Abstract
This essay investigates the peculiarities of contemporary temporal experiences under capitalism by analysing its relationship to the capitalist ‘form’ adopted by social reproduction. It argues that the extent and modalities in which capital mediates the field of social reproduction is responsible for the widespread time-related concerns and anxieties relative to social acceleration and time scarcity. The abstract time of the clock provides crucial conditions of possibility for both the relations of direct domination in the workplace between capitalists and workers, on the one hand, and markets’ impersonal domination over society at large, on the other. However, it is argued that it is not abstract time, but capital, that stands at the root of contemporary temporal concerns. From a value-form reading of social reproduction, it is argued that capital's domination over social reproduction is comprehensive, albeit internally differentiated: on the one hand, capital dominates the practices it subsumes by forcing them to comply with dynamic standards of productivity if they are to be socially recognized as having contributed to society's ongoing reproduction. On the other hand, capital dominates the myriad practices it does not subsume by moulding their terms of occurrence to better serve capital's own context-specific reproductive needs. This approach is contrasted with the social acceleration and total subsumption theses, respectively.
Introduction
Contemporary Western societies seem to be affected by widespread temporal concerns about generalized time scarcity, a heightened tempo of social life, or pervasive social de-synchronization. Nonetheless, as pressing as they are nowadays, these time-related fears and concerns about the Tyranny of the Clock (Woodcock, 1944), or about living in either a Runaway World (Giddens, 1999) or a Burnout Society (Han, 2015), seem not to be an exclusive prerogative of our current times but, rather, to accompany capitalist societies over time. While the political salience they acquire at different historical stages and geographical locations will be overdetermined by the institutional order organizing capitalist activity, along with its attendant specialization patterns, we argue that these time-related concerns are nonetheless inherent features of capitalism, that is, societies where capital constitutes the foremost social logic organizing overall social reproduction. This essay makes several core claims in that regard.
Firstly, it argues that, while the social hegemony of abstract linear time (i.e., clock-time) and that of capital in organizing social reproduction are both mutually implicated, it is the latter which holds causal and explanatory priority, and hence the element whose transformation is required if current temporal maladies are to be eradicated. Secondly, it contends that it is the specifically capitalist social form of labour that constitutes value as a ‘temporal form of wealth’ (Postone, 1993), one of whose most immediate phenomenal manifestations is that of a widespread submission to the capricious dictates of the clock. Thirdly, it argues that, while capital's domination over the social field is all-embracing, it is nonetheless internally differentiated: in short, capital dominates the practices it subsumes by making them comply with ever-increasing standards of productivity for them to be socially validated; and those it does not subsume by entraining them, by forcing the terms of their occurrence to satisfy capital's context-specific reproductive needs, rather than their own. These claims are further explored below.
The text will be organized as follows. The next section critically engages with two prominent accounts of contemporary temporal domination, namely, the theory of social acceleration developed by Rosa (2013), and the postulation of a novel historical stage characterized by ‘total subsumption’, when capital's domination over the social field would be now complete (e.g., Balibar, 2019; Negri, 1996). Section 3 introduces the core characteristics of the capitalist ‘form’ of social reproduction by help of a value-form reading of social reproduction, while Section 4 explores the intimate relation existing between abstract linear time (i.e., clock-time) and capital. Section 5, in turn, explores in greater depth capital's dual mode of temporal domination, depending on whether social practices are subsumed by capital or not. The final section concludes.
Competing views on temporal domination
In recent years, several attempts have been made to explicate the root causes of contemporary temporal concerns and maladies, as well as the extent and mode to which capitalism is implicated in them. From a shared view that capitalism is more than merely a mode of production, whose influences reverberate all through the social field, disagreements concentrate on how to conceptualize the relation between capitalist value-production and the myriad processes which, despite not being subsumed by capital themselves, are nonetheless part and parcel of capitalist societies. Below, before advancing our own account of what capital's temporal domination consists of, two among those theoretical moves are scrutinized, namely, the theory of social acceleration, on the one hand, and those approaches that qualify capitalism's latest stage as one characterized by the ‘total subsumption’ of society under capital, on the other.
Social acceleration
One of the most influential accounts of contemporaneous temporal maladies to have appeared in recent years is the theory of ‘social acceleration’ developed by German sociologist Hartmut Rosa (2013). Highly ambitious in scope and rich in theoretical influences, Rosa postulates that the quintessential dynamic of modern societies is a conspicuous compulsion towards acceleration (‘an increase in quantity per unit of time’), which would in turn explain the all-pervasive everyday experiences of time-hurriedness and temporal scarcity that arguably characterize ‘late modern’ societies.
