Liu Yunshan: The Fetishistic Attribute of Time and the Crisis of the Contemporary Spirit of Capitalism
In Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments, Horkheimer and Adorno discuss the landscape of alienation brought about by capital society: "It is precisely in the form of the machine that alienated reason is working upon a society which reconciles fixed patterns of thought, as a material and spiritual mechanism, with freedom, life, and thought, and addresses society itself as the true subject of thought." This passage reveals that social alienation under capitalism is accelerating its spread from the material realm to the spiritual realm, attempting to erode every field of modern life. Capitalist modernity creates an extremely ironic and paradoxical social picture. On a positive level, capital renovates traditional modes of production, driving the vigorous development of material production with a creativity that no previous social formation could hope to match—"in a word, it creates a world after its own image." On a negative level, however, capital is unable to benignly manage the modern world it has created due to its profound internal structural contradictions. This world is increasingly becoming unrecognizably distorted in the hands of its founder. Capital itself is a contradiction, and only within this contradiction can capitalism break through limitations to seek development. It is precisely out of concern for its own self-valorization and the strengthening of its rule that capital finds ways to ally with the state, conspire with religion, and bind itself to the life-world. It transforms nature and history into products that adapt to its own logic, continuously compressing the expectations for a free future in this world and packaging itself as eternal truth. Natural objects of existence, such as time and space, which originally possessed no instrumental-rational [1] meaning, likewise cannot escape the historical fate of being swallowed by capital. Yet, unlike common forms of pure physical enslavement, time—as a "non-physical" factor of "governmentality"—operates primarily through the reification of the spirit and the nihilism of values. Controlling invisible ideology has clearly become a new type of measure for contemporary capitalism to consolidate its dominant position. It goes without saying that after the eternally flowing object of time was recognized in history through human labor practice as "social time"—the inseparable flip side of natural time—it has, under the action of capital, become commensurable with money and a form that profoundly influences the spiritual world of the people. When capital becomes the new "God" of time, time acquires the quality of a fetish; it reinforces this logic of supremacy in the spiritual reproduction of capitalist society and brings about profound consequences.
I. The Formation of Time Fetishism: The Combination of Capital and Social Time
In works such as Capital, Marx used his profound philosophical insight and unique research perspective on economic and social history to reveal the absolute command of capital in the modern world to modern people, while simultaneously discovering the process of the capitalization of "social time." Capital, as a social relation, "is an all-illuminating light, which masks all other colors and modifies their specific features. It is a special ether which determines the specific gravity of every being which has materialized within it." This inherently conveys two dimensions of the relationship between capital and the modern world: First, the innate high mobility and borderless nature of capital allow it to break through all prejudices and barriers standing between nation-states, subsequently extending the tentacles of its rule far and wide into all "extra-local" and "non-economic" fields (such as politics, society, history, nature, the spirit, and art), striving to realize its globalized and liberalized predatory nature. Second, as the dominant power of capital grows daily, its own forms of governance for commanding "other colors" are also quietly changing; the various factors serving the extraction of surplus value by capital can only achieve self-validation by aligning with the will and needs of capital. Since the birth of human society, capital has maintained an inseparable connection with social time, and produces a consciousness of social time that adapts to the nature of capital within ideology. One could say that capital can only fulfill the internal requirement of its own self-valorization by maximizing the transformation and utilization of time. Time fetishism is itself a stage in the development of fetishism; the requirements for the production of surplus value determine the different forms in which time and capital combine at various historical stages.
Prior to the birth of capitalism, the production and daily activities of people in traditional societies had not yet broken free from the constraints of the natural rhythms of time. The construction and cognition of social time relied heavily on the laws of natural time: working at sunrise and resting at sunset. Major activities such as planting, sailing, ritual sacrifices, and trade had to be arranged according to people's understanding and mastery of the seasons and the Heavenly Timing [2]. This gradually formed a social time that was "humanized" according to the needs of human practical activity on the basis of natural laws. During this stage, time was often regarded as possessing a certain mystical color, even as an existence leading toward some ultimate meaning. Plato treated it as eternal motion; Aristotle viewed it as the number of motion; and medieval theology, emulating natural cycles, used time in the form of repetitive cycles to argue for its own eternity. Feudal rulers used this to proclaim their own eternal legitimacy, treating the rhythm of social time as a predetermined product and time itself as a form of dominance covered in mystical colors, thereby establishing an order of action concerning social time. "For the individual, time was not his own; time did not belong to him, but belonged to a higher, dominant power. This explains why in the Middle Ages, resistance to the ruling class often took the form of protesting the Church’s control over time." People understood the essence of time through religion or other beliefs, treating time as the manifestation of the descent of these objects of faith, thereby forming a corresponding worldview. Faith in time became a part of religious faith.
