Class 06 Reading Marx’s Capital Vol I with David Harvey

 

» NEIL SMITH: One of the striking things
for me always about that chapter was the extraordinarily precise mathematical logic of it. I mean, it comes closest to a mathematical dialectic. And sometimes that ability and that way of working
are why Marx gets tagged as in some ways a structuralist » HARVEY: positivist!
» NEIL SMITH: or a positivist even, without people in the equation and so on.

 

But of course by the time
you move on to chapter 10, “the working-day”, the limits of that kind of analysis become obvious. And you see Marx’s method of deriving.
So at some point, he says: ‘If you’ve got equal rights,
the right of the laborer to sell their labor power and the right of the employer to employ that labor power —
between equal rights force decides.’ So, what’s the shift you see?
What’s the value of all that discussion of the working day, wages, and time? » HARVEY: Well I think that’s where he
does connect the idea that value is about socially necessary labor time.
And therefore time becomes crucial.

 

So this chapter is about time.
He says: “Moments are the elements of profit”; and therefore attempting to capture other people’s
time becomes fundamental to what capitalism is about. And here we get
into something which is I think very interesting. Because we often think of time as a natural phenomenon, …it’s there, you know. But what Marx is showing us is that time
shifts with the dynamics of a capitalist system —that capitalism creates a particular sense of time.

 

It creates the idea of a working day, a working week,
a working year, and of working life. It creates that idea; so that that notion of temporality
is something that is socially constructed. And this social construction of time
suddenly says that time is not natural at all. We’re being told what time is, and all this stuff about
clocking in and clocking out, a system of fines, if you come too late
because you offended against the temporal regime. So there’s a lot in there, which is about
the temporal disciplining of a society. And a little bit about specialty,
because a lot of this goes on inside of the factory. So it’s inside of the factory where this is going on,
… and the bells. I often think: ‘This is strange, why is it that universities,
for example, have a kind of factory regime?’ The bell rings and you say: “Okay, this period of the math class is over,
and I now have to go do my French for another hour.” And so the temporal regime of the university is very much of that sort, and education into time discipline becomes crucial.

 

And even at the educational level, I remember, at some point or other, there was this usual thing about the deficiencies
of university education and teaching first-year students. So we get these people who come down from
Harvard to Johns Hopkins to tell us what to do; and what did they tell us? They said:
‘The thing you should do in the first year of a student’s life at universities—
you have to teach them time discipline. That is the most important thing. How do you do
that? You set them papers, and you don’t accept the papers if they are late.’ This is intellectual production! You and I know
you cannot produce work in that kind of way. And in fact, there is a very funny… I always
had this on my desk for a long time… a very funny letter to Karl Marx from his publisher in Leipzig, where the publisher says: ‘Dear Herr Doktor Professor,
it comes to our attention that you are 6 months late with the manuscript of ‘Das Kapital’.
If we do not receive the text within the next 6 months we will have to commission somebody else to write it.’ But the point here is, that the chapter
on a working day is really about why capitalism has this kind of temporality,
which is radically different from precapitalist societies —how they organize time; and one would hope
radically different from how a socialist society would organize time.

 

But temporality
is fiercely fixed under capitalism and it speeds up. It goes faster, so later on,
in Capital, we see this phenomenon of speed-up, and intensification. Why is capitalism always about that?
So we understand something about the logic of the system and the logic of its temporalities from that chapter, which is one of the
reasons I think it is such a fantastic chapter. We are going to do chapters 10 and 11. Chapter Ten: The working day. I commented before on the fact
that Marx changes styles throughout Capital. And this chapter is constructed in
a different kind of way than the chapters before. It’s full of historical detail and information.

 

It invokes a whole bunch of theoretical categories
that we have not encountered in the text so far. Because I think what Marx is interested in doing
here is outlining a real historical situation and narrative, that both sheds light upon the
fundamental theoretical apparatus that he’s constructed, i.e. the theory of value, at the same time as you see how the theory
of value illuminates something about the history. Now, we’ve discussed the relationship between history and theory
in this text, and this is a good chapter to reflect on a little bit about how it works.

 

But it’s
clear that the history that you are going to look at is a history that involves a lot of
things, which are not yet in the theory. If you want them all to be in the theory, then you
got to get to the end of volume 3 of Capital, and even go beyond. But here he is invoking them
because he wants to tell a real historical story.

 

And the real historical story is about the history
of the struggle over the length of the working day. And he starts by reminding us, and I think this
is always very important to do to remind yourself, about the distinction between the labor theory of value
and the value of labor-power. The value of labor-power is the value of a commodity.
It’s a commodity in some respects like other commodities, but in other respects, as we’ve seen earlier
different from the normal run of commodities because it encapsulates a historical, moral, and civilizational element.

 

And as we will see in this chapter, those questions about what is civilizational and what is not, come back into the picture. But having said that, he then is interested
in the distinction or the difference between what labor produces, the value it produces, and what the value of that labor-power is. And so he sets up this simple diagram at the beginning, that says: ‘There is a fixed level of the working day,
or rather… ‘There is a fixed value of labor-power and that fixed value of labor-power is recorded
in the number of hours which are required to reproduce the equivalent of the value of that labor-power.’ So that is fixed.

 

As he said earlier,
when he was discussing the value of labor-power: ‘We know, in practice it varies a great deal,
depending upon which country you’re in and what the historical moment is, and the degree of civilization
of the country, and the nature of the class struggle, and all the rest of it. But at a given particular
situation, we know what it is.’ So we know what it is, and labor works that length which is going to
reproduce its labor-power —and then more. That is the surplus. And the big question is:
‘How much more? How many hours more than that fixed amount that’s
required to reproduce the value of labor-power?’ And this is something that is not negotiable
through normal market exchange practices.

 

It is something that is
set up in a conflictual way. And so he sets up a conversation
between the capitalist and the laborer, and the question is asked to the capitalist:
‘What is a normal working day?’ And the capitalist says: ‘Well, the working-day
should be as long as possible, because I’m buying this commodity labor-power, and I have a right
to it for as long as I want. And I am therefore going to insist upon my rights, and I’m going to say:
‘I want as much of this as I can get”. But of course, there are certain limits. So Marx
immediately says: ‘Well, there is a fluid element here, but there are limits, one is: the
physical limits to labor-power. ‘You can’t work more than 24 hours a day. And well, you’ve got
to have less than that, for purely physical reasons.

 

But then there are social limits,
and he introduces at the bottom: “The worker needs time in which to satisfy his
intellectual and social requirements, and the extent and the number of these requirements are conditioned
by the general level of civilization.” You remember, that kind of civilizational thing
in the value of labor-power also. So this civilizational element comes in. So he says:
“The length of the working day, therefore ∴, fluctuates within boundaries both physical and social.

 

But these
limiting conditions are very elastic…” On the next page —342— he says:
“The capitalist has his views… As a capitalist…” —remember— “…he is only capital personified.
His soul is the soul of capital.” Again this is Marx dealing with roles, not people. “But capital has one sole
the driving force, the drive to valorize itself, to create surplus value… So “Capital is dead labor which,
vampire-like…” and we’re going to get lots of vampires, and werewolves, and all those other
kinds of persona introduced into Marx’s account here is “…vampire-like lives only by sucking living
labor, and lives the more, the more labor it sucks.

 

The time during which the worker works is the time
during which the capitalist consumes the labor-power he has bought from him. If the worker consumes
his disposable labor time for himself, he robs the capitalist. The capitalist, therefore ∴, takes
his stand on the law of commodity exchange. [H]e seeks to extract the maximum possible benefit
from the use-value of his commodity.” As anybody would. “Suddenly, however, there arises the voice of the worker…”
What the workers say is this: ‘Well, you could try to extract as much as you can,
but what happens if that shortens my working life? I don’t think that’s fair.

