Time : Emile Ike
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El Lissitzky / Globetrotter (in der Zeit)
Time : Emile Ike The concept of time has been approached in numerous ways in the history of Western philosophy. Discussions on the nature of time have often taken center stage in epistemological theories of human knowledge and in ontological theories of human existence. Indeed, the notion of time plays a fundamental role in the epistemological program Immanuel Kant laid out in his Critique of Pure Reason (1781).1 According to the Kantian doctrine of transcendental idealism, all appearances are “to be regarded as mere representations and not as things in themselves, and . . . space and time are only sensible forms of our intuition, but not determinations given for themselves or conditions of objects as things in themselves” (CPR A369). Rather than assuming that our knowledge must conform to the objects presented to us in experience, Kant reverses the order by suggesting that the sensible world is itself dependent on the ways in which the faculties of the human mind—understanding and sensibility—structure our possible experiences of the world. In the well-known second section of the Transcendental Aesthetic, Kant argues that the receptive faculty of sensibility provides us with two forms of pure intuition in an a priori way: space and time. He writes that “time is nothing other than the subjective condition under which all intuitions can take place in us,” only to reiterate the same point in slightly different phrasing two sentences later: “Time is nothing other than the form of inner sense, i.e., of the intuition of our self and our inner state” (CPR A33/B49). In arguing that time is not some objective feature of the world but rather a subjective condition of human intuition, Kant believed he had accomplished nothing less than a ‘Copernican turn.’ Philosophical debates in the wake of this self-proclaimed revolution in philosophy have largely revolved around the status of time in relation to human subjectivity, broadly understood. In the early twentieth century, German philosophers like Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger developed distinct phenomenological approaches to time. Roughly in line with the Kantian project, both approaches retain the emphasis on the phenomenal experience and subjective consciousness of time. A year after completing his own reflections in Being and Time (1927), Heidegger prepared for publication the lectures that Husserl—his former teacher in Freiburg—had delivered some twenty years earlier, issued as The Phenomenology of Internal Time-Consciousness. Whereas Husserl’s analysis of time-consciousness is primarily concerned with the temporal structure of memory, perception, and expectation as it appears directly to the individual subject, Heidegger shifts to a more existentialist and ontological register when he proposes to think of the temporal structure of human existence (Dasein) as a form of being-towards-death. Despite their differences, both Husserl and Heidegger aimed to arrive at a universal account of human experience in the most general sense of the word. These theories’ aspiration to universal validity were methodologically justified with reference to the phenomenological reduction or epoché—a procedure that involves the suspension of judgment and the intentional bracketing of the external world. This method of reduction is deliberately decontextualizing and presupposes direct access to experience in a way that is unmediated by socio-historical realities and political relations of power.2 In order to grasp time as a properly political concept, this contribution pursues a decidedly different path. It aims to provide the contours of what a materialist analysis of time could look like. Such an analysis of time should be able to account for its social and historical specificity (sections 1–3), while also conceptualizing the asymmetrical effects of power relations on how time is experienced differently by disparate subject positions (sections 4–6). In order to meet these desiderata, I propose a reconstruction of Karl Marx’s multi-layered concept of time, which I consider to be of vital importance to his analysis and critique of capitalism more generally.3 Before turning to Marx, however, the next section briefly historicizes the concept of time. 1. If phenomenological accounts tend to foreground the role of time in constituting the temporal unity of human experience, this paper sets out to investigate how human experience is itself fundamentally transformed by time in all its social and historical determinations. Time as we know it has simply not existed since time immemorial; it is itself the product of various social, economic, and technological transformations stretching back to the fourteenth century, when the mechanical clock was invented. As the American historian Lewis Mumford observes in his 1934 book Technics and Civilization, it is “the clock, not the steam-engine, [that] is the key-machine of the modern industrial age. . . . The clock, moreover, is a piece of power-machinery whose ‘product’ is seconds and minutes: by its essential nature it dissociated time from human events.”4 For Mumford, this dissociation of time from human events represents a qualitatively new and historically novel phenomenon. Whereas in earlier social formations, human activity and social life were largely dictated by the cyclical temporality of various natural and biological rhythms, time had now been rendered abstract: “When one thinks of time, not as a sequence of experiences, but as a collection of hours, minutes, and seconds, the habits of adding time and saving time come into existence.”5 With the invention of the clock, time ceases to be a function of concrete human events, such as the time it takes to say a prayer, or the time required to cook rice. One should of course be careful not to interpret this process of time disassociation in an overly reductionist or technological-determinist manner. Even if the invention of the clock made it possible to measure time in constant and homogenous units, this form of linear and abstract time is ultimately the expression of a specific way of organizing and measuring human activity, which only gains its full force with the emergence of capitalist modernity. Indeed, Mumford draws attention to the intimate connection between time and the forms of power associated with industrial capital:
