The employer is busy trying to get more labor out of the worker, while the worker is trying to keep herself from being worked to death.

“The smallest act in the most limited circumstances bears the seed of the same boundlessness, because one deed, and sometimes one word, suffices to change every constellation.” In that sense, the issue of time is also inextricable from the issue of free will.

For Fleming, a “necessary connection between the numbers of the hours and the position of the sun in each local firmament” was something inconvenient and outdated.

But even before unions began forming in the United States, northern industrialists had already begun to act collectively, agreeing to institute certain policies or to blacklist employees across the board.

someone who possesses his own “means of production” (of ideas).

Keeping this field in sight is all the more important amid exhortations to “slow down” for which one person’s slowing down requires someone else to speed up.

the clock is just one tool among many for reckoning time, and its full meaning emerges only when it’s joined with a particular goal or cosmology.

“none of us who toil for our daily bread are free. At one time…we were chattel slaves; today we are, one and all, white and black, wage slaves.”

When the relationship of time to literal money is expressed as a natural fact, it obscures the political relationship between the seller of time and its buyer. This may seem obvious, but if time is money, it is so in a way that’s different for a worker than for an employer.