It’s Davos time again. Our overlords are arriving at the Alpine resort for the World Economic Forum (WEF). But the ski slopes all around are melting. The mountain’s snowline is receding.

As they gather, they’re unpacking environmental anxieties and comparing magic bullets. We hear Adair Turner, the former CBI Director, call for the large-scale expansion of agrofuels and hydrogen—without the slightest grasp of the destructive effects of the former or the wastefulness and colossal energy thirst of the latter.

Turner’s colleague, WEF Director Klaus Schwab, is gesturing airily at ‘public-private partnerships’ and ‘technology.’ Business as almost-usual. Future hope, he says, lies with the CEOs (and shhh, please tiptoe around the oil giants). It’s the polite liberal etiquette of climate change: rhetorical dedication, practical denial.

Schwab tries to integrate ‘time’ into his diagnosis. “Quarterly reporting cycles and shorter terms of office cut time horizons for decision-makers. The urgent scientific message on climate change finds it hard to cut through the news cycle.” This is not wrong, but is flimsy and evasive. For time is indeed of the essence. What is ‘Davos time’? How does ‘capitalist time’ intersect with ‘ecological time’ — the CEOs amidst the snowmelt?

Economies of time

We can find a few pointers in a novel set in early twentieth-century Davos: Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain.

Davos today is a jet-set magnet, thanks to its climate and elevation – ideal for skiing. Back then a sprinkling of Europe’s upper crust congregated at its sanatoriums, for which the climate and elevation were similarly suited.

Magic Mountain is a time-rich novel. It asks: is time a linear axis of existence or is it subjective and non-linear, a concertina? Is boredom the ‘compression of time’?

The novel interrogates temporality. By this I mean the structures through which humans perceive and organise time, through the rhythms of their interaction with the natural environment (diurnal and seasonal cycles) and through technologies, myths, music, and so forth.

Temporalities and timescapes vary across space and through history, with different ‘economies’ embodying diverse dispositions of time. Who owns the future: the gods on Mount Olympus, or is it – like credit – a resource to be exploited by the monied classes? In a capitalist society, time is sliced and priced by states and capital — a time-money continuum.

“Time and the world”

In its own temporality, The Magic Mountain is classically ‘modern.’ Through a protagonist-centred narrative continuum, the present is looped through the past and toward the future. Narrative time is synced to clock time, and a focus on the detailed interactions of everyday life facilitates a tight control of tempo. As a Bildungsroman, it foregrounds processes of development and (self-)discovery. 

In short, it represents a late flourish of classical literary realism. The novel’s genre was keyed to a particular social order: bourgeois, individualistic and meliorist; its advent, some 150 years earlier, signalled a profound shift in sensibility. For the first time in literary consciousness, as Mikhail Bakhtin observed, “time and the world” became historical, unfolding “as an uninterrupted movement into a real future, as a unified, all-embracing and unconcluded process.”

The conceptual twin of this ‘modern’ literary sensibility is Progress. It too courses through Mann’s novel. Its champion is the Italian lawyer Lodovico Settembrini, who sees himself as a warrior for freedom, knowledge, transformative action, and ‘Europe,’ in opposition to tyranny, bondage, passivity, and inertia—in short, ‘Asia.’

In Settembrini’s view, time and history are propelled by machines. “As technology brought nature increasingly under its control,” improving communication “and triumphing over climatic conditions,” it also brought the peoples of the world together, driving a global shift from “darkness and fear” to happiness and virtue. Technological progress paves the road to a shining moral order. Through dominating nature, it secures liberation.

In Davos this week, Settembrini’s ghost feels right at home. It laps up the WEF mission statement, “Committed to Improving the State of the World,” and the ubiquitous undertakings to “shape the future of economic progress.”

The Magic Mountain is set prior to 1914, but Mann wrote it between 1912 and 1924, as liberal order crumpled and burned. Its narrative acceleration conjures a society hurtling toward doom. One hundred years on, ecological collapse is provoking a crisis in our perception of the ontological coordinates of human life, including nature and time. I’ll return to these. But first, how did we get here? And what is ‘capitalist time’?

Ringing the changes

The revolution in temporality of the last millennium is conventionally associated with the diffusion of the mechanical clock. By producing minutes and hours in fixed ticks, it enabled the reproducibility and universal standardisation of time. In severing time from the natural and supernatural realms, it helped foster a vision of an independent world of mathematically measurable sequences, the sphere of Newtonian science. Time could now be imagined as a uniform continuum: linear, divisible, and abstract.

But the transformation cannot have been the work of mechanical clocks alone. Clock time is a productive force, enabling the synchronisation of human purposes—but these are under whose command?

In medieval Europe and the Islamic civilisations, clocks were used less to measure time than by clerics to mark it — the call to prayer. (‘Clock’ derives from clocca/klocke: a bell.) But when clock-bells entered the public sphere to coordinate trade and public intercourse, and above all when they entered workplaces to quantify the working day, that changed.

If pre-capitalist systems were visibly kleptocratic – based on the extortion of labour’s product – in capitalism the goal is labour productivity. Capital is the command of labour time, with the worker appearing as a commodity: personified labour-time. Capitalist rationality is governed by the law of value, the imperative to reduce the labour time of production below the ‘socially necessary’ average required to sell commodities at or below their value—where value is an abstraction of social time.

Put more simply, capital’s aim is to increase profit by saving time. This accounts for the core dynamics of ‘modernity’: the systematic disciplining of labour and its segregation from the rest of the human experience, enabling labour time to be demarcated and measured; the endless acceleration of labour processes and of technical and social change; the centrality, and fetishism, of technology (in view of its key role in displacing labour and reducing circulation time); and the systematic derogation of the natural environment. Capitalism eats time, and in the process erases nature.

Weaponising the clock

Capitalist time can be thought of as a system of interlocking temporalities under the dominance of capital. To simplify, the pulse is capital’s, the wage relation determines the worker’s calendar, while the overarching framework is established by states — not least through the strict metronome of education institutions and other sites of ‘disciplinary social reproduction.’ Outside those structures, ‘social reproduction time’ tends to be cyclical, and gendered.

The imposition of capitalist temporality – a unity of time projected by capital and nation states – is sometimes crisis-prone and arrhythmic, is always contested, and never total. Capitalist temporalities are differentiated, contradictory and uneven across space and time, and they face resistance. In the system’s ‘primitive’ phases, the plantations and workshops and warships and factories became battlegrounds in a war of capitalist time-consciousness.

The same war was fought globally. The early-modern West European bourgeois defined himself by his separation from nature and a taste for regimes of abstract time and space. These predilections were weaponised, deployed in explicit justification of the domination of indigenous peoples whose space he was conquering and whose labour time he was appropriating. The very idea of the ‘savage’ was constructed on the belief that to be fully human requires a rigorous separation of ritual and habit from the rhythms of nature. Indigenous peoples’ lack of alienation from their land served to justify the colonists’ alienation of their land.

Put differently, bourgeois Europeans saw themselves in the mirror of their clocks. Clocks symbolised technological prowess and material well-being — a nation’s ‘civilisation’ and ‘modernity.’ Abstract-regimented time was simultaneously the banner and goal of European militarists, merchants and missionaries in their colonisation of the world who defined their civilisation as orderly, regimented, linear, and uniform, a culture to be imposed on the irrational, irregular and timeless — hence childlike— Others. Punctuality was ordained a moral category: keeping the right time was right.

Choreographing modernity 

Religious time and capitalist time consciousness adapted to one another, most famously in seventeenth-century England, where Puritans “censored the social calendar, flattened the swinging seasonality of time and decreed instead a mechanical routine of six days’ work followed by one day’s pray.” Puritanism choreographed society along business lines, featuring employers for whom saving souls requires saving money, and prayerful-punctual employees. Here the time-money continuum came into being. Saving time is “gainful,” preached the Puritan Richard Baxter, so “spend it wholly in the way of duty.” “Time is money,” chimed Benjamin Franklin, setting the seal on time’s historic transition: once a gift from the gods, now a resource exchangeable for money.

In European visualisations of the human journey, the correlative shift was from Providence to Progress — from a sacred cosmology “bounded by the approach of the Last Judgment“ to a secular historical time in continuous forward motion. In early formulations of history as a stadial process of civilizational advance, the analogy was with the individual.

Just as individuals progress from infancy to maturity, said Lord Kames, “so there is a similar progress in every nation, from its savage state to its maturity in arts and sciences.“ Before long, the Progress idea became infused with connotations of ‘economic infinity’ — the beliefs that human industry has infinite wealth-creating potential and that the credit system is endlessly elastic. Later on, it fused with the growth paradigm — the ideology of unending economic growth.

In identifying a ladder of historical time from barbarism to civilisation, the progress idea hammered the diversity of human populations into a particular temporal-economic chain. Under its banner, abstract time and technological novelty became markers of modernity, defining the cities against the countryside and imperial powers against the colonies. Because the richer and higher-tech nations (and ‘races’) are indexed as history’s vanguard, they should boss the rest, and surgically redirect their faces to the future. When the future appears as a dream of infinite progress, the past is perpetually deficient and the present must be continually realigned with the future through political intervention. It is a manifesto that drums out capital’s rhythms – it appeared as ‘modernisation theory,’ ‘the development project,’ and so forth.

Empty time

In The Magic Mountain, the debate on progress pits the bourgeois progressive Settembrini against Naptha, a socialist-reactionary Jesuit. The latter was nostalgic for medieval hierarchy and sternly critical of liberal Progress. Yet the actual socialist movement of Thomas Mann’s day, above all the Social Democratic Party (SPD), was aligning itself unreservedly with ‘Settembrini.’

The thinker who joined the dots connecting the SPD’s “stubborn faith in progress“ and its “servile integration“ into the apparatuses of bourgeois order was Walter Benjamin. In his Arcades Project, Benjamin highlighted a paradox in the temporality of commodity society. Competition drives the production of ever greater masses of commodities for which buyers must be found, with ever new lines and new seductions, yet novelty is immediately rendered obsolete by its own onward rush.

The paradigm is the fashion industry: the realm of the short shelf-life, the quick kiss. Commodity production inhabits twin temporalities, with a linear acceleration which – in its circularity, its repetitiveness – appears as stasis.

Benjamin uses the phrase “homogenous empty time“ to describe the infinite, inevitable timetable of bourgeois progress to which social democracy had pledged itself in the baseless belief that capitalism’s accelerative dynamic pointed to a socialist society as its pre-determined telos.