Observations along similar lines can be found in E.P. Thompson’s classic essay on “Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism” (1967), which illustrates how the measurement of time came to serve the synchronization of labor processes and became a means of labor exploitation.7 Both Mumford’s and Thompson’s studies are incredibly rich in historical detail as they uncover the temporal regimes that workers have gradually been subjected to in the capitalist workplace, but the frequent references to factory bells and formally employed wage laborers also seem increasingly far removed from the realities and challenges of contemporary global capitalism. The specific form of capitalism we are confronted with today is itself the result of wide-ranging historical transformations within the world economy over the past fifty years, as processes of automation and deindustrialization have contributed to the current phase of capitalism in stagnation.8 The remainder of this paper addresses the crisis of time in our time of crisis. It aims to investigate time as an inherently political concept in order to uncover the temporalities of social domination at the heart of contemporary capitalism. My thesis is that capitalist society is constitutively reliant—i.e., in its very core structure and inner workings—on stolen time for its continued reproduction. Drawing on Marx’s critical theory, I intend to show how the theft and appropriation of our finite time is structurally necessary under capitalist conditions. Although Marx’s distinctively temporal approach to capitalism offers a promising entry point for developing a critique of the present in terms of stolen time, his temporal framework ought to be revised and expanded in order to account differentially for the varying modalities of time theft along racialized and gendered lines. Viewed from this vantage point, the concept of time provides a fruitful axis of analysis for grasping the interlocking temporalities of social domination in contemporary capitalism. My hope is thus that an extension of Marx’s temporal framework allows us to make two crucial moves: a) on a conceptual level, time provides us with an analytical lens to bring capitalist forms of structural domination along racialized and gendered lines into sharp focus; and b) on a political level, it makes room—at least potentially—for a convergence of anti-racist, feminist, and anti-capitalist social struggles. 2. At first glance, when conjuring up the specter of Marx in relation to political concepts, a wide range of Marxian categories seem to present themselves as likelier candidates than the concept of time: alienation, ideology, fetishism, class, revolution, labor, capital, commodity, value, money, etc.; the list appears near endless for a thinker who has so fundamentally shaped and altered our modern political vocabulary. On closer inspection, however, issues surrounding time and temporality turn out to be critical impulses animating Marx’s project.9 My claim is indeed that time provides the analytical glue which ties together the architectonic categories that make up Marx’s critique of political economy. In this context, the concept of time plays a distinctively ambiguous role as it traverses the commonly drawn dichotomies between analysis & critique, description & evaluation, and objectivity & politicality. Arguably, this holds true for the conceptual and methodological approach underlying the critique of political economy as a whole: Marx derives his basic categories (such as commodity, value, money) directly from classical political economists like Adam Smith and David Ricardo, arguing that these categories do indeed have objective descriptive validity in a capitalist society, and in fact only in a capitalist society. Marx’s project is engaged in a form of immanent critique, and his dialectical exposition of categories goes on to show that these basic social forms necessarily give rise to internal contradictions that point beyond the currently existing social reality, thereby also revealing the social and historical specificity of these supposedly ‘natural’ categories. In his critique of political economy, Marx distinguishes between different levels of conceptual abstraction, with the concept of time acquiring various meanings depending on the level of abstraction. On the most general level, the concept of time provides Marx with the basic analytical lens through which social formations can be described, diagnosed, and evaluated. At this high level of abstraction, the extension of the concept of time is broad and its semantic applicability covers a wide range of different and varying social formations within history. For Marx, time in this sense indeed refers to a transhistorical phenomenon, although not in the sense of somehow being positioned outside of history. Rather, he maintains that the organization, use, and distribution of time are likely to be key political questions in any conceivable society. In the 1857–1858 preparatory drafts for Capital, subsequently known as the Grundrisse, Marx suggests that even in a future communist society “the determination of time remains, of course, essential. The less time the society requires to produce wheat, cattle etc., the more time it wins for other production, material or mental. Just as in the case of an individual, the multiplicity of its development, its enjoyment and its activity depends on economization of time. Economy of time, to this all economy ultimately reduces itself.”10 Although this last phrase appears somewhat enigmatic and elusive on first reading, ‘the economy’ should here be understood in a general and descriptive sense as referring to the way in which we organize the material production of our means of life and the social reproduction of our shared conditions of life. On this interpretation, Marx’s proposition is simply that social formations, and the changing ways in which they organize their forms of (re-)production, can be fruitfully analyzed in terms of time and temporality. At the same time, Marx insists that these social forms of (re)-production are historically specific and hence transitory, with capitalism being just one among many other possible ways of organizing social life. If all forms of economy ultimately reduce to economies of time, then capitalism represents a highly distinctive and peculiar way of organizing time that is historically novel. Within capitalist society, time fulfills a twofold role: as a social relation of horizontal mediation on the one hand (section 3), and as a social relation of vertical appropriation on the other hand (sections 4–6). The historically specific capitalist organization of time is ultimately rendered possible by the invention of abstract time (as discussed in section 1), which in turn forms the condition of possibility for the phenomenon of stolen time. 3. Before turning to stolen time, however, I should first excavate a conception of temporal domination implicit in Marx’s theory of value. Marx here descends to a lower level of abstraction to determine the differentia specifica of the capitalist organization of time. Whereas