Having free time need not require great wealth – Guy Standing’s The Politics of Time explains why work is overvalued.
Review by Alex Kozul-Wright.
The Politics of Time is not another contribution to the cult of positive thinking. It avoids any tips to help improve your productivity. Rather, it seeks to illustrate how man’s evolving relationship with time explains the current cluster of global crises (poly crisis), and what can be done to address it.
According to Emeritus Professor at the University of London, Guy Standing, man’s perception of time is framed by the dominant mode of production into which he is born; namely agricultural, industrial and tertiary (service-sector oriented).
Standing begins with a potted history of time management according to the ancient Greeks. Fortunate citizens, as opposed to hapless slaves, made a notable distinction between work and leisure. The former entailed, among other tasks, military training and jury service.
Leisure, or schole, conveyed a combination of civic engagement and self-reflection. Unrelated to the concept of passive entertainment, schole referred to exchanging ideas at the agora (public forum) as a basis for political action.
Standing suggests a revival of schole and deliberative democracy, before next switching geographical focus and social allegiance with a whistle-stop tour of mediaeval Britain.
On his reading, peasant society in the agricultural era was anchored around the “commons”. People had access to, and joint use, of local common land and the rhythm of agrarian society was based on the weather and seasonal festivals.
The idea of daily work, meanwhile, was hazy, and notions of time were based on an inter-dependency between nature and indigenous knowledge. With the evolution of late feudal society, however, barons began altering social relations by expropriating natural resources.
[Mediaeval] Britons had access to, and joint use, of local common land and the rhythm of agrarian society was based on the weather and seasonal festivals.
Enclosing public land, which gathered speed in the late-sixteenth century, involved the removal of community rights over parish commons. For Standing, enclosure led to a “rentier economy”, where income could be generated through asset ownership rather than work.
Growing numbers of commoners became tenant farmers to pay rent to landlords, and labouring to survive became entrenched. Fast forward several centuries and, by way of the clock and steam engine, we get to Richard Arkwright’s textile factory in Cromford, Defbyshire.
In the late 1700s, Arkwright introduced the “standardisation of work based on clocks”. Labourers were steered to adapt their lifestyles around the factory, as time itself became a commodity – in exchange for money, workers gave up control of their time.
Over the next two centuries, employer-led campaigns succeeded in defining labour as virtuous. Standing laments that industrial workers adopted this view too, championing “the dignity of labour”, and elevating jobs as sacrosanct.
Following World War 2, full-employment became the dominant policy mantra in advanced economies. Crucially, unpaid care work became delegitimised during this period, while leisure was relegated to time spent not labouring – restyled as shopping and watching TV.
Ubiquitous internet connectivity means that no time of day remains our own, particularly in the service sector which constitutes 79% of UK output.
Finally, we arrive at the tertiary age, our current system of time management. Tertiary time owes its heritage to industrial-era shifts (the notion of 9-to-5), but also by a “blurring of time uses… and a barrage of demands at any given moment”.
Ubiquitous internet connectivity means that no time of day remains our own, particularly in the service sector which constitutes 79% of UK output. These developments have also precipitated app-mediated labour, often characterised by zero-hours contracts.
With these flexible working arrangements, typified by non-unionised workforces, no minimum wage and the absence of a work space, are more commonly observed among people at low ends of the income spectrum – the precariat.
While, Uber and Deliveroo purport to address unemployment concerns, a closer look reveals their propensity to exacerbate inequality. On top of wages, “elites and full-time salaried professionals benefit from rental income and private pensions,” says Standing.
Labour no longer offers a road to riches for the precariat. Meanwhile, workers across all social groups today devote less time to schole – to quiet reflection and debate. In a world where every second counts, these pursuits are disparaged as time wasting.
In Standing’s view, declining leisure is reflected in waning election turnouts, and community engagement more generally. He underscores the importance of time to engage with politics and society, and that “the loss of civics has led to a rise in [political] charlatanism.”
For Standing, tertiary capitalism is teetering on a knife edge, generating ever more inequality and social instability. He even contends that we face a 1930s-style crossroads. On this point he gets carried away, projecting a global slump that isn’t borne out by the data.
In any case, this is the backdrop against which Standing presents his radically simple solution: reduce the time we spend labouring, “it’s time to remove jobs from their ideological pedestal,” he says.
In place of labour, he advocates for a universal basic income (UBI), which he insists would grant people “financial independence and control over their time,” including through more rewarding jobs. He also calls for the end of stigmatising means-tested benefits.
Trials with guaranteed universal basic income (UBI) back his claim. In Hudson, New York, unemployment among low-income individuals given $500 a month for five years fell by 50%. Recipients also reported lower debt burdens and improved family relationships.
In Standing’s vision, a UBI could be financed through “eco-fiscal policy” which would tax activities polluting “humanity’s commons” – the air, land and sea. This would redress both ecological decay and the excesses of rentier capitalism, as rich people tend to pollute more.
Drawing in taxes on all forms of commons expropriation – physical, financial and intellectual property – would generate “hundreds of billions” in additional funding.
In the UK, for instance, recycling a levy of £100 per cubic tonne of carbon emissions would be enough to finance a rebate of £32 a week to the average household. “Hardly adequate,” but a start towards funding a UBI, referred to as a “common dividend.”
As tertiary capitalism is designed to benefit rentiers, drawing in taxes on all forms of commons expropriation – physical, financial and intellectual property – would generate “hundreds of billions” in additional funding, according to Standing.
While many may question the viability of his claims, Standing’s attempt to address numerous issues in a single charter is laudable; UBI would remunerate care work, slow the pace of environmental collapse and facilitate more time for local politics.
Granted, it may be a leap to assume that people would spend their free time more wisely, but The Politics of Time offers progressive politics a revived purpose: not to surrender to “natural” economic forces, but to pursue security in the face of widespread uncertainty.
