The Treadmill Tendency

A question that sounds like it deserves a really rigorous and vindicating answer, but usually gets little more than a tired shrug:

Why, as citizens of the most powerful, technologically equipped, and advanced society in history, are so many of us spending most of our waking lives working jobs we do not particularly like to sustain lives we do not particularly enjoy?

If this sounds vague, I have in mind a specific and especially pernicious phenomenon, referred to by popular news platforms and obscure Marxist scholars alike as the "treadmill effect".

The treadmill effect is a sense of existential immobility amidst constant economic effort. The sense that one must work their entire life, work they don't particularly enjoy, just to remain in the same precarious, unfulfilling position. There is constant, tiring effort required to keep up, but there is no forward progress. Just an endless cycle of activity, of drudgery, until we die. This is popularly referred to with the metaphor of a hamster running on its wheel, growing exhausted, getting nowhere. But if it stops running, the wheel keeps turning, and it gets painfully ejected.

Our society has progressed for thousands of years. The industrial boom that set off vigorous capital accumulation has developed for over 200 years. And this is the sort of life we've achieved? Why does modern life remain, for an overwhelming mass of people, an exhausting marathon run atop a treadmill going nowhere?

An all-too-common response: "That's capitalism."

Is it? Is there something inherent to the nature of capitalist society that allows this treadmill effect to swallow our lives? Is it really just "capitalism" that makes us live this way? At first, this struck me as a shortcut to thinking. A way to avoid engaging with the actual complex realities at play, but still sound like one knows what they're talking about.

But according to some of the greatest economists who've ever lived — those who I would not accuse of not knowing what they're talking about when analyzing capitalism — there may actually be a link between the nature of capitalist society and the treadmill effect.

This idea is put most directly by the eminent Marxist scholar Moishe Postone, who first used the phrase "treadmill" to describe the natural consequence of capitalism's internal logic playing out

"[The] treadmill dynamic is the initial determination of what Marx developed as central to capitalism: capitalism necessarily must constantly accumulate to stand still ... This treadmill dynamic expresses and constitutes a new form of social domination...intrinsic to capitalism: it is the domination of people by time."

But this idea isn't restricted to Marxists. Adam Smith, Karl Marx, Henry George, John Maynard Keynes; through each of their work, a common thread can be uncovered. Each offers a slightly different perspective on the same phenomenon; on how capitalist society inherently tends towards this treadmill effect.

When I stumbled on this thread, I found it discomforting, to say the least. If the treadmill effect is inherently linked to capitalism, shouldn't some notion of post-capitalism be the obvious position?

Or, what if we've been securing our own chains by rendering no more incisive analysis than shrugging "that's capitalism"? What if we use "capitalism" as more of a rorschach ink blot upon which we project anything and everything we don't like about our lives and the world alike? Used in this way, the word "capitalism" is a roadblock, a premature end-of-the-line to our reasoning about why the world is the way it is, and whether there's anything we can do about it.

I agree with the late anthropologist David Graeber, who writes:

"There is something very wrong with what we have made ourselves. We have become a civilization based on work—not even 'productive work' but work as an end and meaning in itself. We have come to believe that men and women who do not work harder than they wish at jobs they do not particularly enjoy are bad people unworthy of love, care, or assistance from their communities. It is as if we have collectively acquiesced to our own enslavement ... This is a disastrous state of affairs. I wish it to end."

If we wish this state of affairs to end, we need to know exactly what's causing it, and how. We need to be rigorous about our language, so that we can be effective with our remedies.

What I propose, then, is to ask a simple question as rigorously as possible: is blaming capitalism for the treadmill effect an instance of bullshit?

I mean "bullshit" in the technical sense, as given by the philosopher Harry Frankfurt's wonderful essay: On Bullshit. Bullshit is not a lie, nor is it even intentional deceit. It's more like intellectual laziness. One who lies at least knows the truth they're obscuring. One who bullshits is marked by an "indifference to how things really are". Bullshit is concerned with persuasion, not truth. Bullshit "offers a description of a certain state of affairs without genuinely submitting to the constraints which the endeavor to provide an accurate representation of reality imposes."

The bullshitter, then, may believe themselves when they blame capitalism for the dystopian treadmill of modern life. They will tell you it's capitalism's fault, without having done the intellectual work required to figure out whether capitalism actually has anything to do with it. They will blame capitalism without being able to even adequately define capitalism. In so doing, they bury our prospects for doing anything productive about the situation in bullshit.

And if blaming capitalism for the treadmill effect turns out not to be bullshit, but a real dynamic at play in the deep structures of capitalist society, then unless we're content to live like caged hamsters amidst the glaring possibility of better forms of life, we should get serious about tracing exactly what's going on, so that we can dismantle the hamster-wheel and get to work on building a better situation for ourselves.

…

The following proceeds in five parts.

First: we locate the origins of the logic of the treadmill in the work of Karl Marx.

Second: we study the work of Moishe Postone, who branded Marx's logic under the label of the treadmill dynamic. He offers an account of how and why the treadmill effect is coded in the inherent logic of capitalism.