The SPD had become prisoner of its conviction that the historical tide was on its side, pushed ever onward by “technological development.” From there it was a short step “to the illusion that factory work ostensibly furthering technological progress constituted a political achievement,” and to a “corrupted conception” of industry that recognizes only “progress in mastering nature” and not the attendant regressions, and finally to the “naïvely complacent” belief — shared by social-democrat and liberal economists — that nature donates itself “gratis” for the benefit of humanity. These beliefs, Benjamin suggests, lay at the root of the SPD’s rejection of radical strategies geared to rupturing the historical present.

Great acceleration 

Capitalist progress, in Benjamin’s oracular phrase, “must be grounded in the idea of catastrophe. That it continues like this, is the catastrophe.” He wrote this in the late 1930s, following his exile from Nazi Germany, incarceration in Vichy France, and not long before his flight and (probable) suicide.

A complacent observer, a Settembrini, might assume Benjamin had needlessly generalised from the unfortunate juncture. After all, 1940 was “midnight in the century” but the good guys then won the war, eradicated Nazism, and soldered the world economy back together. Progress resumed full-throttle, powering miraculous advances in literacy, life expectancy and prosperity.

But Benjamin’s warnings were prescient. He had earlier described how the same coruscating technologies — gas, dyes, electricity — that had lit up late nineteenth-century city skies morphed into the ‘colourful infernos’ (in Esther Leslie’s paraphrase) and the ‘fire terror’ of the world wars.

A similar and even more treacherous dialectic was to follow. Fossil fuels had become the elixir of growth. As Sadi Carnot, the father of thermodynamics, long ago understood, fossil fuels confer on technologies “the invaluable advantage of being employable at any time and in any place, and of never suffering an interruption’ in their work. Digging deep through geological layers to the Carboniferous, Jurassic and Cretaceous past brings present dividends to capital in the form of cheap energy which then, pumped out as exhaust gas, cues up future infernos and fire terror.

The capitalist system, in the wake of its postwar Great Acceleration, is producing new temporal twists, not least to ecological time and geological time.

Ecological time

Ecological time refers to humans’ interaction with natural events and processes, whether over the short or longer-term. Humans have long had the capacity to rapidly wrench local environments, but ecological time has been generally understood as cyclical and continuous. One sociologist of time describes it as ‘enduring time.’

Today, ecological time is changing globally, and fast. No longer is our image of the planetary future simply an extrapolation of the present. Ecological time is, for a significant minority, infused with a sense of hair-raising change.

A spin-off is that our sense of geological time is undergoing an irreversible shift. The geological past, in the form of carbon-bearing seams, irrupts into the present, irrevocably altering the future. Anthropocene is the buzz word, with Capitalocene its more accurate substitute.

Geological time is accelerating, and this will continue, thanks not least to the time-bending features of climate change: the gargantuan future warming pent up in the form of oceanic thermal inertia, and the irreversible non-linear positive feedback mechanisms (albedo decline, oceanic methane release, etc.) that are either already in train or in view — a climate time bomb that could propel the planet toward a ‘hothouse state.’

The earth’s climate of the last ten thousand years was uniquely benign and stable, if at times with sharp local and occasional minor global volatility. That age is over. Put differently: whereas all human-recorded timescapes were lived under a (relatively) serene sky, over the next thousands, or millions, of years the forecast is stormy.

Jetztzeit – ‘now time’

Facing the catastrophes of his era, and the complacency of progressives, Benjamin offered the image of the emergency brake: “Marx says that revolutions are the locomotive of world history. But perhaps it is quite otherwise. Perhaps revolutions are an attempt by the passengers on this train — namely, the human race — to activate the emergency brake.” The metaphor, Benjamin Noys argues, presents a “non-teleological politics of temporality,” grounded in a belief that future liberation cannot be entrusted to “the continuing dialectic of production/destruction” that generates a ceaseless “state of emergency.” 

In strategic terms, Benjamin insisted that movements of the “revolutionary classes,” at moments of crisis, must seek not to push history faster along its pre-existing tracks but seek “to make the continuum of history explode,” manifesting “a conception of the present as now-time [Jetztzeit] shot through with splinters of messianic time,” and that, however, this will require a seizing of memories of past defeats when they ‘flash up’ at moments of collective peril.

This is a stance not of impotent voluntarism or aestheticized defeatism but a squaring up to the ways in which the present embodies the outcome of the catastrophic defeats of past struggles, in order precisely to warn against the “conformism“ that tends always to overpower us. Far from being an idiosyncratic fantasy peculiar to Benjamin, it is a red thread through radical politics. (To give a notable example, it’s there in W.E.B. Du Bois’ analysis of the tragically missed opportunity to unite workers across the “colour line,” in Black Reconstruction in America.)

As the ice melts, a helpless catastrophism can set in, breeding ennui or apathy in the face of predicted doom. But the dominant forms of passivity, surely, stem either from low levels of social-movement activity itself, which a catastrophist consciousness might in small ways improve (Extinction Rebellion is the obvious example), or from complacent hopes that those who gather at Davos, and their colleagues worldwide, will proffer business-almost-as-usual remedies in the form of green growth, geoengineering, and so forth. These, in turn, tap into the long-ingrained belief in the inevitability of progress, with its tendency to foster “apocalyptic blindness“: the reluctance of humans “to understand that their existence is threatened, and that this could lead to bad end.”

It’s against this background that Benjamin’s arguments, and his uncovering of the strings that attached the complacent historicism of his day to the modes and rhythms of capitalist time, appear, well, jetztzeitig.

This Author 

Gareth Dale teaches politics at Brunel University. He is a co-editor of Green Growth (Zed, 2016). His articles are available online. He tweets at @Gareth_Dale.

Image: Monica Blatton, Flickr. 

It’s Davos time again. Our overlords are arriving at the Alpine resort for the World Economic Forum (WEF). But the ski slopes all around are melting. The mountain’s snowline is receding.

As they gather, they’re unpacking environmental anxieties and comparing magic bullets. We hear Adair Turner, the former CBI Director, call for the large-scale expansion of agrofuels and hydrogen—without the slightest grasp of the destructive effects of the former or the wastefulness and colossal energy thirst of the latter.

Turner’s colleague, WEF Director Klaus Schwab, is gesturing airily at ‘public-private partnerships’ and ‘technology.’ Business as almost-usual. Future hope, he says, lies with the CEOs (and shhh, please tiptoe around the oil giants). It’s the polite liberal etiquette of climate change: rhetorical dedication, practical denial.

Schwab tries to integrate ‘time’ into his diagnosis. “Quarterly reporting cycles and shorter terms of office cut time horizons for decision-makers. The urgent scientific message on climate change finds it hard to cut through the news cycle.” This is not wrong, but is flimsy and evasive. For time is indeed of the essence. What is ‘Davos time’? How does ‘capitalist time’ intersect with ‘ecological time’ — the CEOs amidst the snowmelt?

Economies of time

We can find a few pointers in a novel set in early twentieth-century Davos: Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain.

Davos today is a jet-set magnet, thanks to its climate and elevation – ideal for skiing. Back then a sprinkling of Europe’s upper crust congregated at its sanatoriums, for which the climate and elevation were similarly suited.

Magic Mountain is a time-rich novel. It asks: is time a linear axis of existence or is it subjective and non-linear, a concertina? Is boredom the ‘compression of time’?

The novel interrogates temporality. By this I mean the structures through which humans perceive and organise time, through the rhythms of their interaction with the natural environment (diurnal and seasonal cycles) and through technologies, myths, music, and so forth.

Temporalities and timescapes vary across space and through history, with different ‘economies’ embodying diverse dispositions of time. Who owns the future: the gods on Mount Olympus, or is it – like credit – a resource to be exploited by the monied classes? In a capitalist society, time is sliced and priced by states and capital — a time-money continuum.

“Time and the world”

In its own temporality, The Magic Mountain is classically ‘modern.’ Through a protagonist-centred narrative continuum, the present is looped through the past and toward the future. Narrative time is synced to clock time, and a focus on the detailed interactions of everyday life facilitates a tight control of tempo. As a Bildungsroman, it foregrounds processes of development and (self-)discovery. 

In short, it represents a late flourish of classical literary realism. The novel’s genre was keyed to a particular social order: bourgeois, individualistic and meliorist; its advent, some 150 years earlier, signalled a profound shift in sensibility. For the first time in literary consciousness, as Mikhail Bakhtin observed, “time and the world” became historical, unfolding “as an uninterrupted movement into a real future, as a unified, all-embracing and unconcluded process.”

The conceptual twin of this ‘modern’ literary sensibility is Progress. It too courses through Mann’s novel. Its champion is the Italian lawyer Lodovico Settembrini, who sees himself as a warrior for freedom, knowledge, transformative action, and ‘Europe,’ in opposition to tyranny, bondage, passivity, and inertia—in short, ‘Asia.’

In Settembrini’s view, time and history are propelled by machines. “As technology brought nature increasingly under its control,” improving communication “and triumphing over climatic conditions,” it also brought the peoples of the world together, driving a global shift from “darkness and fear” to happiness and virtue. Technological progress paves the road to a shining moral order. Through dominating nature, it secures liberation.

In Davos this week, Settembrini’s ghost feels right at home. It laps up the WEF mission statement, “Committed to Improving the State of the World,” and the ubiquitous undertakings to “shape the future of economic progress.”

The Magic Mountain is set prior to 1914, but Mann wrote it between 1912 and 1924, as liberal order crumpled and burned. Its narrative acceleration conjures a society hurtling toward doom. One hundred years on, ecological collapse is provoking a crisis in our perception of the ontological coordinates of human life, including nature and time. I’ll return to these. But first, how did we get here? And what is ‘capitalist time’?

Ringing the changes

The revolution in temporality of the last millennium is conventionally associated with the diffusion of the mechanical clock. By producing minutes and hours in fixed ticks, it enabled the reproducibility and universal standardisation of time. In severing time from the natural and supernatural realms, it helped foster a vision of an independent world of mathematically measurable sequences, the sphere of Newtonian science. Time could now be imagined as a uniform continuum: linear, divisible, and abstract.

But the transformation cannot have been the work of mechanical clocks alone. Clock time is a productive force, enabling the synchronisation of human purposes—but these are under whose command?

In medieval Europe and the Islamic civilisations, clocks were used less to measure time than by clerics to mark it — the call to prayer. (‘Clock’ derives from clocca/klocke: a bell.) But when clock-bells entered the public sphere to coordinate trade and public intercourse, and above all when they entered workplaces to quantify the working day, that changed.

If pre-capitalist systems were visibly kleptocratic – based on the extortion of labour’s product – in capitalism the goal is labour productivity. Capital is the command of labour time, with the worker appearing as a commodity: personified labour-time. Capitalist rationality is governed by the law of value, the imperative to reduce the labour time of production below the ‘socially necessary’ average required to sell commodities at or below their value—where value is an abstraction of social time.

