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
