The Fetishistic Character of Time and the Spiritual Crisis of Contemporary Capitalism

In *Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments*, Horkheimer and Adorno discuss the alienating spectacle brought about by capitalist society: “It is precisely in the machine form that alienated reason is at work on society—a society that reconciles the fixed thought patterns of material and mental mechanisms with freedom, life, and thought, and takes society itself as the true subject of thought.” This passage reveals that the alienation of capitalist society is rapidly spreading from the material sphere to the spiritual sphere, attempting to erode all areas of modern life. Capitalist modernity has created an extremely ironic and paradoxical social picture. On the positive level, capital revolutionizes traditional modes of production, driving the vigorous development of material production with a creativity that no previous social formation could match; “in a word, it creates a world after its own image.” On the negative level, however, due to its deep internal structural contradictions, capital cannot benignly steer the modern world it has created, and this world is becoming increasingly unrecognizable in the hands of its founders. Capital itself is a contradiction; only within this contradiction can capital break through limits and seek development. It is precisely out of consideration for its own self-expansion and the strengthening of its ruling power that capital seeks by every means to ally with the state, conspire with religion, and bind itself to the lifeworld, transforming nature and history into products that suit its own logic, constantly compressing the world’s expectations for a free future, and packaging itself as eternal truth. Natural objects such as time and space, which originally had no instrumental rational meaning, cannot escape the historical fate of being devoured by capital. But unlike general forms of pure bodily enslavement, time, as a “non-physical” factor of “governmentality,” operates mainly through the reification of the spirit, the nihilism of values, and similar means. The manipulation of invisible ideology has become a new measure for contemporary capitalism to consolidate its ruling position. Undoubtedly, time—this eternally flowing object—after being recognized in history through human labor practice as social time, which is two sides of the same coin as natural time and inseparable from it, has, under the action of capital, become commensurable with currency and a form that profoundly affects people’s spiritual world. When capital becomes the new “God” of time, time acquires a fetishistic character, and in the spiritual reproduction of capitalist society, this logic of supremacy is reinforced, bringing profound consequences.

在《启蒙辩证法——哲学断片》中，霍克海默和阿道尔诺论及了资本社会带来的异化景观：“正是在机器形式中，异化理性正在对社会——这个社会把作为物质和精神机制的固定思想模式同自由、生活和思维调和起来——发生着作用，并把社会本身当成思想的真正主体。”这段话揭示了资本主义社会的异化正从物质领域加速蔓延至精神领域，并试图侵蚀现代人的一切生活领域，资本主义现代性创生出一幅极端讽刺和吊诡的社会图景。资本在积极的层面革新传统的生产方式，以令以往任何一种社会形态都难以望其项背的创造力推动了物质生产的蓬勃发展，“一句话，它按照自己的面貌为自己创造出一个世界”。但在消极的层面，资本缘于其深重的内在结构性矛盾而无法良性驾驭它所创造出来的现代性世界，这个世界正在它的创始人手中愈发变得面目全非。资本本身就是一个矛盾体，只有在这个矛盾体中，资本主义才能冲破限制谋求发展。资本正是出于自身增殖和增强统治力量的考虑，才想方设法地与国家结盟、与宗教共谋、与生活世界捆绑，将自然与历史改造为适应自身逻辑的产物，不断压缩这个世界通向自由未来的期待，并将自身包装为永恒的真理。时间、空间等诸如此类原本并无工具理性意义的自然存在对象，也难以逃脱被资本吞噬的历史命运。但不同于一般纯粹的身体奴役形式，时间作为一种“非物理”因素的“治理术”，主要是通过精神的物化、价值的虚无等手段进行，对隐形的意识形态的操控俨然成为当代资本主义巩固自身统治地位的新型措施。毋庸置疑，时间这一永恒流淌的对象，在历史中被人的劳动实践认知为与自然时间一体两面、无法割裂的社会时间之后，在资本的作用下已经成为与货币通约，深刻影响人们精神世界的形式。当资本成为时间新的“上帝”，时间就具有了拜物教的性质，并在资本主义社会精神的再生产中强化了这种至上性逻辑，并带来了深刻的影响。

I. The Formation of the Fetishism of Time: The Combination of Capital and Social Time

一、时间拜物教的形成：资本与社会时间的结合

In *Capital* and other works, Marx, with his profound philosophical insights and unique perspective of economic and social history, reveals to modern people the absolute dominance of capital in the modern world, while also uncovering the capitalization process of the object “social time.” As a social relation, capital “is a universal light that overshadows all other colors and changes their characteristics. It is a special ether that determines the specific gravity of everything that appears within it.” This inherently conveys two dimensions of the relationship between capital and the modern world: First, capital’s innate high mobility and borderlessness enable it to break through all prejudices and barriers standing between nation-states, and then extend its tentacles of domination boundlessly into all “supra-local” and “non-economic” fields (such as politics, society, history, nature, spirit, art, etc.), striving to realize its exploitative nature of globalization and liberalization. Second, as capital’s ruling power grows, the forms of governance through which it dominates “other colors” are also quietly changing. Various factors serving capital’s extraction of surplus value can only achieve self-affirmation by conforming to capital’s will and needs. Since the birth of human society, capital has been inextricably linked with social time, and in ideology, it produces a consciousness of social time that suits capital’s nature. It can be said that capital can only fulfill its inherent requirement of self-expansion by maximizing the transformation and utilization of time. The fetishism of time is itself a stage in the development of the fetish form; the requirements of surplus value production determine the different forms of the combination of time and capital at different historical stages.

马克思在《资本论》等著作中以其深刻的哲学洞见和经济社会史的独特研究视角，向现代人揭示了资本在现代性世界中的绝对统摄地位，同时发现了“社会时间”这一对象的资本化进程。作为社会关系的资本“是一种普照的光，它掩盖了一切其他色彩，改变着它们的特点。这是一种特殊的以太，它决定着它里面显露出来的一切存在的比重”。这内在地传达了资本与现代性世界关系的两重维度：第一，资本与生俱来的高流动性和无疆界性使其冲破一切横亘在民族国家之间的偏见和壁垒，继而将统治的触角无远弗届地伸向一切“超地方”“非经济”领域（如政治、社会、历史、自然、精神、艺术等层面），竭力实现全球化和自由化的剥削本性；第二，随着资本统治力量的日益增强，其自身支配“其他色彩”的治理形式也在悄然改变，为资本攫取剩余价值服务的各种因子总是配合着资本的意志和需要才能实现自我确证。资本从人类社会诞生以来，就与社会时间产生着密不可分的关联，并且在意识形态中对适应资本本性的社会时间意识加以生产。可以说，资本只有通过最大化地改造和利用时间才能完成自身增殖的内在要求。时间拜物教本就是拜物教发展形式的一个阶段，剩余价值生产的要求决定着不同历史阶段时间与资本结合的不同形式。

Before the emergence of capitalism, people’s production and life activities in traditional society had not yet escaped the constraints of the natural rhythm of time. The construction and cognition of social time relied heavily on the laws of natural time: rising with the sun and resting at sunset; major activities such as farming, navigation, sacrifice, and trade were all arranged according to people’s understanding and grasp of seasons and weather. Thus, a social time that was humanized on the basis of natural laws and according to the needs of human practical activities gradually took shape. At this stage, time was often regarded as something with a mysterious color, even as an existence leading to some ultimate meaning. Plato saw it as eternal motion, Aristotle as the number of motion, while medieval theology imitated natural cycles to treat time as a recurring cycle, thereby demonstrating its own eternity. Feudal rulers used this to proclaim their own eternal legitimacy, treating the rhythm of social time as a predetermined product and time as a form of domination covered in mystery, thereby establishing an order of action regarding social time: “For the individual, time is not his own; it does not belong to him, but to a higher, dominant power. This explains why, in the Middle Ages, resistance to the ruling class often took the form of a protest against the Church’s control of time.” People understood the essence of time through religion or other beliefs, treating time as the manifestation of the arrival of these objects of faith, thereby forming a corresponding worldview. The belief in time became part of religious belief.

