RETHINKING MARXISM

VOLUME 22

NUMBER 1

(JANUARY 2010)

Marxs Theory of Time and the Present Historical Moment

Artemy Magun
The essay discusses Marxs understanding of time, as represented in his early political writings, in his Utopian vision of a society based on leisure, and most prominently in his critical economy, where paradoxes of time are responsible for the seemingly irrational self-generation of capital. In all these instances, Marx treats time as being finite, or eschatological (even if prosaic times, like the working day, are in question). It is because of this that there is always, in time, a need for a supplementary moment of completion*/ a catch for the salaried worker who needs to do extra work to finish what she or he has been doing, but also an infinite task for contemporaries. Thus, I show that Marxs analysis of temporality is close to Giorgio Agambens theory of time, which he attributes to Saint Paul and Gustave Guillaume. This analysis is pertinent in our time, when there is a widepread sense of ideological exhaustion that coincides with an apotheosis of leisure. Both are not just signs of decadence, but symptoms of messianic work. Key Words: Karl Marx, Time, Giorgio Agamben, Surplus Value, Leisure

Although Marxism in general and Soviet ideology in particular were much criticized for their messianism,1 the end of the Soviet bloc and the discrediting of Marxism were
1. The term messianic literally refers to the Hebrew word Messiah, an anointed king, which came to mean, in the later Judaic tradition, a future king, descendant of David, who would redeem the history of Jewish suffering and introduce a period of messianic time. Christianism transformed Jewish messianism by claiming that Christos (the usual Greek translation of Messiah) had already come. However, Christianity preserved motives of future redemption, such as the book of Apocalypsis, some epistles of Saint Paul, and the subsequently emerging popular doctrine of millenarism that taught of the future coming of Antichrist, victory over him, and the millennial kingdom of terrestrial happiness preceding the ultimate end of times and the second coming of Christ. In twentieth-century thought, particularly in the tradition started by Walter Benjamins theses On the Concept of History (1968, 245/68), the term came to mean, more generally, an eschatology tied with a sense of an exceptional, messianic moment of redemptive action. Two authors who recently insisted on the broader philosophical pertinence of the concept of messianism are Jacques Derrida and Giorgio Agamben. Benjamins own idea of the weak messianic force carried by our present historical moment is manifestly a Christian revision of Jewish messianism since it attributes messianism to the present, not to the future. This version, which also mentions the Antichrist whom the Messiah has to overcome, is therefore close to Christian millenarism. For a clear understanding ISSN 0893-5696 print/1475-8059 online/10/010090-20 2010 Association for Economic and Social Analysis DOI: 10.1080/08935690903411693

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followed by the rise, not the end, of messianic everyday experience and ideologies. In part, this has to do with the infinitely delayed eschatology of the future, which had always been characteristic of liberalism as the ideology of Enlightenment. The promise of global harmony as an ideal and the belief in progress have always been inherent in liberalism (cf. Mannheim 1936, 197/206). It was therefore only natural that the fall of Soviet socialism was interpreted by the mainstream of political science as the third wave of democratization, and the development of post-Soviet countries as a transition to democracy. Some liberals went even further and proclaimed their ideal to have been achieved already, at least in principle, with some technical details to be worked out later. Thus Francis Fukuyama (1993) announced, on this occasion, the end of history (in the sense of the emerging global consensus on the values of Western liberalism). In his book, Fukuyama drew on Alexander Koje `ve who, in an attempt to synthesize Hegel with Marx, interpreted the end of the Second World War as the end of history as a process of innovative change. For Koje `ve, history ended and yielded its place to nature and to leisure, to the Kingdom of freedom as opposed to the Kingdom of necessity (Koje `ve 1947, 435). Unlike Marx, Koje `ve conceived this kingdom of freedom not as a new communist society to come, but (in line with Hegels presentism) as the already actual state of affairs of modern capitalism, the class peace and a universally leisurely life were close to achievement. Originally, Koje `ve attributed this posthistorical state to the United States, and viewed it as a return to a certain animality of humans. And he suggested correcting Hegel on one point: namely, in the impossibility of sublating the opposition between mind and nature. Koje `ve refers to Marx here, but he draws a conclusion opposite to that of Marx. Where Marx suggested that only revolutionary praxis can overcome the wall separating Hegelian history from nature, Koje `ve suggests viewing history as finite and claims that, once over, it is replaced by unhistoric nature. Later, however, Koje `ve thought that he had discovered his posthistoric condition in Japan and reinterpreted it, not as a return to nature, but as a time of fully human snobbism: the desire of recognition in its pure form, deprived of its seriousness and its material stakes (1947, 436/7). In support of his argument, Koje `ve referred to the following passage in volume 3 of Capital. In fact, the realm of freedom actually begins only where labour which is determined by necessity and mundane considerations ceases; thus in the very nature of things it lies beyond the sphere of actual material production . . . Freedom in this field can only consist in socialised man, the associated producers, rationally regulating their interchange with Nature, bringing it under their common control, instead of being ruled by it as by the blind forces of Nature; and achieving this with the least expenditure of energy and under conditions most favourable to, and worthy of, their human nature. But it nonetheless still remains a realm of necessity. Beyond it begins that development of human energy which is an end in itself, the true realm
of this, see Agamben (2005); Derrida, with his messianism of democracy to come or the future in the past, having rather Judaic origins, seems to miss the points of both Marx and Benjamin on this particular issue. In this text, I will be using messianic in the broad sense of an eschatology involving an ambiguity of destruction and redemption, and a sense of historic mission.

