You’re at work at your first job and just
completed a tiring task, so you decide to
relax a bit before you get back to it.
Your boss comes, sees you, and orders you
back on your feet.
Dejected, and maybe even a little confused,
you start walking around, pretending to do
work.
What a weird reality, right?
Having to pretend to do work to appease your
boss, even if there’s absolutely nothing
left to do?
It’s… degrading.
The explanation goes that when you’re on
the clock, you’re on company time, you’ve
essentially leased your time out.
They don’t own YOU, that’s illegal, but
they own your time.
And so you’re at their whims and have to
look confused at your computer or walk around
the store pretending to dust things.
Yet, if you sit down to think about it, the
entire premise that your time can be counted
separately from you as a person and someone
can own one and not the other is a bit nonsensical
and really novel.
At any other point in history, if you were
a powerful man and saw an artisan who’s
wares you liked, you’d have two options:
buy the wares or buy the worker.
But buying their time independent from their
personhood?
Unheard of.
Some might argue that this is one of capitalisms
greatest feats, but the way capitalism has
reshaped our relationship to time itself has
had a lot of damaging consequences.
Now this video will be made infinitely easier
to process if you abandon any notions of time
as solely a physical phenomenon.
Newtonian time is important, but that’s
not the entire picture.
Instead, time is better viewed as a social
relationship between an individual, their
community, and the world around them.
This might be a tough thing to conceptualize,
but I’ll try my best to illustrate.
Minutes, hours, weeks, months.
This is how we view time now, as a static
grid of individual components against which
we can measure things like labor, but before
easily available clock technology, people
viewed time differently.
The concept of time as an ever-present ongoing
thing has been around since forever, but it
was a phenomenon restricted to the heavens.
Here on Earth, time was messy.
I mean, hours and days vary in length depending
on the season so they’re not a good metric,
and rudimentary time-keeping technology like
sun dials would just not work depending on
the weather.
So in lieu of this, ancient societies would
measure time through labor itself, a good
example being European calendars that are
based around seasons to serve farm-work, and
Islamic calendars being based on lunar cycles
to serve their nomadic needs.
Ask a villager how far a village is, they’ll
probably return that the village is two rice-cooking’s
away, or the cooking time of ten eggs.
And since time was not on the minds of the
commoner, people dealt with time nonchalantly,
completely unlike today.
Well not totally unlike today…
Farmers rose when the sun did and slept when
it went down.
Fishers followed the rhythm of the sea.
Time, labor and nature were inseparable, and
because of this there was no great conflict
between labor and free-time.
People rested often, partied and had fun,
but work was an inalienable part of life.
The version of time I’m describing here
is known as a social time.
It is a time inseparable from the social relations
of people in a community and their labor.
Social time is differentiated from clock time,
in which our social relations are not based
in tasks and labor, but by the constant, ever-present
ticking away of the clock.
This one is more familiar to us!
Because of the lack of clock time, it’s
easy to see why waged labor would confuse
the hell out of, say, an ancient Athenian:
time as a divisible, measurable unit which
you could use to measure labor just didn’t
exist.
However, there was one group of people to
whom wage labor might not be so unprecedented:
ancient slaves.
Some slaves would actually be leased off to
work in some facility for a day or two and
split the profits with their masters.
And, like slaves, the phenomena of a boss
demanding busy-work for the sake of busy-work,
is an experience modern workers share almost
exclusively with ancient slaves.
The other identity group who can claim this
experience is women, whether they be wives
or children.
They’ve historically been held to the same
standard of working for work’s sake and
considering domestic housework has itself
been a method to enforce control over women
by men, the similarities make sense.
Anyway, the transition towards a world where
clock-time became pervasive seems pretty self-evident,
so I’ll skim over it.
From the 15th century onward, clock technology
got better and better and towns installed
central clock towers.
The merchant culture of time-keeping was already
well established by the late medieval period,
and as clock technology became more accessible,
it spread to the middle-class and petit-bourgeois
as an all-consuming way of life.
It slowly seeped its way into the working
class with the proliferation of pocket-watches.
And by the 18th and 19th century as capitalism
took over and became increasingly globalized
and decentralized, time-keeping set itself
as the new normal.
Then, atomic clocks, completely separated
time-keeping from the old celestial method.
We generally know this.
But what were its effects?
With clock-time as the global hegemon came
an entirely new discipline, time management.
Time management had been around since the
dominance of social time, but since the lives
of people generally revolved around their
labor, time discipline was pretty lax.
Under clock time, factory owners sought innovative
new ways to absolutely crush the human spirit
of their workers.
The enforcement of grueling working conditions
for sometimes up to 18-hour days led to customary
heavy weekend drinking, again a cycle that
still hasn’t ended.
One worker [Francis Place] described the widespread
cycle of heavy work weeks to heavy weekend
vomiting in 1829: “This is the case with
every workman I have ever known; and in proportion
as a man's case is hopeless will such fits
more frequently occur and be of longer duration.”
Bleak.
Time management had also created the necessity
of choosing between values.
Should you work to support your kid, or stay
at home to raise them?
Under clock-time, everything became a choice,
and one quantifiable through monetary value.
But, this has created an unquantifiable weight
upon workers.
Life became a race against time, leisure and
rest became wasted time, and time itself was
money, commodified.
With this new status quo, there really is
no moment of respite.
Yet, while clock-time is dominant, social
time still manages to seep its way into our
lives.
The most prominent in western life is child-birth.
For about a 9-month period, the entirety of
a person’s world slowly ceases to follow
clock-time, giving them time to live according
to a different schedule, which is why the
battles for maternity and paternity leave
are so crucial.
They represent, at least here in the United
States, a vestige of the old world, one where
you get to slow down and live without the
over-bearing presence of the capitalist sphere
regulating your every move.
A common complaint you hear about socialism
is that it’s not as efficient as capitalism.
Most proponents of socialism will retort with
numbers on the Soviet Union’s grain production
to prove that actually it’s more efficient.
And while these debates are worth having I
think they miss the point.
Maybe capitalism really is more efficient,
and socialism is the alternative where you’re
allowed to slow down and breathe without fear.
Maybe capitalism really is more efficient,
and that’s the whole point.