In Rosa's (2013) account, social acceleration is a multi-faceted and system-wide phenomenon, co-extensive with modernity tout court, with three analytically distinct dimensions: technical acceleration, ‘the intentional (…) acceleration of goal-directed processes’ (2013: 71); the acceleration of social change, manifested in the rising transience of institutionalized social practices and social expectations; and the acceleration of the pace of life, referring to ‘an increase in episodes of action or experience per unit of time’ (2013: 78). Social acceleration emerged as a ‘self-propelling process’ (2013: 151), animated by three analytically independent motors, namely, an economic one, a cultural one, and a socio-structural one, whose interplay gives rise to a prototypically modern pattern of social reproduction which demands constant growth and escalation to remain in place, social stability being attainable, exclusively and paradoxically, through perennial self-destabilization: ‘A society can be called modern when its mode of stabilization is dynamic’ (Rosa et al., 2017: 54).
Overall, despite its suggestive phenomenological description of contemporary temporal experiences, Rosa's grand theory of modernity is made up of sweeping historical generalizations lacking contextual nuance, over-reliant upon over-stretched claims with markedly exiguous empirical support. For instance, Sullivan and Gershuny (2018), working with UK time-use data, found neither a generalized increase in the average density of events per day nor any generalized increase in multi-tasking between 2000 and 2015, thus casting doubt upon Rosa's postulation of a generalized acceleration of social life on empirical grounds. Nevertheless, problems in Rosa's account go beyond a lack of empirical corroboration of its core descriptive claims.
While Rosa does pay lip service to Marx when stressing the role played by market competition and capital valorisation in propelling social acceleration's ‘economic motor’, class dynamics and property relations are glaringly absent from his schemes (Grama, 2021; Najafi, 2023). As a result, he grounds the phenomenological effects he is concerned with upon modernity's temporal imperatives rather than on the specifically capitalist form of securing social reproduction (see below). Contra Rosa, we contend, it is not modern, but capitalist societies, the ones which are inherently subject to a mode of ‘dynamic stabilization’ because of the private and uncoordinated character of capitalist production. In capitalist societies, because of the lack of coordination among productive units that ultimately characterizes them, a constitutive uncertainty haunts every producer relative to whether they will manage to beat their competitors and thus sell their products in the market, from which the social pressures to accelerate ultimately emanate. In consequence, ever-higher standards of productivity progressively become the norm market competitors are forced to beat, while also attempting to reduce as much as possible circulation times inasmuch as they constitute a drag on value's self-expansion: ‘The acceleration of history is not that of a time intoxicated by speed, but the effect of the furious turnover of capital’ (Bensaïd, 2002: 71). In sum, it is the historically-specific form in which capitalist societies reproduce themselves, explored at greater length below, rather than modernity's impetus, that grounds the accelerating and de-synchronizing dynamics whose phenomenal face Rosa excels at capturing.
Total subsumption
A different strand of authors has mobilized the category of ‘total subsumption’ to account for a new historical stage of capitalism in which, arguably, capital's domination would have saturated the social field, and its colonization of other social spheres would be complete. There would no longer be any exterior to the rule of capital, and the totality of social life would be directly implicated in its valorisation. Their basic tenet is that, in the current historical stage of ‘total subsumption’, ‘now everything has become capital’ (Camatte, 1988: 53), either because valorisation relies on social cooperation to an extent that constitutively exceeds the confines of the factory, leading to ‘the subsumption of the entire society under capital in the process of capital accumulation’ (Negri, 1996: 149), or because commodification now ‘leaves nothing outside’ so that ‘there is no dimension of individuality [that remains] untouched by commodification’ (Balibar, 2019: 56–7).
According to them, capitalist social relations have arguably reached a stage of development where no outside to capital exists, and therefore the distinction between different moments and processes involved in the capitalist social totality internally collapses. It thus follows logically that the temporal determinations of value, whatever they may be, now apply equally and indistinctly to every practice involved in the ongoing reproduction of contemporary capitalist societies. This theoretical move, we contend, is untenable for, crucially, it fails to distinguish that which capital integrates within its own accounting schemes from that which capital dominates but does not directly incorporate within itself. While it may be true that no aspect of overall social reproduction is external to capital, in the sense of being unaffected by it, not all aspects of the social totality are shaped by it alike.
While we concur that the category of subsumption is indeed key to grasping capital's temporal domination, using it as a periodizing tool is highly problematic, for the category of subsumption can only refer to the labour process: ‘Nothing external to the immediate production process actually becomes capital nor, strictly speaking, is subsumed under capital’ (Endnotes, 2010). As explored at much greater length below, it refers to the imposition of a dominant social form upon a given social practice, namely, their functioning as a specific instance of capital, thus indicating the utmost specificity of capitalist domination (Saenz de Sicilia, 2022).
While all elements present in capitalist societies are ultimately capitalist, not all of them function directly as capital. It is therefore crucial to distinguish between practices that are subsumed by capital and those that are only dominated by it. Such distinction matters because it denotes a distinct social form, which in turn produces a distinct temporal determination for these practices. The figure of ‘total subsumption’, however, constitutively obliterates this distinction in its entirety.
Overall, both these attempts fail at grasping capitalism as a comprehensive, internally differentiated, and historically specific way of securing social reproduction. While Rosa misattributes to modernity tout court what, in the end, are but structural features of capitalism, the theorists of total subsumption ultimately disregard any qualitative distinction amongst the different elements at play within capitalist societies. To a brief account of what the specifically capitalist ‘form’ of securing social reproduction consists of, we now turn.
