The Essence of Revolutionary Practice

I have been puzzled by the term 'revolution' since the 1970s when I started reading Marx's work. In the past few years my puzzlement has focused more precisely on the 'revolutionary practice' that appears in Marx's third thesis on Feuerbach:

The materialist doctrine that men are products of circumstances and upbringing, and that, therefore, changed men are products of changed circumstances and changed upbringing, forgets that it is men who change circumstances and that the educator must himself be educated. Hence this doctrine is bound to divide society into two parts, one of which is superior to society. The coincidence of the changing of circumstances and of human activity or self-change can be conceived and rationally understood only as revolutionary practice. -- Karl Marx, Theses on Feuerbach

I was on the brink of dismissing it as a rhetorical flourish that 'solves' a philosophical problem poetically. Then it occurred to me. Revolutionary practice was a euphemism for action guided by faith, something that obviously couldn't be uttered in a commentary on Feuerbach's critique of religion. What Marx meant by revolution was simply the name that had been given to major political upheavals that had led to the termination of the ancien regimes: the French Revolution, the Glorious Revolution, the American Revolution. In his Introduction to A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, Marx lamented that Germany had suffered from all the subsequent counter-revolutions without ever benefiting from a revolution of its own. It was in this Introduction, that Marx proposed the idea of a proletarian revolution as well as the famous aphorism about religion being the opium of the people.

To this non-specialist reader, several of Marx's criticisms of Feuerbach in the Theses seem exaggerated or unsupported by an objective reading of Feuerbach. In all fairness, this was not something Marx intended to publish and he may have simply been putting down provocative markers for later attention and revision. The Grundrisse is chock full of disclaimers that one or the other observation "does not belong here." Marx also had a habit of scolding his sources for "not seeing" something that he realized after reading the source.

In The Essence of Christianity, Feuerbach discussed the contradiction of faith and love, with love revealing the "hidden essence of religion" while faith is its conscious form. Love expresses "the identity of the divine being with the human" while the form of religion, faith, revolves around the distinction between the human and the divine, the believer and the unbeliever. 

In his analysis of (partial) political revolutions, in his Introduction to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, Marx highlighted the need for a common enemy to unite the other classes:

For the revolution of a nation, and the emancipation of a particular class of civil society to coincide, for one estate to be acknowledged as the estate of the whole society, all the defects of society must conversely be concentrated in another class, a particular estate must be the estate of the general stumbling-block, the incorporation of the general limitation, a particular social sphere must be recognized as the notorious crime of the whole of society, so that liberation from that sphere appears as general self-liberation.

But in 1840s Germany, no particular class "has the constituency, the penetration, the courage, or the ruthlessness that could mark it out as the negative representative of society." It is this absence of a "negative representative class" that provides the opening for the proletariat as the revolutionary subject.

...a class with radical chains, a class of civil society which is not a class of civil society, an estate which is the dissolution of all estates, a sphere which has a universal character by its universal suffering and claims no particular right because no particular wrong, but wrong generally, is perpetuated against it; which can invoke no historical, but only human, title; which does not stand in any one-sided antithesis to the consequences but in all-round antithesis to the premises of German statehood; a sphere, finally, which cannot emancipate itself without emancipating itself from all other spheres of society and thereby emancipating all other spheres of society, which, in a word, is the complete loss of man and hence can win itself only through the complete re-winning of man.

This distinction between "a class of civil society which is not a class of civil society" and all other spheres of society is an inversion of the distinction between the divine being and the human but fundamentally, it is a distinction. There is even an echo of the Sermon on the Mount in it. "Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth." Blessed is the proletariat, for it will free all society.

To borrow Feuerbach's distinction, while faith is the conscious form of Marx's revolutionary practice, its essence is love. The full context of Marx's description of religion as opium reveals a deeper sympathy with the impulse toward religion:

Religious suffering is, at one and the same time, the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions.

Marx was concerned with eradicating the real suffering religion expressed and thus nominated the proletariat "which has a universal character by its universal suffering" as the agent for ending that suffering. There is an undoubted symmetry to that argument but no obvious procedural logic. One might speculate that Marx's subsequent decades-long study of political economy was in search of such a logic. What that investigation discovered, however, was not a logic of revolutionary practice but of capital accumulation, whose "absolute general law" was the expansion of a disposable industrial reserve army:

The greater the social wealth, the functioning capital, the extent and energy of its growth, and, therefore, also the absolute mass of the proletariat and the productiveness of its labour, the greater is the industrial reserve army. The same causes which develop the expansive power of capital, develop also the labour power at its disposal.

