Conclusion

Abstract

The fight for time remains an indispensible political project that needs to be recovered for the purpose of uniting seemingly disparate political issues that are, in fact, related in their mutual criticisms of the detrimental impact of capitalism on the quality of life. Through the lens of distributive justice, time has the potential to bring together a range of political actors under the fight for time as it relates to their specific but interrelated goals. In particular, I brought together the political concerns of Marxism, Critical Theory, and Feminism in order to extricate their respective contributions to different aspects of the fight for time, including the fight to reduce the workday, the criticism of the culture industry as detrimental to the emancipatory potential of leisure, and the domestic labor debates demonstrating that women continue to spend a disproportionate amount of time on domestic and reproductive labor in comparison to their male counterparts, as do working-class women and women of color in comparison to more privileged women. The fight for time as developed theoretically within the Aristotelian-Marxist tradition is particularly useful because it offers a history of asserting the radical notion that the quality of life is fundamentally related to the access of discretionary time and the exercise of temporal autonomy. Furthermore, the fight for time transforms freedom from an abstract concept into a concrete measurement of discretionary time.¹ In order for temporal autonomy to be realizable it must be institutionalized through public policies that allow for or even encourage discretionary time.