Too little but also too much

“Private property”, wrote Marx, “has made us so stupid and one-sided that an object is only ours when we have it — when it exists for us as capital, or when it is directly possessed, eaten, drunk, worn, inhabited, etc…”

Much of socialist effort, within capitalist society, involves supporting working-class struggles to “have” more within this society, to limit the gap between workers and the rich.

And we see an emancipatory side even to capitalist consumerism, when it spurs workers to widen aspirations, to seek roses as well as bread.

But capitalism remains a society which tilts us ever more, and destructively, to racing for atomised accumulation of “stuff”.

The luxury-goods firm LVMH, formed only in 1987, has through the years of neoliberalism become the largest corporation in Europe.

Inequality has risen. And a new report — from a right-wing thinktank, Onward, not from socialists — shows what has happened even with better-off workers.

Better-off workers have more “stuff”. Yet they spend less time seeing their friends, visiting restaurants, going out, and exercising than in 1974 (and less than half the time volunteering, despite the relative increase in the numbers of retired people in reasonable health).

The “free time” activities they do are more fragmented, the average person’s day going from about 20 “episodes” to 30-odd. Some of that is down to interruptions by smartphones (or, at least, by the way we let smartphones dominate us). Some, to more fragmented work hours which in turn fragment “life” hours.

Sleep

Average hours of sleep are slightly longer than in 1974, but sleep is more fragmented and poorer (partly smartphone use, partly work hours), and 43% of adults are sleeping less than seven hours.

Working hours overall have risen over the 50 years, despite a large increase over the 50 years in productivity, and the long-term trend for decades until the early 1980s for the labour movement to win reductions (though slowly) in the workweek. Weekend work hours have increased more than the average. More people work more hours which make it difficult for them to meet friends. The report doesn’t mention a parallel trend: work regimes have over 50 years generally made it more difficult to socialise, chat, make friends there.

Housework time has decreased through technology. Childcare time has increased. This has downsides: it means children’s growing-up is more “privatised”, more enclosed within the small family unit, less sociable, less autonomous. Parents, as the report says, are “less comfortable letting their children play independently”.

So, in Marx’s terms, there are more “objects” that we “have”, but we are made more “stupid and one-sided”, more oppressed by our work hours, more atomised.

The trends that Juliet Schor found in her book The Overworked American in 1991 are here in the UK, over the decades: “Marketing experts and advertisers spend vast sums of money to make... choices appealing — even irresistible… Americans have been found to spend more time shopping than anyone else. On the other hand, the ‘market’ for free time hardly even exists… Employers… do not offer the chance to trade off income gains for a shorter work day…

“Nor has society provided a forum for deliberate [collective] choice” between the accumulation of often unsustainable privatised “stuff” for the better-off and freedom and sociability for all.