“Ragtime” is a novel that tells the story of the development of American capitalism before the out break of World War I. As a result of telling this story, the novel necessarily involves a sustained mediation on the fragmented and damaged nature of time at it appears in the capitalist mode of production. This paper will investigate this kind of production and will discuss the ways in which the novel serves to describe a particularly capitalist conception of nature. It will show that the novel mimics capitalist understandings of nature buy shows how the experience of the capitalist world actively refutes these ideas, especially as they are experienced by the least privileged within a society. By doing this it will prove that, according to the world of the novel, and indeed according to the world of the early 20th Century, a thinking of capitalism cannot be separated from this fragmented and compartmentalized thinking of time.

In Chapter 20 of the novel, one encounters the characters Morgan and Henry Ford. The latter is based on the famous individual who came to invent a revolutionary new mode of production that led to a situations in which products were able to be produced extremely quick through the mobilisation of a production line process. This famously had a dual effect on the work process. On the one hand it made this process much more efficient and served to fuel what is generally considered to be the economic boom in the first half of the 20th century. However it also led to a situation in which time itself became regimented and divided down to a microscopic level. In this process, it became possible to argue that nature cold be understood as some kind of a production line. However, this famously stated more about the nature of such production than it did about nature itself. Precisely this opinion is voiced by Morgan in the novel when he confidently tells Ford “that here are universal patterns of order and repetition that give meaning to the activity of this planet” (1975 111). He goes on to that he “has never considered the possibility that the employment of labour is in itself a harmonically unifying process apart from the enterprise in which it is engaged” but that he can now understand Ford’s production line as not simply a matter of making the most possible amount of profit but also of saying inherently true about the world itself (111). The reader is clearly not intended to believe that this is the case, and instead of convincing them that capitalist production represents nature, Morgan’s words can be seen to show the depths of capitalist ideology as they existed in the first half of the 20th century.

It is possible to contrast this view of the natural nature of capitalist social relations with what is presented of the strike that takes place in the novel and the effect that it has on the people who witness it and take part in it. In terms of the novel’s characters, then the key figure involved in the strike is Tateh, an immigrant Jew who moves through the course of the novel from possessing socialist politics to a more individualist and personally ambitious outlook. Despite this eventual change of heart, however, it is clear that Tateh’s own view on work as it takes place can be used to call into question the legitimacy of the capitalist ideology that is expressed elsewhere in the book. These descriptions take place most obviously in chapter 16, when Tateh comes to a new area of the country in order to seek work at a textile mill. The passages concerning the nature of his work stand in a marked contrast the Morgan’s own assertive and confident opinion that Fordist production is able to mirror exactly “nature.” The narrator tells us that “Tateh stood in front of a loom for fifty-six hours a week. His pay was just under six dollars. The family lived in a wooden tenement on a hill. They had no heat” (93). The style of this passage and the short sentences that Doctorow employs serve to draw direct attention to the sparsity of Tateh’s life and the matter of fact banality of what he is forced to endure in order to simply stay alive in these social conditions. There is nothing less natural than this apparent relation when it appears as if character’s action and options are continually mediated by the need for profit.

This creates a sense of broken causality, that is different from the organic whole that Morgan claims to see being expressed in Fordism. It is clear that the latter view point is only possible as a result of the suffering and control of many people. In Tateh’s experience one thing follows roughly and limply from another, rather than the sense of an over-arching organic whole that is so important to Morgan’s understanding of contemporary production. This leads, ultimately, to a situation in which everything that is unique about a person is sacrificed to production. Doctorow writes that; “[…] not the parts of the finished product must be interchangeable but who themselves build the products must be interchangeable parts” (104). It is only by resigning himself to these conditions and to the necessary compromise that they involve in terms of the possibility of living differently that Tateh is able to find a degree of individual happiness throughout the novel. Doctorow shows this change of heart in the lines; “Workers could strike and die but on the streets of the city an entrepeneur could cook sweet potato in a bucket of hot coals and sell it for two pennies” (103). Ultimately, Tateh chooses the route of the entrepreneur. Therefore, rather than affirming Morgan’s world view, the resignation that Tateh undergoes in the novel serves to effectively and aggressively refute it.

In conclusion, this paper has argued that “Ragtime” challenges the tendency to see capitalist social relations as “natural” or as expressing something about nature. From the perspective of property owners, their own mode of production appears to present the facts of nature itself given expression by production, while from the perspective of workers the choice is simply whether to survive while putting up minimal resistance to these relations or to accept them and behave as an individual. By dramatising this tension in the character of Tateh, Doctorow effectively dramatises the unnatural nature of capitalist relations, as well as the lived necessity of obeying them.