The politics of free time and the de-commodification of labour
Tedd Siegel
17th April 2025
AI-based robot dog developed to perform industrial inspections. This autonomous andmobile robot provides plant operators the information to maximize equipment uptime and improve safety while reducing operational costs. (Source: Anybotics – CC 4.0)
Introduction
Today we are witness to an increasing, multi-dimensional commodification pressure bearing down on virtually all types of labour.
Intensified neoliberal market competition (financialized, deregulated, globalized) coupled with low tax rates on corporations and the wealthy, the dismantling of labour protections, a disinvestment in social welfare, and new technological efficiencies have resulted in high levels of precarity, which are then married to a neoliberal ethos of “individual responsibility.”
The result is a generalized need for workers of all descriptions to continually invest in their “human capital” to avoid becoming redundant in the fast-changing labour market. As neoliberal market relations have re-shaped society at large, this need has also come to include a broader imperative to further “commodify the self” in pursuit of market value, by means of all manner of activity designed to reshape one’s life as a personal enterprise (Dardot and Laval, 2017).
With ever more time spent by everyone on work, work-related activity, and work-like activity, we also see a commodification of the time that had historically been allotted on grounds of sex in the work of social reproduction, resulting in what today has been called “a crisis of care” (Fraser, 2018).
Under such conditions, it’s not surprising that we can also begin to discern a counter-movement, in the form of rising class antagonism, and with it, both implicit and explicit calls for the de-commodification of labour.
What is the de-commodification of labour?
The answer to this question turns out to be anything but straightforward. For example, one can discern instances in the history of capitalism where commodification has represented an emancipatory moment, such as the liberation of women from traditional patriarchy in the twentieth century by means of access to the wage. Conversely, there are examples today where de-commodification turns out to be just a new form of exploitation, as with things like unpaid internships and volunteer adjunct positions, where people agree to work for no wages in order to increase their human capital under conditions of neoliberal competitiveness.
For another thing, as with many other questions, the meaning of the de-commodification of labour depends a lot on whom you ask – i.e., whether the respondent has a traditionally Marxist, revolutionary standpoint, or one oriented toward social democracy, or else perhaps some version of contemporary postcapitalist or post-work theory, for example.
Indeed, it’s the collision of these different perspectives, how they become superimposed on one another, that leads to some initial disorientation. The confusion has to do with how these divergent accounts of de-commodification actually call forth economic and social contradictions that emerge at different conjunctures of capitalist development — industrial capitalism, welfare capitalism, and neoliberal capitalism (Fraser, 2018, Azmanova, 2020).
We can resolve this confusion to an extent by examining the meaning of commodification/de-commodification in the context of these different, but overlapping historical conjunctures, each with unique manifestations of capitalism’s contradictions and related de-commodification paradoxes.
The de-commodification of labour between the two ‘Karls’ (Marx and Polanyi)
Consider the following example: In the early “industrial phase” of capitalism, the critique of the commodification of labour was focused principally on the internal logic of capitalist accumulation per se. Capitalism is unsustainable due to the tendency of the overall rate of profit to fall over time, such that the continued pursuit of surplus value leads to decreased demand for commodities, falling wages, and ever more alienating working conditions, resulting in rising class conflict and, ultimately, to systemic crisis (O’Connor, 1989).
In this context, the arrow of emancipation, in the form of the call for de-commodification, signifies nothing short of a reversal of capitalism’s commodification of labour power, (i.e., through the abolition of wage labour) and freedom from the market’s overall web of capitalist valorization in a classless society, or what Marx and Engels referred to as a post-capitalist “society of associated producers.”
Painters suspended on cables of the Brooklyn Bridge (1914). (Source: Public Domain)
By contrast, under welfare capitalism, social democratic theorists like Gøsta Esping-Anderson, inspired by Karl Polanyi’s The Great Transformation (1944), recognized a “second version” of the basic contradiction of capitalism. In the twentieth century, it was widely recognized that the unlimited drive to accumulate under unregulated markets had led to a degree of degradation of both labour and natural conditions that demanded at least some measure of de-commodification in order to ensure the continued reproduction of capital itself (Esping-Anderson, 1990).
Here the contradiction is one between the elements of capitalist production on the one hand, and the reproduction of capitalism’s fundamental conditions on the other. By this, Esping-Anderson means things that have not been produced as commodities in the first instance: — natural elements, labour, and the social and communication background in which they are embedded (O’Connor, 1988, Esping-Anderson, 1990, Panayotakis, 2007).
