Wayne Hope

Conflicting Temporalities State, nation, economy and democracy under global capitalism

The information and communication technology (ICT) driven, real-time tendencies of global capitalism are predominant, but they are not universal. Fast, short-term profits undermine long-term strategies of capital accumulation. In this respect, the structures and activities of global capitalism are riven by temporal contradictions. Such is evident between and within different fractions of capital. Fast and long-term imperatives also conflict within transnational corporations and business administration. On a global scale, the clash between different cultural traditions of corporate capitalism reflects opposing temporal logics of profit maximization. How then do these temporal contradictions play out empirically? My response to this question explores the general idea that spatio-temporal fixes enable the cohesion and reproduction of capitalist systems. To this end, I will point out that under global capitalism spatio-temporal fixes cannot be guaranteed. There are no built-in congruities interlinking state, nation, economy and society. Global networks of finance, production and corporate governance may weaken the conjunctures between nation, state, economy and society and exacerbate temporal disjunctures within them. From these observations, I will argue that state-centred constructions of time and temporality are weakening against the general, real-time tendencies of global capitalism. This sharpens temporal conflicts within the nationally constituted economy and the nationally circumscribed state. As upper reaches of the nation state conform to the temporal urgency of institutionalized supranational decision making, the marginalized national polity is answerable to the slower temporal rhythms of representative assembly, the election cycle, public policy formation and civil society. Against this background, worldwide coalitions opposed to ruling global interests are also riven by conflicting temporalities. Such conflicts reflect the temporal contradictions of global capitalism and the associated temporal conflicts within states, nations and economies.

Whose All Blacks

From about the 1880s, an imagined sense of New Zealand-ness, mass communication, and the game of rugby took shape together. This process was primarily signified by the name, image, and exploits of the All Blacks. This article argues that global media and corporate sponsorship threatens the nationally constituted heritage of All Black rugby. But, the argument in question is not a nostalgic defence of some ‘golden age’. At given points in history, the All Black heritage was ideologically constructed and subjected to conflicting interpretations. The All Blacks have always been the template for a contested national imaginary. Now, however, the All Blacks are also the expression of a global corporate culture. In this context, the article explains how an old question takes on a new significance - to whom do the All Blacks belong?

Crisis of temporalities: Global capitalism after the 2007–08 financial collapse

As global capitalism took shape, during the 1990s and early 2000s, high-speed, financialized profit making disrupted long-term strategies of capital accumulation centered upon production, employment, commodity exchange and aggregate demand. In addition, state constructions of time and temporality were besieged by the short-termist tendencies of financialized capitalism. This sharpened temporal disjunctures within the nationally constituted economy and the nationally circumscribed state. And, as upper reaches of many nation states conformed to the temporal urgency of supra-national decision-making bodies such as the IMF, national politics could not effectively process the slower rhythms of the representative assembly, the election cycle, public policy formation and mediated public debate. Against this background, the aftermath and repercussions of the 2007--08 financial collapse will be examined. Global capitalism became pervaded by a crisis of temporalities, manifestations of which can be summarized as follows. First, the temporal contradiction between financialized profit making and long-term strategies of capital accumulation remain unresolved; therefore, financial instability and recessionary spirals will be a recurring pattern. Second, in a world of financial turbulence and global recession, spatio-temporal fixities within and across particular national political economies have weakened or disintegrated. Third, the political impossibility of reconstructing Keynesian policy instruments at a national, supra-national and international level has generated a historic malaise. Unregulated financialized capitalism and neo-liberal policy regimes cannot be sustained over time, yet new political-economic arrangements characterized by spatio-temporal fixity are not in prospect.

Global Capitalism and the Critique of Real Time

Digital technologies globally interlink finance, production, consumption, mass communication, and cyberculture. The processes of interlinkage generate the sense that time is accelerating towards instantaneity. Promoters and critical observers of such developments have created a proliferating discourse of ‘real time’. This key phrase and its associated terminology covers a diversity of referent spaces (e.g. cyberculture, financial flows, supply-chain management, on-line selling, live media events). In the context of global capitalism, discursive constructions of ‘real time’ are interrelated with new temporal constructions of systemic power. The nature of this interrelationship is obscured by the ideological features of ‘real time’ terminology. Here, this argument will be developed with references to popular business literature and (supposedly) critical academic writings. I conclude with a set of preliminary requirements for an effective critique of ‘real time’.

The Internet, the public sphere and the ‘digital divide’ in New Zealand

The Internet has no fixed point of reference. Rather, it is a key word in a vocabulary which seeks to describe the shifting infrastructures of electronic communication. Historically, the ground of scientific competence for the Internet included the existence of computers and the use of machine code compilers as a basis for intercomputer communication. Also crucial were telecommunication networks, along with their theoretical tools of design: information theory and cybernetics. As a technical construction the Internet originated from a classified national security project commissioned by the American Department of Defense and from British computer science research at the National Physical Laboratory (Winston 1998, p.100). A scientific division of labour emerged which would, eventually, conjoin the accomplishments of packet switching, telephony, mainframe development and mini computer networking. This process spawned an elite cluster of university-based research centres. Early Internet infrastructures thus precipitated the growth of computer science departments. By 1970 linked mini computers could be operated as interface message processors (IMPs) from the first mainframes. Mainframe researchers at Stanford University established host-to-host protocols, network control protocols and files transfer, and created the LOG IN command. By 1974 the development of email messaging and @-centred email addresses had opened the way for Intemetworking among computer user groups (Winston 1998; Naughton 1999, pp.146-150). From here the historic signposts of Internet applications are well documented. The American National Science Foundation coordinated a nationwide backbone of university research user groups. When the foundation allowed the commercial exploitation of user group sites in 1979, online services quickly proliferated. The big three Compuserve, Prodigy and America Online (AOL) expanded their markets with the backing of computer, media and retail conglomerates. In 1986 the emergence of a domain name system allowed for the installation of file server networks within corporations, governmental bureaucracies, and white collar professions (e.g. law, accounting, insurance). The inauguration of the World Wide Web

