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CHAPTER 10: THE WORKING DAY

Chapter 10 is constructed in a different way and written in a different style than are the preceding chapters. It is light on theory and laden with historical detail. Yet it also invokes abstract categories not yet encountered. This is so because Marx here focuses on the history of class struggle over the length of the working day. I have commented before on the complex interweaving of logical and historical argumentation in Capital and for the most part argued that we are on safer ground with the logical argument. But here it is the historical narrative that counts—though it is not bereft of theoretical significance. We here encounter a deep theorization of the nature of time and temporality under capitalism at the same time as we more clearly see why a capitalist mode of production is necessarily constituted through and by class struggle.

Marx begins by reminding us that there is a world of difference between the labor theory of value and the value of labor-power. The labor theory of value deals with how socially necessary labor-time is congealed in commodities by the laborer. This is the standard of value represented by the money commodity and by money in general. The value of labor-power, on the other hand, is simply the value of that commodity sold in the market as labor-power. While this commodity is like other commodities in certain respects, it also has some special qualities because there here enters in a historical and moral element. A failure to distinguish between the value of labor-power and the labor theory of value can generate fundamental misunderstandings.

“We began with the assumption,” writes Marx, “that labour-power is bought and sold at its value” and that “its value, like that of all other commodities, is determined by the labour-time necessary to produce it” (340). This is equivalent to the labor-time taken to produce those commodities needed to reproduce the laborer at a given standard of living. Marx assumes that this value is fixed, even though we know (as does he) that it is perpetually changing, depending on the costs of commodities, the state of civilization and the state of class struggle.

As workers add value to commodities in the labor process, there arrives a point in the day when workers will have created the exact equivalent of the value of their own labor-power. Let us suppose, says Marx, that this occurs after six hours of laboring. Surplus-value arises because workers labor beyond the number of hours it takes to reproduce the value equivalent of their labor-power. How many extra hours do they work? That depends on the length of the working day. This length is not something that can be negotiated in the market as a form of commodity exchange in which equivalent exchanges for equivalent (as is the case with wages). It is not a fixed but a fluid quantity. It can vary from six hours to ten hours to twelve hours to fourteen hours, with an outer limit of twenty-four hours—which is impossible because of “the physical limits to labour-power,” and because “the worker needs time in which to satisfy his intellectual and social requirements … The length of the working day therefore fluctuates within boundaries both physical and social” (341).

Marx then sets up a fictitious discussion between a capitalist and a laborer. The capitalist, as purchaser of the labor-power, says he has the right to use it as long as he can. He is, after all, “only capital personified” (recall that Marx deals with roles, not persons). “His soul is the soul of capital,” and “capital has one sole driving force, the drive to valorize itself, to create surplus-value.” Capital, Marx says, “is dead labour which, vampire-like”—and this is a chapter where we’ll get a lot of vampires and werewolves running around, a major departure from usual modes of political-economic theorizing—“lives only by sucking living labour, and lives the more, the more labour it sucks.” If the laborer calls time-out or takes time off, “he robs the capitalist … The capitalist therefore takes his stand on the law of commodity-exchange. Like all other buyers, he seeks to extract the maximum possible benefit from the use-value of his commodity” (342).

Workers, unlike machines and other forms of constant capital, answer back. They note that they own this property called labor-power and that their interest is to conserve its value for future use. The capitalist has no right to squeeze so much out of them in each day as to shorten their working life. This is, says the worker,

against our contract and the law of commodity exchange. I therefore demand a working day of normal length, and I demand it without any appeal to your heart, for in money matters sentiment is out of place … I demand a normal working day because, like every other seller, I demand the value of my commodity. (343)

Notice, both workers and capitalists take their positions according to the laws of exchange. Marx is not, as you might expect from a revolutionary thinker, advocating abolition of the wages system, but has both the workers and the capitalists agree to abide by the laws of market exchange, equivalent for equivalent. The only issue concerns how much use-value (the capacity for congealing values in commodities) the laborer is going to give up to the capitalist. Marx makes this move because, as I have emphasized, a key objective in Capital is to deconstruct the utopian propositions of classical liberal political economy on their own terms. “The capitalist maintains his right as a purchaser when he tries to make the working day as long as possible,” and

the worker maintains his right as a seller when he wishes to reduce the working day to a particular normal length. There is here therefore an antinomy, of right against right, both equally bearing the seal of the law of exchange. Between equal rights, force decides. Hence, in the history of capitalist production, the establishment of a norm for the working day presents itself as a struggle over the limits of that day, a struggle between collective capital, i.e. the class of capitalists, and collective labour, i.e. the working class. (344)

So finally, after 344 pages, we get to the idea of class struggle. Finally!

There are a number of issues that call for clarification here. The acceptance by both sides of a notion of “rights” is a statement of fact concerning the hegemony of bourgeois notions of rights. But Marx immediately indicates that the problem of the length of the working day cannot be solved by appeal to rights and the laws and legalities of exchange (this parallels his earlier attack on Proudhon’s concept of eternal justice). Issues of this kind can be resolved only through class struggle, in which “force” decides between “equal rights.” This finding has ramifications for understanding the politics of contemporary capitalism. In recent times, there has been a remarkable upsurge in “rights talk,” and a lot of political energy has been invested in the idea that the pursuit of individual human rights is a way (if not the way) to shape a more humane capitalist system. What Marx is signaling here is that there is no way that many of the important questions posed in rights terms can be resolved without being reformulated in class-struggle terms. Amnesty International, for example, deals well enough with political and civil rights but has a hard time extending its concerns to economic rights because there is no way that these can be resolved without taking a side, either that of capital or that of labor. So you can see Marx’s point. There is no way to adjudicate “fairly” between equal rights (both bearing the seal of the law of exchange). All you can do is to fight for your side of the argument. This chapter therefore ends on a very skeptical note about some “pompous catalogue of ‘the inalienable rights of man’,” as opposed to what can be achieved through class struggle (416).

“Force,” in this context, doesn’t necessarily mean physical force (though there have clearly been instances when this has been crucial). The main thrust of this chapter concerns political force, the capacity to mobilize and to build political alliances and institutions (such as trade unions) to influence a state apparatus that has the power to legislate a “normal” working day. In Marx’s account, there are moments of possibility that can be grasped or lost, depending on the contingencies of the political situation and the relations of force in play. The technique here is similar to that so superbly represented in Marx’s study in The Eighteenth Brumaire of how Louis Bonaparte came to power in France in the wake of the failed 1848 revolution in Paris. The materials in this chapter shed a special light on Marx’s way of jointly pursuing a theory of a capitalist mode of production on the one hand and a deep understanding of processes of historical transformation of actually existing capitalist social formations on the other. Class-struggle outcomes are not determined in advance.

