Saturday, November 03, 2007

Tick, Tock, We Live By The Clock


Consider this an appendix to my post Tempus Fug'It. Also see my pal Werner at Shagya Blog's post on clocks and time. The domination of the clock, the mechanization of time over natural time coincided with the protestant reformation and industrialization and thus resulted in protestant capitalism. The result ever since has been the clash between 'wasted time'; leisure and 'productive time'; work and consumption.

The first requirement, regular work habits, which seems so self-evident today, took a lot of getting used to. For the vast majority of humanity's history, labour was directed towards the completion of a task. With wage labour, workers were expected to engage in continual production, regardless of the number of tasks completed, for the amount of time that they had sold their labour. This necessitated a dramatic change in the way people related to the labour process. As the historian Paul Phillips points out, this change, which occurred in the development of the capitalist labour market, "required a remaking of the behaviour and attitudes of the workers themselves, a remaking that constituted a cultural as well as an economic transformation - a replacement of the habits of irregularity, illdiscipline
and sloth and a preoccupation with the immediate, with habits of punctuality, regularity and
order and a longer-term view, all of which were necessary to the working of an emerging capitalist order with its new scientific technology".


Modern time is no different, computerization is itself an outgrowth of the clock, as is automation, itself a time based form of production. Automation is the standardization of time applied to production. Computerization is now the standardization of our time to the new clock.

From the 1970s, the adoption of computer-aided design and computer-aided manufacture (CAD-CAM) reshaped not only the labour-process but also marketing, a shift which soon feed back into the structures of production. The initial advantage to capital from CAD-CAM was a reduction in down-time because lathes and their highly paid operators did not have to be idled for so long in order for the machines to be reset. A contested benefit was the deskilling of certain operations which made it easier to replace skilled militants, and at lower rates of pay. (Jones, 1982)

The new machines renovated marketing because they also made shorter production runs profitable. Hence, the range of models on offer could be increased. That possibility has installed a built-to-order nexus between the sales effort and manufacturing. Dell’s customized computers provide the best-known case. Here, the advantage has been to cut the costs of having capital tied up in product as well as supplies. Just-in-time now applies to both ends of the chain. This expanding international trade in semi-finished goods (vertical specialization) has combined with new production technologies to dislodge certain higher-paid skilled workers. (Egger and Steher, 2003)

The cost-cutting depended on a reorganization of transport. Freight companies have re-branded themselves so that trucks promote “Mayne Logistics”. Geo-positioning satellites allow the firms to track each order around the globe, much as punch-cards did for cartons inside warehouses fifty years ago. Faster and more reliable deliveries are not enough. The services delivered by logistics firms are rewriting the production script. What began as a twist to outsourcing will reshape manufacturing, giving greater salience to continuous flow inside factories. (Economist, 7 December 2002: 69-70) The costs of down-time more fall not on capital part-time casuals, not sunk in the capital backing the assembly line.

No managerial innovation for the application of labour-times since the 1970s has had as much impact as did continuous flow, or the micro-time controls introduced during Mark IV. Instead, the era of the most advanced technologies has been accompanied by pushing up the rate of exploitation through the crudest devices of exacting unpaid labour-time throughout the service sector, and by intensification everywhere. The success of these measures was possible because of the disorganization of the working class, shadowed by fears of dismissal, now rampant in the airline industry.


The advent of the internet and other computerized communications systems are now changing our leisure, wasted time, to productive time. We must always be busy, consuming or producing.

According to Clifford Sharp, in his book "The Economics of Time", humans have at their disposal "economic time." That is, the time that a person allots between alternative activities. In all situations time is a scare resource; there are only 24 hours in a day, and the lives we live afford us a limited number of decades in which to participate in our world. Also, we can't do more than perhaps one or two activities at a time so how we divide our time is an important personal decision and is a major factor in our personal happiness and satisfaction.

The creation of social capital can take place during leisure, paid work or unpaid work. The
greater the volume of market labour, expressed in terms of hours per adult member of the
population per year, the lower the time potentially available for creation of social capital outside of work. Leisure time, which is by definition time available to focus on freely chosen activities, in particular socialising and taking part in associations of various kinds, may be particularly rich in its capacity to generate social capital, especially of the kinds analysed by Putnam (2000). On the other hand, paid work time has historically generated important forms of social capital; the trade union movement and bonds, often heavily gendered, within work-groups such as described by Massey (1994) or Fielding (1994). These forms have been relatively neglected in the social capital literature. Developments in the labour process are tending to undermine the potential for creation of social capital within the workplace, as we shall see later. Social capital can also be generated during unpaid work - for example whilst shopping - but in modern societies unpaid work is largely an isolated activity within the home; and as we shall see later, it is becoming more so. The key issue in relation to unpaid work is its gender distribution; if childcare and housework have been re-distributed from women to men, time available for participation in civil society or in socialising outside the family must surely have been redistributed from men to women.


Under modern capitalism we no longer sell our labour so much as our time. Each of us regardless of our skills or professions are interchangeable cogs in a machine of production and consumption. It is our time that is valued, not our person or our abilities. This is no mere truism of our existence in capitalist society. Over a hundred years ago the struggle began for the eight hour day today we now work more than that, and when we aren't working we are consuming ,all part of the cycle of modern capitalism.

The anthem of the Knights of Labor was the "Eight-Hour Song,"

We want to feel the sunshine;
We want to smell the flowers;
We're sure God has willed it.
And we mean to have eight hours.

We're summoning our forces from Shipyard, shop and mill;
Eight hours for work, eight hours for rest, Eight hours for what we will.



Beginning with Taylor and Ford mass production destroyed artisan and craft based production. It's teleology results in Toyotaism, just in time production, automation of work and society begun in the fifties with Demming's theories of Total Quality Management now are part of our daily lives, and indeed the language of work, public life, production and consumption. The 1980's and 1990's saw TQM applied not just to car factories and mass production but to all aspects of the social organization of capitalist society including the public sector; hospital's, schools, universities, and to all levels of government.

We are all interchangeable now. We are advised not to plan for life long careers but rather changing jobs over our lifetimes. We all multi-task, and are replaceable cogs in the machinery that is our daily lives. One of the revolutions that occurred in the nineties along with TQM was the home work revolution.It was the result of the contracting out and reduction in government services.

Internet and local computer based technologies not only change work and home life, but also challenge the relation between them. Drawing on advances in technology, many hi-tech firms promote remote forms of work. Teleworkers give up their company office some or all of the time, and work from home. By separating the place of employment from the place where the work is actually carried out, teleworking restructures the relationship between public and private spheres. Organizations expect to profit from the deep-seated restructuring and decentralization that telework entails. While firms may start teleworking with their budget in mind, however, employees adopt telework to balance their work and family commitments. Indeed, since promoters of telework use different symbols for different groups, goals often come into conflict (Sturesson,1997). The integration of family and work spheres raises deeper issues than moving data from the center to the periphery, and propels us to understand how employees experience working at home for the firm.

We work all our lives. We no longer retire to idle away in some pastoral idyll but rather we invest and consume if we are lucky and rich, or we retire and work, part time to supplement our pensions.

It is all about time. As the old joke goes whats the difference between work time and free time? I don't get paid for my free time.

But I am consuming none the less, and so I am part of the cycle of production. Our leisure time which once was an idyll from work is now a part of work, we consume leisure. We party in our free time at clubs, restaurants, movies, concerts etc. even when we watch TV or DVD's we have someone working to entertain us,
we are consuming someone's work. We are all part of the cycle of capitalism.

We have whole university departments now focused on the productive use of leisure, specifically keeping us healthy. Healthy to continue working and consuming.

And so as I blog I am both producing and consuming, I am in fact working, without pay, a slave to the new clock, the computer. And so are you as you read this. Glance down to the right see that little clock.....


Time and Information Technology: Temporal Impacts
on Individuals, Organizations, and Society

As a defining technology, both the clock and the computer
affect temporal aspects of individuals , organizations ,
and society on the one hand, and the way people view time,
on the other. Clocks affected every aspect of temporality
not particularly because they were time-measuring machines,
but because they were the deŽfining technology.

The mechanical clock, in its simplest form, was a tool
for measuring time. However, it had two fundamental
differences, which enabled it to make huge impacts on
human life and civilizations , compared to its predecessors
such as the sundial, water clock, hourglass, etc. First, the
mechanical clock, which had became reliable since the application
of the regular swing of a pendulum in 1657 by
Christiaan Huygens, was incomparable in accuracy. Before
1657 clocks could not keep time more closely than to
about 15 minutes per day; within 20 years they kept time
with a variation of less than 10 seconds per day (Macey,
1980, p. 33). Now it became a reliable tool which could
direct, and provide criteria for, the organization of human
activities. For example, before the clock, it was not
possible to consider and apply notions of accuracy and
punctuality as we do now.

Second, the mechanical clock freed time from nature.
Before accurate mechanical clocks, time had always been
measured in relation to physical and biotic phenomena, for
example, the rising and setting of the sun and the growth of
plants. By those temporal indications from nature, people
organized and conducted their activities. They woke up
and started to work when the sun rose and harvested their
cropswhen the days drewin.This “time was not something
Ž xed in advance and divorced from external events” and
with the advent of the mechanical clock, time became “a
function of pure mechanism” (Rifkin, 1987, p. 85). People
wake up when the clock strikes seven, not because the sun
rises. Thereforewe can argue that clocks “dissociated time
from human events” (Mumford, 1934, p. 15) and “human
events from nature” (Landes, 1983, p. 16).