The capitalist ‘form’ of social reproduction
The most basic condition of social life is its need to reproduce itself. Human beings, like any other animal, must engage in a continuous and dynamic exchange of energy and materials with their outer environment to satisfy their species-specific needs (Foster, 2000). What sets human beings apart is the fact that such continuous engagement with their outer environment occurs not instinctively but, rather, through conscious labour acts (Marx, 2024; Starosta, 2022). Such human metabolic process has, also, a species-specific temporal dimension (Rey-Araújo, 2024b). On the one hand, not only do human bodies possess species-specific needs but, also, a limited storage capacity that imposes a particular temporality upon their necessarily recurrent satisfaction (Fracchia, 2023). Their needs for sleep, caloric intake, or hydration, must therefore be replenished periodically. On the other hand, their non-human environment does also impose a certain rhythmicity upon their capacity to satisfy those needs, from daily and yearly variations in temperature that enter into conflict with human beings’ need to maintain their respective bodily temperatures within certain ranges, to daily variations in visibility conditions that affect their capacity to secure food, water, or protection from potential predators (Foster and Kreitzman, 2009).
Furthermore, the satisfaction of these needs is necessarily a collective enterprise, cooperation among individuals being a mandatory fact of human existence. In short, there is no human individual reproduction which is not, simultaneously, social reproduction (Fracchia, 2023). 1 Hence, a set of social relations must mediate the ongoing metabolic relation between humans and their environment. While open-ended, such social relations must unavoidably satisfy two conditions (Iñigo Carrera, 2021; Kuruma, 2017; Otani, 2018). Firstly, a division of labour must be established that distributes the available temporal and physical resources (limited, by definition) across the various tasks required for successful social reproduction. Secondly, and intimately related, the products resulting from such division of labour must be allocated to individuals. If available labour resources and their ensuing products are not distributed in adequate proportion to the social needs to be satisfied, society's overall reproduction will be compromised. These two conditions thus constitute the transhistorical content of social reproduction (Rey-Araújo, 2024b).
However, while social relations must satisfy both requirements in one way or another, the exact form these social relations will adopt is constitutively under-determined. Capitalism, in turn, is one specific form the social relations mediating the social metabolism have adopted in human history, one ultimately characterized neither by the existence of markets, nor money, nor even that of capital itself (Mau, 2023). Rather, what ultimately characterizes capitalist societies is the form adopted by their process of social reproduction, consisting in manifold individual acts of labour, privately undertaken and thus lacking any sort of over-arching coordination, which are only socially recognized as having effectively contributed to society's overall reproduction in case they manage to sell the products of their labour in the market. If so, they will receive money in return, the general equivalent, by means of which to acquire the goods and services they need for their own reproduction (Heinrich, 2012; Rey-Araújo, 2024a). In short, capitalist production involves not the production of use-values to satisfy some previously determined social need but, rather, production for impersonal others aimed at securing a monetary profit in exchange (Clarke, 1991).
Any society in which social reproduction is prominently attained through the exchange of products must be one in which the exchange of equivalents predominates. Otherwise, exchange could not have been generalized in the first instance. Insofar as the only available way to secure a surplus while simultaneously respecting the exchange of equivalents is to force the direct producers to work for longer than it would have taken them to produce exclusively for their own subsistence, the class relation between capitalists and workers is implicit everywhere social reproduction is attained prominently through market exchange (Bonefeld, 2014; Wood, 1995). In turn, the pervasiveness of the capital-relation is necessarily premised upon the widespread availability of ‘doubly free’ labourers, which itself presupposes a generalized split between human beings and the conditions that enable their ongoing reproduction. A situation of comprehensive dispossession, therefore, is the ultimate condition of possibility for social reproduction adopting a capitalist ‘form’ (Mau, 2023).
Nevertheless, the extent to which a given society counts as capitalist is not an either/or question but, rather, always a matter of degree (Heinrich, 2012). The process of commodification of the ensemble of use-values required for overall social reproduction is typically far from complete: Dispossession is rarely all-embracing, as households often retain some capacity to produce use-values themselves, while the use-values embodied in commodities generally must be further transformed to make them liable to satisfy human needs (e.g., cooking). Hence, a sizeable, albeit varying, portion of the heterogeneous labour acts involved in securing social reproduction is not intended ab initio for exchange but, rather, articulated through direct personal relations, predominantly taking place within households (Quick, 2010). ‘In the capitalist mode of production, the full-time labour of the working-class household is insufficient to provide for its reproduction. It must, therefore, sell a portion of its labour power to the capitalist class’ (Quick, 2023: 464). Therefore, the ongoing reproduction of working class households must rely on both commodified and non-commodified labour and, accordingly, must combine use-values that have acquired the form of commodities with others that remain merely use-values from the start.
