Original Article

Free time as a necessary condition of free life

Jeff Noonan
Philosophy Department, University of Windsor, 401 Sunset Avenue, Windsor, Ontario, Canada
N9B 3P4.
E-mail: jnoonan@uwindsor.ca

Abstract Human life is finite. Given that lifetime is necessarily limited, the
experience of time in any given society is a central ethical problem. If all or most of
human lifetime is consumed by routine tasks (or resting for the resumption
of routine) then human beings are dominated by the socially determined experience
of time. This article first examines time as the fundamental existential framework
of human life. It then goes on to explore the determination of time today by the
ruling value system that underlies advanced capitalist society. It concludes that the
equation ‘time is money’ rules the contemporary experience of time, and goes on to
argue that this experience deprives those who live under this ruling value system
of a central requirement of free human life: the experience of time as an open matrix
of possibilities for action (or free time).
Contemporary Political Theory (2009) 8, 377–393. doi:10.1057/cpt.2008.27

Keywords: time; free time; life requirement; life value; life activity

Introduction

The only life that human beings know is terrestrial, mortal life. Each person’s
life plays out between the two poles of beginning (birth) and ending (death).
Human life, it is obvious, is temporal, and all judgements as to its quality
must ultimately make reference to what was done and not done within its
limited temporal framework. Perhaps it is this obviousness that has caused
contemporary political philosophy to by and large overlook the relationship
between time and the quality of life. In comparison with rights, income
distributions, forms of government and economy, national, cultural, gender,
and sexual identities, and even metaphysical ideas like essence and totality, the
connection between the social structure and experience of time and good
human lives has received little attention. As important as each of these factors
and relationships are, their importance presupposes the temporal finitude of
human life. The structure of our government, our degree of control over basic
life resources, and every other social and cultural institution matters to us
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because our life on earth can be better or worse. Since no rationally acceptable
argument can prove or even give plausible grounds for believing in an afterlife,
it must follow that the only good life we can rationally expect and demand is
here on earth. What I will argue in this article is that the structure and
experience of time is not only essential to establishing the framework in which
our experiences, relations and activities become meaningful, but, in the form of
free time, is an essential requirement of a better life in its own right.
The argument will unfold in three moments. First, I will elaborate upon
time as the existential frame of human life in which the meaning and value
of experience, activity, relationships, goals and achievements emerges. In the
second, I will examine the structure of time in existing liberal capitalist
societies. This section will begin with Marx’s groundbreaking analysis of the
way in which the development of industrial capitalism altered the experience
of time for the working class. It will ultimately go beyond Marx, however, to
argue that the harmful effects of the temporal organization of capitalism must
be understood as the result of the operation of what McMurtry calls the
money-grounded value system beneath the machinery of capitalist production
and across the social spaces of life in capitalist society (McMurtry, 2002,
p. 163). The common expression ‘time is money’ is a colloquial example of
the rule of this money value system. As it relates to human lifetime, the money
value system computes as valuable only those forms of human activity that
produce commodities or services for sale, or that aid in the realization of
profit through the purchase of those same commodities or services. It thus
forms a general social value matrix linking work life and leisure within which
people come to experience their life activity as valuable or worthless to the
extent that it serves this money value system as its instrument. This experience,
however, is the antithesis of the experience of free time required by a free life.
In the final section, I will explicate my conception of free time by emphasizing
its differences from ‘empty’ time. I will conclude that once the harm caused by
the experience of time as money is understood, multiple pathways of resistance
to its harmful effects open up.

Life Value and the Temporal Frame of Human Existence

Human beings occupy a distinctive place in the order of things in the universe.
Composed of physical elements produced in ancient supernovae, structured by
a genetic code and shaped by environmental influences, we nevertheless have
demonstrated a capacity for world building of which there is no known
analogue in the rest of nature. This world-building capacity proves that
humans are social-organic beings capable of genuine action, and not simply
behaviour. The difference between action and mere behaviour is clearly
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 Free time as a necessary condition of free life

