Capitalism and Freedom from Toil
According to Karl Marx, “In communist society, where nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity but each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes, society regulates the general production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, herdsman or critic.” Ironically, though, capitalism has actually made this sort of lifestyle possible by reducing the amount of time people have to spend working.
The most direct way that capitalism has accomplished this is by shortening the number of hours people have to spend on the clock. In 1880, the average American spent 182,100 hours at work during their lifetime, with 43,800 dedicated to leisure. In 1995, the average American spent 122,400 hours at work, with 176,100 hour dedicated to leisure. The primary cause of this reduction in work hours is not unionization or labor laws, but increased productivity. Economist Robert Whaples explains: “Historically employers and employees often agreed on very long workweeks because the economy was not very productive (by today’s standards) and people had to work long hours to earn enough money to feed, clothe and house their families. The long-term decline in the length of the workweek, in this view, has primarily been due to increased economic productivity, which has yielded higher wages for workers. Workers responded to this rise in potential income by ‘buying’ more leisure time, as well as by buying more goods and services.”
But we shouldn’t overlook how capitalism has reduced the amount of time we spend toiling outside of our jobs by driving down the price of labor-saving devices and thus making them more accessible. Consider a day in the life of a typical American (or perhaps a typical American in the not-too-distant future). You pop a pod in the Keurig to get your morning coffee after you drop a bagel into your toaster. When you’re done eating, you put your dishes in the dishwasher instead of washing them by hand. You grab some clothes out of the dryer that you had previously tossed in a washing machine instead of cleaning them with a washboard and hanging them to dry on a clothesline.
Before heading out of your house, you turn on your Roomba to clean your floors while you’re away. You then order a self-driving Waymo to take you to work—while on the way, you send out a few emails instead of writing letters by hand. While taking a walk during your lunch break, you take a digital photo that doesn’t need to be developed. After work, you ask Alexa to play you some music while you take a few minutes to microwave dinner. You remember that you need to make a poster for your kids’ school fundraiser and so you enlist AI to do it for you. You find a movie for the family to watch by browsing Netflix from your couch instead of driving to Blockbuster.
Of course, you might prefer not to use all of these labor-saving alternatives—maybe you’d rather cook a meal from scratch than microwave something from the freezer. Fair enough (although I’ll note you’ll have more time to cook if you don’t have to wash the dishes by hand). But the point is that capitalism makes this extra discretionary time available to us, whether or not we want to take advantage of it in any particular case.
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