Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism
E.P. Thompson's life and his groundbreaking monograph by the same name
Time, Work-Discipline and Industrial Capitalism is a study by the English historian, writer, and activist Edward Palmer Thompson. It was published back in 1967 in issue 38 of Past & Present, one of the journals of historical research at Oxford University. By that time, its author was already a widely recognized and well-known researcher. Seven years earlier, in an edition numbering eight hundred (and in 1968 in a revised one numbering a thousand pages, this time with all the necessary footnotes, as the critics insisted), Edward Thompson’s most important work, The Making of the English Working Class, was published.
This magnum opus of his is regarded as one of the most influential in social and labor history. Among the central and salient theses of the work is the author’s belief that the working class is an active historical subject that dynamically contributes to the shaping of its own condition — it creates itself with the same force as it is created by the situation and relations in which it finds itself. Here, within this understanding of Thompson, we also find the grounds for one of the most important debates in British left-wing thought that raged between him and Perry Anderson in the early 1960s.¹ Countless significant writings followed, making Thompson one of the most remarkable British historians of the 20th century, alongside, of course, Eric Hobsbawm.
Like Bloch, for him, history doesn’t resemble in any way watchmaking or carpentry but is a quest for a better and deeper understanding.
Thompson’s unusual approach and methodology — which I will discuss in some detail in a minute — and perhaps his entire intellectual development, were decisively influenced by the French school around the magazine Annales d’histoire économique et sociale and the inspiring work of its leading representatives: Lucien Febvre, March Bloch, Fernand Brodel, etc. Like Febvre, Thompson also refused to be ‘exhaustive’ in his work and opposed the claim for universal objectivity in academic historiography. Like Bloch, for him, history doesn’t resemble in any way watchmaking or carpentry but is a quest for a better and deeper understanding.
The political aspects of E.P. Thompson’s life are marked by many twists and turns — he was an active member and one of the important intellectual figures of the British Communist Party in the 1940s and 1950s. He founded the Historians’ Group in 1946, along with Christopher Hill and Eric Hobsbawm. He was also part of the unprecedented departure and distancing — after Khrushchev’s so-called “secret speech” in 1956 — from the party and its policy line moving in parallel with Moscow.
Disillusioned with the invasion of Hungary and Stalinism in general, the following year, together with John Saville, he founded The New Reasoner, which became a major instrument of the informal movement of left-wing intellectuals known as The New Left, taking its name from Thompson’s essay of the same name. Later, the same journal would expand into one of the most popular magazines in the history of left-wing popular and academic journalism, The New Left Review.
As a staunch defender of human rights and a hardworking activist, the historian would not be excluded from the painful theoretical debates and real struggles of his time, from labor strikes to international issues like the Vietnam War, the Cuban Revolution, and more. To his last breath, Thompson described himself as a “humane socialist” and a “Marxist historian,“² precisely to distance himself from the now-turned orthodoxy of Soviet Marxism.
In his preface to The Making of the English Working Class, Thompson points to the guiding star of all his future work:
“… to rescue the poor stockinger, the Luddite cropper, the “obsolete” hand-loom weaver, the “utopian” artisan, and even the deluded follower of Joanna Southcott, from the enormous condescension of posterity.”³
In other words, for Thompson, history must not continue to modestly serve those in power by contributing to the over-idealization of the historical process by strictly following their behavior — be they generals, intellectuals, dictators, or monarchs — and their notable or infamous hours or days. It should be committed to the daily and hourly creators of history, with those who too have, for so long, generated in the memory of posterity only enormous condescension. Where do the misfortunes and troubles of the living, often nameless historical subjects, lie? Where — his or her successes and victories? To make them live a new life—breathing, and pulsating with power, still nameless, if you insist— that is the real goal of the new historian from the second half of the twentieth century.
Thus, according to Thompson, if we wish to understand what is happening in the ceaseless and monotonous course of the days, to understand a single anonymous man and his life, if you will, we must, first of all, learn what the struggles and aspirations guiding his daily life were. To clarify the historical relations between people, it is necessary to study the “actual person and in the actual context”⁴ which are in turn such because of the enduring and recurrent nature of different types of struggles.
By idealizing the forces of a bygone day, history helps to justify the force(s) of today.
Itis safe to say, then, that Thompson is first and foremost a historian of everyday life, interested in the dynamics of human transformation, their relations to others, and, mostly, their shared context. On the other hand, Thompson is also acutely aware of the task facing history as a science — the fact that we have always been interested in our past, in our collective past, whether tribal or modern, narrowly political or religious and that, besides being implicit, such a point of departure is also immensely obligatory.
