The Politics of Time, by Guy Standing

This is not the first time I’ve reviewed Guy Standing, radical economist and author of The Plunder of the Commons and Basic Income. But I’ve been particularly looking forward to his new book. I wrote my university dissertation on the commodification of time, and I consider time use to be one of the great unexplored avenues of politics. We’ve needed a book like this one to unlock its possibilities – The Politics of Time: Gaining Control in the Age of Uncertainty.

Standing begins with a historical account, beginning with ancient times. The Greeks had a more nuanced view of time than we do, dividing time into work and labour. You did work to live, you did labour to earn money, and they’re different things. We’ve forgotten this. As the book points out later, and many others have too, over half the work done in the economy isn’t counted – it’s care, housework or other tasks for which nobody was paid. It’s therefore invisible to modern economics and we need to do better than that.

The Greeks also saw distinctions in non-working time. There was leisure that was for rest and recreation, and there was schole, which was free time used in citizenship, self-improvement and learning. Again, this distinction has been lost. We prioritise leisure time for entertaining ourselves, and have let the schole category wither away as unproductive.

Moving on from the ancients, Standing describes ‘agrarian time’ and how lives were shaped by farming. This was cyclical and depended on the seasons. It gave way to ‘industrial time’, where people’s time was configured around the needs of the factory and the employer. A third transition then occurred to ‘tertiary time’, oriented around services and the flexible, on-demand needs of a service based economy.

Along the way, “one of the great historical errors of modernity” occurred as the left embraced ‘labourism’ – the idea that labour was “a proper and desirable way of working and earning a living”. Historically this was not the case. You provided for yourself, ran your own affairs and hired yourself out for pay as little as possible. This wasn’t about avoiding work – remember the distinction between work and labour – it was about freedom and control. “Most people,” says Standing, “did not want or like labour. It was servitude.”

It’s natural that industrialists would want to convince people that having a job and doing what you’re told was the better option. That served them very well. What Standing laments is the fact that workers’ movements adopted this view too, championing “the dignity of labour” and elevating jobs as sacrosanct. Unpaid work vanished from discussion, government policy came to see maximum employment as a social good, and most working people lost control over their own time.

There are now a host of inequalities around who has the freedom of their own time and who doesn’t, whose work is recognised as valuable and whose is taken for granted. Many of these inequalities were highlighted during the pandemic, and there’s a whole chapter on ‘time in the eye of covid’.

Most importantly, there are alternatives. In the final chapter, on ‘the emancipation of time’, the author casts his mind back from an imagined 2030s and other side of a political transformation. A progressive alliance government has come to power and set in motion a string of policies to improve people’s lives, after the chaos of the 2020s. A better understanding of economic growth is at the heart of that, with time identified as a major opportunity to increase quality of life. There’s a land value tax, carbon levies and a basic income, time rights, and a revival of the commons and public affluence (and a pleasing amount of overlap with my own book The Economics of Arrival). Debt has been reduced. Schole has been rediscovered and citizens have time for more participative democracy. Idealised maybe, but Standing grounds his vision in existing trends and never loses a sense of possibility.

The Politics of Time is a book that feels, perhaps ironically, long overdue. Time is one of the most promising ways to improve people’s lives without increasing material or energy use – a qualitative rather tha quantitative improvement. Life is a gift. Exactly how much of it should we sign away to somebody else’s control in return for money? How should we recognise and reward work that is currently unpaid? What would politics look like if it focused less on money, and more on time? These are counter-cultural questions, but with AI challenging our notions of work, and a growing number of people in precarious labour, the future demands a politics of time.