The very calculation of value under capitalism, then, is inimical to the actualization of freedom. Indeed, the deepest contradiction of capitalism resides in its own measure of value. Capitalism employs the measure of value that is operative in the realm of necessity and treats it as though it were a measure of freedom. Capitalism is therefore bound to increase the realm of necessity and decrease the realm of freedom. Even when capitalism potentially expands the realm of freedom by reducing the socially necessary labor time, we cannot actually recognize the expansion of the realm of freedom under capitalism, since disposable time is not allowed to serve as the measure of social wealth. The form of activity that is only intelligible as a means (necessary labor time) is treated as though it were an end in itself, and the actual end (free time) is not recognized as having any value at all.
As a consequence, even the wealthy cannot convert their capital into free time. If they spend their capital on something that has no value under capitalism—disposable time—they will cease to be wealthy and become part of the proletariat. Of course, individual capitalists may be wealthy enough to “waste” part of their capital on disposable time, but that is beside the point, since the principle of their wealth still requires that they adopt their wealth as an end in itself rather than as a means to leading a free life. The point of wealth under capitalism is to accumulate more wealth, not to use it as a means for a meaningful end. The accumulation of dead labor is what we call value, and the more dead labor we accumulate the wealthier we take ourselves to be. This is why Marx describes the dead labor of capital as a vampire that “lives only by sucking up living labor, and lives more, the more of this it sucks up.” Rather than dead labor being in the service of living labor, living labor under capitalism is in the service of accumulating more and more dead labor. The purpose of labor in the realm of necessity is thereby fundamentally distorted and prevented from achieving its own end. Instead of serving as a means for leading a life in the realm of freedom, labor as a means becomes an end in itself.
The most striking example is of course when people in our society are not needed for wage labor and we regard this as a problem that needs a solution (“unemployment”) rather than as an opportunity to be seized. The idea that wage labor—which by definition is a means—is required for the sense of purpose and meaningful activity (an end in itself) is entirely specious. If we value freedom, what we need is time to figure out who we should be and what matters to us. This requires time to educate ourselves and to deliberate on what should count as meaningful activities for us—both individually and collectively—rather than being prescribed what should count as meaningful activities by what happens to be profitable for a capitalist at the moment. The latter is serfdom and not freedom.
The key to the critique of capitalism is therefore the revaluation of value. The foundation of capitalism is the measure of wealth in terms of socially necessary labor time. In contrast, the overcoming of capitalism requires that we measure our wealth in terms of what I call socially available free time. As long as our measure of wealth is socially necessary labor time, machine technologies cannot produce any value for us by virtue of their own operations. The technologies that could make us wealthier—that could give us more time to lead our lives—are instead employed to exploit human labor even when such labor is not needed. If we measured our wealth in terms of socially available free time, however, then machines would produce value for us by virtue of their own operations. The technological means that make work more efficient would make us wealthier if socially available free time were our measure of value, but because our measure of value is socially necessary labor time the technological means that reduce the need to work are seen as reducing our wealth.
The revaluation of value is an immanent critique of capitalism. The revaluation does not propose a new value that is opposed to the capitalist measure of social wealth. Rather, the revaluation demonstrates that the capitalist measure of social wealth makes no sense on its own and presupposes the value of free time that it denies. The problem with capitalism is not that it privileges value and social wealth. The problem with capitalism is that it distorts the meaning of value and social wealth. The measure of value under capitalism is distorted and self-contradictory, since the means are treated as the end.
The profound distortion at work in the capitalist measure of social wealth can be illustrated by a comparison with the measure of social wealth in smaller unities like the family or a group of friends or lovers who live together. Unless we operate like the families that Marx studied in Manchester (where the children had to labor for their parents to secure their means of survival), the level of social wealth in our household is not measured by how much labor time is required to sustain our life together. If we acquire a dishwasher and a vacuum cleaner—with the result that each member of the household is required to spend less time on cleaning and doing dishes—we do not think that this entails a decrease of our level of social wealth that needs to be compensated by surplus labor. There is also no crisis of “unemployment” as a result of the daily chores being less time consuming, so we do not have to invent pointless tasks to keep the members of the household busy. Rather, we can affirm as a feature of our freedom that all the members of the household now have more time to lead their lives: to pursue their education or chosen profession, to connect with people who matter to them, to engage in sports or dancing, to observe nature, to read or paint, to learn new skills, or to engage in some other way with the question of what they ought to do with their time. Likewise, we now have more time to deliberate on how we should lead our life together and how we should divide the social labor that remains necessary in the household.
