Re: 24/7

[timework@xxxxxxxxx (Tom Walker)]

>In his last dispatch from Washington Martin Kettle reflects on the one
>thing he won't miss - America's love affair with 24/7.

In the view of this old hand, the price of admission to post-modernity may
be had for close attention to less than a dozen pages of the Grundrisse,
namely pages 704 to 714 of the Vintage edition. In those pages there are
mysteries within mysteries that might take a pretty comprehensive
understanding of Das Kap. to unravel. But the outline is there, dense as it is.

I hesitate to mention (because you will wrongly suppose that I'm kidding)
that those ten pages can be summarized in a four word inversion of Benjamin
Franklin's injunction that "time is money": wealth is disposable time.

If I could cut and paste from the .pdf copy of Empire, I would send you
pages 401 to 403 where Hardt and Negri try to say the same thing in several
hundred times as many words. The best they can come up with is:

"The progressive indistinction between production and reproduction in the
biopolitical context also highlights once again the immeasurability of time
and value. As labor moves outside the factory walls, it is increasingly
difficult to maintain the fiction of any measure of the working day and thus
separate the time of production from the time of reproduction, or work time
from leisure time. There are no time clocks to punch on the terrain of
biopolitical production; the proletariat produces all its generality
everywhere all day long."

Which is to say, wealth is disposable time.

24/7 is the negation of disposable time and thus *value* at this late and
lamentable stage is the negation of *wealth*.
Tom Walker
Bowen Island, BC
604 947 2213