In the previous report to the inter-federal meeting in Milan last June, a description was given of ‘Marx’s schema for the simple reproduction of fixed and circulating capital’. In it (see Il Programma Comunista, no. 20 of 2-11-1962), the absolute rate of surplus value, s/v, is highlighted, which is always assumed to be equal to 100%, and the annual rate of surplus value, surplus value in the year divided by variable capital advanced in the first turnover, a rate that reaches, instead, up to 1000%.

The different, lower annual rate in department II – production of consumer goods – compared to the first is due to the slower rate of capital turnover in department II compared to the first. The annual rate is therefore greater by as many times as there are annual capital turnovers. Thus the more rapid process of industry than of agriculture is explained.

The nature of capital is also highlighted. For bourgeois economists and also opportunists (cf. the Russians in particular), capital has an arcane provenance, from which they derive the social and political programme of collaboration between capital and labour. In reality, everything is labour, and the Jesuitical theory that profit is the ‘reward’ to capital advanced is clearly refuted by a careful reading of Marx’s schema. In fact the reconstitution, in the ten-year schema, of fixed capital is nothing more than setting aside of a share of labour in its natural form, which in the mercantile and monetary mechanism takes the form of money. Going back to the historical origins of this reconstitution, we would simply be retracing the history of the accumulation of human labour, which the bourgeois economist considers only as accumulation of capital that is lost in the mists of past centuries. The trick and deception lies in the fact that the producing class, the industrial and agricultural proletariat, is deprived of control over the product of its labour; and this phenomenon – private appropriation – gives the impression that the product has a provenance different from what it actually has.

It seems that the advance payment has been in money, gold; but neither money nor gold can be transformed into products of various materials and shapes. Gold and money are the phenomenal form, the general equivalent assumed by extorted labour, crystallised in machines, plants, and tools.

Communism is the return to the society of producers of the means of production and products, of which it has been deprived. An act of force, which has deprived a part of society of ownership of the means of production and products, must be answered by a new act of force to regain possession of them. And that is the task of the communist revolution.

Having established that everything is labour, it is also true that the level of production depends on the efficacy of labour, that is, on the productivity of labour, on the capacity that labour has to produce in a given time under given conditions.

In this regard, it is irrelevant whether we consider the simple or expanded production of commodities, since the laws that preside over production in the capitalist mode of production apply equally to both. Thus, ‘waste’ will not only be waste of labour, and more precisely of labour time, and from a quantitative and qualitative point of view, it will occur primarily in the production phase, but also, taking the form of money-capital in the mercantile mechanism, in the phase of distribution. Therefore: waste of time in the production phase and waste of time in the circulation phase.

The current historical period of exaltation of the productive forces places us into the real conditions outlined in point B) of Section IV of Chapter 17 of Part V of Capital: ‘Increasing intensity and productiveness of labour with simultaneous shortening of the working-day’.

In the sections preceding IV, Marx shows how the different combinations of productivity, labour intensity, and of the working day do not alter the capitalist mode of production in any way, even when (Section III) ‘Productiveness and Intensity of Labour Constant’ the working day is shortened, and even when (Section I) ‘it is possible with an increasing productiveness of labour, for the price of labour-power to keep on falling, and yet this fall to be accompanied by a constant growth in the mass of the labourer’s means of subsistence’.

Because, in the latter case, ‘the fall in the value of labour-power would cause a corresponding rise of surplus-value, and thus the abyss between the labourer's position and that of the capitalist would keep widening’. In the former case, the reduction in the working day follows or precedes ‘a change in the productiveness and intensity of labour’, so that there is a compensation between necessary labour and surplus labour. (See developments in Abacus of Marxist Economics, pp. 15-17).

In the capitalist mode of production, labour time consists of necessary labour time and surplus labour time. Necessary labour time is the time required for the reconstitution of labour power, and is for the workers; surplus labour, on the other hand, is the working time for the capitalist, or more precisely for capital. The tendency is therefore to reduce necessary labour to zero and to extend surplus labour to the maximum. Naturally, ‘the minimum length of the working-day is fixed by this necessary but contractile portion of it’ (italics in the text). If the entire working day were reduced to that part, surplus labour would disappear, which is impossible under the regime of capital. ‘Only by suppressing the capitalist form of production could the length of the working-day be reduced to the necessary labour time’ (italics in the text).