Marx’s theory of value is often misunderstood as a quantitative theory of price-formation—by both Marxists and anti-Marxists alike—, his dialectical exposition of value is better understood as a theory of the social interconnections between privately and independently organized producers, regulating their economic interactions in the absence of planning. Under capitalism, the social coordination of production is executed through a logic of competition and market exchange among separated yet horizontally connected capitalist firms.11 Marx identifies the regulating or mediating principle in quantitative exchange relations with value, which he understands to be the historically specific and temporally determined form that wealth assumes under capitalist social relations. Within the capitalist mode of production, value becomes the regulator of production, as the privately expended labor time carried out by isolated producers only becomes retroactively socially validated at the point of exchange as part of the total labor time of society. In societies in which social reproduction is governed to a large degree by the logic of capital as self-valorizing value, abstract time comes to fulfill a crucial function of social mediation. To illustrate the historical specificity of time as relation of social mediation, Marx juxtaposes the role of working time in ancient societies with the role of labor time in capitalist societies. For instance, he mentions ancient Germans who measured the size of a piece of land according to a day’s worth of labor. In a similar vein, Marx quotes Plato and Xenophon to show how the division of labor in ancient Greece contributed to greater time efficiency in production.12 However, neither the ancient Germans nor the ancient Greeks could possibly establish a connection between labor time and value magnitude due to the absence of generalized commodity exchange in their societies. With the emergence of capitalism, the subsistence modes of social reproduction characterized by the wealth in-kind of use values increasingly made way for a system of all-round exchange and interdependence on global markets characterized by the abstract wealth of exchange values.13 The magnitude of the latter is measured in temporal terms by the socially necessary labor time required to produce a commodity given the generally available levels of productivity at a certain moment. These examples tend to show that working time is a matter of concern for every mode of production, yet only in a specifically capitalist society of generalized commodity production does labor time come to serve as a measurement of value. At the level of the capitalist social totality, socially necessary labor time thereby turns into a socially compelling norm to which everyone is subjected—proletarians and capitalists alike. In order not to perish under the constraints of competition, everyone must in some way conform to the temporal norms imposed by the value form. In his Time, Labor, and Social Domination (1993), Moishe Postone argues that the historically specific form of domination intrinsic to capitalism is precisely constituted by this temporal norm, which is the necessary result of organizing human activity in the anarchic way described above.14 Although the socially compelling norm of value is ultimately rooted in the actions of the immediate producers themselves, it simultaneously acquires a quasi-independent existence over and against them. Hence, for Postone, social domination under capitalism necessarily takes on the abstract and impersonal form of temporal domination. Although Postone’s conception of temporal domination rightly directs our attention beyond the factory walls and toward the socially mediating function of time in capitalist society, it nonetheless fails to take into account the ways in which gendered and racialized subjects are asymmetrically affected by the temporalities of capital. In this context, even class domination tends to fade into the background. If we conceive of capitalism solely as a system of abstract domination of people by time, the rather concrete domination of people over people remains obscured. In the words of William Clare Roberts, “domination here loses all reference to an arbitrary, incontestable will, and becomes nothing more than a metaphor.”15 However, these criticisms of abstract temporal domination overlook the fact that Marx’s theory of exploitation is similarly spelled out in explicitly temporal terms. In the Grundrisse, Marx suggests that all present wealth is ultimately based on the “theft of alien labour time” (G 705). The important point to note for now is that the role of time in capitalism is therefore not just limited to its function of abstract mediation among horizontally organized producers. Rather, it simultaneously expresses a concrete, vertical relation of power, in the sense that time is continually being stolen and appropriated (in more or less direct ways). Postone seems to gloss over the painfully concrete forms of domination implicit in Marx’s concept of time. He thereby tends to neglect Marx’s theory of exploitation in favor of an account of abstract domination, yet he still quite crucially insists on the temporal determinations of Marx’s concept of (surplus) value.16 Arguably, surplus value is the centerpiece of the Marxian theory of exploitation, to which I will now turn in order to elucidate the concept of stolen time. 4. In the chapter on “The Working Day” in the first volume of Capital, Marx approvingly cites a factory inspection report which states that “moments are the elements of profit” (C 1 352). Although the British factory inspector who wrote the report probably intended it as a figure of speech, Marx’s theory of exploitation lends some credibility to a more literal interpretation. This conception of exploitation, which is explicitly cast in temporal terms, sheds light on the real effects of the aforementioned theft of time. In the third volume of Capital, Marx writes: “The specific economic form in which unpaid surplus labour is pumped out of the direct producers determines the relationship of domination and servitude.”17 In a society where the logic of capital prevails, surplus value is the specific economic form in which surplus labor is ‘pumped out’ through the extraction of time. Indeed, Marx crucially argues that capitalism is a peculiar way of regulating access to our collectively generated wealth through the mediation of stolen time, which thereby comes to serve as a precondition for social life in capitalist society. In order to clarify what is at stake in this reference to wealth, it is useful to have a closer look at the radical distinction Marx draws between ‘material wealth’ and ‘value.’ This distinction is front and center in Postone’s creative reinterpretation of Marx’s critical theory. In his reading, value not only refers to a temporally determined relation of social mediation; it also refers to the historically specific form that wealth assumes in a capitalist society. Under capitalism, wealth necessarily appears as value, which in turn can only be expressed in temporal terms. Value can only be measured by its immanent standard: the self-positing norm of socially necessary labor time. The value form of wealth is thus qualitatively understood as revolving around the paradoxical temporality of abstract time, which ultimately boils down to the tautological formula that 1 hour always equals 1 hour. In terms of quantity, the magnitude of a commodity’s value is determined by the socially necessary labor time required for its production, given the technical means prevalent within society at that moment in history. As Postone puts it succinctly:
What Postone’s account seems to occlude, however, is that this inherently temporal form of wealth is ultimately premised on class exploitation in the form of time appropriation. It is only within capitalist society that the ‘surplus labor of the masses’ serves as the condition of the “non-labor of the few” (G 705). Surplus value in turn depends on the temporal division of the working day between necessary labor time and surplus labor time. Whereas the former expresses the time required for the reproduction of the commodity labor power, which is paid out in the form of wages, the latter is appropriated by the capitalist in the form of surplus value. The wage, which is the price paid for the ‘unique’ commodity of labor power, regulates the worker’s access to the means of subsistence and life more generally, whereas the extracted surplus labor time translates into surplus value. Since the price of labor power in the wage form is subject to class struggle, time thereby becomes a direct object of political contestation. In other words, the vertical power relationship in the workplace puts the capitalist in a position to force the workers to perform extra hours of free labor over and beyond the wage they receive at the end of the day. If “the worker is here nothing more than personified labour-time,” as Marx observes, then surplus value must be understood as nothing more than reified labor time, which is ultimately crystallized in profit (C 1 352).19 Moreover, this relation of domination between worker and capitalist is largely concealed through the money form in which wages are paid and through the legal contract, which serves to disguise the vertical power relation as one of voluntary agreement instead. Indeed, this is what ultimately distinguishes the capitalist mode of production from preceding ones, which were predominantly characterized by more direct and heavily personalized relations of dependence between serf and lord, for instance. What remains hidden from view in the apparently free and equal act of commodity exchange is the fact that the commodity labor power possesses the unique capacity to create more value than it receives in the form of the wage. The capitalist practice of commodity exchange implicitly presupposes the equivalent exchange of non-equivalents, and the realization of value in the sphere of circulation is hence fundamentally premised on the creation of surplus value in the sphere of production. In brief, capitalism organizes material production and social reproduction in a way that is structurally reliant on stolen time. In addition to fulfilling a function of horizontal mediation, time is hence also the object of vertical dispossession. As such, the concept of stolen time helps us understand how the production of social difference along racialized and gendered lines forms an integral part of the temporal dynamics of capital accumulation. In the remainder of this paper, I will sketch a tentative diagnosis of the present in terms of stolen time as a conceptual lens to illuminate the temporalities of social domination in contemporary capitalism. 5. Although Marx is mainly concerned with the class exploitation of wage labor, the appropriation of time is by no means exclusively limited to the production process in a narrow sense. Rather, stolen time refers to a constitutive feature of capitalist society in a much broader sense, as many Marxist-Feminists associated with the Wages for Housework campaign have long and consistently pointed out.20 These accounts convincingly correct the overly abstract and undifferentiated way Marx tends to conceive of time theft, which is primarily in terms of the class exploitation of those dependent on paid wage labor to access their means of life. If the form of time theft implicit in labor exploitation remains hidden from view through the labor contract, then the sphere of reproductive labor largely remains invisible altogether. In addition to the invisibilization of domestic labor, the predominantly unwaged expenditure of labor time in the household historically assigned to women remains unpaid altogether. In the last essay collected in her classic Women, Race, & Class (1981), Angela Davis draws attention to the time-consuming character of housework: “The countless chores collectively known as ‘housework’—cooking, washing dishes, doing laundry, making beds, sweeping, shopping, etc. —apparently consume some three to four thousand hours of the average housewife’s year.”21 According to more recent estimates by the International Labour Organization, 16.4 billion hours are spent on unpaid work every single day, with most countries spending approximately 50% of their total labor time on unwaged reproductive work.22 Whereas the time spent engaged in waged work is partially (but never fully) monetarily compensated for with the wage, the unwaged expenditure of time spent on social-reproductive labor remains uncompensated altogether. Indeed, the surplus or excess of time that is appropriated here does not register in the books or minds of men and women, even though the full weight of it has always been clear to those burdened with the drudgery of housework. The distinction between the directly market-mediated sphere of wage labor and the indirectly market-mediated sphere of social-reproductive labor reveals that time is stolen from women in a much more direct way.23 If stolen time is a constitutive feature of capitalist society, as Marx contends, the indispensable Marxist-Feminist insight is that the concept of stolen time must be extended to account for the qualitatively different modalities through which time is appropriated along gendered lines. Furthermore, the case of social-reproductive labor shows how struggles over the waging and un-waging of work play out in contemporary capitalism. It brings into sharp focus how gendered and racialized dynamics intersect