在资本主义诞生之前，传统社会中人们的生产、生活活动尚未摆脱时间的自然节律的限制，对社会时间的建构和认知严重依赖于自然时间的规律，日出而作、日落而息，种植、航海、祭祀、贸易等主要活动都要按照人们对季节与天时的认识和把握来安排，也就逐渐形成了在自然规律基础上按照人的实践活动需要而人化了的社会时间。在这个阶段，时间往往被视作具有某种神秘色彩，乃至是通向某种终极意义的存在。柏拉图将其作为永恒的运动，亚里士多德将其视为运动的数，中世纪神学则仿效自然周期将时间以反复循环的形式借以论证自身的永恒性。封建统治者则借此宣扬自身的永恒合法性，并将社会时间的节律作为某种先定的产物，将时间作为一种覆盖了神秘色彩的支配形式，借以确立起关于社会时间的行动秩序，“对于个人来说，时间不是他个人的，时间不属于他，而属于一种更高的、处于支配地位的势力。这解释了为什么在中世纪，对统治阶级的反抗常常呈现出一种抗议教会对时间控制的形式”。人们通过宗教或其他信仰来认识时间的本质，将时间作为这些信仰对象降临的表现形式，以此形成相应的世界观。对时间的信仰成为宗教信仰的一部分。

In the early stage of liberal capitalism, especially since the Industrial Revolution, the power of capital was mainly concentrated on expanding its own mode of production across all industries and worldwide. Capital entrenched itself in all industries around the world, completely overturning the backward production methods of feudal society. By creating new industries, eliminating old ones, and updating backward ones, it eliminated all negative factors hindering its self-expansion, leaving behind the most valuable and malleable production materials. At the same time, through colonial plunder and capital export, capital extended its expansion map to every corner of the world, achieving hegemonic rule in global space. The dominant driving force of this expansion process was the direct need to satisfy “capital’s self-expansion through the appropriation of others’ labor.” In this process, social time became a tool for capital’s self-expansion, a general measure of the magnitude of capital’s expansion. “In modern people, the quantitative view dominates.” Time is treated by capital as a quantity of labor, and thus becomes an intermediary in people’s indirect dependency relationship with capital. This intermediary replaces direct personal domination, using the precise measurement of time brought by clock technology, replacing possibility with certainty, and becoming a universalized and abstracted unit of time that demands efficiency of expansion and breaks away from natural time.

在早期自由资本主义阶段，尤其是工业革命以来，资本的力量主要集中在全行业、全世界范围内展开自身生产方式上。资本盘踞在世界范围内的各行各业，彻底颠覆了封建社会的落后生产方式，并通过创生新产业、消灭旧产业、更新落后产业等，将一切阻碍自身增殖的消极因素淘汰出局，留下了最具价值性和可塑性的生产素材。与此同时，通过殖民掠夺和资本输出等方式，资本将扩张的版图延伸至世界各个角落，实现了在全球空间上的霸权统治地位。这种扩张进程的主导动力正是满足“资本是通过占有他人劳动而使自己的价值增殖”的直接需要。社会时间在这一进程中成为资本自我增殖的工具化需要，成为衡量资本增殖量的一般尺度。“在现代人那里占统治地位的则是量的观点”，时间被资本作为一种劳动的量，进而成为人对资本间接依附性关系的中介。这个中介代替直接的人身统治，以钟表技术带来的精确化测度时间，用确证性取代可能性而成为一种要求增殖效率、脱离自然时间的测度普遍化抽象化的时间单位。

*Capital* depicts the dominating character of time. Although at this stage the one-dimensional domination of people by capital’s control of time is predominant, it also contains the basic conditions for the formation of a fetishism of time. First, capital’s comprehensive occupation of time cramps the possibility of workers’ spiritual development. Capital, using precisely measured time, “ravenously pursues surplus labour, and not only oversteps the moral limits of the working day, but also its purely physical limits.”[n] Stimulated by the drive to extract extra surplus value, capital prolongs labour time, employs child labour on a large scale, and by such means constantly compresses the time available to the working class for education, leisure, intellectual development, physical exercise, the performance of social functions, and the full development of their own capacities and potential for the all-round development of their spirit. Ultimately it strives to ensure that every moment of the workers’ disposable social time serves the valorisation of capital. Every second of the workers’ own life-existence is subjected to the will of capital; the sensuously rich substrate of human life vanishes under the goal of “absolute surplus-value production.” Under the squeeze of “a man expending in one hour the vital force which he formerly expended in two,” the worker’s body and spirit are both reduced to emptiness; their most immediate need is the subsistence-oriented “natural need,” and from this arises the possibility of believing in the time that dominates them. Second, the intellectual foundations of this period also contain the possibility of a fetishism of time. Hegel took absolute spirit as the essential determination of humanity, holding that historical time had already achieved the conceptual dialectical unity of reality, history, and reason in capitalist society, reaching the endpoint of the universal historical development of the external form of absolute spirit. However, because Hegel always observed society from the standpoint of conceptual historical movement, as Marx criticised, “The sphere of circulation or commodity exchange, within whose boundaries the sale and purchase of labour-power goes on, is in fact a very Eden of the innate rights of man. There alone rule Freedom, Equality, Property and Bentham.”[n] Hegel’s conception of historical time likewise reflects an abstract domination that, proceeding from the logic of capital as the “universal light,”[n] has stripped away the real relations between capital and labour. Hence he can only see the formal realisation of ideas like democracy and freedom within the logic of capital. This understanding, which steers historical time toward an abstract endpoint, makes the subject always a passive recipient in the movement of absolute spirit, never an active agent, holding that the spirit of the labouring subject is generated within a top-down necessity. This itself implies that a spiritual form that achieves the unity of reality and idea is in fact merely the spiritualised expression of the real relations of domination in capitalist civil society. It is concretely manifested as the proof and dependence on the eternity of the capitalist historical order, and in reality it characterises the fact that the power of time’s domination is whitewashed with the cloak of democracy and freedom. Third, capital creates the reifying mechanism of time. In capitalist society, the proletariat’s perception of time is the perception of its own immediate, sensuous quantity of labour. This alienated labour time is precise and measurable, and regardless of day or night, spring or autumn, it gradually distances itself from the characteristics of the workers’ own life-process, yet it achieves an exact correspondence with the products of labour and with money. This is the reification process of time. Time gradually becomes a tool for exchanging labour for subsistence needs; the labour process is also a process of producing reified time. In the life-world of the proletariat, as their spirit is crushed and their freedom and developmental value are lost, earning a livelihood in labour time becomes the primary need, and completely reified time becomes the temporal mechanism within the labour process, which, with the expansion of capital, becomes the social norm of time. What Marx called “historically developed needs”[n] form, in capitalist society, a “system of things” composed of commodities, money, and labour, creating a logical framework fully commensurable with reified time. Within this essentialist reified time, people treat time as the incarnation of use-value and the universal equivalent. The more such “historically developed needs” there are, the more thoroughly reified time combines with commodities, and the clearer the fetishistic logic of time becomes.

《资本论》描绘了一副时间的支配性面貌，尽管这一阶段主要以资本控制时间而形成对人的单向度支配为主，但其中也蕴含了时间拜物教形成的基本条件。第一，资本对时间的全面侵占钳制了劳动者精神发展的可能。资本利用精确化测度时间“像狼一般地贪求剩余劳动，不仅突破了工作日的道德极限，而且突破了工作日的纯粹身体的极限”。在获取超额剩余价值的刺激下，资本通过延长劳动时间、大量雇用童工等手段不断压缩工人阶级用以接受教育、享受休闲、开发智力、锻炼体力以及履行社会职能等充分开发自身的能力与潜力以供自身精神全面发展的时间，最终力求达到使工人全部可供支配的社会时间都用以为资本增殖服务。劳动者自我生命存在的每分每秒，全部受制于资本的意志，人类感性丰富的生命基质在“绝对剩余价值生产”的目标下荡然无存。在“一个人在一小时内耗费他从前在两小时内耗费的生命力”的压榨下，劳动者肉体和精神都处于虚空状态，他们最直接的需要正是谋生性的“自然的需要”，由此也就会对支配他们的时间本身产生信仰的可能。第二，这一时期的思想基础也内含着时间拜物教产生的可能。黑格尔以绝对精神作为人的本质性规定，认为历史时间在资本主义社会就已经实现了现实、历史与理性在理念上的辩证统一，达到了绝对精神外在形式的普遍历史发展终点。但由于黑格尔始终是基于理念上的历史运动观察社会，正如马克思批判的那样，“劳动力的买和卖是在流通领域或商品交换领域的界限以内进行的，这个领域确实是天赋人权的真正伊甸园。那里占统治地位的只是自由、平等、所有权和边沁”。黑格尔历史时间观也正反映从作为“普照的光”的资本逻辑进行的抽离了资本与劳动现实关系之后的抽象统治，因此他只能看到民主、自由等理念在资本逻辑中实现的形式性。这种将历史时间导向抽象终点的理解使主体始终是绝对理念运动中的受动者，而非能动者，认为劳动主体的精神是在自上而下的必然性中生成的。这本身就暗含了一种达成现实和理念统一的精神形式实则只是一种资本主义市民社会现实支配关系的精神化体现，具体体现为对资本主义历史秩序永恒性的证明和依赖，实际上所表征的正是以民主自由外衣粉饰时间统治力量的事实。第三，资本创造了时间的物化机制。在资本主义社会，无产阶级对时间的感知就是对自身直接的、感性的劳动量的感知，这种异化的劳动时间精确并可测量，且不分昼夜、无论春秋地与自身生命历程的特征逐渐远离，却与劳动产品、货币产生精确的一致性，这就是时间的物化过程。时间逐渐成为通过劳动换取谋生性需要的工具，劳动的过程也是一个生产物化时间的过程。在无产阶级的生命世界中，随着他们精神的被摧残、自由与发展价值的丧失，在劳动时间中谋生成为第一需要，完全物化的时间也就成为劳动过程中的时间机制，并随着资本扩张成为整个社会的时间规范。马克思认为的“历史地形成的需要”在资本社会中形成了由商品、货币与劳动构成的“物体系”，形成了与物化时间完全通约的逻辑架构。人们在这种本质主义的物化时间之中将时间视为使用价值和一般等价物的化身，这种“历史地形成的需要”越多，物化时间与商品结合也就越彻底，关于时间的拜物教属性逻辑也就越清晰。

