The Dynamics of Capitalistic Time Contradictions

Part X

Time Contradictions of Capitalism*

By Andri W. Stahel

1. Introduction

The logic of capital is essentially temporal; therefore, to understand the inherent contradictions of capitalism, we have to understand its temporal dimension.

As Marx noted, capitalism has to be seen as a process in which “the circulation of money as capital…is an end in itself, since the expansion of value only exists in this continuously renewed movement.” [1] The circulation of capital is essentially temporal in that it is an ongoing process, marked by a continuous and progressive temporality, the time of expanding capital. We are aware that the spatial and temporal aspects are intimately interwoven, constituting a dialectical whole where one dimension only exists in relation to, and by means of, the other. However, for purpose of analysis, we will separate them in order to argue that while capital has an inherent tendency to expand in spatial terms (geographically, increasingly extending throughout the globe, as well as socially and ecologically, encom-passing more and more social, cultural, political and biospherical domains under its rules), this expansion is subordinated to the temporal logic of its ends: the accumulation of capital itself. As Altvatar put it, “At first space is conquered extensively; subsequently, it is capitalized intensively.” [2]

To sum-up, the essential means of expansion of capitalism as a spatio-temporal process lies in its spatial dimension, while the essence of its ends and logic (the expansion and accumulation of capital itself) is given by its temporal dimension.

What Martin O’Connor has referred to as the process of the capitalization of nature [3] represents a subordination of biospherical temporality to the temporal logic of capital, whenever capital expands spatially to new natural domains. The fundamental contradictions that arise in this process are the contradictions between these different temporalities, the issue that will constitute the core of the present analysis. Further, the aim of this article is to analyze these contra-dictions, which have been termed by James O’Connor the second contradiction of capitalism, [4] by trying to understand and explain its underlying temporal logic.

In the first part, I will briefly discuss the dependency of the capitalist system on an instrumental, purely quantitative external and abstract time concept (the time of mechanical clocks) at the expense of the qualitative, internal and process-related time of systems. In doing so, I will discuss what Polanyi termed the “utopian character of the self-regulating markets” from the perspective of the different temporalities involved, particularly the more general and internal time of self-organizing systems (which I will call “systemic time”) and the mechanical time of the clock (refered to simply as “mechanical time” or in some passages as “chronological time”), which became the center piece of the hegemony of the capitalist system and of the organization of the industrial market economy.

Our definition of systemic time is based on the studies of the ther-modynamics worked out by Prigogine and his followers. As he stated:

Today’s physics no longer negates time. It recognizes the irreversible time of evolution; the rhythmical time of structures whose drive is nourished by the world which passes through them; the bifurcating time of evolution due to instability and amplification of fluctuations and even microscopic time...which manifests the indeterminacy of the microphysical evolutions. Every complex being is constituted by a plurality of times, inter-woven and interrelated according to subtle and multiple articulations. History, be it of a living being or of society, can never again be reduced to the monotonous simplicity of a unique time, whether this time monitors an invariance or whether it follows the path of a progress or a degradation. [5]

This “larger time of the thermodynamic becoming” [6] implies a radically different conceptual and methodological framework, that constitutes the basis for my analysis of the “second contradiction of capitalism.”

This thermodynamic time is essentially systemic and internal, in contrast to the external and abstract time of the clock. As Prigogine and Stengers stated:

Far from equilibrium, the homogeneity of time is twofold destroyed: by the active spatio-temporal structure which gives to the system the behavior of an organized totality, characterized by an intrinsic rhythm and dimension, as well as by the history behind the emergence of those structures. [7]

Thermodynamic time relates, therefore, to a qualitative and non-homogeneous time and the autonomous self-organizing capacity of systems, while mechanical time refers to an external, abstract and quantitative time, seen as a line along which events can be placed. More fundamentally, thermodynamic time refers to irreversibility and the way in which history — irreversible evolution — is introduced in physics itself. This is contrasted to the concept of mechanical time, which (exported to the social sciences, particularly economics) lead economists and other social scientists to seek an ahistorical and universal knowledge, thereby extirpating history from social sciences.

We use the term “mechanical” not only because this abstract time was originally measured by a mechanical device (the mechanical clock, although it makes no difference whether it is measured by electronic or atomic means, as it is presently), but more fundamentally because it refers to the time concept that lies at the heart of Newtonian mechanics, which shaped modern science paradigmatically. It did so not only in physics and the other so-called natural sciences, but also in economics. As Georgescu-Roegen put it, “the way this discipline (economics) is now generally professed, is mechanistic in the same strong sense in which we generally believe only Classical mechanics to be.” [8] In this article, I reinforce Georgescu-Roegen’s argument by stressing that this attachment to the Newtonian paradigm is most importantly the incorporation of a given mechanical time concept, which is an a priori implicit assumption that shapes economics as a science, particularly the idea and explanation of economic value.

This Newtonian world-view portrayed the universe as perfectly ordered, made up of passive, separate objects, which are subjected to outside forces and perform perfectly reversible trajectories. This world-view and its underlying mechanical time concept was intimately coupled to the emergence of a mechanical industrial organization of production and the associated appropriation and transformation of human and non-human nature. [9]

While talking about systemic time we have to retain Luhman’s point that “the concept of systems denotes something that is really a system and thus assumes the responsibility to verify its own proposition.” [10] Therefore we are referring not to a way to conceive time from a systemic perspective, but more fundamentally to the systemic features of reality itself and thus to a grounded time, the reality of which has to be assessed and verified in terms of this physical and socio-cultural reality. [11]

Building on Poincaré’s studies, Prigogine noted (as Capra put it) that “resonances occur in all systems involving continual interaction. The phenomena described by Newtonian mechanics, by contrast, are simple examples involving transitory interactions such as collisions of billiard balls without friction, which are always idealizations.” [12] Prigogine could show that the notion of unique and pre-determinable trajectories has to be abandoned, since the “general case is the one of systems where the notion of a unique trajectory cannot be evoked. The only possible description is thus the statistical one in terms of a distribution function.” [13] Thus, what Prigogine termed the “becoming of dissipative structures” was shown to be essentially and irreducibly open to novelty. It is in this framework that a picture of a living nature with an irreducible element of unpredictability emerges: “The bifurcating nature is the one where small differences, insignificant fluctuations, may, if they occur in the right circumstances, take over the whole system and promote a new functioning level.” [14] This unpredictable, living indeterminacy is not only a feature of the micro-physical level of quantum physics; it is also a reality in our world of larger systems and even of the planetary orbits, the symbol of the ordered and predictable Newtonian universe, whose long-term stability can no longer be asserted with certitude. [15]

It has to be stressed that this “far from equilibrium” thermodynamics is not only the source of destruction (high entropy), but also “that irreversible processes play a constructive role. The processes of this complex and active nature, and our own lives, are only possible because they are maintained far from equilibrium by a continual flux which nourishes them.” [16] Therefore what I termed “systemic time” is the time by which everything that exists, does so not as isolated and passive objects, but as self-organizing systems in continuous interaction with other systems. These, in turn, exist within larger systems in a continuous dialectical and creative process of destruction, as well as of the maintenance of structural identities (Bergson’s durée) and of becoming.