 

I think there
should be a length of working day that does not shorten my life.’ And so, in this conversation,
the worker also takes a position, which is based upon the law of exchange. Now, this is
interesting, because Marx is not talking here about the lack of validity of the exchange process.
He is saying: ‘All right, we assume, both sides assume, the exchange system is OK, and it is fair;
equality against equality. Now, we have however the situation, of how much use-value
the laborer is going to give up. And the worker says ‘I consider this to be against the laws of contract, and the law of commodity exchange, if you shorten my working life.’ And a result of this is —on page 344—
he says that: “The capitalist maintains his rights as a purchaser when he tries
to make the working day as long as possible, and, where possible, to make two working-days
out of one.

 

On the other hand, the peculiar nature of the commodity sold implies
a limit to its consumption by the purchaser, 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 labor, i.e. the working class.” So finally, on page 344, we get class struggle. —Yeah, we are there! But there are some interesting things about this argument: First is that Marx considers this a battle
between equal rights, and it is a forced relationship. And as a result of this, Marx is very skeptical about rights talk. You can’t solve this problem with rights talk. You can only resolve it through conflict, through struggle. And I think today we also have to recognize
the importance of this argument because there are a lot of rights talked around. And I think it’s extremely interesting that Amnesty International,
which deals mainly with civil and political rights, now and again says: ‘We would like to extend this
into the world of economic rights.’ But it can’t get very far without taking sides in class struggle; either it sides with capital or it sides with labor.
Faced with that, Amnesty International withdraws from the discussion.

 

Because they don’t
want to be caught up in that particular politics. But you can see Marx’s point, that here
we have a situation, in which there is no way in which you can solve the problem of ‘who is right
or who is wrong’. You can’t do it that way; through a discussion of rights. And the chapter ends up
with a very skeptical kind of statement about vague Magna Chartas about the universal rights of man,
as opposed to what will be achieved through class struggle.

 

The second point about this is that Marx talks about this,
and says: “Between equal rights force decides.” Now, force here, can on occasion mean simply physical force, but actually, the main thrust of the chapter
is not about that, it’s about political force. It’s about political achievement. It’s about the capacity
to mobilize political power. So we’re talking about force, which,
yes, in extremis, is going to be about violence and all the rest of it. But we’re talking here about political organization, political battle, class
struggle, and all the institutions of class struggle. He doesn’t talk much about that in this chapter,
but I think it’s implied, that when we’re talking in this way, we are going to say:
‘This issue is going to be resolved in this particular way.’ Now, at this point, I think we find something
that is interesting and deserves some immediate comment. By setting things up this way, Marx is moving away
from the normal processes by which economists and political economists talk about the world.

 

And I think, it’s fascinating to ask yourself the question,
those of you who have taken an economics class: Did you talk about the length of the working day as a big issue? It’s ignored, except maybe in some labor economics class,
somewhere separate. The general theory of economics
does not deal with this issue. You can read your way through all of
the classical political economies, and you won’t find any kind of discussion over class struggle
over the length of the working day. You can read John Locke, and you won’t find anything
about struggle over the length of the working day.

 

But when you ask yourself the question historically: Has that been an important aspect of capitalist history? Is that still today a very significant fact, of what is going on around us, all of the time,
struggles over the length of the working day, the working week, the working year, the working life? Ages of retirement; how many vacation
days you have; all of those kinds of things. These things are going on around us all the time. And from the 19th century onwards this has been
a very, very significant aspect of how capitalist societies have worked.

 

And here
you have Marx moving straight in to say: ‘What my theory does, is immediately tell
you why that’s the case, and how it is the case.’ And in that sense you would say: ‘Well, the next time one of you takes
—if you ever get to take— an elementary economics class, why don’t you ask questions about the length
of the working day and how that is determined?’ And people will look at you saying:
‘I know what you’ve been reading.’ And indeed you’ll say: ‘Well, if you can’t talk about that
in your theory, then you’re missing out on something incredibly important
in terms of the political economy of the world, and we should be able to talk about it.’ And Marx is of course saying: ‘This is one
of the first issues that come to my attention— is: there is going to be a fight
over the length of the working day.’ And that this fight is vital for
understanding how capitalist society evolves, how it develops, and who wins and who loses, and who wins for a time, and then
loses out later, and what happens when capital moves somewhere else,
where they can institute a working day of 12 instead of 8 hours, instead of 6 hours.
Those kinds of things start to become important.

 

This is one of the first points I think,
where, if you interrogate immediately, the utility, the use-value if you
want to call it that, of the concept of value you would say: ‘One the useful things about it
is that it immediately focuses our attention on this issue. And it does it in a certain way,
that reveals something, which is: this is not a market exchange process,
this is a class struggle process. Now, there are some dissident economic texts by
people like Joan Robinson, who introduce some aspects of this into their economic argument.
But of course, they’re dissident texts and I’m sure you won’t find any of them taught in
any of the major schools in the United States when you’re reading introductory economics.

 

But Marx then points something else out,
which is in the second section. He says: ‘All right, the extraction
of surplus labor from one group in society to the benefit of another group in society
is not something unique to capitalism. Etruscan theocrats did it, Athenians did it,
Egyptians did it, and Aztec emperors did it. So, the idea of surplus labor,
which is taken away from one group and becomes the property, or under the control,
of another group is not unusual at all. But there’s a big difference
between surplus labor and surplus value. And the unique form of capitalism is
that it is concerned with surplus value. And it is surplus value extracted from wage labor,
as we’ve seen in previous discussions about the theory of surplus value. The thing about it is:
the wage laborer can’t identify it, can’t see it clearly; it is mystified; it is hidden behind
the fetish of the market exchange. So, as we mentioned last time, it’s not as if a bell goes off after you’ve
reproduced the value of your labor-power, and then you say: ‘Okay, I’m working free
for the capitalist.’ Marx introduces here the idea, that
actually, it’s not as if it is just: that part of the day is the reproduction of labor-power,
and that part is the surplus.

 

Every 30 seconds you are sort of going through that
‘surplus production’ + ‘reproduction’ process. So you can’t see it. Now, in other
societies of course you can see it. Under a serf society, and he is
particularly interested in the corvée system, and what the corvée system does. And the corvée system is introduced in such a way,
that, yes, there’s a certain amount of labor, which you give to those who are going to control
the surplus. And you know how many days it is. And Marx makes the point, that the evolution of that,
was not out of serfdom. Serfdom was produced through the corvée system,
rather than serfdom generated by the corvée system.

 

The corvée system came in, and then serfdom arose out of it. So again, we are not dealing with a serf society,
which then introduces this system. We are looking at this system, which then produces states of serfdom. But then he raises, I think,
what is a very interesting question: What happens when a system of that kind gets integrated with a capitalist system,
which is about the production of surplus value? What’s the big difference? The big difference is this: Again, this argument has been made before. There’s a limit to which you can
accumulate use values.

 

So, if you are just creating
use-values for the lord, there is a limit to the amount the lord can absorb,
or is even interested in having. But as soon as you monetize it, and you
recognize money as a form of social power, there’s no limit. So the result, he says, is that any system of this kind,
which then gets in contact with the monetized accumulation process of capital, which is
limitless in principle, you put immense pressure on that corvée system, and you become extremely exploitative. And this is part of his argument about what
happened to slavery in the American South; it’s also the argument he makes
in relationship to the corvée system. But then there is something interesting, he points to here. On page 347 he starts to talk about the ‘Règlement Organique’, and he starts talking about, how this requires 12 working days.