today through a mechanism of differential inclusion into globalized capitalist labor markets.24 The increasing labor force participation rates of women in the past decades suggest that women—at least in the so-called Global North—have managed to get some of their time monetarily compensated by means of formal employment. While this might be taken as a sign of progress on a superficial level, it is important to stress two significant limitations and countervailing tendencies against this emancipatory movement. First, the monetary ‘compensation’ received in the form of the wage does not live up to the amount of time that is stolen from women if we consider the double day that is housework. Moreover, the persistence of the gender pay gap shows how gendered differences contribute to differential monetary compensations for their appropriated time, thus directly contravening the capitalist temporality according to which one hour counts as one. Second, to the extent that white women in central capitalist countries have managed to get part of their labor time compensated through integration into capitalist labor markets, this development has simultaneously facilitated and encouraged the displacement of women of color from the Global South, who are filling up the domestic gaps left by more affluent households in the urban centers of the capitalist core. These racialized women perform the same domestic labor that white women in the Global North were previously burdened with, but they generally do so at a much lower pay rate, hence receiving even less monetary compensation for their stolen time. To understand how this is possible, one would need to look more closely at the complex workings and forms of differential inclusion in capitalist labor markets facilitated by a highly stratified international border regime, where some states—e.g., the Philippines—come to act as “labor brokerage states.”25 These two limitations indicate how the production of social difference is related to dynamics of capital accumulation in a way that is conceptually necessary rather than ‘merely’ historically contingent. By way of concluding this section, let us briefly return to the previously cited essay by Davis, provocatively titled “The Approaching Obsolescence of Housework.” Writing in the early 1980s, Davis describes “the real possibility of radically transforming the nature of housework” as “one of the most closely guarded secrets of advanced capitalist societies.” With the help of “technologically advanced cleaning machinery,” she speculates that workers “could swiftly and efficiently accomplish what the present-day housewife does so arduously.”26 Davis rightly identifies the emancipatory content of this ‘real possibility,’ which is internally generated within capitalism itself. In the conclusion, I briefly return to these immanent objective possibilities, which I propose to understand as capital’s temporalities of emancipation, operating in tandem and in tension with capital’s temporalities of domination (the main focus of this paper). The important point to note here is that the former are systematically undermined by the latter, but are just as immanent to the inner workings of capitalism: the limitations spelled out in this section serve to show that capital’s objective possibilities structurally fail to materialize if the price of labor power is held ‘artificially’ cheap by racist and sexist means, thereby disincentivizing fixed capital investments in expensive machinery as well as blocking further technical innovation to liberate our time in the future. Indeed, the utopian moment in which (house-)work is genuinely rendered obsolete, as Davis hoped for, never arrives within a system thriving on the production of social difference. 6. At the end of section 3, I suggested that Marx’s concept of time allows us to bridge the distinction commonly drawn between abstract and concrete domination, showing that it was a false opposition all along. For Marx, forms of impersonal and personal domination have always gone hand in hand in the history of capital, which, after all, came into the world “dripping from head to foot, from every pore, with blood and dirt” (C 1 926). Of course, accounts of racial capitalism in the Black radical tradition have long insisted on the ineradicable coloniality of these violent forms of “belligerent accumulation.”27 The persistence of slavery and forced labor in the world economy can in some ways be said to represent a limit case of stolen time.28 Indeed, in a recent article titled “Stolen Life, Stolen Time: Black Temporality, Speculation, and Racial Capitalism,” Tao Leigh Goffe draws on Saidiya Hartman’s concept of “the time of slavery” to argue that “on the plantation, time became a violent metric of colonial management stolen from Black people.”29 In the case of unfree labor, one’s time of life is stolen tout court, thereby turning stolen time into stolen life. Having one’s entire life reduced to the status of a commodity, the owner of this private property accordingly decides how and to what ends time is spent, leaving the slave dispossessed of having any autonomy over one’s time. One way to approach these racialized temporalities of social domination in contemporary capitalism is through the concept of early death. Arguably, this is a more general category capturing the limit case of absolute time extraction, in the sense of being robbed of one’s life-time altogether. Indeed, Ruth Wilson Gilmore has offered a definition of racism as “the state-sanctioned or extra-legal production and exploitation of group-differentiated vulnerability to premature death.”30 Gilmore’s definition of racism allows us to expand the stolen time framework even further, as it can help us make sense of migrant drownings in the Mediterranean, police murder and mass incarceration in the United States (and beyond), and the similar carceral logic in European detention centers. Marginalized and racialized populations tend to suffer disproportionately from border and police violence, but also from incarceration and unemployment. The always insightful (yet still much neglected) revolutionary auto worker from Detroit, James Boggs, notes how Black workers are typically “the last hired and the first fired.”31 The concept of stolen time captures something crucial in the experience of both unemployment and incarceration, although in a qualified sense. Because at first sight, incarceration and unemployment might appear to be more adequately described as an enforced excess of time rather than an appropriation of time. On closer inspection, however, it becomes clear that this supposed excess of time is usually re-stolen through forced and unfree labor for those facing time in prison, and through all the hurdles that the unemployed have to overcome