Third: we reexamine the treadmill effect in light of two penetrating critiques: that certain periods in history suggest capitalism can achieve the opposite of the treadmill effect; and that the treadmill's logic, at least as given by Postone, relies on using Marx's labor theory of value. So if Marx's theory is wrong, as many economists today would tell you it is, then the treadmill is left without a logical foundation.

Fourth: we examine the work of other great economists, such as Adam Smith, Henry George, and John Maynard Keynes. Their work provides alternative views on how the theory of the treadmill holds up beyond the confines of Marx's categories.

Fifth: we take account of where the treadmill effect stands after the dust kicked up by his essay settles. We assemble all the clarity we can muster regarding the reality of our situation, and what, if anything, might be done about it.

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Origins of the Treadmill: Karl Marx

Marx's critique of capitalism establishes the treadmill effect in all but name. The only point in his work where he uses the phrase "treadmill" was a metaphor, invoking the "treadmill of the Roman slaves" to describe the existential condition of workers in capitalist society:

"The crudest methods (and instruments) of human labour are coming back: the treadmill of the Roman slaves, for instance, is the means of production, the means of existence, of many English workers ... The simplification of the machine, of labour is used to make a worker out of the human being still in the making, the completely immature human being, the child – whilst the worker has become a neglected child. The machine accommodates itself to the weakness of the human being in order to make the weak human being into a machine."

Note that Marx's concern in this passage, like Graeber's, is what the human becomes by virtue of subjection to the treadmill-like conditions of existence. If the treadmill is a theory that describes structural trends, its consequences are felt at the level of the individual.

It wasn't until Volume 1 of Capital that Marx elaborated the specific dynamic - the treadmill effect in all but name - that Postone would later codify:

"The law by which a constantly increasing quantity of means of production, thanks to the advance in the productiveness of social labour, may be set in movement by a progressively diminishing expenditure of human power, this law, in a capitalist society – where the labourer does not employ the means of production, but the means of production employ the labourer – undergoes a complete inversion and is expressed thus: the higher the productiveness of labour, the greater is the pressure of the labourers on the means of employment, the more precarious, therefore, becomes their condition of existence, viz., the sale of their own labour power for the increasing of another’s wealth, or for the self-expansion of capital."

Our intuitions might tell us that rising productivity is good for all. The more productive we are, the less labor that's required to produce the same level of output. But for Marx, capitalist society "inverts" the effects of rising productivity. Rising levels of productivity do not liberate workers from the need to sell their time in exchange for wages, but increases the pressure on them to do so. Rising productivity makes the condition of the worker more precarious, not less.

How? The logic comes from Marx's labor theory of value (LTV). The LTV posits that "value" is determined by the average amount of labor time it takes to produce a particular thing. If it generally takes about 20 hours of labor time to produce a wooden table, the table holds 20 units of value.

Notice what happens as productivity rises: the value of each good decreases. If, after a technological innovation, it only takes 10 hours to produce that same table, all such tables, past, and present, now only hold 10 units of value. If a firm produced 100 tables per year at the old productivity level, the result was 2,000 units of value (100 tables x 20 labor hours embodied in each table). At the new level, if the firm does not increase production, it would produce only 1,000 units of value (100 tables x 10 labor hours embodied in each table). Value, as Postone will later pick up on, is "temporally determined". It derives from the "socially necessary labor time" required to produce any particular good.

The overall amount of value produced is vital, because profit is determined by the ratio of surplus value to total value. That is, workers need to work some amount of hours in order to earn enough wages to survive. But, on Marx's theory, workers are exploited to work more hours than are required by subsistence, and the value created in those hours is captured by the capitalist (the one who owns the means of production). Surplus value is the amount of value created by a worker in excess of the amount they must receive to sustain themselves.

So if total value produced is decreased, the ratio between surplus value and total value decreases, and so do profits. Thus, firms are driven to produce more and more, 'just to stand still'. The same firm must now produce more tables than before to achieve the same value production.

To achieve higher levels of production and maintain or increase the ratio between surplus value and total value, firms must increasingly exploit workers to labor beyond the amount required for their subsistence. The higher the level of productivity, the greater the pressure to exploit workers and exact more surplus value from their labor.

It's by this dynamic that, for Marx, rising productivity levels make the "condition of existence" for the worker more precarious.

This should begin to sketch the logical contours of what Postone would later call the treadmill: "That treadmill dynamic is the initial determination of what Marx developed as central to capitalism: capitalism necessarily must constantly accumulate to stand still."

But Postone would take this sketch and fill it out into a concrete theory of how this treadmill effect sustains "a new form of social domination...intrinsic to capitalism: it is the domination of people by time."

…

Postone Assembles the Treadmill

For Postone, the decisive aspect of capitalism that drives the treadmill effect is the temporal determination of value by "socially necessary labor time". If profits depend on total value production, and value depends on wage labor for the sake of profit, then capitalist society depends upon propping up the necessity for wage labor, despite whatever reductions in labor time rising productivity levels make possible.

According to the LTV, the production of value in capitalist society fundamentally depends upon preventing the reduction of the working week, even as new technologies make such reductions conceivable.

Postone:

“In a society in which material wealth is the form of social wealth, increased productivity results either in a greater amount of wealth or in the possibility of a corresponding reduction in labor time. This is not the case when value is the form of wealth."