The introduction of class struggle marks a radical departure from the tenets of both classical and contemporary economic theory. It radically changes the language in which the economy is depicted and shifts the focus of concern. Introductory courses in economics are unlikely ever to focus on the length of the working day as a serious issue. It was not discussed in classical political economy, either. Yet historically there has been a monumental and ongoing struggle over the length of the working day, the working week, the working year (paid vacations) and the working life (the retirement age), and this struggle is still with us. This is clearly a fundamental aspect of capitalist history and a central issue in a capitalist mode of production. What are we to make of economic theories that ignore it?

Marx’s value theory, in contrast, leads directly into this central question. This is so because value is socially necessary labor-time, which means that time is of the essence within capitalism. As the old saying has it, “Time is money!” Control over time, other people’s time in particular, has to be collectively fought over. It cannot be traded. Class struggle therefore has to move center stage in political-economic theory as well as into all attempts to understand the historical and geographical evolution of capitalism. It is at this point in Capital that we can start to appreciate the “use-value” of Marx’s labor theory of value and of surplus-value. And while it would be wrong to treat this as some kind of empirical proof of the theoretical apparatus, it certainly illustrates its utility when it comes to the practice of theoretically informed empirical inquiry.

So how, then, does Marx lead us through this history of struggle over the length of the working day? He begins by noting that capitalism is not the only kind of society in which surplus labor and a surplus product is extracted for the benefit of some ruling class:

Wherever a part of society possesses the monopoly of the means of production, the worker, free or unfree, must add to the labour-time necessary for his own maintenance an extra quantity of labour-time in order to produce the means of subsistence for the owner of the means of production. (344)

But under capitalism, surplus labor is converted into surplus-value. So the production of a surplus product is a means for the capitalist to gain surplus-value. This imposes particular qualities on capitalist exploitation because value accumulation in money-form, as we earlier saw, is without limit.

In any economic formation of society where the use-value rather than the exchange-value of the product predominates, surplus labour will be restricted by a more or less confined set of needs, and … no boundless thirst for surplus labour will arise from the character of production itself. (345)

Furthermore, because this appropriation occurs in a society characterized by wage labor, laborers are not going to experience their surplus-value production in the same way that serfs and slaves experience surplus labor (the fetishism of market exchange hides it). Marx uses the corvée system in central Europe as an illustration. Here, the laborer was forced to contribute a certain number of labor days to the landowner such that the appropriation of surplus labor is totally transparent. The freeing of the serfs through the Russian edict of 1831 actually created a situation in which the corvée system that replaced it, organized under the Règlement organique, allowed certain definitions of a day’s work to be made fluid and open. The landowners (the boyars) argued that a day’s labor is not measured by an actual day, but by how much work should be accomplished. This work requirement could not possibly be done in a day, so that it took more and more actual days to do a formal day’s work, until “the 12 corvée days of the Règlement organique … amount to 365 days in the year” (348).

There is the germ of a very important idea here which we are going to encounter several times in Capital. The measure of time is flexible, it can be stretched out and manipulated for social purposes. In this instance, 12 labor days become 365 actual days. This social manipulation of time and temporality is a fundamental feature of capitalism also. As soon as the extraction of surplus labor-time becomes fundamental to the replication of class relations, then the question of what time is, who measures it, and how temporality is to be understood moves to the forefront of analysis. Time is not simply given; it is socially constructed and perpetually subject to reconstruction (just think, for example, how time horizons for decision making in, say, the financial sector have shifted in recent years). In the Règlement organique case, the stretching of time was obvious. Laborers knew full well how much surplus labor they were giving up to the lord and how time stretching by a ruling class contributed to this result. But the thrust of the Factory Acts in Britain in the nineteenth century—the centerpiece of much of this chapter—was very different: it was to “curb capital’s drive towards a limitless draining away of labour-power by forcibly limiting the working day on the authority of the state, but a state ruled by capitalist and landlord” (348).

Marx’s formulation poses an important question: why would a state ruled by capitalist and landlord agree to, or even contemplate, curbing the length of the working day? So far in Capital we have only encountered the figures of the laborer and the capitalist, so what on earth is the landlord doing here? Clearly, as Marx seeks to analyze a real historical situation, he has to look at the existing class configuration and how class alliances might work when the workers do not have direct access to state power. The British state in the first half of the nineteenth century was essentially organized through the power relation of capitalists and landlords, and it would have been impossible to analyze the politics of the period without paying attention to the role of the landed aristocracy. The power of the working-class movement was in the background. “Apart from the daily more threatening advance of the working-class movement,” Marx writes,

the limiting of factory labour was dictated by the same necessity as forced the manuring of English fields with guano. The same blind desire for profit that in the one case exhausted the soil had in the other case seized hold of the vital force of the nation at its roots. Periodical epidemics speak as clearly on this point as the diminishing military standard of height in France and Germany. (348)

If labor is a key resource, like the land, in the creation of national wealth, and if it is overexploited and degraded, then the capacity to continue production of surplus-value is undercut. But it is also in the state’s interest to have laborers who can become an effective military force. The health and fitness of the working classes is therefore of political and military interest (as is remarked in the lengthy footnote [348–9]). In the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–1, for example, the rapid defeat of the French at the hands of the Germans was in part attributed to the superior health of the German peasantry relative to the impoverished French peasantry and working class. The political implication is that it is militarily dangerous to permit the degradation of the working classes. This issue became important in the US during World War II, particularly when it came to mobilizing elements from impoverished and in some instances racially distinct populations.

The British Factory Acts, which Marx focuses on, were imposed by the state and designed for both economic and political/military reasons, to limit the exploitation of living labor and prevent its excessive degradation. The law is one thing, but enforcement is another. This brings us to the important figure of the factory inspectors: who were they and where did they came from? They were certainly not radical Marxists! They came from the professional bourgeoisie. They were civil servants. But they did a pretty good job of collecting information, and they pushed hard to discipline the industrial interest according to state requirements. Marx would not have been able to write this chapter without the abundant information they supplied. So why would a state regulated by capital and landlords employ factory inspectors to do this work? This is where “the degree of civilization in a country” enters into the picture, as well as bourgeois morality and the military concerns of the state. In nineteenth-century Britain, there were strong currents of bourgeois reformism (e.g., Charles Dickens) that thought some of the labor practices then in play should not exist in any civilized society. This introduces into the discussion that same “historical and moral element” which affects the value of labor-power. So while the working-class movement was indeed growing stronger, it would not have gotten as far as it did without the assistance of bourgeois reformism, particularly that strain represented by the factory inspectors.

