Fear of Free Time

"...and nothing else"

"...for if the two other imperial Unions will probably
always be superior to the Latin Union in the domain
of economic work and of political struggles, one is
entitled to suppose that they will never know how to
devote themselves to the perfection of their leisure
as could, under favorable circumstances, the unified
Latin West."
Alexandre Kojève (1945)

For a long time the expected arc of social development was one which tended to greater degrees of leisure over labour, and to a steadily rising level of material abundance to be enjoyed by an ever-freer, ever-greater population; the “pursuit of happiness” became in the last century a universal directive and verifiable indicator of the development & maturation of the economy, with the concepts of joy and freedom bound in a real movement toward common wealth and prosperity; freedom and spending power entirely synonymous, the notion of conditioned spending power (i.e. wage labour) became to some as spurious an ideal as conditioned freedom, or freedom “within limits” — formally the notion of (pure) freedom was conceived as a conceptual benchmark for the further development of civilisation, and everything tended towards it as a matter of course, of greater or lesser realisations of the form; freedom as Absolute, unattainable in actuality while nevertheless being the persistent object towards which history moved at faster and faster rates, a category without value and yet the wellspring of all political values. The shepherds of our civilisation have abandoned this conception for one reason or another, and the cause of freedom as leisure-over-labour has become an increasingly minority position, even amongst the Fabian Society’s post-Keynesian forecasts and policy directives, the forebears of which we owe a debt for the past popular conception of grounding economic development in the promise of reduced labour time. The reason this has been abandoned isn't due to lack of imagination, so much as an irreversible disintegration of optimism and comradely aspirations into terminal fear, a fear of what the real reduction in labour-time might entail. It isn't that people are really denying the possibility, or even the likelihood, of an end to work, but rather denying the quality or value of that potential state of affairs. Rather than oppose free time from the point of view of its economic viability, they oppose free time because of the perceived social consequences, fear of a descent into a perverse pleasure-seeking as the dominant mode of life, the pursuit of happiness seen as something suspicious, as if beneath the term lies a secret command to masturbate. A devastated media ecology serves as evidence for why people must be forced to do some kind of work or another, because the alternative appears so much worse; perhaps this argument might stand if the work being done by the majority was in any way generative or productive, but in practical terms there's no meaningful difference between the kinds of predominant leisure and labour activities with regard to all extant standards of value generation — at heart the leisure time of the majority is of the same substance as their labour time in that it is without value, is a dead leisure.

In Aristotle's schema leisure is placed above labour, time cleared for the ends of contemplation, free time as the more generative/productive form of time-spent; there is an ‘end’, an ‘objective’ to this leisure beyond consumption and stimulation for its own sake, Wisdom. Archaic free time as time for contemplation is however still necessitated by the labour time of the slave conditioning the leisure of the Master. Modern experience subsumes the Master/Slave into a grey opacity, where slavery and mastery as modes of time-spent are entangled and obscure, aspects of each and the impressions of the period of slave society are very much present and contemporary, as indelible wounds in the process of historical development; if temporal experience can be distilled into these two pure forms of Mastery & Slavery, then to pick apart the instances of time spent “in Mastery” versus time spent “in slavery” is difficult and time-consuming, and doesn't immediately lend itself to a rigorous or systematic method of unravelling, but of a confused and ultimately meaningless exercise. Increasingly from the Right the argument is put forward to reignite the Master/Slave dialectic in black and white terms against the grey complexity of modern relations of production; the honest demand for clarity of present conditions delivers them to the desire to impose a ‘New Antiquity’ corresponding to their conception of the birth of civilisation, as an entirely arbitrary and meaningless imposition of a sovereign minority onto the whole human mass; however, the archaic relations of production with its conception of free time as “ceaseless time carved out for the pursuit of Wisdom”, supported by slave labour, met in time a definite threshold wherein the premises of that pursuit by those means was no longer viable, and was superseded by higher forms of the organisation of labour and leisure.

