anarchism and time

Eight hour day of any interest? Latest Freedom has a feature piece on it.

Fuck me, that took me ages to track it down over the net, i've got the original at home somewhere (my head screaming it's got an orange cover) and i couldn't remember the name of it, and something to do with japanese word to do with sudden death due to overwork (karoshi). After all that i end up back here!

http://libcom.org/library/ballad-against-work-kamunist-kranti

It's probably no help at all, but hey...

I think that'll be my last coffee of the day.

Not anarchist, but; http://libcom.org/library/time-work-discipline-industrial-capitalism-e-p-thompson

Have you ever heard of
Time And its Discontents
by John Zerzan?

Postone had a few chapters on time - although I have to admit that I didn't find it particularly helpful - mainly because I couldn't understand what he was talking about - (and it's Marxist rather than anarchist)

Guy Debord raises the question of time in Society of the Spectacle. if I remember rightly, he tries to show, correctly in my opinion, how modes of production prior to capitalism had different concepts of time. i don't know if he was familar with the work of Mircea Eliade, but I think that the latter had shown the same thing from a 'history of religions' viewpoint.
Marx's writings on India also give a few clues about this - locating the cyclical vision of time in the repetitive cycles of life under the 'Asiatic' mode of production
Zerzan also takes up some of these lines of thought. I think he is correct to see the link between 'linear' time and alienation/repression, and to show that this alienation has reached its peak under capitalism. But his primitivist dogma prevents him from seeing any forward movement in history at all, so that what appears to be the complete triumph of alienation actually announces the overcoming of alienation and the advent of a human society.

There's also a great book about the use time amongst slave owners in the pre-Civil War South, and how the rise of "Work-time" corresponded with the drive for slave efficiency; the book is called Mastered by the clock : time, slavery, and freedom in the American South and its by Mark Smith. While its not from an anarchist perspective, its till interesting to see the development of time and its relation to work.

EP Thompson has a good essay on this in "Customs in Common" -- he was a libertarian Marxist, not an anarchist, but it is a good essay. Then there is THE TYRANNY OF THE CLOCK by George Woodcock. It is in his "The Anarchist Reader", I think, but originally from War Commentary - For Anarchism, mid-march 1944.

Not anarchist or Marxist at all, but an interesting read regarding time nonetheless - The Tyranny of the Moment: fast and slow time in the information age, by anthropologist Thomas Hylland Eriksen.

Yeah, he talks about the different concepts of cyclical time in agrarian and industrial capitalist societies, and their effects on consciousness. In lots of places Debord on time is expanding on Lukacs in Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat, though neither Lukacs nor Debord were anarchists.

Idon't know if it was in Debord or Vanneigem (which I consider a quintessentially Marxist text) but one of the situ bods talked about capitalism creating a pseudo-cyclical time which mimicked the cyclical time of agrarian societies in which the cyclical alternation of the seasons was vital- i.e. we are no longer tied to the rythms of the seasons (at least in the big city) but have to get up go to work, come home and repeat the same thing next day, ad infinitum until we die.......however the experience that we all have had of being thoroughly engrossed in the present with no sense of time passing- that is a product of capitalism too. A linear time is created which we can live but its use is kept from society by the pseudo-cyclical time of production............tantalising stuff!

Yeah thats Debord in Society of the Spectacle. The concept of dead time is quite important i think.

fixed.

ta bruv

He mashed in aristocratic clowns like Johan Huizinga too, with bad results.

Django, thanks for that comment ,I think what debord meant by dead time was the domination of the living present by the dead past that accumulated capital represents not just "dead" labour but dead time as well- past time which dominates the living activity of the present and holds it in captivity. You may in fact regard capital investment as a response to history and as the domination of the present by history. In The London Hanged, Peter Linebaugh describes the introduction of automation and the inception of the Industrial Revolution as a response to the former insubrdination of workers in this case in eighteenth century London where many different modes of production were harnessed to the goal of capital accumulation. Hope this is clear.Anyway for an example of dead time just look at the present London Docklands.

Scientifically speaking Stephen Hawking has a lot of good stuff.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Brief_History_of_Time

Not really anarchist as such, but a good overview of different ways of classifying time. (i.e. If time began with the Big Bang, then if the Universe begins receeding back into the centre of the Universe we will "go back in Time", etc.)

This book is actually really interesting, I'm just really surprised to find anyone else who has read it. Also, yeah, Thompson is indispensable on this topic.

Although current observations indicate that gravitational collapse, i.e the big crunch, won't happen. The expansion of the universe is accelerating rather than slowing down.