in order to receive benefits. Moreover, it should not be too much of a contentious claim that those incarcerated and unemployed are not free to dispose of their time as they wish in any meaningful sense of the word. Second, and more importantly, one might reasonably question to what extent being rendered disposable is a similar theft of time as having one’s surplus labor time appropriated: is the fight not to get killed at the hands of police violence in any way analogous to the fight for higher wages? It seems that time is stolen from racialized subjects in a much more direct way. However, in addition to revealing something about the temporalities of racism, being exposed to early death also has a clear gendered and class-character. The life-expectancy of poor and working-class people is still disproportionately lower, and death and bodily damages are obviously essential dimensions of gendered violence as well as work under capitalism more generally. Whether we are addressing the appropriation of surplus labor time in capitalist exploitation processes; the gendered expenditure of unpaid labor time that is central to social-reproductive activities in the household; the absolute extraction of time under racialized conditions of incarceration or the exposure to premature death through police violence: all these forms of social domination fundamentally rely on stolen time, which more accurately involves the differential appropriation of time. In order to allow for these qualitatively different—though not categorically distinct—modalities of time appropriation, I propose to conceive of them as being situated on a spectrum of violence that moves from the total violence of slavery, incarceration, and murder—which constitute the most extreme cases of time appropriation— down to the slow but sure violence of labor exploitation. Furthermore, I contend that these disparate phenomena can be unified against the background conditions of the contemporary phase in the trajectory of capitalist development, which is perhaps best characterized as stagnant, if not in decline. Although a full account of capital’s economic crisis tendencies lies beyond the scope of this paper, it is useful to briefly foreground the historical transformations within global capitalism in the past half-century, which has witnessed the rise of surplus populations. As Aaron Benanav has argued, capitalism has entered a period of stagnating economic growth ever since the 1970s, as relative de-industrialization went hand-in-hand with a proliferation of what Michael Denning has termed “wageless life”; a term that captures both rising unemployment in capital’s imperial core as well as the rise of the informal sector in the capitalist periphery.32 In this context, many have pointed out the enduring relevance of Marx’s chapter on “The General Law of Capitalist Accumulation” in the first volume of Capital, where he shows how the trajectory of capitalist development gives rise to an increase in populations that are progressively rendered obsolete and superfluous to the requirements of capital, since less labor time is required to generate the same amount of material output. A quote from the Grundrisse connects this development directly to the concept of time: “Capital itself is the moving contradiction, [in] that it presses to reduce labour time to a minimum, while it posits labour time, on the other side, as sole measure and source of wealth” (G 706). Capital may no longer need many of us; the more crucial point is of course that we are still dependent on capital for commodifying our labor time to gain access to our means of living. Being unable to sell one’s labor-power to a capitalist able or willing to ‘merely’ exploit their time, these racialized surplus populations end up being exposed to the extreme conditions of vulnerability and suffering mentioned above. It can hardly be stressed enough how all these forms of time theft clearly involve the concrete domination of people over people in addition to the abstract domination of people by time. The boss, the manager, the master, the immigration police, the prison ward, the cop: they all extract and appropriate varying shares of our finite life-time, in more or less arbitrary and incontestable ways, unevenly distributed along racialized and gendered lines. This demonstrates how stolen time is indeed a precondition for participation in capitalist society, but in a much broader sense than Marx probably intended and initially anticipated. At the same time, however, it is important to point out that Marx already considered the production of surplus populations to be the endogenously produced result of the temporal dynamics of capitalist value production itself. These surplus populations in turn need to be managed and contained, thereby giving rise to an increase in carceral logics and a proliferation of borders. In order for capitalist society to reproduce itself in the context of deteriorating conditions of economic growth, it increasingly comes to rely on these more violent and repressive forms of social reproduction rather than the mute compulsion of economic relations; yet, it is only against the background of the latter that the former can be properly understood and assessed. The concept of stolen time can help to elucidate the social constitution of race and gender in relation to historical transformations within the dynamics of capital accumulation. If Kant’s concept of time sought to uncover the transcendental conditions of possibility for human cognition, then Marx’s concept of time seeks to trace the materialist conditions of possibility for social life in capitalist society back to stolen time.33 7. The materialist analysis of time as a political concept brings into view how the differential theft of time is reproduced through racialized and gendered domination, thereby disclosing specifically racialized and gendered forms of time appropriation. It allows us to highlight the continuity of structures of social domination at the level of social diagnosis, while simultaneously allowing for a convergence of feminist, anti-racist, and anti-capitalist political struggles at the level of practice. These struggles can at least partially be reconceptualized as social struggles for the re-appropriation of time: from the traditional labor and trade union struggles for higher wages (i.e., demanding higher monetary compensation for appropriated time); through the feminist contestations demanding wages for housework (hence demanding to be compensated for their stolen time; and the prison-abolitionist fight against the absolute theft of time of the incarcerated; up to the coordinated political action in defense of the regenerative time required by our ecosystem to replenish its natural resources. Everywhere we look