In the stage of early liberal capitalism, especially since the Industrial Revolution, the power of capital was mainly concentrated on deploying its own mode of production across all industries and worldwide. Capital entrenched itself in all walks of life globally, completely overturning the backward modes of production of feudal society. By creating new industries, eliminating old ones, and updating backward ones, it phased out all negative factors hindering its own self-valorization, leaving behind the most valuable and malleable materials of production. Meanwhile, through colonial plunder and the export of capital, capital extended its map of expansion to every corner of the world, achieving a position of hegemonic dominance in global space. The primary driving force of this expansion process was precisely to satisfy the direct need that "capital valorizes its own value by appropriating the labor of others." In this process, social time became an instrumentalized need for the self-valorization of capital, a general measure for calculating the amount of capital valorized. "In the modern person, the dominant view is that of quantity"; time is treated by capital as a quantity of labor, thereby becoming the mediator of the person's indirect dependency relationship on capital. This mediator replaces direct personal rule, using the precise measurement of time brought by clock technology to replace possibility with certainty, becoming a measure of universalized, abstract time units that demand valorization efficiency and are detached from natural time.
Capital depicts a face of the dominance of time. Although this stage was characterized primarily by capital’s control over time forming a one-dimensional dominance over the human being, it nonetheless contained the basic conditions for the formation of time fetishism. First, capital’s comprehensive encroachment on time stifled the possibility of the laborer's spiritual development. Capital utilizes the precise measurement of time to "have a wolf-like hunger for surplus labor, breaking through not only the moral limits of the working day but also its purely physical limits." Stimulated by the pursuit of extraordinary surplus value, capital uses means such as extending labor hours and the massive employment of child labor to continuously compress the time that the working class needs for education, leisure, intellectual development, physical exercise, and performing social functions—time necessary for the full development of their own capacities and potential—striving ultimately to ensure that all of the laborer's available social time is used to serve the self-valorization of capital. Every second of the laborer's existential life is subject to the will of capital; the perceptually rich life-substrate of humanity vanishes under the goal of "absolute surplus value production." Under the pressure where "a man spends in one hour the vital force he previously spent in two," the laborer is in a state of physical and spiritual void. Their most direct needs are precisely the "natural needs" of subsistence; from this, the possibility of developing a faith in the very time that dominates them arises.
Second, the intellectual foundation of this period also contained the potential for the emergence of time fetishism. Hegel took the Absolute Spirit [3] as the essential definition of the human being, believing that historical time in capitalist society had already realized the dialectical unity of reality, history, and reason in Idea, reaching the end-point of universal historical development in the external form of the Absolute Spirit. However, because Hegel always observed society based on the historical movement of ideas—as Marx criticized, "the buying and selling of labor-power takes place within the limits of the sphere of circulation or the exchange of commodities, which is in fact a very Eden of the innate rights of man. There alone rule Freedom, Equality, Property and Bentham [4]." Hegel's view of historical time also reflects an abstract rule, derived from the logic of capital as "all-illuminating light," which strips away the actual relationship between capital and labor. Consequently, he could only see the formality of the realization of concepts like democracy and freedom within the logic of capital. This understanding of directing historical time toward an abstract end-point leaves the subject as a passive recipient in the movement of the Absolute Idea rather than an active agent, maintaining that the spirit of the laboring subject is generated within a top-down necessity. This itself implies a spiritual form achieving the unity of reality and Idea, but which is in fact merely a spiritualized manifestation of the actual relations of dominance in capitalist civil society. Specifically, it manifests as the justification and dependence on the eternity of the capitalist historical order, representing the fact of time's dominant power being glossed over by the cloak of democracy and freedom.
