Both capitalists and Marxists have long studied how capitalism imposes a time-work discipline on waged workers. And some Marxists—most famously perhaps Henri Lefebvre— have suggested that time structures social life more generally. In what follows, I think about this question from the more specific perspective of social reproductive labor time. That is, what can be said about the temporalities of lifemaking in capitalist societies? How might an analytic focus on time and temporalities help us better understand how capitalism concretely conditions the work of lifemaking? And how might social reproductive labor time, despite being conditioned by capitalist productive relations, contradict and be deployed to resist capitalism?
This essay, I hope, offers some thoughts on how answers to such questions might be pursued. It is part of a larger project on the social reproduction of childhood in capitalism. After a condensed discussion drawing heavily on Jonathan Martineau’s discussion of capitalist clock-time, I consider ways in which social reproductive labor enacts and resists capitalist clock-time. I offer ideas about what makes the capitalist temporal organization of social reproductive labor both necessary and possible if never total and argue that the temporalities of meeting human needs through capitalistically unproductive social reproductive labor are essential to both profitmaking and to resisting capitalist class power. (By “capitalistically unproductive” I mean both unwaged social reproductive labor done in households and communities and waged social reproductive labor performed by workers in the public and nonprofit sectors.)
Capitalist Clock-time
In Time, Capitalism, and Alienation , Martineau argues that clock time is constitutive of class power.1Jonathan Martineau, Time, Capitalism, and Alienation: A Socio-Historical Inquiry into the Making of Modern Time (Chicago: Haymarket, 2016). Noting that clock time itself precedes capitalism (the earliest clocks appearing circa 1300), he shows how, with its precise, invariable, quantifiable units of hours, minutes and seconds, clock time is the very condition of the production of capitalist profit or surplus value. The quality of time is irrelevant. What matters, he demonstrates, is that the average hours of labor time is a key determining force of wealth creation. Quantitative clock-time is the force behind the law of value, which not only dictates the prices of goods and services (and thus which goods and services will produce a profit and thus be produced) but also how these must be produced in order to realize that profit. His point is that clock time is not simply a measure of capitalist productivity, but that it structures production and the ongoing production of surplus value, ultimately undergirding capitalist class rule.
However, Martineau stresses, capitalist clock-time does not and cannot fully determine productive activity in general. Whether lifemakimg or valuemaking, he writes, all “acts of concrete labor, as producers of use-value, entail and produce a concrete time.”2Martineau, Time, Capitalism, and Alienation, 114. Clock time, Barbara Adam tells us, is artefactual, empty time abstracted from natural processes and human activities.3Barbara Adam, Timewatch: The Social Analysis of Time (New York: Polity, 1995). This contrasts with what Martineau calls concrete time, which is variable, generated, and measured in the process of the activity itself (for example, the amount of time it takes to change a baby’s diapers equals the amount of time it takes to change a baby’s diapers). Whether drilling for oil on a rig off the Gulf Coast or learning to tie a shoe, workers, waged and unwaged, produce things, services and people in concrete time—that is, within specific timeframes “based on the very unfolding of the activity itself.”4Martineau, Time, Capitalism, and Alienation, 114. But Martineau also notes that there is a crucial difference between the production of oil and the production of a tied shoe or shoelace-tying expertise: only the former is directly and immediately organized by the law of value, by clock time.
Social Reproduction Time and Accumulation
We know a fair bit about how clock time is enacted in the workplace over waged workers producing profits for capitalists. Studies on productivity and time-work discipline are countless, an essential part of the capitalist labor management arsenal. But what of communities and households engaged in noncommodified lifemaking work? How—and to what extent—does capitalist clock-time assert its discipline over the social reproduction of labor power and of life? And how is this discipline resisted?
Capitalist temporal domination of lifemaking banks upon and exploits the uneven and flexible character of social reproductive standards and labor.
To begin, the timeframes of social reproductive labor generate and respond to multiple and particular needs (of subsistence, pleasure, education, health and so on) as well as to natural processes of growth and development (that is, processes that are guided by an internal dynamic that is responsive to, but not principally dependent upon, human intervention). These timeframes tend to be conditioned by: (i) particular concrete interactions between reproducer and reproducee (for example, teacher/student, nurse/patient) and their specific desires, needs, and aptitudes; and (ii) the material and social environment in which lifemaking is carried out (for example, the available resources or the specific dynamics of social oppression at play). Moreover, the timeframes of social reproductive labor (and, relatedly, its standards) are—to a point— flexible, fluctuating, and subjectively defined. A parent can make their own baby food or buy it off a shelf; a teacher can advance an excellent or a “good enough” student from one level to the next.