In consequence, the collective mediation of the social metabolism is itself internally fractured (Rey-Araújo, 2024b). While all labour practices through which social reproduction is attained are ultimately capitalist, they are so in different ways, and to different degrees: whereas some practices involved in social reproduction are market-oriented and thus mediated by the incessant movement of value in search of further self-expansion, myriad others remain articulated through direct personal relations, and thus their products do not acquire the form of commodities. The ‘social form’ bestowed upon them differs starkly, even if both sets of practices are equally implicated in the overall reproduction of capitalist societies (Murray, 2016; Toscano, 2014). Concomitantly, it follows that capital's temporal domination over the social field is comprehensive, albeit internally differentiated. Nonetheless, before analysing in detail the dual nature of capital's temporal domination, it is necessary to delve a bit deeper into the temporal structure the dominance of capital demands, that is, into the intimate relation existing between the capitalist social form of labour, on the one hand, and abstract linear time, on the other.
Capital and abstract linear time
In contemporary capitalist societies, clock-time has become so widespread and internalized that we relate to it as time as such (Elias, 1992). As many have pointed out before, for social reproduction to adopt a capitalist form, a shared, widespread, a highly refined notion of abstract linear time must be available (e.g., Harvey, 1989; Postone, 1993). The social dominance of a specific social form of labour (subsumed by capital), on the one hand, and that of a specific form of time (clock-time), on the other, are thus mutually implicated. Clock-time provides a crucial condition of existence for the capitalist ‘form’ of social reproduction as a means of accounting, discipline, and social coordination, resulting into a fusion of the rules of capital and clock-time, respectively, over the social field (Tombazos, 2013). Clock time, in short, constitutes the necessary temporal infrastructure of the rule of capital (Martineau, 2015). Nevertheless, despite the intimate affinity existing between abstract linear time and capitalist social relations of (re)production, clock time is not an exclusive feature of capitalist societies. While some functions which clock-time plays in contemporary societies are historically-specific and linked to the social prevalence of the capitalist ‘form’ of social reproduction, others instead are not intrinsically capitalist but, rather, correspond with the satisfaction of the transhistorical requirements of coordination and synchronization of social activities pertaining to any complex pattern of social organization.
The development of mechanical clocks and their gradual dissemination throughout European town squares from the XIV century onwards (Dohrn-Van Rossum, 1996) introduced ‘a form of time-reckoning based on the empty, homogeneous and constant time-units of clock-time’ (Martineau, 2015: 54), thus inaugurating a form of time-measuring and time-reckoning dissociated from concrete events. While its use was initially restricted to certain mercantile urban centres and specific scientific communities (e.g., astronomers), its gradual ascendance to social hegemony from the XVII century onwards, in turn, is indissociable from the concomitant gradual extension of capitalist social relations worldwide (Landes, 1983; Martineau, 2015). Any capitalist society comprises two distinct modalities of domination: the direct personal domination of workers by capitalists, and the impersonal and comprehensive domination of value over the whole social field (Mau, 2023). Crucially, abstract linear time constitutes a key condition of possibility for both.
As mentioned above, the ultimate condition of possibility for capital to take hold of social reproduction is a situation of generalized dispossession, a comprehensive split between life and its conditions. Unable to reproduce themselves by their own means, (at least some members of) working-class households are forced to sell their labour-power for a fixed period of time, determined by a contract among two formally-free agents. An external means of abstract time-measuring is thus needed to quantify the time of labour exertion once labour-power is commodified. In contradistinction to non-capitalist modes of production, the appropriation of surplus-value by capital occurs not through the direct exertion of violence but, rather, through strictly ‘economic’ means, namely, by making workers work for longer than it takes them to produce for their own subsistence (Wood, 1995). The need to quantify the times of labour exertion thus emerges from the ‘social form’ of labour itself, clock-time being ‘a kind of (real) abstraction that is embedded in the alienated form of human doing in capitalist society’ (Tischler, 2005: 137). ‘Under capitalism, labour and its exploitation are temporally fused through the apparatus of clock-time and its abstract time-form’ (Martineau, 2015: 122).
As exchange is generalized, competition among private, isolated producers establishes exchange on the basis of socially-necessary labour time as the norm (Nagatani, 2022). Capitalists, under pressure by competition, are thus forced to discipline their workers’ use of time without having recourse to overt violence. In the hands of employers, the abstract time measured by the clock functions as a means of direct personal domination, disciplining the workforce to work at the rhythms dictated by the ever-fluctuating standards of socially-necessary labour time, and dissociating the rhythms of labour exertion from the intrinsic temporalities of the tasks at hand (Tomba, 2013). In the act of exchange, the qualitative specificity of these multiple heterogeneous acts of labour is abstracted from, and the only trait they retain in common is the fact that their completion takes time. ‘The adding of concrete labours by time is required because this is the dimension in which the comparison of one process with another is undertaken by capital’ (Arthur, 2013: 113).
