Second, the socially necessary labor that no one wants to do for its own sake (that everyone counts as a negative cost of necessary labor time) is not being done as alienated labor by persons who need money to survive and cannot identify with the social purpose of what they are doing. Rather, the socially necessary labor time is qualitatively transformed in being shared by members of society on the basis of their abilities and commitments, with the explicit purpose of contributing to a common good that everyone can recognize as devoted to improving their own possibilities of leading a free life. Moreover, if you cannot recognize yourself in the conception of the common good—if you are a dissenter or conscientious objector to the work that is being done—no one is forcing you to participate in the socially necessary labor, but there are multiple resources available for you to find a way to make a meaningful contribution that makes sense in light of your commitments and for you to help transform the practices to which you object.
Third, through technological development and innovative solutions, we are collectively committed to reducing the labor time that is socially necessary to maintain our lives and increasing the free time that is socially available to lead our lives. Reducing socially necessary labor time does not necessarily mean that we spend less time on socially necessary labor, but that the time we spend on such labor is to a greater degree a matter of socially available free time. Technological improvements are a quantitative means that can contribute to such a qualitative transformation of our labor time, both in the relation among different occupations and within a given occupation. For example, if I am an architect and the time required for my computer to process my design plans is reduced thanks to a technological innovation, the material conditions for my practice are transformed in such a way that I have to spend less time waiting for my program to process data. Instead I have more socially available free time to engage with my design plans on the computer or pursue other aspects of my life. The point of such a transformation is not necessarily to maximize my efficiency, since there is no given imperative that I should be maximally efficient or that I should spend all my time working on my design plans. The point is rather to make my labor time less constrained by the given material conditions (e.g., the operating speed of my computer) and more a matter of my free commitment to the amount of time I want to devote to my work.
The difference between socially available free time and socially necessary labor time is not a difference between being unconstrained and being constrained, but a difference between being subjected to constraints that are recognized as essential rather than inessential for the practice to which we are devoted. For example, there are practices in which the established degree of the instrument’s material resistance is taken to be essential to the practice itself, rather than as something to be reduced. Many kinds of musical practices could here serve as illuminating examples. Such examples, however, do not gainsay that we are committed to decreasing socially necessary labor time and increasing socially available free time. Rather, in such cases, the time we are required to devote to the practice by virtue of the instrument’s degree of material resistance—e.g., the amount of effort required of us by virtue of a saxophone’s constitutive constraints—is itself recognized as socially available free time rather than socially necessary labor time, since the degree of material resistance is recognized as an essential part of the practice to which we are committed. In pursuing architecture or music—as in pursuing any practical activity—we will always be dependent on material instruments that both enable and constrain what we can do. The dependence on some form of material instruments is an essential constraint of the practice, but we can still seek to reduce material constraints that we take to be inessential for the practice, as part of our project to decrease socially necessary labor time and increase socially available free time.
The project of reducing socially necessary labor time, however, should not be conflated with an aspiration to eliminate socially necessary labor time. It is neither possible nor desirable to eliminate socially necessary labor time altogether. Our lives will always require some form of maintenance and the question of how to maintain our material lives is an intrinsic part of our spiritual freedom. Eliminating socially necessary labor time is not even an intelligible goal for a free life, since the question of where to draw the distinction between necessity and freedom must itself remain a living question for anyone who leads a free life.
How we distinguish between social roles and practical identities is an expression of how we distinguish between the realm of necessity and the realm of freedom. Under democratic socialism, the question of how to negotiate these distinctions is at the center of political deliberation. We identify the realm of necessity in terms of the labor that is needed to sustain our shared life and the social roles that are required for such labor. We aim to decrease the realm of necessity by reducing the socially necessary labor time and making it possible to transform the required social roles in light of our ends. By the same token, we identify the realm of freedom in terms of the socially available free time that we aim to increase and the social roles to which we are committed as ends in themselves (our practical identities). Since it is a matter of freedom, nothing can or should guarantee that everyone has the same set of practical identities. What counts as a practical identity for me may be a mere social role for you and vice versa. Moreover, for each one of us, what counts as our practical identities and their order of priority (our existential identity) must remain at issue and possible to change.
To be sure, the project of democratic socialism depends on the social role of citizen counting as a practical identity for us. Such an active identification of ourselves as citizens, however, cannot be imposed from above but must emerge and be sustained by virtue of our social practices. Precisely because the practical identity of being a citizen—of participating in the project of democratic socialism—is pursued as an end in itself, the meaning of such a commitment must itself be open to question. Under democratic socialism, we are committed to providing not only socially available free time for everyone to engage the question of who they are trying to be, but also socially available institutions for pursuing the question concretely through various forms of creative activity and education, which themselves are open to revision.