Put more simply, capital’s aim is to increase profit by saving time. This accounts for the core dynamics of ‘modernity’: the systematic disciplining of labour and its segregation from the rest of the human experience, enabling labour time to be demarcated and measured; the endless acceleration of labour processes and of technical and social change; the centrality, and fetishism, of technology (in view of its key role in displacing labour and reducing circulation time); and the systematic derogation of the natural environment. Capitalism eats time, and in the process erases nature.

Weaponising the clock

Capitalist time can be thought of as a system of interlocking temporalities under the dominance of capital. To simplify, the pulse is capital’s, the wage relation determines the worker’s calendar, while the overarching framework is established by states — not least through the strict metronome of education institutions and other sites of ‘disciplinary social reproduction.’ Outside those structures, ‘social reproduction time’ tends to be cyclical, and gendered.

The imposition of capitalist temporality – a unity of time projected by capital and nation states – is sometimes crisis-prone and arrhythmic, is always contested, and never total. Capitalist temporalities are differentiated, contradictory and uneven across space and time, and they face resistance. In the system’s ‘primitive’ phases, the plantations and workshops and warships and factories became battlegrounds in a war of capitalist time-consciousness.

The same war was fought globally. The early-modern West European bourgeois defined himself by his separation from nature and a taste for regimes of abstract time and space. These predilections were weaponised, deployed in explicit justification of the domination of indigenous peoples whose space he was conquering and whose labour time he was appropriating. The very idea of the ‘savage’ was constructed on the belief that to be fully human requires a rigorous separation of ritual and habit from the rhythms of nature. Indigenous peoples’ lack of alienation from their land served to justify the colonists’ alienation of their land.

Put differently, bourgeois Europeans saw themselves in the mirror of their clocks. Clocks symbolised technological prowess and material well-being — a nation’s ‘civilisation’ and ‘modernity.’ Abstract-regimented time was simultaneously the banner and goal of European militarists, merchants and missionaries in their colonisation of the world who defined their civilisation as orderly, regimented, linear, and uniform, a culture to be imposed on the irrational, irregular and timeless — hence childlike— Others. Punctuality was ordained a moral category: keeping the right time was right.

Choreographing modernity 

Religious time and capitalist time consciousness adapted to one another, most famously in seventeenth-century England, where Puritans “censored the social calendar, flattened the swinging seasonality of time and decreed instead a mechanical routine of six days’ work followed by one day’s pray.” Puritanism choreographed society along business lines, featuring employers for whom saving souls requires saving money, and prayerful-punctual employees. Here the time-money continuum came into being. Saving time is “gainful,” preached the Puritan Richard Baxter, so “spend it wholly in the way of duty.” “Time is money,” chimed Benjamin Franklin, setting the seal on time’s historic transition: once a gift from the gods, now a resource exchangeable for money.

In European visualisations of the human journey, the correlative shift was from Providence to Progress — from a sacred cosmology “bounded by the approach of the Last Judgment“ to a secular historical time in continuous forward motion. In early formulations of history as a stadial process of civilizational advance, the analogy was with the individual.

Just as individuals progress from infancy to maturity, said Lord Kames, “so there is a similar progress in every nation, from its savage state to its maturity in arts and sciences.“ Before long, the Progress idea became infused with connotations of ‘economic infinity’ — the beliefs that human industry has infinite wealth-creating potential and that the credit system is endlessly elastic. Later on, it fused with the growth paradigm — the ideology of unending economic growth.

In identifying a ladder of historical time from barbarism to civilisation, the progress idea hammered the diversity of human populations into a particular temporal-economic chain. Under its banner, abstract time and technological novelty became markers of modernity, defining the cities against the countryside and imperial powers against the colonies. Because the richer and higher-tech nations (and ‘races’) are indexed as history’s vanguard, they should boss the rest, and surgically redirect their faces to the future. When the future appears as a dream of infinite progress, the past is perpetually deficient and the present must be continually realigned with the future through political intervention. It is a manifesto that drums out capital’s rhythms – it appeared as ‘modernisation theory,’ ‘the development project,’ and so forth.

Empty time

In The Magic Mountain, the debate on progress pits the bourgeois progressive Settembrini against Naptha, a socialist-reactionary Jesuit. The latter was nostalgic for medieval hierarchy and sternly critical of liberal Progress. Yet the actual socialist movement of Thomas Mann’s day, above all the Social Democratic Party (SPD), was aligning itself unreservedly with ‘Settembrini.’

The thinker who joined the dots connecting the SPD’s “stubborn faith in progress“ and its “servile integration“ into the apparatuses of bourgeois order was Walter Benjamin. In his Arcades Project, Benjamin highlighted a paradox in the temporality of commodity society. Competition drives the production of ever greater masses of commodities for which buyers must be found, with ever new lines and new seductions, yet novelty is immediately rendered obsolete by its own onward rush.

The paradigm is the fashion industry: the realm of the short shelf-life, the quick kiss. Commodity production inhabits twin temporalities, with a linear acceleration which – in its circularity, its repetitiveness – appears as stasis.

Benjamin uses the phrase “homogenous empty time“ to describe the infinite, inevitable timetable of bourgeois progress to which social democracy had pledged itself in the baseless belief that capitalism’s accelerative dynamic pointed to a socialist society as its pre-determined telos.

The SPD had become prisoner of its conviction that the historical tide was on its side, pushed ever onward by “technological development.” From there it was a short step “to the illusion that factory work ostensibly furthering technological progress constituted a political achievement,” and to a “corrupted conception” of industry that recognizes only “progress in mastering nature” and not the attendant regressions, and finally to the “naïvely complacent” belief — shared by social-democrat and liberal economists — that nature donates itself “gratis” for the benefit of humanity. These beliefs, Benjamin suggests, lay at the root of the SPD’s rejection of radical strategies geared to rupturing the historical present.

Great acceleration 

Capitalist progress, in Benjamin’s oracular phrase, “must be grounded in the idea of catastrophe. That it continues like this, is the catastrophe.” He wrote this in the late 1930s, following his exile from Nazi Germany, incarceration in Vichy France, and not long before his flight and (probable) suicide.

A complacent observer, a Settembrini, might assume Benjamin had needlessly generalised from the unfortunate juncture. After all, 1940 was “midnight in the century” but the good guys then won the war, eradicated Nazism, and soldered the world economy back together. Progress resumed full-throttle, powering miraculous advances in literacy, life expectancy and prosperity.

But Benjamin’s warnings were prescient. He had earlier described how the same coruscating technologies — gas, dyes, electricity — that had lit up late nineteenth-century city skies morphed into the ‘colourful infernos’ (in Esther Leslie’s paraphrase) and the ‘fire terror’ of the world wars.

A similar and even more treacherous dialectic was to follow. Fossil fuels had become the elixir of growth. As Sadi Carnot, the father of thermodynamics, long ago understood, fossil fuels confer on technologies “the invaluable advantage of being employable at any time and in any place, and of never suffering an interruption’ in their work. Digging deep through geological layers to the Carboniferous, Jurassic and Cretaceous past brings present dividends to capital in the form of cheap energy which then, pumped out as exhaust gas, cues up future infernos and fire terror.

The capitalist system, in the wake of its postwar Great Acceleration, is producing new temporal twists, not least to ecological time and geological time.

Ecological time

Ecological time refers to humans’ interaction with natural events and processes, whether over the short or longer-term. Humans have long had the capacity to rapidly wrench local environments, but ecological time has been generally understood as cyclical and continuous. One sociologist of time describes it as ‘enduring time.’

Today, ecological time is changing globally, and fast. No longer is our image of the planetary future simply an extrapolation of the present. Ecological time is, for a significant minority, infused with a sense of hair-raising change.

A spin-off is that our sense of geological time is undergoing an irreversible shift. The geological past, in the form of carbon-bearing seams, irrupts into the present, irrevocably altering the future. Anthropocene is the buzz word, with Capitalocene its more accurate substitute.

Geological time is accelerating, and this will continue, thanks not least to the time-bending features of climate change: the gargantuan future warming pent up in the form of oceanic thermal inertia, and the irreversible non-linear positive feedback mechanisms (albedo decline, oceanic methane release, etc.) that are either already in train or in view — a climate time bomb that could propel the planet toward a ‘hothouse state.’

The earth’s climate of the last ten thousand years was uniquely benign and stable, if at times with sharp local and occasional minor global volatility. That age is over. Put differently: whereas all human-recorded timescapes were lived under a (relatively) serene sky, over the next thousands, or millions, of years the forecast is stormy.

Jetztzeit – ‘now time’

Facing the catastrophes of his era, and the complacency of progressives, Benjamin offered the image of the emergency brake: “Marx says that revolutions are the locomotive of world history. But perhaps it is quite otherwise. Perhaps revolutions are an attempt by the passengers on this train — namely, the human race — to activate the emergency brake.” The metaphor, Benjamin Noys argues, presents a “non-teleological politics of temporality,” grounded in a belief that future liberation cannot be entrusted to “the continuing dialectic of production/destruction” that generates a ceaseless “state of emergency.” 

In strategic terms, Benjamin insisted that movements of the “revolutionary classes,” at moments of crisis, must seek not to push history faster along its pre-existing tracks but seek “to make the continuum of history explode,” manifesting “a conception of the present as now-time [Jetztzeit] shot through with splinters of messianic time,” and that, however, this will require a seizing of memories of past defeats when they ‘flash up’ at moments of collective peril.

This is a stance not of impotent voluntarism or aestheticized defeatism but a squaring up to the ways in which the present embodies the outcome of the catastrophic defeats of past struggles, in order precisely to warn against the “conformism“ that tends always to overpower us. Far from being an idiosyncratic fantasy peculiar to Benjamin, it is a red thread through radical politics. (To give a notable example, it’s there in W.E.B. Du Bois’ analysis of the tragically missed opportunity to unite workers across the “colour line,” in Black Reconstruction in America.)

As the ice melts, a helpless catastrophism can set in, breeding ennui or apathy in the face of predicted doom. But the dominant forms of passivity, surely, stem either from low levels of social-movement activity itself, which a catastrophist consciousness might in small ways improve (Extinction Rebellion is the obvious example), or from complacent hopes that those who gather at Davos, and their colleagues worldwide, will proffer business-almost-as-usual remedies in the form of green growth, geoengineering, and so forth. These, in turn, tap into the long-ingrained belief in the inevitability of progress, with its tendency to foster “apocalyptic blindness“: the reluctance of humans “to understand that their existence is threatened, and that this could lead to bad end.”

It’s against this background that Benjamin’s arguments, and his uncovering of the strings that attached the complacent historicism of his day to the modes and rhythms of capitalist time, appear, well, jetztzeitig.