If the main feature of the era of liberal capitalism was the primacy of material production, with capitalists controlling workers’ life-time by prolonging necessary labour time or adjusting the ratio between necessary and surplus labour time, then for contemporary capitalism, as the dimension of capitalist production has spread from material production to cultural production, institutional production, spiritual production, ideological production, and every other level, capital’s grip on time has become more micro and more covert. On the one hand, the power accumulated by capital has grown so great that it can control every sphere of social life; on the other hand, capital has changed the mode of exploitation through the application of various technical means, releasing its power in a more hidden and more comprehensive way. As Marx said, “A change in the productive forces, which increases the productivity of labour and thereby diminishes the value of labour-power, has no effect whatever on the labour that appears in value. Since the productive forces belong to the concrete useful form of labour, they can no longer have any bearing on labour when that form is abstracted away.”[n] In this process, social time, as the scope of capital’s power expands, breaks through the limit of merely measuring labour time in the sphere of production. It becomes, in the form of an instrumental unit of measurement, an intangible universal power that penetrates almost all fields of contemporary society, and, following the will of capital, profoundly reshapes the entire social landscape with its immense power. This is essentially an encroachment of surplus time upon free time. Workers engage in dead labour operating machines during labour time, and during non-labour time they are also occupied by non-productive labour, with “concrete useful forms of labour” hidden under the name of “leisure time” in activities such as consumption and entertainment. Marx long ago clearly elucidated the foundation of this temporal regime: social time, as the complete abstraction of time, and with the expansion of capital’s power gradually becoming public, is “developed gradually out of the existing relations as a natural law of the modern mode of production. Their formulation, official recognition, and proclamation by the state were the result of a long class struggle”[n] — that is, the socialisation of the mode of capital’s valorisation. It can be seen that, due to factors such as class struggle, capital’s long-term need for valorisation, and the development of science and technology, the capitalist mode of production, having already “created a world after its own image,”[n] continuously improves itself. Technology and capital collude to creatively open a new path of capitalist deprivation. Burdensome manual labour is increasingly replaced by mental labour and mechanised, automated production devices; surplus labour time, which once heavily oppressed the body, is gradually transformed into labour time that controls the spirit. This “universal light” on the surface becomes ever harder to provoke resistance against, and capitalism declares that it is entering the historical endpoint where, as Hegel said, everything finds its proper place.

如果说自由资本主义时代的主要特征是以物质生产为主，资本家通过延长工人必要劳动时间或者通过调节必要劳动时间与剩余劳动时间的比例，来达到对工人生命时间的操控，那么对于当代资本主义而言，随着资本主义生产的向度从物质生产蔓延至文化生产、制度生产、精神生产、意识形态生产等各个层面，资本对时间的把控也变得更加微观和隐秘。一方面，资本积累起来的力量愈发壮大以致足以控制社会生活的各领域；另一方面，资本通过对各种技术手段的应用改变了剥削的方式，以一种更隐蔽、更全面的方式释放自己的权力。正如马克思所说，“生产力的变化本身丝毫也不会影响表现为价值的劳动。既然生产力属于劳动的具体有用形式，它自然不再能同抽去了具体有用形式的劳动有关”。在这一过程中，社会时间随着资本权力范围的扩大而突破了在生产领域仅仅作为对劳动时间进行衡量的限制，以一种工具化的测度单位的形式成为渗透进当代社会几乎全部领域的无形的普遍权力，并依照资本的意愿以自身所具备的巨大权力深刻改变了整个社会图景。这本质上是一种剩余时间对自由时间的侵占，劳动者在劳动时间从事着操纵机器的死劳动，在非劳动时间也被非生产性劳动所占据，以“休闲时间”之名将“具体有用形式的劳动”隐藏在消费、娱乐等活动中。马克思早已深刻阐明了这种时间体制的基础，社会时间作为对时间的彻底抽象化，并随着资本权力的扩张逐渐公共化，是“作为现代生产方式的自然规律从现存的关系中逐渐发展起来的。它们的制定、被正式承认以及由国家予以公布，是长期阶级斗争的结果”，即资本增殖方式的社会化。可见，由于阶级斗争、资本长期增殖需要、科学技术发展等因素，资本主义生产方式在业已“按照自己的面貌为自己创造出一个世界”的基础上不断改进，科技与资本合谋创造性地开启了一条新型的资本主义剥夺之路，烦琐沉重的体力劳动愈来愈被脑力劳动以及机械化自动化生产装置所取代，对肉体压迫沉重的剩余劳动时间逐渐转化为控制精神的劳动时间。这种“普照的光”表面上越来越难以激起反抗，资本主义宣称正走进黑格尔所说的使一切各得其所的历史终点。

So, has the development of science and technology and political progress led to the weakening or even disappearance of capital’s exploitative nature? The root cause is precisely that the relationship between capital and social time has changed; the socialization of the extraction of surplus value has given time a fetishistic character. First, capital’s mode of domination has undergone an unprecedented change. The very process by which various factors—science and technology, politics, the economy—constrain the power of capital is precisely the process by which capital’s power extends to cover these domains. Having integrated these elements, capital’s profit-driven nature no longer confines its exploitation of labor solely to the visible physical factory. Capital has already embarked on a journey of exploitation from “attacking the body as the primary method” to “attacking the mind as the primary method” [9]9 “Attacking the body as the primary method” (攻身为上) and “attacking the mind as the primary method” (攻心为上) are classical Chinese strategic maxims, originally from military treatises, referring to the superiority of psychological warfare over physical force., which means that the way capital extracts workers’ surplus labor time must also change accordingly, shifting gradually from coercion and violence to gentleness and concealment. As the goal, capital accumulation has, to a certain extent, diluted the coercive means of time deprivation, transforming it into a latent control over the entire social sphere and the state of human existence. Within contemporary capitalist relations of production, this capital accumulation disperses concrete labor into the non-productive spheres of the whole society, achieving stability, diversity, and non-violent characteristics in accumulation. The combination of this immaterial labor with material labor makes social time, within the infinitely expanding object domain governed by the principle of the identity of labor, a socially recognized universal measure. Second, technological rationality encroaches upon social time. Within the mode of thinking of positivism and scientism, all objects of human cognition and objectifying activities can be reduced to quantitative measures, calculated to determine their form of rationalization and rationalization; only in this way can the truthfulness of the object of cognition be established. On the one hand, capital accumulation demands that technological rationality penetrate the calculation and arrangement of production efficiency and organization, continuously improving labor efficiency per unit of time in a highly precise and rationalized manner, so that all of social time is constantly squeezed for surplus value. On the other hand, it serves as a latent ideological tool of society, creating, at the level of people’s conceptions, a highly rational and precise framework for the use of time through people’s unconditional faith in science, and using the masses’ trust in science to promote their conscious acceptance of the political, economic, and cultural power established by capital. The logic of capital emerges and prevails as an accomplice to capital’s nature, consistent with the internal needs of capital’s domination and accumulation. Third, the power of social time does not manifest characteristics of violence and coercion; rather, it presents a state of acceptance, adaptation, and even identification across the whole society. As capital evolves from being the “supreme power in industry” to increasingly “manifesting itself as a social power” [10]10 The phrase “increasingly manifests itself as a social power” is a reference to Karl Marx’s analysis in the *Grundrisse* of capital’s tendency to develop into a social power independent of individual capitalists., it has driven modern society to form a strict temporal regime, which has become the basic norm for people’s production and life. “The various tools, equipment, and mechanical devices created by industry form an artificial world that operates independently of nature; in big cities, in factories, people live and work in this artificial world” [11]11 This quotation appears to be a paraphrase or summary of arguments found in Hannah Arendt’s *The Human Condition* regarding the artificial world created by modern industry.. This differs from the situation where workers were forced to accept extended labor time; instead, through social norms, professional requirements, and the like, a collective unconsciousness of adhering to a strict temporal regime is manufactured across the whole society. Violating social time norms—habitual lateness, leaving early, wasting one’s life—invites public censure and moral condemnation. This is precisely the “social relation between man and man that takes on the form of a relation between things” [12]12 This is a direct reference to Marx’s definition of the fetishism of commodities in *Capital*, Volume I: “a definite social relation between men that assumes, in their eyes, the fantastic form of a relation between things.” that capital constitutes by treating time as a substance. Through the measurement requirements of capital accumulation, it is generalized into social relations between people and between people and things. Social time transforms from a tool of bodily control into a tool for disciplining the spirit, embodied as a highly self-disciplined and conscious spiritual quality of valuing time as if it were life itself, and it manifests more as a tacit acceptance, recognition, and approval of the temporal regime of modern society. Under the capitalist system, time thus becomes the universal measure and basic norm for all social action; it is, more fundamentally, a form of fetishism that is essentially manipulated by capital and centered on the power of accumulation.