The factory inspectors had to confront the problem of how the working day might be defined in practice. At what times should laborers get to work? Is the start-up time inside the factory or outside the factory? And what about breaks for lunch? Marx quotes an inspectors’ report:

‘The profit to be gained by it’ (over-working in violation of the Act) ‘appears to be, to many, a greater temptation than they can resist’ … These ‘small thefts’ of capital from the workers’ meal-times and recreation times are also described by the factory inspectors as ‘petty pilferings of minutes’, ‘snatching a few minutes’ or, in the technical language of the workers, ‘nibbling and cribbling at meal-times’.

Marx then quotes the key idea: “‘Moments are the elements of profit’” (352). I think this a crucial formulation. Capitalists seek to capture every moment of the worker’s time in the labor process. Capitalists do not simply buy a worker’s labor-power for twelve hours; they have to make sure every moment of those twelve hours is used at maximum intensity. And this, of course, is what a factory disciplinary and supervisory system is all about.

If you can believe old movies, telephone operators once had time to chat with you (I am old enough to remember even flirting with them). Operators now have a strict schedule of calls to handle every hour. If they don’t meet that schedule, they get fired. And the schedule is constantly tightening, so you are now privileged if you can claim more than two minutes of their time. I’ve read about an operator who spent half an hour on the phone with a child whose mother evidently had died; the operator was fired for failing to keep to schedule. This is characteristic of labor processes generally. The capitalist wants the time, wants those moments that are the elements of profit. This is a corollary of the fact that value is socially necessary labor-time. For all its abstractness, the value theory reveals something important about daily practices and experiences on the shop floor. It touches the reality of how the capitalist behaves, and it touches the reality of the worker’s life.

In the third section of this chapter, Marx discusses at length “Branches of English Industry without Legal Limits to Exploitation.” I am not going to go over these, because the appalling accounts of the labor practices in the match industry, wallpaper, linens and baking in particular (where night work and the adulteration of the bread were a big issues) are fairly self-evident. Marx also cites the accidents that can come from overwork, such as one on the railways where the coroner noted that the workers’ lack of attention that led to the accident probably resulted from their excessively long hours. Then there is the famous case of Mary Anne Walkley, “20 years old, employed in a highly respectable dressmaking establishment”—in a situation where “girls work, on an average, 16½ hours without a break, during the season often 30 hours, and the flow of their failing ‘labour-power’ is maintained by occasional supplies of sherry, port or coffee”—who quite simply died from overwork (364–5). Dying from overwork is not something that is confined to the nineteenth century. The Japanese have a technical term for it, karōshi. People do die from overwork, and many people’s lifetimes are shortened through the overwork they suffer or from the work conditions they encounter. In 2009, the United Farm Workers sued California Occupational Safety and Health Administration for not protecting farmworkers in the state from deadly heat, citing three cases of needless death from heat exhaustion.

Marx is here describing what happens when the power relationship between capital and labor becomes so lopsided that the labor force is reduced to a position of degradation and even driven to untimely deaths. This problem is exacerbated by the rise of the relay system described in the fourth section of this chapter. Unemployed capital is lost capital, and capital, recall, is not a machine or a sum of money, but value in motion. If a machine is not being used, it’s dead capital, so there is pressure to use it all the time. The continuity of the production process becomes important, particularly in those industries, such as blast furnaces and heavy-metal engineering, employing large amounts of fixed-capital equipment. The need to keep the fixed capital employed mandates a twenty-four-hour workday. Since individual workers cannot work twenty-four hours, the relay system is devised and then supplemented by night work and the shift system. Remember: workers not only produce surplus-value, they reanimate constant capital. The result is night-shift work via the relay system. There is, therefore, no such thing as a “natural working day,” only various constructions of it in relation to the capitalist requirement to maintain a continuity of flow at all costs.

Section 5 takes up the struggle for a normal working day. What is the length of time during which capital may consume the labor-power whose daily value it has paid for? Capital, plainly, is going to take as much as it can get. For capital,

it is self-evident that the worker is nothing other than labour-power for the duration of his whole life, and that therefore all his disposable time is by nature and by right labour-time, to be devoted to the self-valorization of capital [i.e., the production of surplus-value]. Time for education, for intellectual development, for the fulfilment of social functions, for social intercourse, for the free play of vital forces of his body and his mind, even the rest time of Sunday … what foolishness! But in its blind and measureless drive, its insatiable appetite for surplus labour, capital oversteps not only the moral but even the merely physical limits of the working day. It usurps the time for growth, development and healthy maintenance of the body. It steals the time required for the consumption of fresh air and sunlight. It haggles over the meal-times, where possible incorporating them into the production process itself. (375–6)

I always remember the assembly-line scenes from Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times when I read these passages. Capital

reduces the sound sleep needed for … restoration, renewal and refreshment … [It] asks no questions about the length of life of labour-power. What interests it is purely and simply the maximum of labour-power that can be set in motion in a working day. It attains this objective by shortening the life of labour-power, in the same way as a greedy farmer snatches more produce from the soil by robbing it of its fertility. (376)

The parallel between exhaustion of the soil and of the vital powers of the laborer echoes the formulation in chapter 1 where Marx cites William Petty’s comment that “labour is the father of material wealth, the earth is its mother” (134). But this also implies that excessive exploitation of the resources required to produce all wealth poses a danger for capitalism itself. At some point or other, the capitalist will also think that a normal working day might not be a bad idea.

If then the unnatural extension of the working day, which capital necessarily strives for in its unmeasured drive for self-valorization, shortens the life of the individual worker, and therefore the duration of his labour-power, the forces used up have to be replaced more rapidly, and it will be more expensive to reproduce labour-power, just as in the case of a machine, where the part of its value that has to be reproduced daily grows greater the more rapidly the machine is worn out. It would seem therefore that the interest of capital itself points in the direction of a normal working day. (377)

The problem, however, is that individual capitalists in competition with one another cannot stop pushing toward the overexploitation of their fundamental resource bases, labor and the land. The potential exists for a conflict between the class interest of capitalists in a “sustainable” labor force and the short-term individual behaviors of capitalists faced with competition. Therefore some limit has to be put on competition between them.