brought out in Aristotle’s objection to the ancient atomist belief that the
mechanical motion of atoms alone causes movement: ‘And in general we may
object that it is not [by the mechanical motion of soul atoms] that the soul
appears to initiate movement in animals – it is through intention or process of
thinking’ (Aristotle, 1966, p. 554). Human beings are conscious beings and
their actions are the consequence of thought operating in definite social and
natural conditions. The power of thought, however, is not supreme, but is
limited by environmental, and especially social, context. Different social
relations expand or restrict the range of possible individual activities. The
extent of human freedom, therefore, is a social, rather than a metaphysical
problem. Where humans are adequately furnished with the material (natural
and social) requirements of life they are able to reflect, think, plan, and act in
unique and individuating ways and these unique and individuating ways of
action are the substance of human freedom.
However, there is one limit on human action that no society can overcome.
Our world-building capabilities create societies in which there are wider
ranges of free activity than are found in the physical world and the worlds of
other animals, but the physical world ultimately has its revenge. There is no
overcoming the forces of internal and external nature that slowly but inevitably
erode life activity and lead to each person’s death. All life activity, therefore,
has an irreducible temporal frame that begins with birth and ends with death.
Human life is finite and everyone, regardless of what they believe will happen
after death, must, (assuming the person lives long enough to become fully
conscious of this temporal frame), contend with their own mortality. As Camus
observes incisively, all people must ‘situate [themselves] in relation to time, y
[everyone] must take their place in it y [because everyone must] admit that
[they] stand at a certain point on a curve that [they] acknowledge having to travel
to the end. [Everyone] belongs to time, and by the horror that seizes [them, they]
recognise their own worst enemy’ (Camus, 1955, p. 11). The honest confron-
tation with the inescapable link between temporality and death forces us, so
Camus claims, to confront the question of whether life is even worth living.
The importance of Camus’ confrontation with the problem of death is that it
reveals the way in which the finitude of life illuminates meaning in even the
most mundane of activities. Real, vivid and life-affirming experience and
activity depend, so Camus believes, on acknowledging death’s reality. While
Camus considers the experience of temporal finitude as a permanent existential
problem, his understanding of death as the frame within which life becomes
a matter of care and concern (and therefore, as I will argue, valuable) is an
excellent starting point for the consideration of the social structure and
experience of time. For Camus, an honest understanding of human life requires
that we accept the inevitability and permanence of our death. While this
admission drives some to despair and suicide, Camus argues that it can have
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the opposite effect as well, leading to a conscious embrace of life’s potentialities

for experience and activity as the substance of its value. In other words,
acknowledging terrestrial life as the only life is the necessary first step for
discovering the value in the fact of life’s real nature.
What I mean by ‘discovering the value in the fact of life’s real nature’ can be
illuminated by considering what value means. Anything that has value has
value to the extent that it matters for some reason to some person.
Generalizing, I define value as that in the object that can make it an object
of care and concern for a subject. In general, life’s natural and social conditions
have value, are objects of care and concern for living subjects, because those
subjects’ lives are better or worse to the degree to which they are able to satisfy
its natural and social conditions. But life value as such is found in the
development, expression and enjoyment of the capabilities – of critical and
imaginative thought, of emotional connection between people, other living
things, and natural environments, of conscious action and creation that
contributes to the well-being of others and communities – ‘in more coherently
inclusive ranges’ (McMurtry, 2008, p. 94). Thus, all living subjects have an
ultimate interest in leading a better rather than a worse life because there is no
known life but the one we lead on earth. The life we lead on earth, however, is
lived within time as the general matrix of activity. The experience of time,
however, as well as the way in which time is valued, is shaped in different
societies by the structure of the major social institutions that rule over the
content of life activity, and the ultimate system of value that rules over them.
The political importance of Camus’ existential analysis of temporality and
death is that it emphasizes what one might call the ethical priority of the
range and depth of experience and activity. I use ‘ethical’ in the ancient sense of
referring to the good life for human beings. For any finite human agent who
accepts the finitude of life, there is nowhere else to turn, in general, than to the
experiences and activities he or she is able to have and do over the course of
a lifetime. As Camus concludes, ‘if I admit that my freedom has no meaning
except in relation to its limited fate, then I must say that what counts is not
the best living but the most living’ (Camus, 1955, p. 45). I will return in the
conclusion to offer certain important qualifications to this purely quantitative
conception of valuable life activity. For the moment I simply want to stress the
point that recognizing the finitude of life emphasizes the need for terrestrial,
mortal beings to become aware of what impedes the fuller development of life
value, because beyond this mortal existence nothing is assured.
In order to understand this point clearly, consider an example. Lunch with
friends is good, but would become unbearable if, as in Sartre’s No Exit, one
were trapped with those same friends for eternity. A life so confined or reduced
to one and only experience would be a life of stasis and thus, to the extent that
life is essentially motion, change, activity and variation, not really a life at all.
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In our life it is not Satan that condemns us to a single activity, but the rule of
the money value system which, while it permits multiple forms of activity,
reduces the multiple forms of life value potentially expressed by them (the
development in more inclusively coherent range and depth of our sentient,
emotional, practical, cognitive and imaginative capabilities) to the monovalue
of money. As the development of life value is through the forms of activity that
are possible over a lifetime, it follows that the experience of lifetime is a decisive
factor in the problem of life-value development, expression and enjoyment.
One-dimensionality and stasis is the opposite of activity and therefore opposed
to the growth of life value. If we assume that terrestrial life is our only life,
and that everyone therefore has an interest in a better, rather than a worse life
here on earth, then a life of greater life value is better and less worse. To lead
a worse rather than a better life not because of intrinsic lack of capability but
because of the rule over life value of a life-blind money-value system is thus the
general form of harm to which mortal human beings are liable. Worse and
better, therefore, essentially refer to the expressed and experienced content of
life activity, and thus both have inescapable temporal dimensions.
As I noted in passing above, time is not simply a general existential problem.
The structure and experience of time, and therefore the structure and experience
of real possibilities for action, depends upon the form of social organization and
the underlying value system that legitimates its normal dynamics and structures.
If the social structure and experience of time dominates over life activity,
reducing its value to an instrument of the system’s self-replication, then the
social structure and experience of time can constitute a real harm to human
beings in so far as it impedes the wider and deeper development of life value.
Conversely, if the social structure of time can be changed such that it is
experienced not as a dominating but an enabling condition of more valuable
life activity and experience, it can be a real material condition of a better life.
In the former case, time is experienced as an oppressive force that reduces the
content and value of human experience and activity to the non-living values
that rule in the given society. In the later case, time is experienced as free. The
experience of free time, however, is not a simple matter to explain. Hence,
before turning to the task of explicating the meaning of free time, I will provide
a socially concrete analysis of time as oppressive.

