does anyone remember that sick sociology book about the south american workers' conception of time and how it relates to their labor under capitalism, and additionally how they view the devil
been a while, dont remember the name
I remember now, it was The Devil and Commodity Fetishism in South America
"They took away time, and they gave us the clock.” - Abdullah Ibrahim
“In places without clocks time is measured by actions rather than action being measured by time” -David Graeber
"E. P. Thompson - Time-Work Discipline And Industrial Capitalism" 👀
the wiki summary: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E._P._Thompson#Time_discipline
Reminds me of one of my favourite quotes.
"Try to imagine a life without timekeeping. You probably can’t. You know the month, the year, the day of the week. There is a clock on your wall or the dashboard of your car. You have a schedule, a calendar, a time for dinner or a movie. Yet all around you, timekeeping is ignored. Birds are not late. A dog does not check its watch. Deer do not fret over passing birthdays. Man alone measures time. Man alone chimes the hour. And, because of this, man alone suffers a paralyzing fear that no other creature endures. A fear of time running out." - Mitch Albom
A dog does not check its watch. Deer do not fret over passing birthdays. Man alone measures time. Man alone chimes the hour.
Every organism has an internal clock. The human brain keeps track of many different lengths of time, but we don't have a single mental clock to experience reality as a whole. This is how capitalism can exploit us
Sometimes I like to imagine what life would have been like before modern time keeping. Sure you were still a serf suffering under capitalism but imagine your most specific scheduling being "sunrise" or "high noon". No stressing about leaving your house by a certain time to commute, no worrying about being reprimanded for 2 minutes tardiness, no packed full schedule of back to back meetings... Even if you are doing hard manual labor, I imagine the ambient stress levels would be quite different.
My brain too small. Gears r cool.
Ugh lets bring mechanical clocks (and watches) back to mainstream. I'd dump my phone if I could afford a nice vintage~ pocket watch.
And cool historic pocket watches aren’t that expensive actually
They are to me and the expenses I can afford lol. Not everyone lives in a country with strong currency. F.
I used to be able to find reasonably priced old mechanical soviet watches on etsy. Think the site might have gone completely to shit since though. Still, mechanical watches are probably still around some online marketplaces.
And my cool automatic watch is a great tool for explaining the labour theory of value to libs!
no, time itself is exploited by capitalists for profit but clocks themselves are okay
But you can't conveniently divide time into 10 minute increments using sundials. Under feudalism, work was measured in days, or maybe hours, but the rationalization of production required to increase profits under capitalism was only possible with the invention of mechanical clocks.
I get that. Was just trying to point out, in a roundabout way, that while clocks are particularly useful tool in capitalist exploitation, reliably measuring time is incredibly useful to human lives outside of that context and has always been, so you can't tie time measuring devices solely to capitalism.
Ah ok, then we're on the same page and I just misunderstood the thrust of your initial arguement 🤝
"because capitalism"
It's always the philistine's response on this site.
How about blame Communism when Stalin got rid of Sundays to make workers more efficient?
Yeah, sure dumb move, but from the link you just sent it looks like the initial plan was to shorten the work week from 6 days to 5 and have the rest days staggered.
When this didn't work, it went back up to six days (as it was previously) with rest days staggered, and was eventually abandoned as it wasn't working.
Shit all over it and much as you want, but it doesn't seem to be as malicious as either you, or the History Channel, seem to want to make it.
I read a novel when I was a kid about a town in New England and what happened to their society when someone opened a mill and installed a clock. It was pretty wild to me as a kid, thinking about what it would mean to not be ruled by the clock. (Especially since I always seem to be running late.)
Before mechanical clocks, the length of hours would change depending on the season. The total period of daylight was divided into twelve hours, so an hour was longer in the summer than in the winter.
This but unironically. Debord talks about this in society of the spectacle a little bit and i found it incredibly illuminating
i was gonna type “real time abolitionist hours who's up” but then my brain imploded
