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.

Politics After the Fascism Debate

By Max B. Sawicky

Here is a sample from my Substack.

The key antagonists on Trump and fascism, the ones I have noticed, include Corey Robin, John Ganz, Timothy Snyder, Samuel Moyn, and Daniel Steinmetz-Jenkins. Except for Ganz, they are all credentialed professors at well-regarded universities. No disrespect for Ganz; I tend to agree with him the most. I have high regard for all of them.

In another sense, however, the entire debate seems off. It is focused on relating, or distinguishing, Trump and the MAGA movement to or from historical analogs in Germany and Italy. To me it reads like a pissing contest for academics. I respect the scholarly activity, but the implied politics leaves me cold.

There is no lack of fascism-mongering among some Democratic Party voices, not to mention MSNBC, but their alternative, per Billie Holiday, is as cold as yesterday’s mashed potatoes.

What matters the most? I would say the combined threats of the U.S. government fomenting massively destructive wars around the world and an authoritarian regime trampling over U.S. law to violate the basic rights of people here at home. A friend likes to distinguish authoritarianism from fascism by suggesting the latter entails a mass mobilization of non-governmental forces to extend its own myriad oppressions. I’d take that as a useful amendment. Any heightened activation of the viciousness we can already see among heavily-armed U.S. citizens obviously makes everything worse.

We can see hints of all this in the coming order. As I’ve said before, if we were at the point where all the horrors were fully in play, it could be too late to do anything about it.

What matters the most is whether and to what extent this all comes to pass, not on whether anybody wins an academic prize for the best analysis of the fascist roots of the MAGA movement. The incentives facing scholars are not conducive to vigorous politics.

“He who has not learned from history is doomed to repeat it.” O.K., but he who becomes absorbed in history is doomed to political paralysis, or doomed to a guest appearance on MSNBC with Rachel Maddow.

The power of the U.S. presidency is greatest in the field of foreign policy, especially in the use of massively lethal military force. That is why I say a peace movement is the top priority now. To work for peace, we will also need to defend our civil liberties.

The lead item on the peace agenda is cutting off aid to Israel, which would matter more for the implied political signal than for its material impact. We have been here before. Way back in the mid-1960s, the apparent constituency for peace was invisible. Students for a Democratic Society and a few other groups began their efforts mostly in isolation, not least under continual harassment from the Federal government and its lawless enforcement bodies. We are in a better position now because U.S. Muslim communities, importantly including Jewish allies, are natural advocates for peace, but we face the new obstacle of a pro-war Zionist lobby that squashes dissent on college campuses and tends to curb Palestine-sympathetic messages everywhere else.

The Democratic Party is hopelessly compromised for this cause. At the same time, third party projects are hopeless and facilitate Republican Party rule. The reason for the latter is simple: the electoral rules for national office (the presidency and Congress) render such efforts counter-productive. We are about to find out exactly how much worse the Trump Administration will be for Palestine and for Muslims everywhere.

I’ve thought there is more space for 3rd parties in state and local elections. The dilemma there is that failure to hold onto state government power now imperils reproductive rights, a big deal in my book. In some places with very narrow legislative majorities, such as my own state of Virginia, this will matter.

Otherwise, my current thinking is the Working Families Party is the way to go. A separate ballot line in general elections, following vigorous primary campaigns, allows the peace vote to be fully manifested without sabotaging efforts to block the Right. But prior to that, organizing without much concern for party politics is the near-term priority. When the anti-war movement gets big, the establishment politicians will pay attention and the movement can begin to swing its electoral weight.

Before its slide towards irrelevance, Democratic Socialists of America was a natural vehicle for this sort of work. But its current leadership cannot bring itself to stand up an intelligent posture regarding national elections. What we get instead are moralistic, abstentionist messages in super-Left guise.

Where I live, in Loudoun County, VA, our Democratic member of Congress was forced to retire due to illness. Her replacement is one Suhas Subramanyam, a Democratic state senator. Here are all of the Democratic candidates to replace Suhas in the Virginia state senate:

1. Hurunnessa Fariad

2. Ibraheem Samirah

3. Puja Khanna

4. Buta Biberaj

5. Kannan Srinivasan

6. Sreedhar NagiReddi

Do you get the picture? It tells me that right here at home in Loudoun is a place to start. To the best of my knowledge, Samirah is the most progressive of the group, though not necessarily one who can win.

The Prodigal Son Returns

By Max B. Sawicky

Hi EconoPeeps. I launched this cockamamie blog for my pals when I had to abandon my own and work for the Federal government (Government Accountability Office, not CIA). Then my webhost "1 and 1" (now Ionos) erased the entire blog, which I had been doing since about 2004. I was delinquent in a monthly payment and they failed to warn me.

Now I'm retired but still writing. I have a substack to which I've been posting regularly. Subscriptions are free and there is no segregation of paid from free subscribers. I tell people I don't need donations but they make me happy. 

