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industrialization fostered the growth of late modern life and modern culture.
Berman's (1982) celebrated and eloquent account distinguishes between
two interrelated dimensions of modernity, modernism—the culture and dom-
inant form of consciousness typical of the modern world—and moderniza-
tion as a process of social and economic change, the continual obliteration
and renewal of landscapes, communities, and ideas. Modernization entailed
transformations ranging from class struggle, demographic upheaval, and
technological innovation to new systems of urban growth, state bureaucra-
cies, mass communication, and the world economy, all of which bound
diverse peoples around the globe together in powerful, complex ways. Berman
notes (p. 15) that modernity “pours us all into a maelstrom of perpetual
disintegration and renewal, of struggle and contradiction, of ambiguity and
anguish. To be modern is to be part of a universe in which, as Marx said, 'all
that is solid melts into air.' ” Modernism is thus simultaneously a rich,
vibrant vision of limitless possibilities and a set of impersonal forces and
processes that imprison people in webs of anomie, annihilating tradition
and leaving them
floating in oceans of alienation. In this world, stability
equals entropy and decay: modernity is the repeated celebration of the
new and burial of the old. The very power of capitalism as an economic and
social force stems from its ceaseless pursuit of the new and the concomitant
destruction of the old.
As with its early modern counterpart, commodi
fl
cation was central to late
modern time-space compression: “Time became money once it had become a
tool (or a weapon?) deployed primarily in the ongoing e
fi
ort of overcoming
resistance of space: shortening distances, stripping the 'remoteness' of the
meaning of an obstacle, let alone of a limit, to human ambition” (Bauman
2000:112). The onset of labor commodi
ff
cation was the piece-work system
widely used before the Industrial Revolution; its spatial correlate was the
“putting out” system in which workers worked at home, mostly in garment-
making. Such a system, without intricate coordination of di
fi
ff
erent work
tasks, did not demand a strictly de
ned and ordered sense of time, and task-
orientation still prevailed (Thompson 1967). By the late eighteenth century,
the enclosure movement steadily ensured that rural labor had few choices but
to work in the cities, where they became subjected to the time discipline of
mercantile capitalism. With the incorporation of workers into factories, a
distinctively new work ethos emerged: the commodi
fi
cation of labor time
split the day into time owned by capitalists—work time—and time owned by
the worker, or leisure. This division formed one of the primary points of class
con
fi
ict over the next several centuries, and was strongly resisted, albeit
unsuccessfully, especially among artisans undergoing prolonged de-skilling
and standardization of their craft. In raising productivity, industrialization
axiomatically increased the value of time, so that the opportunity costs of
absenteeism greatly exceeded what they used to be. As E.P. Thompson
(1967:90) famously wrote,
fl
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