“The Geopolitics of Free Time” (by JONATHAN CULBREATH)

Original piece here: https://postmodernperennialist.substack.com/p/the-geopolitics-of-free-time?utm_source=twitter&sd=pf

“My Twitter timeline has recently been abuzz with communists of different stripes arguing over the truth of the claim that “communism is free time and nothing else” — a slogan coined by Jehu, a popular Marxist blogger who has singlehandedly revolutionized the way Marxists understand their own theory. Some communists on Twitter associated with the “#MAGACommunism” movement responded to this slogan critically, arguing instead that “Communism means business. It means hard work. It means long hours. It means sacrifice. In a Communist society, the businessman embodies Socialist values. Under Communism, we will work harder, longer, and more productively than ever!”

I’m not going to weigh in on the Marxology that is necessary to address this question. My friend Ed Berger, himself an expert on Marx’s texts (and quite a lot besides), has done most of the leg work on Twitter already, and Jehu’s blog likewise houses a wealth of direct citations from Marx that couldn’t be any clearer. To paraphrase Marx in Volume 3 of Capital, the basic precondition for the transition out of the realm of necessity into the realm of freedom is the shortening of the working day! In other words, the purpose of capitalistic progress towards communism is really nothing other than maximal free time for the whole human race. This is a basic component of Marx’s theory that has been largely neglected by Marxists until Jehu’s online revolution.

There is, however, an entirely other dimension to this question that few people on Twitter, or even Jehu on his own blog, have addressed. That is the question of geopolitics. Believe it or not, geopolitics has a lot to do with the question of free time, because not only is communism necessarily international according to Marx and Engels, but capitalism itself has attained such global and international scale that the fundamental historical questions concerning the resolution of its contradictions can only be resolved at the same international scale. The social relations and the basic dynamics of capitalist production now take place on such a scale, and it is important to see the above summary of the economics of free time on this scale as well.

But first, it is useful to recall in a rudimentary form some of the economic groundwork here. In a capitalist economy, free time is actually related to productivity. The more productive the labor, the less time it takes to produce a given output. It is in capital’s interest, up to a point, to minimize the socially necessary labor time that goes into the production of a given commodity, so that it may maximize the surplus time that goes into producing that commodity, thereby, maximizing the quantity of commodities produced), and thereby maximizing the surplus value that is produced and then valorized on the market as profit. As labor gets more and more productive, the maximization of surplus time (and the reduction of necessary labor time to a minimum) serves the interests of capital in the production of profit; and yet, it also essentially contains the possibility of the worker’s liberation from the chains of wage slavery. Surplus time is free time in potency. Communism, premised upon the reduction of the work day, entails the appropriation of surplus time for the laborer, as his own time, and not another’s time. This is also to overcome the alienation of labor that Marx famously described in the Economic Manuscripts of 1844. The overcoming of the alienation of labor consists of the reappropriation of time for oneself: free time.

Now, there is a curious phenomenon that takes place as capitalism becomes more productive. With the maximization of surplus time, and the minimization of necessary labor time, capitalism tends to produce what Marx calls the “superfluous population,” i.e. that portion of the population who are no longer useful for the production process. Speaking somewhat vaguely, along with the minimization of necessary labor time there tends also to occur the minimization of the quantity of labor power required for production, such that the labor power of a vast portion of the population is deemed useless. This surplus population are stuck in a contradictory situation: they cannot participate in the production of surplus value, and unless they find some other way to derive income, they cannot consume the massive surplus of commodities that capital produces as it gets more productive; and yet their existence is the direct effect of that productivity. So capital has to find ways to deal with that population, and the variety of ways in which it deals with them ranges from severely oppressive—eugenics, population control, or simply impoverishment and unemployment—to strangely pacifying—new “bullshit jobs” and unproductive jobs that produce nothing of value but at least pay out some form of income (whether it really counts as a “wage” is a sticky question: it is often some concealed form of a financial dividend). So these people are kept working unproductive jobs, while in the meantime there is another portion of the population that is working the really productive jobs—and probably very long hours doing so. As Jehu has demonstrated on his blog, the reduction of labor hours would entail the dismantling of unproductive sectors, the transferral of their laborers to actual productive sectors, so as to “share the load” of productive work with those who have been stuck doing it for very long working hours. The gutting of unproductive labor alone will induce a massive reduction in aggregate working hours, but also a big reduction in the labor hours worked by each productive laborer. In other words, the surplus population—much like surplus time itself—represents the possibility of free time for all.

Now, in current era of capitalist development, we have witnessed the financialization of the U.S. economy, the offshoring of productive labor to China, and the rise of a heavily “service” oriented sector in the U.S. itself, plus a dramatic increase in government spending directed to funding a series of highly destructive wars in the Middle East and elsewhere. Wages in America have stagnated, and yet thanks to the rise of the dollar and the offshoring of production to cheap labor in Asia, low wage Americans are now able to enjoy a far greater quantity of cheap consumer goods than their ancestors were (though the same might be able to be said of more basic goods like healthcare, education, housing, and so forth). There is the illusion of a high distribution of wealth in America, despite the stagnation and even decline of productive jobs in the U.S. Meanwhile, financial giants seem to make massive profits, though those profits do not come mainly from domestic production; rather, they come from rents extracted from the larger populace, as well as a collection of manipulative techniques that simply redistribute wealth upwards — and all on top of a productive apparatus that is located, not in America, but mostly in China. It is China that has produced the wealth of America in the neoliberal period, as well as its own wealth in that same period. China represents the global proletariat, the global productive working class, who spend the majority of their time producing not only their own wealth and profits, but also the wealth and profits of the global capitalist class and the global consumer class, located in the United States.

Here is where the geopolitics comes in. A reduction of total labor hours world wide, and the increase of free time for all, will require the gutting of unproductive industries in the U.S. — high finance, many service jobs, military spending, a lot of government jobs, etc. — and the reshuffling of the American labor force, which is a surplus population, out of unproductive jobs into more productive jobs. This requires, of course, a massive program of reindustrialization in America, i.e. bringing back the industrial production which it lost to China. This will not only reduce global aggregate labor hours by getting rid of a massive glut of unproductive jobs, but it will also in all likelihood reduce labor hours for each individual worker, not only in the U.S. but also, significantly, in China, where labor hours have been excessively long because the Chinese workforce works not only for themselves but also for us. No longer having to work for us, since we will be working for ourselves again, China will be free to reappropriate its surplus time; and so will we, since our surplus time will not be filled up any longer with unproductive jobs — which is another way of saying that our surplus population will not be forced into unproductive jobs.

In a way, what I’m talking about here can be captured by the term “multipolarity,” which signifies the birth of a new world order beyond American globalism or “unipolarity.” Under American unipolarity, the whole world works for America; America consumes the world’s profits and commodities; America is the center of the world; and production is largely concentrated in nations like China, which has of course benefited from heavy industrialization and its position as the workshop of the world. Under multipolarity, however, China will no longer work for the rest of the world; America will no longer be the center of the world (i.e. global capital); and the production process will be globally redistributed in a more localized and equitable fashion. Something akin to “economic autarky” will emerge in each nation, so that on the one hand no national population will be forced to use up its surplus time in production, nor on the other hand will any surplus population be forced to use up its time in “unproduction.” Instead, productive labor will be so evenly distributed that surplus time might be available for the workers of the world to reappropriate for themselves. Thus, the emergence of a multipolar world plays a central role in the global redistribution of productive forces, which, provided that unproductive and useless industries are done away with, will bring a global reduction in labor hours. On the whole, that will be better for humanity.”