Capitalism treats time as a scarce factor convertible into surplus profit

Evidence

In the second place, and quite independent of this historical dimension, time is a factor of production and therefore a scarce good when considered as a resource within the capitalist process of production. Since gains in time can immediately be converted into the (surplus) profits necessary for survival, time comes to stand out as a factor of competition in the modern economic system, one related in multiple ways to money and acceleration (of processes of development, production, and circulation). This explains in great measure why the acceleration imperatives of modernity aim at the instrumental enhancement of velocities (in transportation, communication, production, and organization) and an increase in the speed of capital circulation and also clarifies the resulting alterations in ways of dealing with time. — Hartmut Rosa, Social Acceleration, 194

Categorization

• DEFINE: Frames the scarcity-and-profit logic that will later be called the escalation principles driving acceleration.
• XREF: connects to: Debt functions as a capture of subjects’ future time under contemporary capitalism — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished…, 1666; Eroded economic security dissolves time boundaries toward always-monetizable hours — Jenny Odell, How to Do Nothing: Resisting the…, 85; Service industries can extract surplus value and prolong capitalism’s viability — Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination: A History…, 132 (+2 more)

Broader Connections

• Eroded economic security dissolves time boundaries toward always-monetizable hours #expands (0.90) — Jenny Odell, How to Do Nothing, 85
• Surplus value arises from the gap between labour time given and reproduction cost #expands (0.82) — Dirk Braunstein, Adorno’s Critique of Political Economy, 1364
• Service industries can extract surplus value and prolong capitalism’s viability #expands (0.75) — Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination, 132
• Capitalism’s defining move is abstracting exchange value from ordinary life processes #expands (0.75) — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection, 146