[D66] Disposable time / socially available free time

[A.OUT]

Hagglund:

"The real measure of value is not how much work we have done or have to 
do (quantity of labor time) but how much disposable time we have to 
pursue and explore what matters to us (quality of free time). The 
measure of social wealth in terms of free time is not an ideal that I 
impose as an external alternative to the measure of social wealth in 
terms of labor time. On the contrary, the value of having time in the 
realm of freedom—the value of disposable time—is the real measure of 
wealth because it is internal to the value and measure of labor time in 
the realm of necessity. The value of labor time in the realm of 
necessity (i.e., the cost of labor time) can be understood as such only 
because we are already committed to the value of free time."


"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).