(This is a personal review/reaction to the article: Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism — E. P. Thompson)

Photo by Heather Zabriskie on Unsplash

Have you ever thought about time? I mean of course you have but like really thought about it? The abstract nature of time provokes many intriguing questions but here we’re going to focus on how we measure it and why. Currently we have a universal notion of time that can be precisely measured quite easily with devices like clocks and concepts like hours or years. Could there be other ways of thinking of time? And what about clocks? Personally, I’ve had a distaste for clocks for as long as I can remember. And I hate watches. Ugh, the thought of strapping a device on my wrist at all times so that I can always know what time it is and worry about buying more of them in different colors and sizes. But I just couldn’t grasp what it was that bugged me so much about these seemingly innocent devices. E.P. Thompson helped me understand why.

E. P. Thompson is a British historian that had a significant role in the emergence of the field of social history and promoted grassroots history narrated from “below.” Do you realize how important that is? History has never been written from below! I just couldn’t help but have a problem with the concept of “history” after I realized that. “Those familiar with Thompson’s historical writings recognized in his peace activism the same concern that had preoccupied him throughout his scholarly life: creating a space for grassroots human agency and for moral dissidence against the arrogance of the powerful.” What a beautiful purpose! He was an activist, a communist and he took interest in the emergence of the working class which is what we’ll be discussing here. And he writes so eloquently! Full of emotion and passion and references to literature. I loved his style!

Before we had clocks and minutes and months, how did we perceive time? Well, I don’t know. Our understanding of time is so deeply embedded in our understanding of life and the universe, it’s kinda hard to imagine what it would be like without it. I spent a couple of months camping this summer and spent a lot of time contemplating what primitive human life would be like compared to the chaotic order of modern life. The sun’s position in the sky, if you know how to read it, actually provides you with a pretty good sense of time of day. After some time, I even got the hang of predicting the time by looking at the sky. Then again, I never really needed to know the time of day. I just went with the natural flow, I didn’t really have a choice. You know how it’s important to maintain a healthy sleeping habit? I was never good at that and I realized that being in nature makes all the difference! It didn’t matter what time it was, I woke up early because it was hot and bright out once the sun rose, then you have to sleep early because you can’t oversleep and make up for sleepless nights — night is the only time when it’s dark enough and cool enough to sleep. Check out how the Nuer — an ethnic group that lives on the banks of the Nile River in South Sudan — perceive time:

“. . . the Nuer have no expression equivalent to “time” in our language, and they cannot, therefore, as we can, speak of time as though it were something actual, which passes, can be wasted, can be saved, and so forth. I do not think that they ever experience the same feeling of fighting against time or of having to co-ordinate activities with an abstract passage of time because their points of reference are mainly the activities themselves, which are generally of a leisurely character. Events follow a logical order, but they are not controlled by an abstract system, there being no autonomous points of reference to which activities have to conform with precision. Nuer are fortunate.”

I couldn’t help but get a little jealous reading this quote. Even though a universal conception of time did not always exist, in many societies there were still measurements of time that took local activities such as chores as their reference point. Thompson provides an example from Madagascar: “a rice cooking” apparently is a phrase that means half an hour and “the frying of a locust” means something instant. This made me realize that I sometimes use the time required for tea to brew as a measurement of time, or perhaps the time it takes to smoke a cigarette although not verbally but more in my mind. Or I measure my shower length by how many songs have played. This approach to time perception is called “task-orientation” and it’s the main way rural societies managed time. Of course, it’s not as precise a system as clock time but apparently it worked well enough back then when punctuality wasn’t a thing. Think about it, it’s a perspective of time that follows the patterns of nature and it’s very intuitive. How does this relate to work?

