The fact that the desire for more free time became overpowering, in view of the burden of working time even in terms of pure quantity, is understandable. But where does the time ‘released' come from? Part of it may have been wrested from the employers by the labour movement in a dogged struggle, always in conjunction with technological improvements and a rationalization of organization based on the division of labour, which led to increases in productivity. Another part of it stems from women's previously invisible reserves of time, which were not officially identified and represented 'social free time'in the calculation of human working life, even if it was devoted to unofficial, unpaid work. One part, however, paradoxically results from the sheer extension of the need for time which was introduced into the history of humanity with the machine age: the need for time for production, but also the need for time for the consumption of what is produced. In advanced industrial societies, a further increase in efficiency is not just a prerequisite in the area of industrial production, but time also has to be shaped, organized and rationalized more efficiently in order to be able to consume the goods and services produced for consumption. Time is needed and used up in order to produce and to destroy what is produced, in order to make room for new products and services, but also in order to be able to maintain and reproduce the conditions for continued production and continued consumption.
The necessity of creating time for consumption is already contained in the cycle of innovation, repetition and obsolescence. Consumption can occur in many kinds of ways. Just as it is possible to gobble down food in a fast food restaurant or to be cosseted by a chef de cuisine in a splendid ambience, the setting for the consumption of products and services which come on the market can also be shaped in very different ways – but it always needs time. One of the first thinkers to refer to this was Paul Lafargue, the son-in-law of Karl Marx. In his book The Right to Laziness, published in 1883, he advanced the theory that the bourgeoisie had to proceed from its industriousness to idleness, because industrial society was dependent not just on producers, but also on consumers.21 And Georges Bataille, in an essay written in 1933 on the concept of spending', comes to the conclusion that there is no society which does not produce surplus value, but nor is there one which does not also devote a large part of its time, goods and energies to unproductive expenditure, indeed to wastefulness: ‘Terrible as human misery is, society has never been able to control it to the extent that the striving for self-preservation, which gives production the semblance of a purpose, has outweighed the striving for unproductive expenditure.'Bataille further concludes that every society has to cope with two main problems: production which serves the preservation and propagation of the species and which represents the starting point for the development of every social system, and the consumption and destruction of surplus production and energy; for this forms the reaction to the problems arising from growth.22
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Politics of Time