Abstract
In Decolonizing Time: Work, Leisure, and Freedom, Nichole Marie Shippen brings into focus a phenomenon so widespread as to escape our attention: our chronic lack of time. She argues that this generalized lack of time is a product of the current capitalist organization of production, and thus suggests that the crisis around free time can only be averted by a transformation of capitalism.
To overcome this condition, Shippen argues, we need a consciousness around time that would allow us to see the ways in which time is social, in particular how it is created by the social organization of labor. Such a consciousness around time, Shippen thinks, could be found in and further support the workers’ struggle for time away from work.
According to Shippen, at stake in this struggle is freedom as autonomy or self-development. This struggle and its importance for human freedom are obscured by liberal understandings of time, in particular liberalism’s inability to see time as a social and collective resource, as well as “a category of political economy.” Liberalism treats the lack of time as a personal failure meant to be remedied by time-management strategies.
Shippen structures this argument around two related distinctions, which, in chapter 1, she traces to Aristotle. One is the distinction between necessity and freedom, the other between work and leisure. Work is the opposite of freedom; it is composed of activities we do in order to fulfill necessary needs. It follows then that we need leisure, that is, time away from work, for freedom; we need leisure to perform autonomous activities, activities done for their own sakes, activities that exercise and develop human powers.
In Aristotle’s argument that the freedom of citizens depends on the work of slaves and women, chapter 1 finds the insight that time is a social resource, an insight useful for countering the liberal ideology of time as an individual resource.
In chapter 2, Shippen draws on Marx’s analysis of primitive accumulation to argue that the tendency to take as much time away from workers as possible is intrinsic to capitalism. In the transition from feudalism to capitalism, producers are separated from the means of production, which renders wage labor a necessity for most individuals. As a result, the difference between necessary working-time (working-time necessary for the provision of needs) and surplus working-time become invisible. This creates the conditions for the process of exploitation: capital can extract surplus working-time from the worker and transform it into profit, while paying the worker only for necessary working-time (pp. 56–57). The individual worker, who is compelled to sell his or her labor to survive, cannot put limits to this process. Only an organized working class can (p. 60).
I find the analysis of the book refreshing on a number of levels, perhaps most notably because it discusses an urgent social problem with the theoretical tools of a wide array of intellectual traditions and disciplines. Decolonizing Time is informed not only by classical thinkers like Aristotle and Marx as well as Frankfurt School critical theorists, but also by contemporary liberal normative theorists and feminist thinkers. Moreover, by drawing on historical and sociological studies, the book pays careful attention to the social and political reality it refers to.
For instance, chapter 4, “Critical Thoughts on Leisure,” draws on US social history to show how in the United States leisure came to be understood and lived exclusively through consumption. By reconstructing the debates of that historical moment, Shippen shows the contingency of the connection between leisure and consumption, points to alternatives to it, and to the political struggle that stood behind it. In the face of threats of overproduction and the decline of the need to work, Shippen argues, “there was a political choice to be made between reducing work hours and increasing consumption” (99). While labor leaders, reformers, religious leaders, educators, and social critics favored the former, business favored the latter (100–101). The success of the latter argument, Shippen argues, shows that in the twentieth century, time away from work, not only time spent in productive activity, became colonized by the demands of capitalism.
However, I find the basic assumption of the book—that work is antithetical to freedom as self-development—problematic for two sets of reasons. The first has to do with the reasons we have to preserve the connection between work and freedom. The second has to do with its implications for the politics of care and housework. Let me take these in turn.
First, framing the argument in terms of the dichotomy between freedom and necessity, with freedom understood in opposition to work, casts work as simply a matter of achieving necessities of life through productive activity. By severing the link between work and the development of humanly important talents, this discounts the reasons that make work a source of satisfaction. On my reading, what recommends Marx’s idea of alienation is precisely its ability to make this connection between work and freedom as self-development. Under capitalist conditions of production, work is alienated because it becomes only a means for the satisfaction of needs. In its essential quality, work is not a means to an end, but an end in itself. It is the end of humans. In this sense, as the telos of humans, work is free activity, activity done for its own sake, not as a means to other ends. Work is activity through which humans create their material world in a self-reflective and social way. Capitalist conditions of production deprive work of this essential quality.
