马克思主义研究网Marxism Research Network

Unofficial English translation by DeepSeek, a Chinese LLM · source marxism.cass.cn

Time in Our Lives: Reflections on Work and Capitalist Temporality

布赖恩·D.帕尔默:我们生命中的时间:对工作和资本主义时间性的反思

· · Marxism Abroad · Bryan D. Palmer · Foreign Theoretical Trends, 2023, no. 4—Socialist Register, 2021, vol. 57, first published at www.merlinpress.co.uk, translation abridged. This translation is a phased result of the 2022 Liaoning Provincial Social Science Fund project "Research on the Generation Mechanism and Resolution Path of the Digital Labor Paradox from the Perspective of Historical Materialism" · 32 min read

At certain moments in history, people have viewed time itself differently, even grasping it in ways that break with past practice. Revolution is such a moment: rigid old calendars are often overturned. Crisis, like revolution, leads to the restructuring of time and changes in how it is conceived. 2020, the year this article was written, the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic was such a moment, a catalyst that accelerated and intensified developments in the concept of time in recent years. Time, and how it has become an important factor affecting the reorganization of work, is at the core of these changes; a rethinking of capitalist temporality seems particularly important.

在历史上的某些时刻,人们对时间本身的看法不同,甚至以与过去的做法相决裂的方式来把握时间。革命就是这样的时刻:僵化的老黄历经常被推翻。危机就像革命一样,会导致时间的重构及构想方式的改变。2020年,也就是在本文撰写之时,新冠疫情的暴发之际就是这样一个时刻,它是一种催化剂,加速并强化了时间概念在最近几年的发展。时间以及它如何成为影响工作重组的重要因素是这些变化的核心;对资本主义时间性(temporality)的重新思考似乎尤其重要。

The crisis triggered by the novel coronavirus has left millions of people around the world unable to leave their homes to go to work. The traditional divisions between day and night, labor and leisure, private and public have successively collapsed, breaking down distinctions such as the work week/weekend, which had seemed to be the basic pattern of daily life. Governments have been forced to invest huge sums of money to maintain the operations of capital, both large and small, and to sustain the livelihoods of countless workers whose ability, under established conventions, to "do a fair day's work for a fair day's pay" has suddenly ceased. Many temporarily unemployed workers will undoubtedly lose their jobs permanently. For others, the expectation of working from home has eliminated the long-recognized distinction between earning a wage through labor outside the home and ceasing work to raise offspring inside the home. In many respects, large numbers of capitalist economies have been "gigified," while other sectors labeled "essential" are caught in a dilemma between unrealistic and unattainable expectations of "service" and the harsh demands of authoritarian authority.

新冠病毒引发的危机导致全世界数以百万计的人无法走出家门去上班,白天与黑夜、劳动与休闲、私人与公共的传统划分相继瓦解,打破了工作周/周末等的区分,而这似乎已成为日常生活的基本样态。各国政府被迫投入巨额资金来维持大小资本的运转,并维持无数工人的生计,这些工人在既定惯例中“做一天公平的工作,得一天公平的工资”的能力突然终止。许多暂时失业的工人无疑将永久失去工作。对于另一些人来说,他们期望在家里工作,这消除了长期以来公认的在外通过劳动挣工资与在家里停止工作、繁育后代的区分。在许多方面,大量的资本主义经济体被“零工化”了,其他被贴上“重要”标签的部门则陷于对“服务”的不切实际和无法实现的期望与专制权威的苛刻要求的两难境地。

For many, the original understanding of what constitutes working time has vanished, and they must work around the clock. Matters originally accomplished in different spaces—such as caring for children, purchasing daily necessities, and obeying the boss's orders—are now crammed into paid working hours. Working time restrictions won through centuries of struggle, and workplace health and safety rights gained after 1965, have been ruthlessly discarded with the outbreak of the pandemic. The pandemic has pried open and detonated Pandora's box of time and the working day. Can capital, and the state serving its interests, easily retreat from this?

对于许多人来说,原有的对什么是工作时间的理解已经烟消云散,他们必须不分昼夜地工作。原本属于在不同的空间中完成的诸如照顾孩子、购买生活必需品和听从老板的吩咐等事宜现在都被塞进带薪工作时间里。通过几个世纪的斗争才获得的工作时间限制,以及在1965年以后获得的工作场所健康和安全权利,随着新冠疫情的暴发而被无情抛弃。新冠疫情撬开并引爆了时间和工作日的潘多拉魔盒,资本以及为其利益服务的国家能否轻易从中撤退?

For socialists, time and its meaning and organization have always been a core issue, simply because capitalism places great importance on controlling time and subordinating it to the demands of capital. In the current situation, time has become a challenge that socialists must address, not only because it defines what is and is not the working day, but also because it is increasingly evident that time and its organization define life itself. Will time continue to be compressed into the demands of capital, or will it be reimagined as an object of liberation, a constant struggle to strengthen the project of human emancipation?

对于社会主义者来说,时间及其意义和组织一直是一个核心问题,这不过是因为资本主义非常重视控制时间并使其服从于资本主义的要求。在当前的形势下,时间已经成为社会主义者需要应对的挑战,不仅是因为它界定了什么是工作日,什么不是工作日,而且越来越明显的是,时间及其组织界定了生活本身。时间会继续被压缩为资本的需求,还是被重新想象为解放的对象,以加强人类解放规划的方式不断为之斗争?

I. Time Becomes the Standard

一、时间变为标准

Lucy Larcom, a "mill girl" in Lowell, Massachusetts, USA, was uninterested in the noisy machinery of the early 19th-century Massachusetts textile mills and wrote poems titled "Early Doom" and "The Complaint of the Nameless." When she finally decided to leave her unsettling workplace, her boss asked, "Are you going where you can earn more money?" Larcom quickly replied, "No, I am going where I can have more time." Although Marx lived in a world entirely different from Larcom's, he well understood the mill girl's wish, writing that time "is the space for human development."

露西·拉卡姆(Lucy Larcom)是美国马萨诸塞州洛威尔市的一位“磨坊女郎”,她对19世纪早期马萨诸塞州纺织工厂里嘈杂的机器不感兴趣,曾写下了题为《早期注定》和《无名之辈的抱怨》的诗。当她最终决定离开令人不安的工作场所时,她的老板问道:“你要去可以赚更多钱的地方吗?”拉卡姆迅速回应道:“不,我要去可以有更多时间的地方。”马克思虽然与拉卡姆生活在两个完全不同的世界里,但他还是很理解这位磨坊女工的愿望,他曾写道,时间“是人的发展的空间”。

Capitalism has operated for a long time, but it pays little attention to human development; its concept of progress narrows economic benefits to ensuring gains for capital. As Jonathan Martineau points out: "In the temporal order of our modernity, time that is measured and organized is closely related to its alienation, for the simple reason that time is not measured and organized by us, but by capital; nor is it measured and organized for us, but for capital itself." Max Weber endorsed Benjamin Franklin's understanding of the nascent capitalist spirit: "Since the measurement of time has become a uniform standard, and since precious time is minted into individual hours, the industrious person knows how to make good use of each piece of time to do their work well. Wasting time is in fact wasting money."

资本主义已经运行了很长一段时间,但它几乎并不关注人类的发展,它的进步观念将经济利益缩小到保证资本受益。正如乔纳森·马蒂诺(Jonathan

Marx recognized that the core contradiction of capital lies in its vampire-like insatiability: it must create disposable labor time for the few while simultaneously converting the free time of the majority into surplus labor time for accumulation. Capital's conquest of labor is expanded and sustained by extracting wealth from direct mass consumption. Therefore, "the results achieved in time spent directly on production must be relatively large, exceeding the direct needs for the reproduction of the capital used in these production sectors."

Martineau)指出的那样:“在我们所处现代的时间秩序中,被衡量和组织起来的时间与其异化密切相关,原因很简单,时间不是由我们,而是由资本来衡量和组织的;也不是为了我们来衡量和组织,而是为了资本本身去衡量和组织。”马克斯·韦伯(Max Weber)认可本杰明·富兰克林(Benjamin Franklin)对新生的资本主义精神的理解:“既然时间的衡量已经变成一个统一的标准,既然宝贵的时光被分铸成一个个小时,勤劳的人知道怎么样好好利用每一块时间来做好自己的工作。挥霍时间实际上就是挥霍金钱。”

On the one hand, the costs of reproducing labor power (including the foundations of human development, such as housing, childcare, literacy, and cultural horizons) are constrained to the point that working people are forced, in different ways, in different places, and across historical periods, into ever-deteriorating material conditions. Their prospects for development in all aspects are limited.

马克思认识到,资本的核心矛盾在于,它像吸血鬼一样贪得无厌,既要为少数人创造可支配的劳动时间,同时又要把多数人的自由时间转化为用于积累的剩余劳动时间。资本对劳动的征服是通过从直接的大众消费中提取财富而扩大和持续的,因此,“用在直接生产上的时间所取得的成果必定相对说来很大,超出了这些生产部门所使用的资本的再生产的直接需要”。

On the other hand, the resources spent on reproducing capital have historically been enormous, including costs measured not in gold bullion but in human heads, including imperial expansion (often driven by war) that brought powerful freight benefiting only a few, colonial plunder that conquered indigenous peoples from the Americas to Australia and New Zealand, and the slave trade. As the transportation and communication revolutions of the 18th and 19th centuries became increasingly prominent in the Industrial Revolution, the global expansion of railways, canals, aqueducts, and telegraph systems became a hallmark of the transformative era. Associated with this massive expenditure was the establishment of supervisory and regulatory mechanisms. From archives to asylums, including prisons, police forces, and public education systems, these were typically established with the support of nation-states serving the needs of capital.

一方面,再生产劳动力的成本(包括人类发展的基础,如住房、儿童看护、读写能力和文化视野等)受到限制,以至于劳动人民被迫以不同的方式、在不同的地方并贯穿各个历史时期,陷入不断恶化的物质环境之中。他们在各个方面的发展前景都是受到限制的。

For Marx, this imbalance between human development and capitalist appropriation stands in opposition to the expansion of true social wealth. In this expansion, "the development of social productive forces will be so rapid that, although production will aim at the enrichment of all, the disposable free time of all will still increase. For true wealth is the developed productive force of all individuals. Then the measure of wealth will no longer be labor time, but disposable free time." Conversely, what happens under the insatiable system of individualism is the reduction of a portion of the laboring population to a surplus population, because "modern industry constantly produces both overproduction and underproduction," inevitably leading to "fluctuations and convulsions." Therefore, time, and capital's appropriation of time, ultimately results in a political economy of universal expropriation, manipulated by turbulence, scarcity, and frequent crises, which can only be adjusted through a revolutionary reversal.

另一方面,花费在再生产资本上的资源历来是巨大的,包括不是以金条而是以人头数来计算的成本,包括帝国扩张(通常是由战争来驱动的)带来的只让少数人受益的强大货运、征服了从美洲到澳大利亚和新西兰的土著居民的殖民掠夺,以及奴隶贸易。随着18世纪和19世纪的交通和通信革命在工业革命中的日渐凸显,铁路、运河、渡槽和电报系统的全球扩张成为转型时代的显著标志。与这笔巨额支出相关的是监督和监管机制的建立。从档案馆到收容所,包括监狱、警察部队和公共教育系统,通常都是在为资本需求服务的民族国家的支持下建立起来的。

For Marx, this imbalance between human development and capitalist appropriation stands in opposition to the genuine social expansion of wealth. In such an expansion, "the development of the productive forces of society will proceed so rapidly that, although production will aim at the enrichment of all, the disposable free time of all will nevertheless increase. For real wealth is the developed productive power of all individuals. The measure of wealth is then no longer labor time, but rather disposable free time." Conversely, what occurs under the insatiable system of individualism is the reduction of a portion of the laboring population to a surplus population, because "modern industry always produces overproduction and underproduction" inevitably leading to "fluctuations and convulsions." Hence, time and capital's appropriation of time ultimately give rise to a political economy of universal expropriation, one manipulated by turbulence, scarcity, and recurrent crises, which can only be rectified through a revolutionary reversal.

对于马克思来说,人类发展与资本主义占有之间的这种不平衡与真正的财富社会化扩张相对立。在这种扩张中,“社会生产力的发展将如此迅速,以致尽管生产将以所有的人富裕为目的,所有的人的可以自由支配的时间还是会增加。因为真正的财富就是所有个人的发达的生产力。那时,财富的尺度决不再是劳动时间,而是可以自由支配的时间”。相反,在贪得无厌的个人主义体制下发生的事情是将一部分劳动人口减少为过剩人口,因为“现代工业经常生产过剩和经常生产不足”必然导致“波动和痉挛”,因此,时间以及资本对时间的占有最终导致了一种普遍剥夺的政治经济学,这种政治经济学由动荡、匮乏和频现的危机所操控,只有通过革命的逆转才能调整。

Marx saw this subordination and its destructive consequences in the struggle of transition. In this struggle, time occupies a prominent place. Socialized human beings must reconfigure time, “rationally regulating their material interchange with nature, placing it under their common control, instead of letting it rule them as a blind force.” This can only be achieved through material interchange with the realm of necessity, which is the foundation of Marx’s dialectical understanding of human and economic development. He believed that the true realm of freedom can flourish only when time, as a typical natural phenomenon, serves the associated producers, rather than satisfying capital’s insatiable desires. This class struggle for shorter working hours, in Marx’s words, is to protect the working class “against the ‘serpent of their torment.’” Capital’s insatiable demand to consolidate labor time produces fatal consequences: it “shortens the life-span of labor-power,” “just as a greedy farmer increases his harvest by robbing the soil of its fertility.” As time is reduced to money, consumed for its own sake, capital begins “to shorten the life of the worker, in order to extend the production time of the worker within a given period.” Hence, the proletariat must establish a “powerful social barrier,” legally limiting the length of the working day, to prevent workers from “selling themselves and their offspring into death and slavery through a voluntary contract with capital.” When the bourgeoisie proclaims itself the savior of humanity with “the pompous catalogue of ‘inalienable human rights,’” workers offer “the modest Magna Carta of a legally limited working day,” clearly defining “when the time the worker sells ends and when the time belonging to the worker himself begins.” Although the struggle to reduce working hours is compulsory, it can only be an intermediate action. Marx points out: “The absolute limit to the shortening of the working day is the universalization of labor. In capitalist society, one class enjoys free time because the entire life-time of the masses is converted into labor time.” Under capitalism, reducing formal paid labor time is ultimately futile, yet it is crucial in the escalating class struggle. “Thus the working day is not a constant, but a variable quantity”; “the working day can be determined, but it is in itself indeterminate.” The use of labor-power for the full 24 hours of a working day is an inherent tendency of capitalist production.

马克思在过渡的斗争中看到了这种从属及其破坏性的后果。在这种斗争中,时间占据了显著地位。社会化的人必须重新配置时间,“合理地调节他们和自然之间的物质变换,把它置于他们的共同控制之下,而不让它作为一种盲目的力量来统治自己”。这只能通过与必然王国中的物质变换来实现,这是马克思理解人类和经济的发展辩证法的基础。他认为,只有当时间作为典型的自然现象服务于联合起来的生产者,而不是满足资本的贪婪欲望时,真正的自由王国才能繁荣起来。这种争取较短工时的阶级斗争,用马克思的话来说,是为了保护工人阶级,“‘抵御’折磨他们的毒蛇”。资本对巩固劳动时间的贪得无厌的需求产生了致命的后果,它“缩短劳动力的寿命”,“正像贪得无厌的农场主靠掠夺土地肥力来提高收获量一样”。随着时间还原为金钱,为自己的利益而消耗,资本开始“靠缩短工人的寿命,在一定期限内延长工人的生产时间”。因此,无产阶级有必要建立一个“强有力的社会屏障”,以立法的形式限制工作日的长度,以防止工人“通过自愿与资本缔结的契约而把自己和后代卖出去送死和受奴役”。当资产阶级以“‘不可剥夺的人权’这种冠冕堂皇的条目”宣称自己是人类的救世主时,工人们提供了“从法律上限制工作日的朴素的大宪章”,明确“工人出卖的时间何时结束,属于工人自己的时间何时开始”。尽管减少工作时间的斗争是强制性的,但这只能是一种中间行动。马克思指出:“工作日的缩短的绝对界限就是劳动的普遍化。在资本主义社会里,一个阶级享有自由时间,是由于群众的全部生活时间都转化为劳动时间了。”在资本主义制度下,减少正式的有薪劳动时间最终是徒劳的,这在不断升级的阶级斗争中至关重要。“所以,工作日不是一个不变量,而是一个可变量”,“工作日是可以确定的,但是它本身是不定的”。在一个工作日的全天24小时内使用劳动力,是资本主义生产的内在趋势。

Hence, the call to limit the length of the working day—which can measure much of the self-activity of the 19th-century working class—is both necessary and insufficient as a foundation for proletarian emancipation. For in the very process of redefining time itself, the working class inevitably confronts the realization that their struggle is not merely for “a fair day’s work for a fair day’s wage,” but for “the abolition of the wage system.”

因此,限制工作日长度的呼吁——可以衡量19世纪工人阶级的大部分自我活动——作为无产阶级解放的基础,既是必要的,也是不充分的。因为在重新定义时间本身的过程中,工人阶级必然面临这样的认识:他们的斗争不仅仅是为了“做一天公平的工作,得一天公平的工资”,更是为了“消灭雇佣劳动制度”。

The Ten-Hour, Nine-Hour, and Eight-Hour Leagues and Short Time Committees became synonymous with workers’ uprisings, proclaiming themselves “merchants of time,” in a manner that extended the demand for reduced labor time into the broader realm of social change. Whether it was the uprising for reduced labor time organized by the Short Time Committees from February to March 1867, or the confrontation between Chicago workers and police on May 4, 1886, fighting for an eight-hour workday, these were struggles centered on time. These struggles, vital to the interests of the working class, were completed by making workers adapt to capital’s logic of treating time as an input for producing profitable commodities. For capitalists who prioritize capital accumulation, nothing is more important than increasing labor intensity while shortening labor time. The maintenance of this necessity relies on capital’s hegemonic position in a society premised on property, supported by a state that upholds such property relations. Acceptance of this order is the cornerstone of the legal system, upon which the recognition of trade unions and the realization of their potential rights, including collective bargaining rights, will ultimately find their balance.

十小时、九小时、八小时联盟和缩短工时委员会(Short Time Committees)成为工人起义的代名词,他们宣称自己是“时代的商人”,这样的行为方式将减少劳动时间的要求延伸到更广泛的社会变革领域。无论是1867年2月至3月期间缩短工时委员会组织的争取减少劳动时间的起义,还是1886年5月4日芝加哥工人为争取一天八小时工作制而与警察发生的对抗,都是围绕时间展开的斗争。这些对于工人阶级的利益至关重要的斗争,通过让工人适应资本把时间作为生产获利商品的投入的逻辑而完成。对于重视资本积累的资本家来说,没有什么比在缩短劳动时间的同时增加劳动强度更重要的了。这种必要性的维持有赖于资本在以财产为前提的社会居霸权地位,并得到了维护这种所有制关系的国家的支持。接受该秩序是法律制度的基石,在此基础上,工会的承认以及对其潜在权利包括集体谈判权利的实现,最终将取得平衡。

Marx had already articulated this before all this occurred. Marx appreciated this binary division around labor time, placing it at the heart of struggle, recognizing that “legal restrictions on the working day” could put an end to some of the worst abuses of capitalist exploitation: “The compulsory shortening of the working day greatly promotes the development of productive forces and the economizing of the conditions of production.” He noted: “There is no doubt that when the law forever prevents capital from extending the working day, capital strives to compensate by constantly increasing labor intensity, and turns every improvement in machinery into a means of more intensively sucking dry labor-power. This tendency of capital soon reaches a turning point, making a further shortening of labor time inevitable.”

马克思在这一切发生之前就已经作出了论述。马克思很欣赏这种围绕劳动时间展开的二元划分,把它置于斗争的核心位置,认识到“法律对工作日的限制”能够终结资本主义剥削中一些不正当的做法,“强制缩短工作日,大大地推动了生产力的发展和生产条件的节约。他指出:“毫无疑问,当法律使资本永远不能延长工作日时,资本就力图不断提高劳动强度来补偿,并且把机器的每一改进变成一种加紧吮吸劳动力的手段,资本的这种趋势很快又必定达到一个转折点,使劳动时间不可避免地再一次缩短。”

II. Your Time and My Time

二、你的时间和我的时间

As the 20th century unfolded, both sides of revolution and counter-revolution vied for the emotions and needs of the masses. Capitalists could rely on war and militarism, imperialism and various other higher stages of domination, as well as multiple ways of dividing workers among themselves (such as racism, labor market segmentation, gender differences in the spheres of production and reproduction) to achieve their accumulation, while workers adopted various means to resist the treatment of time as a commodity or property of the wage-earning class. These resistances both embodied relentless class struggle and reinforced the logic of capital’s ultimate authority.

随着20世纪的发展,革命和反革命的双方都在争夺群众的情感和需求。资本家可以依靠战争和军国主义、帝国主义和其他各种更高级别的统治阶段,以及工人彼此分裂的多种方式(如种族主义、劳动力市场分割、生产和再生产领域的性别差异等)来实现自身的积累,而工人则采取多种方式抵制那些把时间作为雇佣阶级的商品或财产的做法。这些抵制既体现了无情的阶级斗争,也强化了资本终极权威的逻辑。

In 1913, a massive textile workers’ strike in Paterson, New Jersey, brought the American silk capital to a standstill for four months. At the same time, the Eight-Hour League, led by the Industrial Workers of the World, advocated “Americanism from below” among the 25,000 strikers, most of whom were immigrant women and children. Women, who had to perform both domestic labor and factory work, were ardent supporters of reducing labor time. However, when anarchist agitator Carlos Tresca suggested at a mass meeting that shortening working hours would make working men and women less tired, thus giving them more time to be together, the women’s response was sullen silence. Tresca joked: “That way we can have more children.” But the women were not amused. Noticing their sullen reaction, leader Big Bill Haywood interrupted and corrected Tresca: “No, Carlos, we believe in birth control—fewer children, and take good care of them.” The women burst into laughter and warm applause.

1913年,在新泽西州帕特森爆发的大规模纺织工人罢工运动导致美国丝绸之都停摆了四个月。与此同时,由世界产业工人联盟领导的八小时联盟在25000名罢工者中倡导“来自底层的美国主义”。这些罢工者大多数是移民妇女和儿童。妇女们既要做家务,又要进入工厂劳动,是减少劳动时间的衷心拥护者。然而,当无政府主义煽动者卡洛斯·特雷斯卡(Carlos Tresca)在一次群众集会上建议缩短工作时间,让工作的男女不那么累,从而有更多的时间相处时,妇女们对此的反应却是闷闷不乐的沉默。特雷斯卡开玩笑说:“这样可以生更多的孩子。”但女人们并没有因此高兴起来。在注意到她们闷闷不乐的反应后,领导人大比尔·海伍德(Big Bill Haywood)打断并纠正了特雷斯卡的讲话:“不,卡洛斯,我们相信节育——少生孩子,好好照顾这些孩子。”女人堆里爆发出欢笑声和热烈的掌声。

Thus, although capitalism weathered many storms, its hegemonic control over rebellious labor and other potential opponents was challenged from multiple directions, including the world’s first proletarian revolution, the Russian October Revolution of 1917. John Reed, in his classic account *Ten Days That Shook the World*, described this revolution as bringing a “newer, faster life.” The seven-hour workday implemented in certain industrial sectors of the Soviet Union stood in stark contrast to the situation in the United States, where a five-day, 40-hour workweek was rare, existing mostly in well-organized craft sectors of the construction industry, supported by the conservative American Federation of Labor. On the eve of the Great Depression, American manufacturing workers still labored long hours; fewer than 20% worked less than 48 hours per week, while 54% worked more than 49 hours, and even over 60 hours. It was not until the World War II period of the 1940s that American unions broke through to a 40-hour workweek, something already achieved much earlier in Europe and Australia.

因此,尽管资本主义经受住了许多风暴,但它对反抗的劳工以及其他潜在反对者的霸权控制受到了多方挑战,包括世界上第一次无产阶级革命,即1917年的俄国十月革命。约翰·里德(John Reed)在其著作《震撼世界的十天》(Ten Days That Shook the World)中对十月革命作了经典描述,认为这次革命带来了一种“更新、更快的生活”。苏联某些工业领域中实行的七小时工作制与美国的情况形成了鲜明的对比:在美国,工人每周工作五天40小时的情况很少见,大多数情况下这只存在于建筑行业中组织严密的手工艺领域,且得到了保守的美国工会联合会的支持。在大萧条前夕,美国的制造业工人仍然需要长时间工作,只有不到20%的工人每周工作时间少于48小时,54%的人每周工作时间超过49小时,甚至超过60小时。直到1940年代的二战时期,美国工会才打破每周工作40小时的规定,而这在欧洲和澳大利亚很早就已经实现了。

Time is clearly against the worker; by 1915, the stopwatch had become the odious symbol of capital’s rationalization of every movement of labour. As David Montgomery has pointed out, with the introduction of Frederick Winslow Taylor’s system of “scientific management” into American machine shops and other industries, the components of the labour process that constituted the life of the workplace were subdivided, precisely decomposed by time-study men whose contempt for the worker reached shameless proportions. For the Taylorite manager, the measure of time was the progress of science in the service of capital. The mathematician and engineer Carl Barth introduced Taylorism into the Watertown Arsenal in Massachusetts, provoking a strike by workers that led to the prohibition of time study in national arsenals and navy yards from 1915 to 1949.

时间显然对工人不利,到1915年,秒表已成为助力资本把劳动者的每一个动作合理化的可恶的象征。正如大卫·蒙哥马利(David Montgomery)所指出的那样,随着弗雷德里克·温斯洛·泰勒(Frederick Winslow Taylor)的“科学管理”系统被引入美国的机械车间和其他行业,构成工作场所生活的劳动过程的组成部分被细分,被时间研究人员精密分解,他们对工人的蔑视达到了无耻的程度。对于泰勒派管理者来说,时间的衡量标准是科学为资本服务的进步。数学家、工程师卡尔·巴特(Carl Barth)把泰勒制引入马萨诸塞州的沃特敦兵工厂,引发了工人罢工,导致1915—1949年禁止在国家军火库和海军船厂进行时间研究。

In a changing environment, due to the intensification of labour and ongoing conflicts over clocking in and out, time was eventually incorporated into the accepted rhythm and tone of capital–labour conflict. To a large extent, time was radically rethought at the margins of the workers’ movement and re-identified as a decisive component of potentially transformative class struggle. In his *Reflections on Violence*, Georges Sorel sought to transcend the limitations of present thought, envisioning a future “at an indeterminate time” in which residual relations and constraints could be cast aside. Understandings of this kind (sometimes conscious, more often unconscious) intersected with the confrontational planning activities that occurred informally in many workplaces (both unorganized and organized). But this disruption and negation of capitalist time was far removed from the legally constituted system of collective bargaining, which developed an increasingly clear understanding of how unions should fight for time.

在不断变化的环境中,由于劳动的密集化以及关于打卡工作时间的冲突不断,时间最终被纳入公认的资本—劳动冲突的惯常节奏和基调中。在很大程度上,时间是在工人运动的边缘被彻底重新思考,并被重新认定为潜在的变革性阶级斗争的决定性组成部分。乔治·索雷尔(Georges Sorel)在他的《对暴力的反思》(Refections on Violence)一书中,试图超越当下思想的局限,设想一个“在某个不确定的时间”里的未来,在那里,可以把残留的关系和约束观念抛在脑后。诸如此类的理解(有时是有意识的,更多时候是无意识的)与在许多工作场所非正式地发生的对抗计划的活动(这些活动既有无组织的,也有有组织的)相互交叉。但是,这种对资本主义时间的破坏和否定与合法构成的集体谈判制度相去甚远,后者对工会应该如何争取时间有了越来越明确的理解。

Thus, the struggle around time never truly ended; it is just that there is now no time to struggle. The centrality of time disappeared with its monetization. During the period of relative capitalist prosperity, the prevalence of Keynesianism, the recognition of limited union power, and the implementation of the welfare state, the union-led mobilization for shorter hours also subsided, and the formal struggle over the length of the working day reached a stalemate. In the 1950s, trade unionism stumbled in the advanced capitalist economies of the West, even as organized labour achieved considerable gains—a situation that continued into the 1960s and early 1970s. Time did not leave the bargaining table, but was incorporated into collective bargaining in a way that intensified economism, where the primary consideration of differences was wages.

因此,围绕时间展开的斗争从未真正结束,只是如今没有时间去斗争了。时间的中心地位随着它的货币化而消失了。在资本主义相对繁荣、凯恩斯主义盛行、承认工会权力有限且实施福利国家制度的时期,工会领导的缩短工时的动员活动也平息下来,关于工作日长度的正式斗争陷入僵局。1950 年代,工会主义在西方发达资本主义经济体中步履蹒跚,而此时,有组织的劳工所取得的收益却相当可观,这种情景一直持续到1960年代和1970年代初。时间并没有离开谈判桌,而是以一种强化激进经济主义的方式融入集体谈判,其中分歧的首要考虑因素是工资。

III. A Transitional Period: Time and the 1960s

三、一个过渡期:时间和1960 年代

The 1960s witnessed the final boom of the postwar economy. The long-standing struggle over labour time seemed to have been resolved, prompting historians and social scientists to consider the question of leisure—a topic that quietly evolved into a revival of interest, raised in a very mechanical way in Edward A. Ross’s sociology of social control. The Twentieth Century Fund, composed of liberal social scientists and progressives, along with its board of directors, conducted extensive research on time, work, and leisure, with the results published in 1962. Sociologists and historians developed a keen interest in mass entertainment and the distinction between work and leisure, especially as this related to mainstream political science and anthropology’s understanding of modernization. Sidney Pollard offered pioneering insights into how factory discipline was instilled in workers during the Industrial Revolution. This was a process of saving time, which Pollard and Beatrice Webb called a “compulsory asceticism”; they denounced the leisure activities of the common masses as “typical of immoral idleness.”

1960年代见证了战后经济的最后繁荣。围绕劳动时间展开的长期斗争似乎得到了解决,这促使历史学家和社会科学家开始考虑休闲的问题,这个话题悄悄地演变为兴趣的复活,在爱德华·A.罗斯(Edward A.Ross)的关注社会控制的社会学中以非常机械的方式被提出来。由自由社会科学家和进步人士组成的20世纪基金会及其董事会就时间、工作和休闲问题展开了广泛的研究,研究成果于1962 年出版。社会学家和历史学家对大众娱乐及工作与休闲之间的区分产生了浓厚的兴趣,特别是当这与主流政治科学和人类学对现代化的理解有关时,更是如此。西德尼·波拉德(Sidney Pollard)就工业革命期间如何向工人灌输工厂纪律提出了开创性的见解。这是一个节省时间的过程,用波拉德和比阿特丽斯·韦伯(Beatrice Webb)的话来说,是一种“强制禁欲主义”,他们抨击平民群众的休闲活动是“不道德的无所事事的典型”。

In the process of giving a materialist transformation to Hegel’s theory of alienation, Marx’s reflections of 1844 resonated with the contradictions of a seemingly affluent society that was not committed to overcoming human alienation through the establishment of a welfare state. Marx insisted that different classes have different and conflicting relationships with time, thereby extending Hegel’s claim that “time is the negative element in the sensuous world”; in this conflictual relationship, the working day is “enslaved” by the commodity. The possession of capital can only be experienced as “alienation.” In Marx’s view, labour time is entirely external to the worker; such discourse fully aligned with the sentiments of young radicals, the New Left’s intense pursuit of human liberation, and the postwar emphasis on the affluent society and leisure, thus echoing repeatedly in various oppositional thoughts. Tom Bottomore, citing Marx’s *Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844* in 1965, emphasized that labour “is not voluntary, but coerced,” a mere means to satisfy needs outside of labour, the basis of which is time itself. Thus, workers in capitalist society, especially younger workers not weighed down by the experience of past constraints, instinctively grasped the difference between their working conditions and their free time. Marx’s view that “the worker feels at home only outside of work” was also reflected in Herbert Marcuse’s *An Essay on Liberation*.

在对黑格尔的异化理论进行唯物主义改造的过程中,马克思在1844年的反思与表面上富裕的社会的矛盾产生了共鸣,这个富裕社会并未致力于通过建立福利国家来克服人类的异化。马克思坚持认为,不同阶级与时间的关系是不同的,并且是相冲突的,并借此扩展了黑格尔关于“时间是感性世界中的否定因素”的主张,在这种冲突关系中,工作日被商品“奴役”。资本的占有只能被体验为“异化”。在马克思看来,劳动时间是完全外在于工人的,这样的话语完全符合青年激进派的情感、新左翼对人类解放的强烈追求以及战后对富裕社会和休闲的重视,因而一再回响于各种对立的思想中。汤姆·博托摩尔(Tom Bottomore)在1965年引用马克思的《1844年经济学哲学手稿》中的话时强调,劳动“不是自愿的,而是强制的”,只是为了满足劳动以外的那些需要的一种手段,这些需要的基础是时间本身。由此,资本主义社会的工人,尤其是没有被过去的束缚体验压得喘不过气来的年轻工人,本能地掌握了他们的工作条件与休息时间之间的差异。马克思认为,“工人只有在劳动之外才感到自在”,这一观点也反映在赫伯特·马尔库塞(Herbert Marcuse)的《论解放》(An Essay on Liberation)中。

The rethinking of time, its meaning, and its possibilities was central to all these discussions. In the workplaces of advanced capitalist countries, young workers struggled against bosses, the state, and union bureaucrats, sometimes influenced by the developing ideas of the New Left. In *One-Dimensional Man*, Marcuse envisioned the end of capitalist scientific rationality in “the possibility of an essentially new human reality—namely, existence in free time on the basis of fulfilled basic needs.” In the words of the Students for a Democratic Society’s founding 1962 document, *The Port Huron Statement*, if doing so seemed like “seeking the impossible,” it was in fact the only way to “avoid the illusory.”

对时间、时间的意义及其可能性的重新思考,是所有这些讨论的核心。在发达资本主义国家的工作场所,年轻工人与老板、国家和工会官僚作斗争,有时会受到发展中的新左翼思想的影响。马尔库塞在《单向度的人》(One-Dimensional Man)一书中设想资本主义的科学理性终结于“一种本质上新的人类现实的可能性——即在满足了基本需求的基础上在自由时间中的存在”。用“学生争取民主社会”(Students for a Democratic Society)组织1962年的创始文件《休伦港宣言》(The Port Huron Statement)中的话来说,如果这么做看起来是在“寻求难以实现的目标”,那么其实是“避免那些虚无飘渺的东西”的唯一途径。

IV. E.P. Thompson: Time in an Age of Affluence, Apathy, and Alienation

四、E.P.汤普森:富裕、冷漠和异化时代的时间

The above views were not far from what E.P. Thompson thought as he entered the 1960s as a member of the first generation of the British New Left. His concerns included the need to explore historical themes of oppression, deprivation, and rebellion in ways that might indicate “a relation to Marx’s concept of alienation.” In the opening essay of *Out of Apathy*, the first collection expressing the New Left position, Thompson declared that against the broad social backdrop of Fabian gradualism, the new urgent task was to mobilize against the decline of capitalist society and popular apathy. He argued that apathy and alienation could only be countered by breaking “the conventions that limit our lives,” and time was one such limitation.

上述观点与E.P.汤普森(E.P.Thompson)在作为第一代英国新左翼的一员步入 1960 年代时的想法相差无几。他关注的问题包括需要以可能表明“与马克思的异化概念相关”的方式探索压迫、剥夺和反叛的历史主题。汤普森在第一本表达新左翼立场的论文集《走出冷漠》(Out of Apathy)的开篇中宣称,在费边渐进主义(Fabian gradualism)的社会大背景下,新的紧迫性问题是动员起来,反对资本主义社会的衰退和民众的冷漠。他认为,冷漠和异化只能通过打破“限制我们生活的惯例”来对抗,时间就是这样一种限制。

Thompson’s highly influential work *The Making of the English Working Class*, first published in 1963, prompted him to turn his research direction toward the past in a timely manner. In that book, discussing the eighteenth century, he pointed out that the worker predecessors who launched uprisings between 1790 and 1832 were prepared for proletarianization. The essay “Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism,” from his collection *Customs in Common: Studies in Traditional Popular Culture*, is hailed as Thompson’s finest historical research. Based on a broad survey, this essay argues that capitalism shapes human nature into strict adherence to time and domination by property/accumulation, yet few have studied it theoretically, situated it within the sociocultural and political context of the work, or assessed it in terms of its enduring relevance. At the time of writing this essay, Thompson resolutely opposed fashionable modernization theory. In his view, modernization, with its positivist, utilitarian, and quantifiable characteristics, appeared to transition smoothly into industrial capitalism, compressing it into a path model from “primitive” to “advanced” social formations, reifying the route that might be taken in Western Europe and North America, and simply and absolutely dividing human society into two types: “traditional” and “modern.” This dichotomy obscures historical complexity. In the *May Day Manifesto* published in 1967 and 1968, he declared that modernization is the “theology” of new capitalism, an ideology that the present never ends, a technological means detached from the past yet creating no future. It does not confront conflicts of power, values, or interests, nor does it envision or encourage prioritizing choices among competing matters. Modernization theory perfectly adapts to the ideological project of power continuing to shape “disciplined labor” globally.

