Marty Hart-Landsberg asked, >So my question: in what ways, if any, should this current >trend/development influence our own political efforts in this period. >Should we just ignore it, promote it, take aim at it for its limited >understanding? Comments or reactions appreciated. I don't know if it's just because I'm stubborn or if it's because I've been right all along but I don't see anything in the current developments that would make me change my main political focus on working time. My perception is that most people, including most 'progressive economists', still simply can't get it into their heads that the quantities expressing money are abstracted from real relationships between people. We can talk until the cows come home (and until they go back out to pasture again) about income, prices, profits, rents, productivity, interest rates, etc., but unless those concepts are anchored in a qualitative assessment of everyday life, whatever conclusions we reach or answers we propose will be "blowin' in the wind." Time is the medium in which we experience life. Wage labour is the site where people's qualitative experience of time is reduced to a quantitative exchange for money. The free market ideology inverts the relationship between time and money. Time is portrayed as a void unless filled up with the "values" that money can buy. What Marx called bourgeois ideology was a coherent intellectual and moral system compared with today's shallow, cynical and deeply pathological sham of the "free market". It's like the difference between Calvinism and Calvin Klein: one is theology, the other is brand name underwear. So what happens when "ideology" becomes transformed into a consumer commodity? What happens when "financial assets" are transformed into consumer commodities? To make a long story short, they get adulterated and become debased. Obeying Gresham's law, the phoney ideology and ersatz financial assets drive the genuine articles out of circulation. It is a mistake to accept this counterfeit capitalism on its own terms as "capitalism" (although it _is_ the historical result of the development and then the decay of capitalism). Economic struggles become increasingly futile, not because they "can't win" but because *what* they might win is of questionable substance. Only a "politics of time' can offer a substantive ground for progressive political struggle. Marx said it: ". . . the limitation of the working day is a preliminary condition without which all further attempts at improvement and emancipation must prove abortive." In advocating a politics of time, it is necessary to guard against a counterfeit strategy: calls for a limitation of work time that are predicated on "no loss in income" (the venerable slogan '30 hours work for 40 hours pay') deflect the issue back into the insubstantial, quantitative realm of monetary exchange. If the money is shit, why bicker about 'how much'? Regards, Tom Walker ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ #408 1035 Pacific St. Vancouver, B.C. V6E 4G7 [EMAIL PROTECTED] (604) 669-3286 ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ The TimeWork Web: http://www.vcn.bc.ca/timework/
