Comfort and Leisure Make You Very Wise

"communism is luxurious"

We’re testing a theory. And I mean we’re really testing it.

Karl Marx saw the stages of history advancing toward leisure and liberation, and he saw that coming emergence of comfort as a great gift for people whose lives were wasted in labor for the profit of others. “The saving of labor time [is] equal to an increase of free time, i.e. time for the full development of the individual,” he wrote. For Marx, the “true realm of freedom” followed the decline of work. “The shortening of the working-day is its basic prerequisite.”

The British writer Aaron Bastani drags Marx farther down that road:

With the arrival of communism any distinction between mental and physical labour would vanish, with work becoming more akin to play. This also meant a society with greater collective wealth, where all essential wants as well as creative desires are satisfied. Which is where luxury comes in. The concept, under conditions of scarcity, expresses that which is beyond utility, its essence an excess beyond the necessary. So as information, labour, energy and resources become permanently cheaper – and work and the limits of the old world are left behind – it turns out we don’t just satisfy all of our needs, but dissolve any boundary between the useful and the beautiful. Communism is luxurious – or it isn’t communism.

In Marxist theory, the lives of liberated workers become creative. Released from work, they work on themselves; they become healthier, wiser, productively free. See, for the clearest possible expression of the theory, this essay from an academic historian on “Radical Leisure”:

Circularly, the commons and the public sphere require adequate leisure. To restore a social world independent of the market and the workplace, and to keep the commons vital, we need the leisure time to inhabit the commons. We also need our communities to have time to be there with us—hanging on the porch chatting, shooting hoops at the rec center, jamming in the basement. In other words, we need both a vital cultural commons beyond the world of paid labor and we need a leisure ethic, a constant challenge to the very concept and valorization of work. A leisure ethic and the public commons depend on each other. And for both of these, collectivity is key. With the communal revalorization of leisure, by pushing back against the constant attempts of capital to encroach on work-free time and the unmonetized forms of everyday life and community, we take up the most foundational struggle, the struggle against work itself.

Leisure is self-development, education, strong community, open public spaces. When you sit on your ass, you turn smart. Also, if you had more free money, you would turn into Shakespeare:

So.

If the theory is correct, we must be living through a golden age — an astonishing burst of artistic and scientific achievement, a great explosion of disciplined literacy, and a radical expansion of personal health.

Also, at Columbia University, Ivy League undergraduates in keffiyehs and surgical masks are doing political interpretive dance with yarn.

Imagine how wise they’ll become when their student loans are forgiven, liberating their minds entirely.