At the organizational level, Thompson (1967) investigated
the impacts of the mechanical clock on labor disciplines
in early industrial capitalism when the “task orientation”
of time organization by which work proceeded in
“natural” rhythms gave way to “labor timed by the clock”
(pp. 59–60).

Mumford argued that “The clock, not the steam-engine,
is the key-machine of the modern industrial age” (1934,
p. 14) because the clock was “a model for many other
kinds of mechanical works, and the analysis of motion
that accompanied the perfection of the clock, with the various
types of gearing and transmission that were elaborated,
contributed to the success of quite different kinds of
machine” (p. 15). Macey (1980) suggests that the British
supremacy in the horological revolution of 1660–1760
contributed greatly to the British industrial revolution,
which is usually considered to have begun about 1760.

He further insists that clocks in the 17th century not only
affected industrial organizations, but also affected every
aspect of the society: literature, philosophy, theology, and
therefore, our way of thinking and our view of the world.

The computer is, in its simplest form, a tool for calculation.
However, it is “the contemporary analog of the
clocks” (Bolter, 1984, p. 10). Information technology is
affecting every facet of contemporary society. Time is
no exception. “Our appreciation and our evaluation of
the passage of time is changing in the computer age”
(Bolter, 1984, p. 100). Information technology can affect
and change temporality, people’s perceptions of time, its
measurement, and the way time is organized. As Rifkin
(1987) argues,
It is likely that within the next half century, the computer will
help facilitate a revolutionary change in time orientation, just
as clocks did several hundred years ago when they began the
process of replacing nonautomated timepieces as society’s
key time-ordering tools. : : : the new computer technology is
already changing the way we conceptualize time and, in the
process, is changing the way we think about ourselves and
the world around us.

TIME, WORK-DISCIPLINE, AND INDUSTRIAL
CAPITALISM

E. P. Thompson
University of Warwick

Tess . . . started on her way up the dark and crooked lane or street not made
for hasty progress; a street laid out before inches of land had value, and
when one-handed clocks sufficiently subdivided the day. Thomas Hardy.

IT IS COMMONPLACE THAT THE YEARS BETWEEN I3OO AND 1650 SAW
within the intellectual culture of Western Europe important changes
in the apprehension of time.1 In the Canterbury Tales the cock still
figures in his immemorial role as nature's timepiece: Chauntecleer —
Caste up his eyen to the brighte sonne,
That in the signe of Taurus hadde yronne
Twenty degrees and oon, and somwhat moore,
He knew by kynde, and by noon oother loore
That it was pryme, and crew with blisful stevene . . . .
But although "By nature knew he ech ascensioun/ Of the equynoxial
in thilke toun", the contrast between "nature's" time and clock time
is pointed in the image —
Wei sikerer was his crowyng in his logge
Than is a clokke, or an abbey orlogge.
This is a very early clock: Chaucer (unlike Chauntecleer) was a
Londoner, and was aware of the times of Court, of urban organization,
and of that "merchant's time" which Jacques Le Goff, in a suggestive
article in Annales, has opposed to the time of the medieval church.

I do not wish to argue how far the change was due to the spread of
clocks from the fourteenth century onwards, how far this was itself
a symptom of a new Puritan discipline and bourgeois exactitude.
However we see it, the change is certainly there. The clock steps
on to the Elizabethan stage, turning Faustus's last soliloquy into
a dialogue with time: "the stars move still, time runs, the clock will
strike". Sidereal time, which has been present since literature began,
has now moved at one step from the heavens into the home. Mortality
and love are both felt to be more poignant as the "Snayly motion of
the mooving hand"3 crosses the dial. When the watch is worn about
the neck it lies in proximity to the less regular beating of the heart.
The conventional Elizabethan images of time as a devourer, a defacer,
a bloody tyrant, a scytheman, are old enough, but there is a new
immediacy and insistence.

As the seventeenth century moves on the image of clock-work
extends, until, with Newton, it has engrossed the universe. And by
the middle of the eighteenth century (if we are to trust Sterne) the
clock had penetrated to more intimate levels. For Tristram Shandy's
father — "one of the most regular men in everything he did . . . that
ever lived" — "had made it a rule for many years of his life, — on
the first Sunday night of every month . . . to wind up a large houseclock,
which we had standing on the back-stairs head". "He had
likewise gradually brought some other little family concernments to
the same period", and this enabled Tristram to date his conception
very exactly. It also provoked The Clockmaker's Outcry against the
Author:
The directions I had for making several clocks for the country are countermanded;
because no modest lady now dares to mention a word about winding -
up a clock, without exposing herself to the sly leers and jokes of the family
. . . Nay, the common expression of street-walkers is, "Sir, will you have
your clock wound up ?"

Virtuous matrons (the "clockmaker" complained) are consigning their
clocks to lumber rooms as "exciting to acts of carnality".

However, this gross impressionism is unlikely to advance the
present enquiry: how far, and in what ways, did this shift in timesense
affect labour discipline, and how far did it influence the inward
apprehension of time of working people ? If the transition to
mature industrial society entailed a severe restructuring of working
habits — new disciplines, new incentives, and a new human nature
upon which these incentives could bite effectively — how far is this
related to changes in the inward notation of time ?

It is a problem which the peoples of the developing world must live
through and grow through. One hopes that they will be wary of pat,
manipulative models, which present the working masses only as an
inert labour force. And there is a sense, also, within the advanced
industrial countries, in which this has ceased to be a problem placed
in the past. For we are now at a point where sociologists are discussing
the "problem" of leisure And a part of the problem is: how did
it come to be a problem ? Puritanism, in its marriage of convenience
with industrial capitalism, was the agent which converted men to new
valuations of time; which taught children even in their infancy to
improve each shining hour; and which saturated men's minds with
the equation, time is money.128. One recurrent form of revolt
within Western industrial capitalism, whether bohemian or beatnik,
has often taken the form of flouting the urgency of respectable timevalues.

And the interesting question arises: if Puritanism
was a necessary part of the work-ethos which enabled the
industrialized world to break out of the poverty-stricken economies
of the past, will the Puritan valuation of time begin to decompose as
the pressures of poverty relax ? Is it decomposing already ? Will
men begin to lose that restless urgency, that desire to consume time
purposively, which most people carry just as they carry a watch on
their wrists ?

If we are to have enlarged leisure, in an automated future, the
problem is not "how are men going to be able to consume all these
additional time-units of leisure ?" but "what will be the capacity for
experience of the men who have this undirected time to live ?" If
we maintain a Puritan time-valuation, a commodity-valuation, then
it is a question of how this time is put to use, or how it is exploited by
the leisure industries. But 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 the interstices
of their days with enriched, more leisurely, personal and social
relations; how to break down once more the barriers between work
and life. And hence would stem a novel dialectic in which some of
the old aggressive energies and disciplines migrate to the newly industrializing
nations, while the old industrialized nations seek to
rediscover modes of experience forgotten before written history
begins:

. . . the Nuer have no expression equivalent to "time" in our language, and
they cannot, therefore, as we can, speak of time as though it were something
actual, which passes, can be wasted, can be saved, and so forth. I do not
think that they ever experience the same feeling of fighting against time or of
having to co-ordinate activities with an abstract passage of time because their
points of reference are mainly the activities themselves, which are generally
of a leisurely character. Events follow a logical order, but they are not
controlled by an abstract system, there being no autonomous points of
reference to which activities have to conform with precision. Nuer are
fortunate.

Of course, no culture re-appears in the same form. If men are to
meet both the demands of a highly-synchronized automated industry,
and of greatly enlarged areas of "free time", they must somehow
combine in a new synthesis elements of the old and of the new, finding
an imagery based neither upon the seasons nor upon the market but
upon human occasions. Punctuality in working hours would express
respect for one's fellow workmen. And unpurposive passing of time
would be behaviour which the culture approved

It can scarcely find approval among those who see the history of
"industrialization" in seemingly-neutral but, in fact, profoundly
value-loaded terms, as one of increasing rationalization in the service
of economic growth. The argument is at least as old as the industrial
revolution. Dickens saw the emblem of Thomas Gradgrind ("ready
to weigh and measure any parcel of human nature, and tell you
exactly what it comes to") as the "deadly statistical clock" in his
observatory, "which measured every second with a beat like a rap
upon a coffin-lid". But rationalism has grown new sociological
dimensions since Gradgrind's time. It was Werner Sombart who —
using the same favourite image of the Clockmaker — replaced the God
of mechanical materialism by the Entrepreneur:
If modern economic rationalism is like the mechanism of a clock, someone
must be there to wind it up.