Slave owners, Marx points out, can, if they wish, afford to kill off their slaves through excessive work provided they have a new source of cheap slaves at hand. But this is also true for the labor market:

for slave trade, read labour-market, for Kentucky and Virginia, Ireland and the agricultural districts of England, Scotland and Wales, for Africa, Germany. We have heard how over-work has thinned the ranks of the bakers in London. Nevertheless, the London labour-market is always overstocked with German and other candidates for death in the bakeries. (378)

Marx here introduces another important concept: that of a surplus population. This permits capitalists to super-exploit their workers without regard for their health or well-being. Of course, the surplus population has to be accessible to capital. Marx here cites the case of the Poor Law commissioners, who were instructed to “send the ‘surplus population’ of the agricultural districts to the north, with the explanation ‘that the manufacturers would absorb and use it up.” (378). Agricultural districts conveniently rid themselves of their Poor Law obligations, at the same time as they provided surplus labor for the manufacturing districts.

What experience generally shows to the capitalist is a constant excess of population, i.e. an excess in relation to capital’s need for valorization at a given moment, although this throng of people is made up of generations of stunted, short-lived and rapidly replaced human beings, plucked, so to speak, before they were ripe … Experience shows too how the degeneration of the industrial population is retarded only by the constant absorption of primitive and natural elements from the countryside, and how even the agricultural labourers, in spite of the fresh air and the ‘principle of natural selection’ that works so powerfully amongst them, and permits the survival of only the strongest individuals, are already beginning to die off. (380)

A surplus population affects whether the capitalist has to care about the health, well-being and life expectancy of the labor force. As individual human beings, capitalists may care. But forced to maximize profit come what may under conditions of competition, individual capitalists have no choice.

Après moi le déluge! is the watchword of every capitalist and of every capitalist nation. Capital therefore takes no account of the health and the length of life of the worker, unless society forces it to do so. Its answer to the outcry about the physical and mental degradation, the premature death, the torture of over-work, is this: Should that pain trouble us, since it increases our pleasure (profit)? But looking at these things as a whole, it is evident that this does not depend on the will, either good or bad, of the individual capitalist. Under free competition, the immanent laws of capitalist production confront the individual capitalist as a coercive force external to him. (381)

No matter whether they are good- or bad-hearted, capitalists are forced by competition to engage in the same labor practices as their competitors. If your competitors shorten the lives of their laborers, you have to, too. That is how the coercive laws of competition work. This phrase, “the coercive laws of competition,” is going to come back into the argument several times. And it’s important to notice at what point these coercive laws play a decisive role, as they do here.

This brings Marx to consider the “centuries of struggle between the capitalist and the worker” that have led to “the establishment of a normal working day.” He interestingly notes that “the history of this struggle displays two opposite tendencies” (382). In medieval times, it was very difficult to get people to be wage laborers. If they couldn’t make a living off the land for themselves, people became vagabonds, beggars or even highway robbers (like Robin Hood). So legislation was enacted to codify the wage relation, extend the length of the working day and criminalize beggars and vagabonds. In effect, a disciplinary apparatus was created (and Marx will take this up again in part 8) to socialize the population into the role of wage laborers. Vagabonds were whipped and put into the stocks before being mandated to do a good day’s labor. And a good day’s labor was defined as a workday of twelve hours in the first such statutes, which date from 1349. This was how labor discipline was imposed in Britain. You will find similar issues being raised by colonial authorities during the nineteenth century and later. They would report that, say, the problem in India or Africa is that you can’t get the indigenous population to work a “normal” working day, let alone a “normal” working week. They typically work for a bit and then disappear. The local notion of temporality doesn’t fit with the idea of clock time and hinders the ability of capitalists to extract value as moments that are the elements of profit. The lack of time discipline of local populations was a frequent complaint among colonial administrators, and tremendous efforts were made to instill labor discipline and an appropriate sense of temporality. (I have heard contemporary university administrators make similar complaints about students and even once suffered a course from the educational geniuses of Harvard, who insisted that the first thing we had to do to teach undergraduates properly was to instill a proper sense of time discipline.)

There is now an extensive literature on the medieval and late-medieval attitude toward time, as well as on the transitions that occurred in temporality with the rise of capitalism (or, as some prefer to speak of it, of “modernity”). For instance, we all too easily forget that the hour was largely an invention of the thirteenth century, that the minute and the second became common measures only as late as the seventeenth century and that it is only in recent times that terms like “nanoseconds” have been invented. These are not natural but social determinations, and their invention was not irrelevant to the transition from feudalism to capitalism. When Foucault talks about the rise of governmentality, what he is really talking about is that moment when people started to internalize a sense of temporal discipline and to learn to live by it almost without thinking. To the degree that we all have internalized this sense, we become captive to a certain way of thinking about temporality and the practices that attach thereto. For Marx, this temporality arises in relationship to the emergence of value as socially necessary labor-time. And for him, the role of class struggle is central in ways that Foucault tends to evade or downplay. Says Marx,

It has been seen that these highly detailed specifications, which regulate, with military uniformity, the times, the limits and the pauses of work by the stroke of the clock, were by no means a product of the fantasy of Members of Parliament. They developed gradually out of circumstances as natural laws of the modern mode of production. Their formulation, official recognition and proclamation by the state were the result of a long class struggle. (394–5)

It is no longer a matter of saying that “between equal rights, force decides,” but of recognizing the class character of hegemonic forms of temporal thinking about the world. And it is not only temporality that is involved here, because the issue of spatiality also arises. To ideologists like the anonymous author of An Essay on Trade and Commerce of 1770, the problem is a “fatal” inclination to “ease and indolence” on the part of the working population (387). Marx quotes the essay:

‘The cure will not be perfect, till our manufacturing poor are contented to labour six days for the same sum which they now earn in four days.’ To this end, and for ‘extirpating idleness, debauchery and excess’, promoting a spirit of industry [and] ‘lowering the price of labour in our manufactories’ … our ‘faithful Eckart’ … ‘proposes the well-tried method of locking up workers who become dependent on public support … in ‘an ideal workhouse’. Such an ideal workhouse must be made a ‘House of Terror … [where] the poor shall work 14 hours in a day, allowing proper time for meals, in such a manner that there shall remain 12 hours of neat labour.’ (388)

Marx then makes his reply. The equivalent of such a House of Terror for paupers, he writes,

only dreamed of by the capitalist mind in 1770, was brought into being a few years later in the shape of a gigantic ‘workhouse’ for the industrial worker himself. It was called the factory. And this time the ideal was a pale shadow compared with the reality. (389)

Spatial organization is part of the disciplinary apparatus brought to bear on the worker. This almost certainly inspired Foucault’s various studies of spatially organized disciplinary apparatuses (with the panopticon as his template) in books like Madness and Civilization, Discipline and Punish and The Birth of the Clinic. It is ironic, I think, that Foucault is so often viewed in the English-speaking world as a thinker radically at odds with Marx when he so clearly takes Marx’s analysis of the working day as one of his inspirations. Foucault does a magnificent job, in my view, of generalizing Marx’s argument and giving it substance. Although in some of his later works he departs from what the Marxists (and more particularly the Maoists and Communists in France at the time) were saying, his early fundamental texts about asylums, prisons and clinics should, in my view, be read as continuations of rather than departures from Marx’s arguments concerning the rise of a disciplinary capitalism in which workers have to be socialized and disciplined to accept the spatiotemporal logic of the capitalist labor process.

