Marx and the Concept of Historical Time · 第 129 页

Thus together with the concepts of need and productive force, the concept of free/disposable time must be understood as constitutive of Marx’s transhistorical concept of wealth. And yet, free/disposable time – which is, amongst other things, the ‘time for education, for intellectual development, for the fulfilment of social functions, for social intercourse, for the free play of the vital forces of [the] body and…mind’¹³⁶ – is only intelligible as a concept when it is placed in relation with the concept of labour-time. In capitalist society, therefore, free/disposable time is only intelligible in relation with the doubled relation between necessary and surplus-labour; that is, the doubled relation between necessary and surplus-labour-time. The necessary labourtime which contains surplus-time within itself – the necessary labour-time to produce every commodity but labour-power – is the basis of the free time of the capitalist: ‘the free time of the non-working parts of society is based on the surplus-labour, or overwork, the surpluslabour-time, of the working part.’¹³⁷ This free time might be characterised as the ‘time of the superstructure’: the time for ‘the performance of activities which are not directly productive’ (e.g. statecraft, war), as well as the time ‘for the development of human abilities and social potentialities…which have no directly practical purpose’ (e.g. art, science).¹³⁸ Surplus-labourtime is the ‘base’ of this time of the superstructure – it is the base of ‘ideological time’ – but only insofar, to return to the first chapter, and as the upcoming passage reinforces, as there is a co-constitutive, not unilateral, relation between these two times. Additionally, the necessary labour-time which surplus-time excludes itself from – the labour-time necessary to reproduce labour-power – constitutes the basis of the free time of the worker. It is not that the individual worker does not have free time – the physiological limits of the working-day, and the ensuing struggle to reduce its length, renders this impossible – but rather that his labour-time posits his free time as ‘existing in and through the opposition to surplus-labour-time.’¹³⁹ Yet whilst this free time is opposed to surplus-labour-time, it is also – and only – ‘free’ by virtue of the fact that it is productive for capital. Consider the following passage:

The saving of labour-time [is] equal to the increase of free time, i.e. time for the full development of the individual, which in turn reacts back upon the productive power of labour as itself the greatest productive power. From the standpoint of the direct production-process, it can be regarded as the production of fixed capital, this fixed capital being man himself...Free time – which is both idle time and time for higher activity – has naturally transformed its possessor into a different subject, and he then enters into the direct production-process as this different subject. This process is then both discipline, as regards the human being in the process of becoming; and, at the same time, practice [Ausübung], experimental science, materially creative and objectifying science, as regards the human being who has become, in whose head exists, the accumulated knowledge of society.¹⁴⁰

¹³⁶ Marx, Capital 1, 375.

¹³⁷ Karl Marx, Economic Manuscripts of 1861-63, in Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels Collected Works (MECW) Volume 30, Marx: 1861-1863, trans. Ben Fowkes (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1988), 191.

¹³⁸ Ibid. 190.

¹³⁹ Marx, Grundrisse der Kritik der politischen Ökonomie, 604 (Grundrisse, 708). The use of the masculine personal pronoun ‘his’ here is deliberate: it registers the fact that free time ‘existing in and through the opposition to surplus-labour-time’ must itself negotiate the fact that labour-power is reproduced through the absolute unfreedom of domestic labour-time. Simply put, Marx is indifferent to the fact that, within capitalism, domestic labour-time measures nothing, neither value nor wealth.

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