An illuminating example is the production and consumption of artworks. Under capitalism, “owning” a work of art means having the abstract property right to a work of art rather than having the concrete ability to appreciate and understand the object in question. Under capitalism, we can be “owners” of artworks while having a merely abstract relation to the objects in question. We can hang a Cézanne on our wall as a token of social prestige without having either the time to appreciate it or the education to grasp its significance. Furthermore, artists under capitalism have the abstract property right to their works of art, but concretely they have to sell their artworks for profit in order to make a living. Under democratic socialism, by contrast, artworks cannot be commodities that are bought and sold for profit, but artists have the concrete property right to their work—in the sense that no one can take it away from them against their will—by virtue of having created it. Given that artworks are created to be seen and appreciated by others, however, there will be an intrinsic motivation for artists to donate their works to galleries, households, libraries, offices, or public museums and make a case for why they deserve a place among the collections. For the same reason, the only ones who will “own” artworks under democratic socialism are the ones who make it a priority to engage with artworks. The artworks themselves will in principle be available for all in public museums, or on display in other venues hosted by the artists themselves or by supporters of their work. In practice, however, the artworks will be accessible only to those who devote time to attend the exhibits, receive education concerning the history of art, and participate in committed conversations regarding what art ought to be. Concretely “owning” a work of art requires taking time to engage with the work of art, learn how to understand it, and put yourself at stake in an attempt to grapple with its meaning.
The point is not that everyone ought to be art lovers, but that everyone ought to have the socially available free time to explore the questions of what they love and to which activities they are committed. This requires the material and social resources to engage, cultivate, and transform your own senses, in order to explore what matters to you. As Marx emphasizes, our senses are themselves formed by the kinds of labor we do and the conditions under which we live. If you are worn out after a day of alienated labor, your ability to engage with other aspects of your life will itself be diminished and your free time will become a means to restore your labor-power rather than the form in which you lead your life. Actual free labor, by contrast, requires the socially available free time that allows you to own the question of what to do with your life.
Actual free labor does not mean that you can do anything you want. Which occupations you can take up as your official professions and what you can do in your spare time will depend on your concrete abilities. For example, under democratic socialism everyone has access to free education and can apply to medical school, but which of us will actually become doctors is a matter of how able we turn out to be. Likewise, everyone has the chance to learn to play an instrument—if we are collectively committed to having music in our lives—but which of us will be able to take it up as a vocation or even be good enough to play meaningfully in our spare time is a matter of talent and dedication. Actual freedom does not mean guaranteed success, but the freedom to explore who you can be and to fail by virtue of your own limitations rather than by virtue of systemic injustice. As Marx points out in a brilliant passage, when you cannot buy love, art, and influence over other people for money, then being a lover, an art connoisseur, or an influential person will depend on who you actually are, rather than on the purchasing power you have:
Then you can exchange love only for love, trust for trust, and so on. If you want to enjoy art, you must be an artistically cultivated person; if you want to exercise influence over other people, you must be a person with a stimulating and encouraging effect on other people. Every one of your relations to human beings and to nature must be a specific expression, corresponding to the object of your will, of your real individual life. If you love without evoking love in return—that is, if your loving as loving does not produce reciprocal love; if through a living expression of yourself as a loving person you do not make yourself a loved person, then your love is impotent—a misfortune.69
Democratic socialism is in no way designed to insure us against such misfortune. To lead a free life is to be defined by what you do and how you are received—what Marx here calls the specific and living expressions of your real individual life. Precisely because you are defined by what you do and how you are received, leading your life must include the risk of failing to be who you are trying to be. You are entitled to the resources that enable you to try to be a lovable person, an artistically cultivated person, or a politically influential person. But nothing can—or should—guarantee that you succeed in being a lovable person, an artistically cultivated person, or a politically influential person. Because you are essentially a social being, your successes and failures must themselves be a matter of the social recognition of your deeds. Of course, you can be misunderstood and contest the given social recognition of your deeds, but there is no space outside the social in which these concerns can be adjudicated. To own your life is to own that who you are is essentially a social achievement, which always comes with the risk of failure.
For the same reason, your own actual freedom depends on the freedom of others. For you to be genuinely recognized as having achieved a social status by virtue of your own deeds—e.g., being lovable or a great composer—others must have socially available free time to engage with who you are and what you do. Such engagement requires that they have the material and spiritual resources to assess the meaning of your deeds. If their time is consumed by alienated labor or if they are forced to recognize you as lovable or as a great composer because you wield your purchasing power over them, then you will at best have a compelled assent to your supposed achievements but no genuine recognition. Because everything we do and everything that matters to us is a form of social activity, to will our own freedom we must will the freedom of others. For any one of us to be recognized as free, others must have their own free time to confirm or challenge our self-conception. Inversely, to the extent that others are alienated from exercising their freedom, we too are alienated from our own freedom. Our freedom is inseparable from the freedom of others to acknowledge or contest our claim to be who we are trying to be and to do what we are trying to do. It is impossible for any one of us to be in the realm of freedom alone, since who we are and what we do is unintelligible without the recognition of others.
Hence, the requirement that we share and increase our socially available free time is both a commitment to true equality of opportunity and a condition for our own freedom as social individuals. If to be free is to be able to see what I do in light of my commitments, such freedom must include the ability to recognize my commitment to freedom in the institutions I sustain and that sustain me. This is why neither Adorno nor I nor anyone else can fully actualize our freedom under capitalism, even if we get to devote our lives to what we love in teaching philosophy, writing books, and composing music. If the institutions on which we depend exploit the labor time of others even as they give us free time to lead our lives, then we ourselves fall short of actual freedom.
Democratic socialism therefore requires that we develop practices which allow us to grasp explicitly that our material and spiritual lives are two sides of the same coin. If the time we spend in the realm of necessity—e.g., doing some form of labor that is necessary to sustain our life together—can be seen as socially shared and as contributing to the expansion of our collective realm of freedom, then even tedious forms of labor become expressive of our commitment to lead a free life. For example, my spending an hour per day mopping classroom floors and running the dishwashers in the cafeteria could itself be expressive of my commitment to being a university professor, if our lives were organized in such a way that
we shared the socially necessary forms of labor. There would still be a distinction between the time I spend in the realm of freedom (teaching my classes) and the time I spend in the realm of necessity (mopping classroom floors). The time I spend teaching is valuable in itself and not to be reduced (insofar as there are people who want to devote the time to my classes), whereas the time I spend mopping the floors is not valuable in itself and can happily be reduced through advanced technology. The crucial point, however, is that the distinction between the realm of freedom and the realm of necessity does not have to be a distinction between free and alienated labor. The time spent in the realm of necessity is not alienated labor if it is not being exploited for the sake of profit but is being done for the sake of a recognizable common good, which moreover embodies our collective commitment to reducing the socially necessary labor time for all.
Accordingly, the actual freedom of labor must include that we share the burden of the material production and reproduction of life. Contrary to what many influential philosophers have claimed (from Hannah Arendt to Michel Henry),70 freedom for Marx does not consist in a liberation from labor and necessity. Overcoming capitalism will not lead us to a state of “overabundance” in which all our needs are automatically fulfilled and we do not have to make any effort to sustain our material lives. Such a state of overabundance is not only impossible to attain but also undesirable, since there cannot be a realm of freedom that is not bound to a realm of necessity. If we did not have to sustain our lives, there would be no question of how we should lead our lives. Thus, I have argued at length that spiritual life cannot be separated from material life. How we lead our lives in the realm of freedom is inseparable from how we sustain our lives in the realm of necessity, since any form of spiritual life depends on a fragile material body that must be maintained.
Moreover, in leading any form of free life we must reckon with the possible loss of time, both through the risk of illness or disability that follows from being embodied and the risk of “wasting” our time that follows from leading a spiritual life that can fail in its integrity or turn out to be based on principles that themselves are misguided. As a spiritually free being, I can fail by not living up to the demands of a given practical identity, but I can also come to see the very aspiration to live up to that practical identity as itself a failure. The question that is always implicit in my life (the question of what is worth doing with my time) then becomes explicit. In a full-blown crisis, the very life I was trying to lead—the order of priorities that defined my existential identity—can come to be seen as a waste of my time.
At stake here is my ability to judge that my time is being wasted and that I myself am wasting my time. The ability to make such judgments—and the concomitant risk of existential crisis—is inseparable from the exercise of my spiritual freedom. If I could not judge that my time is being wasted, I could not see myself as alienated and I could not struggle for any form of emancipation. Moreover, if I could not judge that I myself am wasting my time, I could not deliberate—whether implicitly or explicitly—on what I ought to do with my life.
Under democratic socialism our time will not be wasted on generating surplus value, but we will still run the risk of wasting our surplus time, since such a risk is intrinsic to leading a free life. To be emancipated is not to be released from the question of what to do with our finite time and the concomitant risk of wasting our time. Rather, the point of emancipation is to enable us to own the risk by owning the question of our priorities—the question of what we ought to strive for and what we ought to forsake—as the vital question of our lives.
The overcoming of capitalism, then, should in no way be conflated with the overcoming of finitude. Yet this is precisely the mistake made by Adorno and many other utopian Marxists. “I believe,” Adorno maintains, “that without the notion of an unfettered life, freed from death, the idea of utopia, the idea of the utopia, cannot even be thought at all.”71 Adorno places great emphasis on this overcoming of temporal finitude. “The elimination of death is indeed the crucial point,”72 he underlines, since the idea of utopia “cannot be conceived at all without the elimination of death; this is inherent in the very thought.”73 Following the same line of argument, Adorno holds that “the possibility of a completely unshackled reality remains valid.”74 He specifies that such a completely unshackled reality would be “a world in which senseless suffering has ceased to exist”75 and in which even “the smallest trace of senseless suffering”76 has been removed.