A last introductory remark has to be made about this dichotomized use of the terms “mechanical” and “systemic” time. As Adams already noted, most social science studies of other times “are characterised by a common feature: they dichotomise societies into traditional and modern ones in which the former ones are constructed through its opposition to the dominant images of ‘our western time.’” [17] This way of constructing the time of “others” ignores the implicit cultural time assumptions of the researcher. By doing so, it often serves to establish an unequal power relation, through which the specific socio-cultural time constructs of other human societies are encapsulated in a simple category, which often says more about the temporal (implicit) assumptions of the researcher than of the varied, multi-faceted time practices and conceptions of these societies. Reduced to a simple category (which ignores both cultural and historical variability in space among different societies, and also in time due to changes in conceptions and practices of each individual society), their own historicity is denied once they are represented as living in a single, traditional, cyclical and ever-repeating time, in opposition to the linear, historical time of the West. It reduces other societies to empty objects, represented as ahistorical and thus with no intrinsic autonomy and dynamism. Lost in their ahistorical slumber, these societies are vulnerable to being shaken up by spatially expanding capital, bringing (and imposing) its own historical and temporal logic, in the same way as “nature,” portrayed by the mechanistic world-view as being made up of inert objects, is prone to being appropriated and transformed by these same forces.

These dichotomizations tend to ignore that “there is no single time, only a multitude of times which interpenetrate and permeate our daily lives.” [18] This is true for non-capitalist societies as well as for our modern capitalist world. Different qualitative, quantitative, internal, external, linear, cyclical, changing, stable (and so on) patterns can be found in every activity, be it labor in a factory or hunting in a hunter-gatherer community. What changes is the intensity and the relations established between these different patterns. Therefore, our two terms “mechanical” and “systemic” time have to be understood, first of all, as analytical constructs (in the sense of Weber’s “ideal types,” which can never be found as such in reality, but which serve to throw analytical light on actual concrete reality). [19]

The ‘nature’ which our science studies nowadays is no longer the ‘nature’ which an unchanging and repetitive time manages to describe....From now on we must explore a ‘nature’ comprised of multiple and diverging paths of evolution, which invites us not to hold a perception which excludes all other ones, but instead the coexistence of times irreducibly different and articulated. [20]

Both times are in fact intimately related and dialectically interwoven. Both are the basis of two opposite paradigms, the one of the new science of complexity, the other the science of simple elemental behavior. As Prigogine noted,

The first synthesis, the Newtonian synthesis, could not be complete: the universal interaction law whose action was described by dynamics cannot account for the complex and irreversible behavior of matter. As in Newton’s time, two sciences are confronted: the science of gravitation, which describes an atemporal and lawful nature, and the science of fire, chemistry. Ignis mutat res: we already quoted this ancient device, chemical bodies are the creatures of fire, the creatures of the irreversible becoming. How is it possible to cross the abyss which separates the time of complex processes and the time equated with the identity of laws, the science of becoming and the science of being, two sciences which are separated by everything and notwith-standing describe the same world? [21]

Seen in isolation, both times appear to deny each other. But as a dialectical pair, both times only exist by means of and in relation to the other. It is in this interdependency and mutual exclusion that we have to understand both times, knowing that every concrete situation is permeated and constituted by a multiplicity of times. What is important to retain is the pre-eminence, from the physical point of view, of systemic time in contrast to the hegemony of mechanical time-based practice and concept in the industrial capitalist system.

In a world made up by systems (living systems, ecosystems, climate systems, socio-cultural systems, etc.), the time of Newtonian mechanics appears as a special case. Nevertheless, it is this time concept and logic which is at the heart of the organization of the industrial market economy and, in more general terms, capital’s appropriation, transformation and organization of reality. It is this “role inversion,” by which the mechanical time concept and practice became hegemonic (in Gramsci’s sense of this term), negating the intrinsic autonomy, interdependency and dynamism of reality, which is at the heart of the contradictions that can be found in the capitalist accumulation process (here we are thinking not only of the second contradiction, derived from the contradiction between the capitalist and biospherical, natural time, but also of the “first contradiction,” the classical Marxist socio-historical one, which can be read as a contradiction between the different social and individual dimensions of human temporalities (in its multiple biological, socio-cultural, sentient, and self-reflexive dimensions), on the one hand, and the time of the organization of industrial labor and the market-based order, on the other.

At this point, I will argue that the idea of a second contradiction can be identified more easily in the works of Polanyi than those of Marx. We can see this in Polanyi’s major book where he discusses the utopian character of the idea of a self-adjusting market: “Such an institution could not exist for any length of time without annihilating the human and natural substance of society.” [22] Marx, on the other hand, by following the path of classical political economy in his economic writings, distanced himself from a deeper understanding of the human/ nature contradiction inherent to the capitalistic system. [23]

James O’Connor explicitly acknowledged his indebtedness to Polanyi’s work, “who remains a shining light in a heaven filled with dying stars and black holes…” [24] I believe that Polanyi’s analysis of three fictitious commodities is particularly revealing in relation to the contradictions I am discussing, especially when he shows that:

labor, land and money are essential elements of industry; they also must be organized in markets; in fact these markets form an absolutely vital part of the economic system. But labor, land and money are obviously not commodities.…Labor is only another name for a human activity which goes with life itself, which in its turn is not produced for sale but for entirely different reasons, nor can that activity be detached from the rest of life, be stored or mobilized; land is only another name for nature, which is not produced by man; actual money, finally, is merely a token of purchasing power which, as a rule, is not produced at all, but comes into being through the mechanism of banking or state finance.” [25]

Here Polanyi implicitly throws an important light on our discussion. Discussing three fictitious commodities that are not produced capitalistically, he says that they belong to another temporal domain than that of capital; and that they are not (nor can they be) produced and controlled according to capital’s own temporal logic and needs. We can hear his words echoed by O’Connor when he states that:

the point of departure of ‘ecological Marxism’ is the contradiction between capitalist production relations and productive forces and conditions of production. Neither human laborpower nor external nature nor infrastructure including their space/time dimensions are produced capitalistically, although capital treats these conditions of production as if they are commodities or commodity capital. [26]

2. From Becoming to Being: the Emergence of Instrumental Time

The emergence of the capitalistic system was only possible because of a radical shift in social conceptions of time and social time practices. Many authors have shown that our modern society is based on the emergence of a mechanical, abstract and purely quantitative time, to the point that Lewis Mumford, the great historian of technology, argued that the key invention for the industrial revolution was the mechanical clock, not the steam engine. [27]

The capitalization of society, which can be seen in the constitution of the modern labor market, was essentially a conflict concerning time and control over this time. As Edward Thompson showed, the first challenge for the constitution of the labor market was to bring labor under the new time discipline of capital. The reason is that the alienation of labor in the capitalist system meant (essentially) alienated time, which belonged to and had to be controlled from the outside according to the synchronization requirements of emerging mechanical industrial production and of the capital accumulation process. It is in this sense that we can see how the mechanical clock allowed for what Habermas called instrumental reason to be effective in the factory. [28]

Richard Gault defined this shift as a shift from kairological to chronological time. Kairological time is defined by him as “a time of opportunities and events. It is the time of right times, the right time for things to happen.” [29] The same idea can be found in Heidegger’s reading of the Sentence of Anaximandre, who stated that “everything that presents itself lasts its own time….” [30] Here we can find, at the cultural level, a time concept in keeping with the insights gained by Prigogine at the physical level and which we discussed briefly in our definition of what we termed systemic time. This qualitative, internal, relative and process-related time is found to be the central time representation of most non-capitalist societies, where there is a time for everything and everything has its own time. There is the time of the Gods, the sacred time of rituals and myths, the time of society, the time of other natural beings and the time of the different social and yearly seasons. [31]

However, by considering time as an external line of measurement, along which things happen, modern man has placed himself outside time and thus has made himself potentially manageable from an externally given capitalist time discipline — the time of the machines and of capital’s accumulation process.

By emphasizing the intimate relation between the scientific world and the more general cultural milieu, Prigogine and Stengers threw light on how it could come at the moment when the irreversible march of history became self-evident (with the industrial revolution and the fiery spectacle of the new steam engine), the scientist could stick to the Newtonian universe, in which ordered and reversible trajectories exist outside time. Classical science, although non-reducible to this unique aspect was, in fact, one facet of the instrumental reason which was one foundation of the emerging market society, based on mechanical time conception and practices.

Central to capital’s forward drive (which is the time of the capital’s realization process), is the need to act over reality, to transform this reality. This was made possible within a world view which portrayed nature as essentially passive, mere objects, separate and existing outside of time, whose deterministic trajectories were given by the external forces applied on them. It was in this sense that the equation between knowledge and domination could be made, since the knowledge of the laws governing the trajectories of these passive objects would allow humans and their productive forces to control and determine their evolution.

It is only within the mechanical time concept that the idea of planning and of a technocratic control of reality may be conceived. In Gault’s words:

Today forecasting and planning are so common that it is difficult to appreciate their relative novelty. In kairological time planning is inconceivable. Those dwelling in kairological time cannot determine in advance the right time to do this or that. They await the unknown future and prepare to respond to it. Response is vital, since the kairological future delivers, not a pre-determined, fully-formed present, but opportunities and challenges. It is the human response to the possibilities which emerge from the future which actually yield the present. [32]

Only in a time concept devoid of intrinsic quality can the future appear as deprived of any substance, fully open to the determination of those who control and manipulate the forces or energies that will lead to deterministic and predictable trajectories of passive objects.

Nevertheless, it is within the emerging picture of a living nature and its internal, autonomous and irreducible creative time that we can look for answers to the present crisis and also why “The problem of accident...emerges directly as a dialectical by-product of the Enlighten-ment ideology of mastery of nature by technology. It is a sign of not just the non-realization, but of the non-realizability of perfect functional control.” [33]

This picture explains why, in a what Gault termed a kairological culture, human beings have to be prepared to answer the challenge which the future presents, once things present themselves. In this picture, the relation of people to other beings can no longer be one of domination, a monologue in which man imposes his will on reality, but a necessary dialogue between beings in co-evolution.

3. Mechanical Time and Economic Value

Behind every commodity there is a production time that includes not only human social labor (which in our society gives its commodity form to different products) but also the working of the more general systemic time of different natural, social and cultural processes. Through these different evolutionary processes, complex new structures and organizations of matter and energy are created in what Reeves called the “constitution of the different complexity steps.” [34] In Prigogine’s analysis, this process is discussed as the “becoming of dissipative structures,” where order emerges from fluctuation and systems are kept in a state which is far from thermodynamic, low energy equilibrium. This evolution encompasses the different cosmological processes that produced our solar system and the different chemical elements of our primitive earth, up to the geo-bio-physio-logical processes of the creative evolution of this planet which determine the present chemical composition and distribution, as well as the complex structures, of the living matter of our present world. This system is maintained in an “evolutionary balance,” far from thermodynamic equilibrium (in a tension at many levels of change and maintenance, organization and disorganization, order and chaos, as Morin has noted). [35]

Therefore, compared to “dead” planets, which are more or less close to a thermodynamic equilibrium state, the Earth is characterized by the high improbability of the constitution of its atmosphere, oceans and terrestrial ecosystems, where highly reactive chemical elements and living forms (as prey and predators) co-exist in a dynamic “far from equilibrium” balance.

The constitution of modern economics has as its focus human mechanical production time, ignoring the more general systemic one. The very example of the beaver and the deer, by which Smith introduced his labor value theory and constituted the British political economy tradition in opposition to the French Physiocrats, could, according to our discussion here, be read the other way around to contradict what Smith wanted to prove. Whilst the Physiocrats saw in the working of nature the only true source of a surplus value (produit net), Smith argued that value had to be necessarily given by the labor required to hunt the animals and bring them to the market. We can see that Smith considered only the market value (exchange value) of a commodity, and ignored the fact that the animals had to be “produced” by the systemic time dialectics of the ecosystem in which they evolved and, ultimately, by an evolutionary history which goes back to the origins of our universe, a process which, as Prigogine showed, is neither repeatable nor predetermined. [36] Once extinct, there is no human production process which can produce new value in terms of beavers. Thus, value had to be produced by nature initially, whether we consider it as God’s gift, as the Physiocrats did, or whether we consider it in terms of the unique and irreversible history of the evolution of dissipative structures in terms of “far from equilibrium” thermodynamics.

Smith clearly reasoned in terms of a mechanical time and by doing so he changed the focus of economic theory from natural time to human production time. It is this same reasoning that is behind the modern prejudice that sees pre-industrial societies as deprived and their economies as subsistence economies, in sharp contrast with, for example, the first impressions gained by the Europeans who described the exuberance and natural richness of pre-colonial America and Africa, as well as modern anthropological research which shows the relatively little time spent by those societies in order to assure their subsistence. [37] With their social and cultural structure inserted in the overall systemic time dialectics (although, as Ponting’s analysis shows, not without contradictions), these societies based their economic structure on “mining” the wealth created by the free (or directed) [38] systemic time of the natural processes, as Smith’s hunters did. As a result of the colonization of these areas, the systemic dynamics were disrupted and replaced by the mechanical time logic of capital. It is this process of capitalization of nature and capitalization of society brought by the colonization process and later on by economic development, and not the contrary (a lack of sufficient economic development) that really deprived these societies and regions, opening the door to modern manifestations of famine and misery which can be found in contemporary Africa, Asia and the Americas.

