At the Columbia Center for Contemporary Critical Thought Marx 9/13 session on the Grundrisse last night, I asked a question from Zoom that cannot be heard on the Youtube video because of technical difficulties. I will try to reconstruct the jist of the question here along with a bit of context. I apologize if the reconstruction of my question is a bit more coherent than the original, which was made unintelligable by a time delay and apparent distractions in the audience.In his presentation, Michael Hardt spoke about the Italian Autonomists' "refusal of work" strategy that Antonio Negri articulated in his book, Marx Beyond Marx. In talking about how the strategy related to the Grundrisse, Hardt referred to a parenthetical passage where Marx talked about "the worker’s participation in the
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At the Columbia Center for Contemporary Critical Thought Marx 9/13 session on the Grundrisse last night, I asked a question from Zoom that cannot be heard on the Youtube video because of technical difficulties. I will try to reconstruct the jist of the question here along with a bit of context. I apologize if the reconstruction of my question is a bit more coherent than the original, which was made unintelligable by a time delay and apparent distractions in the audience.
In his presentation, Michael Hardt spoke about the Italian Autonomists' "refusal of work" strategy that Antonio Negri articulated in his book, Marx Beyond Marx. In talking about how the strategy related to the Grundrisse, Hardt referred to a parenthetical passage where Marx talked about "the worker’s participation in the higher, even cultural satisfactions...":
...the agitation for his own interests, newspaper subscriptions, attending lectures, educating his children, developing his taste etc., his only share of civilization which distinguishes him from the slave, is economically only possible by widening the sphere of his pleasures at the times when business is good, where saving is to a certain degree possible.
With reference to that refusal of work and widening the sphere of pleasure, I asked Hardt about Marx's discussion of disposable time and his remarkable sentence that "[t]he whole development of wealth rests on the creation of disposable time." I pointed out that Marx had cited the 1821 pamphlet, The Source and Remedy of the National Difficulties, on disposable time immediately before presenting his own statement and that William Godwin, who influenced the author of the pamphlet (Dilke), wrote something very similar to Marx's widening the sphere of pleasure:
Those hours which are not required for the production of the necessaries of life, may be devoted to the cultivation of the understanding, the enlarging our stock of knowledge, the refining our taste, and thus opening to us new and more exquisite sources of enjoyment.
Given these affinities, I asked if Hardt had given any thought to how a reading of the 1821 pamphlet and of Godwin's writings on leisure for all might illuminate Marx's thought on these topics.
Here is a clip of Michael Hardt's reply: