Timewealth: Reclaiming time for a post-growth future

The concept of timewealth offers a powerful lens for rethinking our relationship to time, and in doing so, it provides an organising framework for addressing the interlocking crises of social inequality, environmental degradation, and economic precarity. By examining the temporal underpinnings of our current systems and envisioning alternatives, timewealth can unify diverse social movements under a shared aspiration: the liberation of time from the constraints of productivity and commodification. Social movements focused on labour, environmental justice, feminist and care activities, and post-growth politics already recognize the need to decouple well-being from economic growth. However, they often lack a unifying framework to articulate how their objectives intersect at the level of time. Timewealth provides a shared vision for reimagining time as a collective good rather than a resource to be extracted and commodified. In productivist consumer societies, the time that matters is the time used to produce commodities for exchange, quickening the cycle between investment, profit, and further investment, which builds up productive capacity while simultaneously reducing the labour needed to produce the same commodities in a given period. André Gorz and other degrowth theorists have long advocated a shift from productivity to an equitable distribution of free time. While post-growth theorists have argued that reducing time at work contributes to a broader transition that reduces environmental harms and increases workers’ autonomy, there has been limited exploration of how the social relation of time structures production. Postwork theorists, such as Kathi Weeks, have offered a radical rethinking of time, challenging the supremacy of productivity and the moral imperative to work, arguing for the value of unproductive time as essential to individual and collective well-being, while the popularity of authors such as Jenny Oddel are proving the importance of the topic of time in an age of burnout. Nevertheless, postwork and burnout literature has largely failed to make the broader connections between time, economic production, and the environmental crises. A socialist focus on use-value time—activities that meet real human needs—especially through care work and reproductive labour, can at first seem like a natural corollary of post-growth critique. Yet, even this focus on use-value can run the risk of recreating 'productive time' even in post-capitalist societies, because it is still focused on production even if it is to improve living conditions. What is missing in both capitalism and socialism is a space for what might be called useless value. The freedom to pursue non-productive activities or timewealth is not unproductive in a pejorative sense, but rather a welcomed 'unproductivity'—time spent in pursuit of experiences that enrich life. If capital/wealth comes from an ability to claim someone else's (life)time to further the ability to make more such claims, a new kind of collective wealth based on constraint rather than expansion would free up time while requiring new ways of sharing unpleasant tasks. To consider our relation to time is to ask fundamental questions about how we live, direct the activity of others, what wealthand power are—and how existing society could be transformed.