As Vandana Shiva showed, the very idea of development placed those societies within the hegemonic temporal framework of capitalist societies, by representing them as immature and incomplete, therefore requiring a process of development, seen as a series of linear steps, in order to attain maturity. This development, centered on the pursuit of economic growth and an accelerated process of modernization, meant the displacement of the previous spatio-temporal order in favor of a market-oriented and mechanical time-based organization and appropriation of natural and socio-cultural space. We can see this process happening with the introduction of modern agricultural techniques, the “green revolution,” displacing local-based, subsistence-oriented multiple and diversified traditional farming; or in the rapid industrialization process of these countries, with the constitution of a growing labor market, rapid urbanization, professional and technical schools (to provide skilled labor), and so on. The first thing immigrants who have been displaced by the export-oriented “green revolution” in the countryside learn in the growing urban centers, in technical schools or in their new job (if they get one), is to organize their life according to the clock-time discipline, leaving behind the communal and natural cycles-based time practice they were used to. [39]

On a national level, we can see this transformation carried out by the “entrepreneur-state,” creating the “pre-conditions” for development and aiming to attract foreign transnational capital: space is occupied and transformed by the building of new roads and dams; electricity is distributed throughout the whole territory; and with the introduction of the mass media, particularly nation-wide television, even the most remote households are tuned, at a given hour, to the evening news or to popular television series which every day display the urban living rhythm and the vast array of new consumer goods made available (even if only on an imaginary level) by the national development effort.

Modern state planning follows a clearly instrumental time logic, by which things are seen in an instrumental way, as means to perform a given end, ignoring the multiple dimensions by which every new thing affects and inserts itself in the web of systemic dialectics. For example, seen as a simple cause-effect link of a linear development flux, a dam produces energy and a new road allows trucks to carry soybeans to the export port. Their multiple environmental and socio-cultural effects are ignored, although the violent and accelerated disruption of the environmental and socio-cultural dynamics which accompany them should be self-evident. At this point, centralized states have been powerful allies of development, as in Latin American military dictatorships; in the rapid industrialization of Southeast Asia’s “dragons” and “tigers;” and in the former Soviet bloc and present-day China. These centralized regimes were able to impose this mechanical time logic regardless of the other temporalities involved. The high ecological and social cost of these development processes is, in fact, a good example of the temporal contradictions we are discussing.

But this imposition goes way beyond the political imposition by means of force. Ivan Illich, in his studies of the dynamics of the industrial system, already showed how once a sub-system goes beyond a given limit it tends to impose its logic and rationality on the whole society through what he termed a “radical monopoly.” [40] The important point for our analysis is that this radical monopoly is primarily the monopoly of the hegemonic capitalist temporality, in terms of its implicit mechanical time framework, that shapes our perception of reality and leads voters, in modern democratic states, to vote for given political options. [41]

4. Chronos, Entropy and the Market

As noted, behind everything that exists lies the workings of a complex systemic time dialectic linking the different geo-bio-physiological processes of life on earth, continuously creating (and destroying) new forms and re-creating in turn the conditions for their own existence. These processes have resulted in the earth being kept in a “far from equilibrium,” low entropy state for about 3.5 billion years. Here we can see that low entropy has to be seen as a system’s property, rather than as a property that can be assigned to the object (which is the definition that emerges by studying thermodynamics within the classical framework of mechanics — the way thermodynamics started, in fact — and which Prigogine studied as the first step of thermo-dynamics). It is in the system’s dynamics that we can find low entropy, in contrast to the inert and stable death order of high entropy states. It is this entropic distance that prevents our sun, with its violent nuclear reactions and radiation, in tension with gravitational forces keeping it together, from becoming a dead black star, our sun’s most probable future. This entropic distance also separates our living earth system from Mars, or, at an intermediate level, the distance between an exuberant tropical forest, with its myriad of living organisms, cycles and internal and external relationships, and the pasture land that may replace the forest. This entropic distance, too, separates traditional agriculture practices, with their huge variety of interrelated species, crops and techniques, from modern agricultural monocultures. The latter are much closer to thermodynamic equilibrium and more vulnerable to outside environmental fluctuations such as temperature variations and pests, and thus are closer to collapsing into a high entropy order.

In the latter example, we can see how the low entropy equilibrium of industrial systems can only be achieved by a huge external influx of energy and matter (in the case of industrial commercial agriculture, fertilizers, pesticides, and genetically transformed seeds), debilitating other systems, while at the same time being less stable and complex. This, in turn, is the consequence of the replacement of the previous internal systemic dialectics (whereby the ecosystem as a whole performed a wide range of functions such as soil erosion control by forests and vegetation, material recycling and fixation of atmospheric nutrients by the biota, pest control by species balance, and local humidity and climate control) by a human labor-and-energy-intensive production based on a mechanical, linear organization logic. [42]

It is this definition of low entropy as a “far from thermodynamic” equilibrium state that we will use to define wealth, in sharp contrast to economic value which is the result of the human appropriation and transformation process. The former refers to “far from equilibrium,” self-organizing structures which enhance the equally “far from equilibrium” dynamics of the system as a whole, while the latter refers to the economic appropriation and transformation of this wealth for human use, which is often obtained at the expense of the self-sustaining capacities of the system.

As an emergent system’s property, low entropy is based on, but cannot be reduced to, its parts. It is an emergent property and depends not only on the constituent elements but, most of all, on the proportion within and the links created between elements. Here again we find a vital difference between systemic and mechanical time: while the latter can be considered in a reductionist way, as a discrete interval with no intrinsic quality, or as simple linearity, systemic becoming is essentially dialectical and has to be understood within the complexity of the interrelations whereby the whole system and its parts are both dependent upon and inseparable from one another. [43] Reality can no longer be described in terms of single quantities and isolated objects, but has to be understood in terms of proportions, qualities and dynamic relations. Centered on mechanical time practice and conception, it should not surprise us that, as Illich pointed out, one of the main aspects of Western modernity is the loss of the notion of proportionality, a central aspect of the non-modern cultural tradition. [44]

Everything that exists is thus a link within the web of systemic time dialectics. As a process, it is as much the emergence of past dialectics as it is the basis for future emergent systems. With human intervention another temporality is added into the global process. [45] As a historical being, human beings’ material practices will reflect different cultural and historical temporalities and rationalities which, in turn, will lead to different human/nature dialectics.

We’ve already seen how deeply the capitalist historical order is grounded in a mechanical time concept and practice. Moreover, as Polanyi noted, the “Civilization of the nineteenth century was unique precisely in that it centered on a definite institutional mechanism.… Market economy is an institutional structure which, as we all too easily forget, has been present at no time except our own, and even then it was only partially present.” [46] As he showed, “market economy implies a self-regulating system of markets; in slightly more technical terms, it is an economy directed by market prices and nothing but market prices.” [47]

A society based on markets means a society based on quantitative indicators as its major driving force. In Marxist terms, this is a society centered on the commodity form and exchange value, rather than on use value. Such a society could only emerge in the framework of a quantitative and abstract time conception in which the concept and practices of homogeneous and mechanical time predominate over qualitative systemic time, both in production and distribution.

