>From the Lingua Franca article:
This is one cold war you can blame on
> détente. In
> graduate school at the University of Michigan in the
> early 1960s, co-
> author Robinson helped launch the first
> international social survey
> to go behind the Iron Curtain. Time use was chosen
> as the survey's
> focus; among other advantages, time was the most
> politically neutral
> subject anyone could think of.
The final clause is the most astounding statement I have read about any political or scholarly subject in as long as I can remember. Especially in this context. Time is after all the core of Marx's critique of political economy -- not just in the refinement and debate (please let it rest) about value theory, where value is identified with socially necessary labor _time_, but also in the theory of capitalist exploitation that makes the appropriation of the worker's time and his/her life the focus of the critique of capital itself. (This was a point, btw, where Heidegger, who wrote a thing or two worth reading about being and time and even alienation, gave respectful acknowledgment to old Chuck.) I guess it goes to show how completely both sides of the ex-Cold War had missed Marx's point.
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