Beyond enabling surplus labour extraction in the workplace, the abstract time of the clock plays an equally constitutive role in sustaining the ‘impersonal domination’ of value over society at large (Llaguno, 2025; O’Kane, 2024). A form of securing social reproduction grounded upon generalized exchange requires a temporal infrastructure suitable to its historically specific needs. A conception of time modelled after Newton's ‘absolute time’ proved perfectly fit to the task: one existing independently from, and external to, the events that are to fill it; continuous and evenly flowing in an irreversible manner; infinitely divisible and infinitely extendable towards both past and future.
Intended ab initio for exchange, the products of private uncoordinated acts of labour are bestowed upon the form of value, whose internal measure is given by socially-necessary labour time standards, and whose necessary external manifestation is money (Clarke, 1991; Tombazos, 2013). Clock-time's essential features match those of value, and thus ground the structural homology existing between the latter's internal measure (socially-necessary labour time) and its necessary phenomenal form of appearance (money): Value is both external and indifferent to the specific content of the use-value functioning as its carrier, as abstract time's empty intervals are external to the events filling them; value's homogeneity as a social substance, through which products validated as socially-useful in exchange count as ‘a specific quantum of abstract labour, and therefore as an element of the total labour of society’ (Heinrich, 2012: 51), is paralleled by abstract time's continuous flow unqualified by any sort of qualitative differentiation; value's self-identity, which is only susceptible of quantitative differentiation expressed through the means of money, finds support in the infinite divisibility of abstract time; whereas value's universality, standing as the language commodities use to communicate among themselves, finds its parallel in the ensemble of institutional and material practices through which clock- and calendar-time are integrated into World Standard Time.
Not only are the commensurability of concrete acts of labour and the interchangeability of their products premised upon the homogeneity and infinite divisibility of abstract time but, also, clock-time provides the material infrastructure needed for the production and circulation of value to become the dominant social logic in society at large. ‘Capital [is] a conceptual organization of time. It is neither a thing nor a simple social relation, but a living rationality’ (Tombazos, 2013: 5). The various activities of disparate producers must be coordinated both within and amongst capitalist firms; circulation times must be synchronized to ease the realization of value; financial transactions demand a shared time-reckoning scale to come into being… Insofar as private labours lack any over-arching conscious coordination, all stages of the circuit of capital are dependent upon the temporal infrastructure which clock-time provides, enabling the self-referential movement of value to unify the different organs of social labour (Rubin, 2019; Tomba, 2013).
In sum, the social rule of capital involves both the class domination of workers by capitalists and the impersonal domination of all by the vagaries of value, and clock-time provides an indispensable condition of possibility for both. Clock-time's qualitative homogeneity provides a general metric to commensurate heterogeneous use-values and the equally heterogeneous concrete acts of labour that gave rise to them, while its infinite divisibility enables their quantitative ordering and internal differentiation. Castree (2009: 41) encapsulates it well in a fragment worth being quoted at length: ‘It is not just that its qualitative homogeneity permits otherwise different acts of concrete labour to, as it were, speak to one another; it is also the regimented divisibility of clock time that is crucial – its quantifiability into definite periods. [Clock time] is essential if value is to become the dominant measure of wealth in capitalist societies: without it there is no way that the efforts of heterogeneous wage workers could be compared (the competition relation); no way that employers could appropriate surplus value in aggregate or locally (the class relation); and no way that commodities could be sold for money (the exchange relation)’
Capital and temporal domination
As noted above, the ongoing reproduction of any conceivable society is premised upon the existence of an ensemble of social relations instantiating a division of labour, on the one hand, and the ensuing distribution of its products, on the other. Such collective mediation of the incessant metabolism between human beings and their natural environment constitutes the core transhistorical content of social reproduction (Rey-Araújo, 2024a). Nonetheless, while every concrete act of labour must, as its necessary precondition, produce some useful object capable of satisfying some social need, the specific ‘social form’ they are bestowed upon may starkly differ (Murray, 2016). Their different ‘social form’, in turn, denotes not different degrees of essentiality vis-à-vis overall social reproduction but, rather, a different relation to the world of social needs and, by extension, different conditions these acts of labour must meet to be socially validated, that is, to be recognized by society as having effectively contributed to its own reproduction. Starkly different temporal determinations spring therein.
In capitalist societies, the collective mediation of the social metabolism is internally fractured in that regard (Rey-Araújo, 2024b). Some practices are articulated through direct personal relations and, insofar as they respond to specific social needs determined beforehand, they are immediately socially useful. Myriad others, conversely, are articulated not through direct personal relations but through impersonal market mechanisms; their motivation is not to satisfy any specific social need but, rather, to secure a monetary profit in exchange; and only through a detour through the market can they be socially recognized as having contributed to social reproduction.
