Guy Standing’s prose is delightfully accessible to the lay reader, a surprising discovery considering the depth and complexity of his choice of subject: how the evolution of our western capitalist societies has shaped the progressive loss of what he terms “time freedom”: “the freedom to direct one’s own use of time”. By first supplying us with an elegant, though necessarily simplified, picture of how our time use has changed, the British labour economist builds a solid foundation for his later political arguments on how to build a “Good Society”.
At the origin of this gradual theft of time, according to Standing, lies the privatisation and enclosure of cultural “commons” – shared land and natural resources – by a landowning elite. During the transition from the agrarian to the industrial era, the loss of these communal resources, often serving as both raw materials and a means of production, has not only deprived non-landowning communities of self-directed, meaningful work but has also stripped away a collective safety net against unforeseen adversity.
Top-tier “rentiers” amass wealth from property and assets, while the rapidly growing “precariat” is left to bear the brunt of chronic instability
What stands out about this transformation, among other momentous changes, is how it displaced people’s “right to work” with the duty to labour for a meagre money wage. Central to Standing’s main argument is the necessity, under such conditions, to foster resilience among the vulnerable so that they – meaning “we” – can cope with uncertainty and economic shock. This resilience will in turn allow for revival of the freedom to use our time in activities that blend commoning, labour, work, and leisure in a manner that embraces our long-dormant sense of civic, social, and ecological responsibility.
Unlike the dull, dry economics you might have read in college, Standings makes powerful distinctions between work and labour, leisure and entertainment, charity and compassion, paternalism and social solidarity. Take, for instance, the ancient Greek concept of leisure or “schole”, which is a far cry from the passive consumption of modern-day “entertainment”. It describes a form of public leisure that encompasses discussion and political participation, which takes place communally rather than within the echo chambers of social media algorithms.
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The Politics of Time is a cogent and very readable indictment of neoliberalism in today’s tertiary time era, where top-tier “rentiers” amass wealth from property and assets, while the rapidly growing “precariat” is left to bear the brunt of chronic instability, zero-hours contracts and catastrophic debt. Standing’s daring emancipatory agenda challenges our prevailing “jobs fetish” as anything but progressive.