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of freedom, which, however, can blossom forth only with this realm of necessity as its basis. The shortening of the working-day is its basic prerequisite. (Marx and Engels 1975/2005, 37:807)

But Koje `ve could with even more force refer to Marxs Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, where he ironically attributes to Hegel, in spite of the latters explicit argument, the very thesis that Koje `ve later seeks to add to Hegels teaching: abstraction comprehending itself as an abstraction knows itself to be nothing: it must abandon itself*/abandon abstraction*/and so arrives at an entity which is its exact contrary*/at nature. Thus, [Hegels] entire Logic is the demonstration that abstract thought is nothing in itself; that only Nature is something (Marx and Engels 1978, 122).2 It is from Marx that Koje `ve draws his idea of a finite history and thus of an eschatological, or messianic, moment that would not simply sublate the current state of affairs, but would more radically destroy it and liberate the place for something else. But of course, unlike Marx, Koje `ve interprets this something else in a demobilizing, liberal sense. One of the reasons for this interpretation was that Koje `ve, unlike Marx, was mostly interested in grand historical movements and had little interest in the everyday functioning of the capitalist economy and culture, where the antagonism between work and leisure as well as messianic, eschatological structures are constantly reproduced, even provided the political recognition of workers and the blurring of classes in the West. In this article, I present an analysis of Marxs theory of time. To start with, I speak of Walter Benjamins project of tracing messianic structures in everyday experience. I then argue that such structures remain ubiquitous in todays culture, forming the consciousness of history as well as the more mundane forms of experiencing time such as leisure, fatigue, and the forms of relating to the larger world that are constituted by modern media. I move to Marxs theoretical work and, in particular, to the theory of time that is essential to his analysis and critique of modern political economy. Building on the twentieth centurys theories of finite temporality, namely those of Walter Benjamin and Giorgio Agamben, I show that Marxs theory of labor, like his theory of history, draws on messianic logic. There is nothing mysterious in this logic: it derives from the gap between the discrete and the continuous aspects of time and consists in the supplementary character of the time required to end time or to finish a certain temporal period.

Prosaic Messianism in Walter Benjamin

Messianic structures are present not only in political ideologies but also in everyday practices, or in the material apparatuses of the ideologies. One instance of such structures is the contemporary public sphere. This sphere is structured in such a way as to make one constantly expect, and regularly get, breaking news, even of the
2. The proximity of Marxs argument to Koje `ves is striking; it may be proof of an unconscious influence. The Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts were published by D. B. Riazanov in Berlin in 1932, and Koje `ve must have read them by 1946 when he composed his messianic footnote.

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most banal sort. This practice induces an anxious state of short attention spans and agitation as a dominant social mood. Walter Benjamin (see note 1) was an author who thematized the concept of messianism and gave to it an innovative, secular meaning: he paid special attention to the messianism and eschatology of everyday life. Since the end of the 1920s, Benjamin had converted to Marxism and attempted to unite it with his earlier interest in Judaic messianism. In his mature works, such as The Arcades Project (1999a) and On Some Motives in Baudelaire (1968), 155/200), Benjamin treated the life of society as a totality and showed how the economic structures were mirrored in the cultural ones. Among these cultural activities, Benjamin gave special attention to leisure activities, particularly gambling and fla nerie, which he often refers to, in German, as Mu iggang leisurely walking. In The Arcades Project (1999a), a special section (Convolute M) is dedicated to leisure (die Mue), which is consistently distinguished from fla nerie (der Mu siggang). One particular focus of Benjamins work was mass aesthetics. In his article The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, Benjamin described the sensationalism of contemporary mass culture (both the media and the film) as based on the effects of violent and blinding shocks that destroy the distance between the text and the reader, or spectator (1968, 217/51). In this text, he suggested that the subject of such shocks would gradually become habituated to them and the art would dissolve into life, thus fulfilling the old Utopian program of the Romantics. When everything becomes shock, there is no shock any longer, but a genuine vision of the world. This logic of habituation to emergency that becomes ubiquitous, is also used by Benjamin with regard to surrealist poetry (where, he says, the alarm clock rings sixty seconds per minute [1999b, 221]) and history written large. In his last text, On the Concept of History, Benjamin criticizes the fascist tendency toward turning each moment into a state of exception, but he also insists, throughout the text, that each moment of the now-time (Jetztzeit), each generation, is truly endowed with a weak messianic power, an exceptional and urgent mission to redeem the failures of the past (1968, 254). This routine messianism, under the condition of being actual (wirklich), constitutes for Benjamin a possible, positive program for the Marxist left. One important aspect of Benjamins concept of shock is its intimate connection to destruction. Thus, in a postscript to The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, he presents war as an apotheosis of the aestheticization of politics. Humanity, he says, has reached such a degree of self-alienation that it lives its own destruction as an aesthetical enjoyment of the first rank (350/1). Benjamin makes clear that this destruction is not the ultimate culmination of history or life; it is rather a brusque interruption. In Theories of German Fascism, Benjamin compares German protofascist writers who praise war and destruction to a schoolboy who longs for an inkblot in place of his wrong answer (1999b, 316). But destruction is sometimes described by Benjamin with sympathy. Thus, in the Theologico-Political Fragment (1986), 312/3), he speaks of the hidden complicity of profane happiness with spiritual, messianic redemption. Happiness is again defined here not simply as a goal, but as the ruin (Untergang) of earthly existence, and it is only as such ruin that it contributes to the messianic. The messianic kingdom is not the goal but the end

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of history, meaning its brusque interruption. It is easy to see the proximity of Benjamins argument to the earlier quoted observations of Marx and Koje `ve on the finitude of history, and its simple negation, at the moment of fulfillment. Benjamins theses On the Concept of History refer to a little hunchback who represents theology and who pulls the strings of a puppet called historical materialism. He shows that the irreducible theological element of historical materialism is nothing but finitude, finitude of human time in particular, which is ignored by mainstream liberal historicism, with its Newtonian time understood as a homogeneous and infinite movement toward progress. However, as is seen from thesis 9, the truth of this progress and the moving force of this time is, in fact, also finitude: a storm is blowing from Paradise . . . This storm is what we call progress (1968, 258). On the other hand, the now-time (Jetztzeit), which we can value only if we are aware of times finitude, has not a destructive but, contrarily, a salutary meaning: it fulfills the hopes of the past (thesis 2) by supplementing, completing, and (for now) ending history (thesis 18). It appears therefore that finitude, in this text of Benjamin, splits into two meanings. One, the inauthentic and unconscious one, is the finitude of destruction, which can be unconscious (as in the case of historicism with its telos) or conscious (as in fascism, which is in a hurry to accomplish the telos ahead of time and enjoys destruction for its own sake). Opposed to this is authentic, prosaic finitude, which comes as an interruption of the destructive movement.