If civilisation was actually a strange and unconditional imposition from an elite minority onto the blind and ignorant majority, dominion of the notion of ‘civilisation’ has certainly slipped from their grasp, and is still an entirely open question as to its generative agents. Any attempt to engender a ‘repetition’ of this dubious mythic anthropogenesis would amount most likely to a brief despotic anachronism, and would disappear far quicker than its first iteration without truly re-establishing the historical process — the leisure and liberty of the Master remains a conditioned liberty, against which most must work ceaselessly for that realisation. Liberty as a dependency on slave labour does not then describe real liberty, but a volatile and anxious form of partial and conditioned liberty dependent on the persistence of slave unconsciousness, a historically unsustainable social arrangement inevitably mired in anxiety and fear of the majority; a suppressive apparatus is required, a militarised strata, which further compounds the anxiety of the Masters. Leisure time conditioned on labour, whether the wage labour of modern individuals or the slave labour of antiquity, is not then properly leisure time. If, as Aristotle claimed, free time is for the ends of Wisdom, then from the Master's point of view, the truly visionary Master, it becomes imperative to abolish slavery or else be abolished by it, as the existence of slaves is inevitably an impediment to his own coming to Wisdom - but the Master is incapable of such vision, cut off as he is from working, unable to transform himself because he is a 'satisfied' creature, or rather is satisfied not by himself but by another which he cannot see himself in or cohere himself to.

Attempts to reforge classical despotism by force would not arrive at an end to the historical process, or even its controlled rebirth, but invariably the domination of models and schemas equally inadequate for the pursuit of Wisdom as those at present. At most this speculative regime would open exciting and novel catastrophic horizons as all prior voluntarist regimes have done, prying the decadent order apart to unleash latent potential processes to invariably run far ahead and beyond the intended parameters of their generative agents toward the recapitulation and imminent reversal of their founding premises. The fundamental opposition of Master/Slave recodified in an anti-modern order would fall victim to the processes which initiated it - ultimately what is constituted by the proposition of a New Antiquity is identical in terms of activity to the socialist’s revolution or the futurist’s war. A certain catastrophe, whoever its agents are and to whatever desired ends, is politically neutral and identical to any other catastrophe so far as fundamental consequence is concerned. Determination lies in the breakdown of present models and methods of analysis and the return to zero of all hitherto relevant schematics. More fulfilling then is surely the pursuit of novelty, the humiliation of the Gurus and the modellers? Rather than voluntary initiation of catastrophe (either for contrived political ends,or for its own sake), there is the potential for a kind of cold catastrophic optimism animating a project other than despotism (at least of the Rightist type) - instead of attempting to annihilate the post-Enlightenment condition by means of a proactive & militant reading of Greek classics, rather one might opt for an intensification and radicalisation of the Enlightenment, a paradoxical maintenance and reformulation of the Social and of the State against its enemies. The principle lesson of Fascism and Soviet Marxism is that catastrophic episodes fade, and exhilaration turns to boredom very quickly if not capitulated to a perverse anxious 'outward expansion', a catastrophic obesity of blood-gorging and expulsion. To sweep away anxiety, then, if its right to say our period is determined by ambiguous telos and entangled, convoluted complexes of social relations which only baffles the modellers who study & reproduce them, requires a scandal more penetrative than New Antiquity - more because it harnesses rather than interrupts or suspends the catastrophic currents which engender it.

A radicalisation instead of a refusal of the high modern aspiration for persistent growth, ephemeralisation, and the elimination of unnecessary labour time. Radicalisation not in the sense of intensifying the already-happening industrial automation process, but a shift from industry to governance as the focus of automation advocacy. Our ‘revolution’ is then to marry the presently occurring transformation in the forces of production with an adequate social/civic form which is the perfection of the State, the elimination of human error from administration and the end of bureaucracy and talking shops. This offers something of a direction for the Western countries which have for a long time lacked a kind of civic commitment that might motivate people to look up from their particular every-day troubles, and find a common set of problems to concern themselves with. The kind of AI infrastructure needed for a complete overhaul of the present complexes of state power in my country would require an unleashing of energy output, which the mainstream AI industry unanimously agrees requires accelerated nuclearisation. As Sam Dumitriu notes in a recent Substack article, the major impediment to the twin necessities of AI infrastructure and accelerated energy output is state bureaucracy itself:

“Britain is the most expensive place to build a nuclear power station in the world. Hinkley Point C, currently under construction, will cost 6 times more to build per megawatt than its South Korean equivalent. France and Finland, which use the same reactor design as us, build for about 50% less than us per megawatt… Developers EDF were forced to produce a more than 30,000 page long environmental impact assessment to win planning permission for Hinkley Point C… Beyond planning, there is the problem that our regulators treat nuclear differently to any other technology when it comes to safety.”

