Thinking in the wake of Martin Hägglund’s This Life: Secular Life and SpiritualFreedom
If we had all the time in the world, if we were immortal,
then it wouldn’t matter how we spent our time, for there would always be more
of it. But if life is short, then it matters a lot. If we and the people we love are mortal and can die at
any moment – and will die at some moment – then every
day and every minute of our finite lives is supremely important. How, then,
should we arrange our lives together so that the time of our brief lives is
well spent?
In view of our mortality, wouldn’t we want to spend as much of our allotted time as possible
doing things we want to do, that are worth doing for their own sake, and to
minimize the time we spend doing things we have
to do? There is the realm of freedom and the realm of necessity. The realm of
necessity is what we have to do
whether we want to or not; it includes the activities necessary for maintaining
life: cleaning; caring for children, the ill, the injured, and the aged;
building and maintaining dwellings and infrastructure; and growing and
preparing food belong to the realm of necessity. Some people may enjoy this
work, but it has to be done whether we enjoy it or not. The realm of freedom, on the other hand, consists of
the activities we choose to do
because they are valuable in themselves: athletic activities, art, music,
literature, science, and philosophy are examples.[1]
The realm of necessity is unavoidable in any society: stuff
that has to be done regardless of whether anyone would choose to do it. There
are different ways of getting people to do such work. The Greeks and Romans
built their empires with the power of people they enslaved; so did American
capitalism. Thus citizens, especially the elites, were free to engage in the
arts, sciences, and, of course, politics. Then there are various ways of tying
the lower classes to the land, as in feudalism and sharecropping, in which what
peasants produce must be shared with upper classes, again leaving the well-born
with time to pursue what seemed to them most valuable, such as explaining why
God wanted things to be this way.
Does capitalism give us all the right to choose how we shall
spend our time? Capitalism got its wealth in the first place by means of
slavery in the US and the Caribbean, rapacious colonialism in Africa and
Central and South America, and the dispossession of native peoples in the US
and elsewhere. Wage labor, though, became the primary way for capital to make
money. But although wage labor is called “free” labor, to set it apart from
slavery, it is more perceptive to call it wage
slavery. Whatever job we do for a
wage becomes part of our realm of necessity, not only because we have to do it
to stay alive, but because while we’re at work, we are under the dictatorship
of our employer. Even the owners and managers of capital, in spite of their
wealth, are not free from the demands of capital which requires them to grow
their capital by ceaselessly competing for investment opportunities – more
land, more resources, more labor and more consumers to exploit. Where can you rest
your eyes on things and activities that are not in some way exploited by
capital? Like a cancer on the living earth, capital sucks everything, including the time of our lives, into
its grasp to the point that the survival of life, and certainly civilized life,
is in question.
Is there a way of organizing a society that would expand the
realm of freedom and shrink the realm of necessity, so that more of our time
would be our own and not under control of others whose interests are opposed to
our own? Let’s consider Democratic Socialism as it is laid out in three
principles by Martin Hägglund in his book This
Life.
First, we make it the purpose of our society to liberate our
time from the realm of necessity, to expand the time in which we do what we,
individually and collectively, choose to do.
Second, the means of production, the goods and resources we
need to maintain our lives together, must be owned and managed democratically,
for otherwise we do not control the valuable time of our lives as the first
principle requires.
The third principle is familiar: From each according to our abilities,
to each according our needs. Unless we know our needs will be met, we cannot
freely choose how to spend our time, and we cannot know that our needs will be
met unless we cooperate in meeting these needs to the best of our ability. What
are our needs? Not only what we have to have just to live, but what we need to
flourish, and flourish together. We need the means to develop our abilities –
our abilities to do the things we find satisfying and the abilities to work
together as citizens of a fully democratic society.
Such a society will reduce and transform necessary labor in
three ways:
First, a great deal of necessary labor can be done in the
realm of freedom when we no longer have to worry about making a living by
selling the time of our lives to others. Child care, gardening, and
architecture are socially necessary activities, but many people love to do them
for their own sake, and would do so in a free society.
Second, the problem with unpleasant but necessary labor
today is that those who do it do it because they need the money in order to
survive; that makes it hard to “identify with the social purpose of what they
are doing.” In a cooperative society, socially necessary labor is “shared by
members of society on the basis of their abilities and commitments, with the
explicit purpose of contributing to a common good that everyone can recognize
as” making their lives better.[2]
Third, since we all participate in necessary labor, we will
have good reason to develop and deploy labor-saving technology, whose purpose
now would not be to eliminate jobs that people need, but to decrease and
enhance the amount of time we spend doing things we have to do.
In capitalist society, most people at some level feel
alienated from a society in which so much of the short time we have to live
must be given over to doing things that we do not choose to do. We cannot feel
at home in a society that is governed, economically and politically, by forces
unconcerned with our welfare. People do what they can to carve out a space in
this unfriendly space where they can feel more or less safe and comfortable –
though many millions of us, some of whom you can see living on our streets, are
unable to achieve even this. But very few of us feel any sense of owning or
belonging to this society. Democratic Socialism will be the first society that is truly of the people, by the
people, and for the people.
Only such a society has a shot at not perishing
from the earth.
[1] Any of these can become necessary.
For example, if one’s job is making music, then you have to produce music
whether you want to or not. Conversely, something that typically belongs to the
realm of necessity can become enjoyable and done for its own sake: gardening or
childcare, for example. But from the perspective of society as a whole, growing
and preparing food is socially necessary: someone has to do it, while music,
art and philosophy can and will be done by those who choose them.
[2] Hägglund, This Life, p. 310.
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