In chapter 8 of Capital, Marx wrote:

The working day does have a maximum limit…Not only do purely physical needs limit the extension of the workday; moral limits play a role here, too. A worker requires time to satisfy his intellectual and social needs, which are determined…by the general state of the culture.

Curious what the general state of the culture has to say about workers’ intellectual needs, I turned to the news, and stumbled on this report.

One could say a lot more about all this, but beyond the simple and obvious point, I’d point out that discussions of culture in this country are often removed from discussions of the economy. There’s one conversation about the assault on the humanities or the destruction of higher education or the removal of information from websites. There’s another discussion of consumer confidence, inflation, tariffs, wages, and unemployment.

One of the great achievements of Marx, and Marxism, was to bring those two conversations together. Not just in the reflections of the Frankfurt School or Marxist literary criticism, which marries questions of genre and cultural form to modes of production and so forth, but in a much deeper sense of the kind of cultural life that both emerges from and radically shapes the materiality of work.

In this case, think about what our view of culture is that would allow one class of teenagers—poorer, Black, brown—to work all-night shifts while going to high school, while another class of teenagers is doing calculus and playing three sports and organizing school clubs and so on.

Conversely, imagine what kind of work life grown-ups might enjoy if we included their leisure needs for their own education or entertainment or reading or reflection.

We haven’t begun to ponder the costs and consequences of the real cultural shifts that are being engineered right now. They go far beyond whatever exhibitions are allowed in the Smithsonian or research agendas that are pursued at Harvard and Columbia.