The recently released film In Time, staring Justin Timberlake and Amanda Seyfried, depicts a dystopian future where time, rather than money, acts as the currency. This film gives a Marxist critique of capitalism with a technological twist. In doing so, it reflects the cultural fear associated with life-prolonging technologies. At the same time, the film falls victim to the overly structural depictions common in popular Marxist tropes, and overly individualist claims about human nature—failing to make a connection between the two.

I begin here with a (mostly spoiler-free) synopsis of the film: As noted above, the film is premised on a social system that uses time as its currency. All citizens are genetically engineered to live to 25 years of age, at which time they stop aging and their clock starts running. Workers earn time for their wages, and pay for goods and services with time. If/when a person’s time runs out, that person dies. Citizens are separated into time zones, organized by an abundance or lack of time. The protagonist Will Salas lives in the ghetto. He and his fellow ghetto-dwellers live literally day-to-day and work in factories that produce units of time. In an unusual turn of events, a very wealthy and very old man gives Salas over 100 years. Salas then travels across time zones, ending up in New Greenwich, the wealthiest time zone. This elite enclave houses those who have enough time to buy immortality. Those who live in New Greenwich own the houses, stores, and factories in the ghetto. Salas attempts to steal time from the citizens of New Greenwich and disperse it among the ghetto-dwellers—redistributing the wealth more evenly

Here we can see a very basic Marxist critique of capitalism. Those who own the means of production (citizens from the New Greenwich time zone) control and exploit the ghetto-dwellers, who have only their labor to sell. In the factories, workers produce units of time that they cannot afford, and must increasingly meet rising quotas. Simultaneously, they struggle to afford life-sustaining goods (food and shelter) due to strategically imposed increases in living costs. Regularly, ghetto-dwellers can be found dead on the street, having “clocked out” (i.e. run out of time).  Literally then, the capitalist class sucks the life out of the proletariat.

The twist, of course, is that wealth disparities are measured in time, and humans are genetically engineered for this market system. Here, the film reflects two interrelated cultural fears about life-prolonging technologies: 1) unequal distribution of resources, leading to a literal dying out of the lower social classes and 2) overpopulation.

Cultural debates rage over the development of life-prolonging technologies. Although the potential to extend life considerably is close at hand (and some, like Ray Kurzweil, believe that this ability to prolong life is already here), many fear that these technologies will lead inevitably (and ironically) to the death and destruction of the human race.

One such fear is based in the unequal distribution of resources. The fear is that these technologies will be extremely expensive and available only to the elite, literally privileging the lives of the wealthy over those of the poor. This fear is realized in the film, as wealth (i.e. time) is distributed strictly across class lines. Although all citizens have the potential to live forever, very few actually do. Instead, those with the greatest amount of wealth (i.e. those who own the means of production) live long and youthful lives, while ghetto-dwellers die in the streets at very young ages.

A second (but related) fear is that of overpopulation. The earth can support a finite amount of life, and widespread immortality will result in more life than the earth can sustain. This of course circles back to the first fear, in that immortality can only be available if it is limited to a small number of recipients, and balanced by a decreased life-span among the majority. This is reflected in the film, as Salas is let in on the insider secret that “for a few to be immortal, many must die.” This is the rationale given by New Greenwich citizens for cutting wages, increasing quotas, and raising the cost of living—resulting inevitably and purposefully in the deaths of ghetto-dwellers. In short, the simultaneous preservation of the earth and maintenance of personal wealth for those in the upper echelons comes at the highest cost for those in the under classes.

Interestingly, the film roots the realization of these fears in the evils of human nature. The system is shown to prevail due simultaneously to insatiable greed on the part of the capitalists (i.e. New Greenwich citizens), and the greedy hopes of the underclass. For the former, this is rooted in the desire for infinite growth, while for the latter, it is rooted in the drive for upward mobility and the (allusive) potential to achieve immortality. In a poignant monologue, an elite New Greenwich capitalist deflates Salas by telling him that a re-distribution of wealth will be inevitably undermined, as there will always be those who desire immortality, and they will reproduce the system to achieve it.

These assumptions about human greed are in direct opposition to works of Max Weber, who demonstrates in his famous work on the Protestant Ethic that when left to their own devices, humans do the absolute minimum to acquire exactly (but no more than) they need. The Protestant Ethic and related Spirit of Capitalism, are therefore cultural and structural productions. In other words, the drive for personal maximization at any cost is in direct contradiction to human nature.

With that said, I would be remiss to argue that assumptions of human greed are without base. We are in the midst of an international revolution (or at least a lot of really really big movements) based upon the exploitation of the many for the extreme benefit of a few. Indeed, individuals have, do, and will likely continue, to take self-interested actions for purposes of personal gain—even as these gains come at very high costs to many.

The connection then, that this film and that many Marxist tropes fail to make, is between structure, culture, and individual social actors. Cultures and structures impact not only institutions and social systems, but also how we relate to each other, how we are in the world, and what it means to be human. Greed then, is a socially produced and socially reinforced way of being human in the world. As such, dystopian fears about life-prolonging technologies are not un-contextualized fears about the technologies themselves, but about the ways in which these technologies will fit and work within the structural and cultural realities of the time.