If historiography by default possesses a particular legitimating power, it is largely due to the ability to mythologize the events and the participants in them, which in turn mythologizes everything in appropriate guises. The constructions and narratives that the study of history offers, insofar as they are committed to the being of the community, shape and bring to at least relative reality particular worldviews, often serving particular interests. By idealizing the forces of a bygone day, it helps to justify the force(s) of today.
History, however banal it might sound, is such insofar as it deals with the past, and the notion of historicity with the passing and its experience. The historian’s commitment, then, is to create both spatial and temporal proximity and remoteness in the past. But what does time placed at the beginning of the title have to do here?
Thompson argues that time is not fixed and given once and for all and therefore the past, together with the way we comprehend time — i.e. historicity — are variables whose experiences are in a particular way guided by the conditions in which we find ourselves. Time and our relation to it thus appear as the expression of a particular constellation of factors. It is nothing without our perception of it and our relation to that same perception, and these should be thought of as resulting both from our adjustment to the social and political field and also from the invention of that field itself. Radical (in the primary sense of the word, from the roots of things) political and social changes, as the sources testify, go hand in hand with a new attitude toward time and our place in history.
To put it differently, as the social and political layers shift, so do the layers of time, and so do the directions towards which the possibilities of their realization tend. What has been said can be clarified with a few examples.
First, the so-called “Julian reform” that Caesar proposed after crossing the Rubicon River and his clash with Pompey in 49 BC, along with changes serving purely political interests, was an event followed by a reform in time itself — the notorious Julian calendar. Considering this event in isolation, we might safely attribute it to Caesar’s “personal eccentricity.“⁵
Second, in the mid-13th century, however, we find the same eccentricity in Kublai Khan, who conquered China and founded the Yuen dynasty. The Mongol Khan invested in the establishment of observatories and the reformation of the Chinese calendar, employing for this task some of the most experienced Islamic astronomers at the time.⁶ The Mongol nomadic tribe that Kublai led did not have writing by then. Such an event is not unprecedented in Chinese history — countless preceding dynastic primogenitors made attempts to transcend old and other-imposed temporal boundaries.
Third, after the execution of Louis XVI during the French Revolution of 1793, the Jacobins also engaged in a rejection of foreign time. The French Revolutionary Calendar (Calendrier révolutionnaire français) attacked both ecclesiastical and monarchical time and introduced a clock with a decimal, rather than a duodecimal, system. Instead of saints to be celebrated on the days of the month, the Republic’s partisans elevated the corresponding natural goods, crops, and farm animals of the season: yarrow and chamomile, honey, tobacco, oranges, tomatoes, horses, and geese adorned the days of the fixed thirty-day months in the revolutionary year, each named after objective states of the surrounding world, as of the upcoming tasks — Fog, Snowfall, Flowering, Harvest.
All these examples, and many more, come to tell us that overcoming the other(s), strange and alienating time imposed by a different and alien political ambition(s), is integral to the actual historical outcome. The ever-new in history adjusts time and temporality in general to itself, but only ever adjusts. In the examples given, time has not yet been precisely framed and, therefore, is not framing-in-return in the full sense of the word. Here it is still not the adjusting-everything-else phenomenon, which, as the author tells us, could only be realized with the invention of the clock.
Of interest to Thompson is precisely the framing and adjusting time — the time of the working day…
While there is a real impact on everyday life, in the examples given, time is still not placed in the conditions specific to the capitalist system, which would allow new content to invade the day, gradually changing both its essence and its external manifestation. Of interest to Thompson is precisely the framing and adjusting time — the time of the working day, negotiated and conceived bilaterally, insofar as it is at this time that the notion of a labor discipline emerges, demanding a certain behavior in a certain part of the day. Thompson thus strikes a very different picture of time from the traditional one we know from the physical and philosophical sciences. From an ephemeral and ineffable incorporealness, it is transformed into precise mathematical measurability, into a density shaped from with(in)out, which does not simply flow out and into, but which flows out in a certain way, in the measurable way required by capitalist forms of production.
Henceforth, time will set the beat of the ghostly dance of commodities, of the wistful quantification of value itself. The “renting” of the worker’s labor for a certain part of the day will transform time into a denial of his ability to dispose of himself. In this negation, the commodity emerges both as that which is produced and as that which produces it. Or, to put it another way, the worker himself will become a commodity since he will have to sell the only thing he has — his labor power — “to capital […] in order to live.”⁷ The commodity that the worker possesses will have to be measured similarly to sugar measured by scales — its measure will be the clock.
