Between 1857 and 1867 Karl Marx wrote four drafts of what would become the first volume of Das Kapital. The presumed third draft of volume one is missing. One theory is that this draft was substantially the same as the final draft, which was a 'fair copy' of it. The three extant drafts, the Grundrisse, the 1861-63 manuscript, and the published volume one of Capital are plenty for examining Marx’s revisions of what he argued was the basis of surplus-value and thus of a class of large proprietors: no surplus, no classes; no classes, no class struggle.
My starting assumption is that disposable time was a key category in the Grundrisse but it went underground in the final draft of volume one of Capital. In the German edition, disponible Zeit appeared three times but ‘disposable time’ only twice in the English translations. The first two appearances come in Chapter 10, “The Working Day,” The third in Chapter 16 “Absolute and Relative Surplus-Value” This latter disponible Zeit was translated, respectively, as “superfluous time at his disposal” in the Samuel Moore/Edward Aveling translation of 1887 and “free time at his disposal” in the 1976 translation by Ben Fowkes.
This third instance of disponible Zeit is the one that adheres closest to Marx’s discussion in the Grundrisse.
Without a certain degree of productiveness in his labour, he has no such superfluous time at his disposal; without such superfluous time, no surplus-labour, and therefore no capitalists, no slave-owners, no feudal lords, in one word, no class of large proprietors. [emphasis added]
A footnote at the end of this sentence cites quotations from Ramsay and Ravenstone, respectively. Ravenstone’s quote, “If each man’s labour were but enough to produce his own food, there could be no property,” was paraphrased as, “If one can produce only enough for one, everyone a worker; there can be no property,” in the passage of the Grundrisse where Marx introduced his category of disposable time, The preceding paragraph in the Grundrisse contained paraphrased statements from The Source and Remedy of the National Difficulties, including the “fine statement,” “Wealth […] is disposable time, and nothing more.”
After pithy paragraphs from The Source and Remedy and from Ravenstone, Marx presented the scaffolding for his theory of surplus value, based on the development of the productive forces:
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 production resting on capital, the existence of necessary labour time is conditional on the creation of superfluous labour time.
Beginning in notebook III and peaking in this section of notebook IV of the Grundrisse, Marx emphasized the inseparable relation between surplus value or surplus labour and the development of the productive forces, which plays such a key role in the famous 1859 preface by Marx to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy. For all its canonical status, that preface does not mention surplus value or surplus labour. But “without such superfluous time, no surplus-labour, and therefore no capitalists, no slave-owners, no feudal lords, in one word, no class of large proprietors.”
Another consequential change in Marx’s thinking appears in this section. In a footnoted aside, (“It does not belong here…”) Marx departed from the thesis expressed a decade earlier in the Manifesto of the simplification of class antagonism into “two great hostile camps, into two classes directly facing each other” while “other classes decay and finally disappear in the face of Modern Industry.” In the non-belonging footnote, Marx observed 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. This goes without saying as regards capital itself; but holds then also for the classes with which it shares; hence of the paupers, flunkeys, lickspittles etc. living from the surplus product, in short, the whole train of retainers; the part of the servant [dienenden] class which lives not from capital but from revenue. Essential difference between this servant class and the working class.
But it is not only parasites and servants that perform the “minus-labour.” “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.” Marx expanded on this theme in a remarkable parenthetical passage in Theories of Surplus Value in which Marx speculated about a future advance of productivity such that "whereas earlier two-thirds of the population were directly engaged in material production, now it is only one-third."
What is a Working Day?
The two disposable times of Chapter 10 of Capital follow a similar narrative arc. Section one of Chapter 10 begins with a discussion of the length of the working day and its relationship to necessary labour and surplus labour. This is consistent with the examination Marx conducted of the length of the working day at the beginning of Grundrisse notebook IV, p. 375-397. Toward the end of this discussion, Marx asked, “But, what is a working day?” At the beginning of section five, Marx again asked, “What is a working day?” The initial answers to both questions each contains a sardonic account of the capitalists’ attitude toward the worker taking any of their disposable time for themselves. In section one, “If the labourer consumes his disposable time for himself, he robs the capitalist.” Similarly in section five,
Hence it is self-evident that the labourer is nothing else, his whole life through, than labour-power, that therefore all his disposable time is by nature and law labour-time, to be devoted to the self-expansion of capital. Time for education, for intellectual development, for the fulfilling of social functions and for social intercourse, for the free-play of his bodily and mental activity, even the rest time of Sunday (and that in a country of Sabbatarians!) — moonshine!