Marxism and the Messianic Structures of Everyday Life

Developing Benjamins critique of mass culture and media, but substituting an apocalyptic mood for Benjamins Utopian one, Paul Virilio (2000) terms the shocking effect of the media an information bomb. The explosion of this bomb is based on the messianic temporality of information: ones constant attention to news, mails, phone calls, in apocalyptic anxiety and/or Utopian hope. This, of course, is a prosaic messianism, like that described by Benjamin: breaking news come every hour. Advertised commodities systematically refer to fulfillment of ones dreams while the medical advertisement insistently threatens one with mortal diseases and induces anxious hypochondria, thus simultaneously selling the symbolic protection of danger and the danger itself. The malls that sell the dream-fulfilling commodities are fashioned as luxurious palaces that make one feel the fullness and overabundant totality of Utopia. If the labor-centered economy was messianic in the Protestant or even Judaic way, in the senses of orientation to future redemption and deferred enjoyment, then the consumer-driven economy is rather Catholic or even pseudo-Marxist if we think of Marxs preference for leisure over labor (one instance of which was quoted above). Here rest, leisure, and Sunday are, ideologically, more interesting than the labor of the weekday. The present or the immediate future (right now), not the future (at some moment), is messianic here. All this is known and obvious. It is mentioned here to introduce the problem of applying Marxs philosophy of history and time to the present moment*/the moment where Marxism, as I described above, seems discredited because of the failure of

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really existing socialism but also because of the seeming depoliticization and demobilization of society, and the fusion between the working class and bourgeoisie (the two last arguments already presented by Koje `ve). It may appear that Marxism does not need to be particularly reframed. First, Marxs analysis of capitalism, of class struggle, of the constant need to increase exploitation and the pauperization of masses, of the alienation of labor, holds literally true today if we consider capitalism on the global, rather than national, level. (Indeed, if class tension and polarization seem to have been largely moderated inside the countries of the North, they have grown only more intense on the level of the global division of labor.) Second, the contemporary shift of ideological focus from labor to consumption, from ideological debates to political advertisement and political entertainment, was, in a way, anticipated by Marx in his theory of commodity fetishism. This critical side holds. But what is more problematic is Marxs philosophy of history, which was openly messianic. Marx anticipated, in a relatively near future, a global revolution led by the proletariat. This revolution would bring about a radically new state of affairs where necessary labor would be minimized and, in their free time, humans would give themselves to the creative activity of self-formation. Things would look in a paradoxical manner characteristic of genuine Utopias: necessary time would cease, and there would only remain excessive time (with nothing more to exceed). Capitalism, to Marx and Engels, was carrying inside it the seeds of its own sublation, of radical transformation into something entirely different, a society without property, families or professions. Early Soviet revolutionaries tried to realize this Utopian program in the 1920s, but were rapidly stopped by the new bureaucratic class. This is not to say that all Utopian elements were blocked during the Stalin era, but precisely the emancipatory social Utopias were. Avant-garde art was supplanted by a new classicism, experiments aimed at the destruction of families were stopped, Constructivist architecture gave way to pompously decorated palaces for the elite, and labor was officially celebrated (for instance, in the case of the Stakhanov movement) rather than seen as something to overcome. Utopia itself gave way to a comforting ideology, or fantasy, of the social harmony and abundance to come. Messianic logic was replaced by the logic of telos. Western revolutionaries of 1968 were more successful in realizing some of the Utopian elements formulated by Marx and other nineteenth-century socialists, but only to the extent that these Utopias concerned the superstructure of capital (such as sexual freedom, womens self-affirmation, freedom of expression, and free education). These victories have now been partly mitigated by the authoritarian counterturn of the 1980s, partly appropriated by capital, and deprived of their messianic/Utopian content. Thus, it appears that the messianic element persists in modernity but does so in the routine way predicted by Benjamin. This routine way consists in consumption, understood, first, in the usual way as purchasing commodities, and second, in the sense of destruction, as in terrorist and counterterrorist spectacular violence. This condition where the messianic survives in prosaic form was already the object and impulse of Marxs thought. His early writings on the philosophy of history start with reflections on a certain end and exhaustion (reflections inspired by something more than the supposed completion of philosophy by Hegel). Thus, in the case of

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Germany he analyzes its posthumous situation: The modern ancien re gime is the comedian of a world order whose real heroes are dead (in Marx and Engels 1978, 57). Marx shows the futility of religious and philosophical critique of the present regime as an ideological project. For Germany, the criticism of religion has been largely completed (53). But the oppressive regime that had been legitimated by this religion nevertheless persists, in its mute and deaf obscenity, even deprived of its higher legitimization. Thus, says Marx, posthistorical Germany participates in history, only sharing in the restorations without ever sharing in . . . revolutions (55). The excessive, superfluous condition of the proletariat mirrors the excessiveness and superfluity of the old regime. Proletariat can convert its excessive existence into the destruction of the regime and make a leap into the new communist life, where its sheer, indeterminate existence in the zone of societys self-dissolution would be universalized and turned into a propertyless and classless society. The proletariat itself would be sublated (aufgehoben) in the process (65). Jacques Derrida, in his Specters of Marx, does justice to this aspect of Marxs teaching. He pays special attention to the anachronistic nature of the historical condition described by Marx. The latter is full of survivors or specters from the past and the promises of the unprepared future. Turning Marxs philosophy of history against the static reading of his messianism by Koje `ve and Fukuyama, Derrida writes that in the same place, on the same limit, where history is finished, where a certain determined concept of history comes to an end, precisely there the historicity of history begins, there finally it has the chance of heralding itself (1994, 74). For Derrida, the messianism of our time is oriented to the future. It contains a promise that, in a sense, will never be realized qua present, but is important precisely as an opening toward the new and the other, the democracy-to-come.

Free Time and Surplus Labor in Marxs Mature Thought

The focus on, and the interest in, structures of excessive time are central not just for Marxs early revolutionary manifestos, but also for his mature writings on political economy. The central concept in his explanation of the functioning of capital is surplus labor time, due to which labor exceeds the measure that would have been equivalent to the wage paid the worker by the capitalist. In contrast to surplus labor time, Marx frequently speaks of free or disposable time, time for play and creativity that is stolen by capitalists and that would be increased and emphasized, so far as possible, in an eventually communist society. Communism is presented by Marx as the state of rest in two senses of the word: not in that of immobility, but in the sense of both a remainder (surplus of time and of labor) and leisure, which would provide space for creativity and free self-formation of a subject.

