Study Of Marx's Theory Of Free Time

Marx devoted his whole life to the liberation and freedom of human beings. He had become a historical materialist through the revolutionary practice and theoretical stuggle,the criticism of all the wrong theory and improvement his own theory constantly.With the shift in Marx's world outlook,his concern for freedom had gradually shifted from the philosophy freedom to the secular freedom and his view of freedom had changed the idealism view of freedom into the materialism view of freedom, changed revolutionary democratism view of freedom into communism view of freedom.Among all the changes above,the concept of "free time" becomes clearly and the significance of it to the development of human gradually revealed.Marx pointed out clearly that free time is the time that man would not have to chain down to the necessary and external purposes,it includes"the personal time to education, the development time of intelligence, the time to fulfill their social function , the time for social activities, the time of free use of physical and intelligence...".Human beings can get rid of external,single, one-sided subsistence constraint and play their own interests and hobbies freely and improve their capabilities fully in the sufficient free time.Marx realized the close connection between the time and the human activities,his view of time is the view of"social time",beyond the traditional view of"natural time" .Human beings advance and develop themselves in the river of time, in the historical process, in the relentless struggle with the natural, in the internal repression of human society and the struggle against it.Marx affirmed the measurement function of time to the value of the commodity in the certain stage of capitalism and proposed the concept of "commodity value",he divded warker's labour time into necessary labour time and surplus labour time,revealed the secret of surplus value.He connected the surplus labour time which create the surplus value and the free time where human can develop themselves freely,and bring forth the basic clue of connection between the development of the capacity and the assignment of time:necessary labour time--surplus labour time--free time.We should take notice of the the positive role that surplus labour played.Because of the surplus labour,the whole community's production of material needed for basic survival, while some surplus, which surplus can sustained the progress in human society.But we must be awared of that the private ownership of surplus labour time under the capitalism makes the progress lose it's universal meaning.Most of the people(the proletariat, the workers)are forced to work to meet the desires of capital even if their's production enough to maintain survival of all members of society and to keep the society forward .People's labor time is mandatory extended, free time is a mandatory compressed.In order to survive,they can only develop the capacity passively and one-sided which is good for the value appreciation,thus free and all-round development can only exist in the "other world"Therefore,there are two ways to occupy the free time.First,we must level up our productivity,only the advanced productivity can reduce the labor time and increase the free time of the whole society,and it'll make the development posibility in the aspect of time.Second,we must change the irrational social system,eliminate the opposition between the producer and the possesser of free time,remove the opposition between necessary labor and surplus labor.Only in these ways, people can really hold their own free time,do what they interested in,perform their potential,achieve their fully development.Create the free time and change the irrational social system is the material condition man's occupationof free time, but the key to the man's fully development is use free time reationally.There is a close relation between developing time and leisure time, so people often haven't seen the differences between leisure time and developing time, they only seeing the freedom that they have owned in common, and in turn people tend to share free time for recreation intentionally or unintentionally, they only see the freedom of consumption, but ignoring the freedom of production.This tendency particularly perform in the consumer society's supporting theory - consumerism. Consumerism, rejects"the time for higher freelance"and"the truly free working"in free time, it sees the freedom of consumption as a whole, the so-called freedom which they assert is actually the host that capital logic demands the upgrading of products, and it is a one-sided expansion in how to utilize leisure time, it is negative leisure time.Marx didn't deny the positive role the leisure time played, instead, he regarded it as important as development time. Whether the leisure time or the time for higher function, free time would turn its owner into another subject naturally, and the new subject could rejoin the directed production process. But this judgment is based on the rational distribution of free time, once people spend too much time in leisure activities,their developing time are inevitably leaded to reduce , and they couldn't turn into another positive subject. Therefore, moderate consumption, moderate leisurement and paying attention to development are the correct way to utilize free time.