capitalism, landnahme and social time regimes - an outline

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Time and Society

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DOI: 10.1177/0961463X10394965

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Capitalism, Landnahmeand social time regimes:An outline

Klaus DorreFriedrich-Schiller-University Jena, Germany

Abstract

In this paper the influence of capitalist Landnahme on the modification of social

time regimes will be discussed. The paper’s main thesis is that time is distributed

extremely unequally in processes of social acceleration. A regime of discontin-

uous time deprives part of the subordinates of material and cultural resources

which are essential for rational actions in markets. Moreover, different forms of

exploitation of time resources divide the subalterns. As a result, developed

capitalist metropolises are defined by what is best described as stable instability.

Keywords

acceleration, discontinuous time, Landnahme, organized time, precarization,

social time regimes

Introduction

Already among the classics of sociology, capitalism was considered aformation of society constituted by a particular time regime. Capitalismthus means the implementation of linear time. It is this abstract mode ofmeasuring time which, in contrast to natural cycles and biological rhythms,provides the basis for behavior motivated by economic thinking and cost-benefit calculations. Only this makes rational action in capitalist marketspossible. Accordingly, the history of capitalism can be told as a successionof events where regimes of linear time were implemented which, beyond thespheres of circulation and production, increasingly structure people’s timeoff work and therefore their entire conduct of life (Scharf, 1988). If, at first,

Corresponding author:

Klaus Dorre, Friedrich-Schiller-University Jena, Department of Sociology, Carl-Zeiß-Straße 2, 07743

Jena, Germany

Email: [email protected]



it was Marx who revealed the rulership dimension of social time regimes bypointing at the social differences of being in command of work times andlife times, more recent analytic works generally have a different focus. InHartmut Rosa’s (2005, 2009) influential study on the changes of time struc-tures in modernity, social acceleration is defined as a general phenomenonof alienation by which individuals are affected by relatively irrelevant oftheir position in society. No matter whether banker or bank clerk, ‘unem-ployed’ pensioner or ‘expendable human resource’ in a deprived area – ‘allof us’ appear to be subjected to the workings of a capitalist accelerationengine that no longer knows any real social differentiations.

As a contrast to this version of a critical theory of acceleration, a differentpoint of view will be outlined below. What, on the surface of society, appearsas acceleration is the result of extremely unequal control over and distribu-tion of time resources. In other words, capital’s acceleration drive is notasserting itself without crises or ruptures. As it is always also influenced bya political economy of labour, by social struggle and conflict (Negt, 1984), thecourse of capitalistic development is marked by periodic de- and reconstruc-tion of social time regimes. Thus, the latest capitalist Landnahme1 is by nomeans having the effect of linear acceleration; its impact brings about thedestruction of a regime of organized time which is replaced by a regime ofdiscontinuous time. According to my thesis, this latter, new time regime,deprives a part of the subordinates of those material and cultural resourceswhich would enable them to take rational action in the markets. Differentforms of exploitation of time resources also divide those under its rule – aphenomenon contributing towards the peculiar stabilization of the unstablewe currently experience in the centers of developed capitalism. The reasoningbehind assuming such a point of view will be provided in several steps. Theconnection between capitalism and social time regimes will be addressed first.The concept of Landnahme is then introduced and subsequently made con-crete in the form of an outline of the most recent Landnahme of financialcapitalism. In conclusion, some considerations are presented in which thethesis of acceleration is discussed once more.

Capitalism and social time regime as interpretedby Marx

Traditional, pre-capitalistic societies linked time regimes and time experi-ence to natural cycles or the specific requirements of particular work.In demand-oriented agrarian economies, the sowing or harvesting workhad to be done whenever the natural cycle required. And in pre-capitalistictrades and crafts, the factors determining the producers’ time rhythms were

70 Time and Society 20 (1)



the qualities of the finished product, the materials used and the sequence ofjobs required for production. Changes to the resulting dominance of cyclictime happened only, when during transition to trade capitalism, a moreprecise and universally applicable way of measuring time became necessary.At first, this need extended to the sphere of circulation where rationalizationof the time regime already appeared as ‘the pressure to accelerate the move-ments, the turnover of commodities into capital and the precise calculationof the corresponding turnover times’ (Scharf, 1988: 145). Yet to Marx,concealed behind such abstract time measurement was that equally abstractsubstance of value called socially required labour which enabled marketplayers to ignore the concrete use value of their commodities and referringto them exclusively according to their exchange value.

This means that the markets of trade capitalism differed from their historicforerunners to the extent that they were utilized for enterprises the wealthyinvested in solely ‘‘in expectation of profit’’ (Fulcher, 2007: 8; see alsoBraudel, 1982). Although at this early stage of capitalism, the desire to usecapital as efficiently as possible brought about a change towards exact, time-based modes of calculation and therefore a notion of time in which unifor-mity, continuity and calculability were of interest. Implementation of thisnew time regime was mainly limited to the sphere of circulation. This onlybegan to change in the transition to industrial capitalism. It was industry as aform of production highly dependent on the division of labour that paved theway for the regime of linear, calculable time also in the sphere of production.

As elaborated by Marx, from the beginning, enforcement of the new timeregime was a process saturated with rulership claims and characterized bypower asymmetries in several distinctive respects. First, labourers originat-ing from non-capitalistic parts of society had to be introduced to the newform of production. This took place – not exclusively but to a significantextent – by means of disciplining and extra-economic pressure. If in feudal,agrarian ways of production, pressure and partly even open violence werecommon methods to coerce formally autonomous producers intogenerating and giving up a surplus value, legislation dating back to thefeudal age, such as a mendicacy ban, was utilized during transition tocapitalistic production methods to integrate ‘country folks’ into the newways of production (Marx, 1867/1997). Even if we know today that therepressions against beggars, vagabonds and vagrants used as an example byMarx were ‘individual cases’ at the end of the feudal era (Germany, France)or the beginning of the age of capitalist production (England) (Kuczynski,1988), there is nevertheless ample evidence of actual struggles taking placein the course of the labourers’ adaptation to the new time regime.Entrepreneurs fought for a long time against the traditions of staying offwork, skipping work on Mondays, and absenteeism, to finally manage

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to form a workforce suitable for employment in industrial forms of produc-tion. According to certain reports, workers in factories were relieved of theirwatches to make it possible for the employers to keep ‘timeless’ control ofthe labour they had purchased (Fulcher, 2007).