The problem of how to create and sustain worker discipline is still with us, of course. Then there is the problem of what to do with people who don’t conform and are therefore dubbed odd or even deviant. And this is Foucault’s as well as Marx’s point: they are called mad or antisocial and incarcerated in insane asylums or prisons; or as Marx notes, they get put in the stocks, mocked and punished. To be a “normal” person, therefore, is to accept a certain kind of spatiotemporal discipline convenient to a capitalist mode of production. What Marx demonstrates is that this isn’t normal at all—it’s a social construct that arose during this historical period in this particular way and for these particular reasons.

Clearly, capitalists initially had to struggle mightily to extend the working day and normalize it to, say, ten or twelve hours (as it was in Marx’s time). “Working time” in precapitalist societies varied a great deal depending on circumstances, but in many instances it was not much more than four hours a day, the rest of the day given over to socializing and other activities that could not be deemed “productive” in the sense of contributing to material survival. In our form of society, a four-hour workday would be considered ludicrous, unfortunate and uncivilized, which raises some questions about the “degree of civilization” that exists in our own culture. Presumably, a socialist alternative would aim to restore the four-hour workday!

In section 6, we get the story of what happened through the 1830s and 1840s as workers sought to fight back against the excessive lengthening of the working day in industrial Britain. Marx relates a particular political dynamic, which goes something like this (and here I tell it my way to help clarify Marx’s description). In the 1820s in Britain, the landed aristocracy still dominated political power. It had Parliament, it had the House of Lords, it had the monarchy and dominated the military and the judiciary. But there was also a rising bourgeoisie, partly constituted by traditional mercantile and financial interests (located in London and the port cities like Bristol and Liverpool that made a lot of their money out of the slave trade) but now supplemented by an increasingly powerful industrial interest centered on cotton manufacturers in the Manchester region. The latter became powerful advocates for a particular version of economic theory that was dominated by freedom of the market and free trade (Manchester was, recall, where Senior went to learn his economics). Although increasingly wealthy, the industrial capitalists were politically disempowered relative to the landed aristocracy. They therefore sought to reform the parliamentary system in such a way as to gain greater power within the state apparatus. In this they had to fight a serious battle against the landed aristocracy. And in fighting that battle, they looked for support from the mass of the people, particularly the professional middle classes and an articulate, self-educated, artisanal working class (distinct from the mass of uneducated laborers). The industrial bourgeoisie, in short, sought an alliance with artisanal working-class movements against the landed aristocracy. And through massive agitations toward the end of the 1820s, they forced through the Reform Act of 1832, which transformed the system of parliamentary representation in their favor and liberalized the electoral qualification so that modestly endowed property owners could vote.

But all kinds of political promises had been made to the working classes in the agitation leading up to the reform, including extending the vote to artisans, regulating the length of the working day and doing something about oppressive conditions of labor. The Reform Act was soon dubbed “the great betrayal” by the workers. The industrial bourgeoisie got most of the reforms it wanted, while the working classes got nothing very much. The first Factory Act regulating the length of the working day in 1833 was weak and ineffectual (although it did set the precedent of state legislation on the topic). The workers, angered by the betrayal, organized a political movement, called Chartism, which started to agitate against the conditions of life of the mass of the population as well as against the appalling conditions of industrial labor. During this time, the landed aristocracy became even more antagonistic toward the rising power of the industrial bourgeoisie (read a Dickens or a Disraeli novel and this tension is omnipresent). They were therefore inclined to support the workers’ demands in part on the grounds of the national (military) interest but also through the typical aristocratic politics of noblesse oblige, depicting themselves as the good paternalistic folk who don’t exploit people the way those nasty industrialists do. This was, in part, where the factory inspectors are coming from. They were being promoted by the landed aristocracy in order to curb the power of a ruthless industrial bourgeoisie. By the 1840s, the industrial bourgeoisie was being pushed hard by this coalition of landed aristocracy and a working-class movement that was “daily more threatening,” as Marx puts it (348). Stronger versions of the Factory Act were mooted and passed in 1844, 1847 and 1848.

There is, however, another piece in this jigsaw puzzle of class relations and alliance formation. The Manchester School of economics was a great advocate of laissez-faire and free trade. This led to a struggle over the Corn Laws (N.B., in Britain at that time “corn” referred to “wheat” and not, as in America, to what the British called “maize”). High tariffs on imported wheat protected the incomes of the landed aristocracy from foreign competition. But the result was a high cost of bread, a basic foodstuff for the working classes. The industrial bourgeoisie launched a political campaign, led by Cobden and Bright in Manchester, for the abolition of the Corn Laws, pointing out to the workers that this would mean cheaper bread. Attempts were made (not very successful, since workers remembered the “great betrayal” all too well) to forge an alliance with workers. Eventually there were Corn Law reforms in the 1840s which reduced tariffs on wheat in ways that seriously impacted the wealth of the landed aristocracy. But when bread became cheaper, the industrial bourgeoisie reduced wages. In Marx’s terms, since the value of labor-power is determined in part by the price of bread, cheaper imports of wheat lead to lower bread prices which lead in turn (other things being equal) to a fall in the value of labor-power. The industrialists could pay their workers less because the workers needed less money to buy their daily bread! At this point in the 1840s, the Chartist movement strengthens, and workers’ demands and worker agitation escalate, but there is not a solid alliance against them because of the intense division between industrial (bourgeois) and landed (aristocratic) interests.

