Advocating the revaluation of values so socially available free time would become the measure of value
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 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, in the writings of William Godwin that inspired the 1821 pamphlet, and ultimately in theological views on the doctrine of the calling that Godwin secularized in his pioneering advocacy of leisure as a universal human right.
Marx’s innovation was to show that the creation of disposable time is the basis of all wealth. Under capitalism, disposable time is expropriated in the form of surplus labour time, thereby inverting the relationship between necessary and superfluous labour time — the superfluous becomes necessary (for capital) and the necessary superfluous. Marx’s analysis of the inversion of necessary and superfluous labour time bears close resemblance to Ludwig Feuerbach’s critique in The Essence of Christianity, which had influenced the early Marx, of the inversion of collective humanity and the divine.
Sammich
I agree with you entirely and enthusiastically. I wish you could write on this without the Marxist scholarship (those are two things). But I can’s say I really know anything about what persuades people and what turns them off.
We seem to have a society that worships money and as a consequnce worships work, while their lives go down the drain. If I have observed correctly,countries where Marxism at least nominally determined social and economic policy were not over friendly to free time, much less “spiritual”needs.
To my friends who think “spiritual” means “superstitious,” I urge them to think obout what really matters to them. it really has nothing to do with what they think of as “religion.” Of course, socially necessary work is no bad thing, it might even be spiritually important itself.
coberly,
To borrow an expression from Edgar Allan Poe, Karl Marx is “the man that was used up.” Actually existing Marxism was a concoction of selected texts (some of which are anachronistic) and a mythology of exclusivity and infallibility — provided one correctly understood the canonical Marx. For over a century, “Western” Marxism(s) sought, unsuccessfully, to retrieve the kernal of Marx’s “actual” theoretical contribution from the muck of the mythology. Unfortunately, in this case, the baby and the bathwater are not that easily separable.
Anton Menger clumsily hit on the dilemma when he identified the “real discoverers of the theory of surplus value” as “Godwin, Hall, and especially W. Thompson.” No, Marx was indeed the discoverer of Marx’s theory of surplus value, which was quite distinct and superior to any earlier theory. Those earlier theories nevertheless lent Marx a boost up that enabled him to see further. Fritz Engels’s cavalier dismissal of the earlier “Utopian Socialists” as the equivalent of phlogiston laid the cornerstone of the Marx mythology.
It’s my contention that Marx’s theory of surplus value — not the “labour theory of value” but the historically specific “surplus value theory of labour” — is indispensible to unraveling contemporary social and environmental predicaments. But the theory is only useful if we also understand the circumstances in which it came to be — which includes the contributions of the so-called Utopians along with their historical circumstances, the mid-19th century London milieu in which Marx developed and revised his theory, and the posthumous degeneration of Marxism into totalitarian ideology on the one hand and dissertation industry on the other.
Sanwichman
Thanks for the reply. I will defer to your superior knowledge. I don’t disagree with you, I just wish there was a way to tell the people. We need scholarship. but we also need people who can tell the story so people listen to it. You are doing your part. I am not succeeding doing my part.
btw
i am intrigued by your reference to Poe, I did not know he commented on Marx. I am still dealing with his “imp of the perverse.”
coberly,
Sorry if my phrasing misled you. Poe didn’t comment on Marx. The part I borrowed from Poe was only “the man that was used up.” I added the Karl Marx part.
Thanks for telling me. i would probably have gotten lost looking for it.
Sandwichman:
Thank you for stopping by.
Bill