Marx’s central innovation in understanding capital – the measure of labor as time – courses through his famous glimpse of a utopian communist system. Here, the transformation of the “fisherman” into one who fishes in the afternoon traces not just a shift between economic systems, but the possibilities latent within the human experience of time. Reduced and compelled by his work’s function, the fisherman cannot realize his own multiple potential capacities any more than his days or weeks are differentiated. But to hunt and fish, rear cattle and criticize, all in one day, is to unfold those capacities within days that themselves hold infinite possibilities within each morning, afternoon, evening. The expansion of the worker’s ability to engage multiple potentials is, for Marx, the expansion of our day itself.

Nestled within this time-work logic is Marx’s more subtle but equally crucial refusal of work as a negative construct, as the sacrifice of time. In his reflections on Adam Smith in the Grundrisse, for instance, Marx pushes hard against the idea that labor is the “suspension of tranquility,” offering instead that, within a less instrumental economics, “labour becomes attractive work, the individual’s self-realization, which in no way means that it becomes mere fun, mere amusement.” It is precisely this idea of “attractive work” that offers a mode of resistance often overlooked in treatments of his utopian vision.