Playing For Time - importance of recreation in society

Ecologist, The, May, 2001 by Jay Griffiths

The whole machinery of the Industrial Revolution was a massive attack on the spirit of play, altering the experience of time more dramatically than any other, Work, work, work, was the whip word, and though the middle classes pretended that productive time-use was about morality, it was actually about class politics and class power. For the middle classes spouted that vicious little lie 'Time is Money', without ever answering the question: whose money was being made out of whose time? As landowners made their wealth by stealing the common people's land in the enclosures, so new capitalist timeowners made their wealth by stealing the common people's hours in the factory-enclosures of time. Time was changed forever. The economics of capitalism combined with the Protestant work ethic, class politics, Puritan 'morality', new urbanisation, Christianity's hell-now, heaven-later accountancy of time, and the rise of synchronised mechanical time in factories.

Newton (a misanthropic alchemist from Grantham), offered the intellectual justification for mechanical time which so despised human time, saying that Time was absolute and uniform; factory time in overalls. Time was Granthamised. The Victorians loved him, inaugurating, at Saint Peter's Hill, Grantham, in 1858, a statue of him; two tons of Granthamite misery for two centuries of hard time. To maintain the time of factory machines, many workers' holidays were outlawed by the Victorian middle classes.

It was of course under Margaret Thatcher (a misanthropic chemist from Grantham), very much heir to Newton's factory time, and a banger-on about middle-class Victorian values, that May Day, the traditional workers' holiday, was threatened with abolition.

What was lost? Time varied, curly, elastic and coloured. Time seasonal, mischievous, haphazard, red-lettered and unpredictable was gone. Time was colonised. Mapped. Levelled. Privatised. Enclosed. Counted in and accounted out. Factored in and factoried out. Working people were cut off from nature's time, for in factory time each hour was the same as any other. Days of equal width, hours of equal length replaced the variable hours and stretchy seasons of times gone by. Also, crucially, people ceased to own their 'own' time; the workforce had to demarcate time which 'belonged' to an employer.

There were protests. With eloquent violence, workers in Britain smashed the clocks above the factory gates, the loathed symbol of a new world order which had stolen their time, that quintessence of true individual freedom. Trade Unions took on first the abuse of time. Karl Marx highlighted time's role in capitalism, warning of the 'overconsumption' of workers' time. And Charles Dickens wrote his blistering portrait of such a world, with its Gradgrinds and Bounderbys, in Hard Times in 1854.

Across the world, the colonisation of time happened as surely and as devastatingly as the colonisation of land. Traditional indigenous carnival-times were banned from Burma to Brazil; Christian calendars were imposed and the spirit of play was crushed. Columbus, on first meeting the Tainos people, in the place that we now call San Salvador, was convinced the people should be 'made to work, sow and do all that is necessary and to adopt our ways...' Colonists enslaved people in the 'work camps' of the rubber barons -- concentration camps by any other name -- making their money out of the very life times of indigenous peoples. Few ever survived. Potosi, the 'mountain of silver' in Bolivia, was 'discovered' by the Spanish in 1545. In total, 8 million people laboured and died for the leisure and wealth of white people and to literally finance the capitalism under which they would suffer for the next 500 years.