Capitalism, Abstract Time and Domination over Life Activity

One does not require thought experiments in order to understand a social

structure and experience of time as oppressive. Such a structure and experience
of time is at the heart of contemporary capitalism. One of the great and lasting
achievements of Marx’s critique of capitalism is his understanding of the role
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that capitalist time structure plays in the domination of money value over
human life value. However, to say that this analysis is a great and lasting
achievement is not to say either that Marx’s analysis is fully adequate in itself,
or that his proposed solution – proletarian revolution – is any longer possible.
I will begin with an overview of Marx’s arguments because they represent
the first systematic attempt to comprehend the way in which a particular social
determination of time functions as a material harm to human beings. I will go
beyond Marx, however, in two respects. First, I will trace the oppressive
consequence of the structure of time under capitalism beneath the machinery of
production to the operation of the underlying money-value system that rules
inside and outside the institutions of economic life. Second, I will argue that
once this underlying value system is understood, this recognition can open up
multiple fronts of action against the impediments it places in the way of an
experience of time as free, opening up possibilities in the present for wider
circles of life-valuable activity. Moreover, deepening the argument beyond
Marx (but without abandoning his pioneering work altogether) should appeal
to other political perspectives suspicious of Marx’s practical conclusions but
alive to the sorts of problems his work brings to light.
The relevant arguments in this regard move from the general to the
particular. Economy of time, Marx argues, is a general problem faced by any
society. The organic life requirements of human beings are relatively fixed
necessities that any society must regularly provide, at least in minimal
quantities, if it is to reproduce itself. However, while these necessities are more
or less fixed, the social time required to satisfy them is not. The more
productive a society is, the less socially necessary labour time is required to
satisfy basic organic life requirements: ‘Ultimately, all economy is economy of
time. Society must allocate its time appropriately to achieve a production
corresponding to its total needs, just as the individual must allocate his time
correctly to acquire knowledge in suitable proportions or to satisfy the various
demands on his activity’ (Marx, 1986a, p. 109). However, whereas the economy
of time is a general social problem, the conditions of realizing an economy of
socially necessary labour time is particular and relative to specific social condi-
tions. Capitalist productivity, Marx argued, created the material conditions for
the economization of socially necessary labour time, but its governing priority
(profit, rather than life-requirement satisfaction) militates against the realiza-
tion of the potential for free time that it makes possible.
In the early development of capitalism, even this potential was absent as
capital initially demanded a working day longer than what was normal in
pre-industrial conditions. ‘In its blind, unrestrainable passion’, Marx writes,
‘its werewolf hunger for surplus labour, capital oversteps not only the moral,
but even the physical maximum bonds of the working day. It usurps time for
growth, development, and healthy maintenance’ (Marx, 1986b, pp. 252–253).
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That this demand on the time of the working class is a real harm is proven
above all by working class resistance to it. Among the first great struggles of
the English working class concerned the legal limitation of the working day
(Marx, 1986b, pp. 222–296). Victories in this struggle shortened the working
day from 12, to 10, and finally to 8 hours. Yet these victories, while expressive
of a victory of life value over the rule of money value, were not sufficient to end
its rule over human lifetime. In order to understand this point clearly, it is
necessary to examine more closely the actual structure of time the money-value
system produces.
Recent trends indicate working weeks in the advanced capitalist world are
lengthening after long periods of decline. In Canada, the average workday has
increased from 506 min in 1986 to 536 min in 2005 and in the United States the
average annual hours of work for middle income families have risen from 2150
hours per year in 1979 to 2181 hours per year in 2002 for men and from 919
hours per year for women to 1385 hours per year (Economic Policy Institute,
2006; Turcotte, 2007, pp. 2–9). Despite these trends, most workers do not face
absolute working days of the same length as their eighteenth and early
nineteenth century forerunners. What they do still experience, however, is
a structure of time within and without the workplace which Moishe Postone
terms ‘abstract time’. By ‘abstract’ Postone means ‘emptied of qualitative
content’. Postone defines abstract time as ‘a uniform, continuous, homogenous,
‘‘empty’’ time y independent of events y an independent framework within
which motion, events and action occur. Such time is divisible into equal,
constant, nonqualitative units’ (Postone, 1993, p. 202). Abstract time is thus an
inversion of the pre-modern experience of time. Abstract time is the empty
matrix within which abstract labour (undetermined labour power) is concre-
tized. Both abstract time and abstract labour are divorced from all concrete
human activity. How each is concretized or filled with content is determined by
the fluctuating demands of labour and commodity markets and the techno-
logical apparatus that mediates production. The capitalist economy, viewed in
its most general structure, is a dynamic drive to reduce the time, and therefore
the money-capital expenditure, involved in the production of given quantities
of commodities. For workers especially, therefore, the actual experience of
time in work is of a reified social power that coercively determines the content
of their life activity.
The cause of that reification, however, is not the mechanics of capitalist
production in the abstract, but the requirement of the money value system to
reduce the life requirements of human beings, temporal requirements included,
to a form amenable to calculation and rational exploitation. It is only where life
value is reduced to money value that it is meaningful to say ‘time is money’ and
value the time of life activity solely in terms of the money it makes or spends.