But if religion is "the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world," why should a mere quantitative increase in 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" turn that mass away from the opium of religion -- supplemented by synthetic opiates, whether chemical, mechanical, or digital -- toward the elixir of revolutionary practice? 

The formation of "a disposable industrial reserve army, which belongs to capital just as absolutely as if the latter had bred it at its own cost" was an analysis that Marx had developed in his 1857-58 notebooks in his engagement with the 1821 pamphlet, The Source and Remedy of the National Difficulties. He later summarized that encounter in Theories of Surplus Value, "This scarcely known pamphlet... contains an important advance on Ricardo," Marx wrote:

It bluntly describes surplus-value—or “profit”, as Ricardo calls it (often also “surplus produce”), or “interest”, as the author of the pamphlet terms it—as “surplus labour”, the labour which the worker performs gratis, the labour he performs over and above the quantity of labour by which the value of his labour-power is replaced, i.e., by which he produces an equivalent for his wages.

Toward the end of his discussion of the pamphlet, Marx commented, "Our pamphleteer 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.

The above comment is simply an alternative phrasing of Marx's description in Capital of the "absolute general law of capital accumulation." Its final point about the non-necessity of extending working hours may have been in rebuttal to the pamphlet's question:

How is it that notwithstanding the unbounded extent of our capital, the progressive improvement and wonderful perfection of our machinery, our canals, roads, and of all other things that can, either facilitate labour, or increase its produce; our labourer, instead of having his labours abridged, toils infinitely more, more hours, more laboriously...?

What Marx overlooked in his comment about the lack of need to extend working time was that employers extended hours whether or not they needed to. Average weekly hours in the U.K. continued to increase through the 1820s and only began a gradual decline after 1830. By 1864, when Marx was writing the draft for TSV, average weekly hours had declined by a little less than four and a half hours or 6.6%.

In the Grundrisse, Marx's discussion of the inversion of necessary and superfluous labour time recapitulated Feuerbach's discussion of the inversion of the relationship between humanity and its divine projection, "In production resting on capital, the existence of necessary labour time is conditional on the creation of superfluous labour time." In notebook VI, this inversion become vertiginous:

Labour capacity can perform its necessary labour only if its surplus labour has value for capital, if it can be realized by capital. Thus, if this realizability is blocked by one or another barrier, then (1) labour capacity itself appears outside the conditions of the reproduction of its existence; it exists without the conditions of its existence, and is therefore a mere encumbrance; needs without the means to satisfy them; (2) necessary labour appears as superfluous, because the superfluous is not necessary. It is necessary only to the extent that it is the condition for the realization of capital. 

Where is revolutionary practice when we need it? How does self-change arise from these changing circumstances? In notebook VII of the Grundrisse, Marx declared that the compulsion of capital "to reduce labour time to a minimum, while it posits labour time, on the other side, as sole measure and source of wealth" creates "the material conditions to blow this foundation sky-high." "The more this contradiction develops," he argued, the clearer it becomes that "the mass of workers must themselves appropriate their own surplus labour." In his Inaugural Address to the First International, Marx hailed the Ten-Hours' Bill as a victory of the political economy of the working class over the political economy of the middle class. In chapter 10 of volume one of Capital, he affirmed that the limitation of the working day was a necessary condition for "improvement and emancipation." And in chapter 48 of volume three, proclaimed the reduction of the working day as a basic prerequisite for achieving the "realm of freedom." 

One begins to discern a pattern here. But that pattern is both confirmed and confused by a very famous passage from Marx's 1859 Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy:

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. 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.

The first line reiterates the description of the materialist doctrine from thesis #3: "that men are products of circumstances and upbringing, and that, therefore, changed men are products of changed circumstances and changed upbringing." But it omits what that doctrine forgets: "that it is men who change circumstances and that the educator must himself be educated." Instead it pivots to the conflict between the productive forces of society and the existing relations of production in which the latter becomes a restraint on the continued development of the former. In Feuerbachian terms, think of the productive forces as humanity and the relations of production as God. 

"Then begins an era of social revolution." Marx no longer talked about human activity or self-change but about changes in the economic foundation and political superstructure. "The coincidence of the changing of circumstances and of human activity or self-change" is either taken for granted or overlooked as inessential. One need no longer worry about the contradictory nature of revolutionary practice as love versus revolutionary practice as faith.

