Jonathan Crary - 24/7

Karl Marx pointed out that there are two ways that the capitalists can extract extra surplus value from workers and hence make more profits. By increasing either absolute surplus value or relative surplus value. The latter means making workers more productive, but the former requires making the worker labour more. The problem for the capitalists has always been the natural limits of the worker and the world they labour in. You can only make workers labour for a certain number of hours before they need food, relaxation and sleep. In this context Jonathan Crary's 24/7 book ought to be an important discussion of how capitalism has tried and is trying to extend the working day into 24 hours. Factories work shift systems, public transport systems operate round the clock and so on. But can capitalism fundamentally overcome naturally imposed limitations on the working day? These are important arguments for both the exploiters and the exploited. As Crary points out:

The huge portion of our lives that we spend asleep, freed from a morass of simulated needs, subsists as one of the great human affronts to the voraciousness of contemporary capitalism. Sleep is an uncompromising interruption of the theft of time from us by capitalism.

The importance of sleep, which Crary argues "stand[s] for the durability of the social", is inseparable from the way that time itself has transformed itself through history. Indeed a study creation of capitalist time illuminates the way that society has commodified every aspect of our lives in the pursuit of profit.

So it is disappointing that Crary's book fails to engage with this material, and instead focuses on an esoteric engagement with various philosophers that seems to cover everything from technology to social media, but rarely gets to grip with the real material aspects of sleep and capitalism. While there is a lot of material of interest, the brevity of the work prevents the author drawing out these insights and constructing a coherent argument around them. I was left feeling that the author was more angry about the way that social media has intruded upon our lives than (say) workers working 12 hour shifts in sweat shops:

An attention economy dissolves the separation between the personal and professional, between entertainment and information, all overridden by a compulsory functionality of communication that is inherently and inescapably 24/7. 

This is, of course, true. But I felt that Crary overly focused on this rather than the detail of why capitalism operates like it does and what that means for workers. Social media, likes, friends and shares are an example of what the system does, but they are a consequence of 21st century capitalist production not its central aspect.

I was surprised that there wasn't at least passing reference to E.P. Thompson's classic essay Time, Work-Discipline and Industrial Capitalism which I think backs up some of the historic material that Crary covers. But my biggest criticism is, perhaps, the opaque academic language which would put off many potential readers, even those who had enjoyed a good nights rest. There are far too many sentances that read like this, "This particular constellation of recent events provides a prismatic vantage point onto some of the plural consequences of neoliberal globalisation and of longer processes of Western modernisation". Writing like this can only restrict engagement with books like this, which is a shame, because the topic is of great importance to every working person today.

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