It is because the money-value system rules across all social spheres that the same
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experience of abstract time is encountered in the factory and office as well in the
social world outside of work (in leisure time, as I will explain below). This point
is made clearer if we contrast briefly the experience of time as abstract with a
different form of temporal experience from a pre-capitalist culture.
The experience of time in indigenous North American cultures – cultures
that were not ruled by a money-value system but a set of values that stressed
the unity of humanity with its natural field of life support – was not
independent of events but qualitatively determined by them. The life ground
of their cultures is poignantly expressed in the Great Law of Peace of the
Six Nations: ‘[every fire council will open] by expressing y gratitude y to
the earth where men dwell, to the streams of water, y the maize and fruits y
to the animals that serve as food, y to the great winds, y and to the Sun’
(MacLaine and Baxendale, 1990, p. 101). In these cultures human life was
understood as a moment of the great circle of life upon which individual life
was dependent and towards whose health and sustenance the ends of individual
life were directed. Time, in turn, was experienced in organic unity with the
different elements of this circle and the different phases through which it
passed. Actions and events have their proper time and place; the meaning and
importance of action is determined relative to those times and places. Night
and day, winter and summer solstices, hunting season and wintering season,
youth and old age, these qualitative signs marked the passage of time and
indicated to social subjects what forms of activity were appropriate given the
qualitative context of experience. The experience of time, in short, was governed
by the necessary transitions through which life passed, and life’s meaning and
value was understood as a product of the activities that different times and
contexts required.
Abstract time in a capitalist economy ruled by the money value system is
fundamentally distinct. Whereas the experience of time in indigenous culture is
always full, that is, each temporal moment corresponds to an appropriate form
of activity through which individual meaning and social value is produced,
abstract time is ‘empty’. It is empty in the sense that it is conceived in
abstraction from qualitative changes in the natural and social environment and
human activity. The content of life activity is not determined by what the life
requirements of the moment demand, but is alienated from the underlying life
value of activity by its reduction to the level of a commodity purchased and
utilized according to the demands of its lawful owner. ‘Time expenditure’,
Postone elaborates, ‘is transformed from a result of activity to a normative
measure for activity y . This process, whereby a concrete, dependent variable
of human activity becomes an abstract independent variable governing the
activity is real and not illusory y . It is intrinsic to the process of alienated
social constitution effected by labour’ (Postone, 1993, pp. 214–215). Because
life activity is owned by another, so too is lifetime. Time is not experienced as
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the matrix within which one freely develops their capabilities so as to meet
shared life requirements, but as a coercive framework within which one does
what one is told at the pace at which one is told to do it. Instead of human
activity determining the use of time on the basis of life-grounded understanding
of what is valuable for self and community, time becomes an instrument of the
money-value system using human beings for its own system goals. Ends and
means are in this way inverted: time itself appears as a social power acting over
human beings, determining the content of their life activity.
The consequences for human beings as workers are classically explained by
Harry Braverman. The application of scientific measurement systems to the
analysis of human activity led to a progressive degradation of work throughout
the twentieth century, both in traditional capitalist industries as well as offices
and other service industries. As he argued, ‘labour in the form of standardized
motion patterns is labour used as an interchangeable part, and in this form
comes ever closer to corresponding, in life, to the abstraction employed by
Marx in analysis of the capitalist mode of production’ (Braverman, 1998,
p. 125). The corresponding forms of degradation in the service industries are
examined in Jeremy Rifkin’s The End of Work (Rifkin, 2004, pp. 181–198).
At the root of this intensification of alienation from the process of labour is the
rule of time over human activity. Thus, the form of domination exercised over
human activity under capitalism cannot be fully understood outside of its
temporal dimension. Human activity is ruled by an abstract mathematical
quantification of time rooted in and determined by the imperatives of the
money-value system. Lifetimes are divided and parcelled out according to
calculations of the most efficient means for the ongoing cycle of money
accumulation. The general form of harm here, and thus the ethical problem
posed by this structure of time, is that human beings are reduced to mere
instruments of a value system that regards the value of their life activity only as
interchangeable inputs to its ongoing reproduction and expansion.
It nevertheless remains true that the reduction of socially necessary labour
time in the production of life necessities creates the potential for free time in the
empty time outside of labour higher levels of productivity have historically
produced. While the money-value system that rules over major social institu-
tions does not recognize this empty time as potentially free time, it does not
follow, that conscious people living within this system cannot recognize it.
In order to do so, however, they need to identify the way in which the surplus
time the increasing productivity of capitalism generates tends to be recaptured
outside of the workplace. So long as people continue to fill out the structure of
abstract time through the sorts of activities prescribed by the imperatives of the
money value system, they will continue to fail to realize the life-value potential
that reduced demands on their labour time create. In order to make this point
more clear, let me turn now to an analysis of the experience of time outside the
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workplace, in the ubiquitous leisure and entertainment industries typical of