 

But, here we start to see something else going on,
which is going to be critically important for how we understand the dynamics of capitalism. Those 12 days
of labor are not necessarily measured in days. They are measured in how much we can theoretically do in a day. So you put that amount — and it turns out
that it takes 36 days to do 12 days of labor. And this goes on, and he goes through how the
calculations were made, and then he ends up by saying on page 348: “The twelve corvée days of the Règlement Organique,
cried a boyar, drunk with victory, amount to 365 days in the year.” Now, I want
to draw your attention to something here, which is, I think, very important, which is temporality.

 

What is time? Because in effect, what the boyar is doing,
is redefining temporality and redefining what makes time. And the whole definition of temporary
starts to enter into the discussion. And the capitalist definition of temporality is special to capitalism. Indeed, it expects the laborer to work 365 days a year. Forget that it’s 12 days of labor, just 365 days a year. That’s what you expect—from a capitalist standpoint. The worker will say:
‘I want time off! I want all kinds of things of that sort.’ So, what this chapter does is begin to talk
a bit more specifically about how time is constructed and how it gets normalized
in a certain way.

 

We’ll come back to that. We see here the idea that time can be redefined
by a social process in a certain way. And the redefinition is itself a part of a class project. That is: this redefinition wasn’t just made by some
imperial ruler or something like that, it’s an outcome of a class project. So, the redefinition of temporality is done in such a way,
as to advantage that class, which is going to extract the surplus labor and later on the surplus value. What Marx then does is switch perspectives.
In the next passage, he talks about the opposite tendency, which is not to stretch time in
that kind of way but to restrict it in another. He introduces the idea of the English Factory Acts. He says: “…are the negative expression of
the same appetite. These laws curb capital’s drive towards a limitless
draining of labor-power…” —again that limitless draining of labor-power is significant against
the limitless capacity to accumulate money capital.

 

“…limitless draining away of labor-power by forcibly
limiting the working day on the authority of the state, but a state ruled by capitalist and landlord.” Then he says: “Apart from the daily more threatening
advance of the working-class movement, the limiting of factory labor 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.” Now, this is interesting. A few interesting points here. First: Why would a state rule by capitalists and landlords
agree to limit the length of the working day? And to do so, apart from the fact that there’s a working-class
a movement that became more threatening? And in effect, what Marx is going to do, is talk about
class relations between these various groups in society, and how those class relations intersected in this struggle around
the question of the regulation of the working day.

 

He also immediately introduces here the idea of
‘capitalists left to themselves are likely to go too far’. And if you remember his arguments about wealth —not value—
the sources of wealth are the earth, engendered by the saying: “the earth is the mother,
and labor is the father of wealth”. These are the two basic sources of wealth, and capitalists left to their own devices without
any regulatory regime, are likely to destroy both.

 

They’ll destroy the environment, and resource base,
as well as they will destroy the labor force and the labor power by super-exploitation
unless they are checked. So, there is an element here of class interest in
even checking themselves —and we will come back to that later on— and a recognition that
you can push things a bit too far, even on the part of the capitalist class.
Although we see in this chapter, that was very little developed until towards the end
of the period that Marx is talking about.

 

But then, there is another element
that enters here, which is the state. Again, we haven’t got a theory of the state here yet; we’ve got an element of it in the chapter on money
because the state is essential for the regulation of money. But here, we see the state entering another dimension. And that dimension I think, is most
clearly spelled out in footnote 13. Which is: the state has an interest in having a working class, which is well-fed enough
and healthy enough to go to war. And if they are so sick and they are so decimated
and they are so ill
0:33:05.410,
and they are consumptive, and all the rest of it, and you put them into battle, they are
not going to be able to do much good. So the state has an interest in maintaining
the basis for at least a healthy army. And this became a singular pre-occupation
throughout much of the 19th century. There was a general explanation given of how it was
that the German army rolled so easily over the French army in 1870.

 

And that general explanation was that those Prussian peasants
were far better fed than the French were. They were much healthier, and the French working class was
incapable of carrying a rifle. So there was this concern. And actually, you’ll find
this concern in World War II. when people started to try to recruit people
into the armed services, they found many people were not healthy enough
to go into the armed services. This was true in Britain; they had a lot of the people
coming out of the East End [of London], impoverished areas, who were simply not fit enough to go to war. And to some degree, that led to the construction of
a consensus around more socialist politics after World War II.

 

Again, partly for these militaristic reasons,
but then also for other reasons. So, these issues about the super-exploitation
of the labor force have some resonance. And it is at this point also, that Marx introduces
his story the figure of the factory inspectors. Marx could not have written this chapter without the testimony of the factory inspectors.
He relies very heavily on factory inspectors. While the capitalist classes, he mentions towards
the end, when they got so angry about all the stuff the factory inspectors were producing. They described them as ‘commies’ and ‘reds’
and like the Convention of the French revolutionary period. You have to ask yourself again the question:
why in the absence of political power on the part of the working-class
did parliament set up a factory inspectorate and why did the factory inspectorate
push things pretty hard? When you look at their testimony you got to say
they’re not just standing there, saying: ‘Oh well I’m not going to be bothered’.
It’s not as if they become patsies like OSHA (Occupational Safety and Health Administration)
has now become, from Reagan to Bush and all the rest of it.

 

That they’re not prepared
to challenge anything. They’re challenging a tremendous amount in this literature. What Marx is tapping into here is important politically and he mentions it just by passing;
which is a sense of bourgeois reformism which was quite strong in 19th-century Britain.
And it goes back to that idea ‘what is civilized?’ What is civilized? The bourgeoisie segments of it, being truly shocked at
the uncivilized situations they saw in the factories.

 

And they were shocked at what they saw as the immorality,
they were shocked at the conditions of labor, they were shocked at all these kinds of things
and so there was a bourgeois reformist tendency. and it was there, it was pretty strong. You see it today as people go protesting about sweatshop labor many of the people protesting against that
are not workers themselves, they’re middle-class bourgeois elements
who are saying that should not be the case, we should not be wearing clothes that are made
by unpaid Guatemalan children of 14 years old. That’s wrong. So you will find a persistent history of that sense of civilized morality. Marx is benefiting
from that because in part that was where the factory inspectors were coming from
but they’re also coming from out of the concrete history of struggle
which we will get into shortly. This then leads Marx to look more closely at
how the working day is determined. He gets out of this, one crucial singular principle which is
again going to connect us back to the theory of value.

 

And this is laid out best on page 352,
where he talks about how —again this is the testimony of the factory inspectors— how capital engages, he says: “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 mealtimes. It is evident that in this atmosphere the formation
of surplus-value by surplus-labor is no secret…”, and then he quotes somebody saying:
“moments are the elements of profit”.

 

Now the idea that moments are
the elements of profit is important because what it suggests is that capitalists
are vitally interested in every moment that the worker is in the factory. They want to survey
every moment and control every moment. This comes back to the fact that value
is socially necessary labor time. Therefore if the worker goes to the bathroom too much
the capitalist is losing value and surplus value; if the worker spends too much
time over lunch, tea breaks, or whatever, it’s a loss of value to the capitalists;
a loss of surplus value. Therefore the capitalist becomes
concerned with time and management, the management of the workers’ time. and this becomes a general capitalist principle
that carries over into all aspects of society. I remember, once being instructed by a group of
supposedly very wise Harvard professors on how to teach an incoming class of undergraduates
how to survive in the university. And the first principle they laid out,
and they spent most of their time talking about, was time management. And I said to them:
‘You mean this is a factory or what?’ — ‘No, if they can’t manage their time…
And as an instructor, you have to instruct them on time management.

 

You have to watch their time management
and if they’re failing on their time management you have to tell them immediately that they’ve got
a problem with their time management.’ This has now become a general principle of capitalist society.
But Marx is talking about it inside the factory; this is crucial. Moments are the elements of profit. What this means is that there is continual pressure
within the capitalist system to try to capture more and more of those moments and to make sure of
how those moments are utilized. I love those old 1940s films where people call up
the operator and have a chat with the operator and then get along somewhere, you know. You try having a chat with an operator on AT&T these days They have to handle a certain number of calls per hour
and if they don’t meet that schedule they’re fired.

