The Politics of Time: Retrieving our lives
(an excerpt from the section TIME from Jobs, Jive, and Joy: An Argument for the Utopian Spirit.)
The protagonist of Fernando Trías de Bes’ The Time Seller decides one day to quit his bullshit job. After years of toiling, he realizes that he has not been able to save any money to pursue his one interest in life: the study of the reproductive system of the redheaded termite. The only alternative he imagines is to find some means of earning more money in a shorter period of time so that he can devote his life to a study he deferred for too long.
He mulls over his options to the point of desperation for days and nearly returns to his old job when he hits upon the perfect solution. He realizes that he is not alone in wanting to have more time for his pursuits and decides to figure out a way to sell time. His first venture is to capture five minutes of time in small vials. His attempts at wholesale distribution prove futile, so he lowers his expectations and asks a friend to carry the vials in his store.
By word-of-mouth sales, his small venture proves to be successful. His eager customers take their five-minute vials to work to take short breaks. After a television news story, he becomes a local celebrity and he needs to hire a factory full of workers to keep up with sales.
His venture gets out of hand and he faces the revenge of the ruling class who fear the total disruption of society caused by his selling time in larger quantities.
This tale strikes at the core of capitalist society. What do we all do to survive no matter where we work? We sell our labor power to produce wealth, which the capitalist steals for his profit. But, in fact, even if we employees are not productive, even if we spend all day on social media, we must still remain shackled to our jobs. We have rented ourselves. Or more precisely, we have sold our time to the boss.
The fantasy of this story is that buying time erases the time sold to the boss. It’s like a coupon to give to the boss to obtain free time in exchange. Polling in the over-developed countries does verify that the overwhelming majority of workers would like to reduce their work time. Not surprisingly, some bosses endorse this scheme as it increases productivity! And news stories heralding the success of shorter work days appear on a regular basis.
As is well known, capitalists at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution imposed working days of 12 hours, and often more than that, six days a week. In opposition to this factory chattel system, the first national movement of workers in the US galvanized behind the movement for the Eight-Hour Day. The International Day of Labor, May Day, directly resulted from the commemoration of the Haymarket Martyrs in Chicago who were hung, essentially, for agitating for a shorter working day, since there was no evidence of their culpability of the violence they were accused of. That is, the state executed them for their politics of time.
When the accepted practice of eight-hour workdays was secured, in fact if not in law, the push to reduce hours further stalled. The politics of time revived when the massive unionizing drive during the Great Depression generated a new movement for a Six-Hour Day. The movement to shorten the workday, in part to provide more jobs, developed so much momentum that a federal law was close to passing Congress in the late 1930s. It would have mandated a more modest 36-hour week for government workers, however businessmen freaked at this precedent and sought to derail it.
The bosses privately feared rising labor costs, however their public statements, to the contrary, endorsed as “natural” the eight-hour day. Further, they sought to legally institutionalize it. Besides their opposition based on economic and managerial criteria, they also feared erosion of industrial discipline that a shorter working day portended.
In the Thirties, the notion of leisure for the masses was a concept laden with traditional Protestant prejudices. Prohibition, after all, a ban on leisure mainly directed against the working class, was not rescinded until 1933, thirteen years after the 18th Amendment was passed. The bourgeoisie feared that workers would simply spend their free time getting drunk, abandoning their familial duties, and ultimately populating Skid Rows, if not the jails. Social regimentation, according to this view, would be threatened with the rise of free time spent in pleasurable activities.
The eight-hour day reinforced in a concrete way, on a daily basis by duration if in no other way, the supreme value of the work ethic. Questioning it was, and remains, a taboo. The job, which amounts to the practice of the work ethic, became the focus for social validation and conferred on the workers, with the connivance of the bosses, the clergy, and the union leaders, a male social identity—the breadwinner. It bonded them to this perverse morality of sacrifice.
The work ethic became the dominant social tenet when the concept of time underwent a transformation. This was no coincidence. Without a dramatic, or really a revolutionary, reinterpretation of time that arose at the origins of the industrial revolution there would be no work ethic.
Going back a few centuries, before the rise of industrialism as we know it, to the merchant cities where a nascent proletariat slaved under the strictures of medieval globalization, we confront a system of time that we would hardly recognize. Time then was experienced, in the cities by skilled members of the guilds and on the land by the peasants, not in terms of hours spent at a task, but at the length of a task. Time wasn’t understood as spent in units, but as the result of creating finely crafted clothing, or delicately wrought metal, or glass, or cabinets. Or, for the peasants, as plowing, planting, and harvesting. The task dominated the temporal consciousness throughout society. And likewise, the time of year was not referenced to an abstract concept, but to the seasons, the phases of the moon, and numerous religious observances.
