What is "capitalist time" and why should you care?
For some reason, every time I open my mouth about capitalism on the internet, people get really riled up in the comments. I’ve grown used to it, and even leveraged that rage to grow a following on Threads, but for the longest time I was amused and slightly befuddled by this behavior.
As I’ve educated myself more and more on capitalism and its roots and how it has taken shape to become what it is today, this behavior has become less confusing to me. Because one of the core ideologies underscoring capitalism is the concept of forever.
The absolutism that comes with capitalism and its demands is very, very certain that things can last forever—including capitalism itself. Capitalism also relies upon claims of what “human nature” really is: greedy and violent and always seeking more. To pursue profit by any means necessary is to be human, according to capitalism.
So if I say that this thing that we’ve been culturally and systematically indoctrinated to believe is the ultimate system (ultimate in its truest sense here, as in “the last”) which most accurately reflects and supports mankind’s very own essential nature, of course that’s going to threaten some folks’ views on reality.
But what got me thinking even further was this concept of forever and absolutism and totality and ultimacy, and how effective an ideology like that would be in removing the steam from anyone’s search for an alternative system. If capitalism supposedly supports the best and most enterprising facets of humanity, who would dare oppose it?
If you know anything beyond the surface level about anti-capitalism, you know that this movement isn’t necessarily brand-new. But the shapes it’s taking definitely are. And in a world where our time has become increasingly commodified, it’s worth exploring the ways that “capitalist time” influences our scope on reality.
What is capitalist time?
For the purposes of this piece, when I refer to ‘capitalist time,’ I’m mostly referring to the globalization of time and timekeeping as a result of colonization and the advent of train travel. Historically, this shift took place in the 19th century, in tandem with the first inklings of the Industrial Revolution. As train travel became increasingly popular in the continental United States, it became clear that a more unified system of timekeeping was required in order to coordinate train schedules.
Prior to this, clocks and timepieces were considered a frivolity, or an oddity mostly for the rich to amuse themselves with; they weren’t necessary for everyday life. Time was localized, and determined by things like sundials and other instruments, so “noon” was dependent on wherever you were when the sun reached its apex in the sky.
Examples of “alarm clocks” made out of nails stuck in the side of a candlestick. When the candle burns low enough, the nail falls off and the sound acts as an alarm.
When time zones were established in 1883, it was not only for the sake of train conductors everywhere, but also for the purposes of allowing colonizers to coordinate global shipments and simultaneous conquests of indigenous populations’ natural resources in different corners of the globe. Capitalism’s profit doctrine renders colonization & conquest inevitable, because resources & labor must both be continually exploited to maximize profitability. It’s around this time that I personally demarcate the shift into ‘capitalist time,’ although certainly the roots of it can be seen peeking through in various pockets of history.
Beyond standard time, the subtler impact of railroads was their invention of the 21st-century concept of a career. The word itself comes from the French “carriere,” meaning a racetrack. To achieve its modern meaning, however, work required an element of vocational progress... And so, the industrial economy invented the very concept of a modern career, making the passage of time a materially significant matter for turn-of-the-century workers.1
What are the qualities of capitalist time?
It’s worth noting here that capitalist time isn’t the first time humans have created systems for timekeeping. That has been going on since the dawn of humanity, most notably with astrology, the oldest known timekeeping system. The cycles of the planets have been tracked for thousands of years, and what all ancient calendars have in common are the lunar cycles and the rhythms of the seasons—essentially, the sun and the moon.
Indigenous Peoples from the Americas have been tracking time since they arrived[.] Their solar calendars are the most exact calendars. Their lunar calendars accurately determined ecosystem cycles and, since seven thousand years ago, agricultural cycles too. Their precise recordings of Venus as morning and evening star affirmed their ever-cyclic relationship with the cosmos above them and the underworld beneath.2
Time, according to these peoples, was not used to measure never-ending forward progress, but a rotating series of earth’s cycles. Rather than depending on a calendar date to know when a season had officially begun, or when it was the best time for planting seeds, they depended on the cycles of the planets and the rhythms of their geographical surroundings to tell them what “time” it was. In an agricultural sense, a farmer’s almanac is the most accurate calendar.