汤普森极具影响力的著作《英国工人阶级的形成》(The Making of the English Working Class)于1963年首次出版,这本书促使他及时将研究方向转向过去。书中谈到了18世纪,他指出,1790—1832年间发动起义的工人前辈们为无产阶级化做好了准备。其论文集《共有的习惯:18世纪英国的平民文化》(Customs in Common: Studies in Traditional Popular Culture)中的《时间、工作纪律和工业资本主义》一文被誉为汤普森的最佳历史研究成果,该文在广泛调查的基础上指出,资本主义将人的本质塑造成对时间的严格遵守和对财产/积累的支配,但很少有人从理论上对其进行研究,并将其置于作品所处的社会文化和政治背景下,或根据其持续相关性进行评估。在撰写该文时,汤普森坚决反对时髦的现代化理论。在他看来,现代化以其实证主义的、功利主义的和可量化的特征,似乎可以平稳地过渡到工业资本主义,将其压缩为从“原始”社会形态到“先进”社会形态的路径模型,具体化了在西欧和北美可能采取的路线,并将人类社会简单而绝对地分为“传统”和“现代”两种类型。这种二分法掩盖了历史的复杂性。他在1967年和1968年出版的《五一宣言》(May Day Manifesto)中宣称,现代化就是新资本主义的“神学”,是一种认为当下永远不会终结的意识形态,一种与过去脱离但又不创造未来的技术手段。不去面对权力、价值观或利益的对抗,不去设想或鼓励在相互竞争的事项之间做出优先选择。现代化理论完美地适应了权力在全球范围内继续塑造“纪律严明的劳动力”的意识形态的规划。

Opposing modernization theory as an obstacle to overcoming apathy, alienation, and the failures of reformist social democracy, Thompson turned his gaze to Britain’s first transition to industrial capitalism. In the dual focus on how the socialist opposition struggled in the 1960s and how it understood the costs of the eighteenth-century transition to industrial capitalism, Thompson turned to the study of time. The research he thus drew out on the origins of industrial capitalism constituted an empirical and conceptual investigation of how labor was recruited. His practical assumption was that time is subordinated to the demands of capital, in stark contrast to traditional practices such as peasants tilling land, artisans engaging in handicraft production, or women performing various domestic labors. A crucial aspect of this historical process was the creation of a disciplined wage-labor class, a prerequisite for capital to achieve its hegemonic control under capitalism. The fundamental process of establishing this capitalist prerequisite is commonly termed primitive accumulation, in which the expropriation of peasants and the issue of colonization are particularly prominent. In Marx’s words, these historical events “are written in the annals of mankind in letters of blood and fire.”

汤普森反对现代化理论,将其视为克服冷漠、异化和改良派社会民主政体失败的障碍,他将目光投向了英国向工业资本主义的第一次过渡。在对社会主义反对派在1960年代如何进行斗争以及如何认识18世纪向工业资本主义过渡所付出的代价的双重关注中,汤普森转向了时间研究。他由此引出的对工业资本主义起源问题的研究构成了如何招募劳动力的经验性和概念性调查。他的实际假设是,时间服从于资本的需求,这与农民耕地、手工业者从事手工业生产或妇女从事各种家务劳动的传统做法形成鲜明对比。这一历史进程的一个重要方面是创建一个纪律严明的雇佣劳动阶级,这是资本实现资本主义霸权控制的先决条件。建立这一资本主义先决条件的基本过程通常被称为原始积累,其中对农民的剥夺和殖民化问题尤为突出。用马克思的话来说,这些历史事件“是用不可磨灭的血和火的文字载入人类编年史的”。

Thompson selected this part of the process of expropriation for study and added a cultural dimension to his interpretation, understanding it as the gradual habituation of workers in formation to a completely different mentality, namely that time is constituted by the commands of capital, unrelated to natural cycles. With the ticking of the clock, a new relationship was established between the laborer and work and its discipline, and the entire culture changed. The internalization of time discipline was decisive in transforming common producers into capitalist workers. Thompson believed that the pressure of transition fell on the entire culture: both resistance to and acceptance of change came from the entire culture. His conclusion was: “What we are examining here are not only changes in manufacturing technique which demand greater synchronization of labour and a greater exactitude in time-routines in any society; but also these changes as they were lived through in the period of the industrial revolution.”

汤普森选取了剥夺的过程这一部分进行研究,并在解读中加入了文化的维度,将其理解为正在形成中的工人逐渐习惯于一种完全不同的心态,即时间是由资本的命令构成,与自然周期无关。随着时钟的滴答作响,劳动者与工作及其纪律之间建立了新的关系,整个文化发生了变化。在将平民生产者转变为资本主义工人的过程中,时间纪律的内在化具有决定性作用。汤普森认为,过渡的压力落在了整个文化身上:对变革的抵制和赞同都来自整个文化。他的结论是:“我们这里研究的不仅仅是制造技术发生的变化,这要求整个社会中的劳动更加同步化,时间安排更加精确化;还包括这些变化在新生的工业资本主义社会中经历了怎样的过程而幸存下来。”

Thompson’s instinctive hostility to the disciplinary logic of capitalism led him to be puzzled by the discussions of “the problem of leisure” among sociologists in the 1960s. He asked: “How could this become a problem?” Immersed in the ideology of the affluent age, Thompson wondered what had prompted the industrialized world to escape the economic conditions of past poverty, and whether the Puritan valuation of time might decompose as the pressure of poverty weakened. “Would men lose that anxious urgency, that desire to consume time purposefully, that most of us carry around like our wrist-watches?” After more than half a century, looking back now at the essay “Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism,” the most striking point is the extent to which the debate over time was situated at the peak of the postwar capitalist boom.

汤普森对资本主义的规训逻辑本能地怀有敌意,这导致他对1960年代的社会学家们对“闲暇问题”的讨论感到困惑。他追问道:“这怎么会成为问题?”汤普森沉浸在富裕时代的意识形态中,他想知道是什么促使工业化世界摆脱了过去贫困的经济状况,也想知道清教主义对时间的评价是否会因贫困压力的减弱而分解。“人们会开始失去那种焦虑的紧迫感,那种有目的地消耗时间的欲望吗?多数人都有这种紧迫感和欲望,就像他们手腕上带着手表一样。”经过半个多世纪之后,现在回过头来看《时间、工作纪律和工业资本主义》一文,最突出的一点是,关于时间的争论在多大程度上处于二战后资本主义繁荣的顶峰。

Thompson firmly grasped capital’s boastful claim of having achieved “enlarged leisure,” seeking answers from the past about how people spent time, rather than consuming and squandering it. He pointed out: “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 their time with richer, more leisurely, personal and social relationships; how to break down once more the barriers between work and life. And hence would develop a new dialectic, in which some of the old aggressive energies and disciplines migrate to the newly industrializing nations, while the old industrializing nations seek to rediscover modes of experience forgotten before the dawn of recorded history.” Thompson believed that the task-orientation of peasant, village, and household economies was more comprehensible to people than timed labor; communities of task-oriented work showed the smallest boundary between work and life, and social intercourse and labor were interwoven in historical eras unaccustomed to clock-timed labor.

汤普森紧紧抓住了资本自吹自擂的已经实现了“扩大闲暇”的观点,从过去寻找人们如何打发时间、而不是消耗和挥霍时间的答案。他指出,“如果时间使用的目的性不那么强,人们就有可能重新学习在工业革命中失去的一些生活艺术”,“重新学习如何用更丰富、更悠闲的个人的和社会的关系来填充他们一天中的空余时间;如何再次打破工作与生活之间的壁垒。因此,一种新的辩证法将萌生出来,即一些早已形成的进取精神和纪律迁移到新的工业化国家,而老牌的工业化国家则试图重新发现在有文字记载的历史之前被遗忘的经验模式”。 汤普森认为,农民、乡村和家庭经济的任务导向比计时的劳动更容易为人们所理解,任务导向的工作的社群显示出工作与生活之间的界限最小,并且社会交往和劳动在不习惯于按时钟计时的劳动的历史时代交织在一起。

Thompson believed that the need to resolve the problem of alienation in the 1960s was so urgent, with the discipline of time seeming the most unbearable and resisted from many quarters, that he underestimated the harshness, oppressiveness, and differentiation of various forms of task-oriented work developed in the political economy over centuries before the advent of industrial capitalism and its time-managed workplace. He certainly never questioned the basic assumption that the closer life and work are integrated, the better. This assumption failed to confront how decisively capital had penetrated every aspect of human experience in the 1960s, a process of conquest that was less evident in earlier (often pre-capitalist) times. Equally striking is that Thompson’s assumption underestimated the oppression of women’s lives, constrained by reproduction, subsistence labor, and the exclusively female timetable constituted by domestic life, which itself was a harsh taskmaster.

汤普森认为,解决1960年代异化问题的需求极其紧迫,其中时间的规训似乎是最难以忍受的,受到来自许多方面的抵制,以至于汤普森低估了在工业资本主义及其时间管理的工作场所到来之前的几个世纪里,在政治经济中发展起来的各种任务导向型工作的严酷性、压迫性和差异性。他当然从未质疑过这样一个基本假设,即生活与工作结合得越紧密越好。这一假设未能正视资本在1960年代是如何果断地渗透到人类经验的各个方面,这个征服的过程在早期(通常是前资本主义时代)并不那么明显。同样突出的是,汤普森的假设低估了对女性生活的压迫,她们受到生育、谋生劳动以及由家庭生活构成的专属女性的时间表的限制,而家庭生活本身就是一个严厉的监工。

Of course, Thompson recognized that commoners and the working class, disciplined by time for centuries, had been struggling against this relentless temporal arrangement. Yet the result of resistance was their increasing adaptation to this constraint. In the essay “Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism,” Thompson may have truncated his treatment of the time question, failing to clarify that the “whole culture” is crisscrossed in fragmented ways, and these fragments manifest themselves in the dialectics of resistance, weakening a sense of “totality.” Admittedly, capital appropriates time and redefines it according to the logic of its political economy. However, throughout society, the capitalist conception of time has not been fully inculcated into those immigrant families or marginalized groups. The colonization of indigenous peoples was never completed; for them, the question of time kept them resisting their subordinate status as the dispossessed until the very end. Moreover, capitalism has long been riddled with crises, and the recurring cycles of recession and boom-and-bust have caused an unsettling, regular imbalance in the authority of time’s work discipline. If this test of reality was masked by the seeming leisure of the 1960s, it would manifest itself violently in the instability triggered by economic stagnation and crisis after 1973.