In this context, the project of human emancipation, as realized in the de-commodification of labour, comes to signify something partial, ameliorative, and more limited in scope (Azmanova, 2020). De-commodification refers to protections carved out from exchange relations within the assumptions of an overall capitalist economy and society (La Berge, 2018). This means mechanisms like re-distribution, improved working conditions, rules around employment contracts, limiting working hours, paid leave, and unemployment insurance whereby “individuals and families can uphold a socially acceptable living independent of market participation” (Esping-Anderson, 1990, Azmanova, 2020).
Conjunctures, contradictions & paradoxes
To understand the meaning and significance of the de-commodification of labour today, however, we need something more than just a “sorting out” of different notions based on simple historical periodization. A helpful touchstone for this can be found in Albena Azmanova’s Capitalism on Edge, where she makes the observation that “there is a dynamic relationship between labour commodification and decommodification” (Azmanova, 2020).
I would like to suggest that we should regard this relationship as dynamic, in the first instance, because capitalism is always changing. What Marx referred to as “the forces of production” and “the relations of production” are always evolving, being reconfigured to ensure that capital finds new ways to extract surplus value.
This continual evolution in what Marx called “the capitalist subsumption of labour,” gives rise to partial or inadequate solutions to the basic contradictions of capitalism, which then in turn are at the root of various paradoxes surrounding the de-commodification of labour.
It is helpful, therefore, to think of the history of capitalism in terms of what Althusser called “conjunctures” rather than periods or stages (Althusser, 1970). A conjuncture, as a unique moment of social, political, economic, and ideological tension, is a way to understand a given historical moment by means of its specific structural contradictions and related social paradoxes.
It should be said that by contradictions, Marx means conflicts within the logic of capitalist accumulation that produce opposing class interests, and thus are drivers of class antagonism and movements for system change. For purposes of this discussion, it is useful to describe two basic contradictions of capitalism that come to expression in different ways in each of capitalism’s three major conjunctures.
As mentioned above, the first one exists as something internal to capitalism’s productivist logic (the contradiction between the production and the circulation of capital). The second is at the border between capitalist production and both nature and society, and thus has to do with conflict between capitalist production on the one hand, and the natural or social reproduction of its conditions of possibility on the other.
Where we speak of paradoxes, we generally mean hard-to-resolve or contrary cases concerning the de-commodification of labour, where the experience of “paradoxicality” ends up pointing to the underlying or deeper structural contradiction.
For example, social democratic efforts to overcome crises of capitalism through policies that support labour de-commodification can sometimes appear paradoxical, because “exit from the labour market with little or no loss of income” can be seen to be directly at odds with the social democratic goal of high workforce participation.
Some social democratic theorists have attempted to resolve the apparent paradox by showing that generous social policy, coupled to the goal of high employment, can be rendered consistent as long as the de-commodifying social policies in question are only those that have been demonstrated not to reduce aggregate levels of employment (Huo, Nelson, and Stephens, 2008).
De-commodification under industrial capitalism and welfare capitalism
In the early days of capitalism’s industrial laissez-faire conjuncture, as is widely recognized, the ubiquity of “work as wage labour” was established by means of wholesale land enclosures, and a variety of violent expropriations that were used to maintain the profitability of capital. This included imperialist appropriation of resources, and the use of slave labour. Since wage labour was eventually codified as the “male wage earner, head-of-household,” women were expected to perform the traditionally un-commodified work of social reproduction (domestic work, child rearing, care work, etc.), something which amounted to a wholesale expropriation of women’s labour under condition of an otherwise universal labour market.
With economic production and the work of social reproduction significantly separated at this first conjuncture, political projects of emancipation are generally seen as reactive to the “first contradiction” of capitalism, that of the unsustainability of the logic of accumulation. As Peter Frase points out, here the basic paradox of the de-commodification of labour is that within this conjuncture of capitalism, “de-commodified labour” must be seen as an oxymoron, since labour per se implies the mute compulsion of the market to compel workers to accept the formal subsumption of their labour (Frase, 2011). The paradox of de-commodification so understood is only resolved by the application of revolutionary zeal.
It should be said that the “second contradiction” of capitalism isn’t yet fully visible here. As Nancy Fraser has written, “struggles over the boundaries delimiting economy from society, production from reproduction, work from family, gets expressed differently at each phase of capitalist society,” and this regime simply tended “to leave workers to reproduce themselves autonomously, outside the circuit of monetized value” (Fraser, 2018).