There are also many different types of time, outside of “civil time,” which is what you and I use every day, and “universal time” is the time of all clocks in Greenwich, England, and is used, amongst other things, for precise timing of astronomical (and astrological) events. As far back as ancient Greece, there were thought to be two different types of time: Kronos and Kairos. Kronos (or Chronos) describes what we know as chronological time, which is more quantitative and moves in one direction. Kairos, on the other hand, is more qualitative, and describes the depth with which one experiences time.3 You can also think of this as “horizontal time” (Kronos) and “vertical time” (Kairos).
What I find in Chronos is not comfort but dread and nihilism, a form of time that bears down on me, on others, relentlessly. Here, my actions don’t matter. The world worsens as assuredly as my hair is graying, and the future is something to get over with. In contrast, what I find in Kairos is a lifeline, a sliver of the audacity to imagine something different. Hope and desire, after all, can exist only on the differential between today and an undetermined tomorrow.4
What differentiates capitalist time from pre-capitalist (or anti-capitalist) time are a few things:
Homogenous and standardized - the same for everyone in the same time zone, regardless of latitude or season
Reliance upon clocks to ‘tell’ us the time
Time is linear and moves forward only, instead of in cycles, spirals, or rhythms
“Forever” as a measurable, attainable goal
Time is a commodity that can be bought and sold and “maximized” for productivity
Let’s go through these, shall we?
Capitalist time is homogenous and standardized
What determines a “second,” for you? Is it the length of an inhale? The space between heartbeats? If you’d never heard the ticking of a clock before, how would you know what a second or a minute or an hour feels like? Prior to the advent of clocks and timepieces, the keeping of time rarely had any need to be so precise. There was sunrise, when the day began; sunset, when the day ended; and mid-day, when the sun was at its highest point in the sky. For many people, and especially for indigenous cultures that were colonized by capitalist pursuits, time was inextricably linked to place and people.
Indeed, indigenous concepts of space, and perhaps more obliquely of time, sit uneasily with dominate linear perspectives held in the west; where there is a clear “future” just “ahead”[…] In the Amazonian Amondawa language and culture, time is not based not on countable units, but on social activity, kinship and ecological regularity.5
After the invention of Coordinated Universal Time, the length of a second, minute, hour, and day was standardized. As long as you are in the same time zone as somebody else, it’ll always be the “same time” for both of you, regardless of what’s happening with the sun and the moon and the land and the people.
Capitalist time relies upon clocks to ‘tell’ us the time
When time became standardized, it was no longer necessary to rely upon the angle of the sun or the amount of dew drops on the grass to know what time of day it was. It actually didn’t matter anymore what the quality of the time was, just the quantity of it: I wake up at exactly seven hours after midnight, regardless if that particular 7 am greets me with bright sunshine (in the summer months) or total darkness (in the winter months).
When all of time is standardized, and everyone’s clocks agree on the time regardless of what part of the year they’re in, then it’s much easier to know exactly how much work you’re getting out of your employees, and to punish them for “wasting” time. When the Industrial Revolution was in full swing, an increasing number of people’s livelihoods no longer relied upon them waking up with the sun to feed the livestock and tend to the crops; it relied upon them showing up at the factory at the designated time every single day—or face the consequences.
Interestingly enough, it was farmers who resisted the implementation of Daylight Savings Time, although it’s commonly believed that farmers came up with the whole idea. It was actually retail business owners who supported the proposition and advocated for more daylight hours in the darker months so they could conduct more business.6
Capitalist time is linear and only moves forward
One of the hallmarks of capitalist time is the way it is perceived as linear, existing as if on a horizontal line, constantly barreling toward the future. For capitalism specifically, this horizontal line represents a “timeline based on progress,” which is an ideology that sprung out of liberal ideals of mankind’s endless self-actualization.
