Listen, this user is a terminally online anarchist who complains about tankies and calls Stalin genocidal. But shes correct about this one. Mostly. I mean using the term "bedtime abolition" sounds dumb but Im pretty sure she only did that because its a common joke about anarchists. The core point is about how 9-5 work schedules dont work for everyone. As an ND person who struggles with culturally normal sleep schedules, I absolutely agree that society needs to accomodate these things. I absolutely agree that its literally normal talk everyone says that work schedules suck.
People saying "just go to bed on time" or "just pop a melatonin" have never been in the position of trying to do that and failing, just laying awake for hours until you finally fall asleep two hours before you need to be up.
https://nitter.net/moonlit_misfit/status/1743350718944121067
I don't understand why "time is a social construct" means that it isn't important, or that it not being important is a prerequisite for respecting people's energy needs. Aren't we just asking for the resting time of workers to be valued and allowed flexibility?
Pretty much yeah. And respect for people's different circadian rythems and such.
Initially i agree that when anarchists say "time abolition " its a rhetorically bad way of asking for a good thing. But then i remember that that people react to police abolition, prison abolition, and decolinization like theyre asking for things they arent asking for, and then people say they are rhetorically bad terms. And i wonder if its really so bad or if its just another radical way of asking for something good. Not really sure.
time abolition is rhetorically bad in a very factual way though, because literally every person on the planet experiences a 24 hour day-night cycle (just with some locations having greater variance in the ratio of day:night)
Bedtime abolition doubly so.
Not quite what you're looking for, but in Andreas Malm's Fossil Capital he talks about the shift from concrete time - time attached to day/night cycles, seasonal cycles, weather patterns, etc. - to abstract time, which is fungible and standardized. If your mill runs on water power for example, you're beholden to the former. If you buy a fancy new coal steam engine, you can deal in abstract labour hours. You can run your mill at any time of day or any time of night, or even throw up another set of machines, pull in twice as many workers, and get twice as many labour hours out of a day.
One of the most frustrating things about the more professional jobs I've had is that they really are buying a discrete number of labour hours from me. It has nothing to do with the amount of work that needs to be done. When I was in the factory and the machines on our line would go down, they'd tell us to wipe them down. It doesn't take nearly a full shift (not to mention the last shift already pretended to wipe it down) but letting us go home, read a book, do anything productive or enjoyable, or even fucking sit down would be a lapse of their control over the abstract hours they bought from us. It's a similar story in my current tech job, with the only difference being they're just a lot less strict on white-collar machine operators.
Time is obviously a "real thing" in human terms (I don't care about the metaphysics right this second) but even though it's astronomically rigid and having precision in timekeeping opens up a lot of social and material technology, it is a very strange thing to be buying and selling it in slices. It's even stranger to rely on that to have to feed and shelter yourself.
I think there's a really great bit of :graeber: writing on this but I'm not sure where.