This Author 

Gareth Dale teaches politics at Brunel University. He is a co-editor of Green Growth (Zed, 2016). His articles are available online. He tweets at @Gareth_Dale.

Image: Monica Blatton, Flickr. 

It’s Davos time again. Our overlords are arriving at the Alpine resort for the World Economic Forum (WEF). But the ski slopes all around are melting. The mountain’s snowline is receding.

As they gather, they’re unpacking environmental anxieties and comparing magic bullets. We hear Adair Turner, the former CBI Director, call for the large-scale expansion of agrofuels and hydrogen—without the slightest grasp of the destructive effects of the former or the wastefulness and colossal energy thirst of the latter.

Turner’s colleague, WEF Director Klaus Schwab, is gesturing airily at ‘public-private partnerships’ and ‘technology.’ Business as almost-usual. Future hope, he says, lies with the CEOs (and shhh, please tiptoe around the oil giants). It’s the polite liberal etiquette of climate change: rhetorical dedication, practical denial.

Schwab tries to integrate ‘time’ into his diagnosis. “Quarterly reporting cycles and shorter terms of office cut time horizons for decision-makers. The urgent scientific message on climate change finds it hard to cut through the news cycle.” This is not wrong, but is flimsy and evasive. For time is indeed of the essence. What is ‘Davos time’? How does ‘capitalist time’ intersect with ‘ecological time’ — the CEOs amidst the snowmelt?

Economies of time

We can find a few pointers in a novel set in early twentieth-century Davos: Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain.

Davos today is a jet-set magnet, thanks to its climate and elevation – ideal for skiing. Back then a sprinkling of Europe’s upper crust congregated at its sanatoriums, for which the climate and elevation were similarly suited.

Magic Mountain is a time-rich novel. It asks: is time a linear axis of existence or is it subjective and non-linear, a concertina? Is boredom the ‘compression of time’?

The novel interrogates temporality. By this I mean the structures through which humans perceive and organise time, through the rhythms of their interaction with the natural environment (diurnal and seasonal cycles) and through technologies, myths, music, and so forth.

Temporalities and timescapes vary across space and through history, with different ‘economies’ embodying diverse dispositions of time. Who owns the future: the gods on Mount Olympus, or is it – like credit – a resource to be exploited by the monied classes? In a capitalist society, time is sliced and priced by states and capital — a time-money continuum.

“Time and the world”

In its own temporality, The Magic Mountain is classically ‘modern.’ Through a protagonist-centred narrative continuum, the present is looped through the past and toward the future. Narrative time is synced to clock time, and a focus on the detailed interactions of everyday life facilitates a tight control of tempo. As a Bildungsroman, it foregrounds processes of development and (self-)discovery. 

In short, it represents a late flourish of classical literary realism. The novel’s genre was keyed to a particular social order: bourgeois, individualistic and meliorist; its advent, some 150 years earlier, signalled a profound shift in sensibility. For the first time in literary consciousness, as Mikhail Bakhtin observed, “time and the world” became historical, unfolding “as an uninterrupted movement into a real future, as a unified, all-embracing and unconcluded process.”

The conceptual twin of this ‘modern’ literary sensibility is Progress. It too courses through Mann’s novel. Its champion is the Italian lawyer Lodovico Settembrini, who sees himself as a warrior for freedom, knowledge, transformative action, and ‘Europe,’ in opposition to tyranny, bondage, passivity, and inertia—in short, ‘Asia.’

In Settembrini’s view, time and history are propelled by machines. “As technology brought nature increasingly under its control,” improving communication “and triumphing over climatic conditions,” it also brought the peoples of the world together, driving a global shift from “darkness and fear” to happiness and virtue. Technological progress paves the road to a shining moral order. Through dominating nature, it secures liberation.

In Davos this week, Settembrini’s ghost feels right at home. It laps up the WEF mission statement, “Committed to Improving the State of the World,” and the ubiquitous undertakings to “shape the future of economic progress.”

The Magic Mountain is set prior to 1914, but Mann wrote it between 1912 and 1924, as liberal order crumpled and burned. Its narrative acceleration conjures a society hurtling toward doom. One hundred years on, ecological collapse is provoking a crisis in our perception of the ontological coordinates of human life, including nature and time. I’ll return to these. But first, how did we get here? And what is ‘capitalist time’?

Ringing the changes

The revolution in temporality of the last millennium is conventionally associated with the diffusion of the mechanical clock. By producing minutes and hours in fixed ticks, it enabled the reproducibility and universal standardisation of time. In severing time from the natural and supernatural realms, it helped foster a vision of an independent world of mathematically measurable sequences, the sphere of Newtonian science. Time could now be imagined as a uniform continuum: linear, divisible, and abstract.

But the transformation cannot have been the work of mechanical clocks alone. Clock time is a productive force, enabling the synchronisation of human purposes—but these are under whose command?

In medieval Europe and the Islamic civilisations, clocks were used less to measure time than by clerics to mark it — the call to prayer. (‘Clock’ derives from clocca/klocke: a bell.) But when clock-bells entered the public sphere to coordinate trade and public intercourse, and above all when they entered workplaces to quantify the working day, that changed.

If pre-capitalist systems were visibly kleptocratic – based on the extortion of labour’s product – in capitalism the goal is labour productivity. Capital is the command of labour time, with the worker appearing as a commodity: personified labour-time. Capitalist rationality is governed by the law of value, the imperative to reduce the labour time of production below the ‘socially necessary’ average required to sell commodities at or below their value—where value is an abstraction of social time.

Put more simply, capital’s aim is to increase profit by saving time. This accounts for the core dynamics of ‘modernity’: the systematic disciplining of labour and its segregation from the rest of the human experience, enabling labour time to be demarcated and measured; the endless acceleration of labour processes and of technical and social change; the centrality, and fetishism, of technology (in view of its key role in displacing labour and reducing circulation time); and the systematic derogation of the natural environment. Capitalism eats time, and in the process erases nature.

Weaponising the clock

Capitalist time can be thought of as a system of interlocking temporalities under the dominance of capital. To simplify, the pulse is capital’s, the wage relation determines the worker’s calendar, while the overarching framework is established by states — not least through the strict metronome of education institutions and other sites of ‘disciplinary social reproduction.’ Outside those structures, ‘social reproduction time’ tends to be cyclical, and gendered.

The imposition of capitalist temporality – a unity of time projected by capital and nation states – is sometimes crisis-prone and arrhythmic, is always contested, and never total. Capitalist temporalities are differentiated, contradictory and uneven across space and time, and they face resistance. In the system’s ‘primitive’ phases, the plantations and workshops and warships and factories became battlegrounds in a war of capitalist time-consciousness.

The same war was fought globally. The early-modern West European bourgeois defined himself by his separation from nature and a taste for regimes of abstract time and space. These predilections were weaponised, deployed in explicit justification of the domination of indigenous peoples whose space he was conquering and whose labour time he was appropriating. The very idea of the ‘savage’ was constructed on the belief that to be fully human requires a rigorous separation of ritual and habit from the rhythms of nature. Indigenous peoples’ lack of alienation from their land served to justify the colonists’ alienation of their land.

Put differently, bourgeois Europeans saw themselves in the mirror of their clocks. Clocks symbolised technological prowess and material well-being — a nation’s ‘civilisation’ and ‘modernity.’ Abstract-regimented time was simultaneously the banner and goal of European militarists, merchants and missionaries in their colonisation of the world who defined their civilisation as orderly, regimented, linear, and uniform, a culture to be imposed on the irrational, irregular and timeless — hence childlike— Others. Punctuality was ordained a moral category: keeping the right time was right.

Choreographing modernity 

Religious time and capitalist time consciousness adapted to one another, most famously in seventeenth-century England, where Puritans “censored the social calendar, flattened the swinging seasonality of time and decreed instead a mechanical routine of six days’ work followed by one day’s pray.” Puritanism choreographed society along business lines, featuring employers for whom saving souls requires saving money, and prayerful-punctual employees. Here the time-money continuum came into being. Saving time is “gainful,” preached the Puritan Richard Baxter, so “spend it wholly in the way of duty.” “Time is money,” chimed Benjamin Franklin, setting the seal on time’s historic transition: once a gift from the gods, now a resource exchangeable for money.

In European visualisations of the human journey, the correlative shift was from Providence to Progress — from a sacred cosmology “bounded by the approach of the Last Judgment“ to a secular historical time in continuous forward motion. In early formulations of history as a stadial process of civilizational advance, the analogy was with the individual.

Just as individuals progress from infancy to maturity, said Lord Kames, “so there is a similar progress in every nation, from its savage state to its maturity in arts and sciences.“ Before long, the Progress idea became infused with connotations of ‘economic infinity’ — the beliefs that human industry has infinite wealth-creating potential and that the credit system is endlessly elastic. Later on, it fused with the growth paradigm — the ideology of unending economic growth.

In identifying a ladder of historical time from barbarism to civilisation, the progress idea hammered the diversity of human populations into a particular temporal-economic chain. Under its banner, abstract time and technological novelty became markers of modernity, defining the cities against the countryside and imperial powers against the colonies. Because the richer and higher-tech nations (and ‘races’) are indexed as history’s vanguard, they should boss the rest, and surgically redirect their faces to the future. When the future appears as a dream of infinite progress, the past is perpetually deficient and the present must be continually realigned with the future through political intervention. It is a manifesto that drums out capital’s rhythms – it appeared as ‘modernisation theory,’ ‘the development project,’ and so forth.

Empty time

In The Magic Mountain, the debate on progress pits the bourgeois progressive Settembrini against Naptha, a socialist-reactionary Jesuit. The latter was nostalgic for medieval hierarchy and sternly critical of liberal Progress. Yet the actual socialist movement of Thomas Mann’s day, above all the Social Democratic Party (SPD), was aligning itself unreservedly with ‘Settembrini.’

The thinker who joined the dots connecting the SPD’s “stubborn faith in progress“ and its “servile integration“ into the apparatuses of bourgeois order was Walter Benjamin. In his Arcades Project, Benjamin highlighted a paradox in the temporality of commodity society. Competition drives the production of ever greater masses of commodities for which buyers must be found, with ever new lines and new seductions, yet novelty is immediately rendered obsolete by its own onward rush.

The paradigm is the fashion industry: the realm of the short shelf-life, the quick kiss. Commodity production inhabits twin temporalities, with a linear acceleration which – in its circularity, its repetitiveness – appears as stasis.

Benjamin uses the phrase “homogenous empty time“ to describe the infinite, inevitable timetable of bourgeois progress to which social democracy had pledged itself in the baseless belief that capitalism’s accelerative dynamic pointed to a socialist society as its pre-determined telos.