The industrial bourgeoisie sought to undermine the operation of the Factory Acts of the 1840s. Like the boyars, they played around with notions of temporality. Since the workers did not have timepieces, the employers altered the factory clock times to get extra labor-time. The employers organized work schedules to work in bits, “hounding him hither and thither, in scattered shreds of time” (403), so that, like an actor on the stage, they participated for ten hours of work but had to be present for fifteen. Workers had “to gulp down [their] meals in a different fragment of time” (404). The employers used the relay system to confuse the times and “denounced the factory inspector as a species of revolutionary commissioner reminiscent of the Convention, who would ruthlessly sacrifice the unfortunate factory workers to his mania for improving the world” (396–7). The earlier legislation tended to focus particularly on the employment of women and children, which sparked a debate as to the age at which children become adults. “According to the anthropology of the capitalists, the age of childhood ended at 10, or, at the outside, 11” (392). So much for the degree of civilization among the industrial bourgeoisie! And as one of the factory inspectors, Leonard Horner, vociferously complained, there was no point going to the courts, since all they ever did was to exonerate the employers. But as Marx notes, “the Tories”—the landed aristocracy—“were panting for revenge” (395) over the Corn Laws and pushed through a new Factory Act that would limit the working day to ten hours in 1848.

But in 1848, there erupted one of those periodic crises of capitalism, a major crisis of overaccumulation of capital, a huge crisis of unemployment across much of Europe that sparked intense revolutionary movements in Paris, Berlin, Vienna and elsewhere; at the same time, Chartist agitation in Britain peaked. In the face of this, the whole of the bourgeoisie got nervous about the revolutionary potential of the working class. In Paris, in June of 1848, there was a violent repression of working-class movements that had asserted power, followed by the establishment of an authoritarian regime which became the Second Empire, led by Louis Bonaparte in 1852.

In Britain, events were not so dramatic, but the fear of unrest was widespread. There,

the fiasco of the Chartist party whose leaders had been imprisoned and whose organization dismembered, had shattered the self-confidence of the English working class. Soon after this the June insurrection in Paris and its bloody suppression united, in England as on the Continent, all fractions of the ruling classes, landowners and capitalists, stock-exchange sharks and small-time shopkeepers, Protectionists and Freetraders, government and opposition, priests and free-thinkers, young whores and old nuns [frankly, I have no idea what they had to do with it] under the common slogan of the salvation of property, religion, the family and society. (397)

It is amazing to contemplate how frequently “property, religion, the family and society” gets trotted out as an ideological mantra in the quest to protect the established bourgeois order. We don’t have to look much further than the recent history of the United States, where the Republican Party in particular would not exist were it not for its vehement declaration of loyalty to these principles. In Britain in 1848 it meant that “everywhere the working class was outlawed, anathemized, placed under the ‘loi des suspects’. The manufacturers no longer needed to restrain themselves” and “broke out in open revolt” against “all the legislation since 1833 that had aimed at restricting to some extent the ‘free’ exploitation of labour-power.” This “rebellion” was prosecuted “with a cynical recklessness and a terroristic energy which were so much the easier to achieve in that the rebel capitalist risked nothing but the skin of his workers” (397–8). All of which sounds very much like the Reagan/Thatcher neoliberal counterrevolution of the 1980s. Under the Reagan administration, much of the work that had been done on labor relations (via the National Labor Relations Board and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration) was reversed or left unenforced. In this case, too, it was the shifting character of class power and class alliances within the state apparatus that played the vital role.

In Britain, something interesting happened after 1850. The

apparently decisive victory of capital was immediately followed by a counter-stroke. So far, the workers had offered a resistance which was passive, though inflexible and unceasing. They now protested in Lancashire and Yorkshire in threatening meetings. The so-called Ten Hours’ Act, they said, was thus mere humbug, a parliamentary fraud. It had never existed! The factory inspectors urgently warned the government that class antagonisms had reached an unheard-of degree of tension. Some of the manufacturers themselves grumbled: ‘On account of the contradictory decisions of the magistrates, a condition of things altogether abnormal and anarchical obtains. One law holds in Yorkshire, another in Lancashire; one law in one parish of Lancashire, another in its immediate neighbourhood.’ (405)

What the capitalists had in effect done was to use the law to fragment decisions here, there and everywhere so that actually the law was no longer consistent. But the serious threat of unrest in 1850 forced a

compromise between manufacturers and men, given the seal of parliamentary approval in the supplementary Factory Act of 5 August 1850. The working day for ‘young persons and women’ was lengthened from 10 to 10½ hours for the first five days of the week, and shortened to 7½ hours on Saturdays. (405)

Certain groups, such as the silk manufacturers, procured exemptions, and there the children “were quite simply slaughtered for the sake of their delicate fingers” (406). But by 1850,

the principle had triumphed with its victory in those great branches of industry which form the most characteristic creation of the modern mode of production. Their wonderful development from 1853 to 1860, hand-in-hand with the physical and moral regeneration of the factory workers, was visible to the weakest eyes. The very manufacturers from whom the legal limitation and regulation of the working day had been wrung step by step in the course of a civil war lasting half a century now pointed boastfully to the contrast with the areas of exploitation which were still ‘free’. The Pharisees of ‘political economy’ now proclaimed that their newly won insight into the necessity for a legally regulated working day was a characteristic achievement of their ‘science’. It will easily be understood that after the factory magnates had resigned themselves and submitted to the inevitable, capital’s power of resistance gradually weakened, while at the same time the working class’s power of attack grew with the number of its allies in those social layers not directly interested in the question. (408–9)

Who were these allies? Marx does not say, but it probably comes back mainly to professional classes and the progressive wing of the reformist bourgeoisie. These were crucial elements in a situation where the working classes did not vote. “Hence the comparatively rapid progress since 1860” (409).

While Marx does not comment on it, this reformism was not confined to the conditions of factory labor, and to the degree that it became clear that they, too, could benefit, even the industrial interest increasingly participated. This was best symbolized by the Birmingham industrialist Joseph Chamberlain, who became mayor of the city and was often then referred to as “Radical Joe” because of his commitments to municipal improvements in education, infrastructure (water supply, sewage, gas lighting, etc.) and better housing for the poor. At least a segment of the industrial bourgeoisie had learned by the 1860s that it did not necessarily have to be reactionary on these topics if it was to maintain its profits.

