In normal times, the slightest dip in productivity is enough to bring even the most stoic of billionaires to tears. But when public health measures threatened to suspend the productive process altogether, the floodgates opened. As calls to re-open schools, shops, and workplaces were heeded, it became clear that the cost of billionaire counselling was another irreversible wave of fatal infection. That’s because, for some, there is a far costlier irreversible process than the loss of life; with UK plc predicting a 75% decline in profits by autumn, every hour of lockdown that prolongs human life is an hour of uninvested capital. The question is: whose time is more valuable? In lifting the lockdown, the government have given us an unequivocally lethal answer.
Social acceleration
Time is not simply given. Primarily as a means of organising human activity, time is an essential social construction for collective survival. This is not to say that time doesn’t exist, but that time itself has no meaning independently of how we collectively agree to understand, define, and measure it. If something is not only socially constructed but socially constitutional, it becomes susceptible to manipulation for certain social ends.
In his theory of “social acceleration,” Hartmut Rosa observes the quickening tempo of modern social life.[1] Fundamentally, competition has become the mechanism by which we allocate economic reward. Since competition is inescapably bound up with speed – the etymological meaning of “achievement” is to “finish” or “complete” – our economic system distinguishes between those who cross the chequered flag and those who stay behind.[2] Rosa explains how social acceleration is “all-pervasive and all-inclusive,” inducing the perpetual craving to keep up.[3] In other words, time is money. The craving is perpetual because, as it turns out, there is no finish line after all. Once we embed Rosa’s theory of social acceleration within a Marxist analysis of the capitalist-worker relation, we realise that time is not something to record, but to command.
The working day
As David Harvey explains, one of most bitterly fought class struggles has been over the working day. [4] Paid lunch breaks, shorter working weeks, shorter working days and paid holidays been so difficult to secure, because the capitalist seeks to command the worker’s time they have purchased via a wage. To crudely summarise the labour process, workers are not paid for what they produce, but rather what is needed to sustain their working existence.[5] Suppose a worker needs £100 to fuel their physical and mental capacity to work throughout the day. As such, they would receive a daily wage of £100. However, as a worker creates valuable commodities, there will come a point where they have produced the equivalent value of £100 before the working day is over. That is, they will have effectively covered the cost of their own working existence. Beyond this, the worker generates surplus value for which they are not remunerated.[6] In other words, the worker is exploited.
Crucially, there is no alarm that signals the moment the worker has effectively paid for their own wage. Otherwise, why wouldn’t they just drop their tools? Rather, exploitation is preserved within the labour process at any given moment. Every hour, every minute, and every second contains within it an amount of surplus value being extracted. A worker’s labour is not just bought for twelve hours. It’s commanded so that every moment of those twelve hours is used at maximum capacity. [7] “Moments,” Marx declares, “are the elements of profit.”[8]
This means the working day is not simply something to prolong, but intensify. As Harvey argues, “the social manipulation of time is a fundamental feature of capitalism.”[9] The hour was largely an invention of the thirteenth century, the second only became commonly used in the seventeenth, and terms like “nanoseconds” have only been very recently coined to keep an even closer eye on the clock.[10] In fact, in medieval European and Islamic civilisations, clocks were not used to measure time but to mark it; for example, the call to prayer. Clocks acquired a different, weaponised purpose when they entered the public sphere to co-ordinate industrial rhythm and accelerate the working day. Indeed, during the nineteenth century, colonial authorities would complain that indigenous populations lacked sufficient “time discipline.”[11] Their local notions of temporality did not match up to the colonialist’s idea of clock time, which obstructed the ability of capitalists to extract value from “a good day’s work.”
Back to work
Capitalism, then, only survives by having a firm grip on temporality. Its worst nightmare is seeing time itself slip from its grasp. During the coronavirus lockdown, around 195 million people worldwide are working fewer hours, hours that could have been spent extracting surplus value. No wonder Donald Trump’s top economic adviser is desperate to get the nation’s “human capital stock” back to work. Despite reduced office costs, companies with employees working from home are in a state of paranoia over their inability to monitor and discipline the working day. That’s not to ignore companies that have ruthlessly adapted; Amazon recruited an extra 175,000 workers during the crisis. For those who are profiting off coronavirus, their biggest concern is that the lockdown exposes an inconvenient truth: wealth is created by workers. That’s the reason why GDP – the market value of goods and services produced by workers – fell by 20.4% in April in the UK. If somebody doesn’t defuse this detonating realisation, capitalism might run out of time altogether.
Coronavirus has also revealed that the requirements of reproduction do not fit within the productive timeline. Wajcman explains that, when it comes to caring for others, the nature of time is relational and context specific, which clashes with the regimented schedule of capitalism.[12] We know that re-opening schools and nurseries is not in the interest of public health. Rather, it allows people to go back to work and ensures children meet their deadline of graduation in order to enter the workforce. Capitalism is taking its time back. However, we have a historic chance to turn back the clock.
Crunch time
Rosa highlights that in a constantly accelerating society, nothing is repaired.[13] This is because while production is something we can easily speed up, maintenance is not. Repairing things becomes too expensive as it consumes too much time. What if we stopped treating time as an accelerating linearity, and allowed time to exist as an enduring cycle instead? Time would no longer be something to consume. Rather, it would be something to observe as a signal to reset imbalanced equilibria, namely, to reallocate wealth in unequal economies, reorganise power imbalances in undemocratic workplaces, and correct deep injustices in oppressive societies. We need time as an ally of redistribution, not as a slave of capital. We also need to escape short-termism that has conditioned us to believe that we are all incentivised by instant profit. An enduring concept of time allows for long-term decision-making, giving space to incentivise our desire to live a longer life and to care for each other and the natural world.
We might, then, think twice about rushing to lift the lockdown, and instead find alternative ways to enhance our collective freedoms during the pandemic. Like giving workers democratic control of their workplaces so they can collectively decide how to share the costs of the crisis, taxing the top 1% to support our isolated communities, and implementing a Green New Deal to stimulate a financial recovery. Ultimately, coronavirus and capitalism are both deadly. When building an anti-capitalist vaccine, let’s make sure that time is on our side.
Oly Durose (Twitter: @olydurose) stood as the Labour Party Parliamentary Candidate for Brentwood & Ongar in the 2019 UK General Election and worked on the Bernie Sanders campaign in Nevada in 2020.
[1] Rosa, Hartmut. (2013), Alienation and Acceleration: Towards A Critical Theory of Late-Modern Temporality, New York: NSU Press.
[2] Ibid., p.58.
[3] Ibid., p. 62.
[4] Harvey, David. (2018), A Companion to Marx’s Capital, London: Verso, p. 139-144.
[5] Marx, Karl. (1990), Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Volume I, trans. Ben Fowkes, London: Penguin Classics, pp. 300-301.
[6] Ibid., pp. 317-323.
[7] Harvey, A Companion to Marx’s Capital, p. 143.
[8] Marx, Capital, p. 353.
[9] Harvey, A Companion to Marx’s Capital, p. 142.
[10] Ibid.,p. 149.
[11] Ibid.
[12] Wajcman, Judy. (2015), Pressed for time: the acceleration of life in digital capitalism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, p. 71.
[13] Rosa, Alienation and Acceleration, p. 86.