DOC TAYROC'S [UNSOLICTED] BOOK REVIEW - THE POLITICS OF TIME by Guy Standing

Available here.

This book crossed my mind whilst writing the recent two-part series on Marxist versus capitalist reality, but I could not figure out how to incorporate it fully, so I decided to give it its own little review. In the interest of full disclosure, I was at this book launch, and he is a coworker at the university I also work at.

I was very good at physics, had I not become a economist I would have gone instead for engineer or physicist I reckon. One of the things about physics that really wigged me out were the implications of relativity, namely the idea that our perception of time is linked, amongst other things, to the gravitational pull of the very planet we are standing on and the sun shining down on us, and time itself flows differently on other planets and in other solar systems relative to our own. Of course, this was a main plot point of the 2014 Christopher Nolan film Interstellar, which since the references to that are a bit too obvious, I'll ignore them in favour of my preferred sci-fi reference: Star Trek, Doctor Who, or obscure early-to-mid 20th century pulp science fiction magazine short story.

Of course, Standing is also an economist, and so the phenomenon he's examining is considerably closer to Earth. By Earth, of course, I mean more precisely Western Europe and Ancient Greece. Indeed, one of my biggest pet-peeves about the book is references to 'African culture' that is completely devoid of any specificity, a specificity we always extend to European cultures (we seldom mix Irish heritage and culture with its Greek or Germanic counterparts) but do not grant to African cultures or Asian cultures outside of South and East Asia. (When was the last time you saw someone differentiate between the Maasai people of Kenya and the Igbo people of Nigeria with similar precision? An idea we will return to with a future book review). That said, if we treat the book as a case study of, as the book itself seems drawn to do, just Britain then we do see something more interesting, and more in line with the usual bread and butter of this blog, an intriguing story of how capitalism itself has fundamentally modified our perception and relationship with time.

A very brief reminder on the economic history of Britain, at least as far as will be helpful for the framing of today's entry:

• 1600 East India Company established

• 1604, unification of the English, Welsh, Scottish, and 'Irish' crowns

• 1640-1660 Civil Wars/Interregnum

• 1660s Restoration of Monarchy

• 1680 Royal Africa Company established (Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade)

• 1683 'Glorious Revolution'

• c 1710s Jethro Tull's inventions and writings bring about Second Agricultural Revolution

• c 1760s Beginning of the adoption of 'power looms' in Lancashire, Industrial Revolution begins

• 1803 - 1815 Napoleonic War, 'Pax Britannia' begins

• 1807 - 1833 Britain abolishes slavery, pays reparations to former slavers

• 1832 Acts of Reformation begin 'age of reformation'

• 1846 'Corn Laws' repealed, Britain begins advocating 'free trade agreements'

• 1857 First Indian War of Independence, East India Company largely dissolved

• 1812 - 1890 First waves of labour movements

• 1900 Labour party founded

• 1914 - 1918 First World War

• League of Nations, first wave of internationalism

• 1920 Labour Party forms first government

• 1939 - 1945 Second World War

• 1944 Bretton-Woods Conference

• c 1950s - 1960s 'Golden Age of Capitalism'

• c 1970s OPEC Oil Embargo/Oil Crisis/Stagflation

• 1977 - 1980 Election of Margaret Thatcher/Ronald Reagan Neo-liberal Era Begins

• 1986 Savings and Loan Crisis

• 1987 Black Monday Crisis

• 1995 Barings Bank Collapse

• 2001 'War on Terror' begins, 'Dot Com' Bubble Bursts, Enron collapses

• 2007/08 Sub-prime loan financial crisis

• 2010 Eurozone Crisis/Asian Tiger Crisis

• 2016 Brexit/Trump elections

• 2019 - 2021 Covid-19 Pandemic/Lockdowns

• Future ??? (Insert Star Trek and/or Red Dwarf joke here)

Of the missing dates in there, are the 1666 Great Fire of London and the 'plagues' of the late 17th century, likely a result of the both the general lack of medical knowledge of the era, yes, but certainly not helped by the damage to infrastructure and food supply brought by the civil wars, as well as the 'Gin Craze' brought about by, amongst other things, the wars raging on and against the European continent. According to legend, it was during these plagues that Newton 'invented' modern calculus.