U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) Local and Regional Food Systems Policy Advisor Tricia Kovacs, moderates a discussion (Source: Public Domain)
During the welfare state conjuncture, by contrast, paradoxes around capitalism’s social reproduction become more readily apparent. For example, the pursuit of de-commodifying welfare provisions, as something largely centered on the welfare of individuals already in the labour force, i.e., predominantly men, clashed with the pursuit of individual autonomy through commodification on the part of the multitude of women still seeking basic access to the wage (Huo, Nelson, and Stephens, 2008).
Where the welfare state conjuncture represented an alliance between what Polanyi called “marketization” on the one hand, and “social protection” on the other, Fraser also points out, “many feminists found scant comfort on either side” (Fraser, 2018).
Paradoxes of neoliberal social production and the politics of free time
Under neoliberal capitalism’s renewal and generalization of commodification pressures, we see the wholesale recruitment of women in the paid workforce, coupled to a disinvestment in social welfare, resulting in a growing crisis of care work (Fraser, 2018).
Having responsibilized families with respect to care work while diminishing their capacity to perform it, we also get a paradoxical, “dualized organization of social reproduction, commodified for those who can pay for it, and privatized for those who cannot” (Fraser, 2018). Since the current system often pushes care work onto low paid immigrant women, as privatized, it is de-commodifying for some, and commodifying for others.
Ballet and MACS at Pleasantview Care Facility (Source: Creative Commons 2.0)
Under neoliberal capitalism, the meaning of de-commodification now turns on people’s ability to voluntarily exit the labour market. For example, some workers in the knowledge economy, as ostensible winners in the market, find a kind of emancipation through flexible employment or “self-directed productive activity in the manner of a portfolio.” For others, where employment is a now a good to be distributed, “involuntary flexibility” in this regard represents increased commodification (Azmanova, 2020).
One can see from this that the de-commodification of labour becomes something quite equivocal and ambiguous under the neoliberal capitalist conjuncture. What does it mean for labour to be de-commodified in the social-democratic sense, if nothing is outside the market? Where the de-commodification of labour as such has ceased to represent a path to emancipation, the paradoxicality of the de-commodification of labour becomes instead a call for overcoming the contradictions of neoliberal capitalism per se, to begin once again to look beyond the fiction that there will continue to be a generalized society of the wage (La Berge, 2018).
This is how the problem of social reproduction starts to coincide with contemporary postcapitalist speculations about the end of work. For post-work theory, as something specific to the neoliberal capitalist conjuncture, the paradoxical significations of the term “de-commodification of labour” come to be recognized as something that can only be resolved outside the pattern of a capitalist society.
For example, where Helen Hester and Nick Srnicek have written about “a future organization of social reproduction based around post-work ideas” (Hester and Srnicek, 2023) what emerges is a set of principles under which “capitalism’s imperative to accumulate for accumulation’s sake no longer operates as the regulative meta-norm to which all other norms must conform.”
Echoing Marx in a way that is inclusive of a post-work future – imagined now from the viewpoint of reproduction as well as from production – Hester and Srnicek write that in a post-work society, where the necessary work of social reproduction has been effectively minimized, the remaining socially necessary work “would be distributed equitably – from each according to their abilities, to each according to their needs” (Hester and Srnicek, 2023).
Hester and Srnicek then go on to sketch the normative principles of what they call a “universal project of post-work social reproduction,” that values freedom for all, where the “burdensome work of social reproduction would be minimized, while the pleasurable aspects could be the focus of more freely chosen commitments.” Invoking Marx’s notion of “free working” from the Grundrisse, they write that such a postwork society would be a realm of projects to which we commit ourselves – individually and collectively – for their own sake (Hester and Srnicek, 2023).
Looking ahead
If it still appears as if all the different notions about the de-commodification of labour described here remain contemporaneous and superimposed, it’s probably because (democratic socialist) revolutionary ideas and (social democratic) reformist ideas all continue to jostle for mindshare among those seeking an alternative to the evolving, neoliberal capitalist present. What’s genuinely new and specific to this present regime of the organic composition of capital, therefore, is the potential emergence of a politics of “the liberation of free time” as a key element of a new politics of labour.
Tedd Siegel is a writer/researcher living on the central coast of California. He is the author of Signs of the Great Refusal: The Coming Struggle for a Postwork Society (punctum books, 2023). Siegel worked in Silicon Valley for 20 years in various business and technical management roles related to enterprise software, semiconductor, and optical telecom. He also served as Asst. Vice Chancellor for Research at the University of California, where he managed major R&D contracts, initiatives, and partnerships among academia, government agencies, and private companies. Tedd holds an M.A. in philosophy from the New School for Social Research, where he attended the Ph.D. program.