The SPD had become prisoner of its conviction that the historical tide was on its side, pushed ever onward by “technological development.” From there it was a short step “to the illusion that factory work ostensibly furthering technological progress constituted a political achievement,” and to a “corrupted conception” of industry that recognizes only “progress in mastering nature” and not the attendant regressions, and finally to the “naïvely complacent” belief — shared by social-democrat and liberal economists — that nature donates itself “gratis” for the benefit of humanity. These beliefs, Benjamin suggests, lay at the root of the SPD’s rejection of radical strategies geared to rupturing the historical present.

Great acceleration 

Capitalist progress, in Benjamin’s oracular phrase, “must be grounded in the idea of catastrophe. That it continues like this, is the catastrophe.” He wrote this in the late 1930s, following his exile from Nazi Germany, incarceration in Vichy France, and not long before his flight and (probable) suicide.

A complacent observer, a Settembrini, might assume Benjamin had needlessly generalised from the unfortunate juncture. After all, 1940 was “midnight in the century” but the good guys then won the war, eradicated Nazism, and soldered the world economy back together. Progress resumed full-throttle, powering miraculous advances in literacy, life expectancy and prosperity.

But Benjamin’s warnings were prescient. He had earlier described how the same coruscating technologies — gas, dyes, electricity — that had lit up late nineteenth-century city skies morphed into the ‘colourful infernos’ (in Esther Leslie’s paraphrase) and the ‘fire terror’ of the world wars.

A similar and even more treacherous dialectic was to follow. Fossil fuels had become the elixir of growth. As Sadi Carnot, the father of thermodynamics, long ago understood, fossil fuels confer on technologies “the invaluable advantage of being employable at any time and in any place, and of never suffering an interruption’ in their work. Digging deep through geological layers to the Carboniferous, Jurassic and Cretaceous past brings present dividends to capital in the form of cheap energy which then, pumped out as exhaust gas, cues up future infernos and fire terror.

The capitalist system, in the wake of its postwar Great Acceleration, is producing new temporal twists, not least to ecological time and geological time.

Ecological time

Ecological time refers to humans’ interaction with natural events and processes, whether over the short or longer-term. Humans have long had the capacity to rapidly wrench local environments, but ecological time has been generally understood as cyclical and continuous. One sociologist of time describes it as ‘enduring time.’

Today, ecological time is changing globally, and fast. No longer is our image of the planetary future simply an extrapolation of the present. Ecological time is, for a significant minority, infused with a sense of hair-raising change.

A spin-off is that our sense of geological time is undergoing an irreversible shift. The geological past, in the form of carbon-bearing seams, irrupts into the present, irrevocably altering the future. Anthropocene is the buzz word, with Capitalocene its more accurate substitute.

Geological time is accelerating, and this will continue, thanks not least to the time-bending features of climate change: the gargantuan future warming pent up in the form of oceanic thermal inertia, and the irreversible non-linear positive feedback mechanisms (albedo decline, oceanic methane release, etc.) that are either already in train or in view — a climate time bomb that could propel the planet toward a ‘hothouse state.’

The earth’s climate of the last ten thousand years was uniquely benign and stable, if at times with sharp local and occasional minor global volatility. That age is over. Put differently: whereas all human-recorded timescapes were lived under a (relatively) serene sky, over the next thousands, or millions, of years the forecast is stormy.

Jetztzeit – ‘now time’

Facing the catastrophes of his era, and the complacency of progressives, Benjamin offered the image of the emergency brake: “Marx says that revolutions are the locomotive of world history. But perhaps it is quite otherwise. Perhaps revolutions are an attempt by the passengers on this train — namely, the human race — to activate the emergency brake.” The metaphor, Benjamin Noys argues, presents a “non-teleological politics of temporality,” grounded in a belief that future liberation cannot be entrusted to “the continuing dialectic of production/destruction” that generates a ceaseless “state of emergency.” 

In strategic terms, Benjamin insisted that movements of the “revolutionary classes,” at moments of crisis, must seek not to push history faster along its pre-existing tracks but seek “to make the continuum of history explode,” manifesting “a conception of the present as now-time [Jetztzeit] shot through with splinters of messianic time,” and that, however, this will require a seizing of memories of past defeats when they ‘flash up’ at moments of collective peril.

This is a stance not of impotent voluntarism or aestheticized defeatism but a squaring up to the ways in which the present embodies the outcome of the catastrophic defeats of past struggles, in order precisely to warn against the “conformism“ that tends always to overpower us. Far from being an idiosyncratic fantasy peculiar to Benjamin, it is a red thread through radical politics. (To give a notable example, it’s there in W.E.B. Du Bois’ analysis of the tragically missed opportunity to unite workers across the “colour line,” in Black Reconstruction in America.)

As the ice melts, a helpless catastrophism can set in, breeding ennui or apathy in the face of predicted doom. But the dominant forms of passivity, surely, stem either from low levels of social-movement activity itself, which a catastrophist consciousness might in small ways improve (Extinction Rebellion is the obvious example), or from complacent hopes that those who gather at Davos, and their colleagues worldwide, will proffer business-almost-as-usual remedies in the form of green growth, geoengineering, and so forth. These, in turn, tap into the long-ingrained belief in the inevitability of progress, with its tendency to foster “apocalyptic blindness“: the reluctance of humans “to understand that their existence is threatened, and that this could lead to bad end.”

It’s against this background that Benjamin’s arguments, and his uncovering of the strings that attached the complacent historicism of his day to the modes and rhythms of capitalist time, appear, well, jetztzeitig.

This Author 

Gareth Dale teaches politics at Brunel University. He is a co-editor of Green Growth (Zed, 2016). His articles are available online. He tweets at @Gareth_Dale.

Image: Monica Blatton, Flickr. 

It’s Davos time again. Our overlords are arriving at the Alpine resort for the World Economic Forum (WEF). But the ski slopes all around are melting. The mountain’s snowline is receding.

As they gather, they’re unpacking environmental anxieties and comparing magic bullets. We hear Adair Turner, the former CBI Director, call for the large-scale expansion of agrofuels and hydrogen—without the slightest grasp of the destructive effects of the former or the wastefulness and colossal energy thirst of the latter.

Turner’s colleague, WEF Director Klaus Schwab, is gesturing airily at ‘public-private partnerships’ and ‘technology.’ Business as almost-usual. Future hope, he says, lies with the CEOs (and shhh, please tiptoe around the oil giants). It’s the polite liberal etiquette of climate change: rhetorical dedication, practical denial.

Schwab tries to integrate ‘time’ into his diagnosis. “Quarterly reporting cycles and shorter terms of office cut time horizons for decision-makers. The urgent scientific message on climate change finds it hard to cut through the news cycle.” This is not wrong, but is flimsy and evasive. For time is indeed of the essence. What is ‘Davos time’? How does ‘capitalist time’ intersect with ‘ecological time’ — the CEOs amidst the snowmelt?

Economies of time

We can find a few pointers in a novel set in early twentieth-century Davos: Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain.

Davos today is a jet-set magnet, thanks to its climate and elevation – ideal for skiing. Back then a sprinkling of Europe’s upper crust congregated at its sanatoriums, for which the climate and elevation were similarly suited.

Magic Mountain is a time-rich novel. It asks: is time a linear axis of existence or is it subjective and non-linear, a concertina? Is boredom the ‘compression of time’?

The novel interrogates temporality. By this I mean the structures through which humans perceive and organise time, through the rhythms of their interaction with the natural environment (diurnal and seasonal cycles) and through technologies, myths, music, and so forth.

Temporalities and timescapes vary across space and through history, with different ‘economies’ embodying diverse dispositions of time. Who owns the future: the gods on Mount Olympus, or is it – like credit – a resource to be exploited by the monied classes? In a capitalist society, time is sliced and priced by states and capital — a time-money continuum.

“Time and the world”

In its own temporality, The Magic Mountain is classically ‘modern.’ Through a protagonist-centred narrative continuum, the present is looped through the past and toward the future. Narrative time is synced to clock time, and a focus on the detailed interactions of everyday life facilitates a tight control of tempo. As a Bildungsroman, it foregrounds processes of development and (self-)discovery. 

In short, it represents a late flourish of classical literary realism. The novel’s genre was keyed to a particular social order: bourgeois, individualistic and meliorist; its advent, some 150 years earlier, signalled a profound shift in sensibility. For the first time in literary consciousness, as Mikhail Bakhtin observed, “time and the world” became historical, unfolding “as an uninterrupted movement into a real future, as a unified, all-embracing and unconcluded process.”

The conceptual twin of this ‘modern’ literary sensibility is Progress. It too courses through Mann’s novel. Its champion is the Italian lawyer Lodovico Settembrini, who sees himself as a warrior for freedom, knowledge, transformative action, and ‘Europe,’ in opposition to tyranny, bondage, passivity, and inertia—in short, ‘Asia.’

In Settembrini’s view, time and history are propelled by machines. “As technology brought nature increasingly under its control,” improving communication “and triumphing over climatic conditions,” it also brought the peoples of the world together, driving a global shift from “darkness and fear” to happiness and virtue. Technological progress paves the road to a shining moral order. Through dominating nature, it secures liberation.

In Davos this week, Settembrini’s ghost feels right at home. It laps up the WEF mission statement, “Committed to Improving the State of the World,” and the ubiquitous undertakings to “shape the future of economic progress.”

The Magic Mountain is set prior to 1914, but Mann wrote it between 1912 and 1924, as liberal order crumpled and burned. Its narrative acceleration conjures a society hurtling toward doom. One hundred years on, ecological collapse is provoking a crisis in our perception of the ontological coordinates of human life, including nature and time. I’ll return to these. But first, how did we get here? And what is ‘capitalist time’?

Ringing the changes

The revolution in temporality of the last millennium is conventionally associated with the diffusion of the mechanical clock. By producing minutes and hours in fixed ticks, it enabled the reproducibility and universal standardisation of time. In severing time from the natural and supernatural realms, it helped foster a vision of an independent world of mathematically measurable sequences, the sphere of Newtonian science. Time could now be imagined as a uniform continuum: linear, divisible, and abstract.

But the transformation cannot have been the work of mechanical clocks alone. Clock time is a productive force, enabling the synchronisation of human purposes—but these are under whose command?

In medieval Europe and the Islamic civilisations, clocks were used less to measure time than by clerics to mark it — the call to prayer. (‘Clock’ derives from clocca/klocke: a bell.) But when clock-bells entered the public sphere to coordinate trade and public intercourse, and above all when they entered workplaces to quantify the working day, that changed.

