By Tom Walker

Econospeak

Book proposal: Marx’s Fetters and the Realm of Freedom: a remedial reading — part 2.2

Published in 1821, The Source and Remedy of the National Difficulties was a major influence on Marx’s analysis of ‘disposable time.’ In an 1851 notebook, Marx logged a 1000 word summary of the pamphlet. He also discussed it extensively in volume 3 of Theories of Surplus Value. His discussion of disposable time in a section of his Grundrisse notebooks that came to be known as the ‘fragment on machines’ has inspired rethinking of Marx’s mature work by authors ranging from Raniero Panzieri, Antonio Negri, and Paolo Virno to Moishe Postone. Yet those re-evaluations do not acknowledge the decisive contribution of The Source and Remedy.

By Tom Walker

Econospeak

Book proposal: Marx’s Fetters and the Realm of Freedom: a remedial reading — part 2.3

 Inversion

Marx stated repeatedly in the Grundrisse that capital inverts the relationship between necessary and superfluous labour time. Capital both creates disposable time and expropriates it in the form of surplus value, reversing the nature-imposed priority of necessity before superfluity and making the performance of necessary labour conditional on the production of surplus value. Marx’s analysis of this inversion bears unmistakable traces of Ludwig Feuerbach’s critique in The Essence of Christianity of the inversion of collective humanity and the divine, which had so influenced the young Marx. The theme of inversion returns

By Tom Walker

Econospeak

Book proposal: Marx’s Fetters and the Realm of Freedom: a remedial reading — part 2.3

 Inversion

Marx stated repeatedly in the Grundrisse that capital inverts the relationship between necessary and superfluous labour time. Capital both creates disposable time and expropriates it in the form of surplus value, reversing the nature-imposed priority of necessity before superfluity and making the performance of necessary labour conditional on the production of surplus value. Marx’s analysis of this inversion bears unmistakeable traces of Ludwig Feuerbach’s critique in The Essence of Christianity of the inversion of collective humanity and the divine, which had so influenced the young Marx. The theme of inversion returns

By Tom Walker

Econospeak

Book proposal: Marx’s Fetters and the Realm of Freedom: a remedial reading — part 2.4

Marx’s remarkable, yet largely neglected statement that “[t]he whole development of wealth rests on the creation of disposable time” and his subsequent analysis of the relationship between disposable time, superfluous products, and surplus value suggests an alternative analysis of alienation that identifies disposable time itself as that which is appropriated and confronts the labourer as alien property. Marx came close to making such an analysis explicit in a footnote that begins, “It does not belong here, but can already be recalled here . . . ” and in which he noted “In relation to the whole of society, the creation of disposable

Who doesn’t want to save free enterprise? In 1974 alone there were two books published with the title, How to Save Free Enterprise. One of them had the subtitle, "from BUREAUCRATS, AUTOCRATS, AND TECHNOCRATS." The other one, by Arthur O. Dahlberg, had no subtitle. Implicitly, then, "from ITSELF."1974 was the high water mark for How to Save Free Enterprise books. There were none published in any other year, although the idea of saving free enterprise had its heyday in the 1940s. The antagonist then was frequently the New Deal, although Henry Wallace targeted monopoly in his Saturday Evening Post essay, "We Must Save Free Enterprise."Dahlberg’s prescription for saving free enterprise had two main parts. The first part was a scheme to discourage people from hoarding cash or demand deposits.

By Tom Walker

Econospeak

Book proposal: Marx’s Fetters and the Realm of Freedom: a remedial reading — part 2.7

The revolutionary class

“The working class is either revolutionary or it is nothing,” Marx wrote to German politician J.B. von Schweitzer and copied “word for word” in a letter to Engels. In The Manifesto of the Communist Party, Marx and Engels wrote “the proletariat alone is a really revolutionary class.” Marx cited that statement in a footnote at the very end of the penultimate chapter of volume 1 of Capital. Without denying the plausibility of other, canonical, interpretation of the revolutionary working class, there is one clear definition given by Marx in the Grundrisse that has escaped notice as a definition of the