I say 'according to legend' because Newton is something of an unreliable narrator, like many famous academics of his era, and this era. Of course, I'm not contesting that Newton brought together the ideas of modern calculus and we should appreciate him for that and the labour and intelligence that it took to achieve it, but in the name of honesty and helping other hard working intelligent people advance their careers today in a mentally healthy and honest way, we should acknowledge that since Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz came to roughly the same conclusion and at roughly the same time, independently of Newton's work, that both likely combined pre-existing work into the new branch of mathematics, like how modern academics work. 'Standing on the shoulders of giants' and all that. Of course Newton would spend the rest of this life and a considerable amount of time at the Royal Institute making sure everyone thought less of Leibniz because Newton had, amongst other issues, an overgrown ego.

I digress, because my points to make about Newton and Standing's are quite different. Although slightly related. Newton, Standing, and I are all members of British academia. However, the eras of British academia are entirely different from one another. Newton wasn't quite pre-capitalist, since many of the institutions that would come to define capitalist Britain existed in his time, the EIC, Lloyds, the earliest versions of the London Stock Exchange, the Bank of England, and the Royal Africa company all already existed and were already kicking off the most primitive of primitive accumulation. Further, the Civil Wars had already violently asserted the power of the bourgeois over the aristocratic orders, which had spent most of the last of their political capital in the Civil Wars or in the 'glorious revolution'. Neither the church nor much of the 'traditional' aristocracy had yet to reassert power.

But despite this relatively fertile land for the birth of British capitalism, since this was the most nascent form of capitalism, which had barely had a chance to establish and reaffirm itself, it had yet to consume all facets of British society. British academia was, for all intents and purposes and pardon the pun, still sacred. I say no pun intended because Oxford and Cambridge still hadn't strayed far from their origins functioning as seminaries first and foremost. British academia was also largely constrained to the modern Universities of Oxford, Cambridge, and Edinburgh. The universities were also still largely constrained to well established families, 'old money' like the aristos, and 'new money' of the emergent bourgeois. Statistically, my ancestors would less have 'not made the cut' and more 'would not even been considered, nor would have considered being considered'. Indeed if you're British and reading this and/or the descendent of British settler colonists elsewhere your ancestors were statistically in the same boat, so let us not glorify this era.

Point is that the version of the British academy that Newton was working in when he was in Oxford during the 'plague years' when he 'invented' calculus was a pre-capitalist, that is pre-commodified, version of academia. As someone working in post-Thatcher fully commodified British academia, Newton's British academia is as foreign and fantastical to me as though it were the Baghdad House of Wisdom, and Standing's point is that since the capitalist idea of 'time is money' hadn't yet made it to academia, Newton had time to be bored and think through the problems facing him, and it was this boredom that enabled him to string together many of his most prudent works, from the description of gravity, the early work on the nature of light and prisms, and many of the other works that would lead to him becoming not only the 'father of calculus' but also the 'father of physics'. This boredom, Standing further argues was a luxury that the ancient Greeks and multitudes of other academics, researchers, and workers that lead to the kinds of innovations and creativity that capitalism claims to cultivate, despite growing evidence to the contrary. But why do we not have the right to boredom any more?

Standing guides us through the history of human concepts and measurement of time. Some of this, of course, is fairly well known. For example, the modern concept of standardised time, across an entire nation was brought to us by the spread of the railways, as for the first time in history it was crucial that Manchester and London agreed on when precisely a train was departing and arriving for the sake of time tabling, with time zones shortly following. The addition of electrical telegraphy further increased the need (and the ease) of standardising time across not only a single country, but internationally as well. For how much time rules our lives, and how thoroughly time zones and day-light savings rule our lives today, it is a bit liberating to remember that most of the modern mechanisms and rationale for measuring time comes as recently in the history of humanity as the 19th century. Of course, there are clocks that predate this, but the precision of the clocks was different, the necessity was different (longitudinal clocks, for example, designed (in Yorkshire) to help the Royal Navy navigate), or the idea of standardising the clocks was unimportant, and so Leeds could be (by modern standards) thirty minutes different from Newcastle, which was likely an entire hour off of nearby Edinburgh, which was an hour and a half off of London. And don't even think of trying to measure the difference between all these British cities and Britain's overseas possessions.