advanced capitalism.
Marx, given the structure of the society he criticized, marked as it was by low
wages and long hours of work, understandably conceived of free time simply as
empty time, that is, time outside of work. Free time in Marx’s interpretation
was time ‘free from’ external demands on its use. It was Marx’s belief that
overall success in the struggle against capitalism would lead to a socialist
society in which higher productivity would unburden humanity from mundane
reproductive labour, freeing its time for use according to what individuals had
a mind to do. What he did not foresee was the development of consumer and
leisure industries that function by commodifying ‘what people have a mind to
do’, and in the process undermining the life value of self-directed activity. The
life value of doing what one has a mind to do is negated to the extent that it is
determined in its form and content by what leisure and consumer industries
offer for sale. He did not foresee this development for two reasons. First, he
took the ultimate collapse of capitalism to be an historical necessity, and thus
underestimated its historical adaptability. Second, and more importantly, he
never spelled out with any degree of clarity a distinction between life-valuable
and life-blind forms of expressing what one has a mind to do. In other words,
his own conception of truly human activity was alienated from the life ground
of value, and thus he simply assumed that whatever people wanted to do in
a post-capitalist society – hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon and so on –
would be life valuable, just because people had a mind to do it. We can see
today, however, that with abundance comes apathy towards realizing one’s life
capabilities in ways that are equally individually meaningful and valuable to
the wider social field of life support in which all exist. Egocentric blindness
to the life requirements of others as well as the contributions one might make
to their satisfaction as the substance of an individually meaningful life has
emerged as the dominant tendency of individual action in consumer societies.
Marx’s understanding of free time does not rule out this sort of egocentric self-
enclosure. His aphorism from the German Ideology describing the use of empty
time under socialism as doing whatever one has a mind cannot rule out the sort
of life-blind wasting of potentially free time that we observe so clearly in
today’s consumer society.
In these societies, the ruling money value system produces an experience of
abstract time outside of work that is equally harmful to the life interests of
those subjected to it. In the words of Hugo van der Poel, life takes on a struc-
ture of ‘modularization’ into which different modes of life activity are mechani-
cally inserted’ (Van der Poel, 1997). This modularization is the concretization
of empty time outside of work within the leisure/consumer/entertainment
industries. It refers to the social process whereby people experience time as
divided up into discrete moments the filling of which is determined by
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 Free time as a necessary condition of free life

