Critical Dialogue

TL;DR: The Fight for Time analyzes contemporary capitalism through engagement with the subjective figure of the migrant day laborer in the United States. It explores precarity as an experience that encapsulates a wider condition and a process that displaces fixity.

Abstract: The Fight for Time is a timely and welcome intervention in a number of fields, ranging from political theory to labor and urban studies and from migration to Latino studies. It is a scholarly as well as a political intervention, written on the basis of a deep and prolonged collaboration with day laborers and worker centers in Seattle and Portland. The gambit of Paul Apostolidis’s book is to write an analysis of contemporary capitalism through engagement with and from the perspective of a particular subjective figure: the migrant day laborer in the United States. This is a challenging and important task that both pushes critical theory to an encounter with a wide range of material circumstances and invigorates the author’s approach in ways answerable to the experiences and conditions of the subjects at stake. Contemporary capitalism is usually investigated in critical debates with a privileged reference point to such questions as financialization, digital labor, or the communicative dimensions of neoliberalism. Apostolidis does not deny the relevance of such approaches. But he is convinced that the pains and joys, the desperation, and weird sense of responsibility cultivated by day laborers provide a particularly effective angle from which to grasp a more generalized dynamic of precarity that is reshaping labor and life in ways both subjectively embodied and objectively rooted. It is important to note that in so doing the author of The Fight for Time never forgets the specificity of the condition of day laborers. Rather, he uses the rhetorical figure of the “synecdoche” to register the wider resonances of his analysis and findings. Without claiming the full depth of ethnographic immersion, Apostolidis takes seriously his engagement (along with two research assistants) with the daily operations of worker centers, with the messy environment of the “corner” where day laborers assemble to fight for a job, and with their conviviality and daily strivings. This approach means that the theoretical aspects of the book are enmeshed within practices of thick description and popular education that yield “generative themes” based in the workers’ own experiences and struggles. Thinkers like Kathi Weeks, Lauren Berlant, or Jodi Dean, as well as the panoply of autonomist Marxism, inform the analysis in ways that Apostolidis both embraces and pushes beyond. The tradition of critical pedagogy pioneered by Paulo Freire in Brazil provides a basis for the whole work and is dealt with extensively in the book’s first chapter. The constant interplay between theme and theory provides Apostolidis with an original and responsive means of conducting “militant investigation” on the basis of a radical political commitment. The politics of day labor that emerges from the book is shaped by the reciprocity of exchanges between the researcher and day laborers and a movement that is never linear and always remains conscious of the power relations at stake. Together, these elements constitute a method that at once allows the reader to grasp the specificity of the condition and movements of day laborers and produces the opening that is encapsulated by the figure of the synecdoche. The book begins with a series of theses on precarity, which for Apostolidis offer a kind of bridge between the experiences of day laborers and the wider production of subjectivity under contemporary capitalism. The debate on precarity has been lively and wide in scope over recent years, with approaches ranging from an emphasis on structural dimensions to analyses of the remaking of class and to ontological and existential claims about the human condition. Apostolodis skillfully negotiates this maze of positions, staking out a focus on time as a means of grasping the salient characteristics of precarity and precarization. Precarity, in this book, is both an experience that encapsulates a wider condition and a process that displaces fixity by subjecting workers to a harsh regime of discipline and control. Time is both homogeneous and fragmented in an age of precarity, as the explosion of the unity of the working day combines with an ever-growing domination of the “empty and homogeneous” time of capital valorization and accumulation. As Apostolidis writes, “throughout the employment hierarchy working people are running out of time and living out of time” (p. 8, emphasis in original). For day laborers this situation mandates not only a condition of suffering that often turns into desperation but also a compulsion to