Tom, here are a couple of thoughts. I think your post sharpens rather than revises Burkett’s argument. Your proposal to isolate surplus or “disposable” time as the relevant common-pool resource would seem to be well grounded in Marx’s treatment of disposable time as “true wealth,” but the elasticity you emphasize ultimately brings the analysis back toward Burkett’s broader framing. The boundary between necessary and surplus labor is itself historically variable, and that variability—central to relative surplus value—is precisely what capital exploits, making it important to keep labor power as such, with its embodied capacities and conditions of social reproduction, in view. In this sense your refinement and Burkett’s formulation operate at complementary levels of abstraction: one highlights appropriation, the other sustainability. This seems to dovetail with John Bellamy Foster’s metabolic rift analysis, which shows how capitalism generates a systemic rupture in the social metabolism between humans and nature by treating conditions of reproduction as free or indefinitely elastic inputs to accumulation. Burkett’s CPR (common pool resource) analysis can be read as extending that same logic inward, to labor power itself, so that relative surplus value appears as a boundary-shifting strategy that temporarily masks degradation of both human capacities and ecological systems. Seen this way, labor power as a CPR helps show that the metabolic rift is not a contingent governance failure but a structurally reproduced feature of capitalist accumulation.
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