Third, capital created the reification [5] mechanism of time. In capitalist society, the proletariat’s perception of time is the perception of their own direct, perceptual quantity of labor. This alienated labor time is precise and measurable; it gradually distances itself from the characteristics of one’s own life course—regardless of day or night, spring or autumn—yet achieves precise consistency with labor products and money. This is the reification process of time. Time gradually becomes a tool to exchange labor for subsistence needs; the process of labor is also a process of producing reified time. In the life-world of the proletariat, as their spirit is devastated and the values of freedom and development are lost, subsistence within labor time becomes the primary need. Completely reified time thus becomes the time-mechanism within the labor process and, with the expansion of capital, becomes the time-norm for the whole of society. Marx’s concept of "historically created needs" forms, in capital society, a "system of things" composed of commodities, money, and labor, creating a logical architecture entirely commensurate with reified time. Within this essentialist reified time, people view time as the incarnation of use-value and the general equivalent [6]. The more these "historically created needs" exist, the more thoroughly reified time combines with the commodity, and the clearer the logic of the fetishistic attribute of time becomes.
If the main characteristic of the era of liberal capitalism was material production, where capitalists controlled the life-time of workers by extending necessary labor time or adjusting the ratio between necessary and surplus labor time, then for contemporary capitalism, the grip of capital over time has become more micro-level and secretive. This is as the dimension of capitalist production has spread from material production to cultural production, institutional production, spiritual production, and ideological production. On the one hand, the power accumulated by capital has grown strong enough to control all fields of social life; on the other hand, capital has changed the mode of exploitation through the application of various technological means, releasing its power in a more hidden and comprehensive way. As Marx said:
“A change in the productive forces... does not at all affect the labor represented by the value. Since productive forces belong to the concrete useful form of labor, they naturally can no longer have anything to do with labor once its concrete useful form is abstracted away.” [7] In this process, as the scope of the power of capital expands, social time breaks through the restriction of being merely a measure of labor time within the sphere of production. It becomes an invisible, universal power permeating almost all areas of contemporary society in the form of an instrumental unit of measurement, profoundly altering the entire social landscape according to the will and immense power of capital. This is essentially an encroachment of surplus time upon free time. Laborers engage in "dead labor" [8] by manipulating machines during labor time, while their non-labor time is also occupied by non-productive labor, hiding “labor in its concrete useful form” under the guise of “leisure time” through activities such as consumption and entertainment. Marx profoundly elucidated the basis of this time regime long ago: social time, as a radical abstraction of time that gradually becomes socialized with the expansion of capital’s power, developed “as a natural law of the modern mode of production out of existing relations. Their formulation, official recognition, and proclamation by the state were the result of a long-term class struggle”—that is, the socialization of the mode of capital valorization. It is evident that due to factors such as class struggle, the long-term needs of capital valorization, and the development of science and technology, the capitalist mode of production—having already “created a world after its own image”—continues to refine itself. Science and technology have conspired with capital to creatively open a new path of capitalist dispossession. Tedious and heavy manual labor is increasingly replaced by mental labor and mechanized, automated production devices; surplus labor time, which once heavily oppressed the physical body, is gradually transformed into labor time that controls the spirit. Superficially, this “general illumination” [9] makes resistance increasingly difficult to provoke; capitalism proclaims it is entering the end of history mentioned by Hegel, where everything find its proper place.
Does this mean that technological development and political progress have caused the exploitative nature of capital to weaken or even disappear? The root cause lies precisely in the fact that the relationship between capital and social time has changed: the socialization of surplus value exploitation has endowed time with the character of a fetish. First, the mode of capital's rule has undergone unprecedented change. The very process by which capital power is restricted by various technological, political, and economic factors is precisely the process by which capital power comes to cover these fields. Once the profit-seeking nature of capital has integrated these elements, the visible physical factory is no longer its sole site for squeezing labor. Capital has embarked on an exploitative journey shifting from “conquering the body” to “conquering the heart” (攻心为上) [10]. This means that the way capital extracts surplus labor time from workers must also change accordingly, moving from coercion and violence toward something mild and concealed. As its objective, capital valorization has to some extent diluted the coercive means of time dispossession, converting them into a latent control over the entire social sphere and the state of human existence. In contemporary capitalist relations of production, such valorization diffuses concrete labor into the non-productive spheres of the entire society, acquiring characteristics of stability, plurality, and non-violence. The combination of this immaterial labor with material labor allows social time to become a socially recognized unified scale within the domains where the principle of the identity of labor is infinitely extended. Second, the encroachment of social time by technological rationality. Within the positivist and scientistic modes of thinking, all objects of human cognition and objectifying activities are reducible to quantitative scales and susceptible to calculation to determine their form of rationalization; only this method can confirm the authenticity of the cognized object. On one hand, capital valorization requires technological rationality to invade the calculation and arrangement of production efficiency and organizational methods, constantly improving labor efficiency per unit of time in a highly precise and rationalized manner, so that the whole of social time is socialized to squeeze out surplus value. On the other hand, acting as a latent ideological tool of society, it creates a highly rational and precise framework for time utilization at the conceptual