routinized consumption of ready-made products or activities. The modulariza-

tion of life activity is thus a consequence of the extension of the experience of
time determined by capitalist methods of production into the new social sphere
of ‘leisure’.
Left unchecked, this modularization would affect the totality of relationships
and interactions through which non-working life is led. ‘Family time’ becomes
one module, ‘time for friends another’, ‘me-time’ as the saying goes, yet
another. What people do within the modules is also by and large filled with the
consumption of different forms of commodities. People thus think of the use of
time according to the imperatives of capitalist consumption, and in this way
squander the potential for life-valuable modes of empty time utilization. The
internalization of the ruling value system manifests itself as a restlessness
that makes it psychically difficult not to be engaged in either production or
consumption. The experience of empty time appears as a burden to be filled
through some commodified form of activity. Adorno makes this point with
characteristic eloquence. ‘What keeps all things occupied and in motion is the
striving for existence. With existence, however, secured, they do not know what
to do: thus the second force that sets them in motion is the striving to be rid of
the burden of existence y to ‘‘kill time,’’ that is, to escape boredom. But this
concept of boredom is bourgeois through and through. It is the complement of
alienated labour y free time remains the reflex action to a production rhythm
imposed heteronomously on the subject compulsively maintained even in the
weary pauses’ (Adorno, 2002, p. 175).
Marx had hoped that by reducing socially necessary labour time capitalism
would create a need for free time and free activity that it could not satisfy. The
evolution of the capitalist social form has, however, generated its own solution
to this problem. The potentially socially and politically explosive effects of the
reduction of socially necessary labour time have been contained by shaping
workers’ experience of empty time as a demand for socially and politically
conservative forms of ‘socially necessary leisure time’. By this term I mean to
indicate that advanced capitalist society requires mandatory participation in the
leisure industries as a key moment of the realization of capital. I am writing this
article a week after ‘Black Friday’ in the United States. ‘Black Friday’ is the day
after American Thanksgiving (the second last Thursday in November) and the
‘traditional’ start to what North American business pages refer to as the ‘shopp-
ing season’. There was great anxiety in 2007 that the mortgage crisis and tighter
limits on credit would reduce sales. My point here is simply to show that my
claims with regard to the pre-determined and socially structured forms of con-
sumer behaviour are not arbitrary posits of a contemporary critique of capitali-
sm but, on the contrary, essential to it, and well-known as such by its supporters.
To understand the devaluation of life activity the ruling value system produces
more comprehensively, consider everyday examples of acting as a consumer.
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Whether one is having a coffee, buying shoes, or watching a movie in a comm-

ercial theatre one experiences the exact same calculations of temporal efficiency
as one does at work. One is permitted to stay in an establishment only so long as
one is willing to pay for the privilege. For example, many coffee shops, especially
those owned by major chains, actually post maximum occupancy times. Theatres
are designed so that it is impossible to stay after the show to discuss it. If you
want to discuss the movie with friends you are obliged to go to a bar or café; and
pay to sit. Simply ‘hanging out’ and ‘doing nothing’ is not only discouraged, but
also is illegal (‘loitering’) in most North American jurisdictions.
The synthetic consequence of the domination of abstract time over work and
leisure time is that lifetime as a whole is experienced as divided into discrete
quanta (modules) and personal satisfaction and happiness as always dependent
on making or spending money. Thus, despite the fact that advanced capitalism
creates the potential for the experience of time as free (by reducing socially
necessary labour time), people fail to realize this potentiality to the extent that
the internalized money-value system rules over their self-understanding and
goals. However – and this point is crucial – since we are not dealing with the
determination of human action by an irresistible mechanical necessity, but
voluntary action within a social structure that frames experience in conformity
with its requirements but which cannot absolutely prevent alternative possi-
bilities, a changed experience of time, and therefore, a changed set of priorities
for its use is possible, within and against the prevailing social structure and its
ruling value system. Again, the key is to become conscious of the way in which
the ruling value system devalues life activity by treating it as a programmable
function of commodity cycles. If people become aware of this devaluation, it is
within their power to stop complying with the programme. This point is not
simply a philosophical slogan. There is an accumulating body of psychological
evidence, independent of Marx’s critique of capitalism, that life lived on the
consumption treadmill is not only unsatisfying, but also damaging to one’s
ability to experience the beauty of the world, to form loving and rewarding
relationships, to building trust, and to being able to work together towards life-
valuable goals (Kasser, 2002). Thus, while I am clearly committed to a belief in
the continuing relevance of a qualified Marxist critique of capitalism, the harm
to life value that underlies my argument can be, and is, appreciated from other
perspectives. Instead of being dogmatically closed, my argument is open to any
perspective allied in the task of diagnosing the depth structure of the problem
and encouraging multiple forms of refusal to comply with its orders. It is only
on the basis of this normative transformation of the experience of the potential
life value of empty time that a genuine experience of free time is possible. That
changed experience, however, can be had independently of revolutionary
changes in the social order (and is, in fact, a precondition to any social being in
fact progressive).
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 Free time as a necessary condition of free life

Before turning to the nature of the experience of time as free let me sum up
the argument in its full philosophical depth. As terrestrial life is all we have
reason to hope for, and life on earth is essentially lifetime, the desire to ‘kill
time’ is in a real and not only metaphorical sense a desire to kill life. It is an
expression, not of being’s unbearable lightness, but its unbearable repetitive-
ness: a distorted psychic revolt against the emptiness and essentially life-
valueless nature of activity in advanced capitalism. If people approached life
with Camus’ arguments in mind, boredom should be impossible: 70 or 80 years
and an eternity of nothingness makes boredom a luxury no one can afford.
And yet Adorno describes a ubiquitous disposition in contemporary society.
Susceptibility to this disposition is best understood not as a condemnation of
workers who have failed in their ‘historical mission’, but as social evidence of
the reality of the harm to the life value of people’s activity caused by the rule of
abstract time over their psychic, working and non-working lifetime.

