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willow
Man ceased to be master of time, for time, being now free to pass by independently or man and events, established its tyranny, to which men are constrained to submit.
time, labor, and social domination, pg 213, moishe postone
time, labor, and social domination, pg 214, moishe postone
time, labor, and social domination, pg 215, moishe postone
willow
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time, labor, and social domination, moishe postone The "progress" of abstract time as a dominant form of time is closely tied to the "progress" of capitalism as a form of life. It became increasingly prevalent as the commodity form slowly became the dominant structuring form of social life in the course of the following centuries. It was only in the seventeenth century that Huygens's invention of the pendulum clock made the mechanical clock into a reliable measuring instrument, and that the notion of abstract mathematical time was formulated explicitly. Nevertheless, the changes in the early fourteenth century that I have outlined did have important ramifications then. The equality and divisibility of constant time units abstracted from the sensuous reality of light, darkness, and the seasons became a feature of everyday urban life (even if it did not affect all town dwellers equally), as did the related equality it divisibility of value, expressed in the money form, which is abstracted from the sensuous reality of various products. These moments in the growing abstraction and quantification of everyday objects — indeed, of various aspects of everyday life itself — probably played an important role in changing social consciousness. This is suggested, for example, by the new significance accorded time, the increased importance of arithmetic in fourteenth-century Europe, The abstract form of time associated with the new structure of social relations also expressed a new form of domination. The new time proclaimed by the clocktowers—which frequently were erected opposite the church belltowers— was the time associated with a new social order, dominated by the bourgeoisie who not only controlled the cities politically and socially but also had begun to wrest cultural hegemony away from the Church. Unlike the concrete time of the Church, a form of temporality controlled overtly by a social institution, abstract time, like other aspects of domination in capitalist
Just as labor is transformed from an action of individuals to the alienated general principle of the totality under which the individuals are subsumed, time expenditure is formed from a result of activity into a normative measure for activity. Although, as we shall see, the magnitude of socially necessary labor time is a dependent variable of society as a whole, it is an independent variable with regard to individual activity. This process, whereby a concrete, dependent variable of human activity becomes an abstract, independent variable governing this activity, is real and not illusory. It is intrinsic to the process of alienated social constitution effected by labor. I have suggested that this form of temporal alienation involves a transformation of the nature of time itself. Not only is socially necessary labor time constituted as an "objective" temporal norm, which exerts an external compulsion on the producers, but time itself has been constituted as absolute and abstract. The amount of time that determines a single commodity's magnitude of value is a dependent variable. The time itself, however, has become independent of activity — whether individual, social, or natural. It has become an independent variable, measured in constant, continuous, commensurable, and interchangeable conventional units (hours, minutes, seconds), which serves as an absolute measure of motion and of labor qua expenditure. Events and action in general, labor and production in particular, now take place within and are determined by time — a time that has become abstract, absolute, and homogeneous. The temporal domination constituted by the forms of the commodity and capital is not restricted to the process of production but extends into all areas of life.
society, "objective." It would, however, be mistaken to regard this "objectivity" as no more than a veil that disguises the concrete particularistic interests of the bourgeoisie. As with the other categorial social forms investigated in this work, abstract time is a form that emerged historically with the development of the domination of the bourgeoisie and has served the interests of that class; but it has also helped to constitute those interests historically (indeed, the very category of "interests"), and it expresses a form of domination beyond that of the dominating class. The temporal social forms, as I shall show, have a life of their own, and are compelling for all members of capitalist society — even if in a way that benefits the bourgeois class materially. Although constituted socially, time in Capitalism exerts an abstract form of compulsion. As Aaron Gurevich puts it: "The town had become master of its own time... in the sense that time had been wrestled from the control of the Church. But it is also true that it was precisely in the town that man ceased to be master of time, for time, being now free to pass by independently of man and events, established its tyranny, to which men are constrained to submit." The tyranny of time in capitalist society is a central dimension of the Marxian Categorial analysis. In my consideration of the category of socially necessary labor time thus far, I have shown that it does not simply describe the time expended in the production of a particular commodity; rather, it is a category that, by virtue of a process of general social mediation, determines the amount of time that producers must expend if they are to receive the full value of their labor time. In other words, as a result of general social mediation, labor time expenditure is transformed into a temporal norm that not only is abstracted from, but also stands above and determines, individual action.
Giddens writes: "The commodification of time... holds the key to the deepest transformations of day-to-day social life that are brought about by the emergence of capitalism. These relate both to the central phenomenon of the organization of production processes, and to the "workplace", and also the intimate textures of how daily social life is experienced." I shall not, in the present work, address the effects of this temporal domination on the texture of experience in everyday life.