Leisure
Here, drawn from Volume 1 of Capital, are Marxs most characteristic statements on the constitutive role of leisure.

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[I]t is self-evident [from the capitalists viewpoint] that the laborer is nothing else, his whole life through, than labor-power, that therefore all his disposable time is by nature and law labor-time, to be devoted to the selfexpansion of capital. Time for education, for intellectual development, for the fulfilling of social functions and for social intercourse, for the free-play of his bodily and mental activity, even the rest-time of Sunday (and that in a country of Sabbatarians!)*/moonshine! (Marx and Engels 1975/2005, 35:270)

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The mention of free play (freies Spiel) makes it clear that Marx continues here a respected German tradition: free play was Kants definition of the beautiful, and it became a key concept in Friedrich Schillers theory of art as a political educator. The definition of art and political freedom through play clearly put Schillers (1967) political theory in the context of free, spare time. The even more explicit discussion of leisure as a site of art and freedom is found in Friedrich Ho lderlin, the great German poet and idealist thinker, Schillers admiring disciple (see Magun 2003). However, Ho lderlin also points out the dialectic of frightening leisure (1990, 672), which calls to life a spirit of destruction (Ho lderlin 1977/, 3:83/95). In the twentieth century, this motif was forcefully developed, in direct reference to Marx, by George Bataille, who suggested conceiving economy on the basis of consumption, leisure, and surplus (see especially Bataille 1988). Bataille never showed, however, how his intuitions corresponded to Marxs own teaching and, in this article, I try to fill in this gap. By implicitly referring to the German idealist tradition, Marx makes it clear that, by criticizing work, he sees in leisure a source of truly active and free human activity: that of self-formation (Bildung). The problem is that leisure is defined through work and vice versa! Let me quote a passage by Marx on this topic. The saving of labor time is equal to an increase of free time, i.e. time for the full development of the individual, which in turn reacts back upon the productive power of labor as itself the greatest productive power . . . It goes without saying . . . that direct labor time itself cannot remain in the abstract antithesis to free time in which it appears from the perspective of the bourgeois economy. Labor cannot become play, as Fourier would like, although it remains his great contribution to have expressed the suspension not of distribution, but of the mode of production itself, in a higher form, as the ultimate object. Free time which is both leisure time (Mussezeit) and time for higher activity*/has naturally transformed its possessor into a different subject, and he then enters into the direct production process as this different subject. This process is then both discipline, as regards the human being in the process of becoming; and, at the same time, practice, experimental science, materially creative and objectifying science, as regards the human being who has become, in whose head exists the accumulated knowledge of society. (Marx 1973, 712; translation modified) What this rather obscure passage clearly states is that free time is the time of reflection and reproduction of labor. It is not labor but meta-labor, which constitutes and reproduces the laboring subject. Thus, there is a dialectical movement between labor and free time, which makes free time a higher labor. However, this dialectic is not to be conceived as an immediate identity, in the sense that, if we simply make the work playful and interesting, the problem will be solved. This solution, attributed by

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Marx to Fourier, vividly reminds us of todays postmodern theories of immaterial work. Marx, for whom free time overcomes and sublates labor via an Aufhebung, thinks of it as a privative cessation of work rather than as works playfulness. Marx is therefore closer to someone like Andre Gorz, who accepts the inevitability of labor but seeks to subordinate it to the values and structure of free time. Free time, being a concept seemingly derivative with regard to work or its obverse side, appears ultimately to be constitutive of it (at least as human, project-oriented work). The whole process is viewed backward and the meaning of work is set through its ending, which precisely destroys the works meaning and renders it void. Moreover, it may be implied that free time, time taken in its pure form, is constitutive of time as such: time appears as such only when it is completed and ousted into the past. However, one should not view free time metaphysically, as an intellectual intuition of pure form. The constitutive status of free time, as will be shown below, depends on its status as excess and surplus: it is free, but it is still time. The processes with which time had been busy cannot be stopped at once, and free time is defined by rest: the survival of motion its purpose had been completed. The source of the particular activity of leisure is both the inertia of motion and the drive of liberating time from this inertia, of being completely at rest. Therefore, the obverse of the concept of disposable time, for Marx, is surplus labor, which refers precisely to the work one performs in addition to the work that is absolutely necessary. Marx shows that in chapter 10 of volume 1 of Capital that, structurally, a worker volunteers to work in his or her spare time, even if she or he is not conscious of this. [I]n its blind unrestrainable passion, its were-wolf hunger for surplus labor, capital oversteps not only the moral but even the merely physical maximum bounds of the working day. It usurps the time for growth, development, and healthy maintenance of the body (Marx and Engels 1975/2005, 270). Free time and surplus labor are distributed by the sides of the division of labor. The free time of the non-working parts of society is based on the surplus labour or overwork, the surplus labour time, of the working part (Marx and Engels 1975/2005, 30:190/2). However, the liberation of time even for a part of society is in principle a positive development; it creates the potential for a future society of free time. In chapter 21 of the manuscript Theories of Surplus Labor, Marx discusses in detail an anonymous treatise by an Owenite socialist (and at the same time a Ricardian economist), called The Source and the Remedy of National Difficulties.3 It is from this remarkable pamphlet that Marx quotes, several times, a strong formula: Wealth is disposable time, and nothing more (Marx and Engels 1975/2005, 32:391/2). Marx sympathizes with this formula, and it is from this treatise that, in all probability, he takes up the term disposable time.4 He also quotes the authors positive project.
3. Today it is known that the author of the pamphlet was Charles Wentworth Dilke (1789/1864), a British critic and writer of liberal orientation. 4. Marx often prefers disposable time to free time because, as he shows in chapter 8 of Capital, capitalists often give workers pauses and breaks where they must always be ready at the capitalists disposal. True leisure is that where a worker can dispose of his or her own time, plan on it.