When value is the form of wealth, as in capitalist society, then any reduction in labor time is a reduction in total value produced, which undermines profits.

From this tension, Postone draws out the "necessity represented by value", capitalism's inmost engine powering the treadmill effect. This temporal form of value requires, that is, makes necessary, the continuation of wage labor in all forms of society. As productivity rises, this necessity for the unreduced input of labor time is never transcended, but always recreated:

"Note that inasmuch as the development of productivity redetermines the social labor hour, this development reconstitutes, rather than supersedes, the form of necessity associated with that abstract temporal unit. Each new level of productivity is structurally transformed into the concrete presupposition of the social labor hour—and the amount of value produced per unit time remains constant...In Marx’s analysis, the basic structure of capitalism’s social forms is such, then, that the accumulation of historical time [the accumulation of productivity] does not, in and of itself, undermine the necessity represented by value, that is, the necessity of the present..."

Rising productivity does not undermine the "necessity represented by value", but rather:

"...it changes the concrete presupposition of that present, thereby constituting its necessity anew. Present necessity is not 'automatically' negated but paradoxically reinforced; it is impelled forward in time as a perpetual present, an apparently eternal necessity."

Thus, we do not run the treadmill. The treadmill runs us. By reconstituting necessity, impelling it "forward in time as ... an apparently eternal necessity", capitalism's need to accumulate in order to stand still "expresses and constitutes a new form of social domination...intrinsic to capitalism: it is the domination of people by time."

We're now in a better position to understand what Postone means by the domination of people by time. It is the subjection of life-time to this apparently eternal necessity. Time is not experienced as an end-in-itself, but always as a means of exchange for survival. Workers do not gain the agency to freely determine their own time, their own lives, but are perpetually held within what Marx called "the realm of necessity".

The philosopher Martin Hägglund puts this in a harsher light. The problem with value in capitalist society is not only that it prevents us from achieving the very sort of freedom it claims to provide (freedom of self-determination), but that it actively reduces the realm of freedom available to us:

"...the measure of value under capitalism (labor time) answers to the measure of value that is operative in the realm of necessity. When we labor in the realm of necessity — when we do something that is merely a means to an end — our labor time is normatively understood as a 'cost' for us ... The very calculation of value under capitalism, then, is inimical to the actualization of freedom. Indeed, the deepest contradiction of capitalism resides in its own measure of value. Capitalism employs the measure of value that is operative in the realm of necessity and treats it as though it were a measure of freedom. Capitalism is therefore bound to increase the realm of necessity and decreases the realm of freedom."

In this light, the treadmill effect does more than sustain an eternal form of necessity. The treadmill grinds away at what little freedom remains. More and more of our lives must be converted into this mentality of means-to-an-end, robbing us of the freedom to enjoy time as an end-in-itself, which is the mark of Marx's "realm of freedom".

This should all raise a number of existential red flags. What reason could we have for remaining in a system that's not only incapable of converting higher productivity levels into greater freedoms for all, but that actively converts what spaces of freedom remain into the realm of necessity governed by the profit motive?

Thus, we must now ask: what if the treadmill hypothesis is just bullshit?

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Against the Treadmill

There are at least two strong critiques against blaming capitalism for the treadmill effect:

1. If Marx's labor theory of value is wrong, or no longer applies in a digital society, then Postone's logic connecting capitalism to the treadmill falls apart. So far, the logic that connects the treadmill effect to 'capitalism' relies on Marx's labor theory of value, something that both Postone and Hägglund use in their analyses. Aside from neoclassical economists who reject the LTV on theoretical grounds, even some contemporary Marxists suggest the LTV no longer applies to a digital society.
2. American capitalism from 1830 - 1930 displayed trends that run directly against the predictions of the treadmill effect. From 1830 - 1930, the average working week in the U.S. dropped from 75 - 37 hours. Rising productivity coincided with a declining working week. According to the treadmill effect, this shouldn't be possible in a capitalist society.

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What if You're Not a Marxist?

Most conventional economists, and even some Marxists today, would tell you that Marx's labor theory of value is demonstrably broken. It's important to pair that with an equally important point: the theory of value that quietly prevails today, the marginal or subjective theory of value, is also demonstrably broken (see: adaptive preferences and/or preference falsification, or the absence of distinction between value creation and extraction). Nevertheless, Postone's logic has no basis if one doesn't accept Marx's particular theory of value.

If the treadmill effect is real, and it's intrinsically related to capitalism, then we should be able to see it from perspectives other than Marx's. If it's real, any analysis of capitalism that submits itself to "the constraints which the endeavor to provide an accurate representation of reality imposes" should see it. It's like trying on seven different sunglasses, each with their own tint, and staring at the sun. If each still functions as a clear-enough window onto the world, you'll still see the sun no matter what tint you look through.

Towards that end, we can look for the treadmill effect through the lens of three other, equally giant figures in political economy: Adam Smith, Henry George, and John Maynard Keynes.

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Adam Smith: the Social Production of Scarcity

Adam Smith apparently believed in a different sort of treadmill. Rather than being driven by exploitation, or a contradiction in the value form, Smith believed capitalist society perpetuates a treadmill driven by the desire for social status and distinction. In short, vanity and desire. The quest for status drives members of society to work longer hours than survival demands because they crave "the attention of the world":

"The rich man glories in his riches...because he feels they naturally draw upon him the attention of the world. At the thought of this, his heart seems to swell & dilate itself within him."