 

And each time the number of calls [is raised, there’s less time to talk]. So if you have a real problem and you want to talk
to them about something they hang up on you because they can’t afford to.
This happens! Happened to me last week. I had a problem with my phone, I was trying to get it fixed
and nobody would answer. After the thing became a bit more complicated they hung up and then you had to go through all of the phone messages again
to get back in and say: ‘Look I’ve been hung up on twice now.’ This is the kind of world in which we live, where moments
are the elements of profit and that’s all that matters. So Marx is, I think, connecting that to this idea.

 

Moments are the elements of profit,
that’s what the labor theory of value tells you and that’s what the theory of surplus value tells you,
is going to be mobilized in the production process. This then leads him to look at how
this works in many different areas and I’m not going to talk about them. We’re talking about the pottery industry, the match manufacture,
the baking bread industry, all of those things. He then talks about railway accidents and how when many people have to work 30 hours continuously they make mistakes. There’s this example of the railway accident where
people had been working for that length of time and even the coroner said “well maybe
you shouldn’t have done it, but…” and then there’s the famous case of “…Mary Anne Walkley, 20 years old, employed in a highly respectable dress making establishment,
exploited by a lady with the pleasant name of Elise.

 

The old often-told story was now revealed once again. These girls work, on an average, 16 1/2 hours without a break,
during the season often 30 hours, and the flow of their failing ‘labor-power’ is maintained by
occasional supplies of sherry, port or coffee.” “Mary Anne Walkley had worked uninterruptedly 26 1/2 hours, with
sixty other girls, thirty in each room.” “…at night the girls slept in pairs…” “…Mary Anne Walkley died from long hours of
work in an over-crowded workroom, and a too small and badly ventilated bedroom.” Now, dying from overwork is not an uncommon phenomenon. But as in this case, I guess the coroner said it was apoplexy,
which maybe had been exacerbated by the work conditions. I can’t remember the actual term for it, the Japanese
have a word for dying from too much hard work [Karōshi], and there is a category in Japan, that they’re willing
to utilize.

 

We don’t use that category in this country, so you would not be
able to go to the statical data and find out how many people die from hard work. But if you care to inquire, I think you would find
that would be a significant category in our society. In any case, as he ends up the
chapter he talks about the diminished life expectancy; that somebody
instead of living until 50 dies at 37. Now, life expectancy tables are extremely interesting. For instance in the steel industry in
Baltimore in 1970 or so the life expectancy of the steelworkers was 64
years, as opposed to 72 or whatever it was on average. And even if you compare it with the African-
American community, which has a lower life expectancy, because many of the steel workers were African-American,
you still find a diminished life expectancy in that industry. And we will find the same thing in many areas of work like coal mining, and all the
rest of it. So the whole question of life expectancy, of dying from overwork,
is a very significant element within the system.

 

This then takes us into section 4, where
Marx talks about day work and night work. And the point here is something that we’ve hit before; which is the idea that once capitalists have
money wrapped up in machines and capital, they want to get it back as soon as possible. That is:
they want that capital to be fully employed 24 hours a day. This leads immediately to the need to have labor available
24 hours a day. How’s that going to be done? It’s going to be done through the relay system.
And this relay system becomes a significant aspect of the mobilization of labor. And again,
it can disguise in some ways the stresses that attach to certain notions of the length of the working day.
You can start to split the relay system up into pieces.

 

People do different pieces at different times.
And this too becomes a very strong pressure, which has to be resisted on the part of workers. Then we come to section 5, which starts on page 375,
into “the struggle for a normal working day”. And this struggle for a normal working day
entails us, trying to understand the dynamics of how the capitalist
approaches the labor question. So he starts by saying, as far as the capitalist is concerned “… it is self-
evident that the worker is nothing other than labor-power for the duration of his whole life, and that therefore all his disposable time is
by nature and by right…” —notice: by right— “… labor-time to be devoted to the
self-valorization of capital.

 

Time for education, intellectual development,
fulfillment of social functions, social intercourse, the free play of the vital forces of his body and his mind,
even the rest time of Sunday —what foolishness! But in his blind and measureless drive, its insatiable appetite
for surplus labor, 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…” For those of you who’ve seen Charlie Chaplin’s “Modern Times,” you’ll remember his great spoof of trying
to eat while he is in the machine more or less. “…so that food is added to the worker as a mere
means of production, as coal is supplied to the boiler and grease and oil to the machinery. It reduces the sound sleep needed for the restoration,
renewal, and refreshment of the vital forces to the exact amount of torpor essential to
the revival of an exhausted organism.” “It is not the normal maintenance of labor-power
which determines the limits for the working- day here, but rather the greatest possible
daily expenditure of labor-power, no matter how diseased, compulsory, and painful it may be,
which determines the limits of the worker’s period of rest.

 

Capital asks no questions…” —and after all, why should it?— “…about the length of life of labor-power.
What interests is purely and simply the maximum labor power that can be set in motion in a working day. It attains this objective by shortening the life of labor-power, in the same way as a greedy farmer snatches more produce
from the soil by robbing it of its fertility.” He then says in the next 2 paragraphs: ‘Now at some point, even capitalists may recognize
that this is a stupid thing to do, that you’re destroying the source of value and wealth.’ //So he suggests on page 377, that you would think
a rational capitalist would seem therefore to have… // He says: “it would seem therefore that the interests of capital itself
point in the direction of a normal working day.” He then switches to talk about the slave owner and he says: The slave owners guard their slaves but do so only
when it is hard for them to procure replacements.

 

If it is easy for them to get replacements then
they just kill them off and just buy some more, why should they care? And then he says on page 378:
“For slave trade, read labor market, for Kentucky and Virginia, Ireland and the agricultural
districts of England, Scotland, and Wales, for Africa, Germany.” What he’s beginning to introduce here is the idea that a labor surplus
has a crucial role to play in how this dynamic works. He first talks about how a labor surplus
or a ‘surplus population’ in the South was sent to the North under the aegis of the Poor Law Commissioners. In other words: you needed labor up north,
and people were in the agricultural districts of the south maintained in the “Poor Law”. So as soon as they went
on the “Poor Law”, the commissioners round them up and shipped them north and put them in the factories. This then leads on page 380, to a very important argument: “What experience generally shows to the capitalist
is a constant excess of population, i.e., an excess about 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 to the intelligent observer how rapidly and firmly capitalist production has seized the vital forces of
the people at their very roots”.

 

He then talks about “the degeneration of the industrial population which is retarded only by the constant absorption
of primitive and natural elements in the countryside.” Now, this theme of the labor surplus is critical. It’s something that is going to come back
again and again throughout Capital. That it’s only when you have a large labor surplus
that you’re in a position to discipline the existing laborers and also replace them as you need to,
at relatively low wages. This leads Marx to say that, what this does
in a situation where a population of this sort exists, the capitalists have a simple way of thinking.
Which he suggests on page 381: “Après moi le déluge! is the watchword of every capitalist
and 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,
premature death, and 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.” Here also there’s a very important theme, what Marx calls the coercive laws of competition.
Individual capitalists don’t have a choice; If I’m an individual capitalist and I want to be nice to my workers,
pay them a lot, only employ them 6 hours a day, and I’m competing with somebody who’s paying them very little
and working them 12 hours a day, how can I possibly stay in business? So Marx is saying here, ‘look, it doesn’t matter if you’re
a nice capitalist or a greedy, horrible, disgusting, sadistic capitalist.