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If everybody has to work, if the contradiction between those who have to work too much and those who are idlers disappears*/and this would in any case be the result of capital ceasing to exist, of the product ceasing to provide a title to alien surplus labour*/and if, in addition, the development of the productive forces brought about by capitalism is taken into account, society will produce the necessary abundance in six hours, [producing] more than it does now in twelve, and, moreover, all will have six hours of disposable time, that is, real wealth; time which will not be absorbed in direct productive labour, but will be available for enjoyment, for leisure, thus giving scope for free activity and development, time as scope for the development of mans faculties, etc. The economists themselves justify the slave-labour of the wage-labourers by saying that it creates leisure, free time for others, for another section of society*/and thereby also for the society of wage-labourers. (32:391)

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This project is, in fact, very close to Marxs own, except that the author clearly believes in the peaceful, evolutionary transformation of capitalism, while Marx insists that the present economy would simply not work this way at all. The whole system should be rebuilt in a revolutionary way, and free time itself is understood by Marx as revolutionary and redemptive. It is self-evident that if labour-time is reduced to a normal length and, furthermore, labour is no longer performed for someone else, but for myself, and, at the same time, the social contradictions between master and men, etc., being abolished [Aufhebung], it acquires a quite different, a free character, it becomes real social labour, and finally the basis of disposable time*/the labour of a man who has also disposable time, must be of a much higher quality than that of the beast of burden. (32:392)

Surplus Labor
We have seen by now that, for Marx, capital exploits specifically human, free or pure temporality in the form of the surplus labor. There is an internal contradiction between overwork and increase in leisure, which is distributed into the two poles of class struggle. It is only due to surplus labor that capital may exist at all. But if this is so, then it appears that surplus labor is productive of surplus value not only in relative terms (the part of labor that exceeds the needs of material reproduction of labor power), but also in an absolute sense: surplus value is a product of surplus time, of the internal excess of human existence that is leisure. Only surplus time and surplus labor are truly creative, and self-expanding capital is a transformed form of this leisurely excess of humans. In spite of the centrality of the concept of surplus labor time, one cannot say that its content is quite clearly presented by Marx. It is obscured, it appears, by the oscillation between metaphorical, or even politico-theological, interpretation and seemingly realist, rationalist interpretation. Unlike his early texts, in Capital Marx mostly employs theological and metaphysical language to describe the inadequate self-presentation, the inherently deceptive appearance of the capitalist economy.

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Nevertheless this language, even considered as metaphorical, plays a constitutive role in Marxs argument. Marx explains the existence of surplus value in two ways. First, the time that the worker is actually able to work is much longer than is needed for the reproduction of his capacity to work (such as food, drinking, and sleeping). The difference between the actual working day and the necessary labor time is precisely the surplus labor time (Marx and Engels 1975/2005, 35:196/208). Thus, the capitalist buys not the labor itself but the labor power, which exceeds its own measure*/is extendable, stretchable in time. From the official viewpoint of the capitalist, time is linear and measurable, but in fact, time is a continuum and its border is indeterminate. This is where surplus labor and, consequently, surplus value come from. Marx presents their emergence in a dramatic way, making the capitalist smile and provide the worker with the material for a twelve-hour working day instead of the six hours that are necessary. [T]he surplus-value results only from a quantitative excess of labor, from a lengthening-out of one and the same labor-process (35:208). In fact, there is no separate time when the worker produces surplus value: it is continuously produced throughout the work time, as far as it exceeds the necessary minimum. The second explanation of surplus value, with regard to a working day, concerns the relationship of labor to constant capital, or the means of production that are accumulated by the capitalist for the workers labor. By working, says Marx, the worker does two jobs at once: [The worker] is unable to add new labor, to create new value, without at the same time preserving old values (35:216). Therefore his work, by virtue of its goal-oriented form, preserves and transfers to the product the value of the means of production, so that he at the same time, by the mere act of working, creates each instant an additional or new value (35:218). Living labor must seize upon these things and rouse them from their death-sleep (35:193). This process of resurrection follows from the aspect of consumption that is inherent in work. The raw materials are consumed, used up in the fire of labor and thus appropriated as part and parcel of labors organism (35:193).

Consumption
Marx frequently uses the word consumption (Konsumtion) in the sense of negation and destruction. This corresponds to the original meaning of the word which, in Latin as well as in German, originally means the process of wear and tear brought by time. In fact, this process is already an instance of the rather mysterious force of time as a separate agent (strictly speaking, time can destroy nothing, but is simply an abstraction of various processes that bring destruction due to the very fact of moving), the opposite of capital, which seems to grow from the sheer force of time. The link of consumption to the fire of labor may also suggest a contamination of consumption with consummation, a contamination that happened in the French language, so that la consommation came to mean consumption as well as accomplishment (thus, consommation du mariage is the first sexual act of a married couple).

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This meaning of the French word should be kept in mind when Marx develops, in the Grundrisse, how consumption and production stand in a dialectical interplay so that production is also immediately consumption (1973, 90). The subjects abilities are used up in the act of production; the means of production are worn out through use (90). The product only obtains its last finish in consumption (91). And consumption is consistently understood as a negation. Only by decomposing the product does consumption give the product the finishing touch (93). Moreover, [c]onsumption accomplishes the act of production only in completing the product as product by dissolving it (93). All this makes consumption a mirror image of Hegels Aufhebung: it also destroys and accomplishes at the same time, but Marx makes destruction, and not preservation or appropriation, the first and dominant meaning. Of course, consumption does not necessarily have the last word, and the logic is circular: production determines the specific way in which one consumes*/crecreates the consumer. But it is consumption that is endowed with a double force of finishing and destroying while production remains unilaterally positive. We have also to remember that Marx starts Capital with the account of use value (Gebrauchswert), which is subsequently supplemented and perverted with the fetish of exchange value. His emphasis on consumption is clear, as it is clear that capitalism hinders and obscures consumption*/prevents it from fully enjoying and destroying its objects. The case of consumption teaches us something more general about Marxs theory of time. By presenting free time as a time of the constitution of the subject and of free play, Marx seeks to point to the hidden origin of capitals spontaneous increase, which seems to feed on time itself. Free time is the origin of the force of time, as both a productive and destructive force. However, it appears that free time is not as empty as it seems: it is a time when a human being reflects on time and thus constitutes it retrospectively. As such, this free, excessive time is not as idyllic as it may seem. The very mention of play is not just a reference to Kant and Schiller, but also a recognition of the fact that free time is to be filled with something, and this something is the imitative, symbolic activity that repeats, recapitulates, in a way that is not serious, the previous time of required work. As Benjamin showed (1968, 175/80), the structure of a game, or gambling (Spiel), reflects the logic of labor, in the insatiability that proceeds from lack of completion: in play, as in labor, one has constantly to start anew as though nothing had been previously achieved. Thus, the very formula of alienation is, for Benjamin, a sign of the failure of messianic redemption*/of the incapacity to end, which, in the case of play, feeds the new attempt to finish all at once. Indeed, the mania of a gambler is driven by the contradiction between the leisurely type of his or her activity and the seriousness of the stakes: such game is not pure leisure, but an attempt to demonstrate the vanity of paid labor and the money it brings, to triumph over labor and money and thus to set oneself truly free. If, in his theory of history, Marx often insists on the comic, playful way that history repeats itself in the post-Hegelian, posthistoric situation, in his theory of labor and leisure he similarly emphasizes the playful way in which labor is supplemented and ended, in leisure. In this sense, we return to the dialectic of labor and leisure where leisure, free time, is a paradoxical origin of labor that makes time busy.