Although these specific regularities of capitalist production have been theoretically examined many times before, the historian’s job here is to present them in action, in actuality, in the process of their affirmation and the resistance to it. If in 1975 the great French philosopher Michel Foucault found the foundations of what he called ‘disciplinary society’ in the way space educates and molds the body to make it obedient and performative, Thompson gives us the other side of discipline — its intimate relationship with time.
How is time thought and experienced, and how is it imposed and framed in the period of the Industrial Revolution so thoroughly and engagingly explored here by Thompson? Parallel to this, we should also ask: whose time is other people’s time?
Roughly speaking, this is the time of the bosses, the owners of the means of production. At first, this framing of time coming from outside is a distinct boundary, fitting into the otherwise natural course of the days. The time of the working day, and with it, the worker as a commodity, becomes the measurable time of others. The worker’s wasted time is the boss’s lost profit. In this first stage, the other’s time tries to fill the worker’s time, that is, his daily life, and he is conscious of it precisely as the other’s time.
Here he still has different and counter to the new temporal logic means to oppose it — the regular festivals, the village fairs, the duties around the animals, the harvest, and so on, which often force him to be absent from production and stand in distinct opposition to factory time. Thompson also discusses at length the capitalists’ concerns generated by workers’ resistance forces and the measures they take at the individual and sub-individual levels to combat them.
However, the boundary between “our” and “foreign” time becomes blurred and unclear. First, second, third generation... Until, at some point, the time of the workshops and their managers, the time of the factories, and the large fabricators — with their dominant and outgoing motives — change the overall attitude to time. In this second stage, clock-framed labor is no longer experienced as the time of others but is adopted, as it were, becoming an internal imperative of meaning, reachable only through the abstract ways of productivity. Here, too, the tools for confronting “other people’s time” have already lost their weight, if not lost themselves, as with “Drunken Monday,” for example — one of the author’s main accents, which was also found in many different lands, not just the UK.
If the Industrial Revolution made possible the mass production of watches, their use in production gave further impetus to the Industrial Revolution itself.
But let us not forget that — as we have pointed out above — for Thompson, the working class is an active historical subject. Although it loses the oppositional attitudes inherited from its past, in the third stage it invents internal ones that fit into the logic of the new conditions, thanks to which it successfully opposes the socio-economic situation, namely movements aimed at reducing the working day, increasing holidays, wages, etc.
If the Industrial Revolution made possible the mass production of watches, their use in production gave further impetus to the Industrial Revolution itself. With all this, the author reveals to us the processes and the resistances against the establishment of labor discipline in early capitalist society and how it is imposed through the notion of time as measurability. Not least is the inherent inventiveness of the particular epoch, actively reproducing its dominant ideological underpinnings.
The historical reading to which this study urges us, and the discovery of its relevance to our times, could help to awaken our resistance. It could remind us of the significance of every major technological invention — such as the clock, and, for us, all the aspects of digital technology — for the way society will operate both socio-economically and at the political level.
Purpose-driven work, preceding and displaced by industrial, abstract clockwork time in the Industrial Revolution, reveals to us the revocability of the taken-for-granted habits of our everyday lives. Thompson’s work, with which I hope you might find inspiration to become familiar, successfully lays bare before us the contingent nature of what is already established in the world around us, along with its reducibility to ourselves, and in so doing — points to the possibility that we and our world might be otherwise.
Notes
For a detailed exposition of their opposing positions, we recommend Robert Louker’s brilliant article “Shifting Trajectories: Perry Anderson’s Changing Account of the Pattern of English Historical Development” in Historical Materialism (Fall 2019).
Roger Fieldhouse and Richard Taylor (eds.) (2014) E. P. Thompson and English Radicalism. Manchester: Manchester University Press.
Edward P. Thompson (1963). The Making of the English Working Class. Vintage Books, pp. 12.
E. P. Thompson. The Making of The English Working Class, pp. 9
Nomi Claire Lazar, “Introduction: Framing Time” in Out of Joint (2019, Yale University Press). Some of the examples given here come from the same edition.
Paul Lunde, 1985, Muslims in China: the History. Aramco World Journal 36(4).
Friedrich Engels, “Wage Labour and Capital” in Selected Works vol. 7 (1978), pp. 18–19.