Given Adorno’s demands regarding how our lives ought to be—freed from death and suffering—it is hardly surprising that he cannot form any positive conception of his utopia. Adorno repeatedly emphasizes that there must be a “ban on images” of utopia, which can be posited only as a negative absence.77 Yet, while Adorno cannot picture a life freed from death and suffering, he is convinced that it is desirable and would give us the fulfillment that we seek.
Adorno’s understanding of our finitude is thus essentially “religious” in my sense of the term. Even if Adorno does not believe that we can attain an eternal life, he regards our finitude as a negative restriction and assumes that we fundamentally suffer from the lack of a utopian life that would be exempt from death. For the same reason, Adorno fails to understand that finitude is a condition of possibility for freedom. Only someone who is finite can be free, since only someone who is finite can engage the question of what is worth doing with her time and grasp her own life as being at stake in how she leads her life. An infinite being could never lead a free life, since her own life could never be at stake in her activities. Indeed, an infinite being would have no life to live at all, since her life would not depend on self-maintenance. The problem with Adorno’s utopian life is not that it is unattainable but that it is undesirable and incompatible with the fragile possibility of freedom. The fragility of freedom cannot be eliminated but is intrinsic to freedom itself. The reason we cannot conceive of leading a life that is exempt from death is not because of cognitive or historical limitations but because such a conception of life is unintelligible.
For his part, Adorno never addresses the conditions of intelligibility for life and freedom, but persistently conflates such conditions with historically specific conditions. In the “Free Time” essay, the conflation is manifest in Adorno’s treatment of the problem of boredom. Adorno argues that the problem of boredom can be seen as “a function of life under the compulsion to work and under the rigorous division of labor.”78 Our labor time is haunted by boredom because it is compulsory rather than expressive of a free commitment, while our leisure time is haunted by boredom because it requires “superficial distraction” in order “to summon up the energy for work.”79 If we understand these observations as pertaining to a historically specific form of boredom, Adorno is here making an important point. Capitalist labor conditions qualitatively transform the problem of boredom, formally acknowledging our free time but making our lives much more tedious than they could be if our material and social conditions enabled us to own the question of what to do with our time. In a characteristic move, however, Adorno conflates the historically specific problem of boredom under capitalist labor conditions with the existential category of boredom per se. “Boredom need not necessarily exist,” Adorno asserts, since “if people were able to make their own decisions about themselves and their lives, if they were not harnessed to the eternal sameness, then they would not have to be bored. Boredom is the reflex reaction to objective dullness.”80
If Adorno were right, then leading a free life would mean that one could never be bored with what one is doing. In Adorno’s account, boredom is reducible to the fact that there is something objectively wrong (“dull”) with the world and our boredom is merely an automatic reaction (a “reflex”) to the objective dullness. By claiming that boredom ought to be eliminated, Adorno thus commits himself to the vision of a utopia in which we could never judge the world t
o be dull and would always be completely absorbed by what we do. Far from allowing us to be free, however, such a utopia would eliminate the question of both objective and subjective freedom. There would be no question of objective freedom, since we could never discern any deficiency (dullness) in the world to which we belong. Rather, we would take the world to be exactly what it ought to be and not call for any transformation of our objective social conditions. Likewise, there would be no question of subjective freedom, since we could never discern any deficiency (dullness) in how we lead our own lives. Rather, we would take ourselves to be exactly who we ought to be and find everything we do to be absolutely interesting. For Adorno, any sense of “negativity”—any sense that there is something wrong with ourselves or the world—is operative only insofar as we fall short of utopian life. If we were granted utopian life, we would never suffer from anything, never be bored by anything, never die from anything.
Adorno does not grasp that the relation to the negative—suffering, boredom, and death—is intrinsic to the positive possibility of freedom. Suffering, boredom, and anxiety before death are not reducible to psychological states—or historically specific pathologies—but rather necessary conditions for leading a free life. The relation to suffering, boredom, and death renders intelligible how leading our lives can matter to us in the first place. If nothing could count as suffering for us, we would never have a reason to object to anything that happens to us and no reason to change or improve our condition. Likewise, if we could not take ourselves to be bored by anything or bored with our own activities, we would never have a reason to try to transform how we conduct our lives.81 Finally, if we could not grasp ourselves as finite and as anxious before death, we would not be able to understand the urgency of pursuing any project or any activity, since we would not be able to distinguish between sooner and later in our lives. The relation to suffering, boredom, and death is a necessary condition for spiritual freedom. If we could not suffer, could not be bored, and could not die, there would be no distinction for us between success and failure, engagement and indifference, life and death. By the same token, we could never be committed to doing anything, since nothing that we do would make a difference for us.
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