What you discover about your abilities and your commitments through education will in turn inform the kinds of work you do in contributing to society—e.g., treating patients, designing houses, taking care of children, inventing new forms of medicine, building better machine technology. The practical identities in question (being a doctor, an architect, a nursery teacher, a scientist, an engineer) entail a sense of what you ought to do, but under democratic socialism there is no inherent demand that you have to choose only one vocation for your whole life. Since you are not required to work for your survival, you have the spiritual freedom to ask yourself if you ought to sustain a given practical identity and if you ought to transform or abandon the practice. The question of what you should do with your life—the question of your existential identity—is recognized as an irreducible question, which must be allowed to remain explicitly at issue in any vital spiritual life.
The fundamental questions of economy—the questions of what we prioritize, what we value, what is worth doing with our time—are thus recognized as being at the heart of our spiritual lives. How we organize our economy is inseparable from how we live together (how we make our shared home, our oikos), since the way we organize our economy is ultimately how we express our priorities and our conception of value. The aim of democratic socialism is not to answer our economic questions once and for all, but to enable us to “own” the questions as the most important questions of our shared lives. The three principles of democratic socialism therefore express the recognition of the inseparability of economic and spiritual life. To lead emancipated lives, we have to measure our wealth in terms of socially available free time, own our means of pro
duction collectively, and pursue our labor from each according to her ability, to each according to her needs.
VI
The stakes of my arguments in this book come together in the principles of democratic socialism. Democratic socialism seeks to provide the institutional, political, and material conditions for spiritual freedom. The project of democratic socialism thus depends on the cultivation of secular faith, since it requires that we avow and in practice acknowledge the commitment to our shared, finite lives as ends in themselves. Under democratic socialism we can “own” the question of what to do with our time, which does not mean that our time belongs to us as our possession. On the contrary, in owning the time of our lives we put ourselves at stake in what we do and recognize that we are vulnerable to the loss of time. In accordance with the dynamic of secular faith, the recognition of the fragility of our lives is an intrinsic part of what animates our fidelity to the project of democratic socialism. The project is not something that can be completed once and for all but depends on our continued engagement as citizens. The aim of democratic socialism is not to overcome finitude but to enable us to own the question—both individually and collectively—of how to lead our finite lives.
Accordingly, the idea of democratic socialism must be dissociated from any form of utopianism that conflates the overcoming of capitalism with the overcoming of finitude. An influential example of such utopianism is the work of the philosopher Theodor W. Adorno. As a leading member of the Frankfurt School of critical theory, Adorno is the most sophisticated of the many Marxists who fail to think of the secular faith and spiritual freedom that is required for democratic socialism. While Adorno is committed to emancipation, we will see that he ultimately conflates a secular notion of freedom (the liberation of finite life) with a religious notion of salvation (the liberation from finite life). As a result, his own valuable insights into freedom and the possibility of emancipation are compromised.
The most instructive example is Adorno’s late essay “Free Time,” in which he comes closest to grasping the relation between freedom and time that is at the center of democratic socialism. In his essay, Adorno rightly proceeds from the premise that freedom is inseparable from having the material and social resources “to seek out and arrange”58 one’s work according to one’s own intentions. To be free is to be devoted to one’s activities as ends in themselves, which is why freedom requires that people are “able to make their own decisions about themselves and their lives.”59 The crucial task of emancipation is how “to help free time turn into freedom.”60 This requires free time not only for leisure but also for exploring one’s commitments through education and other forms of institutional activity. Freedom cannot be reduced to an individual achievement, since both how much free time we have and what we are able to do with our free time depends on how we organize our society. Or as Adorno puts it: “free time depends on the totality of societal conditions.”61
If we develop the implications of Adorno’s compressed formula, we can say that both the quantity and the quality of our free time depend on how we organize the time of our lives collectively. As Adorno notes, free time in a quantitative sense has “already expanded exorbitantly” thanks to technological inventions that automate production and by virtue of which “free time should increase enormously.”62 Adorno does not, however, link this problem to the measure of value under capitalism and the need for a revaluation of our conception of value. As I have shown, under capitalism neither the quantity nor the quality of free time can be recognized as having any value in itself, since the measure of value is labor time and only activities that are commodified can contribute to our economic “growth.” While the measure of value that determines our notion of economic growth is treated as natural, we need to recognize that it is a collective normative commitment that is inimical to the actualization of our freedom. As far as the capitalist system is concerned, it does not matter if what we do is intrinsically meaningful for us, as long as we spend our free time consuming commodities that contribute to the growth of capital in the economy. This is why I have emphasized that capitalism is a historically specific form of organizing the time of our lives, which is inseparable from how we valorize the time of our lives. The social form of capitalism recognizes each one of us as “owning” a lifetime that is inherently valuable (in contrast to societies that keep slaves who are systematically denied ownership of their time), but our lifetime is treated as a means for the end of accumulating surplus value in the form of capital.
