Leisure, or: on the subordination of permitted materialism to capitalist requirements Ruthless Criticism

Translation of a text by Freerk Huisken

Leisure

or: on the subordination of permitted materialism to capitalist requirements

There was a time when the nobility and clergy were called the “idle class.”[1] To do whatever one pleases and to indulge in private penchants, wishes and enjoyments completely free of necessities, in short: to live one’s materialism – this only becomes a label for an entire “class” when the other “classes” in society are forced to provide not only for their own livelihoods, but also for those of the “idlers.” It goes without saying – yes, we are talking about feudalism – that providing for the physical well-being and all the material prerequisites for the other more or less stupid inclinations of the high nobility left the unseen servants of society little time, firstly, to provide a decent existence for themselves and their families and, secondly, to spare time for their own “leisure” – apart from going to church, which was coerced with threats of otherworldly horrors by the clerical division of the “idlers.” And any further development in the productive forces, however elementary, which in and of itself would have allowed everyone to divide their lives into labor time and free time in such a way that their lives were not consumed by labor, but made leisure time possible for everybody, would in any case only have benefited the ruling “class of idlers” under feudal conditions.

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In the case of the productive forces, things are now well under way with the development of capitalism, making every feudal advance in the appropriation of nature by labor look archaic; but unfortunately, things are going – and indeed by necessity – in the wrong direction. The time it now takes to produce all the goods that are needed in this country for individual consumption in its broadest sense, as well as for the means of production and for government use-values ranging from schools and hospitals to all kinds of modern killing devices, is constantly being reduced, but without the free time available for leisure increasing to the same extent for all workers. At the same time – this is one of the most brutal paradoxes of this mode of production – although there is plenty of free time for a growing number of workers, this isn’t a source of serene joy for those affected, but of vexation.[2] It’s no mystery what is being talking about: unemployment does not result in liberation from toil for more leisure, but just the opposite: it continues the lifelong shackling to wage labor and its capitalistic rules. Someone who gets a pink slip from his[3] employer doesn’t thank him and jubilantly run out of the factory: “Free at last, I can finally do what I want!” This kind of liberation from work is precisely not liberation for self-determined activities, for a liberated materialism. This is because – as everyone knows – the laid-off worker in his freedom from labor is at the same time “freed” from the all-determining means of living in this country: money. As a result, he lacks everything: the means to buy basic and upscale necessities for himself and his family, and certainly everything he would need to “finally” be able to pursue his passions in untroubled leisure. This points to two more paradoxes of this economic system. First: the poverty that begins when the household “breadwinner”[4] is unemployed is not the result of a shortage of goods for meeting needs in society; it is well known that it is quite the opposite: businesses or entire national economies regularly report overproduction, which oddly enough becomes visible in a crisis when an abundance is detected. This consists, on the one hand, in the stockpile of useful goods which are withheld from use and, on the other hand, in the laid off workers who produced these goods and could surely use them. They then sit in the Job Center and wait until their number is called – something that would never be confused with leisure. On the other hand, a lack of money is neither the result of laziness nor of a previous lack of thriftiness, i.e. because the wage earner didn’t save money. Again, it’s the other way around: he lacks the money he needs in order to be able to enjoy liberation from wage labor as free time for himself because money has been saved on him. The company tries to save on the costs of the wages it pays in order to increase its income from profits; and because this leaves so little for the private savings of the workforce, the state once again duly deducts something. It collects taxes, without saving anything, and additional mandatory insurance contributions, which it also does not save specifically for itself, but rather redistributes through its social insurance funds in its own interest so that the unemployed and the sick have to get back to work as quickly as possible.

This scarcity curses the lives of the unemployed and also brings additional obligations that leave little room for leisure. Their liberation from work does not include liberation from obligations to the state: Even those who, when faced with the choice between looking for a job or a reduced living standard on welfare, pick the latter, that is, who ditch most of their needs and condemn themselves to a drifter’s existence by living off the waste of commodity-capital in order to “be totally at peace with themselves” in, of all things, this freely selected penury, have not reckoned with the political administrators of capitalist life. In a “paradise of abundance,” not even a minimal subsistence is free.