The universities of the West are today thronged with academic
clocksmiths, anxious to patent new keys. But few have, as yet,
advanced as far as Thomas Wedgwood, the son of Josiah, who
designed a plan for taking the time and work-discipline of Etruria into
the very workshops of the child's formative consciousness:

My aim is high — I have been endeavouring some master stroke which should
anticipate a century or two upon the large-paced progress of human
improvement. Almost every prior step of its advance may be traced to the
influence of superior characters. Now, it is my opinion, that in the education
of the greatest of these characters, not more than one hour in ten has been
made to contribute to the formation of those qualities upon which this
influence has depended. Let us suppose ourselves in possession of a detailed
statement of the first twenty years of the life of some extraordinary genius j
what a chaos of perceptions! . . . How many hours, days, months have been
prodigally wasted in unproductive occupations! What a host of half formed
impressions & abortive conceptions blended into a mass of confusion . . . .
In the best regulated mind of the present day, had not there been, & is not
there some hours every day passed in reverie, thought ungoverned,
undirected ?

Wedgwood's plan was to design a new, rigorous, rational, closeted
system of education: Wordsworth was proposed as one possible
superintendent. His response was to write The Prelude — an essay
in the growth of a poet's consciousness which was, at the same time,
a polemic against —
The Guides, the Wardens of our faculties,
And Stewards of our labour, watchful men
And skilful in the usury of time,
Sages, who in their prescience would controul
All accidents, and to the very road
Which they have fashion'd would confine us down,
Like engines . . . .

For there is no such thing as economic growth which is not, at the
same time, growth or change of a culture; and the growth of social
consciousness, like the growth of a poet's mind, can never, in the last
analysis, be planned.



The Fabrication of Labor

Germany and Britain, 1640–1914

Richard Biernacki

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS
Berkeley · Los Angeles · Oxford
© 1997 The Regents of the University of California
1— Conclusion: Under the Aegis of Culture

The Explanatory Method

The Fetishism of Quantified Labor

Forms of Passage

When the British adopted methods for calculating an efficiency ratio on new looms, their methods did not always conform to the cultural framework in place in Germany. At the firm of Benjamin Thornber and Sons in Burnley, records show that managers began calculating the efficiency of production no later than 1919. Unlike German managers, however, they did not begin with the maximum production possible in a given unit of time. They calculated the hours required to complete a piece of cloth of a fixed length with uninterrupted operation of the loom and then compared this with the actual number of hours used to produce cloth of that length. To be sure, the formula expressed efficiency as a percentage of the maximum possible, as in Germany. Yet fabric partitioned time, not time fabric; British practitioners


495

reasoned in this instance from hours per cloth, not, as the Germans did, from cloth per hour. Even when the British analyzed the use of labor in time, then, they sometimes began with the length of cloth, not the motions executed, as labor's denominator, a sign that change did not necessarily push them toward the German perspective of transmission of labor as a commodity.

Whether the systems of industrial practice in Germany and Britain contained endogenous forces for change that would have revealed themselves but for the intervention of the First World War, no one is in a position to determine. In the event, the force summoned to dislocate the systems was the organizational influence of the state, which broke the liberal-capitalist occultism of commodity production. In both Germany and Britain, during the war the state assumed greater responsibility for determining the rate at which workers were paid. In Germany, the workers' receipts from employers for piecework were adjusted to provide additional allowances, regardless of performance, to men for each dependent child.] Government intervened to decide not just the social benefits workers received as citizens but the wages they received as wage laborers, which now diverged from the quantity of labor power expended. The state determined not just the amount of pay but the formula by which it was calculated. The purchase of labor as a commodity through the autonomous workings of the market was not circumscribed; rather, it was completely undermined.


496

In Britain the breakdown of a market in raw materials and labor is illustrated by the policies of the Cotton Control Board, an association of textile manufacturers appointed in 1917 by the government Board of Trade. The Control Board allocated raw cotton at controlled prices to manufacturers, who were required to purchase a license to operate all their standing machinery. The more equipment the mill owners operated, the greater the levies they owed to the Cotton Control Board; the funds were used to provide unemployment relief for operatives in the industry.The board also controlled wage agreements. When the spinners, weavers, and card-room workers began negotiations in 1918 for large pay raises, the Cotton Control Board threatened (with great effect) to eliminate unemployment relief. Clearly, the bargaining no longer revolved around the sale of materialized labor, but centered on the collectively managed maintenance of labor power.

The war brought about a fundamental shift in the symbolic apparatuses of production in Britain. Perhaps because manufacturers had to purchase a license for each machine they wanted to run, they began to abandon the custom of locking tardy workers out; instead, they threatened to make latecomers put in a full day of labor by working past quitting time. Government-sponsored costing principles made it superfluous to reckon expenditures on overlookers' labor as an input embodied in the cloth; instead, overlookers received a guaranteed wage whether or not they or their underlings worked.

Receiving shadows: governance and liminality in the night-time economy


This paper focuses upon the emergence of the night-time economy both materially and culturally as a powerful manifestation of post-industrial society. This emergence features two key processes: firstly a shift in economic development from the industrial to the post-industrial; secondly a significant orientation of urban governance involving a move away from the traditional managerial functions of local service provision, towards an entrepreneurial stance primarily focused on the facilitation of economic growth. Central to this new economic era is the identification and promotion of liminality. The State's apparent inability to control these new leisure zones constitutes the creation of an urban frontier that is governed by commercial imperatives.

Into the Night-Time Economy: Work, Leisure, Urbanity and the Creative Industries.
By Tara Brabazon and Stephen Mallinder

Abstract

The goal of this paper is to investigate the shape and challenges of urban and economic development. We continue the analysis of Paul Chatterton and Robert Hollands in Urban Nightscapes, to reveal the contradictions between the production, regulation and consumption of nightlife. Their research discussed nocturnal urban history as, “a story of corporate power, greed, domination and marginalization, not to mention hedonism / pleasure, dissatisfaction and resistance across city streets at night.” Noting their study with intellectual respect, we continue their ‘story’ to probe the role of nocturnal practices,
behaviours and attitudes in an attempt to understand and map the margins of work, leisure and urbanity after dark.

While Fordism chained labour tasks to external rhythms, Post-Fordism displaced much of what was previously termed ‘work.’ The acceptance of part-time and casual employment would be rare, even thirty years ago. Aronowitz described this phenomenon as, “millions of people take whatever part-time work is available regardless of its content and do not expect to be fulfilled by it, except in relation to income it yields.”What has enabled this transformation is the movement from an identity formed through work to an identity shaped by consumerism.

Shopping is the pay off for the highly exploitative employment without security. While manufacturing still exists, hospitality, tourism and retail are the growth areas of the economy, providing the foundation and framework for the night-time economy. A small and skilled core workforce is outnumbered by a large group of
temporary, casualized and deunionized workers. Post-Fordism encourages worker flexibility, autonomy and responsibility. It also creates cyclical poverty for many and builds a ‘service economy’ of cleaners and waiting staff. Non-standard employment has increased, encompassing underemployment, over-employment and self-employment. These positions have few benefits and little job security.

There is a clash between the older theories and modes of work and the non-standard employment of the creative industries, particularly in the night-time economy. As Stanley Aronowitz has argued, “the labor movement focused on the struggle over the working day.”The working night was not a focus.

Mothers' Toil and Daughters' Leisure: Working-class Girls and Time in 1920s Germany

Christina Benninghaus1

1 University of Bielefeld, Germany

Gender not only influences how time is used, it also shapes the way it is experienced. Thus `time' has a different meaning for men and for women. Based on the analysis of hundreds of compositions written by working-class girls in the 1920s, this article examines the significance of gender and age in the perception of time. Changes in the realms of both work and leisure time, a powerful cult of youth, and contemporary debates on the `New Woman' helped girls and young women living in Germany in the interwar period to develop a new relationship to free time. However, while girls claimed leisure opportunities for themselves, they did not challenge the fundamental tension between femininity and access to free time. On the contrary, in the girls' own eyes, constant readiness to work and unflagging concern for the welfare of others remained basic components of adult female identity. Building on these reflections, the final section of the paper focuses on a methodological problem. If it is true that working-class women saw having free time at one's disposal as part of a masculine identity and as virtually incompatible with respectable feminity, evidence on working-class women's leisure activities is unlikely to figure in their self-testimonies. As a close examination of contemporary surveys and oral-history interviews shows, texts by women on their use of time have to be understood as constructions and therefore must be read `against the grain'.

Time & Society, Vol. 3, No. 3, 277-303 (1994)
DOI: 10.1177/0961463X94003003002
© 1994 SAGE Publications

The Tensions between Process Time and Clock Time in Care-Work

The Example of Day Nurseries

Karen Davies Implicit or explicit in work on care and caring has been the issue of time. Notwithstanding this fact, however, time itself has not been sufficiently problematized. In the first part of this paper, the concept of process time is introduced and its relevance for an understanding of care-work is suggested. Drawing on data from a qualitative study of day nurseries in Sweden, the second part of the paper explores various tensions and conflicts that (can) arise in this type of care-work due to the intermeshing of clock/linear time and process time. The implications, in relation to present day economic cuts, are also briefly discussed.

