Focus nd.DieWoche: Time – off to the ghost train

Having no or too little time gets on your nerves. It’s stressful and makes you nervous. That’s why French revolutionaries shot at clocks, the symbol of emerging capitalism. That’s why the young Viennese cultural theorist Simon Nagy calls for “abolishing time” in his new book, because he detests “the constant production of broken, cluttered time.”

This is a maximum demand, but the social forces for it are minimal, and the promise of a better society is more absent than ever. And free time seems to be becoming even less, jobs are becoming even more flexible and the mixing of work and non-work is becoming even more rapid. Problem, problem! Nagy uses a trick – he invokes the old progressive ideas and movements as ghosts. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels already thought so: “A ghost is haunting Europe – the specter of communism,” is the first sentence in their “Manifesto of the Communist Party” from 1848.

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The spooky thing about it is that communism has remained surreal to this day; it does not exist and never existed. “He’s good for you, ask about him,” Bertolt Brecht had written, but if you try it today, it looks bad: strange communists who always tell you that the time isn’t ripe yet while the world is falling apart . It’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism is a popular quip among frustrated leftists.

The awakenings of 1917 and 1968 are generally only dimly understood, if at all. They are seen as illusionary at best, but mostly as nonsensical and violent. Against the “specter of communism,” “all the powers of old Europe” no longer have to join forces “in a holy hunt,” as Marx and Engels said. They have done this very thoroughly in the past. There is currently nothing going on. Even if it is repeatedly invoked in an absurd and laughable way by the right-wingers, from Berlusconi back then to Trump today, by accusing their political opponents of “communism.” Or when the AfD acts as if the Greens were the “new communists” who would ruin everything.

No, those on the right no longer fear the ghost and those on the left don’t want to believe in ghosts. That is exactly the mistake, because it means the self-abandonment of left-wing politics, which wants to break with the terror of the economy and its powerlessness in the face of practical constraints: climate catastrophe, increasing authoritarianism and multiple “world order wars” (Robert Kurz). Dear leftists, if you can’t think of anything else to say, then say hello to barbarism. Emancipation? End, over, bye-bye.

But if you take time for the ghosts, you can also turn around the fearful fantasies and distress so that you don’t give up discussing the big questions, but rather approach them anew. “Abolishing time” as a consistent political demand is, so to speak, left-wing crazy in a very good way, stimulating and fresh. Given the depressive-defensive left-wing lack of theory and imagination, Nagy’s essay is one of the most important political books of the year. And what’s more, it’s written in clear, beautiful language so that you understand it straight away.

“Abolishing time” is a radical attack on a central category of capitalism: the control of the time that is used to turn things into goods. They are manufactured and traded, but “no one buys anything and sees this purchase as a direct exchange of their own labor worked in the past for the newly acquired product.” So time is present and absent in the goods at the same time – there is something ghostly about it. Even scarier is the fact that people wouldn’t have to work as much to make these products because production is getting faster. But they don’t get any of that because capitalism hogs their time because it wants added value and nothing else. And he destroys all other ideas or exploits them, just as neoliberalism economized the forms of self-empowerment in 1968. At the end of the relaxed hippie movement are the strict tech companies of Silicon Valley. That’s why Nagy suggests calling capitalism “permanent counterrevolution.”

He follows the Canadian historian Moishe Postone in that he is not concerned with a different distribution of surplus value or wealth, but with production itself, with the “production of a lack that constructs the present as always unfinished and therefore not to be abandoned.” as Nagy writes. For him, this production is an expression of “an irrational and people-hating economy.” Through technical progress, capitalism creates the possibility of its abolition, which it must constantly prevent. This is a fight against “Marx’s ghosts,” as the post-structuralist Jacques Derrida called perhaps his last important book in 1993, when he refused to send the idea of ​​a better society or communism into the pit after the fall of the Soviet Union.

To investigate this haunting, Derrida playfully proposed the term hauntology, formed from the English word to haunt and ontology (the study of being). This is a concept that is as handy as it is effective for keeping utopian moments, approaches and goals of the left available, even if they were never able to prevail: the specter of communism continues to haunt, in the area of ​​​​tension between “no longer” and “not yet”, as the British pop theorist Mark Fisher put it.

But Marxism also has to do with ghosts by declaring the reproductive and care work that was and is traditionally carried out by women in families as “invisible” work or non-work, a neglected category, which feminists as Silvia Federici has long been criticized. Because labor power is reproduced under isolated, privatized conditions, emphasizes Nagy, who sees the wage-for-housework movement of the 1970s as revolutionary because it was about “the abolition of that time that is constantly framed as love “While it constantly produces surplus value, just like every hour measured by a time clock.”

In order to understand this, “you need a concept of work that you can’t get to by just quoting guys like Marx and Postone, as cool as they may be,” says Nagy, for whom the abolition of time comes from abolition work and family. Put it very loosely. He calls it “interdependent desires.” There’s really only one problem with ghosts: you have to be able to see them. Nagy shows how it’s done, luckily.

Simon Nagy: Abolish time. A hauntological essay against work, family and the rule of time. With an afterword by Clemens J. Setz, Unrast, 188 pp., br., 14 €.