The contradictory relation between means and ends under capitalism is clearly visible in the opposition between work and free time that is due to the social form of wage labor. In receiving a wage, our labor is normatively recognized as a negative “cost” for which we ought to be compensated. Our wage labor is a means for the end of leading our lives in a realm of freedom that opens up beyond our working hours. Our free time outside of work, however, itself becomes a means for the end of restoring our strength and ability to work, since the measure of value under capitalism is socially necessary labor time. As Adorno himself observes, given the form of wage labor, “the time free from labor is supposed to generate labor power.”63 As a consequence, “free time should in no way whatsoever suggest work, presumably so that one can work that much more effectively afterward,” and “the time bereft of labor—precisely because it is merely an appendage to labor—is separated from the latter with puritanical fervor.”64
Free time is thus reduced to leisure time. Rather than being the form in which we engage the question of who we are and what matters to us, our free time is commodified for the sake of profit and reduced to “a selection of hobbies that matches the supply offered by the leisure industry.”65
In contrast, Adorno holds that freedom requires that we overcome the opposition between work and free time. In a striking move, Adorno takes his own life as an example. As a famous philosopher, he is regularly asked in interviews about his “hobbies.” Rather than answer the question, he underscores that the question itself testifies to a separation between work and free time that is fatally misleading:
I am startled by the question whenever I meet with it. I have no hobby. Not that I’m a workaholic who wouldn’t know how to do anything else but get down to business and do what has to be done. But rather I take the activities with which I occupy myself beyond the bounds of my official profession, without exception, so seriously that I would be shocked by the idea that they had anything to do with hobbies—that is, activities I’m mindlessly infatuated with only in order to kill time….Making music, listening to music, reading with concentration, constitute an integral element of my existence; the word hobby would be a mockery of them. And conversely, my work, the production of philosophical and sociological studies and university teaching, so far has been so pleasant to me that I am unable to express it within the opposition to free time that the current razor-sharp classification demands from people.66
Adorno is well aware that he is speaking as someone who has had the privilege of both personal wealth and an outstanding education, which have allowed him to discover and cultivate his passions. Adorno was not only a successful philosopher and sociologist but also a classically trained pianist who studied composition with the prominent composer Alban Berg and wrote his own music. For such a person, it is easy to see that there does not have to be an opposition between work and free time. The work you do as your official profession (e.g., being a philosopher at a university) is meaningful in itself and expresses your own commitments, so even when it is demanding and difficult the time you devote to your work can count as free time. Likewise, the activities you pursue in your spare time (e.g., composing music) are not mere “hobbies” designed to kill time but meaningful in themselves and expressive of who you are. While the work you do as your official profession can be seen as free time, the free time that does not belong to your official profession can itself be a form of dedicated work.
This is Adorno’s model of freedom. “If free time would really finally become that state of affairs in which everyone would enjoy what once was the prerogative of the few,” he writes, “then I would imagine the situation along the lines of the model I observe in myself, although under altered conditions this model would change as well.”67
Adorno does not say anything about what the altered conditions would be, but in light of the principles of democratic socialism we can clarify what is at stake in overcoming the opposition between work and free time.
Let me first make clear that neither your official professions nor your other activities have to belong to so-called high culture in order to count as free. As we have seen, when Marx speaks of the activity of composing as “actual free labor” he is not primarily thinking of the composition of music or philosophy. The free activity of composition can express itself in any number of social projects, ranging from cooking, harvesting, and building to child rearing, athletics, and study groups, while including music and philosophy as well. The activities in question can be pursued either as your chosen professions or in your spare time. The difference between what you do as your chosen professions and what you do in your spare time is not a matter of wage labor but of the nature of your commitment. If you commit to being a doctor as an official profession, you are bound by a different set of obligations than if you commit to participating in a study group in your spare time. In both cases there are constraints to which you bind yourself, but their weight and significance is different. Actual free labor is not a matter of being free from constraints, but of being able to identify with the constraints to which you subject yourself.
Accordingly, the key term in Marx’s discussions of alienated versus free labor is aneignen,68 which is a German verb for “making something your own.” Capitalism alienates labor and makes the sense of owning your life abstract by aligning it with the ownership of private property for the sake of profit. The concrete sense of owning your life that Marx affirms is, on the contrary, a matter of being able to make your life your own by putting yourself at stake in what you do.
This Life Page 36