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Even though the form of organization described here comes closer to a high-performance flexibilization and cannot be regarded as typical of the whole area of production, it is the temporal principles of organization which clearly predominate: thus capital, raw materials or partmanufactured products and work are organized according to the financial, market and order situation, on the principle of short-term, and the most economical, temporal availability. Time is money, but money time is no longer to be found in the machine alone, but in a widely ramified, multi-layered, complex machinery of organization. It must be such that flexible'disposition and redisposition is possible at any time. Temporal disposability extends from venture capital via marketing to sales; the temporal network organizes the spatial one.

Production alone on the principle of optimal flexibilization is not yet enough. The products thus manufactured, above all the rapidly growing proportion of electronic devices, computers, fax and audiovisual technologies along with the relevant infrastructure, bring a part of the scientific laboratory time which has led to their development, as well as the temporal logic of industrial manufacture to which they owe their production, into working and everyday time. For their operation, their constant use and sale, similar temporal disposabilities are required to those which they already embody. The logic of temporal availability does not stop at industrial manufacture but spills over into other jobs and into so-called free time. A production process based on availability at any time of the necessary inputs as an optimizing principle demands as a correlate (free) time structures in which the time needed for consumption also manifests similar qualities to those built into technological products. Presupposing a class of buyers and users with a high income, consumption time must be such that things are usable in accordance with the built-in intention. But not just things - the proportion of consumption time reserved for individual production, for the do-it-yourself approach to products and individual services (if one thinks of those, for instance, which tend body and soul through therapy, massage and body-building), is also of the quality geared to availability at any time. In extreme cases this results, from a negative perspective, in a switch-on-and-off culture, in which temporal sequences follow one another arbitrarily, or temporal coincidences are correspondingly manipulable: the economic rationality which manifests itself precisely in the temporal sequence and synchronization of the production process is travestied, but not therefore abolished.

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Conflicts are thus installed and to be met with almost everywhere. Between the time systems fixed by the market and the state, there are grey areas in which the working time of the black economy unofficially flourishes in conscious evasion of regulations to protect working hours and of tax laws. In the conflict over the reduction in working hours between employers and trade unions, in which far more is at stake than this alone, it will be up to the social welfare legislation of the state in the end to intervene with regulations. Against the background of the general money preference and the time preferences of male and female employees, highly individualized because dependent on their situation in life, no easily attainable solution emerges. But conflicts also arise in the immediate everyday life of all those who wish for more free time and more possibilities for shaping things at work, in order to attain that 'quality' of time which is intended to convey more autonomy, a reduction of the sense of strain, and more of the ability to structure time into meaningful, coherent units oneself. From an economic point of view, there is the permanent conflict which results from the opportunity costs and manifests itself in the dilemma between 'buying and do-ityourself'. A socio-political conflict of larger proportions, and full of individual tragedy, results from unemployment, from involuntarily produced ‘free time'and the extent to which work can be distributed more fairly'. Also full of conflicts is that area of general welfare in which the market and the state furnish public benefits in education, in health and through social services, which are paid for and for which one has to pay. Without voluntary and unpaid work, and this means the work and time of women, the present standard could not be maintained, however, and it will not be possible to sustain it in view of rising costs in the public sector. Thus it is a question here of the relationship between paid public time and private unpaid time. A separate private sphere, escaping the intervention of the state, no longer exists. And the hypothetical appeal to the forces of the market has been ideologically undermined; it is refuted daily by political reality. Public time has penetrated far into the private sphere, and private time can only be protected if it is made political. This occurs through women making demands in terms of the politics of time, when they insist on a new everyday culture and new everyday rights.1⁵ For in the temporal conflicts of women, all other lines of conflict between market and state, between working time and free time, involuntary and voluntary, paid and unpaid time, are expressed in exemplary fashion. Their conflicts result from the conflictladen experience of a system of society and time, based on the division of labour, in which the time of men was never the same as the time of women. Thus different cultures of time have developed which go far deeper than pragmatic demands or attributed productivity would lead one to expect. The conflict breaking óut here is a struggle for a new culture of time.

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Every treatment of the subject of time never deals with time alone. The conflicts over time which are coming to light are strategic battlefields, political arenas, as the political scientists say, in which it is a question of better understanding what directions social processes are pursuing and what options are open. Shifts in the patterns of the allocation of time, which are to be found in the historical survey or in the international comparison, produce highly meaningful chronograms of a society. So much time for ourselves: so much time for others; so much time for work (paid): so much time for work (unpaid); so much time for buying: so much time for making; so much time for fundamental needs: so much time for luxury; so much time for waiting: so much time for getting things done. The list of empirically ascertainable classifications can be refined, and continued almost at will. Every categorization says something about the content and its quality at the same time, since the assessment results from the relation with the remaining pattern of allocation. Desires and reality can be confronted with one another, classified according to the features of the stratification of a society. Retrospectively, it is possible to ‘estimate’ what social development has changed and what it has 'brought'.

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The empirical data for such an analysis are available in their rudiments, but fragmented and tied to local patterns of inquiry as the calendars and calculations of time in medieval towns once were. Thus here is just one example of a historical change in the social allocation of time, empirical findings which, like all others, are open to interpretation. The extension and gradual reduction of working hours underwent a dramatic development in Europe from the beginning of the machine age on. In Germany, for instance, the ten- to twelve-hour day, which prevailed around 1800, rose to eleven to fourteen hours in 1820. In the period between 1830 and 1860, that period in which the first statutory reduction was achieved by the labour movement in England in the form of the Ten-Hour Bill, working hours in Germany grew to fourteen to sixteen hours.16 Sundays and holidays were lost in many cases, and weekly working hours shot up accordingly. The turning point occurred only with socio-political legislation around 1870.

