Karl Marx: A biography by David McLellan

THE 'ECONOMICS'^281

laid himself open to the charge of 'idealism', the spinning of ideas that
had no foundation in reality. But certain passages in the Grundrisse give
an even better idea than the well-known accounts in the Communist
Manifesto and the Critique of the Gotha Programme of what lay at the heart
of Marx's vision. One of the central factors was, of course, time - since
the development of the 'universal' individual depended above all on the
free time he had at his disposal. Time was of the essence in Marx's ideal
of future society:

If we suppose communal production, the determination of time remains,

of course, essential. The less time society requires in order to produce

wheat, catde, etc., the more time it gains for other forms of production,

material or intellectual. As with a single individual, the universality

of its development, its enjoyment and its activity depends on saving

time... ,^32

Only by the extensive use of machinery was this free time possible.
Whereas in the past machinery had been a factor hostile to the worker
in the future its function could be radically altered:

No special sagacity is required in order to understand that, beginning

with free labour or wage-labour for example, which arose after the

abolition of slavery, machines can only develop in opposition to living

labour, as a hostile power and alien property, i.e. they must, as capital,

oppose the worker.

It is equally easy to see that machines do not cease to be agents

of social production, once they become, for example, the property of

associated workers. But in the first case, their means of distribution

(the fact that they do not belong to the workers) is itself a condition

of the means of production that is founded on wage-labour. In the

second case, an altered means of distribution will derive from an altered

new basis of production emerging from the historical process.^33

Marx rejected Adam Smith's view of work as necessarily an imposition.

Nor did he subscribe to Fourier's idea that work could become a sort of

game. According to Marx, Smith's view was valid for the labour

which has not yet created the subjective and objective conditions (which

it lost when it abandoned pastoral conditions) which make of it attrac-

tive labour and individual self-realisation. This does not mean that

labour can be made merely a joke, or amusement, as Fourier naively

expressed it in shop-girl terms. Really free labour, the composing of

music for example, is at the same time damned serious and demands

the greatest effort. The labour concerned with material production can

only have this character if (1) it is of a social nature, (2) it has a

scientific character and at the same time is general work, i.e. if it