level through people's unconditional faith in science, using the public's unconditional trust in science to promote a conscious acceptance of the political, economic, and cultural power created by capital. The logic of capital appears and prevails as a conspirator with the nature of capital, consistent with the internal needs of capital's rule and valorization. Third, the power of social time does not manifest the characteristics of violence or coercion, but rather presents a state of acceptance, adaptation, and even identification throughout society. As capital moves from being the “supreme power in industry” to “increasingly appearing as a social power,” capital drives modern society to form a strict time regime, which becomes the basic norm for people’s production and life. “The various tools, equipment, and mechanical devices created by industry form an artificial world that operates independently of nature. In metropolises and factories, people live and work in this artificial world.” This differs from the situation where laborers are forced to accept extended labor hours; rather, it is a collective unconsciousness following a strict time regime created across society through social norms and professional requirements. It is believed that violating social time norms, frequently being late or leaving early, or “idling away the time of one’s life” [11] will lead to public outcry and moral condemnation. This is precisely how capital treats time as a substance, constituting a type of “social relationship between people mediated by things,” where the measurement requirements of capital valorization are generalized into social relations between people, and between people and things. Social time has changed from a tool of corporeal control into a tool for disciplining the spirit, manifesting as a highly self-disciplined and conscious quality of “valuing time as much as life” (惜时如命), showing an attitude of acquiescence, endorsement, and recognition toward the modern social time regime. Under the capitalist system, time thus becomes the unified scale and basic norm for all social action; it is a form of fetishism essentially controlled by capital and centered on the power of valorization.
II. The Fetishistic Attribute of Time
Capital dominates the modern world by dominating time. Social time has become the universalized mechanism of the modern world’s operation, a modern fetish, and a synonym for wealth. In human history, religion often provided people with supreme sacred goals, spiritual sustenance, and emotional refuge; it was a value-based need for people to transcend their real spiritual lives, and a form of self-consolation used in class societies to channel and divert class oppression. Since the Reformation, what people pursue is no longer the illusory soul-soothing from the world beyond, but the pursuit of wealth in reality. Faith in God has gradually degenerated into the pursuit of individual rights, status, position, material desires, and physical pleasures. Consequently, the fetishization of time has spread far and wide. Social time, closely linked with material wealth, has thus become a new, indestructible faith in people's hearts.
Marx once described the formation and development of fetishism in detail in Capital, expounding on the developmental stages of fetishism through the three progressive forms of commodity, money, and capital. This contains the internal logic of the changes in the forms of capital's rule, reflecting the process of capital's rule becoming a generalized “general illumination.” Bourgeois national economics takes the rational “economic man” and the resulting free competition and commodity exchange based on the principle of equivalent exchange as its entire theoretical premise. This one-sided theoretical abstraction and metaphysical view of history make it impossible to truly perceive the historical temporality and transitionality of capitalism; the capitalist mode of production is thoughtlessly regarded as a natural, rational, and eternal existence. Hegel also took capitalist history as the ideal end-point of the externalization of the Absolute Spirit. Marx, however, dismantled this eternal design with the historical concept of “social relations,” criticizing: “When the economists say that present-day relations—the relations of bourgeois production—are natural, they imply that these are the relations in which wealth is created and productive forces developed in conformity with the laws of nature. These relations therefore are themselves natural laws independent of the influence of time. They are eternal laws which must always govern society.” Similarly, commodities and money—originally the simplest and most direct economic categories of the capitalist mode of production and all commodity production—were also veiled in the mystery of fetishism. In bourgeois political economy, commodities and money were internalized as a naturalist belief: omnipotent things with some mysterious value, visible deities that transcend all other social elements. As expressions of capital’s deployment, commodities and money represent an expression of the absolute abstraction of a ruling power, manifesting a typical religious character that “constitutes the totality of life on the one hand, and represents the unity and foundation of complete existence on the other.” Highly similar to the deified nature of commodity fetishism and money fetishism, social time has also acquired fetishistic attributes. On one hand, social time constitutes a necessary link in social operation and material production, acting as a crucial hub connecting social relations between people; on the other hand, social time has completed a high degree of self-abstraction from natural time, becoming an object of universal belief. This gives rise to a “naturalist” attitude toward social time; people tend to hold an attitude of unconditional acceptance and approval of the operation and arrangement of social time. It is precisely because the shell of this naturalist attribute of social time covers up the hidden facts of capital and labor exploitation in modern society that it has caused the regression of proletarian ideology, the dilution of class subjectivity, and value nihilism. Fundamentally, the fetishism of social time—like the fetishism of money and commodities—originates from capital fetishism. It is the universalization and concealment of the forms of exploitation, with capital valorization as its final destination. Thus, according to the general logic of Marx’s critique of fetishism, one discovers that even if time exists in modern society as an abstract form of units and scales, and appears closer to a natural, non-constructed feature, it still refers to the relations between people, and the objects it measures and acts upon are the “humanized world.” More importantly, just as Marx's rebuttal of naturalism in capitalist economics was not directed at the “natural properties of things,” social time under the capitalist system produces a dominant effect on real life precisely because of its social attribute functions that transcend natural properties and mere experience, which is what makes it a time fetishism.
