The Broken Social Pact. Work, Time and New Forms of Citizenship

With the end of social democracy, “one of the strongest symbolic images of the twentieth-century social contract has disappeared: the tripartition of time: eight hours of work, eight hours of rest, eight hours for love and leisure, while work time and life time now merge together in 24/7 capitalism. In today’s digital and transnational economy, one contributes to the creation of value even just by communicating on a smartphone. Resisting this new form of domination therefore requires reclaiming time, acting on a spatial scale that cannot be localist but must be transnational, just like the political, technological, and economic powers that currently control the world.