Of course, whether the lifemaking is carried out as part of waged work matters. Teachers, nurses, and social workers are directly supervised, even if parents raising children are not. The former are accountable to managers with established productivity goals—goals that are set not by the operation of the law of value but by bureaucracies beholden to variable (if often market-related) values and agendas. This is a key distinction that I cannot discuss more fully here. But I want to stress that, even in waged social reproductive work, the two conditioning aspects mentioned above regularly exert significant force—precisely because we are dealing with the reproduction of human life (as opposed to a commodity). For example, the time it takes for a child to learn to read is significantly determined by their emotional and intellectual readiness, the reading environment and resources, and the aptitude of the instructor. Gender, class, race, age, sexuality, and citizenship status—which can easily override the timelines imposed by curriculum designers and testing regimes that are imposed by managers of public sector teachers—also factor into the equation.
As a result, although essential to creating the human labor power that capital depends upon, lifemaking activities—from learning to read to making dinner to recovering from an illness—can stubbornly resist clock-time regulation. This is because they are (and generally must be) organized in relation both to meeting human needs and to biophysical and ecological trajectories of growth and development. That capacity to resist has much to do with the fact that the products of social reproductive work (clean clothes, healthy bodies, poems, little league games, and so on) are not exchanged on the market; they are not, therefore, subject to the law of value.
But while resistant to capitalist timeframes, concrete social reproductive labor times are not unaffected by them. Capitalist temporal domination of lifemaking banks upon and exploits the uneven and flexible character of social reproductive standards and labor. As I explain below, ruling classes and their states variably squeeze, stretch, or delay the time workers take to meet their needs in ways that direct that work away from meeting human needs and toward the goal of capitalist accumulation.
A Necessary Possibility: Capitalist Conditioning of Social Reproductive Time
The very structure of capitalist production makes ruling class conditioning of social reproductive time necessary;the capitalist state’s political organization of social reproductive labor makes it possible.
Much social reproduction takes place in people’s “spare time,” which is nothing less than time away from waged work. Therefore, the time it takes to reproduce the self and others is, a priori, defined and limited by the timeframes of capitalist value production. And, as workers well know, spare time is hardly sacrosanct, especially as neoliberal capitalism has increasingly blurred the spatial and temporal boundaries between profitmaking and lifemaking such that millions juggle the maintenance of themselves, their households, and their communities interchangeably with zoom meetings, lace production, copyediting, and much more for their bosses. But the invasion of capitalist clock-time into spare (social reproductive labor) time is also a fact for the millions of workers who still earn their wages outside the home. It is felt through the dismantling of unions and state benefits placing greater responsibilities for caring on individuals (mostly women), and through bosses squeezing the time workers have to meet their needs by demanding workers take on overtime and irregular hours. Here, capital banks on the flexible and largely subjective nature of lifemaking time. It can do so because—to a point—needs can go unfulfilled and humans can be alienated from their bodies, their selves, and their worlds.
The invasion of capitalist clock-time into spare (social reproductive labor) time is also a fact for the millions of workers who still earn their wages outside the home.
Such temporal pressures and limits are structural. They are embedded in the economic system and essential to capitalist profitmaking. Other incursions on workers’ social reproductive labor time, while not structural, are typical of capitalist societies. Backed up by the rule of law, they are deeply ingrained. These are state-led efforts to support, discipline and undermine workers’ lifemaking time in ways that make capitalist clock-time’s domination possible.
Through laws governing social security, citizenship, immigration, education, healthcare, and so on, the state alternately captures, colonizes, and disciplines the social reproductive time of working class people. The manner and extent of the state’s incursion on social reproductive time depends, to a large extent, on a person’s social position—their wealth, gender, race, ethnicity, age, ability, and status.
