E P Thompson on the clocks going back & time discipline
Clocks have gone forward or back in Britain to mark summer or winter time for around a century. There are debates about how daylight is lost or gained as a result and the impact of this and these continue.
Behind that however lies an industrial obsession with time and the market capitalist idea (also in a related sense an idea of state directed capitalism, in terms of how much could be produced and how quickly) that time is money.
A common theme of the clocks going back for winter is that those who are not working overnight will get an extra hour in bed. The subtext there is perhaps whether an extra hour not doing something is necessarily a good idea.
EP Thompson’s Time, Work Discipline which appeared in Past and Present in 1967, almost 60 years ago, remains a foundation text.
To give a brief flavour, he writes of ‘Smilesian snippets about humble men who by rising early and diligence made good’. He continues that as workers secured reductions in working hours moralists became concerned that ‘manual workers after concluding their work were left with several hours in the day to be spent nearly as they please’.
How time is used or not used is political
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