Typical New Class decadence! The vicious circle of British regulation, that on the one hand AI might liberate us from the reactionary pig-headedness of the regulator-planner strata, and on the other that it is precisely this strata who ensure (albeit unaware) that Britain remains trapped in a state of energetic & speculative stagnation. The presence of the myopic regulator-planner cabal is a reactionary knot around the country's potential, out of step with our mythic (Victorian-Fabian) self-concept as a people determined by cold rationality, industrial revolutionary progressivism, and technical prestige. What this condition reveals is a reversal of the function of regulation/planning, the ideal of rationality reversed by its excess. So before laying the case out properly let's briefly derail and indulge in a little New Class critique. Marx asserted that the formation of capitalism proper is historically determined by the coming together private competitors into a hegemonic bloc, a ‘general capitalist’:

Marx writes that “by proclaiming the dissolution of the hitherto existing world order the proletariat merely states the secret of its own existence, for it is in fact the dissolution of that world order.” Capital being the force that at once binds workers into a collectivity and encourages its own self-dissolution strips bare the kernel of the capitalist mode of production which both the Communist political movement and the corporate system aimed to overcome, albeit under different justifications, for different ends, and with different orientations regarding how economic rationalisation was to occur (however both accounted for by Marx: the Real Movement, etc). EdBerg in his Metacartel writings (the only accurate term to describe the thing pulling the levers) notes that “it was the introduction of the trusts, large-scale combines integrating industrial and financial capital under new monopolistic form, that was heralded as the machine to bring [the transition between 19th & 20th Centuries] to its close,” the trust being at its heart an attempt to arrive at some level of rational economic stability while at the same time being “a bid to increase the rate of profit at all costs”, a formal admittance of the necessity of economic organisation and the further consolidation of the ‘general capitalist’. However this objective step towards the increased generalisation of the capitalist class, the consolidation of the ‘class-as-class’ produces the further paradox of the socialisation of property; something which itself begins the secret construction of a socialist mode of production within capitalism. Marx in Capital 3: “[the] result of the ultimate development of capitalist production is a necessary transitional phase towards the reconversion of capital into the property of producers, although no longer as the private property of the individual producers, but rather as the property of associated producers, as outright social property… the stock company is a transition toward the conversion of all functions in the reproduction process which still remain linked with capitalist property, into mere functions of associated producers, into social functions.” As the capitalist class fights to persist and properly establish its ‘general’ interest, it proceeds to dismantle itself. The process of generalisation constitutes the transition from a competitive to associative (socialised) mode of production: “This is the abolition of the capitalist mode of production within the capitalist mode of production itself, and hence a self-dissolving contradiction, which prima facie represents a mere phase of transition to a new form of production.” What the ‘capitalist’ is reduced to in the generalisation-dismantling of its class is, on a higher level, a function of asset management and bureaucratic planning, an instance in a logic which no longer places at its centre the mere accumulation of more money via commodity production (but nevertheless permits profit, as well as 'proletarian-coded' or 'work-themed' behaviour as sublated instance, just as the British Parliamentary regime permits the persistence of Monarchy), and on a lower level (namely that of the petit bourgeois) a levelling wherein the capitalist’s property becomes objectively expropriated amidst cartelisation and bureaucratic-managerial capture. This levelling conjoins the small capitalist and the proletarian worker, complexifies the antagonism between labour and capital toward political alignment; the cause of productivity against lethargy, which was essential to Trump's win the other day: “To achieve this rapid reduction in energy costs, I will declare a national emergency to allow us to dramatically increase energy production, generation and supply, which Comrade Kamala has destroyed”.

This is what gives the demand for administrative automation its immediate sensical political dimension: the clarification of irrationality/hyperrationality at the commanding heights of state power, being the disembodied New Class despotism as a kind of Bonapartism-without-Bonaparte where the State begins to move by itself, not towards its own ends, but rather blindly and unreasonably. The New Class has ushered in the age of Western Socialism, and in their ignorance they continue to act as if blind market forces still dominate, so they do very little with the immense transformative power they wield. If the present regime is a headless Bonapartism, then the obvious solution is Napoleon, a reversal of Lenin's directive to smash the readymade state machinery; now the command is to lay claim, and to cut. Reviving governance against its double, the aimless planning-regulatory system, becomes then the impetus for the great project of our time; a Year Zero event in the State, a brief period of necessary arbitration & clarification of the terms of our condition by a political leader or a disciplined, articulate political organisation. A phase such as this, resembling Socialist primitive accumulation, or the early phases of the LKY regime, or the Park regime, or the De Gaulle regime, (whoever you like); the idea of the Five Year Plan, or something like it — this becomes the ground of political thinking & motivation at once novel and within a firm tradition of industrial-technical progressivism, a means to cut like a razor through all bureaucratic coagulations and spectral ideological blockages. The cause of leisure is ultimately for the perfection of the State, the 'Administration of Things' - under no other condition could Time be properly considered Free. To pursue as Western civic Logos a leisure that is 'converted' from a negative to positive value (from "not-work" to Free Time), the conversion of dead into living leisure; the horizon of an emboldened West is one which aims for the absolute quantitative increase in leisure (=the qualitative transformation of time).