Of course, for the average person, train time tabling isn't enough to internalise time the way that we all have. The concept of the 24 hour day divided 'neatly' into three eight hour chunks is, as Standing demonstrates, a product of the advent industrialised capitalism. In a largely agrarian society, the necessity to measure the time of workers down to the minute was unheard of. When time was necessary, it was either measured by the sun or by the season. This, of course, is why agriculture even today frustrates some aspects of modern capital, there is little we can do with our present understanding of agriculture to speed the rate at which grains grow. Agriculture, by its very (pardon the pun) nature moves at the rate of nature, no amount of managerial reform or allocation of capital can modify that fact. (There are many, many other ways capitalist logic has taken over the agricultural sector and frankly, ruined it, leading to amongst other things mass suicide in India, but we will return to that in later posts). The factory, on the other hand, being a wholly human construct could be open to human modifications, and was more directly impacted by the various attempts at measuring and standardising time. Now, the 'harder' the worker worked the more productivity could be squeezed from them. Again, remembering here that the concept of productivity is measured as a ratio of profit to the time it took to make the profit.

Here's where the nefarious term 'human resources' comes into play. Some apologists for the capitalist system will assert that Henry Ford was a 'friend of the worker' as he brought in the eight hour day. It is true that he brought the eight hour day to his factory, but he was no 'friend to the worker'. Another innovation of Mr Ford's was the first recorded instance of what would become the dreaded Human Resources department. The term 'resources' does the heavy lifting here, as modern HR studies revolve around the concept of making employees as productive as possible. Let me be clear, contrary to some claims, modern HR is never working in the interest of the employee, always in the interest of the firm. The eight hour day is part of these 'Fordist' calculations, as it was the longest Ford believed he could get his employees to work before fatigue set in and reduced productivity, another shift of labour, fresh and ready to work eight hours was ready to deploy, whilst the previous shift recharged, averaging eight hours for additional needs and eight for sleep. Such a strict regiment, when mixed with the five or six day work week, left the employee with relatively little control over their life, as their labour obligation to the Ford plant was the primary shaping force in their daily diary. Ford, like many capitalists of his era, also believed that he had a moral duty to enforce moral codes on his employees, and so it wasn't uncommon for Ford proto-HR workers to come and extol the values of a sober, Protestant, American life to workers, especially immigrant workers. Or more galling, to Brazilian workers in Ford's failed Fordlandia project. And that's not even touching Ford's other... beliefs.

Of course, to many reading this, an eight hour workday seems like a God send. This is largely because we have entered the era of 'surveillance capitalism', in which our employers have a level of scrutiny over our personal and professional lives that the oligarchs of old could only have dreamt of. Further, the notion of 'time is money' has commodified how we spend so much of our lives, that time spent relaxing today is viewed as wasted. Modern capital tells us that every minute of every day must be spent engaging or we are wasting our lives. Conveniently, this means that every moment of our lives would best be spent either accumulating money or spending it, in either case benefiting the capitalist class. Amazon and Microsoft, conveniently to the capitalist class, have both developed software that allows the employer to see what employees are doing on their computers and phones, even when they're off the clock, and of course, are also able to sell that data to advertisers. Every second of modern life must produce surplus value, after all, as even the most industrious worker has a nasty habit of dying someday, and so we must wring everything out of them we can before they challenge Kortar on the Barge of the Dead for the right to see the gates of Sto-vo-Kor.

Standing argues, as do I elsewhere, that the fight for our time is more pressing than ever, as the advent of the 'gig economy' seeks to undermine what few existing labour protections are still in play, and turn the modern worker into a 'task machine' toiling on their own time to complete tasks at rates that frequently undermine existing minimum wage laws. Things be bad, and they're getting worse, and the surveillance technology is a big part of what is making them worse.

For a good introduction of how capitalism has managed to commoditise time itself, I recommend reading Guy Standing's The Politics of Time. Now, like a modern academic, I have to go back to work on seventy separate projects to 'publish or perish' whilst also teaching record numbers of students, to be the most productive for the university. (Some of that is hyperbolic, but the point stands).