当然,汤普森认识到,几个世纪以来受到时间纪律约束的平民和工人阶级一直在与这种无情的时间安排作斗争。然而,抵抗的结果却是他们越来越适应这种约束。在《时间、工作纪律和工业资本主义》一文中,汤普森可能对时间问题的处理进行了删减,没有说清楚“整个文化”以支离破碎的方式纵横交错,这些碎片在反抗的辩证法中表现出来,削弱了一种“整体性”的感觉。诚然,资本占用了时间,并根据其政治经济学的逻辑重新定义了时间。然而,在整个社会中,资本主义的时间观念并未完全灌输到那些移民家庭或边缘化群体中。对原住民的殖民化从未完成,在他们那里,时间问题让他们一直到最后都在反抗着作为被剥夺者的从属地位。此外,资本主义长期以来一直危机四伏,反复出现的衰退和繁荣与萧条的循环使时间的工作纪律权威出现了令人沮丧的规律性失衡。如果这种对现实的检验被看似悠闲的1960年代所表现出的繁荣所掩盖,那么在1973年以后的经济停滞和危机引发的不稳定中,它将以猛烈的方式显现出来。

After the transitional period of the 1960s, time seemed to maintain a peculiar relationship between labor and leisure; alienation became the price of affluence, and the recurring cyclical nature of capitalist crises did not reconstruct an acceptable notion of “a fair day’s work” but rather brutally limited any consideration of it. Neither academically nor otherwise did sustained attention to the question of a leisure society endure. In the sense of the possibilities Thompson himself envisioned for development after the 1960s, leisure itself became an illusion. Alienation persisted, but now it was heavily battered by the shrinking, insecure, or “flexible” employment opportunities of industrial capitalism. These job opportunities manifested themselves in the restructured class relations of developed capitalist countries, and similar processes were evident in the intensified exploitation of enterprises in countries of the Global South. Capital blends the new with the old, but over time it still firmly holds its position, as the ancients said: myriad changes do not depart from the ancestral principle. [9]9 “万变不离其宗” (wàn biàn bù lí qí zōng): A Chinese idiom meaning that despite myriad changes, the fundamental principle or essence remains unchanged.

在 1960 年代的过渡期之后,时间似乎在劳动与闲暇之间维持着一种特殊的关系,异化成为富裕的代价,资本主义危机反复出现的周期性本质并没有重构可以接受的“做一天公平的工作”,而是粗暴地限制了对这一观念的思考。无论是在学术上还是在其他方面,对闲暇社会这一问题的关注都没有持续下去。从汤普森自己设想的1960年代以后发展的可能性的意义上来说,闲暇本身成为了幻想。异化依然存在,但现在它受到了工业资本主义日益萎缩、不安全或“灵活”的就业机会的沉重打击。这些工作机会在发达资本主义国家重构的阶级关系中显现出来,类似的过程在南半球各国企业的强化剥削中也很明显。资本将新与旧融合在一起,但随着时间的推移,它仍牢牢地控制着自己的地位,正如古人所言:万变不离其宗。

V. Our Time: The Vampire Returns

五、我们的时代:吸血鬼回归

In 1930, John Maynard Keynes, in his essay “Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren,” predicted what the world would look like in 2030. Even though we are still ten years away from Keynes’s prediction, we can conclude that, barring a catastrophic revolutionary transformation, his suggestions about how people living in the twenty-first century would live are almost entirely wrong, for he predicted that the working day would then be a three-hour shift, with five days of hard work totaling only fifteen hours.

1930年,约翰·梅纳德·凯恩斯(John Maynard Keynes)在《我们后代的经济前景》一文中预测了 2030 年的世界将会是什么样子。即使现在离凯恩斯的预测还有10年时间,我们也可以断定,除非发生灾难性的革命性转变,否则他关于生活于21世纪的人们将如何生活的建议几乎是大错特错的,因为他预测,那时的工作日将是三小时轮班,五天的辛勤工作加起来也只有15小时。

Keynes believed that capitalism possessed the capacity to rationally use technology and various forms of income redistribution to narrow the gap between rich and poor. Everyone would gain. The leisure society should have arrived. But it did not. Capitalism devours its own components; it wages wars, producing terrifying weapons of mass destruction; its imperialist pursuit of profit spans the globe without end; it destroys the ecology. Periodic crises—depressions and downturns—are peculiar features of its ever-changing political economy, “cleansing” the capitalist organism of evolutionarily failed species, as brutal as any known evolutionary process in natural selection. Those who bear the brunt of capitalism’s consequences are the dispossessed: the indigenous peoples of the New World, long removed from the land and resources that sustained their subsistence economies; the urban and rural poor of the “developed” old-world economies of the West; people of color, whether within these privileged nations or as the main population of regions subordinate to these privileged nations in the world, constitute a reserve army of labor that can be mobilized according to capital’s needs. Capital was not as rational as Keynes hoped; it excludes many from its calculations and conditions of development. Considerations of time rarely extend to how to conceive of “a fair day’s work,” but only to how the working day—whether in length or reconfiguration—can meet capital’s demands. And this is the picture even in the best of times.

凯恩斯相信,资本主义具备理智地利用技术和各种收入再分配来缩小贫富差距的能力。每个人都会有所收获。休闲社会应该已经到来了。但事实并非如此。资本主义吞噬了自身的组成部分;它发动战争,制造了令人恐怖的大规模杀伤性武器;它对利润的帝国主义追求遍布全球,永无止境;它破坏了生态。周期性的危机——萧条和低迷——是其不断变化的政治经济的特有现象,“清洗”资本主义机体中进化论的失败物种,这与自然选择中任何一种已知的进化过程同样的残酷。首当其冲地承受着资本主义恶果的是被剥夺者:新世界的土著居民长期远离维持其自给经济的土地和资源;西方“发达”的旧世界经济的城乡贫民;有色人种,无论是在这些享有特权的国家中,还是作为世界上从属于这些特权国家的地区的主要人口,都构成了一支可根据资本需求调动的劳动力后备军。资本并没有如凯恩斯所希望的那样理智,它把许多人排除在其计算和发展的条件之外。时间的考虑很少延伸到如何设想“做一天公平的工作”,而只是关心工作日——无论是长度还是重新配置——如何满足资本的需求。而这些还是处在最好的时代才有的景象。

The worst of times have arrived. After 1973, global capitalism entered a period fraught with crises. In the post-World War II era of seeming affluence, strong trade unions, and ample welfare state provisions, the stability of the eight-hour workday and the possibility of the working class reclaiming time in new ways collapsed. The fiscal crisis of the state limited governments’ ability to alleviate human suffering and ended the concern for the legitimacy of “fairness” that had upheld working-class rights and expanded the welfare safety net. For decades, we have lived in the shadow of this collapse.

最糟糕的时代已经来临。1973年以后,全球资本主义进入了一个危机四伏的时期。在二战后看似富裕、工会力量强大、福利国家供给充足的时代,八小时工作制的稳定以及工人阶级夺回时间的新方式的可能性土崩瓦解。国家的财政危机限制了政府减轻人类苦难的能力,并终结了对“公平”的合法性的关注,而这种合法性维护了工人阶级的权利并扩大了福利安全网。几十年来,我们一直生活在这种消亡的阴影中。

Among the many losses, one is the reoccupation of time. As Marx pointed out, “the working day is not a constant, but a variable,” an elastic bond that capital constantly seeks to stretch, “setting no limit to the working day” and “setting no limit to surplus labor.” Marx insisted that the capitalist always “tends to extend the working day as much as possible, and, if possible, to turn one working day into two.” A typical case depicting the broader process of class formation, in the words of Nick Dyer-Witheford, is “a vampire relation… a transfer of energy, time, and consciousness—that is, the extraction of surplus value—from one part of a species to another.” Statistics from the OECD Employment Outlook show that from 1970 to 2005, the annual working hours per employed adult in the United States increased by 12%. The major economies of the European Union established strong social safety nets, but due to the 2008–2009 financial crisis and the COVID-19 pandemic, these safety nets have reached their limits. The latest estimates indicate that the average weekly working hours in Canada and the United States are close to 47 hours, while comparable figures for the technology and financial sectors are at a maximum of about 60 hours.

在众多的损失中,其中一个就是时间被重新占用,正如马克思所指出的那样,“工作日不是一个不变量,而是一个可变量”,一个资本不断寻求拉伸的弹性纽带,“没有给工作日规定任何界限”,“没有给剩余劳动规定任何界限”。马克思坚持认为,资本家总是会“尽量延长工作日,如果可能,就把一个工作日变成两个工作日”。描写更普遍的阶级形成过程的一个典型案例,用尼克·戴尔-威瑟福德(Nick Dyer-Witheford)的话来说,“这是一种吸血鬼关系……能量、时间和意识的转移——也就是剩余价值的提取——从一个物种的一部分转移到另一部分”。《经合组织就业前景》的统计数据显示,自1970年到2005年,美国每个受雇成年人的工作时间增加了12%。欧盟的主要经济体建立了强大的社会保障网,但由于2008—2009年的金融危机和新冠疫情,这些安全网已经达到了极限。最新估算显示,加拿大和美国的平均每周工作时间接近47小时,而技术和金融部门的可比数字最高约为60小时。

In fact, time is almost at the core of all trends in automation, digitization, and work reorganization in late capitalism. Globally, working hours have shortened somewhat. By the late 1990s, the number of unemployed and underemployed exceeded one billion, accounting for about 30% of the world’s total labor force. Due to increased labor intensity in some industries, the working day often extends late into the night; in other industries, working hours are constantly under assault, and workers’ means of subsistence are wantonly cut. Over the next thirty years, in countries like the United States and in weaker European economies such as Portugal and Greece, automation and digitization will eliminate 40% to 60% of jobs. In garment, textile, and footwear factories in Vietnam and Cambodia, 85% of jobs are threatened by automation. Leisure is not an autonomous choice for these unemployed workers. However, for those working on assembly lines, at workbenches, or in industries of extreme exploitation, the working day is often either extended or fragmented across multiple jobs, requiring more time to earn enough income to supplement basic necessities.