First, the fetishistic attribute of time begins with its ideological characteristics. Today, technological rationality has brought about a profound transformation in human labor and lifestyles. Science, technology, and instrumental rationality are becoming universal standards for the whole world. With the help of increasingly powerful and sophisticated technological tools, people elevate perceptual cognition into a universally recognized collective consciousness within collective labor and social life. They use the quantitative principle of abstract universal scales as the basis for organizing new forms of practice and cognition, and have formed a mutually recognized pattern where “every abstract science is merely a method of arranging order, a quantitative record of experience.” As the tool with the widest range of application, the closest relationship to production and life, and the most thorough uniformity of measurement scales in modern society, time has completely shaken off its dependence on human sensibility. This causes the “existence of living individuals” mentioned by Marx in The German Ideology to be completely disciplined into an abstract, headless rationality. At this point, social time is colored with an ideological naturalist hue in people's daily production and life: it not only inherently contains and permeates every corner of the modern social structure as a component of the conceptual superstructure, but also forms a unified scale reflecting the interests of all members of society to the greatest extent. Capitalists value social time because they always strive to shorten the turnover time of capital, especially the circulation cycle of fixed capital, thereby accelerating capital accumulation to obtain surplus profits. Laborers value social time because they believe that as long as they make full use of time, they will create more considerable income. In a society where capital promotes efficiency above all else, people's utilization of time is not forced or involuntary; rather, they take time as an important value, believing that one must achieve something as time continuously flows, full of identification with and emulation of efficient action and full utilization of time. This stems, on one hand, from people's desire to pursue wealth creation within time; on the other hand, the pursuit of efficiency—that is, “speed”—by the whole of society makes people sigh over time, cherish time, and use time efficiently.
In the 20th century, many Western Marxists discovered this new form of non-violent control; just as analyzed in Capital, the ideology of social time—as a social form of appearance—is essentially driven by capitalist relations of production. The pursuit of efficiency is not limited to the sphere of production; in the realms of daily life, transportation, and entertainment, "speed"—as an unarguable collective and individual pursuit—has gradually transformed from a means into a value-end in itself alongside the accelerated progress of the economy and society.
Second, the fetishistic attribute of time is manifested in its "two sides of the same coin" relationship with money. Money exerts incomparable power within the capitalist social system, becoming "the universal, self-constituted value of all things. It has therefore robbed the whole world—both the human world and nature—of its specific value. Money is the alienated essence of man’s labor and life; and this alien essence dominates him as he worships it." Due to the high degree of abstraction of money and its role as a value-equivalent for all "things" in the world of capital, it has become a universal standard and rule that people revere. At this point, social time is based on the commensurability between labor time and money itself. Following the process of commodification of the entire social world, and the establishment of money as the supreme measure of human relations, the whole of society manifests a faith in this mode of social time. In the labor process, a certain amount of socially necessary labor time corresponds in reality to a certain amount of money. Within the acceleration logic of the whole society, capital valorization constitutes the fundamental driving force of acceleration: "the more the stages of transformation of capital are as rapid in reality as they are in thought, the more is the maximum reached for the factors that make the repetition of the production process possible." Differing from this, the socialization of contemporary capital produces a "faith in time" through technical rationality and accelerationism [12], taking all members of society as its subjects. People's worship of money can often be substituted by an equivalent worship of time. At this stage, time becomes the measure of all things because, alongside money, it dictates the basic units and momentum of the entire social movement. The naturalistic cloak of "permanence" worn by time causes the entire course of human life to be consciously designed, allocated, and used according to the precision of measured time. All actions follow the standards of technized time, thereby giving rise to the time-faith that "time is money."