 

 

You’re all going to have to come down to the same level because that’s where the coercive laws and the competition push you. And this theme of the coercive laws of competition as a mechanism that disciplines individual capitalists is also
going to be important in the rest of this book. This then takes him into the next section
on the establishment of a normal working day, which he is going to talk about, as a result of centuries
of struggle between the capitalist and the worker. He starts with what I think is an extremely interesting point. That the initial legislation about
the length of the working day was about trying to socialize and discipline the worker
into the idea of a normalized working day. And he goes back to the Statute of Labourers from 1349
and then he tracks through all of that legislation. Now, what he’s talking about here is
the socialization of wage labor to a disciplinary regime around
a certain notion of temporality.

 

The history he tells here is interesting
because it suggests it wasn’t easily done. It took a lot of state action, most people faced the prospect of wage-labor
said it’s better to be a beggar or a vagabond or engage in crime and all the rest of it. So what that took was the state to come in
and round people up who were not good wage laborers and whip them publicly
or put them in the stocks or do horrible things to them to indicate to them
that the only way they could survive, was if they had been forced off the land,
was to become wage laborers.

 

And that to become a wage laborer meant accepting
a certain kind of time discipline. One of the most interesting places where you’ll find
this thing thought out is amongst colonial administrators. Again and again, colonial administrators say:
‘The trouble with these people is they don’t have the time to discipline. They work for a few hours, and then they disappear, well they work for a week and we think they’re fine,
and then they disappear.

 

We can’t keep them here.’ So there was tremendous literature in the colonial office
about what kinds of tribal groups were susceptible to time discipline and what wasn’t
and who you could discipline easily and who you had to whip into order. And one of the big issues of colonial
administrations were precisely time disciplined and what was so interesting about this
is how the notion of temporality had to be normalized and workers had to be normalized
and had to accept normality.

 

And this has become a generalized social aspect of society.
We all accept a certain kind of time discipline. We figure: ‘well yeah this nine-to-five work’ or ‘OK, I’ve got to be
in college at this time and out by that time’. You wouldn’t tolerate it if your teachers gave speeches
like Fidel Castro does, which go on for 12 hours. You would start looking at the clock. 8:30, look at the clock.
Time discipline steps in and you know we’ve all normalized it.

 

So in fact it constructs our lives and we’ve accepted that normalization.
But what Marx is talking about, is a world in which that was not the case. That this time discipline had not been accepted.
And it took a lot of violence, a lot of social pressure. And that social pressure was organized through the state,
but it was also organized through all manner of institutions and it was partly also normalized through recognizing
—as Marx does towards the end of this chapter— that, what capitalists insist upon is
that you shouldn’t pay people too much because if you paid them too much they wouldn’t work
for 6 days or whatever it was, they’d only work for 5. So if you paid them less, then they would work.
Because laborers are inherently lazy, they don’t want to go to work, they don’t want to spend
the whole week down the coal mines, they want to do something else. There was a terrible problem with labor discipline in France
because there was something called ‘blue Monday’ on which the artisan class in particular would get so roaring drunk on Sunday,
they couldn’t possibly go to work on Monday.

 

So there was nothing that could be done on Monday.
So the attempts to wean them away from those habits. And disciplinarians would go in there and start talking about the iniquities of getting drunk on Sundays
and they would try to mobilize family ideals and so on, against the guys going out
and getting smashed on Sundays. It turned out it wasn’t only the guys who were doing it,
the women were doing it too which was considered even worse by the bourgeoisie. So there are tremendous questions
about labor discipline in the 19th century and Marx is, I think, pointing out those problems. Then the institutional arrangements at the end,
which he talks about are very interesting. He says, it’s not only this general kind of assault, but also there are specific kinds of institutions and in particular,
there is what he calls on page 388, “an ideal workhouse”. “an ideal workhouse must be made a ‘House of Terror’, and not an asylum for the poor ‘where they are to be plentifully fed,
warmly and decently clothed, and where they do but little work.’ In this “House of Terror,” this “ideal workhouse,
the poor shall work 14 hours in a day, allowing proper time for meals, in such manner that
there shall remain 12 hours of neat-labor.’ ” Then right at the end: “The “House of Terror” for paupers 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.” Now, what is interesting here, is to reflect on the way
that somebody like Foucault, for example, talks about the disciplinary apparatuses that came into being
in the 17th, and 18th centuries in particular, as part and parcel of creating self-discipline in ourselves
which made governmentality so much easier for the bourgeois state. And what Foucault does in many ways, it seems to me,
is to extend this whole idea here, Through books like ‘Madness and civilization’, ‘Through the birth of the clinic’
and particularly ‘Through discipline and punish’. Now there’s a very interesting way in which Foucault is often viewed
as somehow or other being anti-Marxist. Well, he was anti-Maoists and anti-Trotskyists
and he was anti-Communist Party, but it is very clear when you read this and you read
that literature, that this is his starting point. And those French intellectuals started from a very good understanding
of this and this is the kind of passage that, it seems to me, Foucault takes, and says ‘Okay, I can extend that’.

 

I had to say when I first read all that literature by Foucault,
I didn’t see it in any way antagonistic to Marx at all. I thought it was an extension, it was an elaboration, and with some transformation involved too but that this was a wonderful way in which
to start to think about the sorts of issues that Marx is talking about here.
The creation of a disciplinary apparatus of socialization pressures, and institutional arrangements. In Foucault’s case: the panopticons, asylums, and workhouses
as well, all of those become part of this disciplinary apparatus that is trying to normalize us
into accepting a certain temporality, a certain disciplinary apparatus, as being part and parcel
of our daily lives.

 

So this is, I think a very important element to do and I think
it’s very important to read Foucault alongside this, and realize exactly how Foucault is elaborating on this
and to what extent he, later on, became, as it were, more separated from what Marx was talking about. But in his early stuff certainly, there was an elaboration of
many of these ideas rather than a disputation against them. We should stop here and take a little break and finish off the chapter next. He gives an account of the struggle
over the length of working-day in Britain from the 1820s up to the 1850s, and 1860s. I don’t propose going over this dynamic
in too much detail from the text. But I want to try to clarify the background of the story. What you had in Britain in the 1820s in particular
was a political power structure that was dominated by an agricultural aristocracy
by landed interest. And at the same time, you had a rising bourgeoisie,
partly merchant but increasingly industrial, in the industrial districts.

 

And what we see coming out here
is the importance of what you might call the Manchester school of economic thinking,
which is very much associated with the rise of the cotton industry as a major force in industrial production
but also in British political and economic life. So the industrial interest and the industrial bourgeoisie
is relatively disempowered however in relationship to this landed aristocracy. And they started to try to push, pretty hard,
towards gaining more democratic power. The way, for example, the landed aristocracy was dominated
was by a system of what was called ‘rotten boroughs’. For those of you who know what that is, there would be a place where there’s almost no population
that would return one or some cases three members of parliament, and that place happened to be on the landed estate
or in the pocket of, it was called a ‘pocket borough’, one or other of the landed aristocrats
who on election day would take 5 or 7 or 20 of the retainers and they would go there
and they’d vote this person into parliament.

 

So this is how the majority was maintained, in parliament. So there’s a movement towards parliamentary
reform to get rid of the rotten boroughs and all those kinds of things, which is attracting a certain amount of bourgeois support. It was also attracting a certain amount of working-class support. And the industrial bourgeoisie was
very interested in trying to attract popular support from the working class. And so politically the working class was divided into
an artisan group, that was highly literate, self-educated and then a mass of the population, agrarian base,
who were not literate and therefore not [self-educated]. And so, the industrial bourgeoisie was particularly interested
in trying to attach to it the support of the artisan class in a program towards parliamentary reform. It was envisaged that you’d have
a much more democratic form of government, in which it was envisaged certain reforms would be instituted, among which would be some kind of legislation to curb
the worst aspects of industrial labor.