If pre-capitalist systems were visibly kleptocratic – based on the extortion of labour’s product – in capitalism the goal is labour productivity. Capital is the command of labour time, with the worker appearing as a commodity: personified labour-time. Capitalist rationality is governed by the law of value, the imperative to reduce the labour time of production below the ‘socially necessary’ average required to sell commodities at or below their value—where value is an abstraction of social time.

Put more simply, capital’s aim is to increase profit by saving time. This accounts for the core dynamics of ‘modernity’: the systematic disciplining of labour and its segregation from the rest of the human experience, enabling labour time to be demarcated and measured; the endless acceleration of labour processes and of technical and social change; the centrality, and fetishism, of technology (in view of its key role in displacing labour and reducing circulation time); and the systematic derogation of the natural environment. Capitalism eats time, and in the process erases nature.

Weaponising the clock

Capitalist time can be thought of as a system of interlocking temporalities under the dominance of capital. To simplify, the pulse is capital’s, the wage relation determines the worker’s calendar, while the overarching framework is established by states — not least through the strict metronome of education institutions and other sites of ‘disciplinary social reproduction.’ Outside those structures, ‘social reproduction time’ tends to be cyclical, and gendered.

The imposition of capitalist temporality – a unity of time projected by capital and nation states – is sometimes crisis-prone and arrhythmic, is always contested, and never total. Capitalist temporalities are differentiated, contradictory and uneven across space and time, and they face resistance. In the system’s ‘primitive’ phases, the plantations and workshops and warships and factories became battlegrounds in a war of capitalist time-consciousness.

The same war was fought globally. The early-modern West European bourgeois defined himself by his separation from nature and a taste for regimes of abstract time and space. These predilections were weaponised, deployed in explicit justification of the domination of indigenous peoples whose space he was conquering and whose labour time he was appropriating. The very idea of the ‘savage’ was constructed on the belief that to be fully human requires a rigorous separation of ritual and habit from the rhythms of nature. Indigenous peoples’ lack of alienation from their land served to justify the colonists’ alienation of their land.

Put differently, bourgeois Europeans saw themselves in the mirror of their clocks. Clocks symbolised technological prowess and material well-being — a nation’s ‘civilisation’ and ‘modernity.’ Abstract-regimented time was simultaneously the banner and goal of European militarists, merchants and missionaries in their colonisation of the world who defined their civilisation as orderly, regimented, linear, and uniform, a culture to be imposed on the irrational, irregular and timeless — hence childlike— Others. Punctuality was ordained a moral category: keeping the right time was right.

Choreographing modernity 

Religious time and capitalist time consciousness adapted to one another, most famously in seventeenth-century England, where Puritans “censored the social calendar, flattened the swinging seasonality of time and decreed instead a mechanical routine of six days’ work followed by one day’s pray.” Puritanism choreographed society along business lines, featuring employers for whom saving souls requires saving money, and prayerful-punctual employees. Here the time-money continuum came into being. Saving time is “gainful,” preached the Puritan Richard Baxter, so “spend it wholly in the way of duty.” “Time is money,” chimed Benjamin Franklin, setting the seal on time’s historic transition: once a gift from the gods, now a resource exchangeable for money.

In European visualisations of the human journey, the correlative shift was from Providence to Progress — from a sacred cosmology “bounded by the approach of the Last Judgment“ to a secular historical time in continuous forward motion. In early formulations of history as a stadial process of civilizational advance, the analogy was with the individual.

Just as individuals progress from infancy to maturity, said Lord Kames, “so there is a similar progress in every nation, from its savage state to its maturity in arts and sciences.“ Before long, the Progress idea became infused with connotations of ‘economic infinity’ — the beliefs that human industry has infinite wealth-creating potential and that the credit system is endlessly elastic. Later on, it fused with the growth paradigm — the ideology of unending economic growth.

In identifying a ladder of historical time from barbarism to civilisation, the progress idea hammered the diversity of human populations into a particular temporal-economic chain. Under its banner, abstract time and technological novelty became markers of modernity, defining the cities against the countryside and imperial powers against the colonies. Because the richer and higher-tech nations (and ‘races’) are indexed as history’s vanguard, they should boss the rest, and surgically redirect their faces to the future. When the future appears as a dream of infinite progress, the past is perpetually deficient and the present must be continually realigned with the future through political intervention. It is a manifesto that drums out capital’s rhythms – it appeared as ‘modernisation theory,’ ‘the development project,’ and so forth.

Empty time

In The Magic Mountain, the debate on progress pits the bourgeois progressive Settembrini against Naptha, a socialist-reactionary Jesuit. The latter was nostalgic for medieval hierarchy and sternly critical of liberal Progress. Yet the actual socialist movement of Thomas Mann’s day, above all the Social Democratic Party (SPD), was aligning itself unreservedly with ‘Settembrini.’

The thinker who joined the dots connecting the SPD’s “stubborn faith in progress“ and its “servile integration“ into the apparatuses of bourgeois order was Walter Benjamin. In his Arcades Project, Benjamin highlighted a paradox in the temporality of commodity society. Competition drives the production of ever greater masses of commodities for which buyers must be found, with ever new lines and new seductions, yet novelty is immediately rendered obsolete by its own onward rush.

The paradigm is the fashion industry: the realm of the short shelf-life, the quick kiss. Commodity production inhabits twin temporalities, with a linear acceleration which – in its circularity, its repetitiveness – appears as stasis.

Benjamin uses the phrase “homogenous empty time“ to describe the infinite, inevitable timetable of bourgeois progress to which social democracy had pledged itself in the baseless belief that capitalism’s accelerative dynamic pointed to a socialist society as its pre-determined telos.

The SPD had become prisoner of its conviction that the historical tide was on its side, pushed ever onward by “technological development.” From there it was a short step “to the illusion that factory work ostensibly furthering technological progress constituted a political achievement,” and to a “corrupted conception” of industry that recognizes only “progress in mastering nature” and not the attendant regressions, and finally to the “naïvely complacent” belief — shared by social-democrat and liberal economists — that nature donates itself “gratis” for the benefit of humanity. These beliefs, Benjamin suggests, lay at the root of the SPD’s rejection of radical strategies geared to rupturing the historical present.

Great acceleration 

Capitalist progress, in Benjamin’s oracular phrase, “must be grounded in the idea of catastrophe. That it continues like this, is the catastrophe.” He wrote this in the late 1930s, following his exile from Nazi Germany, incarceration in Vichy France, and not long before his flight and (probable) suicide.

A complacent observer, a Settembrini, might assume Benjamin had needlessly generalised from the unfortunate juncture. After all, 1940 was “midnight in the century” but the good guys then won the war, eradicated Nazism, and soldered the world economy back together. Progress resumed full-throttle, powering miraculous advances in literacy, life expectancy and prosperity.

But Benjamin’s warnings were prescient. He had earlier described how the same coruscating technologies — gas, dyes, electricity — that had lit up late nineteenth-century city skies morphed into the ‘colourful infernos’ (in Esther Leslie’s paraphrase) and the ‘fire terror’ of the world wars.

A similar and even more treacherous dialectic was to follow. Fossil fuels had become the elixir of growth. As Sadi Carnot, the father of thermodynamics, long ago understood, fossil fuels confer on technologies “the invaluable advantage of being employable at any time and in any place, and of never suffering an interruption’ in their work. Digging deep through geological layers to the Carboniferous, Jurassic and Cretaceous past brings present dividends to capital in the form of cheap energy which then, pumped out as exhaust gas, cues up future infernos and fire terror.

The capitalist system, in the wake of its postwar Great Acceleration, is producing new temporal twists, not least to ecological time and geological time.

Ecological time

Ecological time refers to humans’ interaction with natural events and processes, whether over the short or longer-term. Humans have long had the capacity to rapidly wrench local environments, but ecological time has been generally understood as cyclical and continuous. One sociologist of time describes it as ‘enduring time.’

Today, ecological time is changing globally, and fast. No longer is our image of the planetary future simply an extrapolation of the present. Ecological time is, for a significant minority, infused with a sense of hair-raising change.

A spin-off is that our sense of geological time is undergoing an irreversible shift. The geological past, in the form of carbon-bearing seams, irrupts into the present, irrevocably altering the future. Anthropocene is the buzz word, with Capitalocene its more accurate substitute.

Geological time is accelerating, and this will continue, thanks not least to the time-bending features of climate change: the gargantuan future warming pent up in the form of oceanic thermal inertia, and the irreversible non-linear positive feedback mechanisms (albedo decline, oceanic methane release, etc.) that are either already in train or in view — a climate time bomb that could propel the planet toward a ‘hothouse state.’

The earth’s climate of the last ten thousand years was uniquely benign and stable, if at times with sharp local and occasional minor global volatility. That age is over. Put differently: whereas all human-recorded timescapes were lived under a (relatively) serene sky, over the next thousands, or millions, of years the forecast is stormy.

Jetztzeit – ‘now time’

Facing the catastrophes of his era, and the complacency of progressives, Benjamin offered the image of the emergency brake: “Marx says that revolutions are the locomotive of world history. But perhaps it is quite otherwise. Perhaps revolutions are an attempt by the passengers on this train — namely, the human race — to activate the emergency brake.” The metaphor, Benjamin Noys argues, presents a “non-teleological politics of temporality,” grounded in a belief that future liberation cannot be entrusted to “the continuing dialectic of production/destruction” that generates a ceaseless “state of emergency.” 

In strategic terms, Benjamin insisted that movements of the “revolutionary classes,” at moments of crisis, must seek not to push history faster along its pre-existing tracks but seek “to make the continuum of history explode,” manifesting “a conception of the present as now-time [Jetztzeit] shot through with splinters of messianic time,” and that, however, this will require a seizing of memories of past defeats when they ‘flash up’ at moments of collective peril.

This is a stance not of impotent voluntarism or aestheticized defeatism but a squaring up to the ways in which the present embodies the outcome of the catastrophic defeats of past struggles, in order precisely to warn against the “conformism“ that tends always to overpower us. Far from being an idiosyncratic fantasy peculiar to Benjamin, it is a red thread through radical politics. (To give a notable example, it’s there in W.E.B. Du Bois’ analysis of the tragically missed opportunity to unite workers across the “colour line,” in Black Reconstruction in America.)

As the ice melts, a helpless catastrophism can set in, breeding ennui or apathy in the face of predicted doom. But the dominant forms of passivity, surely, stem either from low levels of social-movement activity itself, which a catastrophist consciousness might in small ways improve (Extinction Rebellion is the obvious example), or from complacent hopes that those who gather at Davos, and their colleagues worldwide, will proffer business-almost-as-usual remedies in the form of green growth, geoengineering, and so forth. These, in turn, tap into the long-ingrained belief in the inevitability of progress, with its tendency to foster “apocalyptic blindness“: the reluctance of humans “to understand that their existence is threatened, and that this could lead to bad end.”