Second, the struggle for time resulted from the generalization of a way touse labour which according to Marx is based on a specifically capitalistic formof exploitation. This form of exploitation is no longer constituted by extra-economic pressure, but by an exchange of equivalents: wage for labour.Nothing but the particular characteristic of human labour to produce surplusvalue beyond the measure of time required for individual reproduction enablesthe owners of means of production to appropriate the product of the surpluslabour of doubly free wage labourers who have nothing at their disposal buttheir labour. The degree of exploitation and level of profit are substantiallydependent on the amount of working hours and/or the intensity of labour use.

Finally, the implementation of linear time does not mean the completedisappearance, of cyclic time, though it will become increasingly margin-alized and subaltern. In other words: the hierarchy of time regimes becomesa medium of construction and reproduction of gender hierarchies. In chargeof unpaid reproduction and caregiving work, women remain linked moreclosely to cyclic time, to biorhythms and natural cycles than men. Such alink is the expression of a specific subalternity, with linear time being thedominant regime over cyclic time and the activities connected with it. Thus,the separation between gainful work and work-free time has a gender-spe-cific dimension. ‘Time off work’ to many women merely means time awayfrom paid work, though not from the burden of having to go on working.

In the struggle for ‘every atom of time’ (Negt, 1984: 27; jedes Zeitatom)as it has been conducted between employees and employers since the imple-mentation of capitalistic ways of production, the central matter is not onlyabout relations of distribution and working conditions, but the capitalistrulership itself, a form of rulership characterized by Oskar Negt (1984: 21)as follows:

Rulership can be defined as being in a position at any time to establish rules

according to which the people are forced to divide their time and in which

spaces they are to move. Rulership primarily consists . . . of detailed organiza-

tion of segments of space and time which lock individuals into position as if

wearing a corset.

The struggle for shorter working hours has therefore also always been apolitical struggle, a ‘principle’ in which a political economy of labourattempted to assert itself against the political economy of capital. At first,this struggle was conducted from labour movement against strategies to




extend working hours (according to Marx, equivalent to production of anabsolute surplus value), to finally after over a century turn more and moreinto a struggle for shorter working hours and against work intensification.What is explicitly political about this struggle to the present day is primarilythat it addresses the right of disposition of time and therefore also life time.

Only the regime of linear time and work performed under conditions of abusiness operation make it possible to clearly differentiate between work andleisure time. Even in the daily lives of the subordinates, this difference betweenthe realm of necessity and the realm of freedom that Marx had in view in histime studies could be perceived. AsOskarNegt (1984) rightly emphasizes, thetime conflicts carried on by labour movements were a liberation project. Thefight for shorter working hours was a means to achieve internal as well asexternal emancipation from violence and pressure, a tool intended to provideinitial access to genuine autonomy as well as civil rights and liberties. Fromthe feminist perspective, this conflict was additionally not only about securingbetter opportunities in access to gainful employment, but also about the com-mitment to achieving a social revaluation and fairer division of labourbetween the genders concerning reproductive and caregiving work. Afterseveral stages with various setbacks, this struggle seemed to have enteredinto a new phase. The conflict over the 35-hour working week in the WestGerman print, metal and electrical industries was considered to be the crucialmoment to change course by sympathetic observers all over Europe. In this,emphasis was less on the intended reduction of work time by one hour, butrather on the symbolic content of the struggle.

For the first time in history, it became possible to change the labourmovement’s old triadic formula of eight hours’ work, eight hours’ leisure,eight hours’ sleep in favour of the amount of time spent off work. In spite ofthe leisure industry and commercialized mass culture with its ‘manipulativeeffects’ (Marcuse, 1968), it clearly seemed that the Realm of Necessity wason the retreat. Accordingly, a discussion on the crisis or occasionally eventhe end of the labour society was sparked in the social sciences. Analystssuch as Claus Offe (1984: 7, 37) argued that as formal gainful employmenthad ‘lost its subjective quality of being the organizing central element of lifeactivity, social self-concept and assessment by others as well as of moralorientations’, the conflict capital vs. labour could no longer form the centerof rulership relations in developed societies. In the context of this anti-productivistic course change, conflicts over working hours represented apolitical as well as an intellectual link between trade union struggles andthe new social movements addressing the crisis of social reproduction.Shorter working hours were seen as the way to gain access to the Realmof Freedom, or even a step on the ‘Way to Paradise’, as Andre Gorz (1985)put it in his programmatic work of the same title.

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Nowadays we know that things turned out differently. Not only becauseeven within continental Europe, the German trade unions remained rela-tively isolated with their work time policy.2 Also in Germany, a tendencytowards longer (weekly) work times, rising noticeably above the level of40 hours once again, can meanwhile be observed. No less serious is the factthat in business, a regime of discontinuous time has become dominantwhich not only for the precariously employed, but also for significantparts of the permanently employed entails insecurity, intensification of per-formance and health risks. How can this – from the perspective of labour’scollective interests regressive – development be explained?

Capitalist Landnahme and changing time regimes

Attempts at a sociological answer have led to a concept which the nestor ofGerman industrial sociology, Burkart Lutz (1984), following on RosaLuxemburg, has named ‘capitalist Landnahme’.3 This concept rejects theassumption that capitalism mainly means enforcement of regimes oflinear time, and instead systematically addresses the simultaneity of theunsimultaneous as a topic for analysis of society.

The concept of capitalist Landnahme

The analytical core of the concept of Landnahme is that capitalism, as far asit is based on a general commodification and therefore on equivalentexchange, is by no means able to reproduce itself exclusively from withinitself. In all its metamorphoses, it remains structurally dependent on anon-capitalistic other. This structural and developmental principle can beidentified as the ‘inward’ and ‘outward’ expansion of the capitalistic way ofproduction. Considering that the transition from feudalism to capitalismtook centuries and capitalistic production conditions became general onlyin the course of the industrial revolution, we have to subsume the parallelexistence of linear capitalistic as well as cyclic pre-capitalistic time condi-tions for an entire era. Though the old and new time regimes are not strictlyseparate from one another but form a great variety of syntheses in theeveryday worlds of individuals and social groups. Thus the doubly freelabourer as stylized by Marx is an abstraction. Even after the onset ofthe industrial revolution, over a long period of time, the greater part ofthe industrial proletariat remained embedded in traditional, rural condi-tions of life, production and gender relations where the tradition ofexperiencing time as cyclical remained.