"Natural Man" who exists in a Rousseau-ian state of nature, has few desires. She has little interest in vanity. But "bring him into society," writes Smith, "and all his own passions will immediately become the causes of new passions."

The economic anthropologist Gustav Peebles writes:

"Out of this endless competition for distinction blossoms a world of socially-produced scarcity. Individuals begin to chase after wealth despite its lack of utility to their survival. Indeed, society creates wholly artificial and unnecessary needs only to ensure that a complex symbolic apparatus of distinction exists. The scarcer the sign, the better it is at attracting much coveted flattery: [quoting Smith] 'How many people ruin themselves by laying out money on trinkets of frivolous utility? All their pockets are stuffed with little conveniencies [sic]. They contrive new pockets, unknown in the clothes of other people, in order to carry a greater number'."

Tracing Smith's logic, Peebles goes on to reveal a startling fact. Smith thought this deplorable treadmill of chasing after distinction was both morally bankrupt, and societally necessary. Without it, society would crumble:

"But all is not lost despite this bleak, hamster-wheel, assessment of the human condition. Taking a crucial next step, Smith insists that this socially-produced scarcity is, in fact, the origin of morality itself. Without scarcity, ease and tranquility would prevail, thereby stultifying humankind, since 'Hardships, dangers, injuries, misfortunes, are the only masters under whom we can learn the exercise of this virtue. But these are all masters to whom nobody willingly puts himself to school'. The abundant natural world enjoyed by the vagrant would allow the individual to abandon virtue, since there are few hardships in the abundant Garden that would allow her to develop it."

Smith held a bleak view of human nature. If we overcame scarcity and lived in conditions of abundance, we'd simply "abandon virtue" and do nothing productive. We'd watch Netflix until we die, never having left the couch. We'd found no new companies. Discover no new innovations. Pursue no further education.

"In light of this logic," Peebles suggests: "we can make a pithy distinction between Smith and Marx: Both believed in the reign of false consciousness [that binds us to the treadmill]; it is only that the former hoped to preserve it, while the latter aimed to explode it."

Both Smith and Marx believed in the existence of a treadmill effect. For Smith, it was driven by the desire for social status, while for Marx, it was driven by exploitation and the contradiction between value and wealth. Marx hoped to explode the treadmill, while Smith feared we'd be useless without it.

Although Smith didn't think society could sustain itself without it, he did think that individuals could each, in their old age, grow wise enough to step off the treadmill, one by one. This would leave the treadmill that sustains society intact, while allowing for each individual, once they've put in their time, to orient their lives towards more important matters.

Peebles:

"But even Smith argues that, in older age, people are no longer duped by this ultimately beneficent false consciousness – it is exploded on an individual rather than a society-wide level. Old age ushers in the illuminating real-world truth delivered by what he colorfully terms 'splenetic philosophy.' This little known subdiscipline of the contemplative arts allows 'Power and riches [to] appear then to be, what they are, enormous and operose machines contrived to produce a few trifling conveniencies to the body'. Having recognized this truth, the splenetic old man finds that 'the pleasures of the vain and empty distinctions of greatness disappear.... In his heart he curses ambition, and vainly regrets the ease and indolence of youth, pleasures which are fled for ever, and which he has foolishly sacrificed for what, when he has got it, can afford him no real satisfaction'."

Thus, for Smith, the treadmill is not intrinsic to the logic of capitalism. Rather, it arises from social psychology, from humans living together. The question of whether a form of society is possible that does not consign the majority of human life-time to a misguided treadmill did not interest Smith, because such a possibility would lead to a society of idleness and sloth.

But 120 years after Smith's writing, an economist named Henry George would open a new and immensely popular inquiry into whether there was something intrinsic to the processes of capitalism that perpetuated the 'treadmill of existence' for working classes. His question, in its simplest form:

"Why, in spite of increase in productive power, do wages tend to a minimum which will give but a bare living?"

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Henry George

Writing in the 1870's, Henry George was vexed by the discomforting association between progress and poverty: "The association of poverty with progress is the great enigma of our times."

Wherever material progress was at its greatest, conditions of material deprivation were at their most severe:

"Where the conditions to which material progress everywhere tends are most fully realized — that is to say, where population is densest, wealth greatest, and the machinery of production and exchange most highly developed — we find the deepest poverty, the sharpest struggle for existence, and the most of enforced idleness."

He didn't find this association only in a few industrial centers, but across the entire economic landscape of his time. This led him to suspect that progress and poverty aren't circumstantially related, but causally. That poverty and hardship aren't random correlations with centers of industrial progress, but are "engendered by progress itself":

"This fact — the great fact that poverty and all its concomitants show themselves in communities just as they develop into the conditions towards which material progress tends — proves that the social difficulties existing wherever a certain stage of progress has been reached, do not arise from local circumstances but are, in some way or another, engendered by progress itself...I mean that the tendency of what we call material progress is in nowise to improve the condition of the lowest class in the essentials of healthy, happy human life."