实际上,时间几乎是晚期资本主义中自动化、数字化和工作重组的所有趋势的核心。在全球范围内,工作时间已经缩短了一些。到 1990 年代末,失业和就业不足人数超过10亿人,约占世界全部劳动人口的30%。由于某些行业劳动强度的增加,工作日往往延长到深夜,其他行业的工作时间也不断地受到冲击,劳动者的生活资料被肆意地削减。在接下来的30年里,在美国等国家,以及葡萄牙和希腊等竞争力较弱的欧洲经济体中,自动化和数字化将消除40%至60%的工作岗位。在越南和柬埔寨的服装、纺织品和鞋类工厂里,85%的工作岗位都受到了自动化的威胁。休闲并不是这些失业工人的自主选择。然而,对于那些站在流水线、工作台上或在极度剥削的行业工作的人来说,工作日往往要么被延长,要么被分散在多个工作岗位上,他们需要更多的时间来获得足够的收入,以补充基本的生活必需品。

As it has done throughout its history, capital has subordinated time to itself in ever new ways, while simultaneously reviving old modes of coercion. But the logic of its temporal appropriation is consistent, remaining unchanged amid constantly shifting class relations and the changing nature of class struggle. At present, capital occupies a dominant position while labor is in a relatively weak position, and time has become increasingly vengeful. The fusion of old and new is perhaps most evident in the so-called gig economy, where artificial intelligence, digital platforms, mobile communications, and other technologies intersect with globalization to transform labor processes, thereby altering the nature of work and, most importantly, working time. In this ostensibly knowledge-producing economy, employment is less likely to be tied to traditional factory-style workplaces, or even to specific companies. Hiring is typically conducted remotely and on demand; its slogan is flexibility, and its result is casualization. Proponents of the gig economy claim that over 40 percent of the U.S. labor force is now employed in this sector. This type of work is dispersed across the globe, placing the regulation of working time and wages/salaries, as well as the enforcement of social security provisions, beyond the jurisdiction of any single state.

正如它在其整个历史中所做的那样,资本一直以各种新的方式使时间从属于它,而现在它又同时恢复了旧的强制模式。但其时间占用的逻辑是始终如一的,在不断变化的阶级关系和不断变化的阶级斗争性质中保持不变。当前,资本占据优势地位,而劳动力处于相对弱势的地位,时间变得越来越具有报复性。新旧融合可能在所谓的零工经济中最为明显,其中人工智能、数字平台、移动通信和其他技术与全球化相交融并改造了劳动流程,从而改变了工作性质,最重要的是改变了工作时间。在这种表面上是知识生产的经济中,就业不太可能与传统的工厂式的工作场所联系在一起,甚至不太可能与特定的公司联系在一起。招聘通常是在远程按需进行的;其口号是灵活性,而结果则是随意的。零工经济的推动者声称,现在有超过40%的美国劳动力受雇于该行业。这种类型的工作分散在世界各地,这使工作时间和工资/薪金的监管以及社会保障规定的执行不受任何国家的管辖。

All of this coincides with technological innovation and the ideological assault of neoliberalism, but it is also quite “old,” in that it breaks down the traditional division between work and life established after the Industrial Revolution. Labor in the gig economy can be performed anywhere, subverting any notion of free time, and employers can use platforms to monitor their workers 24 hours a day. Much of this toil has been routinized to the point of numbness, and its alienation is intensified by wages below the poverty line. Each piece of information, worth only a few cents, is used to construct data compilations that are then marketed by monopolies such as Amazon. In on-demand work arranged through centralized corporate platforms, owning the means of production—such as a car—is the worker’s responsibility. Thus, the illusion of independence fuels the growth of the gig economy. But this work is actually a regression to the early capitalist “putting out system,” shifting many costs onto the worker. Workers are not paid by the hour but by the task, which is typically fragmented. The result is, as Marx long ago pointed out: “by forcibly extending the working day beyond its natural limits.” [10]10 Karl Marx, *Capital*, Volume 1, Chapter 10, Section 5, referring to the capitalist drive to extend the working day beyond natural limits (e.g., night and rest).

所有这些都与技术创新以及新自由主义的意识形态冲击相吻合,但它也相当“陈旧”,因为它打破了工业革命后工作与生活之间的传统划分。零工经济中的劳动可以在任何地方进行,它颠覆了任何关于空闲时间的概念,雇主可以利用平台对其员工进行24小时的监控。这种辛勤工作的大部分内容都已经常规化到令人麻木,并因其低于贫困线的薪酬而加剧异化。每条信息只需几美分就可以用于构建数据汇编,然后由亚马逊等垄断企业进行营销。在集中式企业平台安排的按需工作中,拥有汽车等生产资料是工人的责任。因此,对独立的幻想助长了零工经济的发展。但这项工作实际上是对早期资本主义“发包制度”(putting out system)的倒退,并且将许多成本转嫁给了工人。工人的报酬不是按小时计算,而是按通常被细化的任务计算。结果正如马克思很久以前就指出的那样:“通过强制地把工作日延长到超过其自然界限。”

Yet, in the history of struggle over time and the composition of labor time, we have reached a new starting point. In any case, the battle cry of the “eight-hour workday” can no longer fully meet our needs, just as the slogan “a fair day’s work for a fair day’s pay” requires reconsideration.

然而,在关于时间以及劳动时间的构成的斗争史上,我们已经到达了一个新的起点。在任何情况下,“八小时工作制”的战斗口号都不再能充分满足我们的需要,正如需要重新考虑“做一天公平的工作,得一天公平的工资”一样。

Six: Time: Farewell to What, and to Whom?

六:时间:告别什么,告别谁?

Current proposals to focus discussion on reducing working hours echo a call from the 1980s by André Gorz and Rudolf Bahro for a “time policy” and a “new time economy” to transform “the capitalist social order and quality of life.” However, these proposals may not be sufficient. Although the vampire allows those subordinate to it to claim what they need for themselves, as long as time remains subject to capital’s control, the vampire will suck back even more.

当前关于要将讨论重点放在减少工作时间上的建议,与1980年代安德烈·高兹(André Gorz)和鲁道夫·巴赫罗(Rudolf Bahro)的一项呼吁相呼应,他们呼吁制定一种“时间政策”和“新的时间经济”来改变“资本主义的社会秩序和生活质量”。然而,这些建议可能还不够。尽管吸血鬼允许从属于它的人们为自己争取需要的东西,但只要时间受制于资本的控制,那么吸血鬼吸回的就将更多。

For example, Gorz pointed out the limitations of this analytical framework, which demands less work, more leisure, and new methods of consumption. In a fully reformed capitalist society, all of this could be achieved, the traditional working class would cease to exist, replaced by “non-producers” occupying the vanguard of change. Like Keynes, Gorz believed that under capitalism, automation, job sharing, part-time work, and flexible employment were all possible, and they might lead to a revolutionary transformation of labor time, drastically reducing the working day.

例如,高兹就指出了这个要求更少的工作、更多的休闲和新的消费方法的分析框架的局限性。在经过充分改革的资本主义社会里,所有这一切都可以实现,传统的工人阶级将不复存在,取而代之的是占据变革前沿的“非生产者”。高兹与凯恩斯一样,认为在资本主义制度下,自动化、工作共享、兼职工作和灵活就业都是可能的,它们可能会导致劳动时间的革命性转变,从而大幅减少工作日。

For Gorz, “free time” presupposed the “abolition of work.” Work was seen as degradation, an alienated process in which the individual is stripped of collective possibility. “The proletarians have internalized their dispossession to confirm their total dependence, their needs are entirely controlled. … Because their work is useful to society but not to themselves, society should satisfy all their needs and pay wages for every kind of work.” Gorz, author of *Strategy for Labor: A Radical Proposal*, engaged in a broader discussion of the working class in that book, reflecting the imaginative spirit of the New Left of the 1960s more than his subsequent manifesto from the early 1980s. But nonetheless, this remains nothing more than a pathetic declaration of displacement. It proceeds from Gorz’s insistence on an absolute separation between the “realm of necessity” and the “realm of freedom,” which cannot be mixed, spiraling downward from a misreading of Marx’s insistence on a dialectical relationship between these two realms. Yet, as Marx fully recognized, humanity will never win freedom except by acknowledging and engaging with necessity. All the insights in Gorz’s *Farewell to the Working Class* regarding the recalibration of time in the project of human liberation are realized through a false utopianism, in which both work and the working class are unilaterally understood as negation, and class struggle is ultimately seen as an atavism.

对于高兹来说,“自由时间”的前提是“废除工作”。工作被视为堕落,这是一个个体剥夺了集体的可能性的异化的过程。“无产者已经将他们的剥夺内化,以确认他们的完全依赖性,他们的需求被完全掌控。……由于他们的工作对社会有用,但对他们自己没有用,因此社会应该满足他们的所有需求,并为每一种工作支付工资。”高兹是《劳工战略:一个激进的建议》(Strategy for Labor: A Radical Proposal)一书的作者,比起他随后在1980年代初发表的宣言,他在本书中对工人阶级的广泛讨论更能反映1960年代新左翼富有想象力的精神。但尽管如此,这仍不过是一个关于流离失所的可悲的宣言。它从高兹坚持认为“必然领域”与“自由领域”绝对分离、不能混合在一起的观点出发,从对马克思所坚持的这两个领域存在辩证关系的误读盘旋而下。然而,正如马克思充分认识到的那样,除了承认并参与到必然性之中,人类永远不会赢得自由。高兹的《告别工人阶级》(Farwell to the Working Class)一书在人类解放规划中要求重新校准时间的所有见解,都是通过一种虚假的乌托邦主义来实现的,在这里,工作和工人阶级都被单方面理解为否定,而阶级斗争也最终被视为一种返祖现象。

Gorz failed to grasp two fundamental principles of Marx, which he resolutely opposed in his later analyses: first, that class formation is a tortuous historical process and therefore necessarily a collective, not an individual, task; second, that the meaning of time, both under capitalism and beyond it in the reconstruction of socialism, will forever be a matter of class struggle. As Marx asserted, “in the history of capitalist production, the establishment of a norm for the working day presents itself as a struggle over the limits of the working day—a struggle between the collective capitalist, i.e., the class of capitalists, and the collective worker, i.e., the working class.” [11]11 Karl Marx, *Capital*, Volume 1, Chapter 10, Section 1, on the struggle over the length of the working day between capitalists and workers.