Everything and every being is the product of different time dialectics and thus incorporates past time dynamics; in capitalist society, however, based on the commodity form, the balance of these different time dialectics is supposed to be maintained through the regulatory workings of the market mechanism. To work, the system requires time to be translated into prices, that is, “time is money.” Nevertheless, the translation of time into prices only works in the case of the quantitative mechanical time of human production. As we will see, it is impossible to translate effectively the qualitative, creative and irreversible systemic time into a quantitative price system. Therefore, the market will fail as a regulator of the general time dialectics once prices, on which the decisions of the different social actors are based, necessarily fail as an accurate time index.

The reason is that, in their commodity form, things are already considered as objects, isolated and out of time, to which a price can be assessed. But if we consider things as parts of a dialectical process in time, products of past dialectics and irreversibly affecting future ones, there is no longer a unique, fixed quantitative time index that can reflect their role within the more general systemic time dialectics, which depends on proportions, qualities and the kinds of links created within changing conditions, among other factors. In short, prices as accurate time indexes would have to be timely and dialectically changing themselves.

The translation of mechanical production time into value and prices is the essence of value theory in economics. In the classical, and, later, the Marxist tradition, this was studied in terms of how abstract simple labor expended in time can be seen to incorporate its value into a product, which, according to historical distribution conditions, will be translated into prices. Here prices are a “time index.” They reflect the incorporated human labor time in a given commodity. Nevertheless, prices are very limited, as they ignore the incorporated creative time of astronomical, geological, biological and cultural evolutionary processes. To come back to Smith’s example, they represent the hunter’s labor time, but not the beaver’s and the deer’s existential time, much less the working of the ecosystem as a whole or the cultural dynamics within which these hunters emerge.

There is no way to translate systemic time into a price system, since this existential time is essentially qualitative and unique. Creative time, for example, of artistic production or intellectual insights, cannot be reduced or evaluated by means of quantitative time expended. This time is discontinuous and relates to a qualitative, internal time. Market competition, on the other hand, requires (as classical political economy already acknowledged) the common basis of exchange value, abstracted from the uniqueness and qualities of the different use values. It requires that working time (whether of machines or humans) be translated into a quantitative price system. It is only in the case of a monopolistic use of resources, or when prices are fixed by extra-market means, that they reflect, to a greater or lesser degree, the working of a systemic production process. But in this case the working of the market regulatory process is impaired and the conditions of capitalist production are, to use James O’Connor’s term, politicized. [48]

Thus, qualitative and unique time only appears as a constituent part of prices in monopoly situations, as in the case of non-reproducible creation mentioned by Ricardo or of Schumpeter’s entrepreneurs who make extraordinary profits (or rents) for a while, before their creative innovations become widespread and routine. Another example: restricted access to a natural resource allows those who control this resource to impose monopoly prices, and thus appropriate the biospherical evolutionary time incorporated within this commodity, as in the case of oil and natural gas; or when intellectual property rights assure monopoly rights for those who own them. [49] In these cases, prices reflect a political, qualitative and subjective situation, not the required economic logic of incorporated value time.

Ricardo, in his value theory, had already excepted the domain of art production from the laws of incorporated labor. The reason is revealing: every work of art is unique, the fruit of a non-repeatable creative act. Each work pertains to the irreversible time domain of systemic “becoming processes” and not to the repeatable domain of mechanical production. Its value is a monopoly value, which cannot be given by purely economic means. [50] It is only when “art” is produced as a commodity, in the time of its mechanical reproduction (to take Walter Benjamin’s classical idea), that it is subjected to the laws of market competition and the laws of economic value production. This is the case in the modern music and film industries, or when great art works are reproduced and sold as T-shirts, posters or classical music collections.

The same line of reasoning can be followed if we consider creative technical innovations. A linear time reasoning cannot be applied to the creative functioning of the human mind, and therefore the application of market regulation to this domain becomes very uncertain and ineffective. The way capital tries to avoid this problem is through a kind of “large numbers” law: through large research groups you can hope to get an average comparative advantage in gaining innovative breakthroughs.

Another way capital has of controlling the process of human creative activity is by maintaining the vital distinction between inventions and innovations. While inventions are hard to bring under the control of capital (since they belong to an essentially different temporality), innovations (in the Shumpeterian sense of the economic market application of previous inventions) need, in contemporary large markets, the financial, commercial, technical, and logistical basis provided by large capitals. In this way, their economic exploitation can be brought under the control of these capitals. By deliberately separating the time of inventions from the time of innovations, and by protecting the former through patents and intellectual property rights, capital tries to avoid disturbances and threats that would represent the free irruption of the discontinuous temporality of creative time into the required common basis of free-market regulation.

In fact, patents and intellectual property rights are monopoly rights, and in this example, we can see the highly politicized way in which systemic time is translated into prices (the only way through which this translation can be done). Once they are tradable, they are subjected to one-dimensional market logic and begin to be treated “as if” they were commodites. While, on the one hand, this monopolistic barrier threatens the working of free-market regulation, on the other, it protects capital’s temporality by allowing it to apply the temporal logic of capital’s accumulation to the innovation process once the disruptive temporality of inventions is controlled and politically protected.

In this case, we can see a fundamental trait of the dialectics between these two temporalities, namely, that the social mechanical time of capitalistic production is, in fact, dependent on the more general systemic time of creative evolutionary processes, be it in terms of the human ability to create new forms and inventions, or in terms of the cosmological, geological and biospherical creative time dialectics which created the physical basis of all economic activity and of existence itself. Notwithstanding, one central aspect of the capitalist time dynamic is that it tends to hide its dependency on this systemic time and even to ignore it completely in the social process of value creation and in the workings of its price system. In this sense, we can see that commodity fetishism is not only hiding the social and political conditions of the production and reproduction of capital, but also the systemic time dynamics which are essential for the working of this system. This latter veil is even more important in the sense that while prices reflect value (and thus social mechanical production time), they tend to completely ignore the working of the systemic time on which this process is based.

The economic value of capitalized nature is given by the incorporated labor to get it from nature to the market, ignoring its real production cost and time. The absence of extra-market restrictions (be they cultural, political, or monopolistic), that is, the introduction of free-market competition, causes them to be subjected to the labor theory of value, in which value is given only in terms of incorporated human labor. As we saw, human labor time is only a very minor part of the complex time dialectics that lie behind a product, merely the last stage when matter and energy are assembled in its commodity form. But it is the only time which is relevant for economic value, and is thus the only time that will be reflected in prices. As long as there is free access to natural resources (or human inventions, reflecting the working of a systemic time on a human level), prices will ignore systemic time dynamics. At this point, not only do the qualitative relations between humans appear as quantitative relations between things in the market, but also these quantitative relations ignore and hide the creative working of past systemic time dialectics to which these things in fact owe their existence.

