One hundred and fifty-eight years ago, Karl Marx wrote to Friedrich Engels to kvetch about the reviews of volume one of Capital. Marx enumerated the "three fundamentally new elements of the book": 1. it deals with the general form of surplus value, 2. it emphasizes the double character of labour power as use value and exchange value, 3. it shows that wages are "the irrational outward form of a hidden relationship." Then, in response to Dühring's "modest objection to the determination of value" he mentioned something fundamental to all three of those points: "no form of society can prevent the labour time at the disposal of society from regulating production..."
Marx's statement that "no form of society can prevent" is a double negative that could readily be restated as "all forms of society must allow." Here is how Marx stated something related in Capital, "In all states of society, the labour-time that it costs to produce the means of subsistence, must necessarily be an object of interest to mankind." In the Grundrisse, Marx emphasized the pertinence of the economy of time to communal production:
Economy of time, to this all economy ultimately reduces itself. Society likewise has to distribute its time in a purposeful way, in order to achieve a production adequate to its overall needs; just as the individual has to distribute his time correctly in order to achieve knowledge in proper proportions or in order to satisfy the various demands on his activity. Thus, economy of time, along with the planned distribution of labour time among the various branches of production, remains the first economic law on the basis of communal production. It becomes law, there, to an even higher degree.
"Time at the disposal of" is a variant phrasing of disposable time, which Marx identified in the Grundrisse as the basis of wealth:
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. In the lowest stages of production, firstly, few human needs have yet been produced, and thus few to be satisfied.
Marx repeatedly stressed, in the Grundrisse, in the 1861-63 draft of Capital, and in the final, published volume one, that, "the free time of the non-working parts of society is based on the surplus labour or overwork, the surplus labour time, of the working part. ... The whole of civilization and social development so far has been founded on this antagonism." And again:
If the labourer wants all his time to produce the necessary means of subsistence for himself and his race, he has no time left in which to work gratis for others. 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.
What Marx wrote in the German original of the above passage as disponible Zeit appeared in the English translation as "superfluous time at his disposal."
In a posthumously published article, What Every Child Should Know about Marx's Theory of Value, Michael Lebowitz discussed Marx's January 8,1868 letter to Engels, pointing out, "there is no better way to understand Marx’s theory of value than to see how he responded to critics of Capital." After quoting Marx's sentence about time at the disposal of society, Lebowitz commented: "That was the point: in a commodity-producing society, how else could labor be allocated—except by the market!" That was not the point, however. As we discussed above, Marx was explicit that the economy of time applied to all forms of society -- from "the lowest stages of production" to "communal production" -- not exclusively commodity-producing societies regulated by the market.
In December 2006, then President of Venezuela, Hugo Chávez, asked Lebowitz to examine a paragraph from Beyond Capital: Toward a theory of transition by István Mészáros and asked him for "concrete proposals for change." In light of Meszaros's description of capitalism as "an organic system of production, distribution and consumption, a system in which everything is connected," Chávez, wondered, "If everything is connected, how is it possible to change anything?"
Chávez had not specified which paragraph he had in mind, but Lebowitz concluded it was in "section 20.3.5 where Mészáros talked about 'the inescapable dialectical relationship' between production, distribution, circulation," Indeed, the final paragraph of that section reads very much like the description in Chávez's question. The concrete steps that Lebowitz recommended were 1. Producing for Communal Needs and Communal Purposes, 2. Social Production Organized by Workers, and 3. Social Ownership of the Means of Production. These are all concepts that Mészáros discussed somewhere in Beyond Capital.
Two central issues that Lebowitz did not address were "socialist accountancy" and "disposable time." Section 20.3, which contained the sought after paragraph was titled "the meaning of socialist accountancy." Sub-section 20.3.5 began, "To take a topical example..." indicating its continuity from the previous subsection, which had concluded with a discussion of the centrality to socialist accountancy of disposable time as the measure of real wealth:
The measure of real wealth — the total disposable time (not to be confused with idle ‘leisure') available to a given society in its qualitative potentiality and richness — cannot fit into capital's accountancy. Whether the senselessly wasteful 'economic rationality' used in its control processes is double-entry book-keeping or the computerized mathematical sophistication of linear programming and simultaneous equations.
The second to the last sentence of sub-section 20.3.5 reiterated the validity and necessity of the principles of socialist accountancy for superseding all circuits of the capital relation -- "the dialectic of production and consumption."
It would be reasonable to assume that Lebowitz had simply overlooked Mészáros's discussion of disposable time as a key element in socialist accountancy. However in April 2008, he published an essay in MRonline, "The Capitalist Workday, the Socialist Workday" in which he criticized "the simple demand for reducing the workday [as] a demand from within capitalism." Instead, Lebowitz advocated the qualitative improvement of the working day. "Rather than only 'free time' being time in which we can develop, from the perspective of socialism it is essential to make the whole day time for building human capacities."
Lebowitz's "alternative" to reducing the workday is not wrong. It simply is not different from reallocating "time at the disposal of society" and, as a pseudo alternative, it diminishes the analytical and critical role of disposable time, as outlined in Marx's letter to Engels and throughout his mature critique of political economy -- not to mention throughout Mészáros's work, too. In his MRonline piece, Lebowitz mentioned neither István Mészáros nor disposable time.
In 2010, however, Monthly Review published Lebowitz's The Socialist Alternative: Real Human Development in which he reiterated his criticism of reducing the workday and directly challenged Mészáros's notion of socialist accountancy and disposable time. Curiously, he mentioned a subsequent book by Mészáros, The Challenge and Burden of Historical Time (2008), as returning to "socialist accountancy and stressing another side [!]—the importance of 'free time,' 'disposable time'..." This emphasis, however was nothing new and had been fully developed in Beyond Capital. In a footnote, Lebowitz explained his rationale for rejecting Mészáros's focus on disposable time.
Emphasis upon reducing necessary labor in order to give us free time is a demand from within capitalism—one infected by capitalism because it is fixated upon the horror of the workday under capitalism. Contrary to Mészáros and others, the time for the full development of the individual should be understood not as “disposable time,” “free time” that can be put to “creative use” by self-realizing individuals but directly social time. In short, the focus should be not on the reduction of necessary labor but upon its transformation—a new, socialist definition of necessary labor, which incorporates “the time on a daily basis for education for self–managing, for our work within the household and our work within our communities.” With the abolition of capitalism, Marx acknowledged, necessary labor time “would expand to take up more of the day.”
Marx did indeed argue in Capital that necessary labour time "would expand to take up more of the day." But Lebowitz omitted the key argument in the previous sentence where Marx wrote, "Only the abolition of the capitalist form of production would permit the reduction of the working day to the necessary labour-time." In other words, necessary labour time would expand along with the reduction of the working day, not instead of it. Here is the whole passage:
Only the abolition of the capitalist form of production would permit the reduction of the working day to the necessary labour time. But even in that case the latter would expand to take up more of the day, and for two reasons: first, because the worker's conditions of life would improve, and his aspirations become greater, and second, because a part of what is now surplus labour would then count as necessary labour, namely the labour which is necessary for the formation of a social fund for reserve and accumulation.
Also, Lebowitz's claim that "emphasis upon reducing necessary labor in order to give us free time is a demand from within capitalism" is a misrepresentation of the demand, which has always been to reduce surplus labour time, not necessary labour time. Or, as Marx put in the Grundrisse, "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.