 

So there was a proposal for factory acts and so on. Well, the great reform thing finally passed,
and there was a great reform of 1832, which from the working-class standpoint was
quickly dubbed ‘the great betrayal’. And ‘the great betrayal’ was first of all: the reform of the voting structure didn’t empower
anybody significantly within the working class. It only in effect, got rid of the artificial power
of the landed aristocracy and empowered more and more of the industrial bourgeoisie
and those members of the middle classes that had significant assets and significant properties. So in effect, it was a reform that favored the property-owning classes.
And immediately the property-owning classes passed a very weak factory act,
one which was not significant at all. And that indeed was part of the reason why the workers
themselves started to get extremely disillusioned with the alliance they might have had with the industrial bourgeoisie,
and increasingly start to go against the industrial bourgeoisie.

 

But the industrial bourgeoisie had something else
on its agenda, which is the reform of the ‘Corn Laws’. Now, ‘corn’ in English is ‘wheat’. And what that meant was that the tariffs on imported grains
were going to be reduced very significantly. Because this was, again, in the industrialists’ interests. Because cheap grain meant cheap bread which meant lower wages. They went to the working class and said:
‘Would you be interested in cheap bread?’ But by then the working class recognized
that maybe cheap bread also meant lower wages.

 

By then they figured out a little suspicion.
But they tried to again mobilize the working class around the abolition of the tariffs on imported grains. But the trouble with that is when you abolish that,
you abolish a lot of the power of the landed aristocracy in Britain. In other words, their agrarian interests
were very severely threatened. //And they were thoroughly pissed off, to put it mildly,
with the industrial bourgeoisie and what it was doing.

 

So one of how it figured it could get
back against the industrial bourgeoisie, was to start to act like they were ‘Noblesse oblige’
concerning the working class and say ‘Well you know we are not those people who are doing
these awful things to you down the mines and in the factories and so on,
we’re going to try to help you over these factory acts.’ So they started to go into an alliance with
the working class to put pressure on the factory acts. And out of that, there came some of this progressive movement
in the 1840s towards instituting some regulation on factory acts. Initially, of course, a lot of this was taken up, on a kind of moral basis which was primarily concerned
with the employment of women and children.

 

And that is what the first part of the agitation
was dedicated to. Marx points out that this complicated jousting of class alliances, and the shift of class alliances
from a class alliance between workers and industrialists to get the reform act through
and then after that an alliance, which emerged between the agrarian, landed aristocracy
and working class pressures. And as a working-class independent organization, something called the Chartist movement started to become much stronger.
So what you would then see towards the end of the 1840s was a considerable alliance that was beginning
to push the capitalist bourgeoisie to concede something on the length of the working day.

 

And eventually, they conceded things, and then
they tried to subvert it through all of these games. Again, there’s a wonderful phrase Marx uses: ‘If you eradicate child labor,
there’s a big question of when do you stop being a child.’ And capitalist anthropology said ‘9 years old’, and other people said ‘no it’s later’.
So, the whole question of temporality gets in here, and then also
how the capitalists started to use all sorts of things. For instance, if you limited it to 10 hours, what does that
10 hours include, does that start outside the factory gate or inside the factory? And by the way, if workers don’t have timepieces,
you set the factory clock, and they’re supposed to be there at 6 o’clock,
but actually, you put it so it says 6 o’clock when it’s a quarter to 6.

 

And then when the workers want to leave, they look
at the clock and it says 6 o’clock when it’s a quarter past 6. So, in that way,
all sorts of things like that were going on. And it became clear, and this is where the factory
inspectors, who had largely come out of this kind of ‘Noblesse oblige’, kind of support from the landed aristocracy, the factory inspectors
then started to say ‘This is not operative, it’s not working, and we gotta do something about it’.
So they tried to take it to the courts and then, as always happens when you take it to
the supreme court, you lose. Oh, that’s wrong, when you take it to the English courts,
not the supreme court.

 

Of course, you win in this supreme court, right? Okay. You lose, so there’s no point going to the courts
and even the factory inspectors who were taking these to the courts, said ‘There’s no point, Horner says ‘I’ve taken 8 cases and I’ve only won 1
and this is just a waste of time, nothing is going to happen out of this. But then there happens a significant event in 1848.

 

And in 1848 there is a massive crisis of over-accumulation of capital
and there was massive unemployment that results. And you get revolutions breaking out all over Europe.
As Marx says: ‘The bourgeois capitalists waged a campaign
against the factory act but they couldn’t make it work. But then they had this fortuitous event of 1848.’ I have to read this bit to you, an interesting way of putting it. He says: “the preliminary campaign of capital”,
this is on page 397, “the preliminary campaign of capital thus came to grief,
and the Ten Hours’ Act came into force May 1st, 1848. Meanwhile, however, 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 shop-keepers, Protectionists and Freetraders, government and opposition, priests and freethinkers,”
and I have no idea why they are in here: “young whores and old nuns, under the common slogan of the salvation of Property,
Religion, the Family and Society.” Now, have you heard that recently?
“Property, Religion the Family and Society?” Whenever the bourgeoisie gets threatened what does it do?
It always appeals to these categories of Property, Religion, Family, and Society.

 

The result of this, Marx goes on to say: “Everywhere, the working-class
is outlawed, anathematized, and placed under the ‘loa des suspects’. The manufacturers no longer needed to restrain themselves.
They broke out in open revolt, not only against the Ten Hours Act but against
all the legislation since 1833 that had aimed at restricting to some extent
the ‘free’ exploitation of labor power. It was a pro-slavery rebellion in miniature carried on for over two years
with a cynical recklessness and terroristic energy which were so much the easier to achieve in that
the rebel capitalist risked nothing but the skin of his workers.” Now this situation, you know, if you want a really good piece by Marx, you go
and read ‘The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte’, which is a fantastic story of shifting class
alliances around the revolution of 1848 in Paris.

 

But here we’re getting a similar kind of story, about the shifting nature of class alliances in and around
factory acts and how this was being worked out. And we see events at some point or other
when all property owners get threatened when the bourgeoisie suddenly comes together and consolidates around
a single program, which is to oppress the workers. This was effectively what happened in June of 1848 in Paris when the working-class
revolution in Paris was violently suppressed.

 

And in effect, it didn’t have to be
violently repressed in Britain, it was peacefully repressed if you like,
but it allowed the capitalists to reverse almost all of those progressive moves that had been made. Again there are certain parallels you’ve only got to look for example how the decisions
made by the National Labor Relations Board in this country, up until the point where Reagan took power and after Reagan took power, all of the OSHA legislation
or all of the National Labor Relations Board legislation became totally pro capitalistic. And I think in about 3 years,
the National Labor Relations Board reversed about 70 percent of all the decisions that had been made earlier
after Reagan appointed the commissioners in the early 1980s. So what we find here again, when you look back at that,
you would do an analysis, a bit like Marx is doing.

 

‘What were the class forces, behind this, and what were the political conditions
which allowed something like that to happen? And why did it happen in a particular way it did?’
I think this framework of analysis Marx sets up for historical inquiry, is one which, is interesting to think about for those of you
who are interested in understanding contemporary events. You don’t think about individuals so much
as you start to look at class forces, class interests, and how they get mobilized behind this position. How they shift,
how deals get cut, and how things shift around. Then Marx goes on to tell the story after 1850,
and what we find is that after 1850 there is a growing recognition that some
sort of compromise about this working day is necessary. In part for the reasons we’ve discussed,
that if you push things, they just get out of hand, and even the industrialists start to think
that things have gone a little bit too far. And the result of that is that by the time you get to 1853,
he takes this up on page 408.