The following passage is from a 1993 New Left Review essay, "Political Ecology: Expertocracy versus Self-Limitation," by André Gorz. It is an argument for regenerating a norm of sufficiency as a political project. How much is enough and how can we build a popular consensus and movement around such a determination? Of particular interest to me, in the final paragraph Gorz mentions the "anonymous Ricardoite" along with John Maynard Keynes and Wassily Leontieff as examples of those who have seen disposable time as "the true measure of wealth." That Ricardoite was, of course, Charles Wentworth Dilke who wrote the 1821 pamphlet, The Source and Remedy of the National Difficulites.Self-Limitation as a Social ProjectIn complex industrial societies, it is impossible to obtain
an eco-compatible

Book proposal: Marx’s Fetters and the Realm of Freedom: a remedial reading — part 2.8

by Tom Walker

Econospeak

In “The Trinity Formula,” in chapter 48 of volume 3 of Capital, Marx returned to the contradiction between the forces and relations of production. This time, however, it was not to deplore or analyze the fetters but to examine the realm of freedom that would become possible when “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.” This governance of the metabolism with nature would constitute the realm of necessity upon which the true realm of freedom can flourish. “The reduction of the

Book proposal: Marx’s Fetters and the Realm of Freedom: a remedial reading — part 2.9

by Tom Walker

Econospeak

Framing the revolution as being about disposable time brings Marx closer to Walter Benjamin’s remark about revolution being “the act by which the human race traveling in the train applies the emergency brake.” Benjamin’s “On the concept of history” was composed in the wake of Benjamin’s despair at the Hitler-Stalin pact that sealed his disillusionment with the Soviet Union along with the interpretation of historical materialism as a story of progress. “Why should we be the very generation with the luck to experience redemption?” Benjamin asked his friend Soma Morgenstern in 1939. 

One of Benjamin’s draft theses that didn’t make it

Tom Walker or Sandwichman (many of us know him as) has a series of articles I am going to post to Angry Bear. Tom spends much of his time discussing Labor and its value to capital or what I would call manufacturing. Without Labor input there would be no value.

Leisure to Attend to Our Spiritual Business (updated to include link to published article)

by Tom Walker (Sandwichman)

ABSTRACT (PDF AVAILABLE HERE)

Time is central to Martin Hägglund’s discussion of secular faith and spiritual freedom. Time is precisely what is finite in this life and presides over the relationships we value and our risk of losing them. Hägglund adopted the notion of disposable time from Karl Marx’s Grundrisse and reframed it as the more

The return of disposable time: time filled with the presence of the nowFraming the revolution as being about disposable time brings Marx closer to Walter Benjamin’s remark about revolution being “the act by which the human race traveling in the train applies the emergency brake.” Benjamin’s “On the concept of history” was composed in the wake of Benjamin’s despair at the Hitler-Stalin pact that sealed his disillusionment with the Soviet Union along with the interpretation of historical materialism as a story of progress. “Why should we be the very generation with the luck to experience redemption?” Benjamin asked his friend Soma Morgenstern in 1939. One of Benjamin’s draft theses that didn’t make it to his final draft, the notion of revolution as an emergency brake to stop the runaway

A nation is really rich if the working
day is 6 hours rather than twelve.

In “The Trinity Formula,” in chapter 48 of volume 3 of Capital,
Marx returned to the contradiction between the forces and relations of
production. This time, however, it was not to deplore or analyze the fetters
but to examine the realm of freedom that would become possible when “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.” This governance of the metabolism with nature would
constitute the realm of necessity upon which the true realm of freedom can
flourish. “The reduction of the working day is the basic prerequisite.”

Marx’s “prerequisite” echoes his draft of the

The revolutionary class

“The working class is either revolutionary or it is
nothing,” Marx wrote to German politician J.B. von Schweitzer and copied “word
for word” in a letter to Engels. In The Manifesto of the Communist Party,
Marx and Engels wrote “the proletariat alone is a really revolutionary class.”
Marx cited that statement in a footnote at the very end of the penultimate
chapter of volume 1 of Capital. Without denying the plausibility of
other, canonical, interpretation of the revolutionary working class, there is
one clear definition given by Marx in the Grundrisse that has escaped
notice as a definition of the revolutionary working class:

The more this contradiction develops, the more does it become
evident that the growth of the forces of production can no longer be bound

From sufficiency to planned obsolescence… and
back?

