This week friends sent me a link to an article on freedom published in the Jacobin Magazine written by the Marxist scholar David Harvey. Harvey, correctly in my view, calls readers to “reclaim the idea of freedom for socialism.” Again correctly, Harvey also finds fault with the idea of freedom peddled among both Republican and Democratic policymakers, an idea he characterizes as “liberal utopian.” Unfortunately, Harvey proposes as a response to liberal utopian freedom a socialist notion of freedom that is just as one-sided and just as utopian as the idea he is eager that we supplant.
At the center of Harvey’s analysis is a discussion from volume three of Marx’s Capital where Marx seeks simultaneously to locate freedom socially and to distinguish it from the form of domination that prevails under capitalism:
The realm of freedom really begins only where labour determined by necessity and external expediency ends; it lies by its very nature beyond the sphere of material production proper. Just as the savage must wrestle with nature to satisfy his needs, to maintain and reproduce his life, so must civilized man, and he must do so in all forms of society and under all possible modes of production. This realm of natural necessity expands with his development, because his needs do too; but the productive forces to satisfy these expand at the same time. Freedom, in this sphere, can consist only in this, that socialized man, the associated producers, govern the human metabolism with nature in a rational way, bringing it under their collective control instead of being dominated by it as a blind power; accomplishing it with the least expenditure of energy and in conditions most worthy and appropriate for their human nature. But this always remains a realm of necessity. The true realm of freedom, the development of human powers as an end in itself, begins beyond it, though it can only flourish with this realm of necessity as its basis. The reduction of the working day is the basic prerequisite.
Capital, volume 3, chapter 48, §3
Harvey reads Marx’s analysis as a call to eliminate the realm of necessity. Yet, however much we might like to eliminate necessity (a feat that, even if possible, would be disastrous), this reading of Marx’s discussion is one-sided and incomplete. Even were we to elect to rationally and deliberately coordinate our productive relationships with one another, this would itself “always remain a realm of necessity.” Even though we reduce the working day and develop “human powers as an end in itself, . . . it can only flourish with this realm of necessity as its basis.”
Some readers may feel that Marx’s analysis is itself one-sided. Insofar as Marx failed to differentiate labor in its broadest sense and labor for the production of commodities, he also failed to contemplate the circumstance where capitalism persists but the marginal product is distributed more rationally, socially, and equally. This redistribution of the marginal product caught on everywhere, even in fascist economies, following the 1929 stock market crash. Well before the close of World War II, redistribution of the marginal product was counted as sound Keynesian economic policy. Primed with the $18T in total global spending on World War II, the world’s leading economies were set adrift on a sea of capital for the next three decades, a sea of capital that some mistook for freedom. This, clearly, was the case for the generation of 1968 to which Harvey calls our attention. With industrial productivity at an all-time high, wages and benefits climbing, and four-year university tuitions and cost of living at all time lows, professors, workers, women, students, and minorities counted their wealth, education, and leisure only a first installment on a long overdue debt. But, then, in a story that Harvey himself knows better than anyone, the war-time dividend began to run dry. When it did, however, those on the left drew inferences that bore no relationship to economic reality. They had concluded, mistakenly, that the $18T that funded the post-war expansion of the social franchise everywhere in the world was a product of their hard work and tough negotiating. When this money ran out, they concluded that someone was stealing their marginal product.
Workers concluded that the stolen marginal product was theirs. Investors concluded that the stolen marginal product was theirs. Both were mistaken. When the US Congress voted its $4.2T share of the global war debt, this not only brought a quick end to the Great Depression, it also funded the next forty years of industrial growth. Which means that in 1938, when the bonds were approved, the lion’s share of that debt fell to future tax payers. These overwhelmingly were workers. But, considering the much higher corporate and individual tax rates between 1945 and 1970, corporations kicked in an amount that was not negligible.
All of which is to say that 1968 may not be the best point of departure for a discussion of freedom, least of all a Marxian notion of freedom. For as quickly as the marginal product found its way into the pockets of working families, just as quickly was it once again seized. This also places in perspective Karl Polanyi’s analysis, upon which Harvey also relies. The “double-movement” that invites public intervention is the same double-movement that demands the restoration of “freedom” to capital. Both movements are equally immanent to the capitalist social formation. Neither entails the freedom from necessity Marx described in volume 3, chapter 48.
In the discussion Harvey cites to, reproduced above, Marx was clearly contemplating a freedom that, unlike the freedom of 1968, is not grounded in labor, and therefore contributes nothing to the marginal product. When economists object that Marx’s expansion of the realm of freedom eats into the marginal product, they are telling the truth. This Marx readily acknowledged. Which is why simply increasing wages and benefits, which also shifts the marginal product, cannot, on its own, give rise to freedom. Freedom of the sort that Marx was imagining requires that the work day be shortened, for example from eight to six to four hours. With each shift, workers are no longer contributing two or four or more hours to the marginal product. That product is transferred as time to workers’ accounts. To this extent it escapes from Polanyi’s double-movement.
This is not to trash good, progressive, socialist policies that transfer a greater portion of the marginal product to working families; the social product they themselves have produced. But this is not the realm of freedom about which Marx wrote. We do not reclaim the realm of freedom by shifting the marginal product.
This is also, in part, the problem with liberal utopianism. It holds that by distributing the marginal product up the income hierarchy we buy freedom, for some. But, the larger problem with liberal utopianism is that, like socialist utopianism, it promises what it cannot deliver. In particular, shifting the problem up the income hierarchy does, in theory, grant more leisure time to those who enjoy a higher marginal product. But insofar as the marginal product is everywhere equal to a ratio — ΔQ/ΔL, the change in quantity divided by the change in labor or capital — even this marginal product is only as good as the current quantity and volume of labor, which is upwardly slanting. Any investor who stands still loses. Capital must continuously be reinvested. In this sense, too, therefore, investors remain bound to the realm of necessity.
But this means that redistributing the marginal product in this direction or that — housing or health or retirement subsidies — however beneficial or damaging, does not touch the kind of necessity unique to the capitalist social formation. A closer read of Marx could dramatically strengthen Harvey’s argument. It is therefore unfortunate that he relies so much on Polanyi.