The elite, the nobles and the clergy, kept calendars for feasts and rituals, while the merchants kept precise track of time for economic reasons. However, these calendars had limited purpose and never dominated premodern societies. Historians note that the primary interest in time keeping, as we might recognize it, related to ritualistic needs. As precursors of the modern keen interest in time, the Benedictine monks instituted time keeping to regiment prayer times, as did the Muslims. And before them, a millennium ago, the Chinese rulers devised elaborate celestial clocks several stories tall to tell time. However, the Chinese peasants, like the Europeans, and other agriculturalists worldwide, had no use for a clock of any proportions.
So, while the more rarified sectors of most societies were accustomed to maintaining clock mechanisms of some sort, most likely sundials, and organizing a system of time to track royal or religious doings, clocks weren’t used to track subjects. During the late Middle Ages, with the rise of markets and finance, interest in time increased and clocks achieved a significant presence in society as prized tokens of wealth. The development of metallurgy, which made possible smaller and more reliable mechanisms transformed them from furniture to jewelry.
Time in the service of the economy, meaning the boss, only developed when the factory system gained geographic scope. The regimentation that characterized factory life was at first regulated by bells ringing from village church steeples. This system did not satisfy the factory owners’ expectations for control. The workers, newly urbanized, brought their festive habits from the countryside and ignored the routines the bells proclaimed. They rather prepared for the numerous festivals and church pageants they were accustomed to. When the factory owners, frustrated by the continuing lack of obedience when new clocks were installed in steeples, introduced their own factory clocks, which the workers also resisted. It was widely recognized that the owners tampered with the timekeeping mechanism to extend the working hours.
In the United States the new textile mills, built at the end of the 18th century, also faced ongoing worker resistance due to the regularization of time for the profit of the owners. These disruptions culminated, in 1824, with the first American factory strike (or “turn-out” as it was called then) in Pawtucket, Rhode Island. It was a week-long strike led by the women at the Slater Mill and supported by the entire town. Many more examples of worker opposition to factory regimentation imposed by clocks could be cited.
In a matter of decades, as the enclosures of the commons effectively removed peasants from their rural livelihoods, the old peasant time succumbed to factory time. The sons and daughters of the former peasants, with no ties to the countryside, reluctantly accepted the factory routine. New struggles erupted, but they weren’t based on abolishing or sabotaging factory time, but limiting its length. The mill owners, the priests and preachers assuaged the workers’ defeat in the realm of time, by convincing them that they were doing God’s work when they submitted to the daily drill. The work ethic was hatched.
Factory time, to this day, is more than the hours of work. It is the linchpin to a whole system of extraction of value we know as capitalism. Under capitalism, workers rent their power to do a job, but their value to the boss is determined by the extra time expended creating a commodity or providing a service. Let’s say the widgets they make in five hours meets the costs to the boss of a whole day of the workers’ time plus fixed costs (resources, energy, maintenance, etc.—Marx’s dead labor time) but the worker toils for ten hours. The extra five hours of work creating more product is total profit for the factory owner.
The time spent in the factory can be called enclosed time, not only from the point of view of the individual worker, but also as a universal reality. All work-time, all over the world, shares this sense of time that is sequestered. Just as the peasants’ common lands were enclosed, so too with the factory workers’ time. The workers punching a time clock are essentially closing a gate behind themselves—like farm animals herded into a pen from an open field.
The time after work can be called liminal time that could resolve, finally, into project time, that is non-enclosed time. Marx called it disposable time, but that doesn’t nearly describe time away from the job. The liminal time could be the time traveling back home, or going to a pub after the shift to alleviate the previous hours of misery, or going shopping. Liminal times are semi-enclosed times, when survival needs are attended to. The pleasurable content of project time, that is, free-range, autonomous project time depends on the individual and the situation.
For example, going to the pub to play music with one’s mates normally fits the category of pleasurable time. However, going there to drown one’s sorrows does not. And shopping can be a chore, or pleasurable. Liminal time can morph into project time and vice versa.
After work time has been labelled variously as “free time,” which may not be the case as we have seen, or “lived time,” which seems a bit vague. One characteristic of non-enclosed time is that it often flows, as when we are immersed in a game for instance. While this should be a goal of time away from drudgery, it isn’t always the case. Project time may not be a totally satisfying term as it hints at productivity and relegates idling, unfortunately, to decadence. However, if we understand “project” as both an individually directed activity (or purposeful non-activity) and, importantly, as a collective endeavor to playfully undertake a joint activity, it can serve at least until a better term arrives.
The point here is not to delve into the taxonomy of non-work time, but to get acquainted with time as more than an abstract, external flow. Time’s content defines our lives as tasks undertaken and emotional satisfaction received or denied. Project time presupposes some element of choice, while enclosed time (work time) does not. The ability to decide when to shop for food, clean house or see the doctor does provide a distinction from being on the job, or traveling to and from it, but it is still liminal in that it is necessary for the reproduction of everyday life. All enclosed time, of course, should be compensated, and to the extent that liminal time supports enclosed time, it too should be paid as labor. That is until we can abolish exploitation and the money economy.