EconoSpeak

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...

Nassau SeniorIn 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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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:...

 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...