in the present cycle of struggles, we can find traces of attempts to refuse and resist the theft of our finite time. If the critique of stolen time simultaneously hints towards a form of political practice aimed at the emancipatory overcoming of temporal domination through the re-appropriation of stolen time, then such a critique arguably only makes sense against the strong and contentious background claim that time could indeed be liberated given the technical means we already possess. Indeed, Marx suggests something along these lines in the crucial Grundrisse passage on which this critique of stolen time is based: “The theft of alien labour time, on which the present wealth is based, appears a miserable foundation in face of this new one, created by large-scale industry itself” (G 705). Although the emphasis on the first part of the sentence appears in the original manuscript, it is worth paying attention to the second part of the sentence, which establishes a potentiality in light of which current reality might be criticized. A few lines down, he continues: “As soon as labour in the direct form has ceased to be the great well-spring of wealth, labour time ceases and must cease to be its measure . . . . The free development of individualities, and hence not the reduction of necessary labour time so as to posit surplus labour, but rather the general reduction of the necessary labour of a society to a minimum, which then corresponds to the artistic, scientific etc. development of the individuals in the time set free, and with the means created, for all of them” (G 705–706).34 Beyond the negativist emphasis on time theft, Marx here explicitly foregrounds the intimate connection between time and freedom, and it should be noted that the rather scarce references in Marx’s œuvre to communism as a positive normative ideal essentially revolve around the concept of free time. This brings us back to the question (raised in section 5) of whether there might also be temporalities of emancipation in addition to domination in contemporary capitalism.35 In order to provide a tentative answer, I suggest returning one last time to Davis’s essay on housework. She writes:
If Marx hints towards the utopian possibilities generated by capitalism in the form of labor-saving technologies, Davis similarly theorizes the potential obsolescence of housework in relation to the real possibilities provided by capitalist innovations in technology. The real possibility identified by Davis and the historical promise pointed out by Marx ultimately depend on the assessment that current technologies can be socialized and repurposed beyond their current capitalist use in the direction of the more emancipatory ends of time liberation. Of course, Marx never ceases to insist that these technologies originate in the endless quest for surplus value through productivity increases, which are themselves induced by the competitive pressures and temporal compulsions that necessarily arise from value as relation of mediation and form of wealth. But if value is the capitalist form that wealth assumes in a society premised on stolen time, then a communist society aims for the socialization of time in order to make it freely available to everyone, thereby allowing Marx’s “realm of freedom” to flourish on top of a minimized “realm of necessity” (see C 3 959). Although the technical possibilities for liberating humanity from time’s carcass are everywhere, right in front of our eyes, only a political project capable of seizing these possibilities will be able to negate this inverted world in which “time is everything, man is nothing: he is, at most, time’s carcass.”37 Acknowledgments: I would like to thank the editors and two anonymous peer-reviewers for their valuable suggestions and generous engagement with this contribution. I also want to thank Felicia Jing for her insightful comments on an earlier version of this text. Published on August 3, 2025 * Emile Ike * 1. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. and ed. Paul Guyer and Allen W. Wood (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1998); henceforth CPR, followed by A/B pagination.↩ 2. Of course, phenomenological analyses of time provide rich accounts of the subjective experience of lived time. For an overview, see Valtteri Arstila and Dan Lloyd, eds., Subjective Time: The Philosophy, Psychology, and Neuroscience of Temporality (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2014). Moreover, it should be noted that Husserl’s and Heidegger’s projects simply do not aim to address the social, political, and historical dimensions of time; nor does this observation suggest that phenomenology as such is inherently bereft of possibilities for doing so.↩ 3. Besides Marx, there is of course a whole range of other political conceptions of time that could rightly be termed materialist. See for instance Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Redwood City: Stanford University Press, 2002); Michel Foucault, The Punitive Society: Lectures at the Collège de France 1972-1973, trans. Graham Burchell (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015); Jonathan Crary, 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep (London: Verso Books, 2014); Hartmut Rosa, Social Acceleration: A New Theory of Modernity, trans. Jonathan Trejo-Mathys (New York: Columbia University Press). For the purposes of this paper, however, I will primarily focus on Marx. I contend that Marx’s conception of time and its intersectional uses are particularly compelling in explaining time as a political category, while also still providing rich conceptual tools for a critical diagnosis of the present conjuncture.↩ 4. Lewis Mumford, Technics and Civilization (London: Routledge, 1934), 15.↩ 5. Ibid., 17.↩ 6. Ibid., 197.↩ 7. E.P. Thompson, “Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism,” Past & Present 38 (1967): 80.↩ 8. On the relation between automation and stagnating productivity, see Jason Smith, Smart Machines and Service Work: Automation in an Age of Stagnation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2020). For further empirical evidence regarding the global economic slowdown since the early 1970s, see Robert Brenner, The Economics of Global Turbulence: The Advanced Capitalist Economies from Long Boom to Long Downturn, 1945–2005 (London: Verso Books, 2006).↩ 9. Numerous interpretations of Marx already engage with questions of time and temporality, some of which will be discussed in greater detail below. While not exhaustive, the following list is worth noting: Harry Harootunian, Marx after Marx: History and Time in the Expansion of Capitalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015); Jonathan Martineau, Time, Capitalism, and Alienation: A Socio-Historical Inquiry into the Making of Modern Time (Leiden: Brill Books, 2014); Massimiliano Tomba, Marx’s Temporalities (Leiden: Brill Books, 2014); Stavros Tombazos, Time in Marx: The Categories of Time in Marx’s ‘Capital’ (Leiden: Brill Books, 2014).