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Messianic Surplus Labor

Let me return to the second meaning of surplus value: transformation of constant capital into variable capital. The double function of a workers labor*/production of new value and, at the same time, preservation of old value*/means that in the sphere of work, time does not follow the unidirectional, continuous model. In laboring, one is constantly going back and forth in time. Time is, then, discrete; it implies constant new beginnings or constant recapitulations, such as those performed by the worker in relation to capital. Or, rather, there is a double optics: the capitalist and the state view time as linear and continuous while, in fact, sustenance of this linearity and continuity is possible only due to labor and its mysterious capacity to constantly resurrect the past. But, in this case, says Marx, the worker does not literally do any surplus labor: the resurrection of the dead past comes automatically with the fact of labor itself, as a gratuitous gift (Marx and Engels 1975/2005, 35:217). Thus, in both explanations of surplus value, we deal with the strange, nonclassical nature of time, which is responsible for the even stranger, self-increasing character of labor and the seemingly metaphysical qualities of the whole system of capital. What is there in human labor that makes this possible? Marx, speaking of the specificity of human labor, speaks of its being project-oriented*/of its ideality: what distinguishes the worst architect from the best of bees is this, that the architect raises this structure in imagination before he erects it in reality. At the end of every labor-process, we get a result that already existed in the imagination of the laborer at its commencement (35:187). But it remains unclear how this project orientation and ideality actually lead to the excessiveness of labor that produces surplus value. One hypothesis that comes to mind is that the real working time is logically finished, accomplished, while the official time just formally and externally subdivides time into quantitative units. Bergson (1991) opposes these two types of temporality to each other as the dure e and spatialized, inauthentic time. If we apply this distinction to Marxs subject matter, we will see that spatialized time in the Bergsonian sense is totally external to the content of labor and would thus finish it at an arbitrary moment, midway. From the point of view of this spatialized time, the human worker will always exceed the official measure because she or he has to take care of the totality of his or her work, of its accomplishment. The time she or he needs is the time of completion. Because human labor is intelligent, substantive, it includes an effort of holding the totality of labor in mind, or constantly recapitulating the past and anticipating the future. This time, again, is not linear but rather spiral-like. And, even more directly, the accomplished nature of labor time, in relation to its abstract measure in the capitalist state, requires a special work of completion which must go beyond the limits of the measured time and constitute a surplus time needed to finish time! Thus, for example, I am writing this text late in the night, not because I badly need it ready tomorrow but because the internal logic of writing pushes me to continue, fearing that next day I will forget certain motives, lose inspiration, and so on. Moreover, I will

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keep thinking of the work until I return to it. There are known cases of people dying from hunger while playing video games. A similar structure of temporality was recently elaborated by Giorgio Agamben. Drawing on the work of Gustave Guillaume, a twentieth-century French linguist, Agamben introduces the concept of operative time. Messianic time, says Agamben, is the time that time takes to come to an end, or, more precisely, the time we take to bring to an end, to achieve our representation of time (2005, 67). Guillaume applied this concept specifically to the time that the act of enunciation itself takes, as opposed to the present time to which this enunciation refers. (This is a gap, one could say, that divides a performative from its constative meaning.) Agamben sees it more generally as a secular analogon of messianic time, finding it in many texts, from the letters of Saint Paul to the poetry of troubadours. Clearly, this conception of time conceives it as a reflective structure, not as a natural or objective phenomenon. So long as science and law treat time as a representation that is immediately quantifiable, the operative, or messianic, time will remain hidden and unconscious. The operative time is needed because time, taken in itself, is never definite: things that are past do not disappear just because they happened long ago*/simply because of the time itself. If one does not make an effort to destroy pyramids, they will stay where they are. And even more so, if we speak of the human attitude toward time, past events are delayed in our memory until we remember them again and convey the form of remembrance upon them. An event or a thing has to be symbolically ousted into the past, to be buried, for time to obtain its determinate form. And this is why the brief operative time, first, takes the form of a brief recapitulation of the moments of the past and, second, tends to destroy the remnants and surviving parts of the past, including itself, in order to show that it is fully over. Recapitulation and destruction are dialectically tied in the work of the messianic ending. Agambens contemporary philosophic inspiration comes from Benjamins reading of Marx. However, Marx himself is mentioned in the book not in the context of temporality, but only with regard to the notions of class and proletariat (also interpreted in the messianic sense). In my view, however, Marxs surplus labor time is precisely operative time in the sense of Guillaume and Agamben: the supplementary time that a human puts into work, to finish it, after it has formally ended. Marx himself does not say this. He alludes to the capacity of work to extend itself beyond its own measure, but rejects all interpretations of this phenomenon that would be irrational. He abundantly mentions these interpretations only to ridicule and reject them. Thus, a special section of Capital is dedicated to the theory of the last hour by Nassau William Senior (Marx and Engels 1975/2005, 35:233/8). Senior defended the right of capitalists to determine the length of the working day, arguing that profit is generated precisely in the last hour of work. Marx rejected this theory as a too literal image of surplus labor time. He argues that surplus value is evenly distributed throughout the working day, but, in arguing this, he does not miss the opportunity to pun on the messianic and apocalyptic connotations of the last hour theory: But this dreadful last hour, about which you have invented more stories