那么，是科技发展与政治进步导致了资本剥削本性减弱乃至消失了吗？究其原因正是资本与社会时间的关系发生了改变，剩余价值剥削的社会化使时间具有了拜物教的性质。第一，资本统治方式发生前所未有的改变。科技、政治、经济等各种因素对资本权力限制的进程恰恰也就是资本权力覆盖这些领域的进程。资本的逐利本性在统合了这些要素之后，肉眼可见的实体工厂不再是其压榨劳动的唯一场所。资本已经开启了一场从“攻身为上”到“攻心为上”的剥削之旅，这意味着资本对工人剩余劳动时间的榨取方式也必然随之改变，从强制、暴力逐渐走向温和、隐蔽。作为目的的资本增殖一定程度上淡化了时间剥夺的强制性手段，从而转换为对整个社会领域和人的生存状态进行潜在的控制。在当代资本主义生产关系中，这样的资本增殖将具体劳动扩散至整个社会的非生产领域，获得了增殖的稳定性、多元性和非暴力特征。这些非物质劳动与物质劳动的结合使社会时间在劳动同一性原则无限扩展的对象领域中成为社会认可的统一尺度。第二，科技理性对社会时间的侵占。在实证主义、科学主义的思维方式中，人类认识的一切对象及对象化活动都是可以还原为量的尺度，进行计算来判定其合理化与理性化的形式，只有这种方式才能确定认识对象的真实性。资本增殖一方面要求科技理性侵入对生产效率与组织方式的计算和安排中，以高度精确化合理化的方式不断提高单位时间的劳动效率，使整个社会时间在不停地挤压出剩余价值；另一方面则作为社会潜在的意识形态工具，通过人们对科学的无条件信仰在人的观念层面制造一种高度合理性的精确的时间利用架构，以大众对科学的无条件信任推动人们对资本创设的政治经济文化权力的自觉接纳。资本逻辑作为资本本性的共谋者出现并盛行，与资本统治和增殖的内在需要相一致。第三，社会时间的力量并没有体现出暴力与强制的特征，而是在全社会呈现出接受、适应乃至认同的状态。随着资本从“工业上的最高权力”，“越来越表现为社会权力”，资本推动现代社会形成了严格的时间体制，并成为人们生产生活的基本规范。“工业创造的各种工具设备和机械装置，形成了一个独立于自然界而运行的人工世界，在大都市里，在工厂里，人们就生活和工作在这个人工世界中”，这与劳动者被迫接受延长的劳动时间的状况有所不同，而是通过社会规范、职业要求等在全社会范围内制造的遵循严格时间体制的集体无意识，认为违背社会时间规范、经常性迟到早退、虚度生命时光则会遭到舆论讨伐和道德谴责。这也正是资本将时间作为实体，构成的一种“以物为中介的人和人之间的社会关系”，通过资本增殖的测量要求泛化为人与人之间、人与物之间的社会关系。社会时间从一种身体化控制的工具变成一种规训精神的工具，体现为一种惜时如命的高度自律和自觉的精神品质，对现代社会时间体制更多表现出一种默许、认可和承认的态度。在资本主义体制下，时间也就成为整个社会行动的统一尺度与基本规范，更是一种本质上受到资本操控，以增殖权力为核心展开的拜物教形式。

II. The Fetishistic Character of Time

二、时间的拜物教属性

By dominating time, capital dominates the modern world. Social time becomes the universal mechanism of the modern world’s operation, becomes the modern fetish, becomes a synonym for wealth. In human history, religion has often provided people with supreme sacred goals, spiritual sustenance, and emotional belonging [13]13 “Emotional belonging” (归宿) refers to a sense of ultimate spiritual home or final destination, a common term in Chinese discussions of existential meaning.; it is a value-based need for transcending real spiritual life, and also a form of self-consolation through which people, in class society, divert and alleviate class oppression. Since the Reformation, what people pursue is no longer the illusory comfort of the soul from the otherworldly realm, but the pursuit of wealth in reality; faith in God has gradually degenerated into the pursuit of individual rights, status, identity, material desires, bodily pleasures, and so on. The fetishization of time has subsequently proliferated. Social time, closely linked to material wealth, has thus become a new, unshakable faith in people’s hearts.

资本通过支配时间从而支配现代世界，社会时间成为现代世界运行的普遍化机制，成为现代的拜物教，成为财富的代名词。在人类历史中，宗教给予人们的往往是至高的神圣目标、精神寄托和情感归宿，是人们超越现实精神生活的价值性需要，也是在阶级社会中人们借以疏导、转移阶级压迫所进行的自我慰藉。宗教改革以来，人们所追求的不再是来自彼岸世界虚无缥缈的灵魂安抚，而是对现实中的财富追求，对上帝的信仰逐渐蜕变成对个体权利、身份、地位、物欲、身体的快感等方面的追逐。时间的拜物教化随之泛滥开来。与物质财富紧密相连的社会时间遂成为人们心中坚不可摧的新的信仰。

Marx once described in detail the formation and development of fetishism in *Capital*, expounding its stages of development in three progressive forms — commodity, money and capital — which imply the internal thread of changes in the form of capital’s rule and embody the process of the universalization of capital’s rule as a “pervasive light” [14]14 “Pervasive light” (普照光) is a term Marx uses in the *Grundrisse* to describe how a dominant mode of production colors all other relations.. Bourgeois national economics takes the rational “economic man” and the free competition and commodity exchange based on the principle of equivalent exchange derived therefrom as its entire theoretical presupposition; this one-sided theoretical abstraction and metaphysical conception of history prevent it from truly seeing the historical transience and transitional nature of capitalism, and the capitalist mode of production is unthinkingly regarded as natural, rational and eternal. Hegel too took capitalist history as the ideal endpoint of the externalization of absolute spirit. Marx, however, shattered this eternal design with the historical concept of “social relations,” criticizing: “Economists explain that the existing relations (bourgeois relations of production) are natural, thereby seeking to show that these are the very relations through which the production of wealth and the development of productive forces proceed according to the laws of nature. Hence these relations themselves are natural laws independent of the influence of time. They are eternal laws that must always govern society.” [15]15 Karl Marx, *The Poverty of Philosophy*, Chapter 2, Section 1. Similarly, commodities and money, originally the simplest and most direct economic categories of the capitalist mode of production and indeed of all commodity production, are also shrouded in the mystical veil of fetishism; in bourgeois political economy, commodities and money are internalized into such a naturalistic belief: a universal thing possessing some mysterious value, a tangible deity transcending all other social elements. Commodities and money, as forms of the manifestation of capital’s unfolding, represent the expression of the absolute abstraction of a ruling power, embodying a typical religious character that “on the one hand constitutes the totality of life, and on the other hand expresses the unity and foundation of complete existence” [16]16 The source of this quotation is unclear; it appears to be a paraphrase or composite reference from Marx’s critique of religion or fetishism.. Very similar to the deifying character of commodity fetishism and money fetishism, social time also acquires the attribute of fetishism. On the one hand, social time constitutes a necessary link in social operation and material production, an important hub connecting social relations between people; on the other hand, social time completes a high degree of self-abstraction from natural time, becoming an object of universal belief. Hence arises people’s “naturalistic” attitude toward social time; people often adopt an attitude of unconditional acceptance and approval toward the operation and arrangement of social time. Precisely because this cloak of naturalistic attributes of social time conceals the hidden fact of the exploitative relationship between capital and labor in modern society, it causes the degradation of proletarian ideology, the dilution of class subjectivity, and the nihilism of value. Fundamentally, the fetishism of social time, like the fetishism of money and commodities, originates in capital fetishism; it is the universalization and concealment of the form of exploitation, with the valorization of capital as its ultimate destination [17]17 “Valorization” (增殖) refers to the process by which capital increases its value through the extraction of surplus value.. Therefore, following the general logic of Marx’s critique of fetishism, one finds that even though time in modern society exists in the abstract form of a unit or measure and presents characteristics closer to naturalness and non-construction, it still refers to relations between people, and the object it measures and acts upon is also the “humanized world.” More importantly, just as Marx’s refutation of naturalism in capitalist economics is not directed at the “natural attributes of things” per se, social time under the capitalist system, precisely because it possesses social functions that transcend natural attributes and mere empirical ones, exerts a dominating effect on real life, thereby becoming a time fetishism.