Work is defined as the methods by which society structures the activities and labor necessary to its survival (Britannica). In preindustrial societies work basically meant just doing the things you need to do to live. You work so that you and your family has things to eat, to drink, to wear etc. This kind of production in which producers mainly produce for themselves and not to sell, is called subsistence living. Producing surplus to sell for a profit wasn’t always a thing. The timing of these tasks was partially based on necessity and partially up to the person in question. So there was an order, it wasn’t totally random, but it was an order that followed the necessities of the rhythm of nature, tasks were completed when they had to be completed: you milk the cow when you must and you attend to the crops when you must etc. It’s based on necessity because you are doing it for your own well-being and you do it on your own time and you have no fear of being cheated because you’re gonna do it eventually. This point of view also blurs the lines between work and leisure; time just becomes one continuous thing because your work tasks are scattered across time. No such thing as weekdays, weekends, work hours… Wouldn’t it be nice if work were such a thing that you weren’t even aware that what you’re doing was any different than living? Pre-industrial work is highly irregular: the tasks themselves are different, the type of activity these tasks require are different, the locations are different, the times are different. Before specialization people were a part of and could grasp the big picture of the work they were doing which means they were highly aware of its purpose, probably. The variety in “work” activities seems like a nice alternative to doing mainly the same thing every day, not really knowing why you’re doing it.

Another point of Thompson’s that I was happy to read was that when people are in charge of the organization of their own work, the patterns of working generally involve bursts of productivity alongside bursts of idleness. Look at artists, writers, students and farmers! And then think about yourself and the situations in which you organized your own work: who would want to work 9-to-5 almost every day regardless of the work you are supposed to complete? No one would do that to themselves. Perhaps giving yourself time off every now and then is a more humane way of working? Is that too crazy an idea? And when you work when you want to work, it just turns into such a better experience that probably yields better quality results. Don’t get me wrong, I didn’t always think this way. Being a perfectionist, I used to have a really high tempo myself and I never thought that I was unhappy. There were times that working very hard made me feel great, but I later realized that it was also a very tiring and stressful experience and I just couldn’t help but feel that most of what I did, really didn’t matter. And it made it boring. But at the peak of my personal productivity, I remember that time was like blocks for me. Blocks that I had to allocate to the categories of school, work, volunteering and social activities. That was the only way I could manage such a ridiculously full schedule. It was really hard to actually live in the moment, but in retrospect, how could it not be when you’re constantly so concerned with the productivity of your past and present blocks of time? So what happened there? How did mankind go from “its milk the cow o-clock” to “I have some time for you between 6 to 7.30 before my yoga class?!”

Well, the industrial revolution happened. Now, I’m not gonna get into details because I would never be able to end this post but we’ll focus on the relevant aspects. First of all, once human labor became a commodity, coming to work at sunrise just wasn’t gonna cut it because sunrise can mean different things for different people. When you’re paying someone for working for a certain amount of time as it is when you’re buying labor, you wanna make sure that they’re working during that time because you’re profiting from that work. Not only that, you want to make sure that they’re as productive as possible during that time to increase your profit. This is what the old phrase “time is money” means. Time has become money and must not be wasted. Also as companies, factories, organizations become more and more interdependent, the synchronization of labor also becomes important. So now we have a whole new picture of work: you go to some rich guy’s factory and work your ass off for hours, not for the profit that will be gained from your work, but for the minimal wage that your employer sees fit for you. With that money you’re supposed to be able to provide for yourself and your family. When you think about it, this is a whole new system that is very different from the previous one. And it requires different habits, different incentives, and as Thompson puts it, a different human nature that these new incentives can rely on.

Apparently it wasn’t an easy transition, and you wouldn’t expect it to be. I mean, think about it. Even the transition from student to employee is a hard one for many people. Imagine that, out of the blue, factories are built and the new way of living involves long hours of factory work 6 days a week. Does that in any way seem desirable to you? I mean even if you desire the idea of being a worker, I doubt many people would actually desire what that entails in practice. Waking up early every day at the same hour and working hours on end for a business that isn’t even yours and that can only profit through the exploitation of your labor, regardless of how you’re feeling and what you would actually like to do that day. I saw a tweet the other day that went something along the lines of “how do people wake up, work a nine hour shift everyday, around 45 hours a week, and say ‘yep, that’s the way to live life’ without questioning how absurd capitalism is.” Because that’s what it is if you can look at it with fresh eyes, it’s completely absurd! To disguise the absurdity of capitalism, you have to normalize it, or even further, naturalize it. This is where the story gets dirty.