高兹未能掌握马克思的两个基本原则,他在其后来的分析中坚决反对两点:第一,阶级的形成是一个曲折的历史过程,因而必然是一项集体的而非个体的任务;第二,时间的意义,无论是在资本主义条件下,还是超越它进入社会主义的重建之中,都将永远是一场阶级斗争。正如马克思所断言的,“在资本主义生产的历史上,工作日的正常化过程表现为规定工作日界限的斗争,这是全体资本家即资本家阶级和全体工人即工人阶级之间的斗争”。

Contrary to Marx, Gorz assumed that capital’s capacity to expand production was unlimited, paying no attention to imperialism and its role in maintaining empires and the healthy economic development of metropolitan centers. He treated the issue of time as a problem only for the “First World,” thus exhibiting a strong racial bias. His predictions presupposed a historical trajectory in which advanced Western capitalist economies continued to advance, assuming that an annual productivity growth rate of 5 percent was easily achievable. Gorz speculated that by 2001, the weekly working time would be reduced to 20 hours. A matrix with new values, culture, and interpersonal relations would give birth to an entirely new species, freed from the ethical shackles of acceleration, punctuality, and repressive emotions. Authority itself would become softened, forced to treat the wage-earning class as “autonomous individuals, seeking cooperation with them rather than demanding their obedience.” In this elevation of humanity, wage labor would “gradually cease to be the center of people’s lives,” and the working class would ultimately cease to exist. The liberation of time might come from a declaration by those in power: “Releasing time through the free choice of working hours is the best and fastest way to ‘change the quality of life’ and create jobs. In social and postal services, local governments, hospitals, and health centers, all that is needed is a simple ministerial directive to ensure that work within freely chosen hours becomes a reality.”

与马克思相反,高兹假定资本扩大生产的能力是无限的,没有关注帝国主义及其在维持帝国以及大都市中心经济健康发展中的作用。他把时间问题视为“第一世界”才需要解决的问题,因此有很强烈的种族倾向。他的预测以西方发达资本主义经济体继续前进的历史轨迹为前提,认为每年5%的生产率增长很容易实现。高兹推测,到2001 年,每周工作时间将减少到 20 小时。拥有新的价值观、文化和人际关系的母体将会孕育出一个全新的物种,这个物种摆脱了加速、守时和抑制性情感的伦理桎梏。权威本身会变得柔和,被迫将工薪阶层视为“自治的个体,寻求与他们合作而非要求他们服从”。在人类的这种提升中,雇佣劳动将“逐渐不再成为人们生活的中心”,工人阶级最终将不复存在。时间的解放可能来自当权者的声明:“通过自由选择工作时间来释放时间是‘改变生活质量’、创造就业机会的最好、最快捷的方式。在社会和邮政服务方面,地方政府、医院和保健中心所需要的只是一个简单的部长指令,以确保在自由选择的时间内工作成为现实。”

This proposal for effortlessly choosing time is far removed from, indeed diametrically opposed to, the developments of the 40 years since Gorz’s manifesto was published. It turns out that Marx can guide us better than Gorz, the author of *Farewell to the Working Class*, in understanding time and how it is utilized under late capitalism.

这种轻松自在地选择时间的建议与高兹的宣言发表以来的40年中的发展状况相去甚远,甚至南辕北辙。事实证明,与写作《告别工人阶级》的高兹相比,马克思能更好地引导我们认识时间,认识时间在晚期资本主义下是如何被利用的。

After all, Marx recognized that, setting aside advances, innovations, and improvements in productive forces, development under capitalism only lengthens rather than shortens labor time; what is shortened is the time necessary for general social reproduction, but not the time necessary for “capitalist necessary labor.” Human development, rather than the improvement of a privileged social stratum, becomes possible only when time itself is freed from the grip of the vampire, and therefore the power by which “one social stratum shifts the natural necessity of labor off itself and onto another social stratum” is seized from the minority elite. This perspective, of course, presupposes the existence of something called society. This peculiar idea is actually built upon a rather old, long-overdue, and equally peculiar premise: that society truly exists only when the abolition of classes and the wage system renders the discussion of “a fair day’s work” itself obsolete.

毕竟,马克思认识到,撇开生产力的进步、创新和提高不谈,资本主义条件下的发展只会延长而不会缩短劳动时间;缩短的是一般社会再生产所必需的时间,但“不是资本主义的必要劳动”所必需的时间。人类的发展,而不是一个特权社会阶层的改善,只有当时间本身摆脱吸血鬼的魔掌时才成为可能,因此“一个社会阶层把劳动的自然必然性从自身上解脱下来并转嫁给另一个社会阶层”的力量被少数精英夺走了。当然,这种观点的前提是存在社会这样的东西。这种奇特的想法实际上是建立在一个相当古老的、早该存在的、同样奇特的前提之上的:只有当阶级和工资制度的废除使“做一天公平的工作”的讨论本身变得过时时,社会才真正存在。

Freeing time has great significance for the ongoing class struggle, which is to be achieved by refusing to incorporate all considerations of time into the grid that calculates wages and records working hours. The commitment to “a fair day’s work for a fair day’s pay” was correct and just, cherished by generations of past worker activists, but it is also undoubtedly central to capital accumulation. Our era demands a new dedication: the abolition of the wage system. The transcendence of this idea will be premised on the negation of any fairness in wages. For wages imply that work itself should be the responsibility and necessary activity of one social stratum, forced to produce for a much smaller privileged stratum that controls the length of the alienated working day. In May 1968, the walls of besieged Paris streets were covered with graffiti, among which was this phrase: “Under the paving stones, the beach!” [12]12 “Under the paving stones, the beach!” (Sous les pavés, la plage!) — A famous slogan from the May 1968 protests and general strike in France, suggesting that beneath the alienating surfaces of urban capitalist life lies a liberatory, natural, and communal existence. For on the beach, people are not so much arranging time, compensating for time, or killing time as they are enjoying time.

让时间获得自由对正在进行的阶级斗争具有重要意义,这要通过拒绝将所有关于时间的考虑纳入计算工资和记录工作时间的网格来实现。对“做一天公平的工作,得一天公平的工资”的承诺是正确的和公正的,受到了过去几代工人活动家的爱戴,但无疑也是资本积累的核心。我们的时代需要一种新的奉献精神:废除工资制度。这一理念的超越性将以否定任何工资的公平性为前提。因为工资意味着工作本身应该是一个社会阶层的责任和必需的活动,被迫为一个要小得多的特权阶层生产,而后者控制着被异化的工作日的时长。1968年5月,巴黎被围困街道的墙壁上布满了涂鸦,其中有一句话是这样写的:“在铺路石下是海滩!”因为在海滩上,与其说人们在安排时间、补偿时间、消磨时间,不如说是在享受时间。

(Author: Bryan D. Palmer, Trent University, Ontario, Canada; Translators: Deng Jianhua, School of Foreign Studies, Northeastern University; Zhu Chunyan, School of Marxism, Northeastern University)

(作者:布赖恩·D.帕尔默(Bryan D.Palmer),加拿大安大略省特伦特大学;译者:邓建华,东北大学外国语学院;朱春艳,东北大学马克思主义学院)

Online Editor: Tongxin

网络编辑:同心

Notes

  1. “做一天公平的工作,得一天公平的工资” (a fair day’s work for a fair day’s wage) and “消灭雇佣劳动制度” (the abolition of the wage system): These are slogans from the 19th-century labor movement, the former associated with trade-union reformism and the latter with revolutionary socialism, as articulated by Marx and Engels.
  2. 世界产业工人联盟 (Industrial Workers of the World, IWW): A radical, international labor union founded in 1905 in the United States, known for its revolutionary syndicalist approach and organizing of unskilled and immigrant workers.
  3. 大比尔·海伍德 (Big Bill Haywood): William Dudley Haywood (1869–1928), a prominent leader of the IWW and the Western Federation of Miners, known for his militant labor activism.
  4. 约翰·里德 (John Reed): John Reed (1887–1920), an American journalist and socialist, author of *Ten Days That Shook the World*, an eyewitness account of the Russian October Revolution.
  5. Fabian gradualism: A reformist socialist strategy advocated by the Fabian Society, emphasizing incremental, non-revolutionary change through parliamentary and policy means, rather than class struggle.
  6. The *May Day Manifesto* was a political statement issued in 1967 and 1968 by a group of British left-wing intellectuals, including E.P. Thompson, Raymond Williams, and Stuart Hall, critiquing the state of British society and the Labour Party under capitalism.
  7. The phrase “letters of blood and fire” is a direct quotation from Karl Marx’s *Capital*, Volume I, Part VIII, Chapter 26, “The Secret of Primitive Accumulation,” describing the violent origins of capitalism.
  8. “The problem of leisure” refers to sociological debates in the 1960s about how to manage increased free time in affluent societies, which Thompson critiqued as a symptom of capitalist alienation.
  9. “万变不离其宗” (wàn biàn bù lí qí zōng): A Chinese idiom meaning that despite myriad changes, the fundamental principle or essence remains unchanged. ↩
  10. Karl Marx, *Capital*, Volume 1, Chapter 10, Section 5, referring to the capitalist drive to extend the working day beyond natural limits (e.g., night and rest). ↩
  11. Karl Marx, *Capital*, Volume 1, Chapter 10, Section 1, on the struggle over the length of the working day between capitalists and workers. ↩
  12. “Under the paving stones, the beach!” (Sous les pavés, la plage!) — A famous slogan from the May 1968 protests and general strike in France, suggesting that beneath the alienating surfaces of urban capitalist life lies a liberatory, natural, and communal existence. ↩