Far from accepting the permanency
of the measure of labour-time, Marx underlines the role of disposable time
as the measure of wealth under the conditions of an advanced socialist society.
For, as he puts it,
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.
Labour time as the measure of value posits wealth itself as founded on poverty,
and disposable time as existing in and because of the antithesis to surplus
labour time; or, the positing of an individual's entire time as labour time, and
his degradation therefore to mere worker, subsumption under labour?
…
As we can see, in Marx's view 'the
planned distribution of labour time' is the salient feature of regulating the
communal labour process. Moreover, such a genuinely planned distribution of
society's total disposable time happens to be quite unique to the communitarian
mode of production and exchange. For under the conditions when the capitalist
division of labour prevails, the antagonistic structure of production and
distribution imposes on society the law of value as a blind determination.
…
As Marx rightly argues, no society
can function without giving a proper consideration to the 'economy of time'.
However, it makes a world of difference whether such consideration is imposed
upon the society in question by a mechanism that asserts itself behind the
backs of the producers (like the objective imperatives of the capitalist
exchange relation), or whether the social individuals active in the
communitarian system of production and distribution determine for themselves
how they allocate the total disposable time of their society in
fulfilment of their own needs and aspirations.
...
In the ideological discourse
dominant in our own epoch there is a mystifying tendency to identify exchange
as such with commodity exchange. At the same time, we are often
presented with similarly bewildering attempts to establish a necessary
correlation between the economy of time and the market. This is totally
unjustifiable for a variety of reasons.
First, because the proclamation of
this linkage arbitrarily precludes the possibility of operating a rational
system of allocation of the available human and material resources outside the
chaotic, and even in its own terms of reference in many ways wasteful,
distributive and corrective mechanism of the market.
Second, because the
market-determined allocation of time can only operate on the basis of enforcing
the requirement of minimum time, deciding in this crude way not only the
success or failure of competing commodities, but altogether the modality of
society's metabolic exchange with nature, and the legitimation or callous
denial of the needs of its members. Market-oriented management of labour time
is quite incapable of addressing the much more difficult question, concerned
with the total available time of the social body, including that portion of it
which cannot be successfully exploited within its reifying framework for the
purposes of profitable commodity production.
Third, because the development of
society's productive powers in the form of science and technology — i.e. the
cumulative objectification of living labour and of the collective mind, across
centuries, in the form of (beneficially or destructively) usable knowledge and
its instruments — makes it not only obsolete to remain locked within the
confines of directly exploitable minimum time; it also creates the danger of a
total breakdown of the social metabolism by activating, through the profit-oriented
irrational 'corrective' of the capitalist market mechanism, the stark prospects
of an ultimately incorrigible 'structural unemployment'.
Fourth, because the very notion of
'economy of time' — even in its narrowest terms of reference — becomes utterly
problematical with the development of capitalism. Inevitably, under the rule of
capital this shift must assume the form of an extreme contradiction. For the
capitalist system of cost-accounting can never completely renounce the
imposition of minimum time on the production process. It must continue the
maximum feasible exploitation of the labour force that remains in active
employment, notwithstanding all the dangers implicit in the rising structural
unemployment. At the same time, however, in conformity to the imperative to
decrease the rate of utilization, the drive for economizing (characteristic of
the ascending phase of capitalist development) is progressively displaced by
the tendency to ever-increasing wastefulness which asserts itself not
only in relation to goods, services and productive machinery, but also with
regard to the total labour force of society. Thus, the ruthless imposition of the
economy of time on the active labour force goes hand in hand with the capital
system's total disregard for all those — no matter how large their number — who
have to suffer the indignity of enforced idleness as their 'fate',
because it suits the absurd wastefulness of the prevailing profit-accountancy.
And fifth, because the increasing
trend of capital's transnational articulation and monopolistic centralization
turns the market itself (as we know it today) into an utterly problematical and
ultimately threatened structure. This trend carries with it very serious
implications for the position of labour and of its traditional defensive
organizations, originally constituted within the framework of nationally
centered capitalistic market society. The attacks on the earlier legally
safeguarded institutional position of labour which we could witness during the
last two decades in all capitalistically advanced countries, mounted at times —
significantly — by Labour Governments (like Harold Wilson's administration in
Britain, responsible for an ill-fated attempt to castrate the British Labour
Unions by means of its notorious legislative project called 'In Place of
Strife': fully implemented later by Conservative Governments), were
manifestations of the underlying tensions and of the need for major structural
readjustments. The authoritarianism implicit in these developments represents
not only a blatant attempt to 'roll back' labour's gains obtained during the
last century and a half (to roll back, that is, in the form in which such a
strategic objective can be reconciled with the expansionary needs of capitalist
consumer society), but also a design to impose on the 'metropolitan' labour
force the labour discipline which transnational capital can operate in the
'Third World' under its control. Thus, far from amounting to a real
advancement, the 'economy of time' that can be squeezed out in this way from
the various sections of the global labour force is tantamount to an all-round
intensification of the rate of exploitation under the conditions of 'advanced
capitalism'.
