Toward a Time Manifesto

Abstract

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.