This conclusion is significant, especially in view of the forms of valori-zation of labour. Marx (1867/1997: 727) was of the opinion that the




application of political pressure and even open violence in its extensive formwould remain an episode in the early history of capitalism. A proletariatwould emerge which accepted ‘by upbringing, tradition, custom recognizesthe standards of that form of production as undeniable natural laws’. Extra-economic force is only still used in exceptional situations, while in general,the workers can be kept under control by means of the ‘natural laws ofproduction’. This is not quite the case, though. Instead, the parallel exis-tence of different time regimes indicates the two-sidedness of any capitalisticevolution. One development manifests itself in the places of production ofsurplus value, in industry, fully capitalized agriculture and the commoditiesmarkets. Here, capitalism reproduces itself to a great extent on its ownfoundations; the principles of equivalent exchange and linear time apply.4

The other development breaks its path in the form of relations of exchangebetween capital accumulation on the one hand and non-capitalistic territo-ries and ways of production on the other. In the ‘outside markets’, theprinciple of equivalent exchange applies only to a limited extent at best;arbitrariness and overexploitation dominate here, and partly even openviolence. Such violence can also be used as a means of keepingsocial groups, territories or entire countries at least temporarily at apre-capitalistic or less developed stage (Harvey, 2003). In such areas ofexclusion, the regime of linear time is suspended for large social groups,it is even simply dysfunctional if applied to the life styles of those excluded.

According to this conception, Landnahmen are processes aimed at repo-sitioning and, at least, temporarily overcoming the limits of capitalist accu-mulation established by ‘outside’ markets and, in the end, by human andextra-human nature. The endeavour of individual capital to stand itsground against the competition and if possible to realize extra profits resultsin a structural pressure on capitalist economies to grow, which keepsrekindling the hunger for new territories. To Rosa Luxemburg (1913/2003: 347), the tensions resulting from this explain the ‘contradictory phe-nomenon’ that the old capitalist countries provide ever larger markets for,and become increasingly dependent upon, one another, yet, on the otherhand compete ever more ruthlessly for trade relations with non-capitalistcountries.

The implications of breakdown theory in this version of the Landnahmethesis have been criticized frequently, and rightly so (Harvey, 2003).Certainly, capitalist Landnahmen are in many respects irreversible, forexample when they absorb traditional ways of production or exhaustnatural resources. The complete capitalization of ‘outside markets’ thusappears as a process which at a distant point in time must come to anend, for without an ‘outside’, there can be no capitalism. Yet there is analternative way of perceiving the Landnahme theorem. According to this

Dorre 75



interpretation, capitalist players are in a position to counteract structuraldevelopment blockades in the course of passive revolutions. Accumulationregimes and ownership conditions, ways of regulation and productionmodels are circulated and transformed, though with the aim of self-preser-vation of capitalism. Such transformations become possible because withinconcrete space-time relations, capitalism can always refer to an ‘outside’which it creates itself to some extent: ‘‘capitalism can either make use ofsome pre-existing outside (non-capitalist social formations or some sectorwithin capitalism – such as education – that has not been proletarianized) orit can actively manufacture it’’ (Harvey, 2003: 141).

Active generation of a non-capitalistic other is a reaction to realizationproblems and it takes place as part of strategies aimed at nullifying out thetendency towards over-accumulation by ‘shifting’ capital in space and/ortime. ‘Shifting’ means that outdated fixations of capital in space-time arebroken up and replaced by others in the course of new investments. Thus,the movement of capital and capitalist enterprises are never completelywithout any kind of fixation. Capitalist development can therefore beseen as a permanent search for fixations of capital in space-time. Suchspace-time fixations not only tie invested capital to ‘locations’ which dueto their unique qualities promise monopoly profits; as long as these ties arelong-term, they also serve to temporarily defuse the over-accumulationproblem and thus to temporarily ‘‘repair’’ capitalism (Harvey, 2003: 115).Yet this dislocation in space and time means that again and again, suchfixations become the object of restructuring which then become a threat tothe fixed assets. The ‘repair mechanism’ of capitalism in structural crisis,therefore, always operates by means of different time horizons. Brutedestruction and short-term capital devaluations in one location can coincidewith long-term investment and stable commitment in another.

Active generation of an ‘outside’, therefore, also means that in principle,the chain of acts of Landnahme is endless. ‘Falling from grace’, as HannahArendt (2006: 335) calls it, by ‘‘going beyond the scope of purely economicregulations by means of political actions’’, can and must keep repeatingitself on an extended stepladder. The dynamic of capitalism is downrightdependent on the ability to produce and to destroy space in time. By meansof investing in machinery, factories, labour and infrastructure, capitalestablishes spatial ties it cannot sever without causing costs and attrition.In this, investments intended to economically develop spaces – e.g. fundingfor traffic connections and routes, access to raw materials or also invest-ments in education and training, occupational health and safety – have aparticular function. Such investments can only be redeemed over long per-iods of time, i.e. they are temporarily removed from the primary capitalcycle (immediate consumption) and redirected to the secondary (capital for




means of production, generation of funds for consumption, e.g. housing) orthe tertiary cycle (investment in research, development, social matters). Yetthere is no guarantee that such investments will actually be profitable. Thisis why often the state takes on the function of the ‘collective ideal capitalist’where such kinds of long-term investments are required. In this way, an‘outside’ is created for individual molecular capitalist operations, a spherewhich is partly inaccessible to private accumulation, but which can be usedto improve economic performance and which can be privatized at a laterpoint in time.

To the extent that temporary forms of containment of market socializa-tion become obstacles to capital realization, they provoke attemptsat easing or even eliminating previously implemented fixations of capitalin space-time. Where the elimination of such fixations leads to de-industria-lization, economic decline, mass unemployment and poverty, yet another‘outside’ is created – devastated, abandoned regions and an unusedworkforce which in a later phase of development become suitable as theobjects and potential assets of new investment strategies. Takinginto account these dialectics of capitalist Landnahmen, the parallelexistence in space-time of qualitatively different class conditions and classrelations both within and outside national societies is to be considerednormal.

In the process of capitalistic development, such simultaneity of the unsi-multaneous can be utilized for the purpose of preservation, intensificationor even institutionalization of secondary exploitation. In this case, ‘second-ary’ does not mean less painful, less brutal or less significant. Historically,secondary, e.g. patriarchal rulership may precede formation-definingexploitation. What in fact constitutes forms of secondary exploitation isthat the rationality of equivalent exchange does not apply, or only to alimited extent. The functionalization of reproductive work by women orthe establishment of a transitory status for migrants are classic cases of howsecondary exploitation works. In the first case, symbolic-habitual and polit-ical mechanisms are used to hierarchize occupations by means of gender-specific constructs. The devaluation of reproductive work and relativeexclusion of socially sheltered full-time gainful employment have an historicorigin (Aulenbacher, 2009). In the second case, the transitory status ofmigrants is based on relative disenfranchisement and dislocation perpetu-ates a specific difference between inside and outside whose intended effect isto ensure a supply of cheap labour which can be mobilized for those unat-tractive segments of the labour market where work requires little qualifica-tion, is burdensome and badly paid. We can thus speak of secondaryexploitation whenever symbolic forms of pressure and pressure appliedpolitically by the state are utilized in order to preserve differences between

Dorre 77



‘inside’ and ‘outside’ with the aim of pushing the labour force of certainsocial groups below its actual value or of excluding these groups from theactual capitalist relationship of exploitation.