It is this ignorance of the underlying systemic time dialectics which lies behind problems related to the loss of biodiversity. The present richness and complexity of life on our planet is the fruit of a long, irreversible and complex systemic time, in which the different astronomical, geological, chemical, physical, biological, social (if we consider the different species) and cultural (if we consider human intervention) time dialectics were articulated. It is a time which, as Gault pointed out in his analysis of kairological time, reaches deep into the past and far into the future, by contrast to the narrow horizon of mechanical time. [51] Biodiversity, too, becomes an integral part of this past-future axis, in which the importance of a single element (or species) lies not only in its present actual or potential use, but in the way different species which may be irreversibly lost could be crucial for future “far from equilibrium” systems.

Only within a mechanical time framework can the economic valuation of single species be conceived. It is only within this framework, too, that the global value of an ecosystem’s biodiversity can be expected to be obtained by simple summing-up of single values, ignoring the emergent properties which arise from the interrelations and interdependencies of the different species within the whole.

5. Market Prices and Time

To sum-up, in a system based on free-market regulation, prices have to accurately reflect the underlying time dialectics in order to ensure the stability of the system. But, in fact, there are only two ways in which prices, as a quantitative index, may relate to creative, qualitative systemic time, which is at the heart of all geo-biospherical and human creative production. Both are essentially contradictory and tend to impair the system itself, thus revealing the essential contradiction of a system based on the free market, and thereby of prices as the market’s main organizing and driving force.

One is by simply ignoring systemic time and consider value solely in terms of human incorporated labor time (or production time/cost, in the neoclassical formulation), which can be organized in terms of mechanical time discipline. Value is dissociated from wealth and the whole society is organized around the commodity form and the supremacy of exchange value over use value (in Marx’s terms) and subjected to a continuous process of rationalization (in Weber’s terms). [52]

The main contradiction of this solution is that, although it allows the constitution of a market society, it ignores the fact that society and life itself are tributaries of systemic time dialectics, and that quantitative and abstract mechanical time is only a minor aspect of time itself. As we saw, mechanical time is a tributary of systemic time and value is a tributary of previously created wealth (which we can see in general terms as a system’s negentropy). Moreover, the essential dynamism of the capitalistic continuous creative destruction process is based on an essential human feature which is irreducible to the logic of mechanical time. The creative workings of the human mind cannot be considered in terms of a “homogeneous abstract labor time” which incorporates value to the final product.

Once the fundamental decisions in the system are based on prices which only reflect value and thus incorporated mechanical labor time, the market will at best regulate mechanical time dynamics (the economic conditions of production and distribution), while unable to regulate the systemic time dialectics which are crucial for the sustainability and maintenance of the system as a whole.

The second way to articulate prices in terms of underlying systemic time dynamics is by trying to fix prices through non-market mechanisms, by political and legal means. This means prices are dissociated from value (in the economic sense that prices no longer reflect the incorporated labor time or production cost) by trying to make them reflect real wealth.

There are two main contradictions inherent in this solution. The first one is that it impairs the functioning of the free market itself and thus of the free-market society as a whole by promoting what James O’Connor terms more social forms of production conditions, and what Polanyi saw in terms of the impairment of self-regulation and the rise of protectionism and political intervention. [53]

The second contradiction is that quality is irreducible to quantity. It is impossible to internalize qualitative and complex externalities, as are most negative environmental, political, cultural and social side-effects of the workings of the economic system (which threaten to impair the socio-economic sustainability of the system). In other words, even if fixed by non-market means, prices will fail to fully reflect the underlying systemic time dialectics and thus cannot ensure a sustainable market society.

As I argued previously, [54] the internalization of these externalities implies that the qualitative effects and imbalances due to the working of the economic system have to be translated into a quantitative price and that this quantitative price will lead, through the workings of the regulatory market mechanism, to the actions required by the different agents involved in the socio-economic process. Both assumptions are wrong. Externalities are qualitatively changing over time and depend on a huge variety of other factors. The effect and importance of an isolated factor also depends and varies according to its conjunction with other factors. Thus, proportions are more important than the single isolated quantity. These subtle and changing nuances cannot be translated into an unique, fixed and abstract quantity. Moreover, once a given externality is fixed by non-market means and translated into a price, nothing assures that the aggregate consumption and the use of the resources will be kept within the required proportions, that is, that the quantitative price will be translated into the required qualitative balances.

6. Two Examples in Brief

As Martinez-Alier argued for the case of biodiversity and modern agriculture, “the increase in production for the market spoils the very conditions necessary for this production, namely agricultural biodiversity.” [55] This agricultural biodiversity and knowledge (as well as the case of traditional medicine) were built up within a long process of cultural and social dialectics of particular societies. The very fact that you cannot translate this evolutive process into a single market price, and that these practices are still inserted within systemic social and cultural practices, places them out of the market and out of the accumulation circuits of capital based on mechanical time. The way to capitalize them is to insert these communities within the modern market circuits and subject their organization logic to the temporal logic of the market. Another way is what Vandana Shiva calls “biopiracy,” that is, the appropriation by capital of inherited cultural and biological knowledge and wealth by means of intellectual property rights. Here we see again that systemic time can only be capitalized in terms of a monopoly price, which, in this case, is appropriated by the big multinational chemical and pharmaceutical companies who impose their regime of property rights on traditional communities. Genetic engineering does not create new genes, nor do most medicines incorporate new active substances. They only capitalize them by giving them their commodity form through human manipulation.

Another case where we can clearly see these contradictions is the example of fossil fuel consumption and the greenhouse effect. The presently existing fossil fuel stocks are the product of long and complex time dialectics of geo-biochemical evolution of the living earth system. It includes many time processes such as plate tectonics, volcanic activities, physical soil erosion and sea sedimentation, biological and ecosystem processes and regulations, and so on. These complex processes have been the way by which, until now, the increasing radiation of the sun has been counterbalanced, resulting in a remarkable temperature stability over the ages (with periodic fluctuations reflected by different ice ages). Moreover, through these geo-bio-physiological processes, vital proportions of O₂and O₃_,as well as other gases (like methane, SO₂, etc.) were retained and recycled within the biosphere, assuring stable conditions for the evolution and maintenance of life for this long time-span. Through human intervention, particularly in this century by the constitution of our energy-intensive mass-consumption society, a new temporality, the mechanical time logic of the industrial system, is added to this process. This intervention is such that it has managed to reverse the slow tendency of the declining CO₂ content of the earth’s atmosphere, which until now has been the net effect of global systemic time dialectics, as well as disrupting other atmospheric dynamics which act as life-supporting systems. [56]

The intensive use of fossil fuels started under the aegis of capitalist mechanical time and thus follows its intrinsic logic. For example, the value of these fuels is given by human production time, which is only the labor required to capitalize them and not the millions of years of the systemic time within which they were produced. [57] From the long span of systemic time and its long-term processes, the carbon cycle entered the short-term and accelerating historical time of the capitalist accumulation process. From a naturally produced wealth, performing a vital role in the global evolutionary process, it became a capitalized commodity produced (or transformed) and consumed according to the laws of market supply and demand and the economic and political requirements of the global accumulation process.