In sum, the capitalist collective mediation of the social metabolism is internally fractured regarding the ‘social form’ adopted by its constituent practices. Capital is both ‘a system of exploitation and a mode of domination’ (Best, 2024: 84): some acts of labour function as embodiments of self-expanding value, whereas others, despite not being directly subsumed by capital, are nonetheless affected by its gravitational pull: ‘Capital's reach is vast; its powers are differentiated: (…) Capital shapes and subsumes bourgeois society in various ways and to different degrees’ (Murray, 2019: 219). The ‘social form’ of each act of labour determines the extent and mode of its temporal domination by capital's abstract logic. Briefly put, while only subsumed practices are directly integrated within capital's accounting schemes, all are dominated by it: ‘Capitalism [is] an immense conceptual organization of time that seeks to regulate and thus dominate a system of “social metabolic” control capable of penetrating every aspect of society (…) an all-encompassing temporal rhythmology dedicated to ordering the differing tempos of time with an unrelenting and inescapable circularity’ (Harootunian, 2015: 22). In sum, capital is a ‘totalizing’, though far from monolithic, mode of mediating the ongoing metabolic relation between humans and their environment, whose domination over the field of social reproduction is comprehensive, albeit internally differentiated (Mészáros, 1995). Each modality of temporal domination, depending on the social form social practices are bestowed upon, will be analysed in turn:
Temporal domination as subsumption
In capitalist societies, a sizeable portion of total social labour does not produce use-values intended to satisfy a predetermined social need but, rather, to sell them in the market as commodities to obtain a monetary profit in exchange. These acts of labour are private (i.e., they lack ex-ante coordination) and can only be validated as part of society's total labour if the products in which they had been embodied are successfully sold in exchange for money, by means of which to have access to an aliquot portion of society's total commodified product. Only by successfully selling their products can these acts of labour prove their social usefulness, and hence count as part of total social labour, i.e., abstract labour (Bellofiore and Riva, 2015): The question is: how much do they count for?
Concrete acts of labour are, in themselves, inherently heterogeneous. In the act of exchange, however, their qualitative specific is abstracted from and reduced to the single quality of duration (Clarke, 1991). Such reduction is made, in practice, in the very act of exchange of the products of labour (Heinrich, 2012). The commensuration of commodities as values, and that of concrete acts of labour as abstract labour, is one and the same process (Heinrich, 2012: 59): ‘When people exchange their different kinds of products, they equate them as values, and when they do that, they equate their diverse instances of labour as human labour. They know not what they do’ (Marx, 2024: 50). With the partial exception of interpersonal services, where consumption and production times overlap, commodities do not bear any trace of the time it took the producers to bring them to completion. 2 Hence, the time devoted to the production of a given use-value, the one registered by the clock, is not the time capital is concerned with. ‘Abstract labour cannot be measured in terms of hours of labour: every hour of labour measured by a clock is an hour of a particular concrete act of labour’ (Heinrich, 2012: 50, original emphasis).
To count as values, concrete times must be coerced into a shared abstract measure, a process which is continuously undertaken in exchange. The exchange process is ultimately an act of translation into an abstract, ever-fluctuating, and strictly social standard that emerges from the totality of exchange relations: socially-necessary labour time. It is a dynamic and retroactive social standard of productivity, beyond the control of any individual producer, with which all privately undertaken acts of labour must comply to be recognized as part of society's total labour. It is the only temporal measure capital is concerned with, which determines the remuneration accruing to the producers in case their products are successfully sold. Exchange is a translation process into abstract durations, and value-relations a comprehensive accounting scheme (Best, 2021). ‘The only modality of time directly meaningful to capital is necessary labour-time and its operational corollaries, as required for securing and safeguarding the conditions of profit-oriented time-accountancy and thereby the realization of capital on an extended scale’ (Mészáros, 2008: 266).
From the perspective of capital's temporal domination, the crucial category is that of ‘subsumption’ (Saenz de Sicilia, 2022). Following Marx (1976), subsumption is ‘formal’ when, through a change in property relations, the direct producer's conditions of labour become an alien property now belonging to the capitalist. The figure of ‘formal subsumption’ denotes merely a change in the social form of labour, leaving the labour process untouched. Subsumption becomes ‘real’, in turn, once the ‘form’ reconfigures the ‘content’ to its own purpose of maximizing surplus-value extraction, so that ‘a specifically capitalist form of production comes into being’ (Marx, 1976: 1024).
Even if a fully capitalist ‘form’ of production is only attained once subsumption is ‘real’, the specific temporal determinations of the capitalist social form of labour become already manifest as soon as subsumption is merely ‘formal’. As soon as acts of production are de-linked from specific needs, and their products are thus intended for exchange ab initio, a radical uncertainty haunts every act of production relative to whether they will manage to beat their competitors, and thus be remunerated for the effort they had exerted. It is the very social form of labour that imprints its temporal form-determination upon its content, for ‘the form, in this regard, is external to whatever its immediate content’ (Harootunian, 2015: 58). With ‘formal subsumption’, the labour process is form-determined as a carrier of capital's valorisation process, its ultimate motivation no longer being the satisfaction of some predetermined social need, but ‘to produce as much surplus-value as possible’ (Marx, 1976: 1037).