For George, the puzzling relationship between progress and poverty is driven by the tendency for wages to pay only what provides a bare living: "The cause which produces poverty in the midst of advancing wealth is evidently the cause which exhibits itself in the tendency, everywhere recognized, of wages to a minimum." From this tripartite relationship between progress, poverty, and wages, George derives his question given above: "Why, in spite of increase in productive power, do wages tend to a minimum which will give but a bare living?"

If this tendency were reversed, and wages rose as productive power rose, the stubborn relationship between progress and poverty would break. Rising productivity would benefit all. Instead, George's analysis of progress begins to sound much like Marx's analysis of capitalism. Both paradoxically drive workers deeper into precarity.

Thus we can say that Henry George's lens confirms the existence of a treadmill effect independent of Marx's logic. That there is something "engendered by progress itself" that drives wages down despite rising productivity. That something, as we'll explore in a later section, is the rising value, and thus rents, of privately owned land.

For George, the treadmill of progress is driven by the private ownership of land, and unless some great change is made, all progress will only exacerbate the association of poverty with progress.

…

John Maynard Keynes

60 years after George's Progress and Poverty, John Maynard Keynes published an infamous essay titled Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren. In it, he predicts that within 100 years (a prediction landing on 2030), we'd be 4-8 times better off in economic terms, working maybe 15-hour workweeks, mostly just to keep ourselves busy.

New technology and accelerating capital accumulation would cause "the greatest change which has ever occurred in the material environment of life for human beings in the aggregate":

"I draw the conclusion that, assuming no important wars and no important increase in population, the economic problem may be solved, or be at least within sight of solution, within a hundred years. This means that the economic problem is not – if we look into the future – the permanent problem of the human race."

As the economic historian Robert Heilbroner puts it, solving the economic problem would mean "gradually bringing to an end the condition of material need as an effective stimulus for human behavior." This economic problem of material need is what drives the means-to-an-end way of living Martin Hägglund identified as defining the realm of necessity. To exchange the majority of one's waking hours for the resources to satisfy the economic problem constitutes the 'social domination by time' elaborated by Postone. When all time is allocated to the economic problem, existential ones fall out of reach.

But as we near 2030, our trajectory appears nowhere near 10-years-off from solving the economic problem. Precarity, as well as average work weeks, are both rising. Thus, it has become an incredibly popular genre to write essays and books about why Keynes was wrong. What did Keynes miss?

Economists criticize Keynes on a number of important points, ranging from his essay's neglect of distributional concerns to his focus on the satiation of basic needs without much concern for the infinity of relative needs (á la Adam Smith). Jean-Paul Fitoussi makes the perceptive insight that even what counts as a human being's "basic needs" are adaptive. Economic growth may spur an evolution in what we perceive as our basic needs (was internet access a category of basic need 100 years ago?). This infinite evolution of both basic and relative needs undermine Keynes' notion that the economic problem could be solved, and capital accumulation would cease to be of significant interest.

It would be useful for the narrative of this essay to make another, related critique: Keynes simply missed the existence of capitalism's treadmill effect, which guarantees no matter how much progress is made, the economic problem will be no closer to solution, and people will be forced to continue accumulating for its own sake. But this claim would be a case of bullshit.

We find ourselves asking what Keynes missed. But his later work suggests a simple answer: he didn't miss anything.

Keynes, like Marx, is too often framed as having believed that such a transition would occur naturally. That capital accumulation would automatically liberate workers and benefit all. The truth was just the opposite.

Four years after his infamous economic possibilities essay, Keynes was invited to take part in a discussion among English economists on "the outstanding conundrum of today": the problem of poverty in the midst of potential plenty. Sound familiar?

Keynes responds:

"None of this, however, will happen by itself or of its own accord. The system is not self-adjusting, and without purposive direction, it is incapable of translating our actual poverty into our potential plenty.”

Keynes breaks from the prevailing orthodoxy, which suggested the capitalist system was "self-adjusting". A self-adjusting economic system would naturally yield outcomes that transmute poverty into equitable prosperity as capital accumulates and productivity rises. The invisible hand would take care of things on its own. But the capitalist system, writes Keynes, is not self-adjusting.

For our inquiry, this is a crucial semantic point. If the system is not self-adjusting, then it does bear some degree of the treadmill effect. Capitalist society will not naturally carry us from poverty into the potential plenty made possible by capital accumulation. Workers will keep working, but no progress in their overall, existential condition will be made.

Like George and Marx, Keynes believed intentional changes had to be made in the dynamics that drive the capitalist system. Otherwise, poverty would prevail amidst our "potential plenty". These adjustments Keynes had in mind weren't minor tweaks meant to redirect a slightly misguided capitalist system. They were explicitly meant to overcome capitalism in its entirety. Keynes was a capitalist in the same sense that Marx was: capitalism is the worst system for improving the human condition, except for all the other economic systems. The 'point' of capitalism in both of their visions is to create the possibility to get beyond it - a possibility that must be seized by intentional action and policymaking.

Keynes:

"For at least another hundred years we must pretend to ourselves and to every one that fair is foul and foul is fair; for foul is useful and fair is not. Avarice and usury and precaution must be our gods for a little longer still. For only they can lead us out of the tunnel of economic necessity into daylight."