马克思曾经在《资本论》中详尽描述过拜物教的形成与发展，以商品、货币和资本三种递进形式阐述了拜物教的发展阶段，其中隐含着资本统治形式变化的内在脉络，体现了资本统治形式成为“普照光”的泛化过程。资产阶级国民经济学以理性“经济人”及其由此衍生的自由竞争和基于等价交换原则的商品买卖作为其全部理论预设，这种片面的理论抽象和形而上学的历史观使其无法真正洞见资本主义的历史暂时性和过渡性，资本主义生产方式被不假思索地视为自然的、合理的、永恒的存在。黑格尔也以资本主义历史作为绝对精神外化的理想终点。而马克思以“社会关系”的历史性概念破除了这种永恒设计，批判道：“经济学家所以说现存的关系（资产阶级生产关系）是天然的，是想以此说明，这些关系正是使生产财富和发展生产力得以按照自然规律进行的那些关系。因此，这些关系是不受时间影响的自然规律。这是应当永远支配社会的永恒规律。”同样，商品和货币原本作为资本主义生产方式乃至全部商品生产最简单、最直接的经济范畴也被蒙上了拜物教的神秘面纱，商品和货币在资产阶级政治经济学中被内化为这样的自然主义信念：具有某种神秘价值的万能之物，超越其他一切社会要素的有形的神明。商品和货币作为资本展开的表现形式，代表一种统治力量绝对抽象性的表现，这体现出典型的“既构成生活的总体，另一方面又表现着完整的存在的统一体和根基”的宗教性质。与商品拜物教和货币拜物教的神化性质极为相似，社会时间也具有了拜物教的属性。一方面，社会时间构成社会运行与物质生产的一个必要环节，是联结人与人之间社会关系的重要枢纽；另一方面，社会时间完成了从自然时间中的高度自我抽象，成为人们普遍信仰的对象。由此产生了人们对社会时间的“自然主义”态度，对社会时间的运行和安排，人们往往持一种无条件接受和认可的态度。正因为社会时间这种自然主义属性的外衣掩盖了现代社会资本与劳动剥削关系的隐秘事实，所以才造成了无产阶级意识形态的退化、阶级主体性的淡化以及价值的虚无。从根本上说，社会时间的拜物教与货币和商品的拜物教一样，都起源于资本拜物教，是剥削形式的普遍化和隐蔽化，并以资本增殖为最终归宿。所以依照马克思拜物教批判的一般逻辑就会发现，即便时间在现代社会以一种单位、尺度的抽象形式而存在，并且呈现出更接近自然性、非建构的特征，但它指涉的依然是人和人之间的关系，所衡量与作用的对象也是“人化世界”。更重要的是，正如马克思对资本主义经济学中自然主义的驳斥并非针对“物的自然属性”这一方面内容一样，资本主义体制下的社会时间正因为其具有超越自然属性与单纯经验的社会属性功能，而产生对现实生活的支配作用，才使其成为一种时间拜物教。

First, the fetishistic character of time begins with the ideological character of time’s presentation. Today, technological rationality has brought about a profound transformation in the mode of human labor and life; technology and instrumental rationality are becoming universally prevailing norms across the entire world. By means of ever-strengthening and sophisticated technological tools, people elevate perceptual cognition into a universally recognized collective consciousness in collective labor and social life, take the quantitative principle of abstract universal measure as the basis for organizing new forms of practice and cognition, and form a mutually recognized pattern in which “every abstract science is merely a method of arranging order, a quantitative record of experience” [18]18 The source of this quotation is not identified in the original text.. Time, as the tool with the widest scope of application in modern society, the closest relationship to production and life, and the most thorough uniformity of measurement scale, completely sheds its dependence on human sensibility, so that the referent of “living individual human beings” mentioned by Marx in *The German Ideology* is entirely disciplined into abstract, personless reason. At this point, social time is tinged with a naturalistic ideological color in people’s daily production and life: it not only inherently permeates every corner of the modern social structure, becoming a component of the ideological superstructure, but also forms, to the greatest extent, a unified measure reflecting the interests of all members of society. Capitalists value social time because they always strive to shorten the turnover time of capital, especially the circulation cycle of fixed capital, thereby accelerating capital accumulation to obtain surplus profit; workers value social time because they believe that as long as they make full use of time, they will create more considerable returns. In a society where capital trumpets efficiency as paramount, people’s use of time is not coerced or involuntary; rather, they take time as an important value, believing that something must be accomplished amid the ceaseless passage of time, filled with identification with and emulation of efficient action and full use of time. This stems, on the one hand, from people’s eager desire to create wealth within time; on the other hand, from the whole society’s pursuit of efficiency, i.e., “speed,” which leads people to sigh over time, cherish time, and use time efficiently. Many Western Marxists in the 20th century discovered this new form of non-violent control; as analyzed in *Capital*, the ideology of social time, as a phenomenal form of society, is essentially driven by capitalist relations of production. The pursuit of efficiency is not limited to the sphere of production; in areas such as life, transportation, and entertainment, “speed,” as a collective and individual pursuit requiring no justification, gradually transforms from a means into an end in itself with the accelerated progress of the economy and society.

第一，时间的拜物教属性起始于时间呈现的意识形态特征。如今，技术理性带来了一场关于人类劳动方式和生活方式的深刻转型，科技、工具理性正成为整个世界普遍通行的准则。人们借助不断强盛和精湛的技术工具在集体劳动与社会生活中将感性认知上升为普遍认同的集体意识，以抽象性普遍尺度的量化原则作为组织新的实践与认识形式的基础，并且形成了“每门抽象科学都只是安排秩序的一种方法，一种对经验的量化记录”的彼此认同的模式。时间作为现代社会应用范围最广、与生产生活关系最为密切、测量尺度统一性最为彻底的工具，完全摆脱了对人的感性的依赖，使马克思在《德意志意识形态》中提到的“有生命的个人的存在”所指代的对象性完全被规训为抽象的无人身的理性。这时，社会时间在人们日常生产生活中被渲染了一层意识形态的自然色彩：它不仅固有地包含并渗入现代社会结构的每一个角落之中，成为观念上层建筑的组成部分，而且在最大程度上形成了对社会全体成员利益反映的统一性尺度。资本家重视社会时间在于他们总是力求缩短资本周转时间，尤其是固定资本的流转周期，从而加速资本积累获取超额利润；劳动者重视社会时间，在于他们相信只要充分利用时间，就会创造更为可观的收益。在资本鼓吹效率至上的社会中，人们对于时间的利用并不是受强迫、非自愿的，而是将时间作为重要的价值，认为在时间不停流逝中必须要有所作为，充满对高效行动和充分利用时间的认同和效仿。这一方面源于人们对于时间中创造财富的追逐渴望；另一方面由于整个社会对效率，即“快”的追求，使人们感叹时间、珍惜时间，高效利用时间。20世纪许多西方马克思主义者发现了这种新的非暴力控制形式，就像《资本论》中分析的那样，社会时间的意识形态作为一种社会的现象形式，本质上是由资本主义生产关系所驱动的。对于效率的追求不仅限于生产领域，在生活、交通、娱乐等领域，“快”作为一种无须辩驳的集体与个体追求随着经济社会的加速进步，逐渐从手段变成了价值目的本身。

Second, the fetishistic character of time is manifested in its two-sided unity with money. Money exerts immense power in the capitalist social system, becoming “the universal, self-sufficient value of all things. Hence it has robbed the whole world — both the human world and nature — of their intrinsic value. Money is the essence of human labor and human existence alienated from man; this alien essence rules man, and man worships it” [19]19 Karl Marx, “On the Jewish Question,” in *Marx-Engels Collected Works*, Vol. 3, p. 172.. Due to money’s high degree of abstraction and its commensurability with the value of all things in the world of capital, it becomes the universal standard and rule to which people prostrate themselves. At this point, social time, based on the commensurability of labor time with money itself, and along with the commodification of the entire social world and the establishment of money as the highest measure of relations between people, gives rise to the whole society’s belief in the model of social time. In the labor process, a certain amount of socially necessary labor time corresponds in reality to a certain amount of money; within the acceleration logic of the whole society, the valorization of capital constitutes the fundamental driving force of acceleration: “If the various stages through which capital passes were as rapid in reality as in the mind, then this would reach the maximum limit of the factors enabling the production process to be repeated” [20]20 Karl Marx, *Capital*, Vol. 2, Chapter 4, on turnover time.. Differently, the socialization of contemporary capital, through technological rationality, accelerationism, and the like, produces a belief in time that takes all members of society as its subjects. People’s worship of money can often be equivalently replaced by their worship of time. At this point, time becomes the measure of all things, because together with money it prescribes the basic unit and driving force of the entire social movement; the naturalistic cloak of permanence that time wears causes the entire life course of people to be consciously designed, allocated, and used precisely according to measured time, and all actions follow the standard of technicized time, thereby giving rise to the belief in time that “time is money.”