Yet this also means: different time regimes apply to those affected byprimary and secondary exploitation. To trigger the Reserve Army mecha-nism means to actively generate an ‘outside’ in the form of expendablelabour that is ‘‘simply ejected from the system at a certain point’’ toensure ‘‘that they are available at a later point for purposes of accumula-tion’’. The capitalist players create their ‘own ‘‘Other’’’ (Harvey, 2005: 141)by at least temporarily excluding entire groups from the regime of lineartime. Basically, therefore, the social question, also with respect to the dom-inant time regime, always includes an ‘inside’ and an ‘outside’. ‘Inside’stands for exploitation, for the private appropriation of collectively gener-ated surplus value, while ‘outside’ means the reduction of income and livingconditions below accepted class standards, over-exploitation, the devalua-tion of reproductive and caregiving work, and in extreme cases completelylaying work capacities to waste. On the ‘inside’, linear time is functional, aseven the exploited can utilize it in their struggles for improvement of work-ing and living conditions. On the ‘outside’, this does not apply, becausemechanisms of secondary exploitation create a life reality where linear timecan be anachronistic for the groups and individuals affected. This applies inparticular to women, who work in part-time jobs or do the housework andare required to coordinate their everyday arrangements with their partner’sworking hours and expected to provide their reproductive work as a freeresource.

What is crucial is that the dominant capitalist players can keep makinguse of this simultaneity of the unsimultaneous for strategies of regressivemodernization. In creating a model of the action strategies of capitalistplayers, this option must definitely be accounted for. Surely, dominantcapitalist players (companies, top managers, owners) tend towards specificrule violations whose primary motive is to strive for extra profit. And ofcourse, there are always the ‘first-movers’ who leave behind the inertia ofdrawn-out socialization processes in social capitalism in order to overcomecorporate limitations. What is inaccurate, though, is to automatically asso-ciate non-traditionalism or modernity with such behavior, as WolfgangStreeck (2009: 241) implies:

Capitalists, in other words, are the modern, non traditionalist

economic actors par excellence: they never rest in their perennial rush to

new frontiers. This is why they are fundamentally unruly: a permanent

source of disorder from the perspective of social institutions, relentlessly

whacking away at social rules to rewrite them, and undoing them again by




creatively exploiting the inevitable gap between general rules and their local

enactment

Capitalist players also always have the opportunity to utilize the inside-outside dialectics of capitalist Landnahmen for acts of regressive moderni-zation. This is exactly what took place during the transition from organizedfordist capitalism to financial market capitalism, and this development canbe illustrated excellently using changes to the capitalist time regime as anexample.

Fordism and organized time

If so far in this paper, the term used in discussion ‘regime of linear time’, wehave in principle been using an inappropriate expression. Just as the for-mation of capitalist society as a whole, linear, calculable time is subject toqualitative changes. Since 1945, a regime of organized time has been imple-mented in the developed capitalist societies which to a certain extent cor-responded to the basal security interests of a large part of the wage-dependent workforce. The history of capitalism between 1860 and 1970can be interpreted as a large-scale attempt to combine economic efficiencyand prosperity with organizational stability. Accordingly, Richard Sennett(2006) views organized capitalism as a system integrating the ‘anarchy ofthe markets’ with the military-type organization principles of large bureau-cracies. After 1945, not only large companies and nationalized enterprisesfunctioned analogous with the bureaucratic pyramid, but also organizationsand institutions of the welfare state. By means of these bureaucracies, pre-viously possessionless working classes were integrated into a time regimewhich enabled employees to define the stages of a normative professionalcareer and to perform work for a company on a long-term basis and withsteadily increasing incomes. Although in reality, the economic cycles did notcontinue according to plan, the subjective ‘‘notion of being able to plandetermined the area of individual activities and possibilities’’ (p. 24) of alarge part of people in wage-based employment as well as their families.

As we are aware of nowadays, this regime of organized time was basedon historic preconditions which cannot be reproduced at will. Above all, thebasic political conditions – the emphasis on state interventionism manifestsince the Second World War, the US ‘New Deal’ model with mass produc-tion, mass consumption and individualistic life styles, as well as a consensusamong the elites on participation of wage earners in productivity increases –made it possible for capitalist players to transcend the ‘law of wages’.5

Neutralization of the ‘law of wages’ happened in a process during which

Dorre 79



the traditional trades sector6, whose relations of exchange with industry hadstructurally limited wages, was irreversibly absorbed. Wherever its func-tions could not be delegated to industry and the capitalist market, theywere taken on by the state and an expanding public sector. As a result,real wages rose four- to sevenfold within 20 years (1950–1970), both quan-titatively and qualitatively a unique rise in the living standards of wageearners and their families. During this period it became possible to linkwage labour with strong social rights of protection and participation. Thegeneralization of wage labour in society, i.e. displacement of labour fromthe traditional, trade-based sector and its complete mobilization for thecapitalist labour market (commodification/Landnahme) was only possiblebecause at the same time, an expanding welfare state ensured that wagelabour was uncoupled from market risks to a great extent (de-commodifica-tion/Landpreisgabe7). In this period, a ‘‘Society of the Similar’’ (Castel,2005: 46), developed, which despite the continuing existence of relationsof inequality and hierarchic structures made it possible for a large portionof wage labour to catch up with the life styles and standards of security themiddle levels of society enjoyed. A central element of this ascent was to havesocial property at one’s disposal, property intended for collective securingof basic needs which was manifest in claims to pensions and insurancebenefits in case of illness as much as in the validity of collective bargainingstandards and co-determination rights at work and in society.

