"In being reduced to the one-dimensionality of value the richness of concrete labour is reduced to simply a matter of abstract time." Felton Shortall
Do calls for less worktime reproduce the tyranny of abstract time or challenge it? For more on such debates, see: Stop the Clock - Critiques of the New Social Workhouse. Aufheben, Theorie Communiste, and others ask: "What is the link between the struggle to mitigate alienation (for higher wages, shorter hours, more benefits, less work intensity etc.) and the struggle against alienation itself?"
Liberal and socialist critiques of work time have often focussed on the scandal of overwork in the midst of mechanisation.
Bertrand Russell in "In Praise of Idleness" (1932) argued that "The [First World] war showed conclusively that, by the scientific organisation of production, it is possible to keep modern populations in fair comfort on a small part of the working capacity of the modern world. If, at the end of the war, the scientific organisation, which had been created in order to liberate men for fighting and munition work, had been preserved, and the hours of work had been cut down to four, all would have been well. Instead of that the old chaos was restored, those whose work was demanded were made to work long hours, and the rest were left to starve as unemployed."
By "scientific organisation" Russell was, of course, referring to Taylorism (otherwise called 'Scientific Management'), of which there is much more to be said here. Suffice for the moment to note the confluence of abstraction that Taylorism presupposes -- not only the abstract classification of the time and motion studies which Taylor's prescriptions were based upon, but also the abstraction of intellect as management -- with the abstraction of the present as eternity. That is: capitalism is rendered eternal.
Karl Marx, from "Production of Relative Surplus-Value", Capital, volume I: "John Stuart Mill says in his 'Principles of Political Economy': 'It is questionable if all the mechanical inventions yet made have lightened the day's toil of any human being.' That is, however, by no means the aim of the capitalistic application of machinery. Like every other increase in the productiveness of labour, machinery is intended to cheapen commodities, and, by shortening that portion of the working-day, in which the labourer works for himself, to lengthen the other portion that he gives, without an equivalent, to the capitalist. In short, it is a means for producing surplus-value. " The rest here.
More on abstract time: "The phrase 'socially necessary labor time' signifies not only that the quantity of labor time is socially determined to be 'necessary,' but more importantly still that the very form of quantification as labor time is also socially determined as 'necessary.' Alienation occurs in that the concrete time characterizing the use of labor power (the rhythms and particularities of the working day) is transmuted into the quantifiable abstract time deemed socially necessary for its reproduction (so many hours per week at so much per hour). As Moishe Postone puts it: 'It is the temporal dimension of the abstract domination that characterizes the structure of alienated social relations in capitalism'.
The rest here.
The question raised here is not whether struggles to limit work time should be opposed. The question is whether, in supporting such struggles and in making this the horizon of struggle, the question of whether life (and indeed labour) can exist as something other than in a quantifiable, abstracted form is answered in an eternalised negative, rendered beyond sense and possibility.
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