It’s against this background that Benjamin’s arguments, and his uncovering of the strings that attached the complacent historicism of his day to the modes and rhythms of capitalist time, appear, well, jetztzeitig.

This Author 

Gareth Dale teaches politics at Brunel University. He is a co-editor of Green Growth (Zed, 2016). His articles are available online. He tweets at @Gareth_Dale.

Image: Monica Blatton, Flickr. 

American agriculture interests have flooded the US government’s trade agency with demands to pressure the UK into slashing food standards after Brexit, official documents show.

Earlier this week the US trade representative closed its consultation with stakeholders on objectives for post-Brexit trade negotiations with the UK.

Responses to the consultation, which was launched late last year, were dominated by the powerful food and agriculture lobby, which made nearly a quarter of the total submissions received — far more than any other sector of the US economy.

Growth hormones

The comments, made by corporations and trade associations representing thousands of US businesses, urge US negotiators to press the UK into scrapping or weakening regulations that govern pesticides, genetically-modified crops, and the production of chicken and meat products as part of a post-Brexit trade deal.

Shadow trade secretary Barry Gardiner warned that lowering standards could lead to a race-to-the-bottom, telling Unearthed: “We cannot countenance any agreement that would lower our food standards or allow products into the United Kingdom that are produced to lower standards.”

In its submission, global agri-industry giant Cargill said the US “should seek complete agricultural market access for its firms” and “eliminate intended or unintended non-tariff barriers in the agriculture sector.”  

In this context non-tariff barriers are rules that restrict trade from one market to another, such as the EU’s ban on the use of growth hormones in imported beef.

Food standards

The powerful American Farm Bureau Federation said that “full recognition of the safety of the US agricultural and food system must be included.”

This would mean that products such as hormone beef, chlorine washed chicken and genetically modified potatoes could be sold in the UK.

It could also mean that the UK may be forced to permit the sale of fruit and vegetables grown with pesticides that are banned in the EU on environmental and safety grounds.  

The Bureau added that the UK should “restore science as the basis for food safety regulation” by eliminating all restrictions on US agricultural exports.

The National Pork Producers Council (NPPC) specifies “the elimination of all sanitary and phytosanitary [SPS] barriers to pork”, including measures designed to restrict the use of growth promoters such as Ractopamine and to prevent tapeworm and antibiotic resistance.

In 2017 a top lobbyist for the NPPC told Unearthed: “It would be over my dead body that a free trade agreement gets through the US Congress that doesn’t eliminate tariffs on food and agriculture products… and non-tariff barriers”.

Hormone beef

Similarly, the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association, whose former chief economist Greg Doud is now the Trump administration’s chief agricultural trade negotiator, calls on the US to demand that restrictions on beef reared using growth hormones are dropped.

The agriculture lobby also zeroed in on EU rules on genetically modified organisms, with the National Potato Council seeking a deal that “allows for imports” of GMO food products while the American Sugar Alliance raises concerns over labelling.

The EU’s strict regulations on trace amounts of pesticide in food is another issue for the industry, with both the Cranberry Marketing Committee and US Wheat Associates seeking relief from such standards.

‘The pursuit of free trade’

In a statement provided to Unearthed, Gardiner said: “Whilst we want to see positive, progressive trade agreements with our biggest trading partners, we cannot countenance any agreement that would lower our food standards or allow products into the United Kingdom that are produced to lower standards.

“Gove may not allow our domestic standards to be lowered but Fox may allow you to buy the American produce that is produced to a lower tolerance level and is therefore cheaper. In their mind that is not a lowering of our standards, it is simply ‘Consumer Choice’ and the pursuit of free trade.

“Of course, it is only a choice if you actually know what the difference is and what produce comes from which regulatory regime. That is why good labeling is important, however, labeling requirements are seen by Liam Fox and his friends as anti-competitive ‘Non-Tariff Barriers’.

“The knock-on effect for our agricultural producers is clear. I spoke with farmers at the recent Oxford Farming Conference who made very clear their concerns about American agricultural practices and what will happen to their capacity to compete if these products are given access to market here. It will inevitably result in a contraction in our domestic production capacity.”

Koch efforts

In another submission, the powerful libertarian outfit Americans for Prosperity, founded by the billionaire industrialist Koch brothers, said the countries should do “seamless and simple” trade, similar to that done between member states in the European Union.

The letter reads: “There should be no tariffs. There should be no quotas. There should be no regulatory rules.”

It also references the model trade deal drawn up by leading Brexit figure Daniel Hannan together with libertarian organisations on both sides of the Atlantic

The Kochs have also been lobbying on Brexit negotiations on this side of the Atlantic, with their business’ listing the issue on its EU transparency register page.

This Article

This article first appeared at Unearthed, from Greenpeace. HT Steve Analyst

I was particularly struck by one question about protests when I spoke to a student audience at Manchester University about climate change: “How do you justify the impacts and explain them to those who question them?”

My questioner’s case study was the fuel blockade in 2000 – at about the time he was born – which made me think that he was reflecting on the views of a parent, reaching that wonderful point where studies and exposure to different viewpoints from his peers led him to question what he’d taken as family gospel.

The latest edition of Resurgence & Ecologist magazine is out now!

The 2000 action had been undertaken by lorry drivers protesting about rising fuel duty – a reminder that protests can be conducted from very different political directions. In the same era there was the big Countryside Alliance pro-hunting march.

Crucial role

But questioning the very act of protest was an important reminder that many of us live in ‘bubbles’ – social media or otherwise – where we take such activities for granted as a significant, and effective, form of political action. Many others do not – and it is essential that we make it clear to many more that these actions are essential, and to be celebrated.

In answering the question, I referred to the suffragettes and then zoomed forward a century to the recent Sheffield protests against unnecessary street tree felling. I might have referred to the two accounts featured in this issue of Resurgence & Ecologist, from France and Germany, where long, concerted protest has had a clear and positive outcome; or to the Greenham women and other anti-nuclear weapons protests of their time.

As many such case studies indicate, change in our society isn’t granted by those in charge. It has to be forced on them – to be won. The few benefiting from the status quo are hardly going to give up those benefits without a huge struggle, and they frequently can’t see from their lofty positions that change – controlled or uncontrolled – is inevitable.

The crucial role of protest in change was true for the men and women rallying and dying to demand parliamentary reform at Peterloo in 1819, and it remains true for those standing up for people and planet today.

The traditional political methods, petitions and letters, media stunts and reasoned argument, are not going to create transformation change, at least not on their own.

Vested interests

That’s not to say they’re not a crucial part of any struggle, the making of the case, but where vested interests are deeply entrenched at the heart of government they have to be confronted. The government has to know that people are prepared to put their freedom, and even their safety, on the line in resistance.

The full range of change drivers will have to be deployed if our society is going to change its entire political, economic and social approach – which we must do if we are to get away from the disastrous neoliberal politics of Reagan and Thatcher and the growth ideology that’s dominated since the end of the second world war.

The risks that brave people are prepared to take were highlighted by the recent jailing of three anti-fracking protesters, who had ‘lorry-surfed’ at the Preston New Road Cuadrilla drilling site. The three were each sentenced to more than a year in prison for “public nuisance”.

That an appeal judge subsequently described these sentences as manifestly excessive and freed them on conditional discharges a few weeks later came as little surprise, but they, and others who’ve taken similar actions, knew what they were risking. Those dicing with and defying swingeing injunctions brought by fracking companies against peaceful protests at sites across the North and the Midlands, who are putting potentially their homes and financial security on the line, are similarly aware.

Yet those injunctions are a sign of the power of the protests, and how much these companies and other vested interests fear them.

Building strengths

These are not actions taken lightly, and such movements only emerge and develop where it is clear traditional political tactics are not going to succeed. And it often takes time for their broader impacts to become evident.

The massive 2003 demonstrations against the Iraq War are often cited as a failure. But a decade later the Labour Party voted in parliament against bombing Syria, an action that clearly related back to the protest, while the public’s view of interventionist foreign policy continues to be coloured by that action.

The Iraq War march has been an object lesson that’s informed political action and helped develop movements in the 15 years since. A key lesson is that one action – even if it involves well over a million people – almost never brings change on its own.

Protest is a process, not an act. One of the things that happens is that protest movements learn from each other, grow out of each other, develop strengths from others’ successes and failures. The Climate Camp was informed by the anti-war protests; UK Uncut and Occupy grew out of its tactics.

Some people bring their experience from one movement to another, but one of the things that is striking in the anti-fracking protests is that many of those involved have never previously been involved in politics. Protest, bravery, the determination of the anti-fracking protesters camped in the cold and the rain, waving daily to passing locals – all this draws in people and communities.

Flexible tactics

Protests are continually evolving, learning entities, which have good days and bad, successes and defeats. I was there the week Sheffield tree protesters learnt that.

There was despair when South Yorkshire police arrested two women on private property, under repressive anti-trade-union laws. It seemed to be the loss of a crucial tactic. Yet a couple of days later, the protectors had an answer. Someone was employed to paint a householder’s gate under a threatened tree. Police were left scratching their heads – if the law was being deployed to protect workers’ ability to proceed, which workers had priority?

It’s not just a question of flexible tactics. Each movement has to develop its own methods of decision-making, of support and interaction. People bring many different perspectives and experiences to moments of high stress and pressure, and there are no rules to ensure that works effectively.

But while focusing on the successes and the achievements of protest movements, we also need to think about when protest tactics may not be appropriate and may even be counterproductive. Mistakes will be made, but they need to be learnt from. One of the things that’s marked Sheffield trees, anti-fracking, zad and Hambi is that direct actions have always been carefully targeted towards the movement goal.

Sitting under a threatened tree, blocking a lorry with fracking equipment, occupying a vulnerable space, has a clear link to the cause, an immediate impact that can be explained on the evening news. The further you get from that – the more an action can simply be labelled as attention-seeking, as a headline without substance, the less likely it is to be effective.

Successful movements 

Further, the environment in which protest operates is also constantly changing. Protests need to adapt to that, as zad has had to adapt to the removal of its initial raison d’être by victory.

One of the things we need to think about very carefully now is the febrile political age in which we live. That makes it more important than ever that protests offer hope and promote alternatives, and do not just oppose what is happening now.

The far right is promoting a politics of fear and division – and there’s no doubt it is dangerous and won’t be defeated by our adopting the same approach. We have to offer hope and inspiration, positive models and stor­ies of how we’re not just opposing, but proposing, not simply preventing, but building, not just saying no to climate-disastrous fossil fuels, but saying yes to a just transition to a new world.