There is an automatism to the self-changing presumed to spring from the fetters placed on the productive forces in the Preface that is inconsistent with the Promethean world-changing ethos of the Theses. Prometheus despised the gods and his chains and torment were an eternal punishment for his defiance. For the proletariat, their fetters are presumed to be a signal for their self-emancipation from torment. The first time as tragedy; the second as comedy? But Marx was not writing for the stage. He wanted to change the world. The detour from revolutionary practice to revolutionary era was a dead end. Walter Benjamin commented on it in one of his last drafts:

...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.

The error was not the Social Democrats', as Benjamin thought, but Marx's.

In the Midst of a Rupture

"The modern ancien regime is rather merely the clown of a world order whose real heroes are dead." -- Karl Marx, Contribution to the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Law

"This bargain no longer works. Let me be direct. We are in the midst of a rupture, not a transition." -- Mark Carney

In his speech to the Davos World Economic Forum yesterday (January 20), Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney drew an analogy between the so-called "rules-based economic order" and the "post-totalitarian" Communist government of Czechoslovakia described by Václav Havel. Carney began with Havel's parable of the greengrocer who every day places a sign in the shop window:

In 1978, the Czech dissident Václav Havel, later president, wrote an essay called “The Power of the Powerless,” and in it he asked a simple question: how did the communist system sustain itself?

And his answer began with a greengrocer.

Every morning, the shopkeeper places a sign in his window: “Workers of the world unite.” He doesn’t believe in it. No one does. But he places the sign anyway to avoid trouble, to signal compliance, to get along. And because every shopkeeper on every street does the same, the system persists — not through violence alone, but through the participation of ordinary people in rituals they privately know to be false.

Carney made a slight misstatement of the topic of Havel's essay, however. Havel didn't ask how the communist system sustained itself. He was addressing how the post-totalitarian system did so. In fact, "post-totalitarian system" appears 71 times, compared to 0 for "communist system." A few hints from Havel suggest that the post-totalitarian system he analyzed had some notable similarities with the capitalist West:

In highly simplified terms, it could be said that the post-totalitarian system has been built on foundations laid by the historical encounter between dictatorship and the consumer society. Is it not true that the far-reaching adaptability to living a lie and the effortless spread of social auto-totality have some connection with the general unwillingness of consumption-oriented people to sacrifice some material certainties for the sake of their own spiritual and moral integrity? With their willingness to surrender higher values when faced with the trivializing temptations of modern civilization? With their vulnerability to the attractions of mass indifference? And in the end, is not the grayness and the emptiness of life in the post-totalitarian system only an inflated caricature of modern life in general? And do we not in fact stand (although in the external measures of civilization, we are far behind) as a kind of warning to the West, revealing to its own latent tendencies?

It is possible to take Havel's analysis a step further and ask whether there is not a semblance of post-totalitarianism also to the ideology of the so-called free world. That step is warranted by no less an authority than the author of The Origins of Totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt. In "The Ex-Communists," Arendt distinguished between former communists and ex-communists. Former communists simply went on with the rest of their lives while ex-communists morphed into communists-in-reverse and became informers against their old comrades. ‪Commonweal, which had published Arendt's article in 1953, published a retrospective in 2024, "Hannah Arendt on the New Right: Thinking like a communist." The article stresses the relevance of Arendt's essay today, over 70 years after it was published:

Today, amid the rise of what has been termed right-wing populism, Arendt’s work on National Socialism and ex-Communism remains as relevant as ever. The legacy of the ex-Communist mentality is a potent force in American politics. It is used by those who support Trump’s anti-establishment politics to erode democratic norms such as free speech by, for example, banning books that are deemed incompatible with a certain vision of American culture. Written over seventy years ago, Arendt’s Commonweal essay illuminates affinities between the tyranny of this ex-Communist mentality and the “New Right” today, which echoes the worst of the McCarthy era.

In her 1953 essay and in an earlier typescript from around 1950 dealing with the same issue, "The Eggs Speak Up," Arendt argued that the ex-communists brought their Stalinist habits with them into their anti-communist agitation, thus creating a totalitarian threat from the right.‬‬‪"[T]hey are introducing police methods into normal social life..." she wrote, "Because, without exception, they name names, they make police agents of themselves after the fact, as it were. In this way, the informant system is being  integrated into the society."‬‬ To borrow a term from the Soviet lexicon, the ex-Communist cadre performed as the vanguard of McCarthyism.