Free Time as Free Life-value Realization

The political implication of the forgoing analysis is this: if the demand for
free time today is simply a demand for empty time instead of a demand for
a changed experience of the structure and value of lifetime, the problem of
modularization and the instrumentalization of human activity by the money-
value system is neither challenged nor solved. As an essential component of
a good life, free time is not first and foremost a quantity of empty time, but a
changed experience, not of time in the abstract, but of time within the social
field in which one becomes self-conscious and develops one’s life projects.
Conscious human life may be understood at a very general level as an arc of
potentialities, mediated by the social conditions in which one becomes conscious
of oneself. In a society organized so as to make possible good lives, the range of
potentialities at birth should be maximally open. As Camus observes, ‘youth is
above all a collection of possibilities’ (Camus, 1995, p. 123). What must be
added to bring out the full normative significance of this claim is that the
richness of the collection depends on the ruling system of value within which
one becomes conscious of oneself. If one simply internalizes the ruling money-
value system, then the only possibilities to which one will be open are
possibilities for making and spending money. Once that value system has been
internalized, lifetime tends to be regarded as a scarce resource to be ‘spent’
wisely. The vast possibilities for realizing wider and deeper ranges of life
activity are immediately foreclosed by that self-understanding.
As I noted in the first section, however, a good life cannot be determined solely
by a quantitative standard of maximal experience and activity. Many activities
that human beings engage in can be harmful to other humans, to other living
things, to the social and natural worlds that we inhabit and depend upon.
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 Noonan

Moreover, many experiences, as the analysis of time in consumer society reveals,

are momentarily pleasurable but depend upon people being treated as instruments
of capitalist commodity circuits and make no real contribution either to an
individually meaningful life or the social conditions of meaningful lives for others.
Shopping might help existing capitalist economies, but existing capitalist
economies only function by treating people and nature as tools for their own
development and expansion. Shopping demands no effort, leaves no objective
trace of the person who devotes his or her life to it, does not contribute to their
individuation, and enables in others no meaningful capability realization either.
When the argument shifts from a general critique of the structure of time in
advanced capitalism to a critique of what people appear to choose to do within
that matrix, it becomes possible to object to it that it is less about free time and
more about a moralizing drive to tell everyone else how to live. Obviating that
objection requires the argument to consider more fully than it has (and than the
existential experience of time ever does) the relationship between the ego and the
natural and social worlds within which it lives and upon which it depends.
The classical and neo-liberal belief that human beings are abstract ‘wanting
things’ whose life consists of a series of autonomous choices and whose ‘good’
consists in amassing as many of the objects of those choices as possible
presupposes what must be explained – the material existence of the ego in the
first place (Brecher, 1998). Liberalism in these variants consistently assumes the
existence of independent adult egos with no attention paid to the material
(natural and social) conditions of the birth, growth, development and educa-
tion of those atomic abstractions. Because the independence of the ego is
assumed without argument, the extraordinary complexity of the life-sustaining
interdependencies, interconnections and interactions upon which individual life
depends are ignored. Because these interdependencies are ignored, it appears to
be the height of tyranny to question any of the choices these abstractions make.
Once we reverse the perspective, starting from the real interconnections and
interactions that enable individual life (pregnancy and birth, care while young,
ongoing access to natural need-satisfiers, institutional structures in which
socio-cultural requirements of healthy ego development and so on) it becomes
clear that individual freedom is an achievement of social organization rather
than an a priori premise of argument. The full meaning of Marx’s claim that
the ‘individual is the social being’ is spelled out in McMurtry’s explanation of
the social grounds of individual freedom (Marx, 1975, p. 299). As he argues,
‘the social level of life organization in its full life-protective evolution is the
basis and guardian of individual life from which the individual person
differentiates as a unique and unrepeatable bearer of life value’ (McMurtry,
1998, p. 89). Once the real relationship between social life organization and
individual life value has been clarified we can understand the necessity of
distinguishing free time from empty time.
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 Free time as a necessary condition of free life