This whole dynamic calls for some commentary. It’s clear from the data that up until 1850 or so, the rate of exploitation in the British industrial system was horrendous and that the hours of work were equally horrendous, with dreadful consequences for the conditions of working and living. But this super-exploitation slackened after 1850 without any marked negative effect on profitability or output. This occurred in part because the capitalists found another way to gain surplus-value (to be taken up shortly). But they also discovered that a healthy and efficient labor force, on a shorter working day, could be more productive than an unhealthy, inefficient, falling-apart, constantly turning-over and dying-off labor force of the sort that it had utilized during the 1830s and 1840s. The capitalists could then trumpet this discovery and their benevolence and sometimes overtly support a certain level of collective regulation and state interference to limit the effects of the coercive laws of competition. If, from the standpoint of the capitalist class as a whole, curbing the length of the working day turned out to be a good idea, then what does this say about the struggle by workers and their allies to limit it? It says that workers may well be doing capital a favor. Capitalists get pushed into a reform which is not necessarily against their class interest. In other words, the dynamics of class struggle can just as easily help equilibrate the system as disrupt it. Marx in effect concedes here that capitalists, when they finally succumbed after fifty years of struggle to the idea of regulating the working day, found it worked for them just as well as it did for the workers.

In section 7, Marx examines the impact of British factory legislation on other countries, chiefly France and the United States. In so doing, he first recognizes that a mode of analysis that focuses merely on the individual worker and his or her contract is insufficient.

The history of the regulation of the working day in certain branches of production, and the struggle still going on in others over this regulation, prove conclusively that the isolated worker, the worker as ‘free’ seller of his labour-power, succumbs without resistance once capitalist production has reached a certain stage of maturity. The establishment of a normal working day is therefore the product of a protracted and more or less concealed civil war between the capitalist class and the working class. (412–13)

In other countries, this struggle is affected by the nature of political traditions (the “French revolutionary method,” for example, is far more heavily dependent on declarations of “universal rights”) and actual conditions of labor (in the United States, under conditions of slavery, “labour in a white skin cannot emancipate itself where it is branded in a black skin”) (414). But in all cases, the laborer who appears as a “free agent” in the marketplace discovers he is no free agent in the realm of production, where “the vampire will not let go ‘while there remains a single muscle, sinew or drop of blood to be exploited’” (415–16) (here Marx quotes Engels). The lesson that must be learned is that

for ‘protection’ against the serpent of their agonies, the workers have to put their heads together and, as a class, compel the passing of a law, an all-powerful social barrier by which they can be prevented from selling themselves and their families into slavery and death by voluntary contract with capital. In place of the pompous catalogue of the ‘inalienable rights of man’ there steps the modest Magna Carta of the legally limited working day, which at last makes clear ‘when the time which the workers sells is ended, and when his own begins’. (416)

There are a couple issues that arise from this conclusion. Marx’s dismissal of the “inalienable rights of man” is a reaffirmation that “rights talk” is not going to be able to address fundamental issues, such as the determination of the length of the working day. The courts cannot do it, either. But here, for the first time, Marx argues that workers have to “put their heads together” and work as a class, and how they do so is going to have a huge impact on the conditions of labor and the dynamics of capitalism. This struggle is central to the very definition of freedom itself. I here quote from the third volume of Capital:

The realm of freedom really begins only where labour determined by necessity and external expediency ends; it lies by its very nature beyond the sphere of material production proper. Just as the savage must wrestle with nature to satisfy his needs, to maintain and reproduce his life, so must civilized man, and he must do so in all forms of society and under all possible modes of production. This realm of natural necessity expands with his development, because his needs do too; but the productive forces to satisfy these expand at the same time. Freedom, in this sphere, can consist only in this, that socialized man, the associated producers, govern the human metabolism with nature in a rational way, bringing it under their collective control instead of being dominated by it as a blind power; accomplishing it with the least expenditure of energy and in conditions most worthy and appropriate for their human nature. But this always remains a realm of necessity. The true realm of freedom, the development of human powers as an end in itself, begins beyond it, though it can only flourish with this realm of necessity as its basis. The reduction of the working day is the basic prerequisite.¹

But we also see that capitalists, impelled onward by the coercive laws of competition, are likely to behave in such a way as to seriously impair the prospects for their reproduction as a class. If the laborers organize as a class, and thereby force the capitalists to modify their behavior, then the collective power of the workers helps save the capitalists from their own individual stupidity and short-sightedness, thus forcing them to recognize their class interest. The implication is that collective class struggle can be a stabilizer within the capitalist dynamic. If workers are completely powerless, then the system goes awry because Après moi le déluge! is no way to run a stable capitalist economy. Clearly, the coercive laws of competition that drive the capitalists down such a self-destructive path need to be contained. This is as serious a problem with respect to the super-exploitation of the land and the pillaging of natural resources as it is for the qualities and quantities of labor supply.

Now, this is a difficult conclusion to reach since Marx is purportedly a revolutionary thinker. In this chapter, he hemmed himself in by the initial assumption that both capital and labor pursue their rights in terms of the laws of exchange. In these terms, the only possible outcome for the workers is a “modest Magna Carta” of a fair day’s wage for a fair day’s labor. There is no overthrow of the capitalist class or abolition of class relations here. Class struggle merely equilibrates the capital-labor relation. Class struggle can all too easily be internalized within the capitalist dynamic as a positive force that sustains the capitalist mode of production. While this does mean that class struggle is both inevitable and socially necessary, it sheds very little light on the prospects for a revolutionary overthrow of capitalism.

How are we to interpret the politics of all this? My own view is to agree with the proposition that a certain empowerment of the workers’ movement is socially necessary for capitalism to function effectively, and that the sooner the capitalists recognize this and submit to it, the better off they will be. There is plenty of historical evidence to support this conclusion, even to the point where the state, as happened in the United States during the New Deal, deliberately empowered the trade-union movement in order not to overthrow capitalism but to help stabilize it. Struggles over the value of labor-power and over the length of the working day are fundamental to the achievement of a modicum of stability within capitalism for social and political as well as purely economic reasons. It is perhaps no accident that the phase of strong social-democratic governance in the 1950s and 1960s in Europe and the social compact between capital and labor in the United States were associated with strong capitalist growth and that the Scandinavian states with their strong social support systems have remained relatively successful competitors on the international stage even during the recent turn toward neoliberalism elsewhere. Marx will also insist that this finding as to the socially necessary state of class struggle has to be inserted theoretically into an otherwise silent bourgeois political economy in order to understand the dynamics of capitalism.