This is not to argue for an identity between the restriction of political activity under Communist Party rule in Eastern Europe and the marginalization of the broad left in the U.S. and its allies. There are differences of both degree and kind. But there was also convergence as post-totalitarianism began to crumble in the East while in the West, neo-liberal austerity, privitization, and deregulation became the norm  to which there is no alternative, according to "Iron Lady" Maggie Thatcher. It is not just the rules-based international order that resembles Havel's post-totalitarianism.

But returning to that supposedly rules-based order (RBO), Carney painted a rosy, albeit nebulous, picture of its public goods: 

For decades, countries like Canada prospered under what we called the rules-based international order. We joined its institutions, we praised its principles, we benefited from its predictability. And because of that, we could pursue values-based foreign policies under its protection.

We knew the story of the international rules-based order was partially false, that the strongest would exempt themselves when convenient, that trade rules were enforced asymmetrically, and we knew that international law applied with varied rigour, depending on the identity of the accused or the victim.

John Dugard, former member of International Law Commission, Judge ad hoc International Court of Justice, and UN Special Rapporteur on Human Rights in the Occupied Palestinian Territories, gives a considerably less sanguine picture of those "partially false" protections in an editorial, "The choice before us: International law or a ‘rules-based international order’?" in which he asked:

What is this creature, the ‘rules-based international order’, that American political leaders have increasingly invoked since the end of the Cold War instead of international law? Is it a harmless synonym for international law, as suggested by European leaders? Or is it something else, a system meant to replace international law which has governed the behaviour of states for over 500 years?

Dugard's answer outlines several reasons why the U.S. prefers the RBO to international law:

• First, the United States is not a party to a number of important multilateral treaties that constitute an essential feature of international law.
• Second, the United States has placed interpretations on international law justifying the use of force and the violation of international humanitarian law that are controversial and contested.
• Third, the United States is unwilling to hold some states, such as Israel, accountable for violations of international law. They are treated as sui generis cases in which the national interest precludes accountability.

Dugard concludes that the West's adherence to the RBO undermines efforts to establish a universal system of laws based on the same presumed rules and values of the RBO, which, however. do not have a known content beyond the assertion of general principles like "respect for human rights, self-determination, territorial integrity, freedom of navigation, democratic governance, free movement of goods, economic openness etc." The starkest example of the deviation of the RBO from international law Dugard notes can be seen in the "unbreakable bond" between the U.S. and Israel:

This exceptionalism in respect of Israel was spelled out by the United States in its joint declaration with Israel on the occasion of President Biden’s visit to Israel in July 2022, which reaffirms ‘the unbreakable bonds between our two countries and the enduring commitment of the United States to Israel’s security’ and the determination of the two states ‘to combat all efforts to boycott or de-legitimize Israel, to deny its right to self defence, or to single it out in any forum, including at the United Nations or the International Criminal Court’. This commitment explains the consistent refusal of the United States to hold Israel accountable for its repeated violations of humanitarian law, support the prosecution of perpetrators of international crimes before the International Criminal Court, condemn its assaults on Gaza (best portrayed as excessive enforcement of the occupation of Gaza and not self-defence as the United States argues), insist that Israel prosecute killers of a US national (Shireen Abu Akleh), criticize its violation of human rights as established by both the Human Rights Council and the General Assembly, accept that Israel applies a policy of apartheid in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, and oppose its annexation of East Jerusalem. And, of course, there is the refusal of the United States to acknowledge the existence of Israel’s nuclear arsenal or allow any discussion of it in the context of nuclear proliferation in the Middle East. Such measures on the part of Israel are possibly seen as consistent with the ‘rules-based international order’ even if they violate basic rules of international law.

As Carney said in his speech, "we knew that international law applied with varied rigour, depending on the identity of the accused or the victim." But he didn't name the accused or the victims. Don't hold your breath for a clarification on who they are. Nevertheless, this was a bold speech that invites the kind of critical expansion that I have tried to do here. Regardless of whether Carney was aware of all the implications, he definitely provided a lot of substance to chew on.

My Historical Materialism journal debut (in a citation)

 Accumulating disposable time

by Alexis Moraitis

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

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

135 Walker 2021, p.83.

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

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

Time at the Disposal of Society

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.

A century after Marx wrote his letter to Engels, Martin Nicolaus wrote "The Unknown Marx" for which he was awarded the first Isaac and Tamara  Deutscher Memorial Prize in 1969. The following year, István Mészáros was the second recipient of the prize. Michael Lebowitz received the prize in 2004. Fifty-eight years after Nicolaus wrote his essay, the unknown Marx is still elusive for many Marxists.