maynard Dixon, who was also at Foster and Kleiser. This is the way artists had to earn a living. It was just problematical what they did on the side, but they all did something, you know. - Oral history interview with Imogen Cunningham, 1975 June 9

The twins, Padraic and Rondal Partridge, were born in 1917. As a child, Rondal Partridge spent time in Dorothea and Maynard's household. He later became Lange's assistant for her photography work with the New Deal's Farm Security Administration. 

Dorothea Lange by Rondal Partridge

Of particular interest to me is a series of photos Lange (and Partridge) took along U.S. highway 99 in California. She described the project in a "general caption": 

The billboards along highway 99 that Dorothea Lange photographed - along with a much later one by Ron Partridge - make up the visual backbone of my pop-up book, Marx's Fetters: a remedial reading. Not surprisingly many of those billboards bore the Foster and Kleiser logo. The company was the largest billboard company in California. Three of Lange's photos that I featured in Marx's Fetters were of billboards for the National Association of Manufacturer's "American Way" propaganda campaign.

 

The N.A.M. had been the most ardent opponent of the 8-hour day and vigorously  promoted the so-called lump-of-labor fallacy myth to discredit advocates of shorter hours and "educate the educators" in the nation's college economics departments. It stands to reason that they should take credit for the world's shortest working hours once the stock market crash and Great Depression had forcibly reduced hours.

Ron Partridge had also photographed the "World's Shortest Hours" billboard mounted on the side of a dilapidated pipe and plumbing supply shop that also bore the legend, "We Buy Junk." The "World's Highest Standard of Living" billboard was made famous by Margaret Bourke-White's LIFE magazine photo of African-American Ohio River flood survivors lined up for relief supplies in Louisville, KY.  

A few years past a quarter of a century after Lange's highway 99 billboard photos, Ron Partridge photographed a "New Chevy" billboard looming over piles of wrecked cars in Emeryville, California. Again the Foster and Kleiser logo appears discreetly just below the car's image.

It seems to me that this image is a companion to two others by Partridge, "Pave it and Paint it Green" and "El Camino Real, Palo Alto." For about four years my family lived on Tioga Court in Palo Alto, just a short bike ride from El Camino. The rubber stamp shop is probably the one I got a one-day job cleaning up along with my buddy and next door neighbor, Carl Coffee.

Perhaps it is not possible to fit into American life. American Life is a billboard; individual life in the U.S. includes something nameless that takes place in the weeds behind it. - Harold Rosenberg

Back to Dorothea Lange and highway 99 in the 1930s, there are 14 images in the Library of Congress collection of "Billboard along U.S. 99 behind which three destitute families of migrants are camped. Kern County, California" or "possibly related" to it. In my book, I fused two of the "possibly-related" images to show both the front and back of the billboard at the same time. The billboard company was Foster and Kleiser.

The images in Marx's Fetters do not illustrate Marx's text. Instead they allude to a complementary narrative of conspicuous consumption, progressive obsolescence, and "keeping the consumer dissatisfied" as the 20th century counterpart to Marx's 19th century analysis of capital's inevitable tendency to overproduction. In the weeds behind the prosperity boasting billboards are - literally - destitute families, junk shops, eroded landscapes, and auto wrecking yards.

In lieu of a theoretical essay to accompany the images, I will offer a reading list. The first two are satirical pieces by Kenneth Burke, the next two are affirmations of the wasteful practices Burke satirizes in his two essays. The two affirmative essays could be read as satire, which is to say they are cynical affirmations. The last three links are to my thoughts from early 2022 about Herbert Marcuse's, Thorstein Veblen's, and Georg Simmel's theoretical reflections on reification, consumerism, and planned obsolescence. The Marcuse post contains a hint about the connection between the Marx text in my pop-up book and planned obsolescence.

Waste - The Future of Prosperity 1930

Recipe for Prosperity: "Borrow. Buy. Waste. Want." 1956

Is Progressive Obsolescence the Path Toward Increased Consumption? 1928

Keep the Consumer Dissatisfied 1929

Herbert Marcuse and Planned Obsolescence

Expressions that pass from hand to hand like sealed containers...

On that "deep feeling that something is wrong..."

The Book is Not for Selling.

"This is an amazing and unique work of art." – Martin Nicolaus.

I had my first inquiry from someone who wanted to buy a copy of my new pop-up book. This presented me with a dilemma because I had never intended to sell copies of the book. The rationale for not selling appears in the book – on pages eight and eleven. The nature of capital is that "real wealth must take on a specific form distinct from itself, absolutely not identical with it, in order to become an object of production at all." And...

