On Sun, Nov 9, 2025 at 05:29 PM, Ian Angus wrote: > > Talk by Peter Bo y le
> > *Revolutionary degrowth* > Some leftists criticise Hickel saying he does not tell us how to overthrow > capitalism. But who really has the complete recipe to do that? No one. > ... > Arguing against economism, Lenin wrote in What Is To Be Done ? that > revolutionaries have a duty to go beyond immediate struggles between > workers and bosses to explain the broader problems with capitalism and > draw the working class into struggles against all oppressions. > > The "complete recipe" is a tall order. But that does not mean that we have to ignore *ingredients* that have been put forward and discussed, from Marx to Meszaros to Gorz. I have written about how Marx's ingredients hearken to the 1821 pamphlet, The Source and Remedy of the National Difficulties, itself deeply influence by William Godwin's writing from the late 18th century. Capital's imperative is a relentlessly quantitative one, with *value* at the heart of accumulation. Value expresses labour time with the contradictory demand that increasing more labour time must be expended while increasing less is expended on each individual commodity. Marx's secret ingredient for revolutionary degrowth, echoed by Meszaros, Gorz, and I, is the transition from quantitative accounting based on the expenditure of labour time to qualitative accounting based on the social distributon of *disposable time*. Lenin, of course, could not have written about this. The manuscripts in which Marx discussed it were not transcribed until the 1930s and not widely published until the 1950s to 1970s. Why didn't Marx write about disposable time in Das Kapital ? As the title indicates, it was a book about capital and the contradictory effects of value and its accumulation. My experience writing about the alternative qualitative accounting based on disposable time and reading other authors who have written about the centrality of disposable time to Marx's vision of a revolutionary future is that it is a very hard sell. People's *prior assumptions* are based on the *real abstraction* of commodity exchange. The term real abstraction comes from Alfred Sohn-Rethel. In a way, Sohn-Rethel is saying little more than, "it is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness." In a society based on commodity exchange, our way of thinking is molded by commodity exchange. This raises a conundrum. How do we change our social existence if our consciousness is determined by the given social existence? Marx recognized that dilemma and articulated it in the third thesis of his Theses on Feuerbach: > > > The materialist doctrine concerning the changing of circumstances and > upbringing forgets that circumstances are changed by men and that it is > essential to educate the educator himself. This doctrine must, therefore, > divide society into two parts, one of which is superior to society. > > The coincidence of the changing of circumstances and of human activity or > self-changing can be conceived and rationally understood only as revolutionary > practice. > That conceptualization of revolutionary practice guided Marx's research and writing for the rest of his life. Revolutionary practice is not something they teach you in school. The educator who educates the educator is you, dear reader. Self-changing above all else requires time to do the self-changing. Maybe it is a romantic 19th century idea to think that ordinary people will use much greater resources of free time to engage in revolutionary self-changing, as Theodor Adorno seemed to believe. But I think there is a material reason to counter Adorno's pessimism. The centuries-long campaign of big business and their intellectual spokesmen against the legal limitation of the working day has been nothing short of heroic. In his Inaugural Address to the First International , Marx described the passage of the Ten-Hours Bill in England as a victory of the political economy of the working class over the political economy of the bourgeoisie. That's the way the bourgeoisie saw it too. -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Groups.io Links: You receive all messages sent to this group. View/Reply Online (#39200): https://groups.io/g/marxmail/message/39200 Mute This Topic: https://groups.io/mt/116212601/21656 -=-=- POSTING RULES & NOTES #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. #4 Do not exceed five posts a day. -=-=- Group Owner: [email protected] Unsubscribe: https://groups.io/g/marxmail/leave/13617172/21656/1316126222/xyzzy [[email protected]] -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