The Working Class

But one of the structures that unite civil society and the world of paid work is
that of time itself. In general, time is structured largely by the organizations for
which people work for money, and employers are its main controllers. 'They
transform life-time into working-time' (Capital 1, 7, 25: 799). This temporal
order is still largely governed by the speed of an increasingly capital-intensive
machine system, whose rate does not follow the rhythm of life, has little to do
with the phenomena of nature, and, even yearly, seems to accelerate.
Life and life's events simply cannot be organized like industrial time, and
industrial time does not bend to the requirements of human living. Over a
lifetime, falling in love, giving birth and child-rearing occur according to
different experiences of time, and biological imperatives such as eating and
sleeping impose their own time constraints. Similarly, the pattern of the rituals
of the family-household - the ceremonies of life, love and death, of success
and failure – involves experiences of time and its passing that are not
amenable to the industrial clock (Donaldson, 1996: 40).

Nonetheless, industrial time takes precedence over other forms of time. Time
with others outside paid work and time alone give way to its demands. Time
scarcity is passed down a hierarchy of social times. Time pressures within the
organizations of paid work are resolved by methods involving greater work
intensity, longer hours, and night and weekend work. These reduce the
amount of 'interaction time'-time with workmates at work, family and friends at
home-which in turn leads to a greater scarcity of time for and with ourselves.
Because the time we have is definitely finite, the taking of time for one set of
activities necessarily means taking it from others. The stratification of time is
such that personal time is the most consistently sacrificed, as the time needs
of the family-household are above our own, and the needs of the paid
workplace take precedence over them, and over time for building and
sustaining the organisations and networks of civil society.

Those who buck the imperatives of this strict hierarchy of time, as serious
parents must, pay a penalty. Rachel Power (2005: 25, 26) suggests that
current feminists are attentive once more to 'the real barrier to happiness: the
organisation of work', arguing for the 'obvious need' for extensive changes in
paid work, taxation, industrial relations and family policies to allow for a decent
family life and for the raising of children, on the basis that all mothers and
fathers have the right and responsibility to earn and to parent.

Railroads and Time Consciousness in the Antebellum South

Aaron W. Marrs

AARON W. MARRS is on the editorial staff at the Office of the Historian, United States Department of State. He earned his Ph.D. from the University of South Carolina in 2006, and is currently revising his dissertation, "The Iron Horse Turns South: A History of Antebellum Southern Railroads," for publication.

Historians have often looked to industrial capitalism to further our understanding of "time consciousness." This article explores time consciousness through the experience of a railroad in pre-Civil War South Carolina. Examining the South Carolina Railroad allows us to examine how time consciousness operated in a region not associated with industrial capitalism, and also see how multiple times could function simultaneously. While clocks were important to railroad operations, companies also had to address an array of non-clock times. Moreover, companies were never fully in control of their own time, but were in constant conflict and negotiation with various groups in the community. While industrialization and factory labor remain important ways to understand time consciousness, looking beyond the factory walls can help historians make better use of the analytical power of time.

Father Time, Speed, and the Temporality of Posters Around 1900


The essay proposes that advertising posters around 1900 construct a popular-culture iconography of a modern temporality associated with new technologies. In addition, it proposes, posters themselves embody a new temporality as a medium. The essay analyses how posters portray time by focusing on several images, some of which depict an updated allegorical figure of Father Time in order to advertise a racing automobile or precision watch.The essay also addresses the temporality of posters as a medium by investigating their conditions of viewing and the role of their advertising function. The discussion of the media specificity of posters, their cultural context, and a detailed analysis of their imagery, concludes that posters both elicit a certain kind of temporal viewing and portray a conflictual transition between old and new temporalities.

Frederick Winslow Taylor

The man who made us all work like this…

BBC History Magazine, June 2003

One of the most characteristic developments of the 20th century - in social change, in consumerism and in the deadly new efficiency of war - was arguably the rise of industrial mass-production. That makes this a key centenary year.

Because the year 1903 - exactly a century ago - marked the true beginning of mass-production in a series of developments at the leading edge of management thinking. Henry Ford founded the company that bears his name and started experimenting with ideas that would lead to the assembly line, William Morris decided to specialise in motor cars - and the man behind 'scientific efficiency' and time-and-motion study first unveiled his ideas to American engineers.

The trouble was that Taylor's ideal worker wasn't really human at all. He was a cog - an automaton who did what he was told. "Every day, year in and year out, each man should ask himself over and over again, two questions," said Taylor in his standard lecture. "First, 'What is the name of the man I am now working for?' And having answered this definitely then 'What does this man want me to do, right now?' Not, 'What ought I to do in the interests of the company I am working for?' Not, 'What are the duties of the position I am filling? Not, 'What did I agree to do when I came here?' Not, 'What should I do for my own best interest?' but plainly and simply, 'What does this man want me to do?'"

Hand in hand with this assumption - that the workforce had nothing to offer but brawn - was the enthusiasm for standardisation.

"My dream is that the time will come when every drill press will be speeded just so," his assistant Carl Barth told the congressional hearings in 1914, "and every planer, every lathe the world over will be harmonised just like musical pitches are the same all over the world... so that we can standardise and say that for drilling a one-inch hole the world over will be done with the same speed."


Time and the Biological Consequences of Globalization
Author(s) by Kevin Birth
Identifiers Current Anthropology, volume 48 (2007), pages 215–236
DOI: 10.1086/510472
Availability This site: PS | HTML | PDF (179.1k)
Copyright © 2007, The Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research..
Abstract Discussions of globalization and time-space compression have not acknowledged the implications of the relationship of time and place on a rotating globe where each locale has its own cycles of day and night. When these cycles are recognized, several contradictions in contemporary capitalism emerge, most notably temporal conflicts between locations on the globe, desynchronization of biological cycles, and lack of correspondence between those cycles and social life. These contradictions are increasingly being addressed but not resolved through the power of the media to determine the timing of social activity and pharmacological interventions to ameliorate the bodily suffering caused by desynchronization.


Biopolitical Temporalities


Labour and the Temporal History of the Modes of Production: Natural Economies and Capitalism

Research reveals that it would be impossible to argue against the claim that there was from circa 1300 – at least in so far as Continental Europe and the English are concerned - an inter-generational, class-directed and formally articulated policy of manipulation or “indoctrination” with respect to the dominant, organizing temporal structure of society and its temporal form or mode of production. Non-European cultures underwent their change from organic to mechanical time much later and in often in response to European or English idealization, dominance, or (most likely) imposition. Bradby calls the product of this intergenerational, class directed change in the mode of production the destruction of a “natural economy.”For Bradby

‘natural economy’ is to be understood as one based upon the production for personal needs and the close connection between industry and agriculture…is opposed to economies of expanded reproduction, and to all commodity economies. Its destruction implies the progressive socialization of labour processes that can be separated from the land as immediate objective condition of production, and the growth of a commodity economy, in which production is no longer in order to satisfy a direct need of the producer, but in order to create and realize exchange-value. The process of destruction is completed when land and, most importantly, labour-power itself, become commodities, and the end of production comes to be the creation of surplus-value for capital. The term ‘natural economy’ is therefore used to mean those characteristics of pre-capitalist modes of production which are essentially opposed to capitalist relations of production, and which must be destroyed for the development of capitalism to be possible.

The destruction of a natural economy and the change to capitalism is simultaneous with a change in the cultural conception of time; and that this change in the cultural conception of time is a change from an organic or ecologic conception of time to a mechanical or abstract conception of time.

The productive labour of social production historically suffers the greatest change. Thompson writes about the bourgeois alarm against the temporal manners of the labourers; he writes, “a considerable proportion of manual workers (one moralist was alarmed to discover) after concluding their work were left with

‘several hours in the day to be spent nearly as they please. And in what manner… is this precious time expended by those of no mental cultivation?… We shall often see them just simply annihilating those portions of time. They will for an hour, or for hours together…sit on a bench, or lie down on a bank or hillock… yielded up to utter vacancy and torpor…or collected in groups by the road side, in readiness to find in whatever passes there occasions for gross jocularity; practicing some impertinence, or uttering some jeering scurrility, at the expense of persons going by…’

This clearly, was worse than Bingo: non-productivity, compounded with impertinence. In mature capitalist society all time must be consumed, marketed, put to use; it is offensive for the labour force merely to ‘pass the time.’” Labour must be always either producing or consuming.

Moishe Postone stresses in his study of Marx that “the social relations characteristic of capitalism are constituted by labour.” But, importantly Postone immediately points out, “what also characterizes these social forms, according to Marx, is their temporal dimension and quantifiablity.” The concept of time is, then, of “central significance in Marx’s analysis of the nature of capitalist society.”

The relations between time and labour constitute and express a “temporal norm” in production to which “they [i.e., labour] must conform.” Postone writes,

The time expended in producing a particular commodity is mediated in a socially general manner and transformed into an average that determines the magnitude of the value of the product. The category of socially necessary labour time, then, expresses a general temporal norm resulting from the action of the producers, to which they must conform. Not only is one compelled to produce and exchange commodities in order to survive, but – if one is to obtain the “full value” of one’s labour time – that time must equal the temporal norm expressed by socially necessary labour time. It is the temporal dimension of the abstract domination that characterizes the structures of alienated social relations in capitalism.

Capitalism and Mechanical Coordination

I also think that historical research demonstrates that this change in the cultural conception of time without which capitalism would not have been possible is an historical change which formally embodied and enacted a classed-directed bias.

