Time has been defined and controlled by the powerful, but we can reclaim control  as shown by pioneering economist Guy Standing . The Ancient Greeks organised time into five categories: Work, labour, recreation, leisure and contemplation. Labour was onerous, whereas leisure was schole, and included participation in public life and lifelong education. Since the industrial revolution, our time has been shaped by capitalism, our jobs are supposed to provide all meaning in life, our time outside labour is considered simply “time off”, and politicians prioritise jobs above all other aspects of a good life.

Today, we are experiencing the age of chronic uncertainty. Mental illness is on the rise, some people of are experiencing more time freedom while many others are having more and more of their time stolen from them, particularly the vulnerable and those in the precariat. We must create a new politics of time, one that liberates us and helps save the planet, through strengthening real leisure and working together through commoning. We can retake control of our time, but we must do it together.

Men spend lot of time thinking about the Roman Empire. Economist Guy Standing , who has championed basic income in the interest of social justice says it is not Rome but Athens, his vision for an ideal society takes inspiration from the ancient Greeks, five categories of activity a system in which self-directed work, including care-giving would be privileged over paid labour.

If time is money, like money, it is unevenly distributed, intellectual property owners benefit at the expense of the precariat, With financial strain exacerbated by pandemic and inflation, the gig economy has also left the precariat time-poor.

Standing blames this degradation in quality of life on the industrial revolution, which ushered in the synchronisation of clocks and commodification of labour, with the emphasis on efficiency seen in Amazon’s fulfilment centres at perhaps its most extreme. The advent of tech-enabled service economy -giving rise to constant connectivity, scheduling insecurity and unpaid job related work-taxes the time of all but the elite, he argues.

Standing advocates the return to “communing” the sharing of communal resources and suggests that basic income could take the form of a dividend from a “Common Capital Fund” modelled on Norway’s sovereign wealth fund, providing citizens with an amount “on which a person could survive in extremes”/ 

The Politics of Time: Gaining Control in the Age of Uncertainty by Guy Standing, Pelican £25, 432 pages.