Firstly, it should be emphasised how Marx in no way considers the shortening of the duration of the working day or the increased consumption capacity of the working class under the capitalist regime to be a substantial change in the capitalist mode of production. Any economic or working condition gain under capitalism is bent to the needs of preserving the capitalist mode of production itself. The real achievement would be the transformation of the working day into necessary labour time, but, Marx warns, this is realisable only by ‘suppressing the capitalist form of production’. It is easily deduced that this substantial social transformation, the true and unmistakable characteristic of communism, cannot be achieved through continuous constant partial victories in the economic field, let alone through reforms, as the opportunists of today and yesterday, together with Gramsci’s ordinovism and its derivatives, would have us believe, but only after the ‘elimination’ of capitalism tout court; that is, after the destruction of every form of the rule of capital, and above all after the destruction of the capitalist State.

The communist assumption does not rest on a fallacious change in political appearances, whereby a trivial change of guard at the bureaucratic and parliamentary top of the State is then passed off as communist. Marx unequivocally characterises communist society (despite those who argue that the Master limited himself to criticising and analysing capitalism) starting precisely from the characteristics of the capitalist mode of production. ‘The more the productiveness of labour increases, the more can the working-day be shortened; and the more the working-day is shortened, the more can the intensity of labour increase’: in other words, labour productivity can shorten the duration of the working day and allow for an increase in the intensity of labour, provided, however, that labour productivity grows not through an increase in labour agony, but through a radical change in the productive form. Marx lists three conditions for realising the communist assumption: 1) ‘economy of the means of production’; 2) ‘the avoidance of all useless labour’; 3) ‘generalisation of labour’, i.e. proportional distribution of labour ‘among all the able-bodied members of society’.

This is the dialectical antithesis to the capitalist thesis, in which the squandering of labour is realised. To clarify, let us give this example.

According to statistics from 1959, Italy’s population was 50.7 million, of which 17.2 million were employed in the four sectors of industry, commerce, agriculture, and services, excluding entrepreneurs, military personnel, and professionals. The working population, aged between 15 and 65, was 33.5 million. This means that almost half of the working population is excluded from working activity, ignoring for now the distinction between productive and non-productive activity. For the same period, the gross product was 16,830 billion lire, which divided by the 17.2 million people in work gives a gross product per capita of 978,000 lire. Considering only the ‘generalisation of labour’, in order to produce 16,830 billion lire, instead of 17.2 million employees, 33.5 million would have been needed, and the per capita product would have been 500,000 lire, about half; that is to say, the effort expended would have been about half. Assuming that the working day consists of 8 hours, only 4 hours would have been enough to produce the same amount of products. And this only by extending the ‘generalisation of labour’ ‘among all the able-bodied members of society’.

If we consider furthermore that, for example, out of 19,577,280 people in employment in 1951, 4,450,534 were engaged in activities that were ‘useless’, such as clerks, merchants, sales representatives, etc. – and only from a quantitative point of view – then the working day for the 33.5 million people capable of work would fall from 4 hours to 3 hours and would drop to 2 hours if we were to take into serious consideration within production those anti-social products, such as tobacco, alcohol, most steel and cement, used unproductively, etc. By contrast, then, 3/4 of the available time of able-bodied men in a position to work is entirely wasted in the capitalist mode of production, with consequences easily observable in terms of human health and the very integrity of the species.

We have seen that the tendency in the capitalist mode of production is to compress the necessary labour time as much as possible and to extend surplus labour as much as possible. Generalising, then, what we have exemplified, we would have these formulas: \(t\) = total daily labour time = \(n\) (necessary labour time) + \(e\) (surplus labour time); where \(e\) is set equal to zero, \(t\) = \(n\) would follow, i.e. the working day would be reduced to the necessary labour time. In numerical terms, if the working day is 8 hours, let \(n\) = 2 hours be the necessary labour, and \(e\) = 6 hours the surplus labour, it will be deduced that \(e\) = 6 hours are socially wasted, from the standpoint of simple production. If, for example, it suffices that production increase by 10% to meet population growth and to supply the social reserve and accumulation fund, the necessary labour time will grow from 2 hours to 2 hours and 12 minutes per day, still avoiding the waste of as much as 5 hours and 48 minutes per day.

It is clear that the whole argument has been made to demonstrate the ‘waste’ of productive forces under capitalism, then proceeding, with bourgeois mentality and habits, to demonstrate the opposite behaviour of communist society. In fact, once surplus labour is eliminated, the entire life of the human species will consist of necessary labour time, and more precisely, life itself will be truly necessary to society for itself, when it produces material means, when it thinks, eats, and sleeps. These functions in the capitalist mode of production are performed by the producers solely for capital and for its perpetuation and preservation, both the productive ones and the biological and intellectual ones.