第二，时间的拜物教属性体现在与货币的一体两面性。货币在资本主义社会体制中发挥了无比强大的威力，成为“一切事物的普遍的、独立自在的价值。因此它剥夺了整个世界——人的世界和自然界——固有的价值。金钱是人的劳动和人的存在的同人相异化的本质；这种异己的本质统治了人，而人则向它顶礼膜拜”。由于货币的高度抽象性及其对资本世界一切物的价值通约性，使之成为被人顶礼膜拜的普遍标准和规则。这时，社会时间以劳动时间与货币本身的通约性为基础，随着整个社会世界的商品化进程，以及货币被确立为人与人关系的最高尺度，全社会就体现出对社会时间模式的信仰。在劳动过程中，一定的社会必要劳动时间在现实中对应着一定的货币量，在整个社会的加速逻辑中，资本增殖构成了加速的根本动力，“资本转化的各个阶段在现实中也像在头脑中那样迅速，那么这也就达到使生产过程能够重复进行的因素的最大限度”。与之不同的是，当代资本的社会化通过技术理性、加速主义等生产了将社会全部成员都作为主体的时间信仰。人们对金钱的崇拜往往可以等量代换为对时间的崇拜。这时，时间成为万物的尺度，因为它与货币一道规定了整个社会运动的基本单位和动力，时间所披的恒久性的自然主义外衣使整个人的生命历程都自觉按照测度时间精确地设计、分配与使用，全部的行动都遵循着技术化时间的标准，由此产生了“时间就是金钱”的时间信仰。

Third, the fetishistic character of time transforms time from an instrument into an end in itself. Viewed through the history of time’s instrumental character, the evolution of time’s instrumental attribute is unquestionably a process of ever-greater precision and positivism, a process that adapts to and conforms with the changing capacity of human beings to understand and transform the world through practice — that is, the form of time is essentially about meeting people’s real needs. In this sense, human beings ought to have absolute control over time; within the constraints of time’s physical properties, people should measure time according to the needs of their own development. Yet in contemporary capitalist society, the two-sided identity of time and money causes both to become concrete forms of capital, and time no longer exists as an instrument; establishing a consciousness of time at the social level becomes the ultimate end, and this is how the fetishism of time is finally formed. The capitalist article of faith that “time is money” thoroughly extinguishes the natural meaning of time; time shifts from “natural time” to “social time.” Capital imperceptibly instills into naturally flowing time an intrinsic monetary attribute and capital attribute, and a modern consciousness of time — characterized by efficiency, punctuality, and standardization, universally recognized and highly unified at the level of the whole society — permeates every industry and trade. This highly self-conscious and widely prevalent consciousness of time provides a deep ideological foundation for the rapid turnover and accelerated circulation of capital. This consciousness of time, whose ultimate purpose is the valorization of capital, appears at the social level as a social norm and consensus that conceals its exploitative nature. People living in society must follow the corresponding temporal norms; they even believe that these norms are beneficial to themselves. At this point, time has completely slipped out of human control and domination, and has instead turned into an alien force that dominates and controls people. Because time, money, and capital are highly commensurable in quantitative terms, time, like money, no longer serves as a means for the development of people and society themselves, but becomes an end. As Nietzsche criticized, “When one fabricates an ideal world out of thin air, one correspondingly deprives reality of its value, meaning, and truthfulness… Humanity itself, deluded by the ideal, reduces its instincts to a minimum and becomes hypocritical — to the point of worshipping values opposite to reality, and only because of this deception does humanity fail to see prosperity, the future, and the lofty right to the future.” When capitalist society takes the satisfaction of material desires as its eternal and sole pursuit, any sacred and illusory religious faith ceases to be solid; only time and money, which allow people to experience certainty directly and immediately in sensation, become the most reliable objects of pursuit. The spiritual comfort and psychological satisfaction that religion provided in traditional times can, in contemporary capitalism, equally be obtained through “full compliance with and utilization of” time. The more thoroughly one complies with this consciousness of time, the more it promises to bring more money, even social recognition and a sense of honor; therefore people strive to grasp time, cherish time, and utilize time.

第三，时间的拜物教属性使时间由工具性转化为目的性。从时间的工具性发展史来看，时间工具属性的变迁无疑是越来越精确化、实证化的过程，是适应并符合人类认识与改造世界实践能力的变化过程的，即时间的形式本质上在于满足人们的现实需要。这样说来，人对时间应当拥有绝对的支配权，在符合时间物理属性的前提下，人们应该按照自身发展的需要来裁量时间。可是，在当代资本主义社会中，时间与货币的一体两面性导致了二者都成为资本的具体表现形式，时间也就不再作为工具物而存在，在社会层面确立一种时间意识成为最终的目的，这就使得时间拜物教最终形成了。“时间就是金钱”的资本主义精神信仰使时间的自然意义彻底湮灭，时间由“自然时间”转变为“社会时间”，自然流淌的时间被资本在无形之中灌输了一种内在的货币属性和资本属性，一种在全社会层面普遍承认、高度统一，以高效、守时、规范为主要特征的现代时间意识渗透于各行各业。这一高度自觉和普遍流行的时间意识为资本快速周转和加速流通提供了深厚的思想基础。这种以资本增殖为终极旨归的时间意识在社会层面以一种隐藏了剥削本性的社会规范和共识而出现。人们在社会中生存就必须遵循相应的时间规范，他们甚至同样认为这种规范是对自身有利的。这时，时间完全脱离了人的掌控和支配，反过来变成了支配人、控制人的异己力量。由于时间、货币与资本在量上的高度通约性，时间也就同货币一样，不再作为人与社会自身发展的手段，而成为目的。正如尼采所批判的，“当人们凭空捏造了一个理想世界的时候，也就相应剥夺了现实的价值、意义和真实性，……人类本身为理想所蒙蔽，使自己的本能降至最低限度，并且变得虚伪——以致朝着同现实相反的价值顶礼膜拜，只因受了它的欺骗，人类才看不到繁盛、未来和对未来的崇高权利”。当资本主义社会将物欲上的满足作为恒久且唯一的追求时，任何神圣虚幻的宗教信仰都不再坚固，唯有能够让人在直接现实的感觉上立刻体验到确定性的时间和货币才成为最可靠的追求对象。在传统时代宗教带给人的精神安慰和心理满足，在当代资本主义中同样可以通过对时间的“充分遵守和利用”来获得。对这种时间意识遵守得越彻底，就越意味着它能带来更多的金钱乃至社会认同与荣誉感，因此人们极力地把握时间、珍惜时间、利用时间。

When time becomes an end in itself, it profoundly influences and reshapes people’s structure of consciousness and social experience, along with the comprehensive alienation and inversion that capital brings to the whole society across categories such as being and consciousness, money and wealth, production and consumption, and thereby becomes the inner institutional imprint of people’s spiritual world. Capital’s invasion and occupation of the human spiritual world is the domain where capital’s influence is most profound and most hidden; once capital’s consciousness of time enters the human psyche, it gives rise to the spiritual crisis of the capitalist world, a crisis of the overall distortion of human existence, development, and freedom.

当时间成为目的本身的时候，它就随着资本带来的全社会关于存在与意识、货币与财富、生产与消费等范畴的全面异化和倒置深刻地影响和改造了人的意识结构和社会体验，进而成为人们精神世界内在的制度烙印。资本对人精神世界的侵入和占领是资本影响最深刻、最隐蔽的领域，当资本的时间意识进入人类心灵之后，就衍生出关于人的存在、发展与自由整体性扭曲的资本主义世界精神危机。

III. The Fetishism of Time and the Production and Crisis of Social Spirit

三、时间拜物教与社会精神的生产和危机

All innovations and adjustments of the capitalist system manifest themselves through the domination and discipline of real individuals, ultimately completing the purpose of capital’s valorization; human beings, from body to spirit, are without exception subjected to the manipulation of the logic of capital. In contemporary capitalist society, the real trend of the capitalization of social time nurtures the deepening of the fetishism of time; the rich spiritual world of humanity is being eroded bit by bit by capitalized time, until it is thoroughly hollowed out and disintegrated. Capitalized time has a profound impact on the state of human existence, just as Heidegger’s examination of human existence under the conditions of modernity aims “to exhibit time as the horizon for all understanding and interpretation of being.” Under contemporary capitalist conditions, human beings are the terminal on which the capitalist system acts; the human spiritual world is the living object of the ruling power of the logic of capital. As Marx said, at this point “capital has independence and individuality, while the active individual has neither independence nor individuality.” The fetishization of time gives birth to the capitalized personality of social time, which is the complete unity of the human spiritual world with capitalized time. All members of society are reduced to servants secretly manipulated by time. In the face of the modern temporal mode, human beings completely lose their original agency and discursive power as subjects, imperceptibly dominated by the fetishism of time; the entire lifetime of human beings is used to pursue instantaneous gratification and insatiable material desires. The human spiritual world becomes an appendage of capital; because it has long been deprived of replenishment and nourishment, it grows ever more empty and cold.