The problems related to the greenhouse effect and the depletion of the stock of global mineral and biological reserves, as well as the highly politicized and often militarized way in which these questions are treated, are a clear sign of the contradictory character of these processes. [58]

To suppose that this contradiction can be resolved within the institutional framework of the market economy requires that prices be an adequate reflection of underlying time dialectics, and that the social, economic and political decisions based on these signs be in harmony with the requirements of the more general systemic time dialectics. It requires that prices be an accurate time index, not only of the mechanical short-term accumulation requirements of capital, but of the long-term systemic dynamics of the living earth system. But how can the working time of plate tectonics in conjunction with the blooming and sedimentarization of the biota over the earth’s surface be assessed? How can the different desertification processes due to global climate change be translated into prices? What is the price of rural migration, urban overpopulation, deaths due to famine, the losses of ecosystems and biodiversity, and so on, which are related to the spreading of these deserts? What is the price, solely in terms of socio-political sustainability, of the different xenophobic movements which emerge in the different migration centers? Many pages could be written on “externalities” due to global climatic change: what is really the eco-tax that should be imposed on fossil fuels in order to ensure that their prices reflect their ecological value? Should this be a uniform and unique quantity, or are there cases where the use of fossil fuels increases the global sustainability of the system? Finally, in the purely hypothetical case that such a price is actually found (which it cannot be) and that the political will to implement it is achieved, would this price ensure the sustainable use of these resources or would they still be abused by those for whom its transport forms a minor part of their budget? Would Concord, military jets, and car races be abolished? Or would the distance between the rich and the poor increase, leading thereby to a higher social and political stress of the system, thus reducing global sustainability?

7. Conclusion

The high complexity and the huge array of systemic linkages behind the production and consumption of such a simple element as fossil fuel should convince us that it is unrealistic to believe that a complex, changing, multi-dimensional dynamic dialectical process can be expressed by a single price. Or that the emerging result of all human actions based on one such price would actually ensure the sustainability of the system as a whole.

The impossibility of translating the workings and requirements of systemic time into a quantitative price system — as well as the danger of not doing so by ignoring them — is, in fact, a sign (or, if our argument is correct, the essence) of what Polanyi termed the utopian character of the free market. As he pointed out, “while history and ethnography know of various kinds of economies, most of them comprising the institution of markets, they know of no economy prior to our own, even approximately controlled and regulated by markets.” [59] In non-capitalist societies, the market system has always been a sub-system of the larger socio-cultural system and through various qualitative means (political, cultural and social restrictions and enhancements), the social and human/nature relations were regulated and controlled. By regulating human action in this way, societies also regulated the way in which human time relates to the larger geo-biospherical time dynamics by determining the pace and the intensity in which given resources were used or protected.

The various kinds of traditions and cultural restrictions, the central role played by the idea of nemesis, or limits which should not be transgressed by humans in their pride, hubris, at the risk of punishment — these have always been the way in which different societies have ordered and regulated their relation to their environments. To try to mimic a past golden age and to place their rituals within a sacred, strong time — different from ordinary social time — was also a way of slowing down and keeping social time within boundaries, to insert societies within the higher whole of the systemic evolution dynamics. The desire to restore a past golden age harmony, with its clearly settled rules and limits, was a way of directing the present and thereby the future of those societies, rather than a nostalgic longing for the past. Instead of a sign that societies were immobile and bound to their past, as our modern prejudice makes us believe, such cultural restrictions made it possible to place the dynamics of their development within proportions and the large past-future axis of the systemic time. [60]

The long secularization process within the Western tradition is the way in which systemic time has gradually been ignored and suppressed by the abstract and purely quantitative expression of mechanical time. The idea that all could be regulated by means of an entirely free market is only the culmination of this process. As Gault showed, in our chronological time, the future is deprived of substance and thus open to being produced by humankind. It is open to planning and technocratic control, an idea which can be found in most official discussions about our present crisis where the problem is seen as a matter of bad planning and of historical development which has to be redirected. In this conception, humankind is still master of its own future, in spite of the insight which can be gained from the thermodynamic time conception (and which was a constituent part of traditional systemic representations), whereby nature and thus the future have irreducible autonomy and indeterminacy. On the part of human society, this requires a dialogical attitude by which human society responds to nature no longer seen as a passive object, but as a subject on its own rights. [61] It is this central idea that constitutes the core of Michel Serres’ plea for a “Natural Contract” that sets the basis for co-evolution in which human history is embedded and a constituent part of what we could term the larger “systemic becoming.” [62]

Ecological crises are certainly not a prerogative of man, as Lovelock, for example, shows by pointing to the various periods of mass extinction and radical changes in the composition of life on earth. Nor are they exclusively a feature of modern capitalist society, as the historical records assembled by Pointing remind us. [63] But in no other period can we observe such a strong “systemic role inversion,” by which a sub-system exerts influence and perverts the functioning of the larger whole.

Paradoxically, we can see that in the same Western cultural tradition that established mechanical time as an absolute truth, the scientific negation of this view also emerged. Relativistic physics assessed the inseparability of matter, time and space, pointing to a four dimensional time-space continuum; modern complex system theory showed that human consciousness is not an autonomous flux in time, but only exists as an emergent property of the material working and development of the human body and historically given human culture. [64] With quantum physics the notion of separate subject and object broke down. And it is finally in the studies of contemporary thermodynamics that the negation of the dream of human mastery over nature, or the limits of the industrial episteme, are stated. [65] It is, as such, an historical irony that thermodynamics were born out of the study of the steam engine, the emblematic symbol of the industrial revolution and the dream of capitalist progress and conquest.

The idea of an ecological reconversion of society (and all discussions surrounding the idea of sustainability) require the mechanical time of present human economic practices to be qualitatively controlled and restricted by political, cultural and ethical means aimed at restoring the awareness of systemic time dialectics, of which humans are but a part. As such, it is a political question — political in the deep sense of different historical options open to human free will, not only of institutional politics. It is the quality of these options and the way in which this political debate will be carried out and translated into action that will determine not only the quality of our future societies and environment, but probably the very possibility of human survival tout court. Leaving these questions to be answered by the free market means leaving the organization of the whole to the mechanical time logic of capital, which destroys the systemic basis on which its own dynamic is based.