The power of this bias is both exemplified and embodied by the mechanical conception of time. Quantifying and coordinating time and production, increasing the efficiency of production over time by coordinating productive labour, the higher economic classes became the stewards of the labour-time of the monks and the masses. It would be historically naïve to think that the clock’s only role in history was just to tell the time! Rather, Mayr reveals,

When the mechanical clock was first invented, it was greeted…with almost religious veneration…Demonstrating, in an impressively concrete manner, a particular kind of rationality and logic and a distinctive method of achieving desired results, it appealed to unexpressed desires and latent inclinations.

The clock, then, is as ideological and political as it is mechanical and regular. Continuing Mayr writes

For several centuries, the clock’s most important function was perhaps to serve as an instrument of popular education and, indeed, indoctrination. To progress-minded Europeans of the Renaissance, the clock embodied the best things the future could bring: an end to magic and superstition, rationality in thought, and order in public life.

Mayr also supports the thesis offered by E.P. Thompson, Barbara Bradby and Moishe Postone that the mechanical clock-sense of time embodies an authoritarian scheme of domination upon productive labour: indeed that this scheme of domination is the historical reason for the imposition and totalization of the mechanical conception of time and work in the first place. Mayr writes,

While the authoritarian conception of order took shape in the minds of the literate upper classes, the clock also had its effect, partly in a non-verbal manner, upon the thinking and feeling of the unlettered rural majorities. They were not likely to get the clocks into their hands, but they would see them in the village church, on the towers of the town, or at regional fairs. In both its roles, as a timekeeper and as a demonstration model of rational, purposeful action, the clock served as an important and purposefully used instrument in preparing the masses for the ways of modern industrial society.

Thompson too supports the claim that the time-sense of labour underwent “technological conditioning” and that the elites’ use “time-measurement as a means of labour exploitation.” Harvey expresses it this way:

Symbolized by clocks and bells that called workers to labour and merchants to market, separated from the ‘natural’ rhythms of agrarian life, and divorced from religious significations, merchants and masters created a new ‘chronological net’ in which daily life was caught.

But, like Hladik, to what degree would we want to attach our fate to a mechanical clock, a fascist’s or a capitalist’s? Given that industrial capitalistic societies and their institutionalized Leviathans are already being forced to conform to the over-determining reality of natural systems, as enacted in the Kyoto Protocols, unsolved key questions remain for our understanding of the future of global production, specifically its temporal form. Given the future, the possibilities, hope and anxiety associated with it, understanding the emerging biopolitical temporality is important for this is an important and elite domain of political action, as Hardt and Negri in Empire write,

Understanding this construction of new temporalities will help us see how the multitude has the potential to make its action coherent as a real political tendency.[22]

Take the complaint of an 19th century factory worker:

If the clock is as it used to be, the minute hand is at the weight, so that as soon as it passes the point of gravity, it drops three minutes all at once, so that it leaves them only twenty-seven minutes, instead of thirty.[23]

So, the lesson for us and for the future of biopolitical production is that, when it comes to time, we must be wary of

The Guides, the Wardens of our faculties

And Stewards of our labour, watchful men

And skillful in the usury of time,

Sages, who in their prescience would controul

All accidents, and to the very road

Which they have fashion’d would confine us down,

Like engines…


Reality check: Are We Living In An Immaterial World?

Goodbye to value as measure?

As stated earlier, one of the distinguishing features of postworkerism is the rejection of Marx’s so-called ‘law of value’. George Caffentzis reminds us that Marx himself rarely spoke of such a law, but there is also no doubt of his opinion that, under the rule of capital, the amount of labour time socially necessary to produce commodities ultimately determined their value.20 In breaking with Marx in this regard, postworkerists draw some of their inspiration instead from a passage in the Grundrisse known as the ‘Fragment on Machines’. This envisages a situation, in line with capital’s perennial attempt to free itself from dependence upon labour, where knowledge has become the lifeblood of fixed capital, and the direct input of labour to production is merely incidental. In these circumstances, Marx argues, capital effectively cuts the ground from under its own feet, for ‘As soon as labour in the direct form has ceased to be the great well-spring of wealth, labour time ceases and must cease to be its measure, and hence exchange value [must cease to be the measure] of use value’.21

Negri, among others, has insisted for many years, and in a variety of ways, that capital has now reached this stage. Therefore, nothing but sheer domination keeps its rule in place: ‘the logic of capital is no longer functional to development, but is simply command for its own reproduction’.22 In fact a range of social commentators have evoked the ‘Fragment on Machines’ in recent times – apart from anything else, it has held a certain popularity amongst those (like reactionary futurologist Jeremy Rifkin) who tell us that we live in an increasingly work-free society. It’s a pity, then, that few of these writers follow the logic of Marx’s argument in the Grundrisse to its conclusions. For while he indicates that capital does indeed seek ‘to reduce labour time to a minimum’, Marx also reminds us that capital is itself nothing other than accumulated labour time (abstract labour as value).23 In other words, capital is obliged by its very nature, and for as long as we are stuck with it, to pose ‘labour time … as sole measure and source of wealth.’

In its efforts to escape from labour, capital attempts a number of things that, each in their own way, fuel arguments that make labour time appear as irrelevant as the measure of capital’s development. Looked at more carefully, however, each can be seen in a somewhat different light. To begin with, capital tries as much as possible to externalise its labour costs: to take a banal example (although not so banal if you are a former bank employee), by encouraging online and teller machine banking and discouraging over-the-counter customer service. As for our own work regimes, many of us find ourselves bringing more and more work home (or on the train, or in the car). More and more of us also seem to be on stand-by, accessible through the net or by phone. Added together, such strategies (which, to add to the messiness of it all, may well intersect with our own individual aspirations for greater flexibility) go a long way to help explain that blurring of the line between the ‘work’ and ‘non work’ components of our day that Negri decries. On the other hand, they also cast that boundary in light other than that of the collapse of labour time as the measure of value, one in which – precisely because the quantity of labour time is crucial to capital’s existence – as much labour as possible comes to be performed in its unpaid form.

Secondly, in seeking to decrease labour costs within individual organisations, capital also reshapes the process through which profits are distributed on a sectoral and global scale. In a number of essays over the past 15 years, George Caffentzis has outlined the idea, first elaborated at some length in the third volume of Marx’s Capital, that average rates of profit suck surplus value from labour-intensive sectors towards those with much greater investment in fixed capital:

In order for there to be an average rate of profit throughout the capitalist system, branches of industry that employ very little labour but a lot of machinery must be able to have the right to call on the pool of value that high-labour, low-tech branches create. If there were no such branches or no such right, then the average rate of profit would be so low in the high-tech, low-labour industries that all investment would stop and the system would terminate. Consequently, ‘new enclosures’ in the countryside must accompany the rise of ‘automatic processes’ in industry, the computer requires the sweat shop, and the cyborg’s existence is premised on the slave.24

In this instance, if there appears to be no immediate correlation between the value of an individual commodity and the profit that it returns in the market, the answer may well be that there is none: the puzzle can only be solved by examining the sector as a whole, in a sweep that reaches far beyond the horizons of immaterial labour. Here too, it’s a matter of which parameters we choose to frame our enquiry.

Thirdly, and following on from above, the division of labour in many organisations, industries and firms has reached the point where it is difficult – and probably pointless – to determine the contribution of an individual employee to the mass of commodities that they help to produce.25 Again, this can foster the sense that the labour time involved in producing such commodities (whether tangible or not) is irrelevant to the value they contain. Marx, for his part, argued that the central question in making sense of all this was one of perspective:

If we consider the aggregate worker, i.e. if we take all the members comprising the workshop together, then we see that their combined activity results materially in an aggregate product which is at the same time a quantity of goods. And here it is quite immaterial whether the job of a particular worker, who is merely a limb of this aggregate worker, is at a greater or smaller distance from the actual manual labour.26

In this regard, Ursula Huws’ critique of notions of ‘the weightless economy’ deserves careful attention. Like Doug Henwood in his fierce deconstruction of the ‘new economy’,27 Huws draws our attention back not only to the massive infrastructure that underpins ‘the knowledge economy’, but also to ‘the fact that real people with real bodies have contributed real time to the development of these “weightless” commodities.’28 As for determining the contribution of human labour within the production of immaterial products, Huws argues, that while this might ‘be difficult to model, that ‘does not render the task impossible’. Or, in David Harvie’s words, ‘every day the personifications of capital – whether private or state – make judgements regarding value and its measure’ in their efforts ‘to reinforc[e] the connection between value and work’; He adds:

Hardt and Negri may believe in the ‘impossibility of power’s calculating and ordering production at a global level’, but ‘power’ hasn’t stopped trying and the ‘impossibility’ of its project derives directly from our own struggles against the reduction of life to measure.29

Also see;

The End Of The Leisure Society

Black History Month; Paul Lafargue

Take Time From the Boss

Work Sucks

Time For The Four Hour Day

Goof Off Day


The Right To Be Greedy



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A Tax Break The Fraser Institute Hates


Now this is ironic. A tax break the Fraser Institute doesn't like.
“Canadians are investing in labour sponsored funds to get generous tax credits, not because the want to invest in Canadian entrepreneurs or expect to earn a high rate of return,”

Of course it's a tax break for the working class not the parasites of the investing class.