By failing to take these reasons into consideration, the assumption behind Shippen’s argument deprives her theory of the ability to make critical judgments about the quality of the work itself, rather than simply about the need for time away from work. Rather than suggesting ways to transform the organization of labor and the social relations it creates, the book recommends legal limits to time spent in productive activity in the form of paid family and sick leave, paid vacation, or basic income. Without denying the importance of this concern with limiting the time spent in productive activity, I think it should not come at the cost of the ability to criticize the quality of the work itself.
Moreover, this approach limits the author’s ability to address even her concern with the quantity of time outside work. If the tendency to take time away from workers is engrained in capitalism’s DNA, as Shippen argues in chapter 2, then there is an argument to be made that legal protections alone will not be enough to withstand the economic forces that pull in the opposite direction, because over time they will be eroded. A more radical transformation of the organization of work is needed even for limiting time in production.
This assumption that work is the opposite of freedom is particularly surprising given that Shippen reconstructs the idea of alienation in exactly the terms I suggested above:
Marx develops an ontology based on labor, or self-conscious interaction with nature. . . . Labor allows Marx to reconcile necessity and freedom. . . . Marx’s critique of capitalism is based on the limitations it places on this dialectical relationship by alienating people from and exploiting them through their labor, thus denying them a meaningful connection between their self-consciousness and labor. (45)
Yet in spite of references to the “socialist vision of the good life” as “a complete reorganization of the economy” rather than “simply a reduction of work time” (45) or to the search for “temporal autonomy” in the form of “extending democratic control over the production process,” these ideas do not play any role in the larger normative argument, whose main demand remains for leisure, understood as time away from work, to be achieved less by the transformation of the process of production than by limits set on the amount of time spent in production.
Secondly, framing the discussion in terms of these two related distinctions has problematic implications for our understanding of housework and care work.
One of these problematic implications is that housework comes close to being cast as leisure. If whatever is not work, that is, employment, is leisure, then housework (at least in one’s own house) is leisure. Indeed, in her discussion of the struggle for shorter work hours in the 1930s Shippen seems to imply such an equivalence between housework and leisure, which she explicitly connects to freedom (102–3). According to the research she cites, women in particular were in favor of the six-hour workday. Shippen emphasizes, approvingly, that these women understood their increased time away from work as an increase in autonomy, control and freedom, even though some of this time was spent on home duties. She reads the research to show that “leisure increasingly became feminized in its association with women . . . , which demonstrates a reversal of the gendered nature of time from Aristotle where leisure was the privilege of male citizens” (103).
However, I am not convinced by this argument. The gendered nature of time spent in housework is not reversed by the decrease of time spent in paid work. It is safe to assume—and nothing in the research Shippen cites suggests otherwise—that women would continue to take full responsibility for housework and the work of care. Whatever leisure these women would enjoy, it would come only after the end of the second shift, a shift not shared with men. Yet the second shift is work, not leisure. By conflating work with paid work, Shippen’s dichotomy between work and leisure forces her to conflate housework with leisure, and thus to deny that housework is work.
This direction of the argument is particularly surprising given the attention Shippen gives throughout the book to the feminist arguments that housework is work that deserves recognition, work whose distribution is a matter of justice. For instance, one particularly interesting part of the book, her argument, in chapter 4, that the commodification of leisure actually created more work for women in spite of its promise to save time, is itself such an argument that housework is itself work, work made invisible by ideologies of work and time as well as by the gender division of labor. The reader is left wondering if the author is entitled to draw on these arguments given her repeated return to the assumption that the demand for freedom is exclusively a demand for leisure understood as time away from employment.
The problem of the gender division of labor is also central to the discussion of chapter 6, which develops the author’s vision of the politics of time. Here the author speaks of housework as drudgery and casts the problem with the gender division of labor as one of the distribution of repetitive, boring, meaningless work, thus falling in the other extreme. Not only does this reinforce ideas about housework that contribute to its devaluation. It also fails to put into question the legitimacy of the division between paid and unpaid work itself, and to discuss the ways in which the division itself is a product of capitalism and a modern mode of production.
Decolonizing Time. Work, Leisure, and Freedom is nevertheless an important and ambitious book. By showing the importance of a political theory of time rooted in political economy, it breaks new ground in political theory. It should start a much-needed conversation about our current condition.