Time and capital: a brief ontology of modern social domination

Abstract

For millennia, humanity has been wondering about the nature of time. From the most remote civilizations until nowadays, time has been the object of curious fascination and contemplation. However, its social existence, despite its intangibility, is increasingly present in our days. Meet deadlines, time tasks, delimit durations; daily life progressively demands an acceleration of the activities we perform, combined with the rationalization and fragmentation of becoming itself. Several contemporary authors like Elias have devoted themselves to investigating their social nature. However, they conceived it, in the abstract sense, as a symbolic convention for measuring and ordering events, disregarding the processes that lead it to assume its character of domination within bourgeois society. Thus, this article seeks an ontological rescue of time in view of the role it plays in the capitalist mode of production, whose current neoliberal context subjugates us to the uninterrupted labor rhythms of accumulation.