"...the Marxian tradition has made modern sleep a matter of alienation rather than belonging."

Benjamin Reiss on The Slumbering Masses : Sleep, Medicine, and Modern American Life and24/7 : Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep andDangerously Sleepy : Overworked Americans and the Cult of Manly Wakefulness

Sleep’s Hidden Histories

February 15th, 2014

"Closer to the concerns of the authors under review here, the Marxian tradition has made modern sleep a matter of alienation rather than belonging. In chapter 10 of Das Kapital (1867) — “The Working Day” — Marx himself described the process by which capital squeezed ever more labor out of the proletariat: “It reduces the sound sleep needed for the restoration, reparation, refreshment of the bodily powers to just so many hours of torpor as the revival of an organism, absolutely exhausted, renders essential.” The English labor historian E. P. Thompson elaborated on this theme in his classic essay “Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism” (1967), arguing that industrial labor relations were established on an entirely unnatural temporal system — clock time — divorced from the diurnal and seasonal rhythms that had guided preindustrial labor. Thompson had little to say about how circadian rhythms governing the biological sleep-wake cycle were affected by the wrenching of the laboring body into industrial time, but many of his sources — poems, sermons, moral reform tracts — warn of the perils of oversleeping, or improper sleeping, implicitly as a way of producing temporal compliance from workers: sleep, it seemed, needed to conform to the dictates of the new economic order."