Through merely a transformation in the social form of labour, ‘the social transformations involved in formal subsumption are epochal’ (Murray, 2004: 252). The mediation by value-forms between acts of production and their destination imposes an external temporal determination upon formally subsumed concrete labour practices: ‘The work may become more intensive, its duration may be extended, it may become more continuous or orderly under the eye of the interested capitalist’ (Marx, 1976: 1022). The inherent temporal determinations of value are felt decisively at the level of concrete practices themselves: ‘What changes do occur are more of a quantitative than qualitative sort: the process becomes more continuous and orderly, less wasteful in the use of means of production. And, of course, there are those hallmarks of absolute surplus-value, lengthening and intensifying the workday’ (Murray, 2004: 256–257). As soon as a concrete labour practice is subsumed under capital, it immediately acquires an external temporal determination that fundamentally alters its character.
In sum, due to the radical unpredictability of market conditions and prevailing productivity standards, formally subsumed acts of labour face a constitutive uncertainty at the point of production regarding whether they will find demand for the products of their labour, and thus prove their social usefulness (Las Heras et al., 2024). Otherwise, the effort exerted at the point of production will be rendered useless, and no reward will be offered in return (Bonefeld, 2010). Capitalist production is thus an all-or-nothing scenario. As soon as production is production for impersonal others, there ensues a compulsion to extend and intensify operations. The figure of subsumption signals this.
Temporal domination as entrainment
In capitalist societies, only a portion of society's total labour resources is formally subsumed under capital, and hence articulated through market mechanisms. Myriad other acts of labour, equally implicated in securing overall social reproduction, are linked to the world of social needs, instead, through direct personal relations. Insofar as labourer and receiver are linked together through direct personal ties, acts of labour generally respond to social needs that had been determined and/or identified beforehand. They are not forced to undertake a detour through the market, and hence they do not have to confront a radical market uncertainty relative to whether they will manage to be useful at all and, by extension, to be rewarded accordingly. As a result, the temporal determinations explored above do not apply.
Nevertheless, despite these latter practices not being subject to capital's temporal determination, the terms of their occurrence are far from unconstrained. Occurring in a social field traversed by value-forms seeking self-expansion, even those practices not directly subsumed cannot escape value's sphere of influence. ‘The hours after the end of the “(wage)-working day” [are under workers’] own control, but must be structured to ensure its survival, and thereby ensure its ability to continue to supply surplus labour’ (Quick, 2023: 465). In capitalist societies, (partially) dispossessed reproductive units are structurally reliant on market exchange to secure their own reproduction, that is, they are ‘market dependent’ (Moreno Zacarés, 2018; Wood, 2002). Insofar as they must sell a portion of their available temporal resources, the demands springing from capitalist markets must take priority over those springing from other social spheres if their ongoing reproduction is to be secured. Therefore, the terms of occurrence of non-subsumed practices are bent towards compliance with capital's context-specific reproductive requirements, thus being forced to disregard either the intrinsic temporalities of the tasks in question, or the specific needs of their intended recipient.
Take, for instance, the act of providing care to one's relative. Generally, it can neither be provided when the recipient might most need it, nor when the provider might prefer it, but rather at the intervals left free by the latter's involvement in capitalist labour markets (Ferguson, 2023). Hence, capital dominates these practices by preventing them from taking place in a time of their own choosing, and by constraining the terms of their occurrence to fit in the time capital's valorisation requirements leave free. Due to their inability to reproduce themselves in the absence of market participation (by, at least, some members of each reproductive unit), demands springing from capitalist labour markets must take precedence over any other competing consideration. In consequence, the intrinsic temporalities of non-subsumed tasks are made subservient to capital's own reproductive needs, which take priority over those of the former's recipients and/or practitioners.
Such forceful compliance and subordination is well captured by Bhattacharya (2017: 10): ‘Our performance of concrete labour, too, is saturated/overdetermined by alienated social relations within whose overall matrix such labour must exist. Hence even my concrete labour (gardening) is not performed during and for a time of my own choosing or in forms that I can determine but has to “fit in” with the temporal and objective necessities of other social relations’. As ‘market dependence’ is generalized, in turn, the same priority of market demands applies society-wide: ‘To say that the social totality is a capitalist social totality is to suggest that the logic and imperatives of accumulation and production for profit over need (…) dominate (in the sense of exerting pressures on and setting powerful limits to) all aspects of social reproduction (…) An over-arching capitalist imperative structures, in important though not absolute ways, all the partial social relations and processes through which people participate in the daily and generational reproduction of themselves and others’ (Ferguson, 2016: 56).
As a result, the concrete temporalities of non-subsumed practices are not erased but rather moulded so as to be made subservient to capital's context-specific reproductive needs: ‘Reduced to the abstraction of labour time, the worker is subjected to the self-organization of capital's vital rhythms’ (Tombazos, 2013: 6). As a result, the temporalities of non-subsumed labour practices may be displaced, for example when care and attention are given not when the recipient most needs them, but only when the provider is free from her job, or when domestic chores—whether doing the laundry or preparing the next day's meal—must be undertaken late at night, after a long day's work. Alternatively, they can be fragmented—for instance, when work-from-home schemes intrude upon and disrupt the processual nature of housework, or when one's recovery time must be interrupted to care for a relative in need. They can also be accelerated, as when standards of quality or cleanliness must be lowered because there is simply no time to complete tasks in due time, or when children are given ultra-processed food simply because adults lack the time to cook a meal themselves. Lastly, their temporalities can also be compressed, as when sleep time must be systematically shortened due to the difficulty of juggling paid and unpaid work responsibilities, or when healing periods are disregarded because the pressure to return to work is too strong under the threat of being laid off.