Thompson describes how the clock was used as a tool of oppression when these new work habits were trying to be implemented in the emerging workforce. Thus, time discipline. Not surprisingly, owning a clock or a watch were signs of status for a while, everyone wasn’t able to afford one. It’s interesting how your class was able to determine your relationship with time. In some factories the workers weren’t allowed to bring a watch. Apparently the factory messed with the factory clocks to lengthen working hours and shorten breaks. How evil is that? The things people were able to get away with in history… not that exploitation is a thing of the past.

Well, of course, oppression breeds resistance. Thompson describes the tradition of Saint Monday, where workers would spend their only weekly vacation on Sunday drinking all night and wouldn’t show up for work on the next day, declaring it the holiday of Saint Monday! I absolutely loved the idea! Some would even extend it to Saint Tuesday! Here is a quote from the article that describes how horrible a regular job in that day could be:

“I know not how to describe the sickening aversion which at times steals over the working man and utterly disables him for a longer or shorter period, from following his usual occupation”, Francis Place wrote in 1829; and he added a footnote of personal testimony: For nearly six years, whilst working, when I had work to do, from twelve to eighteen hours a day, when no longer able, from the cause mentioned, to continue working, I used to run from it, and go as rapidly as I could to Highgate, Hampstead, Muswell-hill, or Norwood, and then “return to my vomit”…. This is the case with every workman I have ever known; and in proportion as a man’s case is hopeless will such fits more frequently occur and be of longer duration.”

The unproductive tradition of Saint Monday was quickly countered with reductions in wage and similar sanctions. But the disciplining goes way deeper than that, “time-thrift” needed to be internalized. “idleness” became a problem and it wasn’t okay anymore for even children to be idle. Schools were created to take care of the children of working families and prepare them for their turn in the labor force. By the time those children grew up and started working, they would already have been actively doing something every weekday for as long as they can remember. So they would have no problem adjusting perfectly to working hours. Thompson refers to Powell in his article who saw education as a training in the “habit of industry”; by the time the child reached six or seven it should become “habituated, not to say naturalized to Labour and Fatigue.” I ask you, would we really want children to be habituated to fatigue?

Thinking back to my childhood, I remember that I didn’t really have much of a problem with going to school everyday. I’d been doing it as long as I could remember. At university you have to pass the courses which might require exams and papers and a lack of absence to some degree but for the most part you have autonomy because it’s only you that gets affected by any negative consequences. After 6 years of that, white collar work was quite difficult to get used to for me. I feel like it’s just not something your body would naturally do and you have to do it for such unreasonable amounts of time. Here’s a quote from the article about children and schools:

“There is considerable use in their being, somehow or other, constantly employed at least twelve hours a day, whether they earn their living or not; for by these means, we hope that the rising generation will be so habituated to constant employment that it would at length prove agreeable and entertaining to them…”

Well, guess what? It worked! Almost everyone I know supposedly hates working, hate’s being so busy, but has no problem at all with the phenomenon of work. They just hate it, but that’s it, no need to actually solve that problem. It’s understandable because its something that so natural in our culture but it’s also kinda weird. But it goes even deeper than school. The natural “laziness of humankind” was also repressed with an interior moral time piece.