If we were not committed to such an expansion of the realm of freedom—and a corresponding reduction of the realm of necessity—it would have made no sense to acquire the dishwasher and the vacuum cleaner in the first place. To be sure, there may be a member of the household who enjoys the activity of doing dishes for its own sake and for whom the activity accordingly belongs to the realm of freedom rather than the realm of necessity. This is not a problem, since there is nothing that prevents him or her from doing the dishes by hand even though we have a dishwasher. The point of expanding the realm of freedom is not to decide in advance which activities should count as free, or to prescribe that living labor must be replaced by dead labor to the maximum degree possible. On the contrary, the point of expanding the realm of freedom is to enable these questions to be genuine questions—the subject of individual and collective deliberation—rather than being determined for us by our material conditions. When we have a dishwasher, doing dishes by hand is not a necessity but a choice.
The aim of the revaluation of value is to transform our conception of social wealth in such a way that it reflects our commitment to free time. The degree of our wealth is the degree to which we have the resources to engage the question of what we ought to do with our lives, which depends on the amount of socially available free time. To be wealthy is to be able to engage the question of what to do on Monday morning, rather than being forced to go to work in order to survive.
Such freedom should not be conflated with a freedom from obligations and pressing responsibilities. To live in the realm of freedom is to be bound by the demands of your practical identity—as a parent, a citizen, a doctor, an athlete, a scholar, and so on. The point, however, is that you are bound by your commitments rather than by necessities dictated by your material needs. To be free is not to be free from any practical identity, but to be free to engage the demands of having a practical identity. Such freedom includes the demanding question of whether you are succeeding or failing in your practical identity and the equally demanding question—a question of your existential identity—which concerns whether you should hold on to a given practical identity or have to let it go. There are no given answers to these questions of our practical and existential identity, which is why the actualization o
f freedom requires that we have the time and the material resources to engage them as the demanding questions that they are. Having the time and the resources cannot guarantee that we will engage with the questions in a productive way—there can be no such guarantee precisely because we are free to fail—but the point is that we should collectively enable rather than disable one another to lead a free life. This is the point of the revaluation of value.
The revaluation of value as the foundation for Marx’s arguments has generally been overlooked and never fully understood, partly because Marx restricts his own use of the term “value” to the capitalist conception of value as the quantity of labor time. Yet Marx explicitly challenges and seeks to transform the capitalist measure of social wealth, which implicitly commits him to a revaluation of value. A measure of wealth analytically presupposes a measure of value, so in order to transform the measure of wealth one must transform the underlying conception of value.37
The key text for the revaluation of value in Marx is the seventh notebook of his Grundrisse, written in London in the winter and spring of 1858. During this period Marx’s own personal poverty deprived him of free time to work during the day and he had to stay up through the nights to pursue his research, while battling both illness and the stress of trying to support his family. Yet the years when he was writing his Grundrisse (1857–58) were some of the most productive and philosophically fertile in Marx’s life. Grundrisse means “fundamental features” in German and the seventh notebook in particular distills the fundamental features of Marx’s thinking. On a few luminous pages, Marx here captures the central contradiction of capital.38 The contradiction explains why capitalism potentially liberates free time for all, but also enables us to see why only the overcoming of capitalism actually can convert the value of free time into real social wealth.
The contradiction is the one we have observed between labor time and technological development. Capitalism measures value in terms of socially necessary labor time, but it also “calls to life all the powers of science” in order to reduce the socially necessary labor time. This process has rapidly accelerated since the epoch in which Marx lived and the need for living labor has been reduced due to technological efficiency. The reduction of the need for living labor in the process of production is what Marx describes as “one of the civilizing aspects of capital,” which generates “conditions that are more advantageous to social relations and to the creation of elements for a new and higher formation [of society] than was the case under the earlier forms of slavery and serfdom.”39 Indeed, Marx underlines that capitalism “creates the material means and the nucleus for relations,” which could lead to “a higher form of society, with a greater reduction of the overall time devoted to material labor.”40 By demonstrating that we can dramatically reduce socially necessary labor time, the technological advances achieved under capitalism could contribute to an expansion of “the true realm of freedom, the development of human abilities as an end in itself.”41 Nevertheless, under capitalism we cannot directly devote ourselves to an expansion of the realm of freedom, since there is no other measure of social wealth than the surplus value extracted from living labor. No matter how advanced our technological capacities for production become, capitalism must continue “to use labor time as the measuring rod for the giant social forces thereby created,”42 since there is no other source for the growth of capital than the surplus time of living labor.
The contradiction in the capitalist mode of production can move in two different directions, and it is here that the revaluation of value becomes crucial.
