Invasion of Capital into the Creative Worker's Free Time

The problem of the content and nature of the use of a worker's free time is of scientific and practical interest in the unity and struggle of opposites both with working time, existing in capitalist society outside the real “temporal freedom” of a person of labor, and with leisure time, included in the structure of free time. The actualization of these problems is determined by the increasing importance of creative work, which contributes to the formation of a new society of professionals - potentially “another subject of the production process”, characterized not by imaginary, but by real freedom (subjectivity) not only of work, but also the use of free time of an individual and society for personal development. In reality, creative labor and social free time come into conflict with the desire of capital to constantly increase and diversify the exploitation of labor, knowledge, and personality. Classical and contemporary scholars raise the question of capital's unchanging intention to turn the "time of creative freedom" into a surplus product, to resubjugate labor by erasing the boundary between work and leisure, to increase the degree of alienation of labor, directing the free time of the creative personality not to its development, but to consumption, expanding leisure time to the limit. The present study was conducted on a comparative cross-country level in the context of empirical comparison of temporal and chronometric characteristics of creative labor of workers in three branches of the social sphere related to the reproduction of human potential. The main conclusion is the identification of a paradoxical trend of late capitalist socio-economic development associated with the reduction of the share of socially free time in the increasing total amount of free time, in the conditions of increasing productivity, technologization and intellectualization of work and leisure. The above benefit-trend, in combination with the reduction of regulated working time, the transfer of part of the labor process to non-working time and the increase in leisure time, reflects the change in the nature of the exploitation of creative labor by capital in the direction of subjective restraint of its social-revolutionary power adequate to the construction of the "kingdom of freedom" in the long run.