Under capitalist culture, productivity has become a virtue. The best thing a person can be is productive, right? Laziness is the worst. Capitalism owes its spirit of productivity to the Protestant ethic and I think now its way past a religious virtue. Everyone is in on this now. Forget work productivity, people now think they have to spend their leisure time productively! What ever happened to not doing anything? Now it drives us crazy to not do anything, we feel guilty! Guilty and useless for wasting time being unproductive and we feel like we’re falling behind. Falling behind our peers, falling behind our schedule, falling behind in life! These are really crazy feelings to have for not doing anything. That’s how deep it goes. We’ve built a modern world that’s practically designed to fuck us up mentally. And then we have mental diseases flourishing everywhere and we have medicine to treat it — that doesn’t even work but at least lets us keep on being productive — so that’s totally okay and legal. As long as we’re not idle or anything. That would be a problem. People get depressed because they can’t find a job and then people can’t find a job because they’re depressed and then people say you’re depressed because you don’t have a job and you’ll be better if you do. You’re not even a legitimate person anymore if you don’t have a job, you deserve depression if you don’t have job. When did it become necessary to sell your labor for minimal wages to corporations to be happy and mentally well and deserve societal approval? Another quote from the article:

“…if Puritanism was a necessary part of the work-ethos which enabled the industrialized world to break out of the poverty-stricken economies of the past, will the Puritan valuation of time begin to decompose as the pressures of poverty relax? Is it decomposing already? Will men begin to lose that restless urgency, that desire to consume time purposively, which most people carry just as they carry a watch on their wrists? If we are to have enlarged leisure, in an automated future, the problem is not “how are men going to be able to consume all these additional time-units of leisure?” but “what will be the capacity for experience of the men who have this undirected time to live?” If we maintain a Puritan time-valuation, a commodity-valuation, then it is a question of how this time is put to use, or how it is exploited by the leisure industries.”

I won’t go into detail but I can’t help but mention that it was the worst of all for women because a major part of their labor, household labor, wasn’t even acknowledged as labor. It was naturalized. Because how else would you convince half the species to work so much for free without questioning such a harsh system. I’ll probably write another post on this topic but I want to share a poem from the article that I found quite sincere:

when we Home are come, Alas!
we find our Work but just begun;
So many Things for our Attendance call,
Had we ten Hands, we could employ them all.
Our Children put to Bed, with greatest Care
We all Things for your coming Home prepare:
You sup, and go to Bed without delay,
And rest yourselves till the ensuing Day;
While we, alas! but little Sleep can have,
Because our froward Children cry and rave
In ev’ry Work (we) take our proper Share;
And from the Time that Harvest doth begin
Until the Corn be cut and carry’d in,
Our Toil and Labour’s daily so extreme,
That we have hardly ever Time to dream.

So let’s wrap it up, its already become a long post. Time discipline was imposed and new habits were created through many ways: “the division of labour; the supervision of labour; fines; bells and clocks; money incentives; preachings and schoolings; the suppression of fairs and sports.” I get a bit passionate about topics like this, I might come off angry or emotional, and I am, to be honest. That doesn’t mean that I hate modern life and I wish I were born in the past. It just means that we are living in a world that’s far from perfect and if we’re going to do anything about it we have to first realize that this is not the way it has to be. This is not just the natural course of history. The life we are living now is a consequence of things that happened in the past, things other people did, and things that were done intentionally to some extent. Things that involved the exploitation of so many people. And that’s also what Thompson actually wanted to say with this article:

“What needs to be said is not that one way of life is better than the other, but that this is a place of the most far-reaching conflict; that the historical record is not a simple one of neutral and inevitable technological change, but is also one of exploitation and of resistance to exploitation; and that values stand to be lost as well as gained.”

And what are those values that were lost? Thompson puts it perfectly, so I’m just leaving it to him:

“But if the purposive notation of time-use becomes less compulsive, then men might have to re-learn some of the arts of living lost in the industrial revolution: how to fill the interstices of their days with enriched, more leisurely, personal and social relations; how to break down once more the barriers between work and life.”

The below resources were used while writing this essay:

Thompson, E. P. “Time, Work-Discipline, And Industrial Capitalism.” Past and Present, vol. 38, no. 1, 1967, pp. 56–97., doi:10.1093/past/38.1.56.

Bess, Michael. “E.P. Thompson.” Encyclopædia Britannica, Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc., www.britannica.com/biography/E-P-Thompson.