anarchism and time

Confusion around the subject/object goes back further than capitalism though. Certainly the separation between subject and object is fundamental to the emergence of human consciousness. However, it could be argued that this has hitherto only been experienced as an alienation (and hence as a 'confusion'), although there have perhaps been many glimpses of a higher synthesis.

I think it's true that there are profound insights in the real, historical 'mystical' traditions (eg Buddhism) regarding the overcoming of the alienation between subject and object, But these insights have to be seen within their historical limitations, which at best restricted them to an elite, and at worst clouded the insights with a mythological fog that ultimately served the status quo.

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.