In all these respects the economy
of time, in its crudely quantifying modality, imposes itself as a blind
economic law on commodity society, even if it can only do so in a contradictory
and antagonistic form. Qualitative considerations are radically
incompatible with such an operation of the economic law of value intrinsic to
the capitalist division of labour. For the law of value that regulates the
exchange relation in commodity society must assert itself in the form of an averaging
and levelling mechanism which categorically overrules, through the
intervention of its 'invisible hand', all 'erratic' potential departures from
the underlying material imperatives of the capital system.
By contrast, the 'economic
law" discussed by Marx in the context of the communitarian system of
production and distribution is characterized as an inherently qualitative regulator.
It could not be otherwise with
reference to the key concept on the basis of which the social metabolism of
this new reproductive system is made intelligible, namely, the total
disposable time of society. For if the wealth of the communitarian type
social order is to be measured in terms of its total disposable time, rather
than in that of the fetishistically quantified product obtained through
imposing the requirement of minimum time on the working individuals, in that
case the concept of 'economic law" itself mentioned by Marx acquires a
meaning qualitatively different from the law of value that prevails through the
exchange relation of commodity society. 'The law we give ourselves', in order
to regulate the reproductive interchanges of a truly cooperative system, is in
no way comparable to the self-imposing mechanism of the natural law which can
take no notice of the needs, desires and aspirations of the human individuals.
In contrast, the adoption of a genuinely economizing (as opposed to
profit-oriented and quite wastefully 'economical') regulator of the social
metabolism by the associated producers is meant to indicate that:
(1) new areas of activity (and
'free activity’) are opened up, thanks to the multiplication of society's
'total disposable time' for productive purposes in a system oriented towards
the exchange of activities, once the viability of the activities
themselves in which the individuals engage is no longer judged on the basis of
narrow 'economic' (i.e. profit-oriented) criteria; only in this way would be
feasible the satisfaction of needs whose existence cannot be acknowledged from
the perspective, and under the pressure, of the quasi-mechanical constraint of minimum
time (which must always remain the regulating principle of
commodity-oriented production);
(2) in close conjunction with the
previous point, thanks to the greatly expanded and redefined total disposable
time of society, time can be allocated for the production of goods and
services on a qualitative basis, determined by consciously adopted priorities,
irrespective of the 'man-hours' required for the realization of the chosen
objectives, instead of the objectives and priorities themselves being
determined on the ground of whatever can be obtained through the utilization of
the readily exploitable time of the producers. This qualitative shift cannot be
simply the result of an increase in productivity. The capital system is
perfectly capable of that within its own terms of reference. The possibility of
regulating production without undue time-constraints, in tune with consciously
chosen priorities, positively arises from formerly inaccessible 'time-zones',
i.e. from the domain of capitalistically non-profitable and therefore
necessarily untapped human resources. This is how the total disposable time of
the associated producers can be qualitatively redefined. In its new modality,
under the communitarian system of production and consumption, total disposable
time becomes expendable on a multiplicity of activities which could not
possibly enter into the earlier enforced economic equations, no matter how
acute the need. Only within such parameters is it possible to envisage also a
radical redefinition of — under the capital system not only materially
constraining but also alienating and reifying — utility, in the sense
expressed by Marx in The Poverty of Philosophy quoted above. A sense —
according to which the time of production devoted to an article is determined
by the degree of its social utility, instead of the tyranny of minimum time
being allowed to pronounce the final judgement in matters of social utility —
which would make eminently good sense to all working individuals if it was not
for the internalized dictates of capitalist cost-accountancy.
To be sure, the reorientation of
the labour process in the spirit of these qualitative considerations is quite
unthinkable without progressively overcoming the division of labour and its law
of value through the material mediations of the transitional society. And by
the same token, if in the proposed emancipatory strategies the division of
labour and the law of value are not radically challenged, very serious
consequences follow from such a departure from the original socialist project.
For in that case there can be no room left for a vision of the communitarian
labour process, as characterized by Marx, in which quality — and
corresponding human needs — play the deciding role, and the quantitative
allocation of time loses its formerly overpowering role as the uncontrollable determinant
of the social metabolic process.
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