The idea of modern progress establishes a civilizing tendency of development in history that prioritizes the future and rejects the past. The linear time conceives of traditional constitution of life of the oppressed people of the past as obsolete and old, and associates ‘modern’ behaviors in order to establish a bourgeois and utilitarian relation with nature devoid of metaphysics and myth.7
One of the chief shortcomings of this conceptualization of time and human history is the inability to look backward, a failing primarily influenced by “a bourgeois conception of history that, in fact, disables the capacity for revolution, instead of promoting the kind of progress that is needed for creating an actual world-transformative revolution, because it closes off the opportunity to look backwards to the past and the possibility of historical redemption.”8
As mentioned previously, many pre-colonial, indigenous conceptualizations of time were markedly non-linear, as the cycles of the earth and nearby planets could be seen as clues, referencing the past in order to determine not just the linear location of time, but the quality of both the present and the future.
Mayans handled this knowledge exquisitely: indeed, the future was recorded in the past. Because the past was known and visible, it was in the forefront of their understanding of time[…] According to their cosmovision, the agents of change were celestial bodies, because it was in their cyclical re-emergence that knowledge-holders understood how changes of time correlated with changes of climate and other associated natural phenomena.9
While capitalism doesn’t necessarily ignore the past (there’s always gotta be a YTD to beat, right), the liberal philosophy of linear time certainly views the past as a series of bookmarks on the road toward that ineffable, inevitable ideal, progress.
Capitalist time views “forever” as an attainable goal
Consumerism’s most glittering prize is the promise of immortality itself: an earthly paradise of never wanting, never needing, never lacking for anything imagination can dream of.10
Temporality is part of nature: everything dies. None of us are immune to it. But the demands of consumerism, driven by capitalism’s interest in endless growth, would very much like it if you believed differently. Think about it: if a person can be convinced that they can stave off aging and control the length of life through personal choice alone, then it’s very simple to convince that same person to buy things to “guarantee” a longer lifespan or a younger-looking visage.
But on a deeper level than that, the endless growth doctrine of capitalism says profit is king and a business is only thriving when it’s creating more profit than it did at any point previously, which then means capitalism is doomed to become a monster that eats itself from the inside out. Marx argued that this drive to accumulate sowed the seeds of capitalism’s downfall, because surplus capital would consistently be funneled away from the working class and into the owner class, which would result in economic crisis and collapse.11
Emily Dickinson, who died just a few years after the creation of time zones and the international date line, wrote this poem, titled “Forever,” which captures a sense of time felt by someone who very much existed during a turning point in the commodification of time itself:
Forever is composed of Nows -
’Tis not a different time,
Except for infiniteness
And latitude of home.
From this, experienced here.
Remove the dates to these.
Let months dissolve in further months.
And years exhale in years.
Without certificate or pause
Or celebrated days,
As infinite our years would be
As Anno Domini’s.
Capitalist time is a commodity: it can be bought and sold
The Industrial Revolution ushered in a need for more control over time, and not just one’s own time, but that of others—specifically, the ownership of people’s labor-hours by the wealthy ruling class. As I mentioned previously, showing up to one’s shift at the factory at the correct time and clocking out 12 hours later quickly became the way most of the working class made their money. With this came a desire for employers to have greater control over their employees’ time while “on the clock,” so they could maximize their production levels, exploiting the labor-hours they were paying for.
After all, it is something inherent in the very structure of capitalism, present in its original etymology: its root, caput, has the dual meaning of “head” and “total amount of working hours”.12
I know what you’re thinking: “But Sam, hasn’t employment existed since way before capitalism? Surely there must have been bosses throughout history who wanted to squeeze all the juice out of their employees’ time,” and the answer is… yes and no. For the majority of human history, with a few exceptions, labor was not something you bought and sold—it was something you took by force through domination, colonization, serfdom, and/or debt. For example, labor was expected of those who became "subjects" of a lord or noble, and in exchange they received food and shelter, but never currency or raw materials.