Man will be freed from labour time for capital, which he will recover for himself.

As we have already seen, the greatest squandering of productive forces occurs during the production period. But, given the mercantile mechanism and the money-form that the productive economy takes, a subsequent waste of labour-time energies also occurs during the turnover of capital.

Marx in Book II, establishes that ‘the quantity of the constantly functioning productive capital [is determined] by the ratio of the time of circulation to the time of turnover’. Therefore, let Tp be the working time or production time (the time that elapses from the start of processing to the completion of the first batch of finished products ready for use); Tc, the circulation time (or additional time that passes to send those products to the market and recover their commercial value); T is the total or turnover time, which elapses between the initial advance and the first recovery (compare this with Marx’s aforementioned framework): we will have T = Tp + Tc.

Since these periods, expressed in days or weeks, correspond to a proportional advance of capital, we will refer to those correspondingly disbursed as Kp or active capital (of production proper), Kc or passive capital (circulation or commercial placement), and the total capital necessarily advanced will be K = Kp + Kc.

We shall therefore call the index or degree of waste (resulting from the circulation of capital and the mercantile structure of the economy) the ratio:

i

=

Tc Tp+Tc

=

Tc T

=

Kc Kp+Kc

=

Kc K

Therefore, the degree of waste resulting from the fact of turnover is given by the ratio between the circulation time and the turnover time, or rather between passive capital and the total capital advanced.

This index of waste varies with working time and circulation time, and depending on which of the two is greater, there are (in Marx’s text) three cases: working time greater than circulation time, working time equal to circulation time, working time less than circulation time. The index varies in such a way that it is greater when circulation time is greater than working time.

Readers will allow us to postpone for a moment the question outlined above of that index of waste that derives from the necessity, proper to the capitalist economy, of keeping additional capital immobilised in order to wait, beyond the time of production – physically inevitable because what is not a finished product is not even a consumable product – for the subsequent time of circulation that is necessary for the product to return as money-capital investable in means of production and wages. This demonstration by Marx is a significant part of his argument that the squandering of productive forces is attributable to the money-form and to this alone, whereas in a non-monetary form (communist society) this and many other sectors that are ‘components’ of total waste would not be present. The difficulty lies in having had to put into monetary and commercial terms a calculation that compares a market and money economy with a purely physical or natural one, such as the one Marx sees happening after the communist revolution, once again taking the bold and ingenious step between what appears to be a disinterested analysis of the present economy and what is the programme for its violent, historical, and political overthrow.

This passage, found in Marx’s papers among a flood of cumbersome files, prompted a note from Engels that has puzzled us for decades and appears in square brackets at the end of Section IV of Chapter XV of the Second Volume of Capital.

The resolution of this apparent contradiction will come in due course.

For now, in order to clarify the issue, we will go back an entire Volume, that is, to chapter XVII of the First Volume, which we have already cited and used in the preceding pages.

This part has already been presented definitively in our ABACUS of Marxist Economics, and therefore in the Elements of Marxist Economics published in Prometeo (original series) and in Programme Communiste in Marseille.

In the Abacus, consult pages 15 and 17 of the First Chapter, which deals with the subject matter of the First Volume. We retain the indices and definitions of quantities, and the symbols, adopted in that exposition. The title we have given is ‘Distribution of the Value Produced by Labour between the Capitalist and the Wage‑Earner’, while the title of the text is ‘Changes of Magnitude in the Price of Labour-Power and in Surplus-Value’. Throughout this treatment, constant capital is abstracted from, which reappears in its value as such in the product, and the other two parts, product-capital and commodity-capital, are considered (an expression that is not identical to that of ‘value produced’), namely wage-capital and surplus value. Perhaps today it should be less difficult to clarify these basic terms of Marx’s economics, given that even our worst enemies not only speak of value added by labour as ‘net product’ but do so in the study of corporate capital and social capital (for them national, even if they speak... Russian). In other words, it is clear to everyone that all value added, or if you like ‘created’, comes from labour, even if we then have to see whether it has become consumable income or surplus value carried over to new capital, a problem that we have posed for a century in its terms.

Now we will see why we have taken the liberty of reporting Marx’s three cases (the first three of the four) in a different order: the third, the second, the first.