A characteristic of this ‘‘Kapitalismus ohne Reservearmee’’ (‘capitalismwithout a reserve army’; Lutz, 1984: 186) and its regime of organized timewas that precarity, poverty and, accordingly, perception of time as cyclic,were marginalized. Though among women, migrants and individuals withformally low qualifications, various forms of secondary exploitation werestill a bitter reality, even if they took place to a great extent outside pro-tected wage labour and the secured internal labour markets. But the tem-porary marginalization of poverty and precarity had its price. Set in motionmainly by state intervention, the fordist Landnahme displaced characteristicproducts and services of the traditional sector from the range of everydayneeds of wage labourers and mobilized labour from the non-capitalisticsegments for industry and modern service providing. Both processes, ampli-fying each other, had the effect of ‘progressive destruction of structures,forms of production, ways of living and behavior orientations’. Accordingto Lutz, this ‘inner Landnahme’ can be seen in analogy to the ‘outerLandnahme’ of imperialism in the early 20th century (1984: 213). Theprice to be paid was progressive destruction of essential natural resources,an increasingly severe north-south conflict and growing tension within thedeveloped capitalist societies. Once the traditional sector had been absorbedto a great extent, the social preconditions of the anticipated ‘eternal




prosperity’ disappeared. Growth slowed down to a crawl and the resultinginstabilities prepared the ground for a new Landnahme cycle in which thevery ‘outside’, the de-commodification policies the fordist era had created,is invaded.

The Landnahme of financial capitalism and the regimeof discontinuous time

From a perspective of temporal analysis, the ‘outside’ of the fordist era wascreated by the very institutions that made linear time8 organizable andplannable. Not only was such plannability of time a latent power resourceof wage-dependent labour, it also represented, along the lines of OskarNegt, a reduction in the amount of time spent subjected to the direct controlof capital and management hierarchies. Thus, between 1960 and 1982, theamount of working hours generated per employed person in Germany wentdown by 417 to 1664 hours. Left-wing criticism of the social state in itsone-sided perception of fordism often ignores that this very developmentcreated the preconditions for new social needs and movements which wereprimarily located in the sector of reproduction (cf. Dorre et al., 2009;Lessenich, 2009; Rosa, 2009). It made possible the – albeit asymmetrical– integration of women into regular gainful employment. And it providesthe matrix for the kind of ‘artistic critique’ (Boltanski and Chiapello, 2003)in which bureaucratic capitalism was attacked in the name of autonomy,self-determination and individual responsibility and the dominance of male-ruled normative employment over other, reproductive forms of activity.

The disruption of ‘organized time’

Yet any hopes for some liberating escape from the regime of organized timeexpressed in such critiques basically postulates a relative balance of powerbetween capital and labour (in alliance with the new movements; see e.g.Arbeitsgruppe Alternative Wirtschaftspolitik, 1983; Offe, 1984)). But suchpremises have successively been dumped in the course of the past twodecades. A new Landnahme cycle has tipped the scales of social powertowards the side of capital, probably for longer, and for the time being,any libertarian visions are being denied their place in reality. As a reactionto the slowdown of the fordist Landnahme cycle, a counter-movementemerged in the mid-1970s which can be defined as tripartite Landnahme.Outside the centers of capitalism, the engagement was (1) implementationand expansion of capitalism mainly in Eastern Europe and the so-calledBRIC countries (Brazil, Russia, India, China). Within the capitalist centers,the penetration of previously non-capitalistic spaces and territories is

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instrumentalized to (2) break up the fixations of capital in time-space fromthe era of social-bureaucratic capitalism. While expansion outside the cen-ters is partly based on an adaptation of fordist practices and institutions,restructuring inside the capitalist centers (3) takes place by means ofconstituting and implementing a finance capitalistic social order whichhas also irreversibly changed the time regime.

The new Landnahme can be called finance-driven because its inside-outside dialecticts take place under the conditions of increasingintegration, permeation by means of information technology and relativeautonomization of different segements of the financial market. Mainly,three causal complexes are responsible for this: (1) growing vertical inequal-ity concerning wealth and income, with surplus funds concentrating amongthe wealthy levels, with a tendency towards being withdrawn fromconsumption, which is why the search is on for alternative investmentopportunities in the financial sector; (2) reduced economic growth in thetraditional centers, coinciding with growing profit rates and shrinkinginvestment rates, and (3) gradual increase of privatization of old-age secu-rity systems including the resulting growth in significance of institutionalinvestors, such as pension funds (Altvater and Mahnkopf, 1996;Huffschmid, 2002). Excess liquidity in the financial markets is the fertileground on which the transformation of financial capital (synthesis of realand money capital) to ficticious capital (based exclusively on certified claimsfrom creditors) grows abundantly. From legal tender and means to providecredit, M(oney) expressed in securities turns more and more into a mereobject of speculation invested with the objective of realizing M – MoreMoney. This, of course, takes place circumventing the sequence of complexwork processes which together with extra-human nature present the onlysource of new value. The fetishized notion that money capital can multiplyfrom itself in the form of securities and derivatives completely separate fromthe so-called real economy and the use values produced there is the sourceof all financial crises.

This can be considered a Landnahme because the rationality of financialcapitalism which originated from structural overcapacities in the leading,export-oriented sectors, has an effect on the economy and society by meansof a multitude of transfer mechanisms. Such mechanisms are, e.g. the marketfor corporate control, mergers, takeovers, shareholder-value-drivenmanagement, profit or return targets as leverage to press for internal finan-cialization, or also permanent competition between locations. Landnahmeimplies that financial market capitalism is not a completed model. Rather,through a large number of molecular operations and alterations, a principleof rationality becomes dominant which subjects economic operations to thecalculating purpose of financial capitalism (prioritizing maximum returns




and profits, intensified competition in power-play-driven markets and insidecompanies). The main reason why this is to be called a Landnahme is thata rationality reduced to principles of competition and profit maximizationtends to be transferred to the entire society. In the contest for governmentfunding, microregions compete against each other as collective entrepre-neurs in order to create favourable conditions to soften the blow of struc-tural changes to the economy. By means of crediting and accountingprocedures, the logic of financial capitalism influences the sector of smalland medium-sized business. At company level, employees are expected tobecome managers of their own health to reduce corporate costs. Authoritiesin charge of job placement treat the long-term unemployed as clients whoare expected to develop an entrepreneurial attitude towards their workcapacity under the pressure of strict rules of job acceptability. And evenhigher education has discovered the role model of the entrepreneurialuniversity for orientation, managed in compliance with target agreementsand evaluated according to its output efficiency (Dorre and Neis, 2010).

