How much of this one precious life [is] owed to capital?
My sticky notes from Saving Time by Jenny Odell:
The question:
How much of this one precious life [is] owed to capital?
On time being money:
I think the reason most people see time as money is not because they want to but because they have to. The modern view of time can't be extricated from the wage relationship.
A 19th-century British factory worker, quoted in Capital:
Moments are the elements of profit.
On what's really going on here:
What first appears to be a wish for more time may turn out to be just one part of a simple, yet vast, desire for autonomy, meaning and purpose.
A 49-year-old social worker quoted in a 1934 leisure study on what he enjoyed about his hiking trip:
- I was on vacation and I was carefree; 2. I had a congenial companion whose silences I enjoyed as well as her conversation; 3. There was the great natural beauty of clouds, trees, sunshine, dazzling air, etc; 4. And, most important of all, because our recreation had not been planned or directed by anybody. We went where and when we felt like it and had no predetermined location.
On the real aims of the labour movement, as seen by movement leader Ira Steward:
Getting an eight-hour day was not an end in itself but rather "an indispensable first step." It would give workers the time to figure out more ways to get free.
On the common uses of of "leisure":
In its least useful form, the concept of leisure time reflects an undignified process: working to buy the temporary experience of freedom and then faithfully breathing air in the little gasps that are allowed [by] work. Rest and recreation applied like maintenance, the leisure machine to the feeding machine.
At its most useful, however, leisure time is an interim means of questioning the bounds of work that surrounds it.
Bell Hooks writes:
Reduced to the machinery of bodily physical labour, black people learned to appear before white as though they were zombies, cultivating the attitude of casting the gaze downwards so as not to appear uppity. To look directly was an assertion of subjectivity, equality. Safety resided in the pretense of invisibility.
Black Panther Albert Woodfox said:
I have hope for humankind. It is my hope that a new human being will evolve so that needless pain and suffering, poverty, exploitation, racism, and injustice will be things of the past.