I was dithering on how and when to restore my own website, but I've noticed this one seems to be going strong, one of the few genuine blogs still running. So I'm going to cross-post here for a while. It will be quite different from The Sandwichman's erudite, scholarly commentaries on Marx and such. I don't want to step on his toes, but with blogs I learned a long time ago that volume matters. So I'm going to amplify it on EconoSpeak.

The more the contradiction develops: footnotes to "Marx's Fetters: a remedial reading" -- a pop-up book

Last June, I posted a book proposal to EconoSpeak: Marx's Fetters and the Realm of Freedom: a remedial reading. It was a lightly revised version of a proposal that I had earlier sent to two publishers who had rejected it. I realized that I didn't really wnat to endure the ordeal of pitching the book to successive prospects only to win the opportunity, if successful, to work tediously on a manuscript that would appeal to few readers and earn me little or no royalties.

Instead, I made this pop-up book. (Click on the images to enlarge.) I think it was the right choice. I intend to produce 1000 [1001] copies of the book, the numbers alluding to 1000 cranes and 1001 Arabian Nights. As I mention in the introduction below, the method for this project comes from Walter Benjamin. In addition to "theory of knowledge; theory of progress" text mentioned in the intro, my approach also inspired by his "Attested Auditor of Books" from One Way Street and his reflections on "the various modes of communication" in Some Motifs in Baudelaire. The graphic theme of the billboards is another story that will have to wait for another post: Behind the Billboards.

Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy

Notebook VII, Grundrisse

Notebook IV, Grundrisse

Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy

Notebook IV, Grundrisse

Notebook VII, Grundrisse

Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy

Capital, volume 3

Three Fragments Rebooted: The Unfettering

Around three years ago I made a pop-up book titled Three Fragments on Machines, that contained a collection of quotes from the Grundrisse that illustrated some of the research I had been doing related to disposable time in Marx's theory. Last spring, I started work on another pop-up book showing the connection between the Grundrisse and Marx's more famous reference to forces of production, relations of production, and fetters from his Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy. I abandoned that project when the designs started to get too complicated.

Now I am coming back to that second project but with a less ambitions design and more sparing textual approach -- what I consider now as a "second edition" of Three Fragments. Central to this new edition is a mash-up of texts from the 1859 Preface and from notebook VII of the Grundrisse. Marx wrote the Preface in January, 1859; notebook VII was written between February and June of 1858. The Preface clearly reiterates arguments contained in the Grundrisse but leaves out important details that can be fleshed out by attention to similar phrasing in the latter work. 

I have finished the "flat" draft of my pop-up book, "Fetters on the Creation of Disposable Time." Now I move on to the mock up stage in which these images attain their third dimension -- 3-D! I have been wondering about how to get this project out to a wider public and this morning thought about the "thousand cranes" legend and Sadako Sasaki's enactment of the legend for peace. Both origami and pop-up books are made by folding paper. Masohiro Chatani wrote a series of pop-up how-to books that he called "origamic architecture." I will make 1000 copies of this book (which is a tall order).

As the project unfolds, I hope to recruit collaborators to cut, fold and paste the books and even automate parts of the process with die cutting and its own high-quality printer. I would like to give talks about what the book is trying to say and how it came about.

I have been working with the texts used in the book for over two decades and with photo-montage pop-ups for over four decades. The method of this work comes from Walter Benjamin's "N [Theoretics of Knowledge;Theory of Progress]" from his unfinished Arcades Project, the first thesis of which is "In the fields with which we are concerned, knowledge comes only in flashes. The text is the thunder rolling long afterward." 

What Benjamin called the "pedogigic side of this project" was, quoting Rudolf Borchardt, "'To train our image-making faculty to look stereoscopically into the depths of the shadows of history.'"

One more thesis from N: "The work must raise to the very highest level the art of quoting without quotation marks. Its theory is intimately linked to that of montage."

In my pop-up book, I am stereoscopically reading two texts by Marx -- written a few months apart in 1859 -- that I have combined into one. The "first" is from Marx's Preface to his Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (it is actually the later historically). This short summary by Marx of the principles that guided his research through the 1850s became the canonical statement of "historical materialism" in its "classical", "traditional", or "orthodox" formulation of the 2nd and 3rd Internationals.

The second text -- written around six months earlier -- is from Marx's manuscript notebook VII, published posthumously as the Grundrisse. Putting the two texts side by side reveals that they present, in fact, one continuous image with a depth of field that has been excluded from the canonical interpretation of historical materialism. Missing from that classical view is Marx's emphasis on disposable time, which was central to the Grundrisse text. I have added "footnotes" from notebook IV of the Grundrisse that emphasize the importance of disposable time and that explain what the "fetters on the development of the productive forces" are, specific to capital.

