Guy Standing is a radical economist and the author of the counter-cultural The Plunder of the Commons and Basic Income. Both of those books looked at what we share and how we could create a more inclusive economy. His new book has the same DNA while looking more specifically at an often overlooked aspect of the economy: time.
The Politics of Time: Gaining Control in the Age of Uncertainty begins with history. The ancient Greeks had a more nuanced view of time than we do, Standing points out. Where we talk about a work/leisure balance, they distinguished between time spent on work and time spent on labour. You did work to live, and you did labour to earn money, and they’re different things. We’ve forgotten this. With our narrow view of work as paid employment, over half the actual work done in the economy isn’t counted. If nobody is paid to deliver it – care, housework or child-rearing, for example – then that work is invisible to modern economics.
The Greeks also saw distinctions in non-working time. There was leisure that was for rest and recreation, and there was schole, which was free time used in citizenship, self-improvement and learning. Again, this distinction has been lost. We prioritise leisure time for entertaining ourselves, and have let the schole category wither away – to the detriment of civil society.
Moving on from the ancients, Standing describes ‘agrarian time’ and how lives were shaped by farming. This was cyclical and depended on the seasons. It gave way to ‘industrial time’, where people’s time was configured around the needs of the factory and the employer. A third transition then occurred to ‘tertiary time’, oriented around services and the flexible, on-demand needs of a service based economy.
Along the way, “one of the great historical errors of modernity” occurred as the left embraced ‘labourism’ – the idea that labour was “a proper and desirable way of working and earning a living”. Historically this was not the case. You provided for yourself, ran your own affairs and hired yourself out for pay as little as possible. This wasn’t about avoiding work – remember the distinction between work and labour – it was about freedom and control. “Most people,” says Standing, “did not want or like labour. It was servitude.”
It’s natural that industrialists would want to convince people that having a job and doing what you’re told was the better option. That served them very well. What Standing laments is the fact that workers’ movements adopted this view too, championing “the dignity of labour” and elevating jobs as sacrosanct. Unpaid work vanished from discussion, government policy came to see maximum employment as a social good, and most working people lost control over their own time.
There are now a host of inequalities around who has the freedom of their own time and who doesn’t, whose work is recognised as valuable and whose is taken for granted. Many of these inequalities were highlighted during the pandemic, and there’s a whole chapter on ‘time in the eye of covid’.
Most importantly, there are alternatives. In the final chapter, on ‘the emancipation of time’, the author casts his mind back from an imagined 2030s and other side of a political transformation. A progressive alliance government has come to power and set in motion a string of policies to improve people’s lives, after the chaos of the 2020s. A better understanding of economic growth is at the heart of that, with time identified as a major opportunity to increase quality of life. There’s a land value tax, carbon levies and a basic income, time rights, and a revival of the commons and public affluence. Debt has been reduced. Schole has been rediscovered and citizens have time for more participative democracy.
All of this sounds rather close to the economy that we advocate at Joy in Enough, which is why it’s great to be able to welcome Guy Standing as our monthly speaker for May. He will talk about The Politics of Time on May 7th, 6:00, and you will find the details here and the Zoom link below.
Joy in Enough 