A (fictitious) rationality of competition of the kind dominating the finan-cial markets can of course not be enforced in its entirety in other areas ofsociety. There, it is filtered by different production worlds, institutionalsystems, wilful practices of social actors and many other implementationproblems. Still, the competition-based transfer mechanisms impose aspecific social order on society, a basic rule which takes effect by meansof successful failure. Although it can never be implemented completely, dueto the generalization of this basic rule the borders between the ‘inside’ and‘outside’ of financial capitalistic accumulation are shifted. The relativestability of the formation created by this is also due to the simultaneityof the unsimultaneous mentioned earlier, to an occupation of institutions,forms of production, work systems, schemes of action and thinking whichpartly have their origin in earlier stages in history, in social capitalism or, asin countries of the former Eastern Bloc, also in state bureaucratic socialism.These social forms of older society formations do not disappear over night.On the contrary, they must be understood as ‘structures of longue duree’, inanalogy to Fernand Braudel (1984), although they are combined with theregime of competition of financial capitalism, transformed and reshaped, sothat despite their continued existence, they actually enter into a differentstate, which also applies in exactly the same way to the time regime.

The mode of operation employed in the Landnahme of financial capital-ism keeps generating requirements (target returns and profits) businessesand companies can only meet by constantly spewing new, previouslyuntapped assets into the capital cycle. This way, an extremely fragile,crisis-prone economy has emerged where short-term profits are rewardedand the regime of organized time is abandoned in favour of the principles of

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flexible capital accumulation. At the same time, the social conditions oflabour valorization change. Microelectronics, company networks and inter-nationalized value-creation chains generate a space of opportunities inwhich a process of restructuring the collective labourer (‘Gesamtarbeiter’)is taking place. Comparable in this respect with primitive accumulation, theintegration into post-fordist, flexible production principles is based on arecombination of freedom experiences with economic as well as state andpolitical coercion mechanisms.

At the core of these changes, discussed as delimitation, subjectivationand precarization of work, lies the control over time resources.Implementation of flexible production forms means introduction of aregime of discontinuous time. In most countries of continental Europe,this transition is happening under conditions of a revived Reserve Armymechanism and flagging (labour) movements. In Germany, there is also aninternally strongly hierarchicized precarious sector present now whoselowest level is occupied by those ‘surplus people’ without any chance what-soever of integration into regular gainful employment. Between thesegments of still comparatively well-protected occupations and the almostcompletely uncoupled groups, we find a heterogeneous ‘precariat’ whosesize is defined only very imprecisely by the figure of approximately 23 percent of low-wage earners. What these groups, in their oscillation betweenprecarious, mostly badly paid employment, funding measures, job-creationmeasures and unemployment, have in common is that they no longer valuethe advantages of organized time. These individuals have stopped consid-ering a regular wage-based job the cornerstone of planning for a stable,future-oriented life. On the whole, this precarious sector with its lack ofupward mobility and the great internal differences in wages provides an‘outside’ for those segments where protection in the form of collective reg-ulations and institutionalized wage labour power is still in place to someextent. In the precarious sector, though, neither the principle of equivalentexchange nor the rules of reciprocity of social recognition apply; what takesplace here is rather more of an exchange of ‘repression for anxiety’ (Casteland Dorre, 2009). In contrast to conditions in social capitalism, this ‘other’is not located outside the world of those in formally still protected employ-ment. The fact that the ‘zone of vulnerability’ is expanding in society meansthat corresponding experiences in the employment system are made notonly by groups affected to an above-average degree, such as women,migrants and those with formally low qualifications, but increasingly andlastingly also by men and those with high qualifications or academic degrees(Bosch and Weinkopf, 2007).

Mere confrontation with such an ‘outside’ ensures that also ‘Inside’, inthe labour market segments still under formal protection, time conditions




are altered. By introducing team and project work, flexible working hoursand replacing rigid clocking systems with trust-based working hours, theperformance parameters especially of qualified white-collar jobs have chan-ged. The transition from direct performance control to outcome controloften turns out to have the effect of longer working hours. But not onlythe daily working hours are geting longer, even formally work-free time isoccupied by job-related activities (Kampf, 2008). The ideal type corre-sponding to the experience of discontinuous time is the option-maximizingself-manager. Driven in the end by the search for basal security, such self-managers are constantly busy checking out options and have forgotten howto say ‘No’. There are no such things as time margins or kick-back time tothem. They are constantly on the lookout for options and opportunities foraction, as any missed option might turn out to result in a loss of individualstatus. The state of feeling in delay or default is permanent for these types.As much as they struggle, the multitude of real or fictitious options cannever be exhausted, which is why they are invariably lagging behind therequirements of the new time regime, which are perceived as objective. Inthe constant effort to close the gap, available time becomes scarce. This iswhy the liberties the regime of flexible time generates can quickly become aburden rather than a benefit. In the hunt for options, plans to have childrenare shelved. Their demanding work becomes a constant burden, and inextreme cases culminates in work addiction and the inability to relax.Constant further training seems to be a must, and even consumptionbecomes an exhausting matter, as e.g. the mere act of studying the hand-book-size instruction manual for the latest mobile phone is serious work onthe part of the customer. Ever more frequently, consumption itself serves todo nothing more than satisfy false needs. Leisure, rest, availability of freetime are the greatest desires of option maximizers, though on their eternalsearch for elementary security, these self-managers are prepared at any timeto mobilize the last shred of energy to find a ‘productive’ answer to theinconstancy of their employment.

Though in reality, one should add, the ideal type of the option maximizercan only be found in specific social mouldings. It tends to be present informs close to the ideal mainly in those labour market segments whereintegration by means of stable employment is successively being replacedby integration through creative work. In these areas, closely approximatingthe ideal of self-employment, wage labour protected by the social state hasbeen stripped of its status as an authoritative role model of integration intothe working world. In the media, the ‘creative industries’, but also amonggroups in wage-dependent employment to whom project work and internalentrepreneurship have become challenges to be faced permanently, stan-dardized employment conditions are also subjectively losing their

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attractiveness. In these segments, the unsecured position can be decipheredas something positive, an incentive to a certain degree. What during thefordist era was imposed from outside by way of strictly differentiated hier-archies, structured careers and clearly defined areas of competence to pro-vide a rhythm to people’s everyday lives is now at least partly decided byindividuals or small groups themselves. A fundamental problem of many increative work is the need to perform unpaid, yet essential relational work(Bologna, 2006). Relational work is the term used for maintenance ofnetworks and customer contacts, advertising activities and similar chores.That on the part of the customers, such kind of work is expected and madeuse of without having to pay represents a particular type of compulsoryvoluntary option maximization, or to put it another way: a Landnahmeaiming at the very core of human individuality, the mind and individualtime management.