In the Grundrisse, Karl Marx argued that capital’s response
to the barrier to increasing production posed by satiated consumption took
three paths: promoting greater consumption of existing products, expanding
markets for existing products to new territories, and creating new needs
through the “discovery and creation of new use values.” In the twentieth
century, with the help of advertising and marketing, capital has added a fourth
method: create new needs through the premature destruction of old use values by
planned obsolescence. These methods allow capital to “ideally get beyond” the
barrier to production posed by consumption but can’t really overcome the
fundamental contradiction that “real wealth has to take on a specific form

Pauperism and “minus-labour”

“It is already contained in the concept of the free
labourer, that he is a pauper…“

Pauperism and surplus population play brief but strategic roles
in the Grundrisse, appearing in the three fragments on pages 397-423,
604-610, and 704-711, respectively, that all deal with the inverted
relationship between necessary labour and the superfluous – the first and third
fragments also revolving around disposable time. These two themes – or two moments
of the same theme – return with a vengeance in the climactic chapter 25 of Capital,
volume 1, “The General Law of Capitalist Accumulation.”

Closely related to pauperism, at least analytically, is
unproductive labour, which Marx gives fleeting attention to in the Grundrisse
and relegates to the unpublished “Chapter

Alienated labour and disposable timeMarx’s remarkable, yet largely neglected statement that “[t]he whole development of wealth rests on the creation of disposable time” and his subsequent analysis of the relationship between disposable time, superfluous products, and surplus value suggests an alternative analysis of alienation that identifies disposable time itself as that which is appropriated and confronts the labourer as alien property. Marx came close to making such an analysis explicit in a footnote that begins, “It does not belong here, but can already be recalled here…” and in which he noted “In relation to the whole of society, the creation of disposable time is then also creation of time for the production of science, art etc.,” anticipating his advocacy in notebook VII of, “the

Inversion

Marx stated repeatedly in the Grundrisse that capital
inverts the relationship between necessary and superfluous labour time. Capital
both creates disposable time and expropriates it in the form of surplus value,
reversing the nature-imposed priority of necessity before superfluity and
making the performance of necessary labour conditional on the production of
surplus value. Marx’s analysis of this inversion bears unmistakeable traces of
Ludwig Feuerbach’s critique in The Essence of Christianity of the
inversion of collective humanity and the divine, which had so influenced the young
Marx. The theme of inversion returns in the first chapter of Capital in the
section on the fetishism of the commodity, where in the first sentence Marx comments
on the commodity’s abundant

Ambivalence

Published in 1821, The Source and Remedy of the National
Difficulties was a major influence on Marx’s analysis of ‘disposable time.’ In
an 1851 notebook, Marx logged a 1000 word summary of the pamphlet. He also
discussed it extensively in volume 3 of Theories of Surplus Value. His
discussion of disposable time in a section of his Grundrisse notebooks that
came to be known as the ‘fragment on machines’ has inspired rethinking of
Marx’s mature work by authors ranging from Raniero Panzieri, Antonio Negri, and
Paolo Virno to Moishe Postone. Yet those re-evaluations do not acknowledge the decisive
contribution of The Source and Remedy. This chapter examines Marx’s admiration,
criticisms, and uses of the pamphlet, and the neglect of the pamphlet by
subsequent writers, and offers

Der Gefesselte Marx

Karl Marx’s preface to A
Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy contains the best-known
description of his theory of history. At some point contradiction between the
relations of production and the forces of production become fetters on the latter,
ushering in a period of social revolution. The traditional interpretation is
that the social revolution will unleash technological advances that enable
industrial production to expand by “leaps and bounds,” even as free time for
workers also increases. Marx’s description, however, specifically referred to a
general conclusion he had reached in the 1840s that “became the guiding
principle of my studies.” He did not suggest it was a précis of those
subsequent studies. In the Grundrisse, Marx had developed a much

The second part of my book proposal is a chapter outline and summary. I will be doing that on the installment plan, one chapter at a time. Below is a table of contents:Fetters/Der Gefesselte MarxAmbivalenceInversionAlienated labour and disposable timePauperism and “minus-labour”From sufficiency to planned obsolescence… and back?The revolutionary classA nation is really rich if the working day is 6 hours rather than twelve.The return of disposable time: time filled with the presence of the now