In hindsight, Keynes did not miss the presence of a treadmill effect. He believed that capitalism, left to its own, uninterrupted devices, would simply drive accumulation on towards infinity. Instead, he failed to account for just how strong the opposition against making interventions against this tendency would become. What he did not foresee was the rise of neoliberal economics that supplanted Keynesian thinking in the 1970's.

As we'll see later, Keynes believed the redistribution of income and wealth was crucial for maintaining the levels of aggregate demand that would make the abundance of capital possible. Neoliberal policies pushed in the opposite direction. From the 1980's onwards, income & wealth inequality began their well-known climb towards levels rivaled only by those right before the Great Depression.

As with Smith, Marx, and George, through the Keynesian lens we find another perspective affirming some sort of treadmill effect.

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The Time We Broke the Treadmill

What, then, of the century from 1830 - 1930, where precisely the opposite of what the treadmill effect predicts took place? As capitalism developed, the average working week dropped from around 75 hours in 1800 down to around 40 in the early 1930's.

In Marx's analysis, rising productivity necessarily leads to rising precarity for workers, with the assuredness of a natural law. For Postone, in a capitalist society where value is the form of wealth, increasing productivity cannot be realized in the form of a reduction in labor time.

But that's precisely what happened. How, then, could American capitalism have displayed a steady decline in working hours for so long?

Borrowing from Keynes, one answer is that it was a period during which popular opinion did not treat the economic system as self-adjusting. While it's true that 1830 - 1930 was a period when economic orthodoxy preached the opposite, that it was self-adjusting (it was this orthodoxy from which Keynes would break), their opinion didn't hold much sway over public opinion. Until the mid 20th century, society at large didn't care all that much what economists had to say.

As documented by the historian Benjamin Hunnicutt, the century when working hours consistently declined in America was defined by a common view of The American Dream as increasing leisure time for all. Economic progress was broadly understood as leading down the path towards lives of free time, even for workers.

Hunnicutt's academic career was devoted to answering a perplexing question: what happened? Why, after 1930, did working hours cease declining? Had the treadmill effect only temporarily faltered? Did the Great Depression reignite whatever engine had gone bust?

There is no single answer, but one informative turning point was Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal. In 1933, the Black-Connery bill passed the senate, which would mandate a reduction in the national working week to 30 hours. FDR initially supported the bill. Many believed a 30-hour workweek was months from being law.

"The first nationally circulated issue of Newsweek, dated April 15, 1933, had for its front cover, in bold headlines, the news that the thirty-hour workweek would soon be the law of the land. These developments elicited a flurry of speculation about a future in which the nation would have to deal with an abundance of leisure. Few other historical cal trends were as clear in 1933."

But the cultural tides soon reversed course. Perhaps due to stringent provisions in the bill, such as restricting imports from workers who worked more than 30-hour weeks, or perhaps as a response to the business interests banding together against a bill they saw as threatening their bottom-lines, FDR changes his mind. He abandoned the Black-Connery bill in favor of the National Industrial Recovery act. The idea of a reduced working week would never recover.

Hunnicutt:

"In 1935 Roosevelt helped change the direction of American history. He and his administration committed the federal government to the emerging belief that progress was perpetual economic growth and Full-Time, Full Employment — the basic tenets of the new economic gospel of consumption. According to the new vision, progress would no longer be understood as higher wages and shorter hours but as a constantly improving material standard of living with 'full-time' (newly defined as a forty-hour week) jobs for all, supported by new government programs and policies. Roosevelt committed government to do whatever it would take to create enough new work in the public and private sectors of the economy to replace the work taken by new technology. Government would also bridge the gap created by the tendency for economic demand to lag behind increases in productivity by developing countercyclical as well as long-term spending strategies. Labor's view that shorter work hours stimulated demand and helped stabilize the economy, allowing for sustainable growth, was discarded."

What can this episode of America's history tell us about the treadmill effect? The American novelist Marilynne Robinson puts it simply. In response to Henry George's question of why wages tend towards subsistence levels despite rising productive powers, she writes: "because they can, neither ethics nor laws intervening." The same may be said as for why working hours stagnated: because they can, neither ethics nor laws intervening.

The ups-and-downs of wages and working hours across the history of American capitalism suggest that whatever tendencies arise from the internal logic of capitalism, they are just that: tendencies. They are not irreversible. In the end, the determinant of wages and working hours alike are power dynamics, policy commitments, and above all, the choices we make as a society. We are not constrained by the ideological label given to our system.

If we share a broad enough commitment to realizing economic progress in the form of reducing the working week for all, there are policies that can make it so, as they have in the past. So too, with wages.

Robinson observes, in harmony with Marx, George, and Keynes, that in the absence of such policies, capitalism does tend towards subsistence-level wages. Rising productivity does not tend towards shorter working weeks. These tendencies are not iron laws - they can be modulated.

I would then revise our subject of inquiry from the treadmill "effect" to the treadmill "tendency".

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The Treadmill Tendency: Capitalism, or Bullshit?

Let's return to the question of whether or not blaming capitalism for the treadmill tendency is bullshit.

Recall, a claim is bullshit if it "offers a description of a certain state of affairs without genuinely submitting to the constraints which the endeavor to provide an accurate representation of reality imposes."