Zad, Hambi and the anti-frackers have all done that. At Preston New Road there was a wonderful case study of this – an image woven into a security fence of what the fracking field could look like without the drilling rig – trees, green fields and a rainbow of hope, fitting with a sign frequently spotted there, “FARMING NOT FRACKING”. Such creativity, beauty, play, joy are crucial to a successful protest movement – and sometimes forgotten in the telegenic moments of arrests, lock-ons and marches.

And that vision of a liveable planet, with people living in security and just­ice, is one that is only available to our ‘side’. Defenders of the status quo can only oppose change, not celebrate the unstable, dangerous mess their system has created. To deliver radical change, we need – and I’m confident we’ll see – far more actions like zad and Hambi.

Everyone has a role, from promoting actions on social media and answering questions from family and colleagues such as those I was asked in Manchester, to baking quiches and cakes for the protesters, to leaping on top of lorries or marching en masse. There’s a role for everyone in making a new sustainable world – a role for everyone in protesting the destruction of our wonderful planet and the exploitation of the people on it, and building a beautiful alternative. Protest is crucial to get where we need to go.

This Author

Natalie Bennett is a former leader of the Green Party of England and Wales. This story was first published in Resurgence & Ecologist magazine.

Image: Tim Lüddemann, Flickr CC BY-NC-SA 2.0.

A conflict between those working to conserve numbers of hen harriers and those maintaining commercial shooting of red grouse in the English uplands has existed for decades – with little sign of progress.

Drawing on work conducted in psychology, a new study published in the journal People and Nature investigated the underlying values that shooters and conservationists hold that make it so hard to find shared solutions.

Ecological studies over the last thirty years have shown that hen harriers and other birds of prey are capable of reducing the number of grouse to such an extent that driven grouse shooting can become economically unviable. Consequently, hen harriers, although protected under UK legislation since 1952, are killed illegally on grouse moors.

Opposing views

Researchers from Bangor University and the University of Aberdeen surveyed a range of organisations that represent the interests of field sports – hunting, shooting, fishing – or nature conservation in England to assess their values and attitudes towards hen harriers, grouse shooting and potential management interventions.

Dr Freya St John from Bangor University said: “We found that people who are involved in field sports and those engaged in bird conservation hold more or less opposing views about human relationships with nature, challenging our ability to find shared solutions.”

“Although there is general agreement about the evidence of the ecological relationships between hen harriers and grouse, there is much less agreement about the best approach to manage them.”

They found that those from shooting organisations, in contrast to people associated with conservation groups, held a view of human mastery of nature and prioritised human wellbeing over the rights of wildlife.

This group expressed support for various management approaches, including brood management where eggs or young birds are removed from nests, reared in captivity and released back into the wild at fledging.

Management approaches 

In contrast, individuals associated with conservation groups did not support brood management.

However, like those associated with field sports, they did express support for continued monitoring of the hen harrier population, protection of their winter roosts, enhanced intelligence and enforcement, and diversionary feeding of harriers to reduce predation on grouse.

The results indicated that diversionary feeding was most favoured and received greatest consensus amongst the groups surveyed.

To date, this is the only management technique that has been trialled and found to be effective at reducing the number of red grouse chicks eaten by hen harriers. Despite this, feeding has not been widely taken up on grouse moors.

Professor Steve Redpath of the University of Aberdeen, who presented the study’s findings at the British Ecological Society’s annual conference, commented: “Our work highlights that this is a conflict between people with very different views about the management of the countryside and its wildlife.”

Stakeholder conflict 

There is currently no formal dialogue process in place to support the management of this stakeholder conflict.

Conservation organisations withdrew from previous discussions, partly because hen harriers continue to be killed illegally and have almost disappeared as a breeding species in England.

Redpath added: “It seems unlikely that conservation organisations would be willing to return to the negotiating table unless the illegal killing of hen harriers stops. 

“To minimise the impact of harriers on grouse, brood management was put forward, but as we see in this study, it is very controversial. Particularly whilst illegal killing of harriers persists, such a hands-on intervention is unpalatable to some.”

This Article 

Brendan Montague is editor of The Ecologist. This article is based on a press release from the British Ecological Society. 

World-renowned environmental and peace activist Satish Kumar provides simple guidance and inspiration for anyone interested in contributing to positive change on our planet in a series of short videos being published through this month.

Change the Story showcases Kumar remarkable philosophy and insights on caring for the environment, cultivating personal wellbeing and upholding human values. The Resurgence Trust, owner of The Ecologist, is releasing a new film every day in January on its Vimeo channel.

Kumar edited Resurgence magazine for 43 years and founded the Resurgence Trust. He said: “I’m delighted to share my vision for how to meet our planet’s escalating environmental and political problems with hope and optimism in these films.

Wild landscapes

“The subjects of the films range from economics to Gaia Theory, science to Shakespeare, and energy to the importance of the food we eat. Each one has a simple message: together let’s write a new story for our time.”

Kumar, 82, is the author of seven books including the bestselling No Destination about his extraordinary 8,000-mile peace walk from India to America. He is the guiding spirit behind several acclaimed ecological organisations including Schumacher College in Devon. His latest book Elegant Simplicity will be published in April 2019.

Resurgence, renamed Resurgence & Ecologist in 2012, has been at the forefront of environmental change for more than 50 years. It publishes, in print and online, positive, informed and original perspectives on ecology, activism, social justice, ethical living, and the arts. It has been described as “the spiritual and artistic flagship of the green movement”.

Contributors to Resurgence & Ecologist include Fritjof Capra, The Dalai Lama, Noam Chomsky, Jonathon Porritt, Vandana Shiva, Caroline Lucas, George Monbiot and Germaine Greer. Michael Morpurgo, the former Children’s Laureate, said: “No publication has done more to raise awareness of the dangers to the environment of our throw-away society.”

The films were recorded in and around Satish’s home in Hartland, North Devon and other wild landscapes that inspire him and are being shared on the Resurgence Trust Twitter feed (@Resurgence_mag) and Facebook page (@Resurgencetrust).

This Author

Angie Burke is the trust manager at the Resurgence Trust, owner and publisher of The Ecologist.

Everyday products including lighting, displays, washing machines, dishwashers and fridges will need to be made to be more easily repairable and longer-lasting from April 2021.

The move has been welcomed by environmental campaigners and consumer groups, who argue that the “right to repair” will cut waste and greenhouse gas emissions from manufacturing consumer goods that are designed to need replacing prematurely.  

The proposals are part of the EU’s laws aimed at reducing the environmental impacts of products, known as Ecodesign. Previous Ecodesign policies have mostly focused on improving energy efficiency, but this is now being taken further to ensure that products are designed to last longer, and are easier to repair and recycle.

Limited access

However, campaigners have criticised the new laws for limiting access to most spare parts and repair manuals to professional repairers only. This may restrict the access of independent repairers, repair cafés and consumers to some key replacement parts and information, limiting the availability and affordability of repair services, they said.

Campaigners blame strong pressure from industry lobby groups for prompting the European Commission to water down proposals on repairability in favour of recyclability. 

Stephane Arditi of the European Environmental Bureau said that the restriction was a missed opportunity. “Small independent repairers can make a great contribution to the economy and our society. We need to help them do their job,” she said.

However, a spokesperson for the UK Association of Manufacturers of Domestic Appliances said: “It is essential that a repaired product remains safe as well as in good working order and this is why the legislation is specifying a professional repairer.”

This Author

Catherine Early is a freelance environmental journalist and chief reporter for the Ecologist. She can be found tweeting at @Cat_Early76.

The decision to allow the Bradley opencast coal site in Pont Valley, County Durham, which began operating in 2018, is to be reconsidered by James Brokenshire, the communities secretary.

A judicial review brought by local residents today forced the secretary of state to agree to revisit the decision. His department admits that ‘a flaw in the decision-making process’ had resulted in the refusal to revoke the mining company’s permit last summer, enabling them to begin extracting 500,000 tonnes of coal.

Opencast coal extraction involves stripping large areas of topsoil and subsoil to extract vast quantities of coal using heavy machinery and dynamite. It is far more destructive to the local environment than traditional mining which it came to replace.

Fighting back

June Davison, who lives near the Bradley site, said: “As a result of the government’s flawed decision, we have watched from our homes as a much-loved habitat has been ripped apart, and we have suffered coal dust and noise 12 hours a day.

“Within weeks explosions will begin just 500 metres from our homes as they blast away the earth in preparation for destroying a whole new section of the valley for coal, unless the government acts.

“The Secretary of State can’t repair the damage that has been done here but the least he can do is stop it getting worse. We are fighting back for what remains of the wildlife in the Pont Valley, for the climate and for the health of our community.’

Climate change

This comes as the decision on whether to approve another opencast coal site, Druridge Bay in Northumberland, was handed back to the Secretary of State on Friday.

The department admitted that it failed to take into account campaigners’ and lawyers’ letters which had raised comparisons between Bradley and the proposed Druridge Bay opencasts; the latter was refused in 2018 on the grounds of climate change and damage to the local landscape and community.

In reference to Bradley, the department concluded “the matter needs to be reconsidered by the secretary of state on the proper basis“

Tony Bosworth, campaigner at Friends of the Earth, said: “The world’s leading climate scientists have made it clear that we need to act fast to avoid climate chaos.

“Coal is one of the dirtiest fossil fuels and it belongs in the history books, not in an energy system for the 21st century. Our energy future must be based on energy saving and renewable energy, not on more fossil fuels.”

Opencast coal

The company behind both projects is Banks Group, which is also seeking an extension to another opencast mine, “Shotton” in Northumberland, and is investigating a new site for coal extraction near of Newcastle. Banks Group is the only company in the UK which is looking to open new opencast coal sites.

Banks Group is also awaiting a court trial for wildlife crimes, as residents claim the company failed to relocate protected species off the Bradley site before the mine started.

The end of coal…?

Anne Harris, of the Coal Action Network, said: ‘The government should seize this opportunity to end the dirty industry of opencast coal extraction for good. Supporting either Bradley or Druridge Bay would be inconsistent with their promise to end coal use in power stations by 2025.’

But what would the end of coal mean in County Durham, where the deep-pit mines used to provide work for whole communities?

Liam Carr, local resident, said: “Most families around here would have dads or granddads who worked down the pit, but opencast coal does not provide the job opportunities that deep mining once did.

“The government should look again at revoking permission at Bradley and look very closely at any new opencast coal mine applications. This region was built on coal, we are rightly proud of our past. Coal is our heritage, not our future.”

This Author

Isobel Tarr is a Campaigner & Community Organiser with Coal Action Network, @CoalActionUK.