资本主义制度的所有革新和调整都是以对现实个人的统治与规训为表现，最终完成资本增殖的目的，人从肉体到精神无一幸免全部遭受资本逻辑的摆布。在当代资本主义社会，社会时间资本化的现实趋势孕育着时间拜物教的深化，人类丰富的精神世界正在被资本化了的时间一点一滴地侵蚀，直至被彻底掏空和瓦解。资本化的时间对人的生存状态产生了深刻的影响，正如海德格尔对现代性境遇下人的存在的审视，就是要“把时间摆明为对存在的一切领会及解释的视野”。在当代资本主义条件下，人是资本制度作用的终端，人的精神世界则是资本逻辑统治力量鲜活的对象，如马克思所言，这时“资本具有独立性和个性，而活动着的个人却没有独立性和个性”。时间的拜物教化致使社会时间的资本化人格的诞生，是人的精神世界与资本化时间的完全统一。全部社会成员沦为被时间秘密操控的奴婢。人在现代时间模式面前完全丧失了作为主体原有的能动性和话语权，潜移默化地受到时间拜物教的支配，人的全部生命时间都用以追寻即时性的快感和永不满足的物欲。人类的精神世界成为资本的附庸，由于长期得不到充盈和滋养，愈发变得空虚和冷寂。

First, the vulgarity of time and the closure of the spiritual world. “Vulgar time” first appears in Heidegger’s critique of modernity. It refers to the way in which, within a highly rationalized and positivized contemporary capitalist society, authentic *Dasein* — the unity of actuality and possibility that constitutes the genuine existence of the human being — is concealed, obscured, and even distorted. As a result, capitalist social reality produces a conception of time as a thing-in-itself external to human existence and activity, namely the scientistic understanding, inaugurated by Aristotle, of time as “the measure of motion and of the duration of motion.” This conception of time evidently conforms to the operational mode of a highly scientized and rationalized modern society, but in essence it is a utilitarian conception of time. Because it treats time merely as a mode of objectifying existing reality, regarding time as an instrumentalized tool through which to calculate and measure the productive output of human practice, it completely blocks off the ontological and existential dimensions of human beings in time. In Heidegger, “vulgar time” points to a closed state of human temporal existence, a state in which “temporality is woven into the present.” It deprives human beings of the transcendence, coherence, and possibility that span past, present, and future. People are fixed by this temporal regime in the permanence of the given, losing freedom, individuality, and impulse. Thus, by severing the temporality of the domain of being itself, it eliminates the authenticity of self-existence, sealing oneself within the established reality. In Marx, the essence of “vulgar time” was already revealed: it is “gradually developed from the existing relations as a natural law of the modern mode of production.” This points out that such highly abstract social time acquires universal significance only within capitalist relations of production, and that its essence is a reified time that has lost the possibility of freedom. This mode of social production also drives the domination of social time over human possibility. This echoes the critique of Hegel’s closed historical time, in which “everything is in its proper place,” and reveals, through the form of the capital logic based on the mode of production, the closure of the human spiritual world under capitalist conditions. Precisely because quantified time developed to meet the needs of the capitalist mode of production, it could, in the course of history, become an abstract standard in the social sense as the ruling power of actual relations of production advanced; only then could “vulgar time” truly become a continuously produced dominating force. In contemporary capitalist society, the fetishism of time constantly reinforces the closure and actuality of the human spirit. The rational time-consciousness in the political, economic, and cultural production of the entire society manifests itself in the numerous indicators, procedures, and norms of labor, and in the countless forms of entertainment and consumption during non-labor time. This comprehensively enhances the utilitarian character of people’s temporal experience, constantly strengthening both the conscious and unconscious states oriented toward worldly material pursuits and the pursuit of wealth. The masses become objects and appendages of the domination and reproduction of time. Spiritual production degenerates into a production that cannot escape instrumentalized time. In this process, people’s spiritual world becomes increasingly impoverished; spiritual activity continuously degenerates; the pursuit of transcendent freedom is obscured and dissolved; and people’s spiritual activity is steered toward consistency with the logic of capital’s valorization through time. Hence Marx points out: “Even the highest spiritual production is only acknowledged and forgiven by the bourgeois because it is represented and falsely interpreted as a direct producer of material wealth.” [24]24 Karl Marx, *Theories of Surplus Value*, in *Marx and Engels Collected Works*, vol. 33 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1975–), p. 348. Translation modified.

第一，时间的流俗性与精神世界的封闭性。“流俗时间”初见于海德格尔的现代性批判之中，是指在高度理性化、实证化的当代资本主义社会中，作为人的真正存在现实性与可能性相统一的具有本真性的“此在”被隐藏、遮蔽乃至扭曲，由此在资本主义社会现实中产生了将时间作为一种外在于人的存在与活动的自在之物，即作出了由亚里士多德开启的将时间看作“是运动的和运动持续量的尺度”的科学主义理解方式。这种时间观显然符合高度科学化、理性化的现代性社会运行方式，但在本质上却是一种功利主义的时间观。因为它仅仅将时间作为现实存在对象的方式，把时间视为对象化的工具，通过时间来核算、计量人的实践产出，完全屏蔽了人在时间中的本体论和生存论维度。在海德格尔那里，“流俗时间”就指向一种人的时间性存在的封闭状态，是一种“时间性被凝织在当前中”的状态，丧失了人在过去、现在与未来的超越性、贯通感与可能性，人们被这种时间体制固定在现实的持久性中，失去了自由、个性与冲动，从而通过割裂存在界域的时间性本身消除了自我存在的本真性，将自己封闭在既定的现实之中。在马克思那里，“流俗时间”的本质早已得到揭示，正是“作为现代生产方式的自然规律从现存的关系中逐渐发展起来的”，点明了这种高度抽象的社会时间只有在资本主义生产关系中才具备普遍性意义，其本质是一种丧失自由可能性的物化时间。而这种社会生产方式也推动了社会时间对人的可能性的宰制。这也呼应着批判了黑格尔的“一切都各得其所”的封闭性历史时间观，以基于生产方式的资本逻辑形式揭示了资本主义境遇下人的精神世界的封闭性。正因为量化的时间是为了满足资本主义生产方式的需要得以发展，其在历史进程中才可能随着现实生产关系统治力量的进步成为社会意义上的抽象标准，“流俗时间”才真正成为被不断生产出来的支配性力量。在当代资本主义社会，时间拜物教不断强化着人类精神的封闭性和现实性。整个社会的政治、经济、文化生产中的理性的时间意识体现为劳动中繁多的指标、程序、规范，非劳动时间中无数的娱乐与消费活动，在全方位增强人们时间体验的功利性，不断增强着关于现世物质追求、财富追求的意识状态和无意识状态，社会大众成为时间支配和再生产的对象和附属物，精神的生产演变为无法脱离工具化时间的生产。在这个过程中，人们的精神世界愈发趋向贫乏，精神活动不断堕落，追求超越性自由的精神活动被遮蔽、消解，人们的精神活动被导向与资本利用时间增殖逻辑的一致性。所以马克思指出：“连最高的精神生产，也只是由于被描绘为、被错误地解释为物质财富的直接生产者，才得到承认，在资产者眼中才成为可以原谅的。”