What changed was that slavery was eventually abolished, and suddenly ownership over a person had to be replaced by ownership of people's labor power. This is necessary because the primary purpose of production under capitalism is profit, rather than subsistence—producing just enough to meet the needs of one's family or village. Profit makes no sense to a farmer, because it would simply mean more work. People worked until they had enough, plus a small surplus in case of emergencies or tough times, and then they stopped working.13
Because colonization resulted in indigenous peoples having their control over their land stolen away from them, they had no choice but to sell their labor to the people who took their land from them. The same went for former slaves, now free, but left with no alternatives but selling their labor to the people who previously owned them.14
Fast forward to the Industrial Revolution, and the maximizing of employees’ time is turned into a science—one that Henry Ford would use so much in his factories, in tandem with the brand-new technology of the assembly line, that he became the most profitable car manufacturer of his time. No longer was work about finishing a product or gathering a bounty—not for the employees, anyway—but rather about squeezing as many repetitions of a single task as one possibly could into a 12-hour shift.
The latest workplace rage was scientific management, which involved motion and time studies to determine the most efficient way to perform a work task. In 1911, Frederick Winslow Taylor wrote a seminal work on the subject—The Principles of Scientific Management—which suggested that greater workplace efficiency can be achieved by training employees to do a single job, such as opening mail, inspecting ball bearings, performing accounting tasks, or selling products. Taylorism pushed the division of labor to its logical extreme but did not take into account worker satisfaction. Similarly, in 1913, Henry Ford instituted the assembly line into his Ford Model-T car manufacturing plants to boost both efficiency and production.15
For the modern worker (most likely you), the idea of maximizing one’s time on the job is not foreign, and in fact, has grown more insidious and demanding than ever. Much like ol’ Freddy Taylor, the C-level executives of today do not take into account “worker satisfaction” when implementing these systems of surveillance.
Decades after the 40-hour work week was hard-fought and won for workers across America, today’s employees must contend with things like digital forms of micromanagement that track everything from key strokes to eye movement (and are used much more frequently on minimum-wage employees who work from home). The irony in this “virtual micromanagement” is that while employers and executives seem to be very concerned with how employees manage their time at home, employees who work from home report heightened productivity levels.16 It’s almost as if… having agency over how they spend their time, rather than mindlessly filling hours with repetitive and superfluous tasks to satisfy a minimum… makes people more inspired to do their best work. Huh.
So, why should you care?
Capitalist time, along with other facets of liberalism and late-stage capitalism, feels inescapable because by nature, it does not want to be escaped from. There are many opportunities to commodify your time and profit just a tiny bit more on your most precious resource, but that means there’s also a multitude of ways to resist the urge to maximize your time’s ability to make you money (if you’re in survival mode, I love you and I’m with you, but I’m not referring to you in this instance).
While there are certain realities of capitalist time that you can’t escape, like paying bills every fucking month, what is available to you are many other ways of relating to time, experiencing vertical time (Kairos), and even disconnecting from time altogether. Have you ever been to the movie theatre, and even though you only spent a couple of hours in there, you came out of that experience feeling as if many days, months, or years had gone by? You were engaged in vertical time while immersed in an experience of art. Hello??? That’s what being a human is all about!
Maybe that’s just me. But I doubt it. Time is malleable, and it doesn’t just run on a horizontal track: it has a vertical dimension, too, that you can practice feeling deeper into in moments of stillness or waiting. I call those moments my “buffering” moments. Instead of maximizing your time for profit, try maximizing it for depth—of sensation, of emotion, of clarity, whatever the moment calls for. See how you feel after a little while of doing that.
Another thing you can do to relate to time differently is to keep track of what happens to you and when (aka journaling), and attune your mind toward finding patterns and cycles in your life. Astrology can help immensely with that, but it’s not the only way.
Tomorrow I’ll be hosting a free workshop, “Breaking The Clock: Defying Capitalist Time”. I’ll be discussing the different qualities of time in a little bit more detail and giving you more ideas for how to connect with the vertical dimension of time. If you haven’t already, you can register for it here, and even if you can’t attend live, you’ll be automatically notified when the replay is up.