In his Aesthetic Education (1795) Certified Free Timer Friedrich Schiller isolates a double movement of emancipation and enslavement brought by technical development & enlightenment, that through a certain frame assumed in modernity (the cold study of nature afforded by modern technique) a bifurcated decadence emerges: "The child of nature, when he breaks loose, turns into a madman; the creature of civilisation into a knave." For Schiller the degeneration of the State and civil society is a symptom of its own refining-development, the division of 'thought' as such into discrete disciplines which at once consolidate themselves and so extend thinking through that consolidation, while at the same time calcifying, building ramparts against the risk of possible dilution and cross-contamination. The splintering-apart of the disciplines then necessitates their recombination or recoherence in the further development of the State, making the disciplines sensical and grounded in common purpose. This common cause by which we are delivered to singular Thought is the civic movement that converts 'dead' into living leisure.

To Schiller's double movement of coherence/disintegration in the development of the State, we have a corresponding 'material' schema in Marx with the distinction between forms of labour by their generating use versus exchange value: "While labour which creates exchange values is abstract, universal and homogeneous, labour which produces use values is concrete and special and is made up of an endless variety of kinds of labour according to the way in which and the material to which it is applied"; for Baudrillard this passage from Critique provides us in outline with a method for unearthing the conspiracy of labour/productivity itself:

"Here we rediscover the moment of use value: concrete, differentiated, and incommensurable. In contrast to the quantitative measure of labour power, labour use value, remains nothing more or less than a qualitative potentiality... There is, moreover, a profound enigma throughout the articulation of Marx's theory : how is surplus value born? How can labour power, by definition qualitative, generate a measurable actualization? One would have to assume that the 'dialectical' opposition of quantity and quality expresses only an apparent movement."

Elsewhere Baudrillard further condemns the concept of the labourer and labour power as merely an axiom of the machinic-productive society: "Even if [salary and labour power] were equivalent, even if salaries were abolished... man would still be marked by this axiom, by this destiny of production, by this sacrament of labour", that the worker is "producing in order to mark, producing in order to reproduce the marked man." This phantasmic regime is made ever more unsettling in the present period, where full automation of labour is a coherent reality; what is more, this line of inquiry might just as easily be applied to the figure of the politician or the civil servant, who equally 'works' to reproduce the mark of the administrator. In Britain and in the West more generally, the politician finds him or herself unsettled by (amongst other things) ever-rising trends of apathy leaving them to legislate on ever slimmer, ever more dubious mandates - to make up for this clearer and clearer sign of terminally receding legitimacy the politician legislates harder, as the worker works harder for the sake of reproducing the mark of his/her labouring (Trade Unions then are the most perverse kind of chain gang). This phenomenon of insecurity is a particular feature of the contemporary West quite alien to the New East. In China legislators can afford to spend significant time in recess and without passing laws, in sharp distinction to the European or the American lawmaker who is determined by neurotic persistence and little else; parliaments must be seen to be doing things as the worker must look busy, even to the point of actually busying him or herself to no end but the reproduction of an enchanted bracketed agency against the cold clarity of Free Time; in the 19th Century certain forms of romantic production emerged aiming to mend the wound that machinic production dealt, production sustaining the memory of 'artisanal' lines severed by the advent of capitalism. Artisanal labour sustained by sentimentality; this is the condition Western parliaments suffer today, reduced essentially to reactionary trinkets of a by-gone age, reproduced at ever-declining quality for an ever-dwindling market. There's no reason to keep these people around doing this meaningless busy-work when computers could do it faster and better. If for nothing else, at least it'd free up some money to Balance The Budget.