Concluding remarks
To recap, capitalism is a historically specific ‘form’ of securing ongoing social reproduction, one which orchestrates a division of labour and a distribution of its products through the price signals which the mediation of value-forms originates. The ultimate condition of possibility of capitalist social reproduction is a generalized state of (partial) dispossession, which forces reproductive units to sell a portion of the temporal resources at their disposal to the owners of the means of production. As a result, a sizeable portion of society's total labour is subsumed by capital and thus acquires an inherently capitalist ‘form’. Not intended to satisfy any predetermined social need but, rather, to secure a monetary profit in exchange, acts of production are forced, by the effects of market competition, to comply with dynamic standards of productivity impossible to be known in advance. Theirs, therefore, is an ‘all-or-nothing’ scenario: either they manage to beat their competitors, and thus receive money in return, or else all the effort they had previously exerted in production will be rendered useless. Capital dominates that which it directly subsumes by coercing the intrinsic temporalities of the tasks at hand to occur within the coordinates set by socially necessary labour time standards.
Myriad other acts of labour involved in securing social reproduction are rather articulated by direct personal relations. They are not forced to comply with externally imposed standards of productivity to be socially useful and, hence, are not subject to the disciplinary force of market competition. Nonetheless, while themselves not instances of capital, they are neither external to capital's influence. As they occur within a field traversed by value-forms seeking self-expansion, capital dominates these practices not by integrating them within its own self-referential accounting schemes but, rather, by thwarting and moulding the terms of their occurrence to better serve capital's own context-specific reproductive requirements. Capital's domination of the field of social reproduction is thus comprehensive albeit internally differentiated. While all practices are affected by their common partaking of a capitalist totality, they are so in different ways depending on the ‘social form’ they are bestowed upon.
The all-pervasive contemporary concerns with ‘the tyranny of the clock’ rightly point to the existence of an alien power to which society must submit to reproduce itself. Such alien force, however, is not a technical property of artifacts, but a strictly social power emanating from the uncoordinated albeit paradoxically collective actions of individuals. In capitalist societies, social reproduction inevitably reproduces value relations as the abstract nexus linking together disparate producers, resulting into a system of abstractions that seems to have a life of its own: ‘[The magnitudes of value] vary constantly, independently of the will, foreknowledge, and actions of the people exchanging commodities. For these people, their own social movement has the form of the movement of things, which, rather than controlling, they are controlled by’ (Marx, 2024: 51).
Contemporary temporal concerns are thus ultimately grounded upon both the impersonal domination established by the incessant circulation of value, which all agents are forced to respond to if their individual reproduction is to be secured, and the direct relations of domination instituted in the workplace that constitute the former's necessary correlative. Therefore, it is not time per se, but the specifically capitalist social form of labour, and hence the social mediation within the overall social metabolism effected by value, that must be abolished if capital's temporal domination is to be overcome. Nevertheless, although it was the generalization of capitalist social relations that furnished the decisive impetus for both the technical refinement and the social dissemination of the abstract, disembodied time of the clock, it must be kept in mind that the latter is entirely a human creation which, in itself, is not inherently capitalist.
As stated above, clock-time plays a variety of functions in capitalist societies. Some are historically-specific to them, such as underpinning the ongoing extraction of surplus labour in the workplace through purely ‘economic’ means, or sustaining the incessant circulation of value throughout society at large. Beyond its current, historically specific role as a means of class domination, however, there stands the transhistorical need to coordinate, sequentially order, and synchronize social activities, both among themselves and with their broader socio-natural environment, without which no conceivable system of social organization could ever reproduce itself over time. In this regard, the more complex and spatially distant the agents and tasks in need of being coordinated are, the higher the need for a precise collective time-reckoning system shared by all the agents implicated will be.
In sum, the social requirements of synchronization and coordination of activities are not an exclusive prerogative of capitalist societies but, rather, pertain to any complex pattern of social organization. In any conceivable post-capitalist scenario, even if the temporal quantification of activities in abstract terms will no longer be the chief criteria organizing the social division of labour, separate activities will nonetheless have to be duly coordinated and synchronized over time for ongoing social reproduction to be attained. Securing collective freedom will invariably demand a time-reckoning system tailored to its future historically specific needs. The whole clock-time infrastructure, as it has already been developed, will be of paramount importance to achieve it for, in the end, the current tyranny of the clock is nothing but the tyranny of value's endless thirst for further expansion.
Footnotes
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Funding
The authors disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This work was supported by the Xunta de Galicia, Spain, under the Post-doctoral Research Grant (Exp. ED481B-2021-066).
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The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
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