A series of setbacks entirely beyond our control prevented us from publishing in the previous issue the full text of the paragraph on waste in Marx, based on the famous Chap. XVII of the First Volume of Marx’s Capital, where the ‘Changes of Magnitude in the Price of Labour-Power and in Surplus-Value’ are studied in four typical cases. To facilitate understanding of this very important point, we repeat here the last small paragraph of the report published in No. 8 of ‘Programma’, and then continue. In our treatment, the first three examples given by Marx are presented in reverse order: thus the third, second, and first; and we explain the reason for this.

Marx examines the variation of three quantities: the duration (in hours) of the working day, the intensity of labour, and the productivity of labour. Now, in the order adopted by us, the first and second cases (working hours and intensity of labour) can be studied quantitatively, as we have done in the Abacus of Marxist Economics, even for a single company or, isolated enterprise, although, with generalised measures, they become, or have historically become, or may become in the future, a social problem for ‘all private companies’, moving from what we have called the Marxist moment, to the second moment. When, on the other hand, the general productivity of labour varies (due to technological, scientific, and other causes), we are fully in the second moment, and the precious text to which we refer opens for us, with luminous insights, the path to the third moment, namely the theory of communist economics, the historical solution to the vile ‘equation of waste’ which is the Revolution.

The three cases of Marx, Chapter XVII of the classic First Volume, produced in the classicity of the drafting by his hands in an unsurpassable form, ensure that we set up, write down, and put down the equation of waste, which is found in all the letters of his pages, which are the original and invariant platform of the class doctrine of the modern proletariat.

If the number of working hours varies while productivity and intensity remain the same, the simplest case is that wages remain unchanged. This entire discussion, as the impeccable author points out, is based on the assumption that prices coincide with values. This means that wages do not vary, whether considered in nominal terms (in money) or as real wages. Our simple little calculation in the Abacus shows that then, as the working day varies, only one thing will vary: (the total product and) the surplus value. If everyone works longer, a greater mass of commodities will be produced, and if prices and wages remain unchanged, what will grow disproportionately will be surplus value, which in the hands of capitalists will give rise to expanded reproduction, to new investments. Not only will the surplus value and profit of enterprises grow, but so will its rate, as has already historically happened (England in the early nineteenth century). The hypothesis that it increases from 8 to 12 hours will bring the surplus value from one third to eight fifteenths of the net product (wages remaining at two thirds), but its rate from one third to a full eight tenths [sic].

From this first case (which is Marx’s third) follows a trivial first-moment conclusion, namely at the company level: if the employer manages to obtain from his workers a greater number of working hours, and the wage remains the same, exploitation will be intensified, a large mass of profit will be available to the capitalist, and even if this does not increase his consumption (the abstinence of classical economists), there will be a large accumulation of additional investable capital, as far as the single company under consideration is concerned.

If the opposite were to happen, i.e. if the working day in that company were reduced without lowering wages, the workers would have an advantage and the employer would either have to reduce his personal consumption or give up any possibility of expanding the factory.

But, through the emergence of worker’s resistance and the socialist movement, this issue soon becomes secondary, that is, the demand that shortens the working day becomes a social conquest and a legal norm.

In previous times, the opposite had occurred, namely an increase in working hours. This occurred at the beginning of the capitalist era. Our text recalls this, as we have noted, for the English period from 1799 to 1815. There was the grand accumulation of young English capitalism, victorious over Napoleon. Note 8 (in the Kautsky edition; in the Dietz edition it is note 16), from the famous anonymous Essays: ‘A principal cause of the increase of capital, during the war, proceeded from the greater exertions, and perhaps the greater privations of the labouring classes (...) More women and children were compelled by necessitous circumstances, to enter upon laborious occupations, and former workmen were, from the same cause, obliged to devote a greater portion of their time to increase production’. The following note 7 is taken from Malthus, who points out an even greater ‘patriotic merit’ of the English proletariat when he mentions the fall in real wages that was due to the severe rise in the price of grain. However, as a good feudalist, Malthus is not as slave-driving as the bourgeois Ricardo, and he notes that it is against the survival of humanity to increase working hours and decrease bread, even if it ‘favour the growth of capital’. Ricardo and his followers, Marx notes, gloss over the great enterprise of having prolonged the working day during a time of national ‘distress’, and treat it in doctrine as a ‘natural’ constant.

We would like to point to a historical period of young capitalism that can be compared to the early nineteenth-century English: and it is that of the first Russian five-year plans (an undisputed merit of the great Stalin!). The high level of labour effort and low pay of the workers allowed for extremely high levels of the rate of accumulation, and led to a reward in the form of recognition of patriotic merits!

