One of the most profound ruptures inaugurated by industrial capitalism was the transformation of time itself. Once structured around seasons, religious rhythms, and communal life, time became reorganized as work-time: standardized, measurable, and—above all—waged. It is unsurprising, then, that time became a site of intense class conflict, and that struggles over its duration, pace, and control have shaped the history of capitalist production from the earliest factories to contemporary global supply chains. Indeed, calls for a new social order are almost always calls for a new temporal order as well, as Walter Benjamin reminds us in his account of revolutionaries firing at clock towers during the Paris Commune. What economic, political, ideological, and technological developments underwrote this new temporal reality? How has the discipline of clock-time shaped not only working life but also economic theory, ordinary experience, and political imaginaries?
This course traces the political economy of capitalist time across historical periods and geographic contexts. We will begin with Marx’s theory of work-time and the distinction between absolute and relative surplus value. We will then examine nineteenth-century struggles over the length of the working day, followed by the increasingly precise temporal standardization of the Fordist era after the Second World War. Finally, we’ll analyze the neoliberal reorganization of time, paying particular attention to flexibilization, precarity, just-in-time production, and the blurring of boundaries between work and life. Along the way, we’ll ask: How are the social limits of the workday established? Is there a long-term trajectory in the development of working time? How do gendered, racialized, and colonial hierarchies structure the global distribution of labor-time? How does unpaid and reproductive labor challenge conventional economic measures of time? And how have workers and social movements resisted the discipline of the clock? Readings will include selections from Marx, E.P. Thompson, Christoph Hermann, and Maarten Keune, among others, as well as reports from the International Labour Organization and the European Trade Union Institute.