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than have the millenarians about the day of judgment, is all bosh . . . Whenever your last hour strikes in earnest, think of the Oxford Professor [Senior]. And now, gentlemen, farewell, and may we meet again in yonder better world, but not before (35:236/7). At another juncture Marx mentions, and fiercely rejects, the following argument in defense of capitalists. He quotes a factory inspector who says, It is sometimes advanced by way of excuse, when persons are found at work in a factory, either at a meal hour, or at some illegal time, that they will not leave the mill at the appointed hour, and that compulsion is necessary to force them to cease work [cleaning their machinery, & c.], especially on Saturday afternoons (35:249). Or another, similar story of gentlemen who were accused of having kept at work 5 boys between 12 and 15 years of age, from 6 a.m. on Friday to 4 p.m. on the following Saturday, not allowing them any respite except for meals and one hour for sleep at midnight . . . The accused gentlemen affirm in lieu of taking an oath*/as quakers they were too scrupulously religious to take an oath*/that they had, in their great compassion for the unhappy children, allowed them four hours for sleep, but the obstinate children absolutely would not go to bed. (35:249) Of course, the cynicism of capitalists is justly denounced by Marx here. But, on second thought, is the story so unbelievable?5 Marxs own early theory of alienation assumes that the more creative labor and enthusiasm the worker puts into the product that is subsequently taken from him or her, the more she or he is alienated. It is quite plausible that workers would sometimes keep working beyond the working time, through sheer inertia, so that it would take more effort to stop working than to continue working. In our times, capitalist exploitation of white-collar workers (or immaterial workers, in the parlance of Paolo Virno and Antonio Negri) often functions precisely in this way: the more initiative and creativity the work requires, the fewer limits there are for this work (which is still ultimately dictated and expropriated by capital). If the worker tends to keep working after the work has ended, perhaps to finish the work once started or even simply to terminate work (this also requires work!), he or she is immediately caught in the structure of surplus labor, whether she or he stops working or continues working for a while. In any case, the capitalist finds a way of using the workers surplus effort and the end of work brings a sense of dissatisfaction, the inability of the worker to fully distance him- or herself from the working day, to fully enter the free time that Marx so desired.
5. The fact that Marx mentions the argument on the workers fanatic desire to work shows that he was not unaware of this structural function, which would support his own theory. But, fearing a too wild or too ambivalent presentation, he used them only in rejecting them, using a figure that Freud would later call denegation, denial (Verneinung). Marx uses these and other images to create a complex critique of the metaphysics of capital, but he does so in a nonthematic way, without taking responsibility for them. Compare Derrida (1994) on the ambivalence of Marx toward the ghosts: the metaphoric and metaphysical figures of his own text.

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Generally, the fatigue of which Marx writes so eloquently (for instance, chapter 10 of volume 1 of Capital, The Working-Day, abounds with examples of the exhaustion of humans by work)6 is far from being a natural condition. It involves rather the active effort of a human being to interrupt the inertia of an activity that feels threateningly long. It is an effort of self-hindering that is akin to Freuds death drive.7 One fully feels the fatigue only after having stopped working. There can be pleasant and unpleasant fatigue: the first implying a sense of accomplishment, the second bearing the burden of an untimely interruption. This is a phenomenon one knows from experience: we can often mobilize and work unusually long without increasingly losing force or feeling a continuously increasing fatigue. Rather, the fatigue, which is proportional to the degree of overwork, comes all at once, at the moment we finally decide to stop, or at least want to stop, in spite of an external pressure to continue. The weariness of workers, as described by Marx, is not just a feature of their physical state. It is mediated by alienation: workers are badly tired because they fail, on the one hand, to accomplish and appropriate and, on the other hand, to expel what they have produced. Alienation includes, to develop Marx once more, not only the failure to appropriate ones products and labor but, equally, the failure to objectify and move it to the past, to let the dead bury their dead.

6. See also Rabinbach on the popularity of anxiety about fatigue in the nineteenth century. However, all Rabinbachs examples involve a naively naturalist theory of fatigue, ignoring its reflexive character. The obsession with fatigue in the nineteenth-centurys thought was not merely a sign of the real weariness of individuals in industrial society, but of the negative aspect of the body conceived as a thermodynamic machine capable of conserving and deploying energy . . . Resistance to work was no longer located in the souls impurities, but in the physical properties of fatigue (Rabinbach 1990, 48). This naturalist theory is also connected, for instance in Helmholz, with a na vely naturalist theory of time. However, I would emphasize less the naturalization and materialism of nineteenth-century ideology (which is obviously there, but is not that surprising), and more its crypto-messianism, which is so well denuded by Nietzsche in his critique of the second law of thermodynamics as a metaphysical prejudice. Moreover, naturalism and materialism, which assume the spirits externalization and disappearance in nature, are, in a sense, a necessary disguise of the suicidal passion of fatigue. As Benjamin repeatedly showed, melancholia, as a sense of alienation from meaning, has a particular tendency to present meanings in a purely material, corporeal fashion. 7. A concept introduced by Freud in Beyond the Pleasure Principle (Freud 1955, 18:7/64). At this moment of developing his theory, Freud understood that negative emotions, aggression against others and oneself are not just inert reactions to obstacles driven essentially by the will and taste of pleasure, but effects of an active force sui generis. Therefore, instead of his prior concepts of pleasure principle and reality principle (an essentially passive adaptation to environment), he introduces a dyad of equally active principles, life drive and death drive. Unlike a simple desire, which would have a determinate goal, the death and life drives are inherently infinite, insatiable. The death drive has only total destruction as its goal, which it can never reach. Both drives are therefore infinite springs of human behavior. By introducing them, Freud rejects a simplistic view of human psychic economy as driven by a desire for balance and homeostasis. In fact, the very force that can restore homeostasis actually exceeds it and reaches beyond it.

