introduces another important concept: that of a surplus population. This permits capitalists to super-exploit their workers without regard for their health or well-being. Of course, the surplus population has to be accessible to capital. Marx here cites the case of the Poor Law commissioners, who were instructed to “send the ‘surplus population’ of the agricultural districts to the north, with the explanation ‘that the manufacturers would absorb and use it up.” (378). Agricultural districts conveniently rid themselves of their Poor Law obligations, at the same time as they provided surplus labor for the manufacturing districts.
What experience generally shows to the capitalist is a constant excess of population, i.e. an excess in relation to capital’s need for valorization at a given moment, although this throng of people is made up of generations of stunted, short-lived and rapidly replaced human beings, plucked, so to speak, before they were ripe … Experience shows too how the degeneration of the industrial population is retarded only by the constant absorption of primitive and natural elements from the countryside, and how even the agricultural labourers, in spite of the fresh air and the ‘principle of natural selection’ that works so powerfully amongst them, and permits the survival of only the strongest individuals, are already beginning to die off. (380)
A surplus population affects whether the capitalist has to care about the health, well-being and life expectancy of the labor force. As individual human beings, capitalists may care. But forced to maximize profit come what may under conditions of competition, individual capitalists have no choice.
Après moi le déluge! is the watchword of every capitalist and of every capitalist nation. Capital therefore takes no account of the health and the length of life of the worker, unless society forces it to do so. Its answer to the outcry about the physical and mental degradation, the premature death, the torture of over-work, is this: Should that pain trouble us, since it increases our pleasure (profit)? But looking at these things as a whole, it is evident that this does not depend on the will, either good or bad, of the individual capitalist. Under free competition, the immanent laws of capitalist production confront the individual capitalist as a coercive force external to him. (381)
No matter whether they are good- or bad-hearted, capitalists are forced by competition to engage in the same labor practices as their competitors. If your competitors shorten the lives of their laborers, you have to, too. That is how the coercive laws of competition work. This phrase, “the coercive laws of competition,” is going to come back into the argument several times. And it’s important to notice at what point these coercive laws play a decisive role, as they do here.
This brings Marx to consider the “centuries of struggle between the capitalist and the worker” that have led to “the establishment of a normal working day.” He interestingly notes that “the history of this struggle displays two opposite tendencies” (382). In medieval times, it was very difficult to get people to be wage laborers. If they couldn’t make a living off the land for themselves, people became vagabonds, beggars or even highway robbers (like Robin Hood). So legislation was enacted to codify the wage relation, extend the length of the working day and criminalize beggars and vagabonds. In effect, a disciplinary apparatus was created (and Marx will take this up again in part 8) to socialize the population into the role of wage laborers. Vagabonds were whipped and put into the stocks before being mandated to do a good day’s labor. And a good day’s labor was defined as a workday of twelve hours in the first such statutes, which date from 1349. This was how labor discipline was imposed in Britain. You will find similar issues being raised by colonial authorities during the nineteenth century and later. They would report that, say, the problem in India or Africa is that you can’t get the indigenous population to work a “normal” working day, let alone a “normal” working week. They typically work for a bit and then disappear. The local notion of temporality doesn’t fit with the idea of clock time and hinders the ability of capitalists to extract value as moments that are the elements of profit. The lack of time discipline of local populations was a frequent complaint among colonial administrators, and tremendous efforts were made to instill labor discipline and an appropriate sense of temporality. (I have heard contemporary university administrators make similar complaints about students and even once suffered a course from the educational geniuses of Harvard, who insisted that the first thing we had to do to teach undergraduates properly was to instill a proper sense of time discipline.)
There is now an extensive literature on the medieval and late-medieval attitude toward time, as well as on the transitions that occurred in temporality with the rise of capitalism (or, as some prefer to speak of it, of “modernity”). For instance, we all too easily forget that the hour was largely an invention of the thirteenth century, that the minute and the second became common measures only as late as the seventeenth century and that it is only in recent times that terms like “nanoseconds” have been invented. These are not natural but social determinations, and their invention was not irrelevant to the transition from feudalism to capitalism. When Foucault talks about the rise of governmentality, what he is really talking about is that moment when people started to internalize a sense of temporal discipline and to learn to live by it almost without thinking. To the degree that we all have internalized this sense, we become captive to a certain way of thinking about temporality and the practices that attach thereto. For Marx, this temporality arises in relationship to the emergence of value as socially necessary labor-time. And for him, the role of class struggle is central in ways that Foucault tends to evade or downplay. Says Marx,
It has been seen that these highly detailed specifications, which regulate, with military uniformity, the times, the limits and the pauses of work by the stroke of the clock, were by no means a product of the fantasy of Members of Parliament. They developed gradually out of circumstances as natural laws of the modern mode of production. Their formulation, official recognition and proclamation by the state were the result of a long class struggle. (394–5)
It is no longer a matter of saying that “between equal rights, force decides,” but of recognizing the class character of hegemonic forms of temporal thinking about the world. And it is not only temporality that is involved here, because the issue of spatiality also arises. To ideologists like the anonymous author of An Essay on Trade and Commerce of 1770, the problem is a “fatal” inclination to “ease and indolence” on the part of the working population (387). Marx quotes the essay:
‘The cure will not be perfect, till our manufacturing poor are contented to labour six days for the same sum which they now earn in four days.’ To this end, and for ‘extirpating idleness, debauchery and excess’, promoting a spirit of industry [and] ‘lowering the price of labour in our manufactories’ … our ‘faithful Eckart’ … ‘proposes the well-tried method of locking up workers who become dependent on public support … in ‘an ideal workhouse’. Such an ideal workhouse must be made a ‘House of Terror … [where] the poor shall work 14 hours in a day, allowing proper time for meals, in such a manner that there shall remain 12 hours of neat labour.’ (388)
Marx then makes his reply. The equivalent of such a House of Terror for paupers, he writes,
only dreamed of by the capitalist mind in 1770, was brought into being a few years later in the shape of a gigantic ‘workhouse’ for the industrial worker himself. It was called the factory. And this time the ideal was a pale shadow compared with the reality. (389)
Spatial organization is part of the disciplinary apparatus brought to bear on the worker. This almost certainly inspired Foucault’s various studies of spatially organized disciplinary apparatuses (with the panopticon as his template) in books like Madness and Civilization, Discipline and Punish and The Birth of the Clinic. It is ironic, I think, that Foucault is so often viewed in the English-speaking world as a thinker radically at odds with Marx when he so clearly takes Marx’s analysis of the working day as one of his inspirations. Foucault does a magnificent job, in my view, of generalizing Marx’s argument and giving it substance. Although in some of his later works he departs from what the Marxists (and more particularly the Maoists and Communists in France at the time)