Marx's vision of "the realm of freedom," outlined in his 1864-65 draft for volume III of Capital, returned decisively to disposable time (without mentioning the word) in prescribing "The reduction of the working day [as] the basic prerequisite" for achieving the realm of freedom.

The text in black below is from the 1859 Preface. The text in red is from the Grundrisse.

In the social production of their existence, men inevitably enter into definite relations, which are independent of their will, namely relations of production appropriate to a given stage in the development of their material forces of production. The totality of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society, the real foundation, on which arises a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness. 

Forces of production and social relations - two different sides of the development of the social individual - appear to capital as mere means, and are merely means for it to produce on its limited foundation. In fact, however, they are the material conditions to blow this foundation sky-high. ‘Truly wealthy a nation, when the working day is 6 rather than 12 hours. Wealth is not command over surplus labour time’ (real wealth), ‘but rather, disposable time outside that needed in direct production, for every individual and the whole society.’ (The Source and Remedy etc. 1821, p. 6.)

The mode of production of material life conditions the general process of social, political and intellectual life. 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.

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. 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. The measure of wealth is then not any longer, in any way, labour time, but rather disposable time

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.

My plan is to also have two "footnotes" from notebook IV of the Grundrisse elaborating on "fetters" and "disposable time." These two combined are almost as long as the main text, which is why I am subordinating them as footnotes. 

Footnote 1, "fetters"

From the perspective of capital, the stages of production that precede it can be seen as imposing so many fetters upon the productive forces. But correctly understood, capital itself operates as the condition for the development of the forces of production only so long as they require an external spur, which, however, at the same time acts as their bridle. It is a discipline over them that becomes superfluous and burdensome at a certain level of their development, just like the guilds etc. These inherent limits coincide with the nature of capital, with the essential character of its very concept. These necessary limits are: 

1. Necessary labour as limit on the exchange value of living labour capacity or of the wages of the industrial population; 
2. Surplus value as limit on surplus labour time; and, in regard to relative surplus labour time, as barrier to the development of the forces of production; 
3. What is the same, the transformation into money, exchange value as such, as limit of production; or exchange founded on value, or value founded on exchange, as limit of production. This is: 
4. again the same as restriction of the production of use values by exchange value; or that real wealth has to take on a specific form distinct from itself, a form not absolutely identical with it, in order to become an object of production at all. 

However, these limits come up against the general tendency of capital to forget and abstract from: (1) necessary labour as limit of the exchange value of living labour capacity; (2) surplus value as the limit of surplus labour and development of the forces of production; (3) money as the limit of production; (4) the restriction of the production of use values by exchange value.

Footnote 2, "disposable time"

The whole development of wealth rests on the creation of disposable time. ... In production resting on capital, the existence of necessary labour time is conditional on the creation of superfluous labour time.

In the end papers, I will also be quoting the passage from volume III of Capital that addresses the "true realm of freedom" and prescribes reduction of the working day as the prerequisite. 

Basil Oberholzer's Last Hour

Nassau Senior

In Chapter 9 of Capital, "The Rate of Surplus Value," Marx included a satirical section 3, ridiculing Nassau Senior's dimwitted, unmistakably partisan argument that reducing the hours of work from 12 hours a day to 10 would destroy a factory's net profit. Another half hour of reduction would eliminate even the gross profit. Marx simply pointed out that the basis of profit, surplus value, was extracted from the labour process throughout the day and not entirely in the final hour of work.

One hundred and eighty-seven years after the learned professor Senior "was summoned from Oxford to Manchester, to learn in the latter place the political economy he taught in the former" the journal Ecological Economics published an article by Basil Oberholzer titled, "Post-growth transition, working time reduction, and the question of profits."

After a few pages of simple -- one might say simplistic -- mathematical modeling, Oberholzer concluded that working time reduction would collapse profits and thereby trigger macroeconomic instability. From the perspective of working time theory, there are several things wrong with Oberholzer's model. But perhaps the most glaring and elemental flaw is the pretense of building a quantitative model to represent what is fundamentally a highly qualitative process.

Equations such as "output (Y) equals labor input (L) times labor productivity (P)" and "labor input (L) equals number of workers (N) times hours worked (H)" assume what they purport to show -- that there is direct variation between hours worked and output. This is the relationship Thomas Brassey demonstrated to be empirically untenable in his 1872 Work and Wages. In his Fortnightly review of Brassey's book, Frederic Harrison characterized "the bitter pedantry which often usurps" the name of political economy as "usually assum[ing] its facts, after it has rounded off dogmas to suit its clients." 

Based on extensive analysis of accounting records from his father's vast railroad building enterprise, Brassey had found, quite simply, "that the hours of work are no criterion of the amount of work performed." But doesn't the factor of 'labor productivity' correct for that? No. Labor productivity is an ex post derivative from given hours and given output. It simply reintroduces the assumption of direct variation between hours and output.