From personal experience, I can affirm that many, many such accusations are total bullshit. I've heard people confidently blame capitalism for every micro-element of discontent that populates their universe, but who'd be incapable of offering any remotely sturdy definition of what capitalism is, other than some vague trope like "institutionalized greed".

But Smith, Marx, George, Keynes, and Postone knew what they were talking about. Each provides a lens that finds its own shade of the treadmill tendency operating in capitalist society. Each of their treadmills had different causes, from status-seeking, temporally determined forms of value, rising land rents, to interest rates. Each believed that, absent deliberate intervention, the capitalist system would keep us in motion while getting us nowhere, existentially speaking.

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Dismantling the Treadmill

Things cannot end there. If there is a treadmill tendency, and we agree it makes for a less-than-ideal way of life, there is then the question of what to do about it. It's here that I think blaming capitalism for the treadmill tendency is at its most useless.

The labels of a system lag behind the policies that comprise it. Our economy will not evolve by changing the ideological label, and subsequently passing new policies. By focusing on labels (capitalism vs. socialism), we're focusing on the caboose, the tail-end of change rather than the frontiers where it begins. By the time we call our system "social democratic capitalism", "anarcho-syndicalist socialism", or "free-market, pure capitalism", the policies will already be in place. The game will already be decided.

So, what is to be done? We can return to each of our economists, surveying their own visions for how the treadmill tendency is to be dismantled.

Adam Smith: Grow Old

As mentioned, Smith thought dismantling the treadmill would dismantle society, and so had no vision for doing so at scale. Yes, it would drive most of us to waste our lives in a misguided pursuit of wealth and social status. But this would spur the industrious activity that sustains society. In our old age, however, Smith thought we might each individually step off the treadmill. Once we've wasted our youth, in old age we might finally have what he called a "splenetic insight", and pivot our energy towards more existentially valuable things.

So Smith's advice might be something like: grow old, fast.

Karl Marx: Reduce Working Hours

Marx believed that shortening the working-day was the basic prerequisite for the "development of human energy which is an end in itself, the true realm of freedom". But there's a looming answer any such scheme must address: how will we afford to work less?

At the height of the American labor movement in the 19th and early 20th century, calls for reducing the working week were accompanied by calls for higher wages that would makeup the difference. We would eventually work 15-hour workweeks, making as much, if not more, than we did when working 40 hours.

The outlook is bleak for wages naturally rising to fill the gap that would be left by reducing hours. Spain just announced the largest reduced work-week experiment to date. Roughly 200 companies, comprising between 3,000 - 6,000 employees, will drop to a 32-hour work-week. The government will pay the difference in lost wages. The 3-year trial will cost the Spanish government around $60 million.

This method would not scale well; governments can't just pay the difference. The US government is unlikely to foot the bill in lost wages from a nation of ~156 million workers dropping from 40 hours to 15. Just a few weeks ago, the democratic party dropped a provision that would rase the minimum wage to $15/hour from its latest stimulus bill. It will remain $7.25. How, then, can we afford to work less?

The French social philosopher André Gorz, writing in 1988, suggested Marx's vision for shortening the working week should be supported by a guaranteed income that makes up the difference in lost wages. I've written with great enthusiasm about various kinds and benefits of such a basic income, but how much of a gap could it feasibly plug? In 2017, the median personal income of a 40-hours-per-week-worker was $865 per week. Dropping to a 15-hour workweek is a 63% reduction in working hours, with a corresponding income loss of $545 per week.

To plug that gap, the basic income would have to reach a minimum of $2,180 per month for such workers. There is currently no feasible proposal for a basic income of such magnitude.

A recent proposal for a 4-day working week in the U.K. outlined a few policy measures to explore in such a project: higher wages, universal basic 'services' - such as the unconditional public provision of essential programs such as healthcare, transportation, food, and internet access - and a basic income. But the question of how to afford both universal basic services and income remains unsettled.

Henry George: Land Value Tax

Henry George had a different idea. In fact, he was convinced that his analysis revealed the only way to permanently reverse the tendency of rising productivity to increase precarity: land must be liberated from the stranglehold of private property, and held in common ownership by all citizens as a collective inheritance.

"We have traced the unequal distribution of wealth which is the curse and menace of modern civilization to the institution of private property in land. We have seen that so long as this institution exists no increase in productive power can permanently benefit the masses; but, on the contrary, must tend still further to depress their condition...nothing short of making land common property can permanently relieve poverty and check the tendency of wages to the starvation point."

George is adamant that the ownership of land is "the great fundamental fact which ultimately determines the social, the political, and consequently the intellectual and moral condition of a people." What does this mean in practice? Tax the value of land at around 95%.

George refers to this land value tax as "the single tax" that could replace all others. This single tax would strike down to the heart of capitalist development, making it a force for existential progress:

"The change I have proposed would destroy the conditions that distort impulses in themselves beneficent, and would transmute the forces which now tend to disintegrate society into forces which would tend to unite and purify it...A consideration of the effects of the change proposed then shows that it would enormously increase production; would secure justice in distribution; would benefit all classes; and would make possible an advance to a higher and nobler civilization."

