Claudio Napoleoni on the Liberation of Labor versus the Liberation from Labor: A Dialogue with Adam Smith, John Stuart Mill, John Maynard Keynes – And Karl Marx

This article offers an intellectual exploration of the problematic distinction between the “liberation from labor” and the “liberation of labor”, conceived as a response to Adam Smith’s view of labor as “toil and trouble” and his justification of capitalism through the notion of the invisible hand. I begin by revisiting the oscillations in Keynes’s thinking on this issue, from The Economic Consequences of the Peace to The General Theory, passing through Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren. I then outline a genealogy – both preceding and following Keynes – focused on the role of labor and the possibility of exiting from it, with particular attention to Adam Smith and John Stuart Mill. The discussion continues with an analysis of the Freudo-Marxism of Norman Brown and Herbert Marcuse, including Nancy Chodorow’s critique of these authors. I then examine three distinct positions taken by Claudio Napoleoni on this topic as registered in an unpublished manuscript from the late 1960s, an article on the reduction of working hours from the late 1980s, and a chapter on the historical role of capital written in the late 1970s for a high school textbook. In each of these writings the confrontation with Stuart Mill and Keynes is central, while in the last the influence of Marx proves essential. I conclude by suggesting in what sense, and despite its limitations, the position Napoleoni articulated in his late-1970s chapter offers a way to move beyond a rigid dichotomy between the liberation “from” labor and the liberation “of” labor.