The lifemaking time of “surplus populations”—meaning those whose labor power is not immediately required by capital—tends to be institutionally captured (in institutions such as schools, prisons, and retirement homes) and colonized in ways that echo and accommodate capitalist clock-time. It is also regularly “stretched,” in the sense that the state, as Javier Auyero explains, imposes periods of waiting for access to benefits, or status, and so on.5Javier Auyero, Patients of the State: The Politics of Waiting in Argentina (Durham: Duke University Press, 2012). The latter is an especially insidious way of putting people’s lifemaking “on hold” temporally, ensuring the survival of a permanent “surplus population” of workers that enables capitalists to both keep working class wages class depressed and call people into waged work at some undefined point in the future.
Compulsory schooling for children is a prime example of state colonization of lifemaking time. (Not just a relic of the twentieth century, the expansion of schooling is ongoing in the Global South.) The transfer of education from households to schools is about habituating children to capitalist clock-time through the official rhythms, pace, and duration of schooling—we are all too familiar with the dreaded school bell. But it is also a means of capturing children’s own lifemaking time—urging and disciplining them to become (and ensuring their teachers produce) efficient and instrumental producers of self and knowledge.
Insofar as people can define, create and expand the time of their social reproduction, then, they can and will push back against the state’s imposition of capitalist clock-time.
Yet another temporality also dominates schools: that of hegemonic theories of child development that impose abstract standards and timelines of progress. These are imposed within and through a clock-time infrastructure dictating, for example, that students spend so many hours a week on reading and math, or that a student should be able to meet certain academic and behavioral performance markers by the first grade. Even punishment for veering from developmental norms (for example, detentions) is meted out by clock time. Indeed, it is precisely its integration with clock-time temporalities that ensconces linear, teleological child development ideas and practices (in which adulthood is associated with the autonomous, self-interested rational, sexually disciplined worker) as hegemonic—ruling out other potentially more flexible and open-ended paths of development.
At the same time—and this is a crucial point—schools tend also to be spaces where other concrete temporalities are granted greater scope: accommodating slower learners, enshrining some time for play and creativity, allowing some time to meet “excess” needs by addressing interpersonal conflicts or caring for children who have not eaten or slept well, or allowing time for students to discover new needs. Time spent in school does not fully “belong” to the student. It doesn’t fully “belong” to capital either. It—like noncommodified social reproductive labor more generally—is a potential space and time to redefine time in ways that prioritize the concrete time of meeting human need (this can also be the case for communities and households).
We see this every day in schools as students, teachers and staff regularly defy capitalist clock-time organization of their social reproduction. They do so individually when students are late for class or when teachers shift schedules to accommodate slower learners or perform some necessary care work or pursue certain projects off-curriculum. This self-management of social reproductive time is not unlike waged valueproducing workers who defy the clock individually by skipping shifts, sneaking smoke breaks, or simply slowing down their work processes.
The relevant question for socialists is what and how concrete lifemaking temporalities at schools or in communities can be collectivized, politicized, and integrated into broad struggles against capitalism. The potential for this is always present. It is occasionally brought to the fore: the 2018–19 student-led climate strikes, or the 2018 walkouts in the Uunited States protesting gun violence (recently again after shootings in Nashville, Chicago, and Uvalde). Socialists should learn from these examples and build upon them.
Conclusion
Thinking through all this, it becomes clear that—even though capitalists do not directly impose it—the temporal regulation of unwaged and waged public and nonprofit sector social reproductive labor time is critical to the functioning of capitalism; it is through squeezing, stretching, and delaying workers’ lifemaking that the ruling class can so effectively degrade, differentiate, and discipline the living labor upon which it relies to turn a profit.
These temporal relations are, in the first instance, structured into the very fact of capitalist value creation and made possible largely by the state’s capture and discipline of people’s spare time on the one hand, and by turning spare time into the “empty time” of waiting and abandonment on the other. But, insofar as people can define, create, and expand the time of their social reproduction, they can and will push back against the state’s imposition of capitalist clock-time. When they do so collectively, as part of a conscious effort to democratize the conditions of social reproduction, they can create spaces where capital’s temporal edifice starts to crack.
Just like the fight to limit the workday, social reproductive struggles—for clean water and air, or publicly funded childcare and open borders, or against standardized testing in schools and promoting safety from gun violence— are always also class struggles to control the rhythm, pace, and duration of social reproduction. Insofar as they can impose new and collectively determined timeframes of lifemaking, they pose limits on capital’s overall societal domination.