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The situation is hardly any different for the employed class when it comes to time for leisure. They experience the upside down relation in capitalism between work and leisure, career and private life, necessity and freedom every day of their working lives, which they pass serving the interests of others. The fact that they submit to the employment relation in order to provide themselves and their families with a decent life with a high standard of living and a little leisure was once most defintely the starting point of their working careers. By the time this “career” forces them to give their all so as to keep their jobs and with it their income, they find that free time and private life have almost completely merged for the sake of securing their job. Not only does an employee then have to make it a life principle that free time is what’s left over after the demands of his job, he is moreover required to organize it in such a way that he can not only hack the next working day, but a working lifetime in the service of capitalist property. In order to salvage a residue of his materialism, he must constantly wage a struggle between free time for himself or his family and organizing free time into getting ready for work and decompressing from it. There is so little time left over for free activities of his choosing and private wishes that anything more than channel surfing, beers at the bar, or shooting hoops with the guys is now considered a luxury. This upside-down relation – living almost exclusively to work – inevitably means that other types of leisure interests have no chance of surviving or are no longer developed. Not to say anything against basketball and beer, but there are definitely still spheres of pleasure in this world besides those of exercising the muscles connected with lay-ups and swallowing and are aimed at exercising and developing “brain muscles” – without which, by the way, most pleasures are boring.

The totality of society’s knowledge is available on the internet so that – if there is a lack of financial means – at least any ideal interest can make use of it: Whether it is knowledge of Egyptian pyramids, Einstein’s theory of gravitation, or instructions on planting a rose garden – anyone who wants to can find out everything about the subject that is informative as well as a lot of nonsense. There’s only one thing the internet doesn’t provide: The time required for it and the will it takes to put in this kind of intellectual effort in addition that of the job. So one thing leads to another: not only do the great mass of workers in this country lack the money and time to indulge in their “leisure” inclinations and interests, but their subordination to lifelong wage labor also contributes to a narrow-mindedness.

Incidentally, the training for mental neglect already begins in school: Anyone who learns in school that their minds should be made fit for earning money is likely to start questioning the school material by asking why they need to learn this or that when they “won’t need it later.” And – to jump to the end of life – there is nothing more depressing than the retiree who, after his working life has ended, thus when the toil is finally over, doesn’t know what to do with his life and misses work as life’s real meaning. He is the embodiment of the popular saying that “idleness is the beginning of all vices”; even if a pension is never enough for vices, the bones no longer cooperate with jump shots, and the doctor has forbidden the rest.

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There still remains the elite of society, the upscale functionaries of the economy and politics, of culture and the media, etc. It is undeniable that their financial situation would enable many of them to indulge in “leisure” and exquisite pleasures, i.e. to bow out of their career and its demands and devote themselves completely to their private interests. And many of them take advantage of this. However, this doesn’t make them a “class of idlers.” Their interests are far too absorbed in the substance of their elite functions – organizing corporate profit making, implementing new tax, asylum or school laws, dumbing down the masses via the Wall Street Journal, Time magazine or the National Inquirer, reworking bourgeois ideologies into cultural events, etc. Upscale leisure needs can, however, very possibly be detected: champagne and designer drugs are consumed instead of beer, roulette replaces shooting hoops, Lincoln Center instead of television, and weekends in the Hamptons with “partners” rather than short staycations with the family.