The number of working hours, as it rose from feudal times to that of the first factories and mechanical industries, certainly rose between the Tsar and Big Moustache. But above all, the intensity of labour rose (the shadow of Stakhanov!), which allows us to move on to the Second case.

Malthus had understood that increasing working hours indefinitely, especially with the same wages and food, has a limit: not only that of 24 hours, but at least that of sleep-rest. If a worker sleeps only six hours and works the other eighteen, his hourly output will be much lower than if he works only eight hours and follows the somewhat Quaker formula: eight hours of work, eight hours of sleep, eight hours of leisure (!?). So if you push too hard, the product and surplus value will not rise in proportion to the hours worked, as assumed in the little formulas, but rather considerably less.

For this reason, the British, when faced with a general reduction in working hours, had already noted that there would be compensating circumstances (note 5 in the text). If the worker can breathe for two hours longer, each of their eight hours will yield much more than each of the heavy ten (or worse) of before.

Therefore shorter labour means more intense labour. Society, the nation, and for us the bourgeoisie, get a good deal.

Anyway, let us study the case of variable intensity, as in the Abacus, in first-moment conditions, i.e. for a single company. The day does not vary, general prices do not vary, nor do wages. But we achieve (let us say through flogging, or with the no less ignoble ‘performance bonuses’) that the workers work harder.

If 20% more is obtained every hour, the product will increase by 20% for the same number of hours. In the Abacus, these are the formulae that show how the surplus value rises and also its rate.

Here we will limit ourselves to giving the result of their application to the normal numerical example. Two-thirds of the product were variable capital, one-third surplus value. Without changing the working time, a 20% increase in intensity is obtained.

The surplus value, which was one third, has become 8/18 of the product. The wage, which has remained unchanged, is now 10/18 of the daily product, i.e. much less than 2/3. The rate of surplus value, which was 1/2, rises to 8/10.

If we now want to move from the first to the second moment, we would have to assume that the increase in the intensity of labour does not occur in that company alone, but throughout the social field. But we do not do so because we simply move from the third to the first case that Marx deals with in the famous Chapter XVII of the First Volume.

In fact, this assumption is precisely that all human social labour, on average, becomes more intense, more productive. In this text by Marx, or at least in this method of quantitative calculation, which we as usual have taken unchanged, the circumstance considered is precisely that the leap in output has occurred throughout the entire field of society, rather than in a single enterprise. In Marx himself two concepts operate, namely that the power of labour can increase in intensity, when the worker does more in the same hour through greater effort (in which case the real incentive would be a drastic shortening in hours of exertion), or in productivity, when a new tool or machine allows, with fewer workers and in less working time, to obtain the same product. That the two distinct concepts are clearly present in Marx can be seen in the text, at the beginning of the paragraph on his first case. Example: ‘if an hour of normal intensity labour produces a value of half a shilling, a day will produce (...) at an unchanging money value, always six shillings for 12 hours. When productiveness of labour increases or decreases [always at normal intensity], the same day will yield a greater or lesser quantity of products [read physical quantity] and the same value of 6 shillings will be distributed over a greater or lesser number [or quantity] of commodities’.

It is therefore quite clear. In the first and second cases treated, which are the third and second in Marx, universal variations in the social field are not yet considered, or at least it is not necessary to do so in the calculation (then there is Section IV, which deals with the variations of all magnitudes, as we shall see). In Marx’s first case, which we treat as the third, the social measure of value varies, i.e. what is produced in a day of average human labour. Let us not forget that we measure value by average labour time, and this suits us for the considerations of the first and second moments, that is, in order to find the measure of the waste of value, and therefore also of labour, due to the capitalist system, indicating it in terms of capitalist value. When with Marx we rise to the third moment, that is, to the socialist economy, we no longer care at all about value, or surplus value and capital, and we are only concerned with natural physical quantities: number of hours, of people, and of units of products (from metres to kilowatt-hours).

The working day now remains unchanged, but the product of an hour, and therefore of a day, increases across the entire social field of production. This has the effect of causing all commodity values to fall in the same proportion. Among them is also that of the labour commodity, and therefore wages. Workers will therefore have the same real wage, with a reduced nominal wage. The products will, as a physical quantity, have risen in the same proportion as the power of labour, but their value in the market economy will have remained the same due to the equal and inverse reduction in prices. The little formulae are in the Abacus and here, as our Master does, we give some figures; verification can be a fun ‘exercise’ for the reader. Let the overall productivity rise by 20%. The value added in production will always be the same, and in figures let it be 1 (one).