The essential openness, novelty and autonomy of systemic time dialectics means that nature cannot be reduced to scientific forecasting or to technological control. Nor can human beings be reduced to skinnerian behaviorism and thereby fully controlled and molded by technocracy and centralized powers. Human essential systemic autonomy will always manifest itself as resistance, whether in more “rational” or “irrational” forms, frustrating the centralized social control projects. Ignoring this reality may result, as Martin O’Connor argued, in the controlled order ending up in catastrophe. [66] This tragic result of the enlightenment control project should make us aware, more than ever, of Jung’s warning about the unconscious and unwilling results of conscious projects. As he argued:

Our intellect has created a new world that dominates nature and has settled it with monstrous machines. These machines are so unquestionably useful that we cannot even imagine the possibility to getting rid of them or escaping from the subservience to which they have lead us. Man cannot resist the adventurous cry of his scientific and inventive mind, or cease he to congratulate himself for his conquests. But at the same time, his genius displays a mysterious tendency to create more and more dangerous things, which increasingly represent more efficient instruments for his collective suicide. [67]

Based on a mechanical time concept and practice, which is at the heart of a society centered on the commodity form, in modern industrial market society humankind forgot that it belongs to and is dependent on the more general systemic time dialectics, of which the economic sub-system is but a part. We have lost our sense of proportion, of quality and of relatedness, which, as Illich pointed out, also means the loss of our sense of ethics and beauty. [68] Nevertheless as a result of our hubris, such a loss of proportion may, as traditional myths always warned, end up in tragedy.

*Special thanks are due to Martin O’Connor for his valuable comments on the first draft of this article and to Ivan Edwards for his persistency and sense of humor revising the final one.

[1]Marx, O Capital (Rio de Janeiro: Ed. Civilização Brasileira, 1975), p. 171.

[2]Elmar Altvatar, “Ecological and Economic Modalities of Time and Space,” CNS, 3, November, 1989.

[3]Martin O’Connor, “Codependency and Indeterminacy: A Critique of the Theory of Production,” CNS, 3, November, 1989; “The System of Capitalized Nature,” CNS, 3, 3, September, 1992 and “On the Misadventures of Capitalist Nature,” CNS, 4, 3, September, 1993.

[4]See his “Capitalism, Nature, Socialism: A Theoretical Introduction,” CNS, Issue 1, Fall, 1988.

[5]Ilya Prigogine and Isabelle Stengers, La Nouvelle Alliance (Paris: Gallimard, 1996), p. 366. About Prigogine’s theories, see also his From Being to Becoming (San Francisco: Freeman, 1980) and his latest La Fin des Certitudes (Paris: Éd. Odile Jacob, 1996). All quotes in this paper refer to La Nouvelle Alliance.

[8]Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen, The Entropy Law and the Economic Process (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971), p. 1. Although Georgescu-Roegen sees this attachment to the Newtonian paradigm as an historical puzzle, it should not surprise us once we consider the fundamental role modern economics played in legitimizing the emerging industrial order and how the mechanical time concept at the heart of the Newtonian physics was (and still is) coupled to modern social and economic time practice.

[9]By referring to human nature we are thinking in terms of Marx’s classic formulation that humankind with its productive powers, while acting over and transforming nature, transforms its own nature. We can see this mechanistic transformation of human nature in our present-day clock time centered social and individual life, to the point that Gault could state that, “Our ubiquitous possession of clocks not only blinds us to our dependence upon them, it also disguises our exit from time. We have robbed ourselves of our sixth sense and robbed ourselves of the sense of the robbery; we have banished ourselves from time and never sensed our exile” (Richard Gault, “In and Out of Time,” Environmental Values, 4, 1995, p. 154). This transformation of human nature also becomes evident in modern labor relations, in the real subordination of the laborer to the rhythm and time of the mechanical machine, which found its highest expression in Taylor’s “scientific management” and Ford’s assembly line. A magnificent expression of this process can be found in Chaplin’s classic Modern Times, highlighting the conflictive temporal dimensions of modern labor organization. See also Harry Braverman, Labor and Monopoly Capital: The Degradation of Work in the Twentieth Century (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1974) and Simone Weil, A Condição Operária e Outros Estudos sobre a Opressão (Rio de Janeiro: Paz e Terra, 1979).

[10]Niklas Luhmann, Sociedad y Sistema: la ambición de la teoría (Barcelona: Ediciones Paidós, 1990), p. 41.

[11]For a critical discussion of systems, which is in tune with our perspective in this paper, see Edgar Morin, La Méthode 1. La Nature de la Nature (Paris: Ed. du Seuil, 1977) and La Méthode II. La Vie de la Vie (Paris: Ed. du Seuil, 1980).

[12]Fritjof Capra, “The Time Paradox,” Resurgence, 185, November/December, 1997, p. 12.

[17]Barbara Adams, Timewatch — The Social Analysis of Time (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1995), p. 28.

[19]Max Weber, The Theory of Social and Economic Organization (New York: Free Press, 1969), pp. 87-157.

[22]Remarking that Polanyi considers the word “utopian” in the sense of the non-realizable, which is essentially contradictory. See Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation (New York: Farrar and Rinehart, 1944), p. 3.

[23]Although in his philosophy of history, the human/nature axis was clearly present and he (for example, in his The Critique of the Gotha Programme) explicitly stated that “Labour is not the source of all wealth. Nature is just as much the source of use value (and it is surely of such that material wealth consists!).” As we will discuss later, it is the impossibility of translating this wealth creation by nature into a quantitative exchange value plus the focus of the value theory on the “chronological” aspects of wealth, that are behind (in our interpretation) the progressive ignorance of this “material basis of wealth.” For a deeper analysis of the contradiction between Marx’s philosophy of history and his economic writings, see Ted Benton, “Marxism and Natural Limits: an Ecological Critique and Reconstruction,” New Left Review, 178, 1989.

[27]Lewis Mumford, Technics and Civilization (New York: Harcourt Brace and World, 1934). See also Jacques Attali, Histoire du Temps (Paris: Fayard, 1982); David Landes, Clocks and the Making of the Modern World (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983); Wolfgang Schivelbusch, The Railway Journey — The Industrialization of Time and Space in the 19th Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986); Edward Thompson, “Tiempo, Disciplina de Trabajo y Capitalismo Industrial,” in Tradición, Revuelta y Consciência de Clase (Barcelona: Editorial Critica, 1984); Robert Nisbet, Social Change and History (New York: Oxford University Press, 1969).

[28]Thompson, op. cit. And Jürgen Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action (London: Heinemann, 1984). See also Schivelbusch (op. cit.) about the importance of the railway system’s requirement for the emergence of a single and homogeneous national time concept. In all these studies, it is clear how this change has never been a linear, homogeneous transition, but essentially a conflictive process in which contradictory ways to conceive humankind, society and its relation to the environment clashed.

[30]Martin Heidegger, A Sentença de Anaximandro; Os Pensadores/ Os Pré-Socráticos (São Paulo: Abril Cultural, 1978), p. 34

[31]See Almir Andrade, As Duas Faces do Tempo-Ensaio Crítico sobre os Fundamentos da Filosofia Dialética (São Paulo: Edusp, 1971), Chapter 15.

[34]Hubert Reeves, L’heure de s’enivrer — L’univers a-t-il un sens? (Paris: Ed. du Seuil, 1986).

[36]Prigogine, op. cit. and Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (London: Met