Third, the fetishistic attribute of time causes time to transform from an instrument into an end. Looking at the history of the development of the instrumentality of time, the change in time’s instrumental attribute is undoubtedly a process of increasing precision and positivism, conforming to the changes in human practical capacity to understand and transform the world—that is, the form of time essentially lies in satisfying the actual needs of people. In this sense, humans should possess absolute power over time; premised on conforming to its physical attributes, people should measure time according to the needs of their own development. However, in contemporary capitalist society, the "two sides of the same coin" relationship between time and money leads both to become concrete manifestations of capital. Time no longer exists as an instrumental object; rather, the establishment of a time-consciousness at the social level becomes the ultimate goal. This is what finally forms the fetishism of time.
The capitalist spiritual faith that "time is money" causes the natural meaning of time to become completely obliterated. Time is transformed from "natural time" into "social time." Naturally flowing time is invisibly instilled by capital with an inherent monetary and capital attribute. A modern time-consciousness—universally recognized and highly unified at the social level, characterized primarily by efficiency, punctuality, and standardization—permeates all walks of life. This highly conscious and universally popular time-consciousness provides a profound ideological foundation for the rapid turnover [13] and accelerated circulation of capital. This time-consciousness, with capital valorization as its ultimate aim, appears at the social level as a set of social norms and a consensus that conceals the nature of exploitation. To survive in society, people must follow the corresponding time norms; they even come to believe that these norms are beneficial to themselves. At this point, time completely escapes human control and mastery, turning instead into an alien force that governs and controls human beings. Due to the high degree of quantitative commensurability between time, money, and capital, time—like money—no longer serves as a means for the development of the individual and society, but becomes an end. As Nietzsche criticized, "When one fabricates an ideal world, one robs reality of its value, its meaning, its truthfulness... Mankind itself is blinded by the ideal, its instincts are minimized and become hypocritical—to the point of worshiping values contrary to reality, and only because of this deception does mankind fail to see prosperity, the future, and the sublime right to the future." When capitalist society takes the satisfaction of material desires as its perpetual and sole pursuit, no sacred or illusory religious faith can remain solid; only time and money, which allow people to immediately experience certainty through direct sensory reality, become the most reliable objects of pursuit. The spiritual comfort and psychological satisfaction that religion brought to people in traditional eras can be obtained in contemporary capitalism through "full compliance with and utilization of" time. The more thoroughly one complies with this time-consciousness, the more it signifies the acquisition of more money, social recognition, and a sense of honor; therefore, people strive to grasp, cherish, and utilize time to the utmost.
When time becomes an end in itself, it profoundly influences and reshapes the structure of human consciousness and social experience alongside the comprehensive alienation and inversion brought by capital regarding categories such as existence and consciousness, money and wealth, and production and consumption. It thus becomes an internal institutional imprint on people's spiritual world. The invasion and occupation of the human spiritual world by capital is the area where its influence is most profound and hidden. Once the time-consciousness of capital enters the human soul, it gives rise to a spiritual crisis of the capitalist world regarding the holistic distortion of human existence, development, and freedom.
III. Time Fetishism and the Production and Crisis of the Social Spirit
All innovations and adjustments of the capitalist system are manifested in the domination and disciplining of actual individuals, ultimately fulfilling the purpose of capital valorization. From the physical to the spiritual, no human is spared from the manipulation of the logic of capital. In contemporary capitalist society, the actual trend of the capitalization of social time fosters the deepening of time fetishism. The rich spiritual world of humanity is being eroded bit by bit by capitalized time until it is completely hollowed out and disintegrated. Capitalized time has a profound impact on the human state of existence. Just as Heidegger scrutinized human existence under the condition of modernity, it is necessary "to show time as the horizon for all understanding and interpretation of being." Under contemporary capitalist conditions, the human being is the terminal of the capitalist system's operation, and the human spiritual world is the living object of the logic of capital’s power of domination. As Marx said, in this state, "capital is independent and has individuality, while the living person is dependent and has no individuality." The fetishization of time leads to the birth of the capitalized persona of social time, which is the complete unification of the human spiritual world with capitalized time. All members of society are reduced to servants secretly controlled by time. In the face of the modern time mode, humans completely lose their original subjectivity, agency, and discourse power, and are imperceptibly governed by time fetishism. All of a person’s life-time is used to pursue immediate pleasure and insatiable material desires. The human spiritual world becomes an appendage of capital; due to a long-term lack of fulfillment and nourishment, it increasingly becomes empty and desolate.