The assumption is that variable capital was 2/3 and surplus value 1/3. The former, i.e. wages, has decreased, as we said, to 5/9 [8/15]. Surplus value rises, to 4/9 [6/15].

The rate of surplus value, which was only 1/2, rises boldly to 4/5 [3/4].

We can provide a little table of the ‘patriotic’ benefits that await workers when the glorious productivity of national labour increases.

Marx takes three laws that are given first by Ricardo. It is worth giving the eloquent second one which expresses our little table, using the word wage instead of the expression value of labour power, which is seen used in current parlance and which would be better replaced by price of labour power, as in the title of the aforementioned chapter. This confirms that we are following the text closely with our little formulae.

2. Surplus-value and the value of labour-power vary in opposite directions. A variation in the productiveness of labour, its increase or diminution, causes a variation in the opposite direction in the value of labour-power, and in the same direction in surplus-value.

Wage-earners! You have studied us for a hundred years; and now, shout: Long live Italy! Long live Russia!

From Marx’s time to today, the duration of labour has changed (for the better), the productivity of labour has changed (for the better) and the remuneration for labour has changed (for the better). But what we want to demonstrate, upon the equally odious snouts of the apologists for capital and of those for its reform, is that the squandering of human productive power, the alienation of the humanity of man, have changed by far for the worse. And this is written in Marx; it is true with algebraic letters and it is true with numbers.

Now read the text, in Section IV of the chapter presented.

The text first states that it would appear that the working day could be reduced to the necessary labour time. Up to here, it covered two-thirds of the day, but even before his death, Marx calculated it to be one-half (classic figures, of 400 constant, 100 variable, and 100 surplus value). With such figures, the organic composition of capital was 4 to 1, but in a century, the productivity of labour has grown enormously – but uselessly, given that we are in a mercantile regime. Here is our point of arrival. However, Marx warns here the same thing he says in his Critique of the Gotha Programme many years later; it is true that with the elimination of the waste of the first moment, we can descend to necessary labour, i.e. from eight to four hours, but ‘on the other hand, because a part of what is now surplus-labour, would then count as necessary labour; I mean the labour of forming a fund for reserve and accumulation (i.e. a stock of means of production and subsistence that allows for the expansion of production and the coping with possible accidents and losses), and that the current magnitude of necessary labour is only limited to the maintenance costs of a class of wage slaves, destined to produce the wealth of their masters’. This means that proletarian consumption must rise significantly. But there are other margins in the subsequent formulae of waste that allow for quite drastic reductions below four hours. As early as 1910, the Austrian Marxist school calculated two hours or less per day.

But let us leave the events of the rotten bourgeois economy and let us rise to behold the apex of our third moment. It is Marx who does it, as always without warning, such that the unwary immediatist and concretist pass by with their eyes closed:

‘The more the productiveness of labour increases, the more can the working-day be shortened; and the more the working-day is shortened, the more can the intensity of labour increase. [Crystalline truth in a society that is not denatured and dehumanised]. From a social point of view, the productiveness increases in the same ratio as the economy of labour, which, in its turn, includes not only economy of the means of production, but also the avoidance of all useless labour. The capitalist mode of production, while on the one hand, enforcing economy in each individual business [most vulgar first moment!], on the other hand, begets, by its anarchical system of competition, the most outrageous squandering of labour-power and of the social means of production, not to mention the creation of a vast number of employments, at present indispensable, but in themselves superfluous’.

The end of this marvellous revolutionary chapter seeks to make a measured concession to a pure argument of levelling justice. But at the same time, gaze is on the highest and noblest functions of the human species.

‘The intensity and productiveness of labour being given [this means immediately, whether in 1860 or 1960, without waiting for further miracles of degenerating technological science, or further of its crimes], the time which society is bound to devote to material production is shorter, and as a consequence, the time at its disposal for the FREE DEVELOPMENT, INTELLECTUAL AND SOCIAL, OF THE INDIVIDUAL IS GREATER, in proportion as the work is more and more evenly divided among all the able-bodied members of society, and as a particular class is more and more deprived of the power to shift the natural burden of labour from its own shoulders to those of another layer of society. In this direction, the shortening of the working-day finds at last a limit in the generalisation of labour’.

‘In capitalist society leisure time is acquired for one class by converting the whole life-time of the masses into labour time’.