Capitalism, Worker Exploitation and Time Conflict

Within global capitalism, the time conflicts of financialization overlap with specific time conflicts which are inherent in worker exploitation and the associated strategies of class rule. Before developing this argument, the global economics of work will be briefly outlined and the time-epistemic features of exploitation explored. In my view, three central propositions encapsulate the time conflicts involved: the real-time operations of transnational corporations structurally increase the severity of clock-based worker exploitation; the real-time tourniquet of labour process and labour pool management threatens the temporal autonomy of working life; and global capitalism’s strategy of class rule denies coeval status to the working and wageless poor. These conflicts of time are separated conceptually in order to emphasize their complementarity in practice. I will then suggest that the time conflicts which came to shape global capitalism’s exploitation of the waged/wageless poor provide opportunities for disrupting the system.

Epistemes of Time in Global Context

Time should not be understood as a unitary phenomenon. Rather, as this chapter will explain, it is comprised of four epistemes or ways of knowing: epochality, time reckoning, temporality and coevalness. These epistemes are integrally related, both conceptually and in practice. Each of them contains multiple and conflicting standpoints of intellectual debate. Individually and in combination, they help us to understand events and processes within global history. From this perspective, I will show, in Chapter 2, how the different epistemes of time materially combine to produce particular configurations of hegemony, conflict, crisis and rupture. The resulting matrix will become the ground for developing a structural critique of contemporary global capitalism.

Time, Communication and Financial Crisis

Thus far, I have provided a time-epistemic framework for analysing the material formation of global capitalism. My account of this formation traced the unfolding of contemporary history, during the 1990s and early 2000s, without anticipating, retrospectively, the eventual arrival of the 2008 global financial crisis. The intention was to explicate the salient features of global capitalism as it was taking shape, in contrast to what had gone before. Before 2008, it became evident that the hegemony of global capitalism emanated from the transnationality of corporations, ruling class formation and state structures. Their very existence depended upon the digital convergence of the mass media and information-communication technologies as encapsulated by the internet. This was the nervous system of global capitalism, and it drove the growth of global finance and the financialization of capitalist profit. The world-historic significance of these developments was largely obscured by the ideological constructions, manifestations and mediations of realtime. World history, as critically understood from a coeval standpoint, was subsumed within global capitalism’s pervasive aura of detemporalized immediacy. Yet, the reproducibility of global capitalism was, from the outset, threatened by fundamental conflicts. As the three preceding chapters have shown, financial speculation and the financialization of capitalist enterprises profoundly affected the realization of capital and patterns of worker exploitation as well as the cohesion of nation states and national economies.

Toward a Time Manifesto

The previous chapter identified the coalition of political forces necessary for establishing a counter-power to global capitalism. Disrupting the fragile just-in-time networks of supply chain capitalism, forging solidarities between organized labour, precarious workers and the informal poor, fashioning anti-austerity political projects, and sustaining a networked protest culture against financialized capitalism must occur simultaneously. This is a key precondition for sustaining oppositional solidarities and for effectively exploiting the likely repercussions of a future financial crisis. It will also be necessary to rupture the real-time reflexivities and detemporalized presentism endemic to global capitalism. To help coordinate these objectives, I provide a set of time principles that move beyond familiar homilies about remembering the past, creating new futures, slowing down the pace of life and respecting other cultural histories. The central principles are succinctly formulated as calls for action centred upon the four epistemes of time: epochality, time reckoning, temporality and coevalness. Taken together, these calls will enable the construction of a more substantive and programmatic time manifesto.

Crises without End

Repercussions from the 2008 global financial crisis continue to unfold. It is thus difficult to demarcate the passage from crisis to its aftermath and beyond. The difficulty arises from the fact that strategies to resolve the crisis have been problematic and counter-productive; the preconditions for a new financial crisis remain extant. This chapter begins with a short overview of the transition from financial crisis to global recession. I then identify the disparate interpretations of unfolding events. Was this a crisis of global capitalism or a sectoral crisis within it? After providing an answer to this question, I will argue that official counter-measures at national, international and transnational level effectively reinforced the time conflicts of global capitalism. Rescued, too-big-to-fail investment banks regained power, profitability and access to new technologies of financial arbitrage. The incommensurability between presentist, detemporalized profit-making and long-term rhythms of capital realization was not recognized. Political economies of time conflict were reinforced by the introduction of austerity policies in many countries. And, amidst the after-effects of financial crisis, the time conflicts of social exclusion and worker exploitation were reproduced.