Second, the acceleration of time and the sense of emptiness in the spiritual world. The quasi-religious dependence on time leads people to consciously and voluntarily accept and submit to the ever-accelerating rhythm of the entire society. Marx points out: “With the acquisition of new productive forces, people change their mode of production; with the change in the mode of production, i.e., the way of earning a living, they change all their social relations.” The requirement of capital valorization constantly transforms the specific forms of relations of production and their social environment. Contemporary capitalism, by promoting a rapid temporal regime across the entire society, has given rise to entirely new social relations between people and between people and things. The efficient material production universally pursued by society comprehensively dominates people’s objectifying relations. The spiritual dimension within social time gradually becomes blurred. Profound thought, noble souls, sound character, and a rich spiritual world become increasingly luxurious, even disappearing entirely from this commodity world awash with material desires. “The infinity of spirit becomes a very narrow finitude; the speculative intellect of spirit degenerates into a mere instrumentalist sensibility; the richness of spirit is attenuated into a one-dimensional material desire.” To fill the coldness and cruelty brought about by the emptiness of the spiritual world, many people settle for the next best thing, turning to the pursuit of vulgar sensory stimulation and material gratification. Hartmut Rosa characterizes contemporary capitalism as an “acceleration society.” Building on Marxist political economy, he deepens the critique of time in contemporary society, arguing that capital valorization drives people’s time-consciousness and the operational tempo of the entire society, thereby sweeping all members of society into an accelerating society of constant survival-of-the-fittest. He points to the resulting progressive estrangement and deepening alienation in the relationship between subject, object, and practical action. In Rosa’s logic, “people voluntarily do what they do not ‘really’ want to do,” leading to the temporal crisis of modernity. In contemporary capitalist society, people are busy all day without knowing why they are busy; they are constantly running without knowing why they are running; labor fills their life-time yet yields no sense of living. On the one hand, the circulation of capital, accelerated by internet information technology, has reached an unprecedented speed, creating modes of high-speed memory and information-bombardment experiences. This places people in virtual spaces where digital media intensifies the instantaneous and stimulating character of their spiritual experience. The vast flow of information and high-speed information transmission mean that people’s spiritual acquisition can only remain superficial, limited to the senses, and they are thus unconsciously regulated and exploited by the information controlled by capital. On the other hand, the accelerated experience of modernity has completely restructured the relationship between the self and the self, and between people. In the pursuit of time and money, driven by inner urgency, modern people flee from deep thought, are filled with anxiety, continuously lose deep self-knowledge, cannot perceive the direction of life, and thus become estranged from traditional intimate relationships through spiritual tension. The tendency toward individual atomization grows increasingly severe; loneliness and confusion brought by anxiety fill people’s spiritual world. From Nietzsche to Benjamin to Agamben, all have expressed the loss of spirit, emotion, and meaning under this mode of life-time; time itself becomes a value-end in itself. The fetishism of time directs people’s sense of spiritual satisfaction toward money and material goods, yet money and material goods are precisely the most changeable and constantly flowing instruments. Materialistic pursuits keep people in a state of high tension and unease, constantly oscillating between the pursuit of satisfaction and the fear of loss. Thus, they ceaselessly appeal to time, thirsting to gain a fleeting sense of security by controlling time and filling life-time with material desires. This cycle repeats; material desires are continuously reproduced, and the spirit is thereby continuously emptied.

第二，时间的加速性与精神世界的空虚感。对于时间的宗教式依赖导致人们自觉自愿地接受并服从整个社会日趋加速的节奏。马克思指出：“随着新生产力的获得，人们改变自己的生产方式，随着生产方式即谋生的方式的改变，人们也就会改变自己的一切社会关系。”资本增殖要求不断改造着生产关系的具体模式及其社会环境，而当代资本主义在全社会范围内推动快速的时间体制使人们形成了全新的人与人、人与物的社会关系，社会普遍追求的高效的物质生产全面主宰着人的对象化关系。社会时间中的精神向度逐渐变得模糊，深邃的思想、高贵的灵魂、健全的人格以及丰裕的精神世界愈发变得奢侈，甚至已经彻底消失在这个物欲横流的商品化世界。“精神的无限性变成十分狭隘的有限性；精神的思辨知性被退化为单纯工具主义的感性；精神的丰富性被衰减为单维的物欲性。”为了填补由精神世界的空虚所带来的冷漠和残酷，很多人退而求其次，转向追求低级庸俗的感官刺激和物欲满足。哈特穆特·罗萨（Hartmut Rosa）将当代资本主义称作是“加速社会”，他在马克思主义政治经济学的基础上深化了对当代社会的时间批判，认为资本增殖带动了人们的时间意识和整个社会的运转速率，由此将全体社会成员被不断优胜劣汰的加速社会所裹挟，并指出由此带来的主体、对象和实践行动之间关系不断的疏离及其异化的深入。在罗萨的逻辑中，“人们自愿去做他们不是‘真的’想做的事”从而导致了现代性的时间危机。在当代资本主义社会中，人们整日里不停忙碌却不知为何忙碌，时刻奔跑却不知为何奔跑，劳动充斥在生命时间中却没有任何生活感觉。一方面，在互联网信息技术加持下的资本循环空前加快，塑造出了高速记忆、信息爆炸体验等模式，将人们置于虚拟空间中以数字媒介强化人们精神体验的瞬时性、刺激性，庞大的信息流和高速的信息传输使人们精神获取只能流于表面、止于感官，也就不自觉地被资本控制的信息所规导和利用。另一方面，现代性的加速体验彻底重构了人与自我、人与人之间的关系。在对时间和金钱的追逐中，由于内心的急迫，现代人逃避深度思考，充满担忧，对自我的深入认知不断丧失，无法感知人生方向，进而从精神的紧张中疏远了传统的亲密关系，个人原子化倾向日渐严重，焦虑带来的孤独和迷茫充斥着人们的精神世界。从尼采到本雅明、阿甘本等都表达出这种生命时间模式下人的精神、情感和意义的丧失，时间本身成为价值性的目的。时间拜物教将人的精神满足感引向了金钱和物质，而金钱和物质恰恰正是最为变幻多端、时刻流动的工具。物化的追求让人们时刻处于高度紧张与惴惴不安之中，时刻处于追求满足与担忧失去之间，于是不停地将欲求诉诸时间，渴求通过掌控时间，将物欲充斥在生命时间中来获得短暂的安全感，如此循环往复，物欲被不断再造，精神从而不断空虚。

IV. Conclusion

四、结语

On the question of the time fetish formed by contemporary capitalist modernity, thinkers from Nietzsche to Heidegger and from Simmel to Rosa have profoundly reduced the pathological symptoms of this problem from different perspectives. These are the conceptual and ideal frameworks needed to disenchant capital’s time and restore the authentic and free nature of life-time. Yet they either place their hope for a solution in some form of spiritual awakening or fall entirely into pessimism, precisely because they fail to see the mode of production that, as a universal factor, plays a fundamental role behind social time. Marx, by contrast, provides a fundamental diagnosis and a thorough practical prescription: the time fetish, like all previous forms of fetishism, has as its decisive factor in the accumulation of any form of modernity the production of surplus value. In Marx’s view, the total alienation of human existence, life, and even life-time is deeply rooted in the internal structural contradictions of the capitalist mode of production, and is further reinforced by the corresponding social time pattern’s complete abstraction of time as such. This gives rise to an empty time that recognizes only material things and money, but not freedom, meaning, or the future. To break through this abstract character of time and its fetishistic form, and to overcome the spiritual crisis generated by the entire temporal mode of capitalist modernity, a

在当今资本现代性形成的时间拜物教的问题上，从尼采到海德格尔，从西美尔到罗萨，都以不同视角将这一问题的精神病症深刻地还原，这些都是为资本时间祛魅，恢复生命时间本真和自由本性所需要的观念与理想架构。但他们或将解决路径寄托于某种精神醒悟，或彻底陷于悲观，正是由于没有看到社会时间背后作为普遍性因素起到根本作用的生产方式。而马克思则提供了根本的诊断和彻底的实践药方，时间拜物教就如同以往所有的拜物教形式一样，任何现代性的形式的积累中起决定作用的都是剩余价值生产的因素。在马克思看来，人的生存、生活乃至生命时间的全面异化深深根植于资本主义生产方式的内在结构性矛盾中，并借以与之相适应的社会时间模式对整个时间的完全抽象化进行再强化。由此导致了只认物质、金钱而不认自由、意义与未来的空虚时间的诞生。要破除这种时间抽象性及其拜物教形式，破除整个资本现代性时间模式下产生的精神危机，显然类似于海德格尔式的症状解读是不完全、不彻底的，从根本上讲，仍然要回到马克思“改变世界”而非仅仅“解释世界”的实践行动上。当前务必摆脱对时间拜物教问题无意识、未加反思的状态，从而进入自觉的、深刻反思的状态；必须真正揭露资本逻辑唯利是图的真面目，努力把经济理性上升到政治理性的高度。时间拜物教本质来说就是资本逻辑在世界历史中这一阶段的表达方式，只有对资本逻辑进行彻底扬弃和批判性超越，才能迎来社会主义与共产主义阶段所内含的真正的自由时间，使人们从资本现代性时间封闭性的逻辑中走出来得到真正启蒙，使对于自由时间的实践追求成为普遍性的历史力量，最终实现真正意义上的开放、自由的社会时间。（注释略）

(The author is a doctoral student at the School of Marxism, Nankai University)

（作者系南开大学马克思主义学院博士研究生）

Online editor: Zhang Jian

网络编辑：张剑