Where philosophy is deployed critically to expose the rule of a system of

social value that is manifestly harmful to those who live within it, its goal is not
to attack the decisions that people make in the abstract, but to open their
consciousness towards suppressed possibilities that would lead to more
enriching choices, both for themselves and the social world upon which their
selves depend. A ‘wasted’ life, in colloquial expression, is one in which little of
importance is accomplished. But lives can be wasted in different ways. Some
people, fortunate to be born into social circumstances that could easily meet the
social and natural conditions of capability development, realization and enjoy-
ment, chose to serve themselves and do nothing to create a more ‘coherently
inclusive range of life value’, to recall McMurtry’s criterion. For most people,
however, life is wasted not by choice but because of failures in social
organization to satisfy the life requirements that serve as the natural and social
conditions of possibility of regarding one’s future as an open set of possibilities
for creating life value. In either case, however, the problem cannot be addressed
if people do not recognize the wastage, and they cannot recognize the wastage
unless they reflect upon their lifetime from a life-grounded perspective.
If society is to solve the problem of lives being wasted, altering our relationship
to the ruling value system is essential. Altering our relationship to the ruling
system of value, in turn, is impossible without altering the experience of time it
generates. While ultimately the political perspective of this article looks beyond the
current structures of rule and power towards a fundamentally different form of
social organization, it is impossible within the parameters of an essay to provide
an even minimally plausible defence of the possibility of wholesale social change.
As I have noted throughout the argument, however, there are spaces even within
the rule of money value where changed experience and activity is possible. All that
is really required to change experience and activity consciousness of the existence
of the life ground of value that persists beneath the prevailing structures of power
and wealth. No society can completely alienate itself from the life ground of value,
because to do so would be to undermine the very conditions of human life
maintenance. As I have argued however, human life is not simply physical
existence, in its highest value it is life activity that produces more life value in ever
wider ranges. As human life activity is essentially temporal, connecting in
consciousness with the life ground of value necessarily changes our experience of
time, and in changing our experience of time, carries with it changes in our
understanding of what truly valuable uses of it are.
Time is the matrix within which human lives develop their content. Lives are
richer or poorer, better or worse, according to the range and depth of the
capabilities realized within that matrix. Where the ruling money-value system
governs the experience of time it is experienced as a structure that coerces
activity, whether inside or outside the workplace. Yet when people really pause
to reflect on their life activity within that sort of coercive structure the harm it
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 Noonan

causes cannot be denied. This harm is evident in higher stress levels, in more
combative family relationships, in social pathologies like drug and alcohol
addiction, in ignoring friendships, and by avoiding taking on projects that
improve the life value of others because one has been exhausted by the time
demands of work. Recognizing this structure of harm (which requires only
reflection on experience, not on adopting any particular political or philoso-
phical theory) is at the same time to recognize, even if informally, the life-
grounded alternative. The life ground is the implicit basis upon which the harm
is recognized. Its positive expression is the release of the experience of lifetime
towards widening our experience of the natural and created worlds, of the lives
of others, the unsurpassable joys of human interconnection and interaction
that open up beyond the instrumental and exploitative relations typical of life
under the rule of money value, and of the ultimate value of individual activity
that links with others in projects of reclaiming lifetime for free self-creation in
forms that give back to the social field of life support that sustains individuals.
The experience of time as free is possible because there is empty time today.
There is abundant natural and social wealth to support basic life functions if
only it were distributed in accordance with life requirements. Even within the
current structure of distribution in the developed capitalist world, however, few
are the people who have no empty time. This empty time is thus the material
condition for opening towards the experience of time as free. This experience
of time is as an open matrix of possibilities for creative self-realization within
a cooperative and need-satisfying social field.
Thus, the life requirements for free time itself is not identical to the need for
rest, re-creation, or doing what one has a mind to do, although it involves all
these elements as part of the substance of a good life that free time makes
possible. It is, as I said, the need to experience time as free, as an open matrix of
possibilities for life activity, in contrast to a closed matrix of programmed
functioning. Beneath collective political projects to reclaim the production and
distribution of wealth from the rule of money value circuits thus lies the need
for people to properly identify the real conditions of their individual being, that
is, to properly identify themselves within the necessary field of interaction and
mutual dependence which is society. To properly understand oneself, one’s
self-identity, is to understand the real interconnections and interactions that
enable one’s ongoing life. Thus to imagine what one wants to do and to be,
within a consciousness properly attuned to the individual life-sustaining social
and natural grounds, is to imagine oneself as free through making individually
meaningful contributions back to the life-sustaining social (and natural) whole.
As McMurtry argues, ‘A healthy overall life-organization y requires y [that
each member] y contribute in some active way to the well-being of the
interrelated whole to which they belong to sustain their own functioning
capacities and those of the larger bodies of which they are living members’
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 Free time as a necessary condition of free life

(McMurtry, 1998, p. 109). Marcuse evokes the same idea when he maintains
that ‘the form of freedom is not merely self-realization and self-determination,
but rather the determination and realization of goals which embrace, protect,
and unite life on earth’ (Marcuse, 1969, p. 46). While the ruling money-value
system threatens these unites, it has not destroyed them, and thus does not
foreclose the social spaces required for anyone to rethink the content of their
life activity and the modes through which they realize the empty time they
have. Out of this rethinking the experience of time as free can be achieved, and
on the basis of that achievement new goals and ruling values can be intelli-
gently pursued, not as mechanical functions of the ‘forces of history’ but as the
conscious and non-sectarian goals of finite beings who, because they have only
one life to live, share a common life concern in living it together freely.

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Date submitted: 5 March 2008

Date accepted: 12 May 2008

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