First, the vulgarity of time and the closed nature of the spiritual world. "Vulgar time" (流俗时间) first appeared in Heidegger's critique of modernity. it refers to the fact that in highly rationalized and positivist contemporary capitalist society, "Dasein"—which possesses authenticity as the unification of reality and possibility for true human existence—is hidden, obscured, or even distorted. Consequently, in the reality of capitalist society, time is produced as a "thing-in-itself" (自在之物) external to human existence and activity. This produces a scientistic way of understanding time, initiated by Aristotle, which views time as "the measure of motion in respect of before and after." This view of time clearly conforms to the operational mode of a highly scientific and rationalized modern society, but in essence, it is a utilitarian view of time. Because it merely treats time as a mode of the object of actual existence and regards time as an objectified tool—using time to calculate and measure human practical output—it completely blocks out the ontological and existential dimensions of humans within time. In Heidegger’s work, "vulgar time" points to a closed state of human temporal existence, a state in which "temporality is congealed in the present." People lose the sense of transcendence, continuity, and possibility across the past, present, and future. They are fixed by this time system within a persistence of reality, losing freedom, individuality, and impulse. By severing the temporality of the existential realm itself, they eliminate the authenticity of their own existence and close themselves within a pre-determined reality.
In Marx’s work, the essence of "vulgar time" had long been revealed; it was precisely "the natural laws of the modern mode of production developing gradually out of existing relations." This points out that this highly abstract social time only possesses universal significance within capitalist relations of production; its essence is a reified time that has lost the possibility of freedom. This mode of social production also promotes the domination of human possibility by social time. This echoes the critique of Hegel’s closed view of historical time—where "everything finds its place"—by using the form of the logic of capital based on the mode of production to reveal the closed nature of the human spiritual world under the capitalist predicament. Precisely because quantified time was developed to satisfy the needs of the capitalist mode of production, it could, through the progress of the dominating power of actual production relations in the historical process, become an abstract standard in the social sense. Only then did "vulgar time" truly become a dominant force that is constantly reproduced. In contemporary capitalist society, time fetishism continuously reinforces the closed nature and "matter-of-factness" of the human spirit. The rational time-consciousness in the political, economic, and cultural production of the entire society is manifested in the numerous indicators, procedures, and norms in labor, and the countless entertainment and consumption activities in non-labor time. It strengthens the utilitarian nature of people's time experience across all dimensions and continuously enhances the conscious and unconscious state regarding the pursuit of worldly materials and wealth. The social masses become the objects and appendages of time domination and reproduction, and spiritual production evolves into a production that cannot escape instrumentalized time. In this process, people's spiritual world becomes increasingly impoverished, spiritual activities continue to degenerate, and those seeking transcendent freedom are obscured and dissolved. Human spiritual activities are guided toward consistency with the logic of capital using time for valorization. Therefore, Marx pointed out: "Even the highest forms of spiritual production receive acknowledgement and become pardonable in the eyes of the bourgeoisie only because they are presented as direct producers of material wealth and are mislabeled as such."
Second, the acceleration of time and the sense of emptiness in the spiritual world. Religious-like dependence on time leads people to voluntarily accept and obey the increasingly accelerated rhythm of society as a whole. Marx noted: "With the acquisition of new productive forces, men change their mode of production; and with the change in their mode of production, in their manner of making a living, they change all their social relations." The demand for capital valorization requires the continuous transformation of the specific modes of production relations and their social environment. Contemporary capitalism promotes a rapid time system on a society-wide scale, causing people to form entirely new social relations between person and person, and person and object. The highly efficient material production pursued universally by society comprehensively dominates human objectified relations. The spiritual dimension within social time gradually becomes blurred. Profound thoughts, noble souls, sound personalities, and an abundant spiritual world increasingly become luxuries or have even completely disappeared from this commodified world awash with material desires. "The infinity of the spirit becomes a very narrow finiteness; the speculative understanding of the spirit is degraded into a purely instrumental sensibility; the richness of the spirit is reduced to a one-dimensional material desire." To fill the indifference and cruelty brought about by the emptiness of the spiritual world, many people settle for the next best thing, turning to the pursuit of low-level, vulgar sensory stimulation and the satisfaction of material desires. Hartmut Rosa...