In George's day, the idea gained a huge following. In the early 1900's, George's work was commonly placed on the same plane as Darwin's Origin of Species. In fact, Alfred Russel Wallace, who independently came up with the theory of evolution driven by natural selection, and whose papers on the subject were jointly published with Darwin's, stated that George's Progress and Poverty was "undoubtedly the most remarkable and important book of the present century".

Today, however, the idea is mostly forgotten. In practice, a few municipalities have implemented lesser forms, known as a "split-tax". Rather than eliminating all taxes on capital and shifting them over to land, a split-tax compromises, reducing the tax burden on capital improvements and raising the taxes on land. In municipalities employing a split-tax, such as Harrisburg City, land is taxed at 31%, the buildings upon it at 5%.

But recently, it's experiencing a new spark of interest. From economists to tech entrepreneurs, many are suggesting it may finally be time for a land value tax.

John Maynard Keynes: Redistribute Income and Wealth Until Capital is so Cheap that it Becomes Irrelevant

If the system isn't self-adjusting, how did Keynes suggest we adjust the capitalist system so as to lead us "out of the tunnel of economic necessity into daylight"? Broadly, he thought we'd exit the tunnel once we could make so much capital, so cheaply, that it'd no longer make sense for people to devote much time or energy towards pursuing it. It would sink into the background of human life, like the ubiquity of Oxygen, or pencils.

“Economic welfare and social well-being will be increased in the long run by a policy which tends to make capital goods so abundant, that the reward which can be gained from owning them falls to be modest a figure as to be no longer a serious burden on anyone. The right course is to get rid of the scarcity of capital goods - which will rid us at the same time of most of the evils of capitalism - whilst also moving in the direction of increasing the share of income falling to those whose economic welfare will gain most by their having the chance to consume more."

But "getting rid of the scarcity of capital goods" is not an actionable policy. For Keynes, this direction, above all, required stimulating demand at the lower ends of the income distribution as capital accumulated. The most direct way to do so was to raise taxes on the wealthy and redistribute them to the poor and less-wealthy:

“Since the end of the nineteenth century significant progress towards the removal of very great disparities of wealth and income has been achieved through the instrument of direct taxation…Many people would wish to see this process carried much further…For we have seen that, up to the point where full employment prevails, the growth of capital depends not at all on a low propensity to consume but is, on the contrary, held back by it: and only in conditions of full employment is a low propensity to consume conducive to the growth of capital…measures for the redistribution of incomes in a way likely to raise the propensity to consume may prove positively favorable to the growth of capital.”

Keynes believed the primary obstacles to a better form of society were the social and political forces that would "reject a more equal distribution of incomes":

"Yet there will be many social and political forces to oppose the necessary change. It is probable that we cannot make the changes wisely unless we make them gradually. We must foresee what is before us and move to greet it half-way. If capitalist society rejects a more equal distribution of incomes and the forces of banking and finance succeed in maintaining the rate of interest somewhere near the figure which ruled on the average during the nineteenth century (which was, by the way, a little lower than the rate of interest which rules today), then a chronic tendency towards the underemployment of resources must in the end sap and destroy that form of society."

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Seizing Possibilities

Now, returning to the question we began with:

Why, as citizens of the most powerful, technologically equipped, and advanced society in history, are so many of us spending most of our waking lives working jobs we do not particularly like to sustain lives we do not particularly enjoy?

Rather than recourse to a vague answer - "that's capitalism" - we can be more specific: because we lack the policies to make it otherwise.

On the topic of human consciousness - which I've written elsewhere should be understood always in relation to the economic system it evolves within - The American psychologist William James wrote:

"Our normal waking consciousness...is but one special type of consciousness, whilst all about it, parted from it by the filmiest of screens, there lie potential forms of consciousness entirely different. We may go through life without suspecting their existence; but apply the requisite stimulus, and at a touch they are there in all their completeness..."

The same can be said of states of society. Our society as it presently exists is one possibility among a series of alternative possibilities. Apply the requisite policies, and we can dislodge ourselves from the current trajectory and begin evolving towards another.

Most importantly, these possibilities are not distant. Another world is possible, now. In Postone's final essay before his death in 2018, he puts Keynes' verdict that the system is not self-adjusting in stark terms. Capitalism furnishes us with the potential for transformation, but it will not ignite that transformation for us. As the system develops, the possibility of a better world is made more vivid, but the dynamics opening that possibility tend away from realizing it.

Postone:

"Marx’s analysis is directed less toward the emergence of 'resistance,' ... than toward the possibility of transformation. It seeks to delineate the emergence of a form of life that, as a result of capitalism’s dynamic, is constituted as a historical possibility, and yet is constrained by that very dynamic from being realized. This gap between what is and what could be, allows for a future possibility that, increasingly, has become real historically. It is this gap that constitutes the basis for a historical critique of what is. It reveals the historically specific character of the fundamental social forms of capitalism – not only with reference to the past, or another society, but also with reference to a possible future."

Another world is possible; we see this more clearly everyday. As this gap grows between "what is and what could be", so can our resolve for incrementally radical transformation. If we channel this resolve into real, critical policy debates about what strategies are best suited to realize the higher possibilities that are made more visible with each passing phase of capitalist society, then we just might step off the treadmill, and get somewhere.

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