What's Left of Philosophy
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74 | Time and Work Discipline with E.P. Thompson
🕑 Added 2023-10-02 10:00:06 +0000 UTCIn this episode, we discuss E.P. Thompson’s amazing article “Time, Work Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism.” E.P. Thompson is the legendary Marxist historian and author of The Making of the English Working Class. How did time become money? And why can’t we just pass it away? Lots of work discipline, as it turns out, which leads us to ask – maybe laziness is a virtue?
leftofphilosophy.com | @leftofphil
References:
E.P. Thompson, “Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism,” in Class: The Anthology, eds. Stanley Aronowitz and Michael J. Roberts (Hoboken: John Wiley & Sons, 2018).
Music:
Vintage Memories by Schematist | schematist.bandcamp.com
Comments
Gil Morejon
Thanks for the rec and the solidarity! Owen
Nathan Weatherford
Loved this episode, and it resonated a ton with a couple books by Jenny Odell that I've read over the past couple years (How to Do Nothing & Saving Time) - can't recommend enough to y'all, they're both incredibly thoughtful attempts to recognize and combat the ways in which our time is forced into those capitalist conceptions that privilege "productivity" above all else. I definitely think everyone on the pod would love these (but especially Owen, they resonate big time with his thoughts - I, too, really just want to sit and shoot the shit over a beer in my "free time", so Owen is a real one for making it known!)
Paul Bowman
Surprised no one came up with "opportunity cost" re Gil's question of what it means to internalise the ideology of time is money. The whole idea of time wasted is the opportunity cost of how much you could have been making in that time, whether money, or increasing your social or "human capital" through self-improvement, cultural activities, etc, etc. Very much with Owen on finding people's insistence that you have to "do something" on holiday to be oppressive