Both sections one and five contain didactic explanations of the relationship between the length of the working day and the wellbeing of the worker, on the one hand, and on the other hand the production of surplus value for the capitalist. Both end in the endorsement of the normal working-day. Section one is four pages long in the Progress Publishers edition and is entirely explanatory.
Sections two, three, and four total 25 pages of Dickensian accounts of the depredations of capital.
The explanatory part of section five is two pages, after which resumes another 28 pages decrying first efforts by property to enforce longer working days and subsequently haughty resistance by capital to limiting the working day. The chapter then concludes in section seven with a recapitulation of the historical highpoints of the struggle for a normal working day rising to a crescendo of current demands for the eight-hour day in the United States and by the International Working Men’s Association. Concluding, with a flourish,
In place of the pompous catalogue of the “inalienable rights of man” comes the modest Magna Charta of a legally limited working-day, which shall make clear “when the time which the worker sells is ended, and when his own begins.” Quantum mutatus ab illo!
From the Grundrisse to Capital, Marx appears to have demoted disposable time from a central category to a foil for the capitalist villain. One might cynically paraphrase the chapter’s last sentence: “In place of the pompous catalogue of ‘wealth is disposable time’ comes the modest Magna Carta of a normal working-day.”
Did Marx repress “this vision, which now appears as his most realistic, his most amazing insight!" as Herbert Marcuse exclaimed in 1965? No, he buried its lamp under a bushel that was undoubtedly intended to appeal to a broader audience. The politics of the International Working Men’s Association undoubtedly played a major role in his rhetorical style.
In his 1861-63 manuscripts he was still featuring the disposable time analysis. In that draft he referred to “disposable Zeit,” preserving half of the original English. The publication of manuscripts from 1857-58 and 1861-63 has engendered an academic cottage industry aimed at parsing the meaning of Marx’s revisions from draft to draft to draft. I am not aware of any discussions of Marx’s evolution from disposable time to a normal working-day.
DISPOSABLE Zeit
Marx’s 1861-63 manuscripts still give a prominent place to what he called ‘DISPOSABLE Zeit’ in the draft of Capital and ‘disposable time’ in the draft of Theories of Surplus Value. In the Grundrisse the category appeared twelve times: seven times in English, three times as ‘disponible Zeit’ with varying inflections and twice as ‘verfügbare Zeit.’ In Das Kapital, ‘disponible Zeit’ appears three times but only two of those are translated as ‘disposable time’ in the English translation. In the 1861-63 manuscripts ‘DISPOSABLE Zeit’ appears five times (including ‘der freie Zeit, DISPOSABLE nicht in der unmittelbaren Production der Subsistenz') and ‘disposable time’ once (in a citation of The Source and Remedy) in the draft for Capital. Theories of Surplus Value has eight appearances of the English term ‘disposable time.’ So in total there are two more instances in the 1861-63 manuscripts than there were in the 1857-58 manuscripts!
In 1857-58 and 1861-63 disposable time fell under the heading of surplus value. Notebook IV: “Surplus Value and Profit” Notebook VII: “Contradiction between the foundation of bourgeois production (value as measure) and its development”, “The chief role of capital is to create disposable time; contradictory form of this in capital.” In the 1861-63 manuscript, the section heading was “Character of Surplus Labour” in a chapter on “Absolute Surplus Value.”
Theories of Surplus Value is, of course, about surplus value. In Das Kapital only one ‘disponible Zeit’ appearance comes in the chapter on “Absolute and Relative Surplus-Value.” The appearance of disposable time for the workers as sarcastic “moonshine” or theft from the standpoint of capital in the chapter on “The Working-Day” is a novelty and suggests Marx felt some bitterness toward the constraints popularization imposed on his self expression.
The structure of the 1861-63 manuscript suggests that the theme of struggle for a normal working day was an afterthought. Some of the early material related to that chapter only appear for the first time as “additions” to the section b., “Ratio of Surplus Labour to Necessary Labour. Measure of Surplus Labour” of the chapter on “Absolute Surplus Value.” The question Marx asked twice in chapter 10 of Capital – “What is a working-day” – ultimately boils down to a question of the ratio betweem surplus labour and necessary labour.
Positing the labourer consuming his own disposable time as robbery inverts an argument from the 1861-63 manuscript that is otherwise subdued in Capital,
Just as plants live from the earth, and animals live from the plants or plant-eating animals, so does the part of society which possesses free time, DISPOSABLE time not absorbed in the direct production of subsistence, live from the surplus labour of the workers. Wealth is therefore DISPOSABLE time.
