represented by the factory inspectors.
The factory inspectors had to confront the problem of how the working day might be defined in practice. At what times should laborers get to work? Is the start-up time inside the factory or outside the factory? And what about breaks for lunch? Marx quotes an inspectors’ report:
‘The profit to be gained by it’ (over-working in violation of the Act) ‘appears to be, to many, a greater temptation than they can resist’ … These ‘small thefts’ of capital from the workers’ meal-times and recreation times are also described by the factory inspectors as ‘petty pilferings of minutes’, ‘snatching a few minutes’ or, in the technical language of the workers, ‘nibbling and cribbling at meal-times’.
Marx then quotes the key idea: “‘Moments are the elements of profit’” (352). I think this a crucial formulation. Capitalists seek to capture every moment of the worker’s time in the labor process. Capitalists do not simply buy a worker’s labor-power for twelve hours; they have to make sure every moment of those twelve hours is used at maximum intensity. And this, of course, is what a factory disciplinary and supervisory system is all about.
If you can believe old movies, telephone operators once had time to chat with you (I am old enough to remember even flirting with them). Operators now have a strict schedule of calls to handle every hour. If they don’t meet that schedule, they get fired. And the schedule is constantly tightening, so you are now privileged if you can claim more than two minutes of their time. I’ve read about an operator who spent half an hour on the phone with a child whose mother evidently had died; the operator was fired for failing to keep to schedule. This is characteristic of labor processes generally. The capitalist wants the time, wants those moments that are the elements of profit. This is a corollary of the fact that value is socially necessary labor-time. For all its abstractness, the value theory reveals something important about daily practices and experiences on the shop floor. It touches the reality of how the capitalist behaves, and it touches the reality of the worker’s life.
In the third section of this chapter, Marx discusses at length “Branches of English Industry without Legal Limits to Exploitation.” I am not going to go over these, because the appalling accounts of the labor practices in the match industry, wallpaper, linens and baking in particular (where night work and the adulteration of the bread were a big issues) are fairly self-evident. Marx also cites the accidents that can come from overwork, such as one on the railways where the coroner noted that the workers’ lack of attention that led to the accident probably resulted from their excessively long hours. Then there is the famous case of Mary Anne Walkley, “20 years old, employed in a highly respectable dressmaking establishment”—in a situation where “girls work, on an average, 16½ hours without a break, during the season often 30 hours, and the flow of their failing ‘labour-power’ is maintained by occasional supplies of sherry, port or coffee”—who quite simply died from overwork (364–5). Dying from overwork is not something that is confined to the nineteenth century. The Japanese have a technical term for it, karōshi. People do die from overwork, and many people’s lifetimes are shortened through the overwork they suffer or from the work conditions they encounter. In 2009, the United Farm Workers sued California Occupational Safety and Health Administration for not protecting farmworkers in the state from deadly heat, citing three cases of needless death from heat exhaustion.
Marx is here describing what happens when the power relationship between capital and labor becomes so lopsided that the labor force is reduced to a position of degradation and even driven to untimely deaths. This problem is exacerbated by the rise of the relay system described in the fourth section of this chapter. Unemployed capital is lost capital, and capital, recall, is not a machine or a sum of money, but value in motion. If a machine is not being used, it’s dead capital, so there is pressure to use it all the time. The continuity of the production process becomes important, particularly in those industries, such as blast furnaces and heavy-metal engineering, employing large amounts of fixed-capital equipment. The need to keep the fixed capital employed mandates a twenty-four-hour workday. Since individual workers cannot work twenty-four hours, the relay system is devised and then supplemented by night work and the shift system. Remember: workers not only produce surplus-value, they reanimate constant capital. The result is night-shift work via the relay system. There is, therefore, no such thing as a “natural working day,” only various constructions of it in relation to the capitalist requirement to maintain a continuity of flow at all costs.
Section 5 takes up the struggle for a normal working day. What is the length of time during which capital may consume the labor-power whose daily value it has paid for? Capital, plainly, is going to take as much as it can get. For capital,
it is self-evident that the worker is nothing other than labour-power for the duration of his whole life, and that therefore all his disposable time is by nature and by right labour-time, to be devoted to the self-valorization of capital [i.e., the production of surplus-value]. Time for education, for intellectual development, for the fulfilment of social functions, for social intercourse, for the free play of vital forces of his body and his mind, even the rest time of Sunday … what foolishness! But in its blind and measureless drive, its insatiable appetite for surplus labour, capital oversteps not only the moral but even the merely physical limits of the working day. It usurps the time for growth, development and healthy maintenance of the body. It steals the time required for the consumption of fresh air and sunlight. It haggles over the meal-times, where possible incorporating them into the production process itself. (375–6)
I always remember the assembly-line scenes from Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times when I read these passages. Capital
reduces the sound sleep needed for … restoration, renewal and refreshment … [It] asks no questions about the length of life of labour-power. What interests it is purely and simply the maximum of labour-power that can be set in motion in a working day. It attains this objective by shortening the life of labour-power, in the same way as a greedy farmer snatches more produce from the soil by robbing it of its fertility. (376)
The parallel between exhaustion of the soil and of the vital powers of the laborer echoes the formulation in chapter 1 where Marx cites William Petty’s comment that “labour is the father of material wealth, the earth is its mother” (134). But this also implies that excessive exploitation of the resources required to produce all wealth poses a danger for capitalism itself. At some point or other, the capitalist will also think that a normal working day might not be a bad idea.
If then the unnatural extension of the working day, which capital necessarily strives for in its unmeasured drive for self-valorization, shortens the life of the individual worker, and therefore the duration of his labour-power, the forces used up have to be replaced more rapidly, and it will be more expensive to reproduce labour-power, just as in the case of a machine, where the part of its value that has to be reproduced daily grows greater the more rapidly the machine is worn out. It would seem therefore that the interest of capital itself points in the direction of a normal working day. (377)
The problem, however, is that individual capitalists in competition with one another cannot stop pushing toward the overexploitation of their fundamental resource bases, labor and the land. The potential exists for a conflict between the class interest of capitalists in a “sustainable” labor force and the short-term individual behaviors of capitalists faced with competition. Therefore some limit has to be put on competition between them.
Slave owners, Marx points out, can, if they wish, afford to kill off their slaves through excessive work provided they have a new source of cheap slaves at hand. But this is also true for the labor market:
for slave trade, read labour-market, for Kentucky and Virginia, Ireland and the agricultural districts of England, Scotland and Wales, for Africa, Germany. We have heard how over-work has thinned the ranks of the bakers in London. Nevertheless, the London labour-market is always overstocked with German and other candidates