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In addition, this society also maintains an intellectual elite who often exercise their minds freed from productive labor by officialdom. The previously mentioned ideal offers on the internet have to come from somewhere – which, by the way, also costs the user something. What is thought up and developed in universities of all kinds and in other public and private research institutions and brings – to stick with the natural sciences – new “victories of man over the forces of nature” doesn’t all end up on the internet and is certainly not produced because of universal, ubiquitous and instant access via the internet. The knowledge of society – old and new, about nature, culture and society – ends up on the internet only under three conditions: Firstly, it must be unblocked, i.e. exclusive access must be revoked by state institutions or private companies that are keen on using knowledge as a means of competition and on excluding others from it through patents. Secondly, it must be profitable for internet providers; and thirdly, it must not thwart government regulations on permitted and non-permitted thinking. Democratic states are usually pretty lax about this. Racist ideas can be found on the internet, as well as anarchist or communist ideas. Obviously, the state counts on its indoctrination through schools, the media, culture and politics to sufficiently immunize its citizens against the “wrong” use of this online content. Sadly, successfully, which is why it can boast so egregiously about the variety of content on the internet. As proof of freedom of expression, it can’t praise this enough – secure in the knowledge that it will not be used against it. Who then has the leisure to use it to seriously criticize these conditions?

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That life has to be worthwhile, that one wants to work for oneself, that there must be a part of life for free enjoyment, that leisure is part of free time – all of this, which can be encapsulated in the term ‘materialism’, somehow determines the thoughts and aspirations of all people in capitalism; even those who have to earn their money by serving others. Nobody leaves school with the intention of doing badly in the future. Working life is always summed up as a – ultimately less than successful, ongoing – struggle to improve one’s “quality of life.” And even in retirement, most of the elderly get by with the life-long lie that they didn’t have it so bad and that others are even worse off, reminding themselves, at least in a negative way, that well-being was their aim in life.

What they do not do is pose some detached questions: What is the aim that really governs a society in which the state authorities permit and protect – “everyone makes his own happiness!”– what everyone is concerned with completely without any permission, namely: the pursuit of their own well-being? Why is the permitted pursuit of this elementary concern under the conditions of the ruling economic system a constant struggle for the vast majority? What sort of “pursuit of happiness” is actually permitted when the results are regularly assessed negatively for the majority of people? And why are these results really so unsightly when the income-dependent people work so hard and bring about an abundance of goods which could relieve them of all worries and moreover satisfy all their wishes? Questions upon questions! It would be worthwhile to investigate them at leisure – beyond the hints in this text.


[1] Whether this label by Henri de Saint-Simon is a correct determination or only polemical is of no interest. It undoubtedly captures one thing, namely the aforementioned viewpoint on the parasitic existence of this “class.”

[2] Marx developed the connection in Capital, Vol 1, p. 568: “It is an undoubted fact that machinery, as such, is not responsible for “setting free” the workman from the means of subsistence. It cheapens and increases production in that branch which it seizes on, and at first makes no change in the mass of the means of subsistence produced in other branches. Hence, after its introduction, the society possesses as much, if not more, of the necessaries of life than before, for the laborers thrown out of work; and that quite apart from the enormous share of the annual produce wasted by the non-workers. And this is the point relied on by our apologists! The contradictions and antagonisms inseparable from the capitalist employment of machinery, do not exist, they say, since they do not arise out of machinery, as such, but out of its capitalist employment! Since therefore machinery, considered alone, shortens the hours of labor, but, when in the service of capital, lengthens them; since in itself it lightens labor, but when employed by capital, heightens the intensity of labor; since in itself it is a victory of man over the forces of Nature, but in the hands of capital, makes man the slave of those forces; since in itself it increases the wealth of the producers, but in the hands of capital, makes them paupers—for all these reasons and other besides, says the bourgeois economist without more ado, it is clear as noonday that all these contradictions are a mere semblance of the reality, and that, as a matter of fact, they have neither an actual nor a theoretical existence.”

[3] Anyone who is bothered by the masculine form may think “her” here and in any other place. I want to prevent a dispute over the correct spelling that marginalizes my train of thought.

[4] This isn’t a partisanship for every sort of inclination just because it is all about self-selected inclinations. Someone who adopts, for example, collecting military memorabilia as a hobby or goes around hunting autographs can be sure of criticism not just from me.