But there is also a point at which struggle over the length of the working day and the empowerment of a working-class movement can go beyond trade-union consciousness and morph into more revolutionary demands. It is one thing to say that the working day should be limited to ten or eight hours, but what happens when it drops to four? At that point, capitalists get a little jumpy. As happened in France, even a thirty-five-hour week and six weeks’ mandated vacation time have been seen as excessive and sparked a strong movement on the part of the capitalist class and their allies for much greater “flexibility” in labor laws. The question here is, at what point does reform go too far and actually challenge the very basis of capitalism?

If there is an equilibrium point for class struggle, it is not fixed, nor is it known. But it does depend on the nature of the class forces and the degree of flexibility that capitalists have in relation to new requirements. For example, a far shorter working day permits capitalists to push toward intensification and increasing efficiency of labor in ways that compensate for the shorter hours. It is virtually impossible to maintain a high level of intensity over a twelve-hour workday. An interesting example of this occurred in the miner’s strike against the Edward Heath government in Britain in the early 1970s. In the face of power shortages, Heath mandated a three-day workweek, but the subsequent evidence showed that productive activity did not diminish in the same proportion. He also mandated no television broadcasting after ten at night, which ensured he got booted out at the next election (there was also, I recall, an interesting blip upward in the birthrate some nine months later).

I cannot resist ending consideration of this chapter with a few comments on its relevance to contemporary conditions. Plainly, the dynamics of class struggle (including class-alliance formation) have continued ever since Marx’s time to play a crucial role in the determination of working days, weeks, years and lifetimes as well as in the degree of regulation of working conditions and levels of wages. While in certain places and times, the more horrendous and appalling conditions that Marx dwells on at length have been very much circumscribed, the general issues he describes (such as much lower life expectancies than average in many occupations such as mining, steel and construction) have never disappeared. But over the past thirty years, with the neoliberal counterrevolution that places much greater emphasis on deregulation and the pursuit of more vulnerable workforces through globalization, there has been a recrudescence of the sorts of conditions that the factory inspectors so graphically described in Marx’s time. By the mid-1990s, for example, I would give the students in my Capital class the following exercise. I would ask them to imagine they had had a letter from home that noted they were taking a course on Capital and that commented that while the book perhaps was historically relevant, the conditions it describes had long ago been superseded. I gave the students bundles of excerpts from official reports (by the World Bank, for instance) and clippings from respectable newspapers (the New York Times, etc.) describing working conditions in plants producing Gap clothing in Central America, Nike plants in Indonesia and Vietnam or Levi Strauss products in Southeast Asia and describing how that great lover of children Kathy Lee Gifford was shocked to find that her line of clothing for Wal-Mart was produced either in plants in Honduras employing young children at almost no wages or in sweatshops in the New York region where people had not been paid for weeks. The students wrote great essays, though they balked when I suggested they might like to send them home.

Regrettably, conditions have grown worse. In May 2008, an Immigration and Customs Enforcement raid on an Iowa meatpacking plant netted 389 suspected illegal immigrants, several of whom were underage and many of whom worked twelve-hour days six days a week. The immigrants were treated as criminals; many of the 297 convicted were jailed for five months or more prior to deportation, while the authorities only began slowly to move against the company for its appalling labor practices as the moral outrage began to build through public exposure. As the students in my class had also concluded, it is all too easy to insert any number of contemporary accounts of labor practices into Marx’s chapter on the working day without noticing the difference. This is where the neoliberal counterrevolution and the loss of power on the part of the labor movement have brought us. Sad to report, Marx’s analysis is all too relevant to our contemporary condition.

CHAPTER 11: RATE AND MASS OF SURPLUS-VALUE

Chapter 11 is a typical link chapter. It moves out of one set of questions in order to pose another. Marx’s method returns to the somewhat dryly algebraic before taking a substantive twist. Capitalists, he suggests, are most interested in maximizing the mass of surplus-value because their individual social power depends on the total money power they command. The mass of surplus-value is given by the rate of surplus-value multiplied by the number of laborers employed. If the number of laborers employed diminishes, the same mass of surplus-value can be gained by increasing the rate of surplus-value. But there is a limit on the rate of surplus-value given not only by the twenty-four hours in a day but also by all the social and political barriers discussed earlier. Faced with this limit, capitalists can increase the number of laborers employed. But at some point, another limit is encountered, which is the total variable capital available and the total supply of the laboring population. The outer limit here would be, of course, the total population, but again there are reasons why the available workforce is far less than this. Faced with these two limits, capital has to come up with an entirely different strategy for increasing the mass of surplus-value.

As often happens in transitional chapters, Marx provides us, in capsule form, with a conceptual map as to where we have been and where we are going:

Capital developed within the production process until it acquired command over labour, i.e. over self-activating labour-power, in other words the worker himself. The capitalist, who is capital personified, now takes care that the worker does his work regularly and with the proper degree of intensity … [But] capital also developed into a coercive relation, and this compels the working class to do more work than would be required by the narrow circle of its own needs. (424–5)

Capital personified, in its thirst for surplus labor and its incessant pursuit of surplus-value,

surpasses all earlier systems of production … in its energy and its quality of unbounded and ruthless activity … [But] at first capital subordinates labour on the basis of the technical conditions within which labour has been carried on up to that point in history. It does not therefore directly change the mode of production. The production of surplus-value in the form we have so far considered, by means of simple extension of the working day, appeared therefore independently of any change in the mode of production itself. (425)

But all that is about to change, both logically and historically. When “we view the production process as a process of valorization,” then the means of production are changed into “means for the absorption of the labour of others. It is no longer the worker who employs the means of production, but the means of production which employ the worker.” This historical and logical reversal lies at the core of an astonishing transformation in how a capitalist mode of production has to be understood. “Instead of being consumed by him as material elements of his productive activity,” the means of production “consume him as the ferment necessary to their own life-process, and the life-process of capital consists solely in its own motion as self-valorizing value” (425). This all follows from the simple fact that the only way in which the value of the means of production (the dead labor congealed in factories, spindles and machines) held by the capitalists can be preserved (let alone augmented in the form of surplus-value) is by the absorption of fresh supplies of living labor. To the “bourgeois brain” it then follows that laborers exist only to valorize capital through the application of their labor-power!

Capitalism abhors limits of any sort, precisely because the accumulation of money power is in principle limitless. Capitalism perpetually strives, therefore, to transcend all limits (environmental, social, political and geographical) and to convert them into barriers that can be bypassed or circumvented. This gives a definite and special character to the capitalist mode of production and imposes specific historical and geographical consequences on its development. We now turn to consider how the limits encountered in this chapter—of total available labor force and rate of exploitation—are converted by capital into a barrier that can be overcome.