Marx’s Fetters and the Realm of Freedom: a remedial readingTom WalkerOverview (chapter summaries will be presented in a future post)This book proposes a remedial reading of the relationship in Marx’s critique of political economy between the forces and relations of production, real wealth, and value. It is remedial in two senses. First, it seeks to remedy the long-standing misconception of the 1859 preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy as Marx’s definitive statement on the contradiction between the forces and relations of production. Second, it does so by acknowledging the influence of the 1821 pamphlet, The Source and Remedy of the National Difficulties on Marx’s conception of disposable time as real wealth.In his celebrated 1859 preface, Karl Marx stated the

The historical dust has not settled, but at this moment it seems clear that a proletariat which does not embrace Marxism is entirely possible. Why not, then, Marxism without a proletariat? In a thoughtful article, "Radical Chains: The Marxian Concept of Proletarian Mission" (Studies on the Left, September-October, 1966), Oscar Berland argues that this is not only a thinkable but also a necessary thought. Ronald Aronson’s "Reply" to Berland agrees that the proletariat has lost its revolutionary potential, but forcefully asserts that to scuttle the concept of proletarian mission is to scuttle Marx himself. The present paper in general sustains Berland, but puts the argument in sharper terms. At the same time, and this is its major purpose, this paper attempts to show that Marx’s mature

While looking for old sources discussing the "manpower channeling" policies of the U.S. Selective Service (draft) during the Vietnam war, I uncovered a treasure trove of 1960s essays on the military-industrial-academic complex. The first one that caught my eye was "The University and the Political Economy" by James O’Connor. O’Connor later wrote The Fiscal Crisis of the State and founded the journal, Capitalism Nature Socialism. "The University and the Political Economy" appeared in the 1969 first issue of Leviathan, which was a successor to Viet-Report, enlisting many of the latter journal’s key personnel.I had some difficulty finding a digitized copy online of the Leviathan issue but then it turned up on the old standby, JSTOR, which has a nice collection of alternative press

Fifty-four years ago Les Temps Modernes published an essay by André Gorz titled, "Destroy the University." I am posting it here adding occasional underlining for emphasis and commentary at the end. As I will explain in my comments, this piece is of interest to me because of its relevance to current student demonstrations but also because of Gorz’s pioneering thought on ecological politics and on the future of work.Destroy the University, by André Gorz1. The university cannot function, and we must thus prevent it from functioning so that this impossibility is made manifest. No reform of any kind can render this institution viable. We must thus combat reforms, in their effects and in their conception, not because they are dangerous, but because they are illusory. The crisis of the

ABSTRACT: Time is central to Martin Hägglund’s discussion of secular faith and spiritual freedom. Time is precisely what is finite in this life and presides over the relationships we value and our risk of losing them. Hägglund adopted the notion of disposable time from Karl Marx’s Grundrisse and reframed it as the more descriptive socially available free time. Following Marx, Hägglund advocates the revaluation of values so that socially available free time would become the measure of value rather than socially necessary labour time.A close examination of the origin of Marx’s analysis of disposable time suggests that questions of faith and freedom were inherent in the concept as it was expressed in the 1821 pamphlet, The Source and Remedy of the National Difficulties that influenced Marx,

– By Tom Walker

“The Unknown Unknown Marx,” EconoSpeak

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.”

‘These inherent limits necessarily coincide with the nature of capital, with its essential determinants. These necessary limits are:

‘1. necessary labour as limit to the exchange-value of living labour-power, of the wages of the industrial population;

‘2. surplus value as limit to surplus

Decisions, decisions…

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."‘These inherent limits necessarily coincide with the nature of capital, with its essential determinants. These necessary limits are:‘1. necessary labour as limit to the exchange-value of living labour-power, of the wages of the industrial population;‘2. surplus value as limit to surplus labour-time; and, in relation to relative surplus labour-time, as limit to the development of the productive forces;‘3. what

I have expressed my disagreement with Kohei Saito’s Slow Down and Marx in the Anthropocene in previous posts. I welcome Huber’s and Phillips’s critique of Saito at Jacobin. They get much right in their criticism of Saito’s Utopianism and implicit primitivism but they share with Saito a fundamental misreading of Marx. This misreading is based on a speculative interpretation of a stirring but ambiguous passage in Marx’s Preface to his 1859 Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy: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