...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.

Real wealth thus cannot be measured in money. Any price I attached to the book would be arbitrary. Why not $62,885,000? "But you are not Andy Warhol!" O.K., then $62,885? $6,289? $62.89 plus shipping? A banana duct taped to a wall sold for $6.2 million last week.

In The Unknown Unknown Marx, I wrote: Toward the end of his 1968 essay, "The Unknown Marx," Martin Nicolaus quoted Marx's enumeration of four barriers to production under capital that "expose the basis of overproduction, the fundamental contradiction of developed capital." Nicolaus qualified what Marx meant by overproduction to be "[not] simply ‘excess inventory’; rather, he means excess productive power more generally."

Marx's enumeration of those barriers – the infamous 'fetters' on the development of the productive forces – provides the text of page eight of my book.

Page eight of Marx's Fetters: a remedial reading

"It "would require a book," Nicolaus then observed, to present "a proper analysis of the implications of these rather cryptic theses." In lieu of that analysis, he offered a synopsis that "these four ‘limits’ represent no more than different aspects of the contradiction between ‘forces of production’ and ‘social relations of production’."

My contention is that the decoder ring for those 'cryptic theses' appears in the enigmatic statement, "The whole development of wealth rests on the creation of disposable time." The paragraph in which that statement appears gives a concise explanation of what it means. Two paragraphs earlier, Marx had quoted from the 1821 pamphlet, The Source and Remedy of the National Difficulities, "Wealth is disposable time and nothing more..." 

Marx's amendment of the phrase from identity to contingency is decisive. Disposable time is necessary for the development of wealth but not sufficient. This contingency returns with a vengence in the four barriers, culminating in the assertion that "real wealth has to take on a specific form distinct from itself... to become an object of production at all."

The whole development of wealth...

Incidentally, a book has to take on a specific form distinct from itself, too – a 'book proposal' – for it to become an object of publication at all. Which is, of course, another reason my pop-up book is not for sale. The concept of the book, however, is available for free: The more the contradition develops: footnotes to "Marx's Fetters: a remedial reading" -- a pop-up book. A neat feature of that post is that if you click on one of the photos to enlarge it, you get a menu of photos that you can scroll through as a slide show. I also want to make it possible for people to assemble their own copy. I have a workshop scheduled for March and another one in the proposal stage for the end of May. I intend to make pdf files available of the page images and of the cut and fold diagrams.

Here is my cnc cutting machine doing its thing:

Coming Up For Air

 Like Punxsutawney Phil, I’ve started to come out of my hole after last week’s trauma. I was angry at Everybody, including myself.

Party politics of any sort will be a distant concern for a while. What is not is the burgeoning war in the ME. We should lean hard into support for an aid cut-off to Israel. Everything. Note that what’s in question here is not the material effect of the aid, but the political one inside Israel. We need to recognize the distinction between Judaism and Zionism, between Jews and Zionists, and seek Jewish allies rather than pre-judge or stereotype them.

Sure, other things are important too, and the incoming Administration will be setting all sorts of fires that will beg to be put out. In politics, focus and repetition count for the most. It will pay to focus on Palestine (and Yemen, Lebanon, and Iran).

Sadly, the Left has a clear field here, besides the agitation among Muslim organizations. Most important, EVERYBODY WILL KNOW WE ARE RIGHT. That’s a political advantage.

The specter of Trump’s wreckage of democratic institutions certainly looks threatening, but it will prove to be related to the ME. Defying the incoming Administration on Israel will be a challenge to the full spectrum of Federal lawless enforcement bodies on which MAGA power depends. Success on the former breeds success on the latter. You beat something with something else. Back in the day, the anti-war movement opened up all sorts of collateral doors.

Democratic Party voices these days can be pretty sickening. I read somewhere that MSNBC is hemorrhaging viewers. The only talker I still watch (in reduced doses these days), Chris Hayes, said the other night, “I wouldn’t watch me.” Joy Reid is just a hack. Rachel Maddow gives me hives. Lawrence O’Donnell, smart and sometimes insightful, is on too late; I can only take so much rehash of the day.

The Party establishment — its elite pols, consultants, donors — has discredited itself. Of course it wants to blame the Woke or the Left, like it always does. Recognizing the opening, Bernie with his unerring political instincts, plunged in the knife. Would that we could all help to exploit this opportunity. Topic A for moral, strategic, and tactical reasons is still Israel’s expanding rampage in the ME.