Building on Brassey’s and other empirical observations, Sydney J. Chapman presented his theory of the hours of labour in his presidential address to the annual meeting of the Economics and Statistics Section of the British Academy for the Advancement of Science at Winnipeg in 1909. The paper, “Hours of Labour” was subsequently published in the Economic Journal. In it Chapman argued that the hours of work determined by market competition between workmen and between employers would be longer than optimal for worker welfare and even longer than optimal for output.

Chapman’s theory became canonical, at least for Cambridge and LSE economists, until it was passed over after the second world war for conventionally “simplified” assumptions that would be more amenable to macroeconomic modelling. To put it uncharitably, a theory consistent with empirical observation was replaced with assumptions that were empirically false but mathematically expedient.

Aside from the empirically and theoretically untenable assumption of direct variation between hours and output, Oberholzer's finding ignores what should be a truism of Marx's critique of political economy and Keynes's economics -- capitalism is inherently unstable. It doesn't need a reduction of working time to trigger it. Marx's Capital could be described as an extended discourse on that instability. In volume three, Marx summarized "three cardinal facts about capitalist production." The third fact, "establishment of the world market," also establishes the inevitability of crises in that the more rapid growth of productive power and capital values, relative to population, undermines the conditions for valorization of that expanding capital on a progressively narrower base.

In a 1934 BBC radio address, John Maynard Keynes addressed "the problem of poverty in the midst of potential plenty" and observed that views among economists on this question tended to diverge around the question of whether or not the economic system was "self-adjusting" in the long run, albeit "with creaks and groans and jerks, and interrupted by time-lags, outside interference and mistakes." "The strength of the self-adjusting school." Keynes observed, "depends on its having behind it almost the whole body of organized economic thinking and doctrine of the last hundred years." Curiously, Keynes included Marxism in this body of doctrine -- presumably viewing crises as a self-adjustment mechanism.

In opposition to this orthodoxy, Keynes aligned himself with a counter-tradition of "heretics and cranks" who "propose remedies prompted by instinct, by flair, by practical good sense, by experience of the world — half-right, most of them, and half-wrong." He explained his difference with the self-adjusting school in terms of a growing gap between income and expenditure as incomes increased and the fact that interest rates do not adjust automatically to compensate for that gap. Notwithstanding Keynes's assignment of Marx to the self-adjusting camp, his own explanation of macroeconomic instability differed mainly in terminology and emphasis from Marx's.

Growth economics, as developed by Harrod, Domar, Solow, et al., has always concerned itself with proposing remedies for the settled proposition that the economic system is not self-adjusting and that government fiscal policy and/or monetary intervention is required to manage economic cycles, stimulate growth and avoid or recover from crises. The instability rabbit was always already in the macroeconomic hat before Mr. Oberholzer waved the wand of working time reduction over it. In defense of Oberholzer, though, this was a peer-reviewed article. None of his peers seemed to notice the shortcomings I have highlighted. 

More ominously, the degrowth literature Oberholzer was criticizing in his article routinely commits the same quantification fallacy* that he did. Authors typically view work time reduction as instrumental rather than transformative, assuming that an increase in labor productivity can be offset -- or more than offset -- by a decrease in labor hours leaving output constant or even declining. But not only are the hours of work "no criterion of the amount of work performed" as in Brassey's analysis, increasingly there is no clear relationship between working time and output, particularly where people are performing work whose relationship to either social wellbeing or capital accumulation is questionable. André Gorz called attention to the increasing rupture between working time and productive output over 40 years ago. David Graeber described much employment as bullshit jobs. One side benefit of working time reduction could be to pare down the economy's reliance on such systemically useful parasitism.

The real, transformational purpose of work time reduction is not about how to produce less stuff with more people working fewer hours. It is about freeing us from the work/spend cycle of planned or "progressive" obsolescence. It is about creating ample free time to develop autonomous interests, skills, knowledge, and relationships that don't have to rely on and feed back into the work, borrow, spend, buy, waste, want, work cycle. What is the mathematical equation of a different outlook on life and what really matters? What value of 'Y' or 'L' equals freedom? This is how Marx envisioned the relationship between working time and freedom:

The realm of freedom begins only where labour determined by necessity and external expediency ends; it lies by its very nature beyond the sphere of material production proper. ... Freedom, in this sphere, can consist only in this, that socialized man, the associated producers, govern the human metabolism with nature in a rational way, bringing it under their collective control instead of being dominated by it as a blind power; accomplishing it with the least expenditure of energy and in conditions most worthy and appropriate for their human nature. But this always remains a realm of necessity. The true realm of freedom, the development of human powers as an end in itself, begins beyond it, though it can only flourish with this realm of necessity as its basis. The reduction of the working day is the basic prerequisite. (emphasis added)