See:

Flaherty's Smoke and Mirrors

Vencap

Fire Sale

More Income Trust Fallout

A Peoples Program for Alberta

Workers Want Tax Credits NOT Tax Cuts


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Harpers Bonapartism

I did a tongue-in cheek post on the Progressive Conservative Leadership Race in Alberta last year comparing the candidates to the Bolshevik leadership. And in perusing that post I came across this definition of Bonapartism which does really describe the Harper Government well.

What Are The Characteristics Of Bonapartism?
The dictator may pay a hypocritical homage to the tradition of popular consent by means of occasional plebiscites in which the people are asked to endorse some proposal desired by the government. But this purely formal consultation is usually carried out in an atmosphere of intimidation wherein the propagandists of the ruling clique predict the direst consequences unless the proposition is confirmed.

Trotsky used the term affectionately when he referred to Stalin.

The contradictions within the bureaucracy itself have led to a system of handpicking the main commanding staff; the need for discipline within the select order has led to the rule of a single person and to the cult of the infallible leader. One and the same system prevails in factory, kolkhoz, university and the government: a leader stands at the head of his faithful troop; the rest follow the leader. Stalin never was and, by his nature, never could be a leader of masses; he is the leader of bureaucratic “leaders,” their consummation, their personification.

It seems appropriate given Harpers Law and Order government has embraced the military and the war in Afghanistan and has branded the Canadian state in the Conservative party image.


Bushism-Cheneyism has aspects of Bonapartism,
whereby the state rules in an authoritarian way and disregards the people, representing itself as the true representative of the business classes. In fact, it serves only a small spectrum of corporate cronies of the ruling elite, disadvantaging almost everyone else. It expands government, but not into provision of useful infrastructure (bridges, airports), but toward the provision of "security" (often just a label for make-work unnecessary jobs, such as extra al-Qaeda-fighting police in Wyoming) or of artificial "investment opportunities" such as an Iraq under US military occupation..


And we know Harper the student of history admires autocratic power and has studied Stalin, thus his re branding of the party in his own image, as the Party of Stephen Harper.

And it became even more relevant this week when the party purged candidates that they deemed out of touch with the party line.



Karl Marx was a student of Jacobinism and the French Revolution as well as a contemporary critic of the Second Republic and Second Empire. He used the term Bonapartism to refer to a situation in which counterrevolutionary military officers seize power from revolutionaries, and then use selective reformism to co-opt the radicalism of the popular classes.



Tory brass won't let them run in the next election

What do elected Conservative candidates Brent Barr, Bill Casey and Mark Warner have in common?

From Friday's Globe and Mail

The Conservative Party has named the members of the management committee that has taken over the duties of the riding association that renominated banished Tory MP Bill Casey in his Nova Scotia constituency.

But neither Mr. Casey, nor the president of the riding association in Cumberland-Colchester-Musquodoboit Valley, know who those committee members are.

"It's a secret committee. They took over our riding association and all of our money and they won't even tell us who's on it," Mr. Casey said yesterday.

Mr. Casey had hoped to run again for the Conservatives despite being kicked out of the caucus after voting against the federal budget over changes to the Atlantic Accord. But when the members of Mr. Casey's riding association elected him as their candidate despite the expulsion, the national council vetoed the decision and said it was bringing in a new committee to nominate someone else.

It was "anti-democratic," Mr. Casey said.

But he isn't the only elected Conservative candidate to be internally disqualified.

Two others - one in Toronto and one in Guelph, Ont. - announced this week that they had been stripped by the party brass of the opportunity to run in the next election.

Mark Warner, an international-trade lawyer who was elected by the riding association in Toronto Centre, says the party took issue with his participation in a local forum on income and equality. He was eventually given the green light to participate, he said, but on the condition that he remain silent throughout.

Mr. Warner said he believes he should be able to discuss issues that are pertinent to an urban downtown riding. And he doesn't believe he should have been disqualified as a candidate for saying so.

"The riding association made a choice to elect me as a candidate; the riding association was happy for me to continue as a candidate," Mr. Warner said. "If the national party wants to officiate the judgments of a local riding association, I think there are some questions there that democrats will want to discuss."

As for Brent Barr in Guelph, the Conservative national council accused him of not generating enough support for the Conservatives through canvassing and of running a poor campaign in the last election - charges he vehemently denies.

"I wish that I would say that we did something wrong because then I would actually be able to stand up and say here's my resignation. I would be comfortable with my resignation. But that's not the case," Mr. Barr said.

But Conservative Party president Don Plett said there were problems with the candidacy of both Mr. Warner and Mr. Barr that had to be addressed. He disagrees that there is anything undemocratic in the process.

"Our Prime Minister [Stephen Harper], our leader, has made it absolutely clear that he does not appoint candidates, that we have a democratic process. Both Mr. Barr and Mr. Warner were elected by the democratic process," Mr. Plett said. "The fact of the matter is that there were certain issues. And, as there are in all parties when there are certain problems with candidates, candidates at times get removed."

As for the anonymity of the committee that has taken over the riding association in Mr. Casey's constituency, Mr. Plett said the names are not a secret.

But "the management committee, for the best part, has asked that their names not be put into media because, the fact of the matter is, I think everybody in the riding wants to try to find a peaceable resolution there," he said.

"They are all working toward finding a candidate to run in the next federal election and they don't want anything interfering with that."


TORONTO STAR
EDITORIAL
TheStar.com | comment | PM's way or highway
PM's way or highway
Nov 02, 2007 04:30 AM

Prime Minister Stephen Harper promised in the Conservative party's 2006 election platform that local party riding elections would be conducted in a "fair, transparent and democratic manner."

But that certainly isn't the case in Toronto Centre where Conservative candidate Mark Warner has been dismissed by the party's national leadership after he wanted to play up urban and social issues, such as poverty, affordable housing and reaching out to minorities.

None of these issues are high on Harper's list of priorities, as Warner learned when Don Plett, national party president, signed the formal letter informing him that he was no longer the party's official candidate in the riding. Warner, who immigrated from Trinidad and Tobago as a child and has a successful international trade law practice, was slated to run against Liberal candidate Bob Rae.

Warner said he had wanted to stress subjects that matter to residents in the downtown riding, which is home to a large immigrant population and big tracts of public housing.

The move is yet another sign that Harper, despite his claims to the contrary, has little interest in fair and transparent local riding elections. It also is a clear indication that Harper is out of touch with big cities and wants little to do with helping to address their major social and economic problems.

PM distancing himself from 2 rejected candidates

Updated Fri. Nov. 2 2007 4:20 PM ET

The Canadian Press

HALIFAX -- Prime Minister Stephen Harper says he had nothing to do with decisions by the Conservative party's national council to reject the nominations of two Tory candidates.

Harper says Mark Warner and Brent Barr, both from Ontario, were disqualified by the party's National Council -- and he had nothing to do with it.

The prime minister, in Halifax to address an aboriginal conference, says the democratically elected body is charged with the responsibility of making sure the nomination of candidates runs smoothly.

Warner, an international-trade lawyer, had hoped to run in Toronto-Centre, but he was forced to withdraw his candidacy because of what he called "friction'' with the council.

Guelph businessman Brent Barr says he was told his nomination was rejected because he had not done enough to promote party.

"Frankly, I'm not involved in those kind of decisions,'' Harper said. "The National Council is democratically elected and makes those decisions under the constitution of the party.''




See:

Harpers Fascism

Leo Strauss and the Calgary School

Post Modern Conservatives.

Liberals The New PC's



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Friday, November 02, 2007

Harpers Lethal Injection

It is a specific case of a Canadian facing the death penalty in the U.S. that the Harpocrites have decided they will use as their cause célèbre to arbitrarily abandon our long standing national policy that we do not extradite criminals to countries with the death penalty and that we fight for Canadians facing the death penalty abroad.

The U.S. implemented the Death Penalty in 1976 the same year that Canada in a free vote ended the death penalty. Remember 'free votes' that used to be the cornerstone of the Reform/Alliance/Conservatives parliamentary reform policy until they became the government.

A bill to officially ban the death penalty passed in a free vote in 1976.

A free vote on reinstating the death penalty was held in the House of Commons in 1987. MPs agreed by a 21-vote margin to maintain the abolition of capital punishment.



And the irony is that the Canadian on death row is facing death through lethal injection which is now before the Supreme Court in the U.S. as a form of cruel and unusual punishment, torture by any other name.

Is The Government Finally Scrutinizing The Death Penalty?

Since the Supreme Court effectively legalized the federal death penalty in 1976, death penalty legislation or even legislative oversight has been nearly non-existent. Feingold's hearing this summer on death penalty implementation was the first of its kind since 2001-- the last time a Democratic majority enabled Feingold to chair a Senate committee.

But there are indications that Feingold may no longer be the lone wolf in Washington howling about the death penalty's moral and practical problems. His hearing this summer actually made front-page headlines when fired U.S. Attorney Paul Charlton gave specific examples of the Alberto Gonzales-led Justice Department eagerly pursuing death sentences at the expense of due process. Nationally, executions this year are down to 42, their lowest level in a decade.

Of those executions all but one were done via lethal injection. And the Supreme Court's stay of execution for Mississippi prisoner Earl Berry was, according to the New York Times, an "indisputable indication" that the Court will stop all deaths by lethal injection until next spring.