Hartmut Rosa [14] refers to contemporary capitalism as an "acceleration society." Building upon Marxist political economy, he has deepened the temporal critique of contemporary society, arguing that capital appreciation drives both individual temporal consciousness and the operational velocity of society as a whole. Consequently, all members of society are swept up in an acceleration society characterized by constant survival of the fittest. He points out that this leads to an ever-deepening alienation and estrangement in the relationships between subjects, objects, and practical actions. In Rosa’s logic, "people voluntarily do things they do not 'really' want to do," which leads to the temporal crisis of modernity. In contemporary capitalist society, people are busy all day long without knowing why, running constantly without knowing where, with labor saturating their life-time [15] yet devoid of any sense of living. On one hand, bolstered by internet information technology, the circulation of capital has accelerated to an unprecedented degree. This has shaped patterns such as "high-speed memory" and the experience of "information explosions," placing people in virtual spaces where digital media intensifies the transient and stimulating nature of spiritual experiences. The enormous flow of information and high-speed transmission ensure that spiritual acquisition remains superficial and sensory; thus, individuals are unconsciously regulated and exploited by information controlled by capital. On the other hand, the experience of acceleration in modernity has thoroughly reconstructed the relationships between the self and others. In the pursuit of time and money, driven by inner urgency, modern people evade deep reflection. Filled with apprehension, they continually lose deep self-awareness and become unable to perceive a direction in life. Furthermore, the resulting mental tension alienates them from traditional intimate relationships, leading to an increasing trend of individual atomization. The loneliness and disorientation brought by anxiety saturate people's spiritual worlds. Philosophers from Nietzsche to Benjamin and Agamben have all expressed this loss of spirit, emotion, and meaning under this model of life-time, where time itself becomes a value-laden end. Time fetishism directs human spiritual fulfillment toward money and material goods, which are precisely the most volatile and fluid of instruments. This reified pursuit keeps people in a state of high tension and trepidation, caught between seeking satisfaction and fearing loss. Consequently, they incessantly project their desires onto time, thirsting to gain a fleeting sense of security by controlling time and filling their life-time with material desires. In this repetitive cycle, material desires are constantly reproduced, and the spirit is increasingly hollowed out.
IV. Conclusion
Regarding the issue of time fetishism formed by capital modernity, thinkers from Nietzsche to Heidegger, and Simmel to Rosa, have profoundly reduced the spiritual pathology of this problem from various perspectives. These constitute the conceptual and ideal frameworks necessary for disenchanting capital-time and restoring the authenticity and free nature of life-time. However, they either place the solution in some form of spiritual awakening or fall into complete pessimism, precisely because they fail to see the mode of production as the universal factor playing the fundamental role behind social time. Marx, by contrast, provided a fundamental diagnosis and a radical practical prescription. Time fetishism, like all previous forms of fetishism, is determined by the production of surplus value within the accumulation of any form of modernity. In Marx’s view, the comprehensive alienation of human existence, daily life, and even life-time is deeply rooted in the internal structural contradictions of the capitalist mode of production, and is further reinforced by the total abstraction of time through a corresponding social temporal model. This has led to the birth of "empty time," which recognizes only matter and money rather than freedom, meaning, and the future. To dismantle this temporal abstraction and its fetishistic form, and to break the spiritual crisis produced under the temporal model of capital modernity, a Heideggerian symptomatic interpretation is clearly incomplete and non-radical. Fundamentally, we must still return to Marx’s practical action of "changing the world" rather than merely "interpreting the world." At present, it is imperative to shake off the unconscious and unreflective state regarding the problem of time fetishism and enter a state of conscious and profound reflection. We must truly expose the profit-seeking nature of the logic of capital and strive to elevate economic rationality to the level of political rationality. In essence, time fetishism is the expression of the logic of capital at this stage of world history. Only through the thorough sublation [16] and critical transcendence of the logic of capital can we welcome the true free time inherent in the stages of socialism and communism. This will allow people to emerge from the closed logic of capital-modernity time and achieve true enlightenment, making the practical pursuit of free time a universal historical force and ultimately realizing an open and free social time in the truest sense.