Chapter 2 - The economic mediation of time

Summary

Overview

The empirical and theoretical responses to early industrial capitalism tell another story of the increasing salience of small increments of time. It is a historical commonplace that the nineteenth-century factories were the birthplace of a modern experience of time. Chapter 2 concretizes this claim with two sets of nineteenth-century source materials: records of factory life and socialist economics.

The first part of this chapter tries to recover some of the experiential immediacy that beleaguered the first generations of factory workers. Coupled with the reports of medical investigators, the testimonies of workers show that the commonplace about factories being the birthplace of modern temporality is as old as the factory system itself. The second part of this chapter traces these concerns as they are taken up by socialist-economic theory. Socialist economics assimilates abstract time into its critique of capitalism and its utopian alternative. Marxism goes one step further by presenting itself as a hermeneutic key to capitalist economics, whose deep structure is organized by temporal processes and transformations – by what capitalism does with time.