Thus, ‘precarians’ and option maximizers represent a certain kind ofdouble envelopment in the working environment crushing the old regimeof organized time and replacing it by a regime of discontinuous time.9

At the center of impact of this double envelopment are groups, primarilyskilled workers and mid-level employees, who due to the new, global formsof labour division are threatened with collective social descent. Amongthese groups, the firm belief that their own situation as well as that of thecoming generations will keep improving slowly, that prosperity and securitywill improve continuously, is crumbling in its foundations. The experiencethat organizing superindividual interests and taking joint action can changeconditions and lead towards a collective rise in status has been graduallylost. Upward mobility seems to be possible only individually by assertingoneself against one’s competitors. This results in social orientationsprovoking classification struggles within labour and at the same time trig-gering demarcation against supposedly unproductive, ‘parasitic’ elements ofsociety. The large group of industrial workers is at the center of thisdevelopment.10

As a consequence of structural changes and the Landnahme of financialcapitalism, in the perception of society, the status of worker has lost inattractiveness. What is crucial, though, are the dimensions of habitus andsocial psychology in this collective descent. Workers in permanent employ-ment as well as employees in a similar social position tend towards assum-ing a protective posture in defending what is left of their social property andthe islands of organized time remaining in the flood. The reproductionstrategies of those in permanent full-time employment thus have a conserv-ing basic quality. Quite understandably, these groups have a tendencytowards primarily defending their own secure employment situation asthe basis of their longer-term life planning. Though such a basic attitude,




often also dominating the motivation for actions of interest representationin the working environment, makes consolidation of mechanisms of sec-ondary exploitation much easier. The groups still in permanent employmentand their works councils tend towards accepting corporate strategies plac-ing the employment risk unilaterally on the plate of the heterogeneousgroup of the flexibly and precariously employed. Once the functions ofprecarious employment began to change, so did the social effects of workingenvironment corporatism, which has its origin in the era of fordist capital-ism. The – relatively – secure employment situation of one segment ofgroups is maintained at the cost of growing insecurity in other groups.To do nothing but to defend the benefits of internal job markets withtheir regimes of organized time thus becomes a struggle to cushion theeffect of the reactivated Reserve Army mechanism by redirecting it to thedisadvantage of groups who structurally have only weak power resources attheir disposal.

Conclusion

Looking at the entire picture, what we see appears to be a paradox. Indeed,the constraints of traditional, patriarchal rulership with its detailed organi-zation of space and time relations seem to have burst open irreversibly. Yetthe result is neither autonomy nor greater freedom, but a mode of rulershipexacting more complete control over the time sovereignty of the ruled clas-ses than was ever possible by means of the regime of organized time. Thisconclusion leads to the central element of what the changes are about. Seenfrom a perspective of temporal analysis, what the new Landnahme is aimedat is to concentrate control of the disposal of time resources on the side ofcapital, among the ruling groups of owners, top managers and their staffs.Oskar Negt (1984) anticipated this development in his prognosis of entre-preneurs’ intentions of hedging off their businesses from the costs of shorterworking hours and passing them on to society to take care of. This isexactly what has happened. In reaction to a reduction in weekly workinghours implemented successfully only in certain, individual sectors and onlyin a few countries, the side of capital responded with a flexiblization offen-sive during which it has gained control not only of the working hours, butalso of the life times of large parts of their respective populations. Theimplementation of flexible ways of production is accompanied by afar-reaching invasion of the time sovereignty of majorities in society. Thismatter-of-fact expropriation of the control of disposal of work time and lifetime is taking place in a socially differentiated manner. By no means can itbe reduced to the mere reestablishment of privileges of ruling class factionsin the way David Harvey (2007) sees it. Beyond this, it also divides the

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groups of subordinates. At a completely different level of social develop-ment, a problem complex is emerging once more which was alreadyobserved by Marx in his analysis of primitive accumulation or – in aneven more acute form – by Pierre Bourdieu in his early studies onAlgeria. What is separating integrated class factions from the subproletar-ian ones is a differentiated mode of subsumption under regimes of discon-tinuous time. Today, although in different circumstances, Pierre Bourdieu’s(2000: 20) findings from observing declassed groups in the transition societyof Algeria apply once again:

Below a certain threshold, defined or identified as a specific economic and

cultural standard, rational dispositions cannot develop. Incoherence is the

organizing principle of the subproletarian existence located here, an existence

which is disorganized right down to its basic relationship towards space

and time . . .

Not only on the part of the new subproletariat, such disorganization ofentire life concepts limits the ability to form lasting interest organizationand collective action, as from the point of view of integrated groups, ‘‘beingan object of rational exploitation’’ (Bourdieu, 2000: 103) is practicallyconsidered something of a privilege. But no matter whether in the case ofa Polish woman working as a restroom attendant at a German motorwayservice station for EUR 1.80 per hour and two meals for which she isrequired to remain at her workplace for at least 12 hours per day to getpaid for four clocked hours, or of a software developer in project workwhose good salary and interesting job are making him lose any awareness ofwhat (family) time away from work is like – the cause of such phenomenacan be traced back to the dramatic defeat of the workers’ movements in the‘struggle for every atom of time’ which in most of the developed capitalisticsocieties came along with the Landnahme of financial capitalism and is stillcontinuing today.

A basic problem of recent acceleration theories is that they lack asensorium allowing for adequate documentation of the dimension ofpower and rulership in changing temporal structures. Although attempts,e.g. by Hartmut Rosa (2005), have actually been made to analyze the‘engine of economy’ of social acceleration, and there have been a numberof efforts to identify social acceleration in work-related processes, therulership character of capitalist time regimes so far remains mysterious.It is certainly accurate that those who have been ‘forcibly de-accelerated’,the precarized and excluded among the population, just as well as theprivileged caught in their hamster wheel race, are affected by the ‘logic ofthe capitalist system’ in different ways. And indeed, even the new types of




financial aristocracy, the fund managers, analysts and bankers are merely‘driven’, acting to a certain degree as ‘character masks’ of the capitalistacceleration machinery (Rosa, 2009: 278). Yet they do act as rulers whoseactivities inevitably contribute towards a situation where even the ‘rulers inruled positions’ (‘Herrschenden in beherrschter Stellung’, such as e.g.scientists) gradually lose control of their own life time. After all, theLandnahme of financial capitalism also extends to the accumulation andbuying out of social power. It provides managers capable of strategic think-ing with greater decision-making autonomy and at the same time broadensthe social basis of the ruling class faction, as also the middle classes andindividuals in wage-dependent employment engage in micro-investmentactivities in order to profit from the accumulation of financial capitalism.The aggregate functional and service divisions of the financial sector areoperated by high-income groups whose interests are organically linked tothis project of financial capitalism. By acting rationally in their respectivesocial fields in performing as well as possible in their jobs, these groups asthe ruling factions contribute towards keeping the engine of flexible accu-mulation running. It is in their professional interest that new, unused assetsare constantly fed into the capital cycle, social property is expropriated, thatprimary and secondary exploitation are being intensified and extended.Nothing in the least spectacular is expected of them, nothing but to dotheir jobs controlling the life time of the ruled classes, and thus at thesame time encroaching on their ‘‘orientational and liberational time’’(Negt, 1984: 36).

