Capitalism and report time. Essay on chronophobie capital

Résumé du document

How has capitalism transformed our relationship to time (cosmic, historical, social, and individual)? To address this question, I shall refer mainly but not exclusively to Marx. Though it does not give us a systematic and comprehensive analysis of this issue, there are notations about it scattered throughout his work, which are often very insightful, Such notations are especially (but not exclusively) found in Capital. There is in the Capital and the enormous mass of manuscripts that preceded and accompanied its design and drafting (incomplete) analysis of specific temporalities of capital and capitalism, of which Marx shows the complexity: linear time trial production; cyclical time of the circulation process; time helical but also catastrophic global process of capitalist production, leading to the dramatic time of history and political action, etc. My paper proposes to synthesize only some of these ratings. We focus primarily on the idea that, relative to earlier society, capitalism has literally revolutionized our relationship to time in its three constitutive dimensions: the relationship to the past, the present and the report in the future (the future).

Extraits

[...] S. Tombazos, the categories of time in economic analysis, Paris, Cahiers des Saisons, 1994; D. Bensaid, Marx unwanted, Paris, Fayard and the divergence times, Paris, Editions de la Passion For an elaboration of this concept, I refer to the book that I've spent: the reproduction of capital. Prolegomena to a general theory of capitalism, Lausanne, Editions Page Two K. Marx and F. Engels, The Communist Manifesto (1848) in K. Marx and F. [...]

[...] As a social relation of production, capital can not reproduce the same. He is forced to permanently disrupt the production process, ie the instruments of work, production techniques, forms of work organization (the technical and social division of labor), professional qualifications (the different types of force work implemented), the education and training of these forces work, so the professional traditions, etc . In other words, the reproduction of capital as a production report links the structural invariance over changes continuously and hardware components, social and intellectual of this report. [...]

[...] Aggregation still incomplete, contradictory and conflicting ultimately impossible The reproduction of capital. It is the process by which the social relationship (production) capital is what gives immediately (produced by himself), or mediately (by a set of mediations which are well outside that subject) all the conditions its reproduction, its repetition (which we immediately see that it is not an identical reproduction) and therefore its permanence (which does not change, quite the contrary). Process extremely large and complex, since it includes in the final set of social practice. [...]

[...] These mediations are ultimately other than those by which the reproduction of capital is subordinate the latter, resulting in capitalism itself. [...]

[...] This leads me to speak to a real chronophobie capital. Time is the enemy for capital; enemy he certainly can not win, but it will constantly seek to reduce. Doubling. On the one hand by the unidimensionalisation time: time tends to reduce this one. Capitalism abolishes the past on behalf of present and future, and simultaneously the future in favor of this. Only remains ultimately erected in this one "real time". On the other hand - and this is only the consequence of that - the dictatorship of the immediate: while the time is by definition the dimension of mediation, it exists only in the form of the intermediation of past, present and future, capitalism creates a dictatorship of the immediate, so this again. [...]