 

By the time you get to 1853, the factory legislation which had been
initially targeted just a few select industries, there’s the recognition that more and more industries
are being organized along these intensely capitalistic lines, and these intensely capitalistic lines mean that
the regulatory regime has to be extended across nearly all industries. By 1853 you get to this point where Marx says:
“Nevertheless, the principle had triumphed with its victory in those great branches of industry that form
the most characteristic creation of the modern mode of production.

 

Their wonderful development from 1853 to 1860”, The irony being that after this legislation was introduced,
you get this boom. “went hand-in-hand with the physical
and moral regeneration of the factory workers, and this was visible to the weakest eyes.” How many times has this happened historically?
It’s a wonderful story. “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…”, again allies,
the allies of the working class become crucial here. “…in those social layers not directly
interested in the question. Hence the comparatively rapid progress since 1860.” Now, Marx doesn’t say what those social layers were,
not directly interested in the question. And this was not so much the landed aristocracy,
as it was professional middle-classes, professional middle-class interests seeing the situation
had decided that they were going to not put up with living in a kind of country
where these sorts of practices were allowed.

 

So, again, the allies become significant. And the allies were significant because
the working class did not have the vote until after 1867 in Britain.
Male working-class, that is, in 1867. So it was not a working-class vote that did this, it was
a parliament that then became attached to a regulatory regime. This regulatory regime didn’t only apply to this area. This was an era, where there was a lot of public health legislation. Because that was the only way
you could deal with the cholera epidemics, you get stuff about water supply, and in Birmingham,
you get the beginnings of a new regime of governance. Which is structured by Joseph Chamberlain,
an industrialist, a conservative industrialist who insisted on public education, housing for low-income populations,
clean water, good sewage, and all those sorts of things. He was called ‘radical Joe’.
So you get a new climate of activity in Britain, in the 1860s that recognizes that the abuses that
have occurred have to be eliminated.

 

But at the same time, we’re also going to find that this extension of the working day in this way
mattered less and less for the capitalists because they found another way to construct surplus value. And the other way is relative surplus value,
which we’re going to get into next week. And what we see is the struggle over
the length of the working day, forcing capitalists into a reform that
is not necessarily against their interest. And Marx then talks about how
this reform, not only affected England but also spread around the world to some degree. In particular, he’s interested in the cases of France,
in the next section, and of the United States. And he sees clearly that in America,
as he says on page 414: “Labour in a white skin cannot emancipate itself
where it is branded in a black skin. However, a new life immediately arose from the death of slavery.”
Unfortunately, it wasn’t as dead as Marx was assuming. And then he talks about the General Congress of Labour
held in Baltimore in August 1866, and the general pressure towards regulation
of the length of working day in this country.

 

This leads to a conclusion and I think we should discuss this. “It must be acknowledged”, he says, “that our worker emerges from
the process of production looking different from when he entered it. In the market, as the owner of the commodity ‘labor-power’,
he stood face to face with other owners of commodities, one owner against another owner. The contract by which he sold his labor-power to the capitalist
proved in black and white, so to speak that he was free to dispose of himself. But when the transaction was concluded,
it was discovered that he was no ‘free agent, that the period for which he is free
to sell his labor-power is the period for which he is forced to sell it, that the vampire will not let go ‘while there remains a single
muscle, sinew or drop of blood to be exploited’. For the ‘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 the place of the pompous catalog
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 worker
sells is ended, and when he begins.’ ” Now there are a couple of issues I want to raise
about this conclusion and discuss with you. First, there is the issue of the inalienable rights of man
and we’ve talked a little bit about that, and how you cannot approach this
through the discourse of rights. You can’t expect the courts to decide,
it’s going to be an outcome of this struggle. And here again, for the first time, Marx is saying
that workers have to put their heads together. And how they put their heads together is going
to have a huge impact on this particular issue.

 

But then when you look at it and you reflect upon it, what you see also is that the capitalists
left to their own devices are going to undermine their class interest.
The coercive laws of competition are going to force individual capitalists
to behave in such a way as to destroy the capacity of their class reproduction,
at the end of the day. If you went on and on in unlimited ways,
and you kill all your workers off, what’s going to happen? Where are you going
to get your surplus value from? So there’s a sense in which, workers by putting their heads
together and forcing this law, actually save capital from their stupidity.

 

In other words, workers putting their heads
together, in this chapter, seems to have the effect of stabilizing
the capitalist system, not overthrowing it. Now this is a difficult conclusion to reach, right?
Because Marx is a revolutionary thinker who, presumably, wants to overthrow it. But he’s not talking about overthrowing it here,
he’s talking about accommodating it in such a way that you get a fair wage for a fair day’s work,
a modest Magna Carta.

 

You get that, and the capitalist survives,
but the capitalist survives in a better condition than they would have survived if they would have been
allowed to let the coercive laws of competition, force them to engage in this ‘Après Moi, le déluge’ behavior. You can make the same argument
by the way about environmental regulation. The environmental movement, there’s a certain aspect of it
which forces capital to accommodate in such a way as to avoid its stupidities
and what happens under the coercive laws of competition. So, there’s an interesting issue here.
In part, Marx gets to that point, for the very simple reason that at the very beginning
of the chapter, he’s accepted that the law of exchange is the law within which we’re going to discuss.

 

And it is within the law of exchanges that equal rights can be defined,
and about which class struggle could unfold. So in a sense, he has limited his argument,
to a world in which the law of exchanges holds and holds good. And in so doing, he’s ended up
with this Magna Carta position. Now, how do we respond to it?
My view is that, yes, I think a lot of worker organization, trade union activity,
pressures and so on, has often played a very significant role in stabilizing
an inherently unstable capitalist system.

 

And that struggles over the length of the working
day, which are central in that, are a part of that stabilization. Stabilization, for all sorts of social, political,
and economic reasons. But there is also a point at which the struggle over the length of the working
day can start to move into a revolutionary mode. In other words, you could imagine
we have a 10-hour working day but we reduce it to 8 hours. the French reduced their working week, to what, 35 hours? They’re now pushing it in the other direction. But what if you reduced the working week to 5 hours? In other words, this theme of limiting
the length of the working day, can push it to a point where it really,
severely impedes the accumulation of capital.

 

So you can move from what we would consider being
a reformist view of it, which is a stabilizing form of it, into a revolutionary mode of it. When you got into 35 hours a week,
why don’t we go to 30 hours a week? And one of the responses on the part of the capital, when they got faced with that, would be, as Marx points out here, what happened as they reduced the length
of the working day was: the capitalists started to increase
the intensity of labor. That is, you can’t keep people working for 12 hours
or something like that at the same intensity but if they’re only employed for 6, you can work them
extremely intensely, and probably get as much labor out of them in 6
as you might have otherwise got out had they done 9.

 

So the intensity issue becomes rather significant. And there was a wonderful moment when this happened in British history, during the first miner strike against
Edward Heath’s conservative government back in 1973-1974 Edward Heath proclaimed a lockout
and then he did a terrible thing, that is, he decided they would save electricity and they would save it by closing all the factories
down except for 3 days a week. So every one of them went on a 3-day week. Then he made a terrible, terrible, terrible mistake, which was to say that the electricity was going to be cut off
at 10 p.m. and you couldn’t watch television.

 

And the whole populace threw him out of the government,
a few years later. The irony about that was, the birthrate went up
very significantly some 9 months later, after this period when nobody could watch television at night. So this dynamic however is an interesting question:
how revolutionary is the struggle about the length of the working day? And like I say, I think there’s a stabilizing side of it,
a reformist side of it, but then, there’s also a radicalizing side of it,
when you start to push it further. But, again, capitalists have all kinds of responses
in terms of productivity, intensity, and like. So, again, you have to watch out for what those responses might be. Let’s stop here for a little bit and talk about
anything that has animated you or questions you’ve got about this chapter.
It’s a long empirical chapter, different in style, and history.