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Since then, with international time differences, there has been a series of relevant developments everywhere in Europe. General life expectancy has risen thanks to improvement in the control of epidemics, in the sewerage system and hygienic conditions, in medical progress and the development of a public health system. Child labour, which was widespread in the nineteenth century, was drastically reduced at the beginning of this century, prohibited, and replaced by attendance at state schools. The view prevailed that human labour was able to accomplish more if children went to school, instead of prematurely wearing themselves out with work, and that through an improved state of health in the population its output generally rose. The welfare state, with its social welfare legislation and institutions for social security, was able to establish itself as the historical project of the century'. Only around the middle of the present century, however, were the public institutions for education, health and social services so far established, had the need for additional workers in the labour market so far increased, that women began to enter the labour market and paid work in massive numbers. This development is conveyed in a series of figures in which working time is expressed in the form of years of working life.17 According to these figures, up to 1871 in the UK, a male worker spent almost 56 years of his life working; around 1950, it was still 50.9 years; only in 1981 did this fall to 46 years. Thus the progress of a whole century can also be gauged by the fact that the male section of the population gained ten years free of work. Like all statistics, these also not only conceal individual differences, but ignore what happened in the way of historical events, wars or colonial expansion. For women, the picture appears complementary. At any rate, they appear as historical subjects in the official statistics as early as 1871, even though only that part of their life is recorded as working time which they spent in the labour market for bad remuneration. At the beginning of the period under consideration here, this was almost twenty years of life, a figure which remained more or less constant, with fluctuations, up to the 1950s, to rise continuously since then. Up to 1981, English women spent thirty years of their lives on paid employment outside the home. In another English investigation into the working life of men and women who were facing retirement, the author comes to the conclusion that a de facto alignment of male and female working careers is beginning to emerge. The working-time conditions of both are becoming fragmented and discontinuous, occupational social decline is increasing, the proportion of part-time work is rising and with it the marginal status in the labour market, retirement age is showing increasingly large variations, and ambiguities in status are rising among those not officially regarded as employed. All this against the background of a development in which the total duration of working life is beginning to approach that of non-working life, for after the deduction of working life there remain to men and women on average just as many years which they do not spend working: almost three decades.18

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Almost – but before jubilation breaks out over the time gained, and this is muted anyway if one takes into account the microstructure of economic conditions in which the majority of older people, and above all of older women, have to live, it is worth considering the historical time sequence again. For if the statistical average of years of life is ascertained, as Ausubel and Grübler have done, a striking constant emerges: if the official working life of women and men is added up and followed over the period of a hundred years, then despite the rise in life expectancy and the later entry into working life, despite time-saving household technologies and early retirement, nothing has changed. Human working life, if human is taken to mean that of women and of men, constantly amounts to thirtyeight years of life over the period of a hundred years.19

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Of course, it can be immediately speculated here that such a constant expresses the ‘necessary'amount of time which a society requires in order to preserve itself, where the level of ‘self-preservation' is variable. But such speculations are idle, particularly if a freely available residual time' is to be deduced from them. The machine age was, at any rate, directed towards the exploitation of all available reserves of time. Life was divided into those two areas described by Marx and others: the time for production, which was spent at the machine, and the time of reproduction needed for the mental and physical restoration of the capacity for work. Given the far shorter life expectancy and the minimal time at school in comparison with today, there were no reserves of time for the overwhelming majority of the population: few for old age, and almost none for what is called free time or consumer time today. Women were integrated into the production process above all before they were married, and had to shoulder the main burden of the urgently needed work of reproduction in their families. Thus what is concealed by an artificially constructed constant like that of the thirty-eight years of human work has to be seen in the context of more comprehensive changes.

One of these concerns the status of work in the nineteenth century, and that given to the concept of free time in the twentieth century. For the political thinkers of the nineteenth century, as well as for the activists of the labour movement, work was regarded as the source of economic wealth, as an essential human need. If the social struggle was conducted in terms of the demand for the right to work', then this meant a declaration of the right to share in economic surplus value, of the right to work which served the development of human beings and their abilities, and which did not run counter to the idea of satisfaction, but promoted it. Work was to be redeemed', via the radical changes in social relations. Whereas the twentieth century is still governed, one is tempted to say, by the hope for free time, though whether 'the miracle of liberation from totally being taken up with work'o will ever become a reality, whether the time 'released' will become a source of freedom, emancipation and self-realization, or whether it is merely a question of an illusion, the destruction of which is followed by fresh hopes, remains a basic topic for social reflection.

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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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The theory of 'necessary annihilation', the analysis of the modes of destruction which societies choose in order to destroy their surplus products, just as the Indian tribes on the north-west coast of America once did in their institutionalized festivals of wastefulness, the potlatches, draws attention to extreme forms of consumption, the most extreme of which is surely war. But annihilation does not necessarily require a lot of time. What requires time, time for consumption, is more probably slow wastefulness, the forms of that which Veblen once described as lavish expenditure in the allocation of time for consumption by the sophisticated middle classes. But mass production also brought with it mass consumption. The fear of 'mass leisure', which sparked off countless investigations of leisure in which it was implied that the class enjoying 'leisure' for the first time was incapable of leisure, is a special chapter in the history of cultural hypocrisy.23 Even though this fear has not been completely overcome, particularly with reference to the passive consumption of mass media, the initial position still looks different today.

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