If knowledge is power then how do different conceptions of what the universe is like reflect social concerns? In the middle ages it was "known" that the earth was the centre of the universe and the fixed stars and planets revolved around it in crystal spheres, justifying and naturalising the mediaeval order. Time was cyclical, everyone knew his place and everything was ordained by god.(Although whether anyone actually believed that the earth was flat is a moot point, particularly sailors who knew that a ship's mast would only gradually become visible as it came up over the horizon. Church dogma however, insisted that it was.) Then very much later came the "steady-state" theory a la Fred Hoyle, in which the universe had always existed and always would, new matter being continuously created to fill in the gaps as the universe expanded. This was around the sixties when the threat of social upheaval required a theory of unchanging stability. Then a bit later came the cyclical Big Bang /Big Crunch theory perhaps indicating the reimposition of cyclical work time after the preceeding period of uncertainty for capital. Now we have the indefinite expansion theory in which the cosmos will just keep on getting older, all the stars will eventually burn out an an "Everlasting Dark Era" will ensue. Time is unbounded and linear once, more perhaps indicating the possibly indefinite expansion for capital. Einstein's Special Theory of Relativity (1905), which involved time roughly coincided with the first Russian revolution, his General Theory (1915) with the second. There were a multiplicity of diferent points of view nothing was certain "all static order turns to dust" and time depends on the observer's frame of reference. The construction of the atomic bomb in the 1940s, however using the principle of mass- energy equivalence, required this understanding of the relative nature of time to be the property of a minority of privileged experts. The use of this new understanding of time was kept from society at large . How time is conceived depends on the ideologial needs of society at any given moment. This is not to gainsay the validity of Einstein's insights or of physics in general I am merely trying to indicate their function in society. I hope time travel is never developed.

Uh...

I think it's reasonable to say that in the Middle Ages scientific knowledge was used to support the status quo (heirarchical order to both nature and society and all that) because all research was directly controlled by the church back then. But if there's anything that ties Einstein's Special Theory to the Russian Revolution besides just a coincidence of timing, I'll eat my boots.

I'm not wholly (or even remotely) sure what to make of Pingu's post, but Einstein was a socialist....

Please, don't eat your boots.........OK, that was an unsupported statement. I didn't say that they happened at exactly the same time, merely that both occurred around the same period -but by more than just a coincidence, and more than just the Russian revolution, too. The intellectual climate of the time was amenable to Einstein's insights in a way that would have been impossible in an earlier epoch. Newton's clockwork universe, with its absolute space and absolute time served the needs of a burgeoning industrial culture's need to use time as an absolute measure whereby value could be determined. The need to build accurately functioning machines, understand the underlying principles of force and motion and to accurately calculate ballistic trajectories for warfare came into it too I guess. I don't think that the Russian revolution and the various upheavals of the time actually caused relativity theory to be developed in a direct, one-to-one way though, but that the same events that produced the Russian revolution produced the intellectual climate....... oh sorry, I've said that already.........I think it is true that theories which involved four dimensional spacetime and the invariance of the speed of light for all observers were developed earlier around 1875 but nobody took much notice...........Perhaps somebody else could confirm or deny this.
Ncwob sorry about the opaqueness of my language yeah Einstein was a socialist maybe thats all I needed to say. Redemma, there was no scientific research as such back then......

I'm actually really enjoying Pingu's arguments. I'd have to think a lot more about them before I made a conclusive...well...conclusion, but the academic in me loves to dissect such abstract notions as time.

Hmm...can you elaborate more on theories of the fourth dimension being developed in the 19th century, and what made them seem more acceptable in the early 20th? Because that's a completely different ballpark, but I'm not really sure I understand your argument yet.

But then again, there's a huge difference between scientific explanations of the world and their function within society on an ideological level. I mean, Darwin's theory was not the first theory of evolution, but it came along at a time when class society needed to justify itself in secular terms and "survival of the fittest" proved useful. That has nothing to do with the fact that Darwin's theory was basically correct.

"Survival of the fittest" was actually coined by Herbert Spencer in just such a justification.

I think it's also true to say that different social orders allow different "truths" to be recognised. The bourgeoisie were able to recognise the truth of Darwin's theory concerning competition (which was itself derived from a bourgeois economist, Malthus) because their own economy was based on competition. This was obscured in a medieval society based on a communal natural economy (the manor) where the co-operation between different functions and social strata was emphasised.

Engels makes the point in one of his letters how Darwin's theory had obscured insights into co-operation in nature.

Although science can (and is) objective in its examination of reality, the perceived significance of its findings (especially when these are mediated through society as a whole) is inevitably filtered through the ideological distortion of bourgeois society.

while some of pingus formulations seem a bit over simplistic it raises an important point that science should not be treated as something completely independent of the capitalist social environment it is intimately bound with.

with regards to Relativity theory i think the point is that the bourgeoisie has not really been able to fully incoperate such a dialectical approach into its world outlook. The universe remains a dead machine and time fundamentally an absolute part of it, in the bourgeois view. It is the same with regards to quantum theories and the problems this has brought up. These theories basically show the unity and 'oneness' of all things but the bourgeois view as an (extremely)alienated view cannot draw out the wider impplications of this.

oh and heres a verse i wrote about time generally

See the crazed lives, and the strange minds in the city you'll know
the more you try to save time, then the quicker it goes
'coz the machine that feeds on peoples greed perpetually wants more
And when time is money then every one is poor
but this 60 seconds
will live forever
in its essence,
coz it expresses
the spirits message
that time is an illussion
and only existed ever
in the head of
the rigid clever
mind resisting movement
remember when you were a kid 'coz thats when you just knew
that the ever present present is forever produced
so now your unconscious is unlocked, and I'm mapping its secrets
'i don't want some dumb job where i punch clocks'
so my words will simply smash them to peices
twisting its hands into a ying yang sign
coz tho your living this life
if physics is right
we've all been here since before the big bangs time

That's just about what I was tryng to say jaycee........

only somewhat related to this, but I thought that John Holloway's bit about "identity" and confusion around the subject/object as arising out of capitalism and the accumulation of dead labour was one of the more interesting bits of his book (although he wasn't the first to write about this).