 

» STUDENT: I’m trying to think of an anti-capitalist argument
on behalf of these sorts of reforms. Take the issue of climate change, the alternative is untenable.
If there is no environmental regulation, we’re done for. I’m curious to hear what you think of that. On the other hand, if we do stabilize the environment
by putting in reforms, capital will adapt. » HARVEY: Yeah, I don’t think regulating rather
fiercely in the name of climate change is going cause the end of capitalism.
There will be rapid adaptations. The problem is that there are certain sectors
of the economy that will boom and certain interests that will boom.
But again you’ve got an alliance of forces, and I think the way you would analyze it is in terms of, Marx’s way of looking at it and say:
What are the class interests behind why Bush is refusing to do anything significant about it? But then there are class forces even about the responses.

 

Carbon trading is a ridiculous idea,
creating a market out of that but you know that’s where we’re headed
for ideological reasons, so the big question is: why did the Clintonites and everybody else agree
that the market solution is the only one which is possible? And that may lead us to other kinds of disasters. So the way we would analyze something like that
if you come out of this way of thinking is to start to build where the alliance is, who’s pushing what and how’s it working. And that’s the way
the mode of analysis of Marx is pretty good. And I think, for instance, this chapter on the working-day
and the ‘Eighteenth Brumaire’ and some of the studies on class struggle in France
are terrific pioneering pieces on how to do a class analysis of a historical dynamic. And they’re very worthwhile readings, simply because they do that and they allow us to see.

 

But you’ll also notice,
and this is something I’ve emphasized before, the fluidity of the response of capital when faced with, in this case, it’s not an environmental problem,
it’s a social problem and the fluidity of their response is,
at some point or other, to give and then claim they were the ones who agreed with it all along. And they were the ones who created this all along,
and aren’t they the good people? I mean, we’ve seen plenty of that with corporate responsibility
for the environment going on right now. Beyond Petroleum, once BP, still BP
but you know, they tried to… and they made a nice green logo and all that kind of stuff. So, it’s the framework of analysis that is interesting here. Of course, much of this doesn’t fit in the sense of
the theoretical categories we’ve got apart from this connectivity between time control
and socially necessary labor time, as being the core of what value is about.

 

There you do see a strong connectivity between
what Marx is almost bound to look at, given the nature of that theoretical beginning. » STUDENT: With this line of thinking, are we talking about //people having to struggle towards
the expropriation of private property, the eradication of private property,
right now in this moment? Or is there a way to use this human rights framework, in a way that pushes —the way the struggle did with the working day— and then keeps pushing, or is there something
that has to happen more radically? What exactly would Marx say, about something like that? » HARVEY: Well, there are two ways in which you can approach
something like the housing question. And that is, you go and you earn a wage,
and your wage is then applied to living and housing and that is how the market works. Or you can have a collective struggle around social housing and say:
We have to put a floor around us. The same would be true of healthcare or education,
or any of these areas. This is the thing: none of those things are
automatically delivered through the market.

 

And what Marx is drawing attention to here
is that all the time you remain just (…) and this is what neoliberalism is about.
It says you are personally responsible for the education, you are personally responsible for healthcare and your housing and that kind of stuff.
It’s a personal responsibility system. Whereas what Marx would argue is, if you are in that system,
you are likely to get shafted, it’s likely you’ll get very little
because the wages you’ve got are not going to be adequate to purchase whatever you need. And then after that come to the band-aid solutions,
‘well what do we do with all those poor people.’ ‘Well OK, we have Medicaid’ or something like that
or ‘OK we’ll have housing vouchers, we’ll have education vouchers’ or something of that kind.

 

So, you start to mess around a bit with the market, whereas the socialized solution, in say Scandinavia
and so on, was ‘well we have a class struggle and we actually build socialized housing and we just go live in it.’ You know, and we live in it at minimum cost. There’s an analogy, if you like, between Marx’s argument
about the struggle over the length of the working day, over in effect the struggle over what is a real wage, and the real wage can be one or two ways:
that is you can raise your wages and then go out and spend what you like.
Or you can get a real wage through this social action. » STUDENT: So you’re talking about a floor… » HARVEY: Yeah, and this again comes back to the civilizational element,
which is in this situation. » STUDENT: But isn’t that reformist? » HARVEY: Yes.

 

Well again, it can be reformist
but then we can go further. In effect, you have to ask yourself the question,
in the 1950s and 1960s, the welfare states of Europe and even the expanded welfare system
that was being structured in this country, in terms of anti-poverty programs and all the rest of it,
did a tremendous job in stabilizing the economy. It played a tremendous role in actually
the rapid growth of these economies. So it’s untrue to say that the development
of a welfare state is antagonistic to economic growth. The rate of economic growth was very strong
in the 1950s and 1960s when you have a maximum investment going collectively into
these public forms of expenditures. You then get the counter-attack, which had nothing to do with growth,
and everything to do with class power. Which then counter-attacks that, which says:
You now have to go into this private responsibility system and
that has been going on for the last 30 years.

 

Again, the question is: Why is there not
a stronger class force to resist it? And part of that goes back to the fact
that the working class has been dismembered in this country by the movement to China
and the de-industrialization, attacks upon union power and all the rest of it.
this has gone on in Europe as well. So, it’s a question about class struggle and
class dynamics. And again, who are the allies? And there is a coalition if you like, allies, which are around this idea that the market
is how we should go. But the market does not deliver growth, and certainly, it’s made conditions worse
for a large chunk of the world’s population.

 

But it’s made it much, much better off
in terms of the accumulation of capital. This is what Marx is saying,
capitalists are committed to doing. They want to maximize their extraction of surplus value. That’s what they’re doing, as much as they can. We have 5 minutes, I just want to do the next chapter. I’m not going to spend much time on it. It’s a transitional chapter, Marx does what he usually does. He says: ‘Okay, there’s the rate of surplus value,
and there’s the number of laborers you employ or variable capital you invest.
Therefore the mass of capital depends upon the rate of surplus-value times
the number of laborers you employ.

 

If you reduce the rate of surplus value,
you can compensate by increasing the number of laborers.
If you reduce the number of laborers, you can compensate by increasing the rate of exploitation. Now he’s here pointing out
and this is a significant transition: capitalists are interested in the mass of surplus value. Why? Because the mass of surplus value is social power. And the mass of surplus value means that
you’re always thinking, as a capitalist, about how many laborers you employ and
what the rate of exploitation is. But then he introduces the idea that there are limits. This is why this chapter is transitional. There’s a limit to the rate of surplus value,
which we’ve discussed, social and physical. If I decrease my laborers to 1,
and I try to increase the rate of surplus value to 5,000 percent, I’ll never make it.
You just can’t do it that way, there’s a limit to that. There’s then a limit to the amount of capital
you can invest in variable capital, and when you aggregate this up to
the total population and everything else, what you see is there’s a limit
to the number of laborers you employ, which is: the total population of available laborers.

 

So we end up in this chapter with the idea,
that there are these 2 limits to capital accumulation: total population, rate of exploitation, and another limit, internal to capital, which is
the amount that can be spent on variable capital. But capitalism does not like limits, and by definition,
they’re looking for limitless ways to accumulate. So, you have here a contradiction:
how do you have a limitless way of accumulating in the face of these limits? And that’s the question that then gets posed,
which is going to be answered in the next chapter, which says:
‘There’s another way of gaining surplus value. It’s not absolute surplus value, it’s relative surplus value.’ So, next week then we’re going to read chapter 12,
on relative surplus value. This is an intense theoretical chapter and you have to read it
very closely and get it right. It’s very easy to get it wrong, and a lot of people don’t get it. it’s not too hard when you get it, but getting it is sometimes hard.

 

And then we’re going to read the chapter on cooperation
and the chapter on division of labor. So, 12, 13, and 14 for next time.

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