The Thief of Time

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 In Capital, Volume One, Karl Marx shows that capitalism is the thief of time. In pursuit of ever-greater profits, capitalism increases either the working hours or the productivity of those hours in order to cream off the surplus value from the wages paid to workers for maintaining bare life. Individual capitalists cannot help doing so if their business is to stay afloat in the market competition. Since capitalism is pretty much the global mode of production now, national economies cannot escape the logic either. If they cannot exploit their own citizens due to labor laws, they will exploit vulnerable migrant children. 

Written in the 1950s, when the American postwar economy was supposedly booming, the play A Raisin in the Sun, by Lorraine Hansberry, revolves ostensibly around a Black family's difficulties in purchasing and owning a house in a white Chicago neighborhood. Yet, to put the emphasis on the acquisition of a property is to reify a bourgeois dream, as Hansberry's leftist comrades accused her of doing in the play. A signed-up member of the American Communist Party, Hansberry is doing something far more interesting, and subversive, in her play, I think. She is making not just space, but time, lost and regained, visible. 

I'm thinking of the play's epigraph, the poem by Langston Hughes that begins "What happens to a dream deferred?" I'm thinking of how the scenes of the play are marked so specifically in time. After Act II Scene Two, Scene Three takes place "one week later." Then Act III takes place "An hour later." I'm thinking of the lifetime of menial work that Walter Senior underwent to leave his family with an insurance payout of $10,000 after his death. I'm thinking of the days that Walter Junior spends driving his white boss around. I'm thinking of his despair after his mother defers his dream of bossing a liquor store: 

"Mama—you don't know all the things a man what got leisure can find to do in this city . . . What's this—Friday night? Well—Wednesday I borrowed Willy Harris' car and I went for a drive . . . just me and myself and I drove and drove . . . Way out . . . way past South Chicago, and I parked the car and I sat and looked at the steel mills all day long. I just sat in the car and looked at them big black chimneys for hours. Then I drove back and I went to the Green Hat. (Pause) And Thursday—Thursday I borrowed the car again and I got in it and I pointed it the other way and I drove the other way—for hours—way, way up to Wisconsin, and I looked at the farms. I just drove and looked at the farms. Then I drove back and I went to the Green Hat. (Pause) And today—today I didn't get the car. Today I just walked. All over the Southside. And I looked at the Negroes and they looked at me and finally I just sat down on the curb at Thirty-nine and South Parkway and I just sat there and watched the Negroes go by. And then I went to the Green Hat. You all sad? You all depressed? And you know where I am going right now—" 

Is there a more magnificent illustration of a person's alienation from their own labor? Refusing to drive his boss any more, Walter Junior drives himself south, then north, walks on the third day, only to finish up at the bar each time. His self-alienation is so deep that he cannot see that the privately-owned mills and farms are, no, not the solutions, but the sources of his despair. He sees his fellow Black workers with pity or indifference, but he does not recognize any solidarity with them. He has stolen leisure time back from a man, but he has surrendered his life to capitalism. By making visible the time lost and "regained," Hansberry's play demystifies the workings of capital. Truly to live freely, so as to flourish, is to be able to dispose of one's time according to one's free will and to have others to do the same. 

Jee Leong Koh 

March 2, 2023