Hagglund on Marx

Hägglund on Marx

Martin Hägglund’s reading of Karl Marx (This Life: Secular Faith and Spiritual Freedom (2019, Penguin-Random House) is going to change the way I teach both Social & Political Philosophy and Ethics in the Workplace. If Hägglund is correct, then Marx is the most misunderstood philosopher of our age, not only by his critics, but equally by his devoted followers.  Hägglund asserts that one of Marx’s underappreciated distinctions is that between the realms of necessity and freedom.  All finite beings must work to survive. The labor required to keep ourselves alive defines the realm of necessity, the surplus time not required to assure our biological survival defines the realm of freedom. Hägglund writes, “it is an open question for us what we should do with the surplus of time . . . we can ask ourselves what to do and if it is the right thing to do.”[1]

 Hägglund optimistically opines,

[T]hrough technological innovations . . . we can reduce the time we need to expend on securing our own survival, by replacing large parts of our living labor with nonliving capacities for producing social goods. We can thereby decrease our realm of necessity . . . and increase our realm of freedom (the time available for activities that we count as ends in themselves, which includes time for engaging in the question of what matters to us and which activities we should count as ends in themselves.)[2]

While this is surely one of attractions of technological innovation, it is not always the result.  At least at first, for instance, and in regard to individual quality of life, neolithic agriculture represented a net increase in time spent securing survival over preceding nomadic cultures.  On average, neolithic farmers worked longer hours, had less leisure, and poorer nutrition than their hunter-gatherer ancestors. Yet farming thrived and supplanted the earlier cultures because it allowed for a higher rate of procreative success.  As one anthropologist put it, “Forty half-starved, hunch-backed, scurvy-ridden farmers could still beat the crap out of one strapping nomad.”  Likewise, in our contemporary digital economy. the more technology allows the laborer to do, the more that is expected of the laborer to earn his or her living.  Technology can emancipate, or it can simply deflate the value of the laborer’s time. 

Hägglund is at his best in his exposition of the Marxian concept of the alienation of labor. He rightly notes that if one works at an unfulfilling job just to survive, one’s labor time is unfree, “since we cannot affirm that what we do is an expression of who we are,” then a little later adds,

There is certainly a harrowing difference between those who assemble our computers in factories or manufacture our clothes in sweatshops and those of us who turn on our computers or put on our clothes while forgetting the labor conditions under which they were produced. . . To be able to lead free lives and own what we do, we must be able to see ourselves both in the purpose of our occupation and in the social conditions of the labor that sustains our lives; to recognize our own commitment to freedom in the institutions on which we depend and to which we contribute.[3]

I think it implicit in Hägglund’s remark here that, in recognizing our commitment to that freedom, we already recognize our (largely involuntary) complicity in the unfreedom of others which those institutions maintain and on which they (and we) currently depend.

[1] Hägglund, 22.  This is a reminiscent of Aristotle’s remark in his Politics. “Other animals have voices with which they express their pleasure or displeasure, only Man has speech with which he deliberates what he should take pleasure in.”  As with Aristotle, for Hägglund, there seems to be an objective answer to this question; but unlike Aristotle, that answer is also always up for democratic renegotiation.

[2] Ibid., 22-23.

[3] Ibid., 24.