ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that there is a serious problem with Karl Marx's reasoning that it leaves the content of "disposable time" indeterminate, with the consequence that production activity appears once more to be determined by objective necessity. By subsuming all needs under one universal need, abstractly defined as the need for free time, Marx provides a merely formal view of freedom. Marx does not recognize the need for choice between technical alternatives or for a social determination of the "values" in accordance with which such choices might be made. Alert to the manipulative implications of theories of technological determinism, Georg Lukacs believes that human freedom must be understood in terms of an ontological necessity for choice between competing alternatives. Because the end which ultimately governs all choice is the human end of freedom in community, Lukacs remarks that technology and technical reason are but the means to this end and that choices cannot be made on technical grounds alone.
