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Time Contradictions of Capitalism*
1. Introduction
The logic of capital is essentially temporal; therefore, to understand the inherent contradictions of capitalism, we have to understand its temporal dimension.
As Marx noted, capitalism has to be seen as a process in which "the circulation of money as capital...is an end in itself, since the expansion of value only exists in this continuously renewed movement."' The circulation of capital is essentially temporal in that it is an ongoing process, marked by a continuous and progressive temporality, the time of expanding capital. We are aware that the spatial and temporal aspects are intimately interwoven, constituting a dialectical whole where one dimension only exists in relation to, and by means of, the other. However, for purpose of analysis, we will separate them in order to argue that while capital has an inherent tendency to expand in spatial terms (geographically, increasingly extending throughout the globe, as well as socially and ecologically, encompassing more and more social, cultural, political and biospherical domains under its rules), this expansion is subordinated to the temporal logic of its ends: the accumulation of capital itself. As Altvatar put it, "At first space is conquered extensively; subsequently, it is capitalized intensively."
To sum-up, the essential means of expansion of capitalism as a spatio-temporal process lies in its spatial dimension, while the essence of its ends and logic (the expansion and accumulation of capital itself) is given by its temporal dimension.
What Martin O'Connor has referred to as the process of the capitalization of nature3 represents a subordination of biospherical temporality to the temporal logic of capital, whenever capital expands spatially to new natural domains. The fundamental contradictions that arise in this process are the contradictions between these different temporalities, the issue that will constitute the core of the present analysis. Further, the aim of this article is to analyze these contradictions, which have been termed by James O'Connor the second contradiction of capitalism, by trying to understand and explain its underlying temporal logic.
In the first part, I will briefly discuss the dependency of the capitalist system on an instrumental, purely quantitative external and abstract time concept (the time of mechanical clocks) at the expense of the qualitative, internal and process-related time of systems. In...