As already identified by Karl Marx, there is an element of self-alienationin such activities. Yet all along since the days of Marx, the fact that suchself-alienation will not stop the rulers from asserting their rulership ifpushed still remains a fact – of even greater significance now: movingalong the action corridors at their disposal, the ruling class factions havebecome master players at the ‘game’ of inside-outside dialectics. There maywell be individual managers, a few shareholders and stock exchangegamblers who occasionally have a spell of doubt about the meaningfulnessof their activities. It may also be true that relevant parts of the economicelites assume ethical responsibilities and encourage ecological as well associal sustainability. Shielded by that ‘‘collective capitalist created fromfaceless streams of funds’’, the majority of the ‘flesh-and-blood capitalists’have decided to go ahead in a different direction (Castells, 2001: 532). Whatapplies to Germany in particular is that – with neither a master plan nor anyhomogeneous strategic subject – these capitalists have taken the path ofregressive modernization. The ‘two societies’ (Negt: ‘zwei Gesellschaften’),one of which is structured by violence, brutalization, fraud, speculation,irrationality, sexism and fear, already exist in reality. The mere existence

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of such an ‘other’ is sufficient to encourage regressive tendencies even insupposedly protected territories under the regime of discontinuous time.

Unchecked, this development is hardly likely to lead to any leveling-out and democratization of gender hierarchies all by itself. Even thoughthe demographic change is a factor in fuelling the interest of capitalistplayers even more to mobilize the female workforce, the appetite forextra profits through secondary exploitation is unlikely to stop growing,either. The social consequences can already be identified in thedifferentiation – including class-specific differences – in care work.A ‘24/7 live-in Polish maid’ with academic qualifications of her ownmay well get on with her also academically qualified ‘lady boss’ on apersonal level. Yet as an informally employed domestic servant incharge of exclusively reproductive jobs, she remains subject to a rulershiprelationship which factually keeps her in a state of rightlessness(Lutz, 2007).

If all this is to change, the ‘struggle for every atom of time’ will probablyonce more have to be fought from the grass-roots level, by the ruled classes,though in a new way. Sceptics will object that such a campaign for worktime and life time will only lead us into a further round along the spiral ofdestructive growth and acceleration. But this is not even a half-truth.As numerous studies meanwhile confirm (Jackson, 2009; Sakar, 2010),any ecological course change requires social sustainability. Appropriatechanges in orientation are much easier to implement in relatively egalitariansocieties than in social systems characterized by harsh divisions. But equal-ity must no longer be expressed primarily in material wealth and conven-tional growth. In particular in the wealthy western societies, one of themajor assets is time, so control of one’s life time arranged in a maximallyegalitarian way is crucial. Especially during the economic crisis, Germanexperiences with short-time work have made the connection betweenshorter working hours and safer jobs perceivable to hundreds of thousandsof people in employment. This is a point of approach for a new timesovereignty policy. One maxim could be ‘short-hour full-time employmentfor all!’ an idea to surely add some dynamics to the conflict over time. Sucha demand might even be considered outright subversive if it included thecreation of incentives to utilize the time off the job on individual as well ascollective work towards a democratic society, and thus as time for emanci-pation and orientation. And in terms of gender policy, this would be notonly a precondition for a more equal distribution of gainful employment,but also a potential catalyst for public organization of qualified, well-paidcare and nursing work of the kind the societies in Scandinavian countrieshave known for a good number of years. A critical theory of accelerationcould provide an intellectual system of coordinates for the conflicts over




time yet to come. But to do so adequately, the dimension of power in suchstruggles will need to be reflected analytically in it, otherwise, despite its richimagery and analytical brilliance, it will remain teethless and therefore with-out an effective bite.

Translated by Melanie Booth and Mat Dressler/COMPACT.

Notes

1. Translator’s note: Landnahme is a German term, its original meaning is ‘land

appropriation’ or ‘land acquisition’, mostly used in the context of settlement inor conquering of new territory. Used, of course, figuratively here to describe the‘gaining of ground’ or expansion of capitalistic social and economic structures

at the cost of non-capitalistic ones.2. France alone followed on the path towards a reduction of weekly working

hours.

3. Rosa Luxemburg is unlikely to have used the term herself; she employs ’colo-nization’ in this context.

4. This does not mean that adaptation to linear time happens spontaneously; itinitially certainly requires extra-economic pressure and disciplining by means of

military service, schools, correction facilities, etc.5. According to Lutz (1984: 210), the ‘law of wages’ (‘Lohngesetz’) defines that

wages in the modern sector of the national economy can rise neither signifi-

cantly nor permanently above the supply level present among the poorer partsof the traditional sector, which is primarily defined by barter economy.

6. According to Lutz, for a long time, the relations of exchange between modern

industry and a sector with agrarian and small-scale business structures, pre-modern life styles and value orientations had ensured that labour costs didnot rise above certain limits. This was first of all the case because the traditional

sector provided a workforce potential industry could access to satisfy its needsand then to return ‘surplus’ labour to this ‘outside’ sector in times of crisis. Andsecond, because the workers procured most of their essential goods from thetraditional sector which was characterized by small trade and agrarian produc-

tion and provided more or less inexpensive products.7. Translator’s note: Landpreisgabe (German) has the opposite meaning of

Landnahme, i.e. cession of lands or territories.

8. The assumption here is that in the course of capitalistic development, the prin-ciple of linear time becomes concrete in qualitatively discernible time regimes.The regime of organized time is such a concretization which historically formed

along with the transition to fordist capitalism.9. The regime of discontinuous time represents a qualitatively new concretization

of linear time. It has its origin in flexible forms of work, production and livingincreasingly replacing the career principle of organized time.

10. Formally, as a segment of over 28 per cent of the workforce, workers still are alarge – although shrinking – social group. Though ethnic stratification, among

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other indicators, shows that the internal structure of this large group, and

therefore most likely also the prevailing social self-definitions and interestorientations have changed significantly. At 46.6 per cent, the percentage ofmigrants who are workers is above average; in comparison, only 24.9 per cent

of the non-migrant population are employed as workers.

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capitalism, landnahme and social time regimes - an outline

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