↩ 10. Karl Marx, Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy, trans. Martin Nicolaus (London: Penguin Books, 1993), 173; henceforth G, followed by page number. He continues: “Society likewise has to distribute its time in a purposeful way, in order to achieve a production adequate to its overall needs; just as the individual has to distribute his time correctly in order to achieve knowledge in proper proportions or in order to satisfy the various demands on his activity. Thus, economy of time, along with planned distribution of labour time among the various branches of production, remains the first economic law on the basis of communal production” (ibid.).↩ 11. Søren Mau, Mute Compulsion: A Marxist Theory of the Economic Power of Capital (London: Verso Books, 2023), 175.↩ 12. Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy. Volume 1, trans. Ben Fowkes (London: Penguin Books, 1990), 487–488; henceforth C 1, followed by page number. For Marx’s example on the ancient Germans, see ibid., 164n.28. See also Marx’s remarks on Aristotle (ibid., 151–152).↩ 13. Concerning Marx and Hegel on the specificity of abstract time, see Jamila M.H. Mascat, “Hegel and the Advent of Modernity: A Social Ontology of Abstraction,” Radical Philosophy 201 (2018): 29–46.↩ 14. Moishe Postone, Time, Labor, and Social Domination: A Reinterpretation of Marx’s Critical Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 31, 80.↩ 15. William Clare Roberts, Marx’s Inferno: The Political Theory of Capital (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017), 92.↩ 16. Postone largely confines Marx’s theory of exploitation to ‘traditional Marxism,’ which he repeatedly distinguishes from his own critical reconstruction (see Moishe Postone Time, Labor, and Social Domination, 7–8).↩ 17. Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy. Volume 3, trans. David Fernbach (London: Penguin Books, 1991), 927; henceforth C 3, followed by page number.↩ 18. Moishe Postone, Time, Labor, and Social Domination, 25.↩ 19. Marx discusses the transformation of surplus value into profit, and the necessary illusions and fetishes that this transformation generates, in the third volume of Capital. For a convincing and recent reconstruction of Marx’s argument, see Beverley Best, The Automatic Fetish: The Law of Value in Marx’s ‘Capital’ (London: Verso Books, 2024).↩ 20. Silvia Federici, Wages against Housework (Bristol: Falling Wall Press, 1975); Tithi Bhattacharya, ed., Social Reproduction Theory: Remapping Class, Recentering Oppression (London: Pluto Press, 2017).↩ 21. Angela Davis, Women, Race, & Class (London: Penguin Books, 2019), 200.↩ 22. International Labour Organization (ILO), “Care Work and Care Jobs: For the Future of Decent Work” (Geneva: ILO, 2018), 43.↩ 23. The distinction derives from Endnotes, “The Logic of Gender: On the Separation of Spheres and the Process of Abjection,” available at https://endnotes.org.uk/translations/endnotes-the-logic-of-gender (accessed May 3, 2024).↩ 24. Sandro Mezzadra and Brett Neilson, Border as Method; Or, The Multiplication of Labor (Durham: Duke University Press, 2013).↩ 25. See, for instance, Robyn Magalit Rodriguez, Migrants for Export: How the Philippine State Brokers Labor to the World (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010).↩ 26. Angela Davis, Women, Race & Class (London: Penguin Books, 2019), 201.↩ 27. The term “belligerent accumulation” was coined by the recent research group Perception, Jurisdiction, and Valorization in Colonial Modernity – On the Nexus of Accumulation, Race, and Aesthetics, led by Katja Diefenbach, Ruth Sonderegger, and Pablo Valdivia Orozco (see https://accumulation-race-aesthetics.org/belligerent-accumulation/, accessed May 3, 2024).↩ 28. Certain forms of debt payment and bondage tend to replicate the conditions of forced labor, but an extensive discussion of the relation between time, debt, and financialization lies beyond the scope of this paper (see Neferti X.M. Tadiar, Remaindered Life [Durham: Duke University Press, 2022]; Martijn Konings, Capital and Time: For a New Critique of Neoliberal Reason [Redwood City: Stanford University Press, 2018]).↩ 29. Tao Leigh Goffe, “Stolen Life, Stolen Time: Black Temporality, Speculation, and Racial Capitalism,” The South Atlantic Quarterly 121 (2022): 112.↩ 30.Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), 28.↩ 31. James Boggs, “The Negro and Cybernation,” in Alice Mary Hilton (ed.), The Evolving Society (New York: The Institute for Cybercultural Research, 1966), 171.↩ 32. Aaron Benanav, Automation and the Future of Work (London: Verso Books, 2020); Michael Denning, “Wageless Life,” New Left Review 66 (2010): 79–97.↩ 33. With his Marxian critique of Kantian epistemology, Alfred Sohn-Rethel argues in a somewhat similar vein that the processes of cognitive synthesis are ultimately rooted in the ‘social synthesis’ of commodity exchange (see Alfred Sohn-Rethel, Intellectual and Manual Labour: A Critique of Epistemology [Leiden: Brill, 2020]).↩ 34. Elsewhere Marx writes: “But time is in fact the active existence of the human being. It is not only the measure of human life. It is the space for its development. And the encroachment of capital over the time of labor is the appropriation of the life, the mental and physical life, of the worker” (Karl Marx, “Economic Manuscript of 1861–63,” in Karl Marx & Friedrich Engels, Collected Works, vol. 33 [New York: International Publishers, 1991], 493). Although this passage bears striking similarities to the so-called early Marx of the 1844 Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts, it is in fact buried quite deep within the draft economic manuscripts for Capital written over the course of 1863–1865, i.e., twenty years after the early Paris manuscripts. This continuity suggests that the concept of time is indeed central to Marx’s entire critical project.↩ 35. There are myriad and creative ways in which people continually contest and resist the theft of time by recuperating their use of time. Although these subjective forms of resistance should also be understood as temporalities of emancipation, the temporalities I envision here are more oriented toward the objective possibilities that already exist immanently in capitalist social reality for social forces to seize upon.↩ 36. Angela Davis, Women, Race & Class (London: Penguin Books, 2019), 200–201.↩ 37. Karl Marx, The Poverty of Philosophy, available at https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1847/poverty-philosophy/ch01b.htm (accessed May 3, 2024).↩ |