That's when the nine justices argue Baze v. Rees, which will determine if death row inmates can challenge the so-called three-drug cocktail used for executions as a violation of 8th amendment prohibition of cruel and unusual punishment. Some doctors now argue that the drug combination may sometimes result in inmates being paralyzed but not anesthetized, meaning the final moments of their lives are spent in searing pain, unable to move.

Looking at the Ethics of the Lethal Injection Challenge

The Supreme Court decided to halt an execution in Mississippi this week, marking the third stay from the justices since they agreed to hear a challenge to lethal injection. It likely means that states will hold off on all executions until the high court rules on the case, which claims the drug mixture used for the injections can cause severe pain and amounts to cruel and unusual punishment.

The "de facto" moratorium and the case itself raise an interesting ethical question. In the past, other inmates have challenged the constitutionality of lethal injection, have lost their appeals and have been executed. And Richard Dieter, the executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center, says that the court has declined to take similar appeals in the past. So how is it fair that the justices have just now decided to weigh in, and, in the meantime, executions are likely to stop?

Marin judge rules lethal injection procedures invalid

Portrait of lethal injection reveals a barbaric scene


The other irony is that the Canadian in question is an Albertan. And Alberta is the home base of Harpers Law and Order Government.

The lawyer for a Canadian awaiting execution in a Montana prison says he was shocked by the federal government's announcement it will no longer seek clemency for his client.

In the past, the government has requested that Canadian prisoners sentenced to death in the U.S. be allowed to serve out life sentences here, since Canada opposes the death penalty.

The apparent change of heart came as a blow to Don Vernay, lawyer for Albertan Ronald Allen Smith, who faces lethal injection for the 1982 murders of two men in Montana.

"I mean, talk about having the wind knocked out of you. I'm astounded, is all I can say," Vernay told CTV's Canada AM on Friday.

Public Safety Minister Stockwell Day announced in the House of Commons on Thursday that he will not plead for clemency for Smith, since he had been found guilty in a democratic country "that supports the rule of law."

On Friday, Prime Minister Stephen Harper confirmed Canada has no interest in wading into the debate over capital punishment, and would not be coming to Smith's aid.

"The reality in this particular case is, were we to intervene, it would quickly become a question of whether we were willing to repatriate a double murderer to Canada," Harper told reporters.

"In light of this government's strong initiatives on tackling violent crime I think that would send the wrong signal to the Canadian public."

Vernay said representatives of the federal government contacted him about a year ago and said they intended to try and bring Smith home.

"They came to us and they said we want Mr. Smith back in Canada, he's one of our citizens," Vernay said.

"We want the death penalty lifted and we are going to do whatever we can to secure his transfer to Canada and to have the governor of Montana grant clemency. And so we were pleased and we were surprised."

Vernay said he flew to Montana and met with the staff of Gov. Brian Schweitzer late this summer, and got the sense the clemency request was on the agenda.

"It was in the preliminary stages but everybody knew that this is what was on the agenda," Vernay said.

"And we had the Canadian government 100 per cent behind us and then all of a sudden out of nowhere comes this statement."

Vernay said the decision seems to fly in the face of Canada's position on the death penalty and sends a confusing message to the world.

"For your government to make a statement like that to the world internationally that you now support the execution of your own citizens -- what can I say? I mean, it's breathtaking in terms of its implications."


The Harpocrites are abandoning not only Ronald Allen Smith to his fate, but any right to legal intervention that could occur in the Supreme Court hearings on lethal injections. Perhaps fearing their intervention could sway the court.

"We have no desire to open the debate on capital punishment here in Canada -- and likewise, we have no desire to participate in the debate on capital punishment in the United States." Harper told reporters.


Now if one was prone to conspiracy theories one could be forgiven for thinking that the Harpocrites abandonment of this specific case is a sop to the White House, given the President is Executioner In Chief and rather proud of his record of executions when he was Governor of Texas.

And we know that the White House endorses other forms of torture err cruel and unusual punishment; like waterboarding, using public security as an excuse. Which is the excuse Stockwell Day gave for this sudden reversal of policy;

"It would send a wrong message. We want to preserve public safety here in Canada."
One wonders since this announcement has come out of blue. One has to ask why now, and why are they doing this. There is a hidden agenda here despite the Harpers assurances that he does not want to open up a debate on capital punishment.

Except they have.

In 1987, the House of Commons defeated a motion to bring the death penalty back. Among those who voted in favor of the idea was Rob Nicholson, now the federal justice minister. Nicholson did not talk to reporters in Parliament and his chief spokeswoman did not respond to queries about whether he still backed capital punishment.

Yep, a not so hidden agenda. It is the slippery slope towards a return to capital punishment in Canada if the Harper Law and Order government gets a majority.

Mr. Harper added: "The reality of this particular case is that were we to intervene, it would very quickly become a question of whether we are prepared to repatriate a double-murderer to Canada. In light of this government's strong initiatives on tackling violent crime, I think that would send the wrong signal to the Canadian population."

SEE:

Say No To Capital Punishment

Pro-Life Pro-Death

Free Kadhar

More Foreign Affairs Incompetency



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Poitique Vert RIP

As Cliff pointed out in the comments to my post No Comments on Politique Vert it appears that they are no more. The ultimate No Comment Policy.

http://politiquevert.wordpress.com/

WordPress.com

The authors have deleted this blog. The content is no longer available.

Of course this might be temporary as was the case recently with a couple of Blogging Tories. See:

Making Lemonade Aid

Another BT Bites The Dust


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The Return of Capital Punishment

The Harpocrites have decided that it is okay for another state to murder Canadian citizens as long as that state is a so called democratic one.


The Conservative government's announcement that it will no longer stand up for Canadians who face the death penalty in the United States is drawing fire from the opposition. The Tories officially announced a change in Canada's foreign policy when it comes to Canadians on death row. "We will not actively pursue bringing back to Canada murderers who have been tried in a democratic country that supports the rule of law," Day told the House of Commons on Thursday.


Though as arch conservative Pat Buchanan reminded us last night on Dan Abrams show on MSNBC , discussing the use of waterboarding as torture, "the United States is NOT a democracy IT IS A Republic."

This is the same Republic that kidnapped Mehar Arar and sent him to Syria to be tortured and is still illegally holding a Canadian citizen at Gitmo.

And there are those in the United States who will be impacted by Canada's failure to support our own citizens whose right to life is threatened by state sanctioned murder.

Feingold Statement on the Severe Injustices of Capital Punishment

So much for Canada's international reputation as a defender of Human Rights. Once again tarnished by the Orwellian logic of the Harpocrites. They have of course used this logic to attack Canadian values and government programs, claiming them to be aberrations; simply the result of the previous Liberal governments, whether it is over the issues like the Middle East, Kyoto or Peacekeeping.

They are now imposing their Conservative values in reshaping the policies of the Canadian state through executive edict. This is just another example of their anti-democratic agenda, an agenda that uses the power of the PMO and cabinet to avoid parliament.


SEE:

Say No To Capital Punishment

Pro-Life Pro-Death

Free Kadhar

More Foreign Affairs Incompetency


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Flaherty's Smoke and Mirrors



More evidence of the Harpocrites Tax Unfairness. Business got the biggest tax cut while you and I got crumbs.

And even though many in booming Alberta are better off now than they were a decade ago, the taxation on working families earning median incomes; $40-$60,000, are paying for the tax cuts to business.

Simply put it is our taxes paying for Flaherty's corporate welfare while the Conservatives fail to invest the remainder of our money in much needed social programs.


Economists say the personal income tax relief in the Harper government's Tuesday mini-budget is paltry and does little to improve incentives to work, save and invest in a country already suffering from weak productivity growth.

The overall tax breaks that Finance Minister Jim Flaherty doled out this week will ramp up to $14.7-billion annually within five years, but less than 11 per cent of that went toward personal income tax rate cuts. Only about $1.5-billion is directed at lowering personal income tax rates, in this case cutting the lowest bracket rate to 15 per cent from 15.5 per cent.

Global Insight (Canada) chief economist Dale Orr calculates that the personal tax burden on Canadians keeps rising despite the Conservatives' fall mini-budget.

"This puts the small magnitude of that [mini-budget] relief into perspective," he says.

As a result of the relief Mr. Flaherty offered, personal income taxes collected by Ottawa as a share of all personal income fall to 9.8 per cent this fiscal year from 10.11 per cent. But then they rise to 10.12 per cent and soar to 10.94 per cent by 2012-13, only slightly less than where they would have been without the mini-budget.

The marginal effective tax rate on personal income - the tax paid on the next dollar of income someone earns - remains extremely high for most earners in Canada.

Typical marginal effective tax rates for families with children climb above 50 per cent for incomes in the $20,000 to $30,000 range and exceed 60 per cent for those earning $30,000 to $40,000, according to calculations by C.D. Howe Institute research director Finn Poschmann.

For most families, the rate doesn't drop below 50 per cent until incomes hit $45,000.

Edmonton's economic boom is making the rich richer, but most households are barely better off than in 1981, says the Edmonton Social Planning Council.

In making the comparison today, the council reached back to the peak year of the last big oil boom, rather than to the leaner intervening years.

It makes sense to compare "apples-to-apples" boom years, council researcher John Kolkman said as the non-profit agency called for more than $1 billion in tax breaks and increased spending for low-income Albertans.