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Alienation as Blockage of the Messianic

As we know, for Hegel, the notion of alienation (Entfremdung) had an ambivalent meaning: a human being must externalize itself (enta uern sich) in order to affirm its being and avoid the empty longing of an unhappy consciousness. But, after having done so, it runs into the opposite trap: the most important things now happen in the externalized, alienated sphere of objectified culture and science. Only a new, Kantian morality, a secularized Christianity, and Hegels speculative philosophy help to appropriate and interiorize this objective culture back into the individual and collective subject. Marx, in the Economical and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, his main work on alienation, seems to take a much more unilateral view. The so-called externalization, he says, is just a cover-up for the loss: a worker loses what she or he produces, loses a part of him- or herself in the process, and the result is existence in a world of alien objects, comparable to a Christian notion of kenosis or a clinical picture of melancholia or depression. The more the worker spends himself, the more powerful the alien objective world becomes which he creates over against himself, the poorer he himself*/his inner world, the less belongs him as his own (Marx and Engels 1978, 72). But does this mean that Marx only longs for an appropriation of the world by humans and does not see the need to transcend ones borders and go outside oneself? This is not so, as is seen from the concluding sections where Marx turns to the discussion of Hegels minor Logic. Here Hegel is criticized, not for his apology for estrangement, but for proposing a false solution to this estrangement*/namely, the appropriation of the external object in knowledge. Marx criticizes Hegel not for an apology for externalization but, on the contrary, for not being able truly to transcend bland interiority. Marx reads Hegel against the grain and shows that, at the end of the Logic, there is a hidden movement that goes against the general meaning of Hegels system: namely, the movement that annuls thought and transcends to Nature. Let me quote again the passage I quoted above with regard to Koje `ve: [T]he entire logic is a demonstration that abstract thought is nothing in itself; that the Absolute Idea is nothing in itself; that only Nature is something (Marx and Engels 1978, 122). A striking interpretation of Hegels negation as full annulment, not Aufhebung! Hegels abstraction, says Marx, resolves under various conditions to abandon itself and to replace its selfabsorption, nothingness, generality and indeterminateness by its otherbeing, the particular, and the determinate; resolves to let nature, which it held hidden in itself only as an abstraction, as a thought-entity, go freely from itself . . . The mystical feeling which drives the philosopher forward from abstract thinking to intuiting is boredom*/the longing for a content. (123) Hegel fails to find a successful way out of this self-absorption, but Marxs communism is such a way. Marx writes, Atheism and communism are no flight, no abstraction; they are not a losing of the objective world begotten by man*/of mans essential powers given over to the realm of objectivity; they are not returning in

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poverty to unnatural, primitive simplicity. On the contrary, they are but the first real coming-to-be, the realization become real for man, of mans essence*/of the essence of man as something real (123). Thus, communism appears as a response not only to the inevitable selfobjectification of man, but also to the false appropriation of the object in Hegels system which, historically, corresponds to the false appropriation of the object in the system of private property. Private property is false property; it idealizes the object but fails to truly externalize the man or humanize the object. Overcoming alienation means opposing a true, full negation as annulment (passage from Spirit to Nature), to the compromised negation that is Hegels Aufhebung. Aufhebung is a kind of indigestion of history, to speak in Nietzschean terms, and Marx no less than Nietzsche is preoccupied with dropping the dead weight of the past and truly transcending the subject. Marxs preferred type of the eschatological negation, at least as it appears in the early text of 1844, is neither a spectacular destruction nor a Hegelian redemption-recapitulation, but a passage to the irreducible Other, the reunion of humans with the nature that they had foreclosed. This understanding helps to clarify Marxs concept of alienation which, against appearances, refers not only to an overexpenditure of self but, equally, to loneliness and the separation of humans from each other and from nature.8 In our day, the destructive aspect of messianic time is moderated by commodity consumption. To some extent, as Marx already saw, this is not true consumption because it is not sufficiently destructive, so far as things, even the basest things like toilet paper, function as objects valuable in themselves, with a name, character, and a place in the household. In todays consumer economy, goods are often criticized for not being as durable as they had been; for example computers and operating systems are constantly renovated to force one to constantly buy new ones. This destructive and spending consumption is, however, only an Ersatz of a truly radical messianic consumption that would consist, for instance, in producing a highly durable computer and setting free the armies of workers and technologists across the world, so that they might play video games the rest of their time. The drive to end and destroy, which is thus moderated in the consumer economy, is satisfied in televised catastrophes and terrorist acts, produced through a symbiosis between the media and the most consequent consumers and telespectators, the terrorists.

Conclusion
Thus, we see that Marxs ideas of surplus value and surplus labor are more than merely empirical findings, or minor corrections of traditional political economy. They draw on a philosophical analysis of time which puts into question the classical economic theories based on outdated, narrowly rationalist models of time and space (these models are provided by the understanding, in the Kantian sense of the word). While these models are obviously similar to theological concepts of time, Marx and
8. See a similar understanding in Madra (2006, 208), quoting the Community Economies Collective.

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other twentieth-century thinkers who use this concept do not wish to retheologize the world but, rather, strive to understand rationally the crucial elements of the religious world-view that have been ignored by modern science, but which nevertheless are highly relevant to orientation in the contemporary world. Moreover, messianic phenomena seem the more irrational, the more dominant is the rationalist model of extensively infinite and calculable time. Marxs notion of surplus time is structural, not purely ontological. Therefore, it points to the Utopian possibility of destroying the very dual structure of necessity and surplus and searches for a form of synthesis between labor and leisure. Therefore, the apparent end of messianic historical consciousness is far from being a reason to leave Marx in the past, even with regret. What Marx tried to show was that the end of messianism, the end of Utopias, is built into these very Utopias. Thus, not arguing against Derridas orientation at the unknown, transcendent future but rather going in another direction, I would suggest that Marxs teaching today is valuable as a teaching of the immanence of Utopia. Utopias were over already in Marxs time, and this was the beginning of the radical politics of the truly modern kind. Our messianic energies are exploited and caricatured by authoritarian capitalism, but they are all already there, and a catastrophe will immediately raise them to the surface. This messianism does not consist in a simple will to finish and destroy, but rather in the mission of replaying what has already been destroyed, for the very last time. Perhaps the next*/and the very last*/revolution will give us a chance to institutionalize and universalize these energies, as Marx wanted, by synthesizing work and play into something new, and by destroying their fatal division into vain and unproductive labor and the industrialized leisure of working out.

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