Time, capitalism, and alienation: social time relations, clock-time and the making of world standard time

This dissertation enquires into the relationship between time and capitalism. In order to understand the nature of social time in capitalist societies, I perform a historical contextualization of the origins of clocks and clock-time, as well as the origins of capitalism. I situate the origins of clock and clock-time in feudal social time relations and practices of commerce and pre-capitalist wage-labour. I assess the historical development of clock-time, the formation of a temporal infrastructure of clock-time in England, and the transition from feudalism to capitalism through the transitional phase of agrarian capitalism in the English countryside. I then go on to enquire in the relationship between clock-time and capitalist processes of value formation and analyze the rise to social hegemony of clock-time in the form of World Standard Time. I forge a concept of capitalist social time relations as a struggling entity comprising abstract time and concrete social, natural and human times, and enquire into instances of social struggles which I read as temporal struggles. Finally, I enquire into the history of philosophies of time in the West, and I socio-historically contextualize the conceptions of time of Aristotle, Augustine, Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger and Henri Bergson. I end by drawing theoretical conclusion from my study of social time for disciplines in the social sciences.