Using Statistics Canada figures, Kolkman said the median earnings level - the point where half of income earners make more and half earn less - stood at slightly more than $32,000 in 1981, and only $300 above that in 2005. He adjusted 1981 earnings to equate them to the dollar's 2005 buying power.

Even so, in inflation-adjusted terms an increasing proportion of Edmonton-area families are making $100,000 or more, the Statistics Canada numbers show. Back in 1981, about 27 per cent of families were making at least that amount, in 2005 dollars. As of 2005, more than 30 per cent were in that earnings range.

About 55 per cent of families in 1981 were earning between $40,000 and $100,000 in inflation-adjusted 2005 dollars. The middle-income range accounted for just 43 per cent of families by 2005.

About 18 per cent of families earned less than $40,000 in 1981, using the same inflation-adjusted dollars. Families in that lower-income range peaked at about 38 per cent in 1995. As of 2005, they accounted for 27 per cent.

"A greater percentage of families are doing better," Kolkman said. Even so, he said some families that were once middle income have since lost ground.



SEE:

Tax Cuts For All

Tax Cuts For The Rich Burden You and Me

Tax Fairness For The Rich


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Income Trusts; Predatory Capitalism


Predatory capitalism comes to the oil patch through this Income Trust merger. Another consequence of the Harpocrites Halloween surprise last year. And clearly farmer Ed's Royalty compromise has not impacted these guys.
Merger creates oil patch giant
Canada's newest energy powerhouse, forged yesterday by the proposed merger of Penn West Energy Trust and Canetic Resources Trust, is poised to challenge the oil patch's biggest players as it seeks even more aggressive expansion through acquisitions and new projects.

The new entity will be comfortably the country's largest oil and gas trust, with market value of around $15-billion and production of more than 200,000 barrels of oil equivalent a day. It will have the size to compete with some of the oil patch's biggest names, said executives of both companies.

The new company will not only be a leader in Canadian conventional light oil production, but its larger size will make it easier to access debt markets to fund significant developments in unconventional gas, enhanced oil recovery and even Alberta's oil sands, a region in which major projects have been the preserve of only the largest and most well-financed firms.

In addition, the company - which will operate under the Penn West banner for now, but may be rebranded in the future - is now buttressed against any potential foreign takeover and positioned to expand aggressively by taking over other trusts in Canada as well as assets in the U.S., said Penn West chief executive officer Bill Andrew. Last year's federal decision to make income trusts pay corporate tax from 2011 is perceived as having left such firms as more susceptible to domestic or foreign buyouts.

The friendly $3.6-billion cash and paper deal, which came together in a series of confidential meetings held in motels outside of Calgary over a three-week period, was facilitated in part by Calgary-based lawyer John Brussa, one of the original architects of Canada's income tax structure.

Income Trusts generate vast pools of capital which they can use to buy up other companies while retaining their ability to pay out dividends to coupon cutters.Income Trusts began in the oil patch in Alberta before becoming popular across Canada.

They are a product of the Alberta stock exchange lack of regulation and the Klein governments deregulation revolution. They avoid paying taxes thus allowing for higher returns to investors. They are a tax avoidance scheme for owners. And they still will generate value for their owners despite Flaherty's tax scheme which only comes into effect in 2011.

That will impact the coupon cutters far more than the companies real owners, the Class A shareholders and company investment managers. And by then the majority of Flaherty's corporate tax cuts will be in place enabling this trust to transform itself into a corporation again if it is a fiscal advantage.

In practical life we find not only competition, monopoly and the antagonism between them, but also the synthesis of the two, which is not a formula, but a movement. Monopoly produces competition, competition produces monopoly. Monopolists are made from competition; competitors become monopolists. If the monopolists restrict their mutual competition by means of partial associations, competition increases among the workers; and the more the mass of the proletarians grows as against the monopolists of one nation, the more desperate competition becomes between the monopolists of different nations. The synthesis is of such a character that monopoly can only maintain itself by continually entering into the struggle of competition.

Karl Marx
The Poverty of Philosophy
Chapter Two: The Metaphysics of Political Economy


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The Carbuncle of Class War


This has been a well known fact for years Marx suffered from boils. Now some dweeb is explaining his theories of alienation experienced by the working class under capitalism as the result of his condition.

Karl Marx suffered from a skin disease that can cause severe psychological effects such as self-loathing and alienation, according to a British dermatologist.

The father of communism’s life and attitudes were shaped by hidradenitis suppurativa, said Sam Shuster in the British Journal of Dermatology. One of its symptoms is alienation – a concept that Marx, a martyr to boils and carbuncles, put into words as he wrote Das Kapital.

“In addition to reducing his ability to work, which contributed to his depressing poverty, hidradenitis greatly reduced his self-esteem. This explains his self-loathing and alienation, a response reflected by the alienation Marx developed in his writing.”
This is reductum ad absurdum that results from a shallow attempt to deconstruct Marx. And it isn't even new. It is pop psychology of the right, an attempt to dismiss ideas by dissing the man. Not unlike Aileen Kelly's attack on Bakunin.

The fact is that Marx's poverty exasperated his disease. If anything his suffering poverty, like that of his fellow European working class immigrants to England, placed him within the class. And his skin condition had nothing to do with his revolutionary ideas, he had evolved those long before his skin condition became a problem.

Karl Marx did his best writing on deadline.

Commissioned by the Communist League in mid-1847 to write a "profession of faith," Marx and Engels procrastinated, traveled, experimented with form and might never have written the manifesto of the Communist Party if not for a sternly worded letter from the league ordering them to deliver the document by February 1, 1848.

A few all-nighters later, Marx produced a stirring document that by now has been read by tens of millions of people. Far fewer realize that regular deadline commentary provided Marx with the closest thing he ever had to actual employment. From 1852 to 1862 he was a regular London correspondent for the New York Tribune. All told, Marx contributed almost 500 columns to the Tribune (about a quarter of which were actually written by Engels). Marx's newspaper writing takes up nearly seven volumes of the fifty-volume Collected Works of Marx and Engels--more than Capital and indeed more than any of Marx's works published in book form.

The Tribune was in some ways a logical place for Marx's journalism. The paper was founded in 1841 by Horace Greeley as a crusading organ of progressive causes with a pronounced American and Christian flavor; one contemporary writer described the paper's political stance as "Anti-Slavery, Anti-War, Anti-Rum, Anti-Tobacco, Anti-Seduction, Anti-Grogshops, Anti-Brothels, Anti-Gambling Houses." During Marx's tenure as a correspondent, the Tribune was the largest newspaper in the world, reaching more than 200,000 readers.

At the same time, there was probably no publication in the world that would have been a perfect fit for Marx's cantankerous prose and personality. Even when Marx wrote in English, his strident Germanic tone dominated. His analysis was so unsparingly radical that at times the Tribune felt the need to distance itself from its fulminating London correspondent; introducing one of his 1853 essays, for example, the editors wrote, "Mr. Marx has very decided opinions of his own, with some of which we are far from agreeing," but then conceded that "those who do not read his letters neglect one of the most instructive sources of information on the greatest questions of current European politics."


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Time For A Made In Canada Auto Industry

Here is a perfect example of Branch plant economics. Despite the auto pact,there is now a disconnect between our national auto industry and it's American owners.

Time to create a made in Canada auto industry. But not one that means co-opting workers through unionization without the right to strike.

Domestic auto sales up in Canada

Detroit's Big Three automakers did something in October they haven't been able to do in 10 long years - they outsold their overseas rivals in Canada by a wide margin.

Chrysler axes 1100 jobs at Brampton plant

By John mccrank TORONTO (Reuters) - Chrysler is cutting around 1100 jobs at its Brampton, Ontario, assembly plant as part of wider layoffs planned by the automaker, the head of the Canadian Auto Workers union said on Thursday.

Brampton's muscle-car party is over

Two years ago this month, Canadian Auto Workers union President Buzz Hargrove joined other car industry big shots on a stage at Chrysler LLC's Brampton assembly plant northwest of Toronto to celebrate what was then the hottest car on the road and one of Chrysler's most popular products ever: The beefy Chrysler 300.

This week, he took a call from Chrysler brass informing him that sales of the 300 and its two sister cars built at Brampton -- the Dodge Charger and the Magnum wagon -- had slipped enough in North America to warrant a major cutback in production. The unbridled optimism in 2005 among the CAW and Chrysler executives that the car would stand the test of time has now hit a cold wall of realism suggesting it may not. And in a flash, Brampton's muscle car party is over.

Blaming a slowing U.S. market, Chrysler announced yesterday it will discontinue the Magnum and cut the third shift at Brampton in February, putting 1,100 factory workers on layoff. It's part of a wider and deeper cutback effort under new owners Cerberus Capital Management that will see the automaker dump four models and cut an additional 10,000 hourly, 1,000 salaried and 1,000 contract jobs as it aims to steer the company back to profitability. Chrysler lost US$2-billion in the first quarter this year before splitting from Mercedes-Benz maker Daimler AG.

Chrysler bows to price pressure

Chrysler Canada is boosting cash incentives on its vehicles to address consumer concerns that they're paying more for cars and trucks here than in the United States -- the biggest automaker to date to adjust prices to the rising Canadian dollar.


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