The Marxist Causes Of Standardisation

Prior to the 1800s time was not standardised, but now standard time is a fundamental part of society. The reality of standardisation is obvious, but for many the process and motivation for standardisation is in question. While other perspectives like modernisation should be considered, the weight of evidence points towards a Marxist one - that is that the standardisation of time was a tool of control and need of capitalism. Such standardisation was not only “official”, but also internal in the sense that the a person accepted and acted in regularity to such standard time.

The Marxist view is that capitalism is the dominant cause of standardisation as it transformed time into a commodity, and standardisation was greatly needed.

The standardisation

This internalisation was enforced by capitalist society, and the standard time became the tool of punishment. As mentioned previously, the capitalist economy that desires greater efficiency lead to the requirement of standardised time, also required workers to follow that time to boost efficiency. Factories would enforce time by creating schedules for eating hours, as well as fines for being away from productive work, as observed in rule books from Crowley Iron work in England during 1700s (Thompson, 1967). This was to shape the perception that time was money, for workers an unproductive hour was lost wage. This standardised time was in contrast to the irregular working rhythm exemplified by “Saint Monday”, when workers took Monday off, or worked unproductively with a “holiday mood”, as complained by potter Francis Place (Thompson, 1967). Yet eventually, Thompson (1967) notes that standardisation shifted the paradigm of workers after decades, from first fighting the standard time schedule to petitioning for a 10-hour shift, they learned from enforcement that time is money and a commodity. The standardisation of time was a deliberate and effective move to help control workers, that also eventually internalised the standard time. A sort of feedback loop was formed where the

This when further explored has some flaws. Inkeles’s (1975) “modernisation” reflects a underlying trend of rationalisation, one where rational goals and means replace traditional ones, and is helpfully transmitted by exemplification. These rational means would include precision and schedules as it was most efficient. Under Inkeles’s idea (1975), a worker observing the rational time standard of factories eventually become “exemplified” by naturally internalise a rational mean of standard time. Landes (2000) provides evidence of rationalisation by the invention of a modern clock, and argues it could only happen if the desire for scheduling existed in the first place based. While the rationalisation itself has no issues, the effectivity of “exemplification” and transmission of internal standardisation is doubtful. It assumes that the absorption of internalisation in the factory was a natural process, not one enforced. Modernisation assumes that workers are convinced by the rational processes and naturally adopt it. While it can be true in certain cases, it is certainly not universally true as evidenced by traditions of “Saint Monday” that still prevailed decades after official standardisation of time. Hanson