As long as we measure our social wealth in terms of labor time, technological development is bound to intensify exploitative methods for extracting relative surplus value from workers. Due to increased technological efficiency in the process of production, workers either become unemployed and part of an army of surplus labor whose presence can be used to keep down wages (as tends to happen in the Western world today), or they become subjected to extremely cruel working conditions that are designed to extract as much surplus value as possible from their labor (as tends to happen in the parts of the world where we now locate most of our manufacturing).
At the same time, the contradiction of capital bears an emancipatory potential within itself. The more advanced our technological powers of production become, the more manifest it becomes that labor time is an inadequate measure for social wealth. When the process of production is increasingly automated and the need for living labor reduced, “the human being comes to relate more as a watchman and regulator to the production process itself.”43 This is potentially emancipatory, since it can lead us to develop ourselves as “social individuals.” For us to become truly social individuals in Marx’s sense, we have to be the subjects of production—planning and directing it for our purposes—rather than being subjected to production for the sake of capital. “In this transformation,” Marx writes, “what appears as the great foundation of production and wealth is neither the immediate labor performed by the worker nor the time that he works, but rather the appropriation (Aneignung) of his own general productive power, his understanding of nature and his mastery over it by virtue of his existence as a social body—in a word, the development of the social individual.”44
Such a transformation requires that we are educated as social individuals who democratically plan the purposes of production. Given such a transformation of the way we reproduce our life together, “necessary labor time will be measured by the needs of the social individual,”45 which is to say that we will produce in view of what we need to lead our lives rather than in view of making a profit. Furthermore, when we can design technology and plan production for our own purposes, “the development of the power of social production will grow so rapidly that, even though production is now calculated for the wealth of all, disposable time will grow for all.”46
Strikingly, Marx uses the English term disposable time in italics in the original (rather than the German verfügbare Zeit). The social transformation that Marx advocates requires the revaluation of value. “It is no longer,” Marx emphasizes, “labor time that is the measure of wealth, but rather disposable time.”47 What Marx here describes as disposable time is what I call socially available free time. The revaluation of value discloses that socially available free time—rather than socially necessary labor time—is the real measure of our wealth. Given the revaluation of value, we can strive to “reduce the necessary labor of society to a minimum,” instead of “reducing the necessary labor time in order to posit surplus labor”48 (as we do under capitalism). We can seek to increase the surplus of socially available free time, rather than extract relative surplus value from wage labor. Socially available free time is thus both the means and the end of emancipation, since it allows for “the free development of individualities,” which Marx specifies as “the artistic, scientific etc. development of individuals in the time set free, and with the means created, for all” (emphasis added).49
Marx does not, however, explicitly make clear that such a social transformation requires an active revaluation of value on our part. As he observes, capitalism is “instrumental in creating the means of social disposable time, in order to reduce labor time for the whole society to a diminishing minimum, and thus to free everyone’s time for their own development.”50 Capitalism thus creates the material conditions that make it possible to “blow up”51—in die Luft zu sprengen—its own foundation. Yet, in the Grundrisse, Marx elides the question of what is required of us to make use of this explosive power in an enabling rather than disabling way. He merely emphasizes that “the theft of alien labor time, on which the present wealth is based, appears as a miserable foundation in face of this new one, created by large-scale industry itself. As soon as labor in its direct form has ceased to be the great source of wealth, labor time ceases and must cease to be its measure.”52
Everything at stake in Marx’s work hin
ges on the status of the “must” (muß) in the above sentence. Thanks to the level of our material technological development, we are potentially in a position to see that the generation of wealth does not depend on exploiting surplus labor for capital gain and that we would be better off devoting our abilities to conceiving more adequate technologies, in view of liberating time for all of us to lead our lives. As Marx emphasizes, “The surplus labor of the mass has ceased to be the condition for the development of general wealth.”53 Labor time should therefore cease to be the measure of social wealth, but whether or not it will cease to be the measure of wealth depends on whether we pursue a collective transformation of our conception of value. To say that labor time must cease to be the measure of wealth can either be read as the statement of an inevitable necessity (i.e., the dynamic of capitalism automatically leads to its own overcoming) or as an injunction to us—stating that we must revalue our conception of value.
Marx has often been read as advocating the first alternative (the overcoming of capitalism as historically inevitable), but that is a serious mistake. If the overcoming of capitalism is historically inevitable, then Marx’s own analysis is unnecessary, since the dynamic of material forces alone will secure the overcoming of capitalism, independently of what we are committed to, what we value, and what we understand about the world in which we live. Inversely, the revaluation of value requires not only a theoretical but also a practical transformation of the way we reproduce our lives. All the way from our production of goods to our education and other forms of socialization, we must actively promote the value of leading a free life and the challenging responsibility of being spiritually free, rather than subordinated to capital or religion.
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