be read as continuations of rather than departures from Marx’s arguments concerning the rise of a disciplinary capitalism in which workers have to be socialized and disciplined to accept the spatiotemporal logic of the capitalist labor process.
The problem of how to create and sustain worker discipline is still with us, of course. Then there is the problem of what to do with people who don’t conform and are therefore dubbed odd or even deviant. And this is Foucault’s as well as Marx’s point: they are called mad or antisocial and incarcerated in insane asylums or prisons; or as Marx notes, they get put in the stocks, mocked and punished. To be a “normal” person, therefore, is to accept a certain kind of spatiotemporal discipline convenient to a capitalist mode of production. What Marx demonstrates is that this isn’t normal at all—it’s a social construct that arose during this historical period in this particular way and for these particular reasons.
Clearly, capitalists initially had to struggle mightily to extend the working day and normalize it to, say, ten or twelve hours (as it was in Marx’s time). “Working time” in precapitalist societies varied a great deal depending on circumstances, but in many instances it was not much more than four hours a day, the rest of the day given over to socializing and other activities that could not be deemed “productive” in the sense of contributing to material survival. In our form of society, a four-hour workday would be considered ludicrous, unfortunate and uncivilized, which raises some questions about the “degree of civilization” that exists in our own culture. Presumably, a socialist alternative would aim to restore the four-hour workday!
In section 6, we get the story of what happened through the 1830s and 1840s as workers sought to fight back against the excessive lengthening of the working day in industrial Britain. Marx relates a particular political dynamic, which goes something like this (and here I tell it my way to help clarify Marx’s description). In the 1820s in Britain, the landed aristocracy still dominated political power. It had Parliament, it had the House of Lords, it had the monarchy and dominated the military and the judiciary. But there was also a rising bourgeoisie, partly constituted by traditional mercantile and financial interests (located in London and the port cities like Bristol and Liverpool that made a lot of their money out of the slave trade) but now supplemented by an increasingly powerful industrial interest centered on cotton manufacturers in the Manchester region. The latter became powerful advocates for a particular version of economic theory that was dominated by freedom of the market and free trade (Manchester was, recall, where Senior went to learn his economics). Although increasingly wealthy, the industrial capitalists were politically disempowered relative to the landed aristocracy. They therefore sought to reform the parliamentary system in such a way as to gain greater power within the state apparatus. In this they had to fight a serious battle against the landed aristocracy. And in fighting that battle, they looked for support from the mass of the people, particularly the professional middle classes and an articulate, self-educated, artisanal working class (distinct from the mass of uneducated laborers). The industrial bourgeoisie, in short, sought an alliance with artisanal working-class movements against the landed aristocracy. And through massive agitations toward the end of the 1820s, they forced through the Reform Act of 1832, which transformed the system of parliamentary representation in their favor and liberalized the electoral qualification so that modestly endowed property owners could vote.
But all kinds of political promises had been made to the working classes in the agitation leading up to the reform, including extending the vote to artisans, regulating the length of the working day and doing something about oppressive conditions of labor. The Reform Act was soon dubbed “the great betrayal” by the workers. The industrial bourgeoisie got most of the reforms it wanted, while the working classes got nothing very much. The first Factory Act regulating the length of the working day in 1833 was weak and ineffectual (although it did set the precedent of state legislation on the topic). The workers, angered by the betrayal, organized a political movement, called Chartism, which started to agitate against the conditions of life of the mass of the population as well as against the appalling conditions of industrial labor. During this time, the landed aristocracy became even more antagonistic toward the rising power of the industrial bourgeoisie (read a Dickens or a Disraeli novel and this tension is omnipresent). They were therefore inclined to support the workers’ demands in part on the grounds of the national (military) interest but also through the typical aristocratic politics of noblesse oblige, depicting themselves as the good paternalistic folk who don’t exploit people the way those nasty industrialists do. This was, in part, where the factory inspectors are coming from. They were being promoted by the landed aristocracy in order to curb the power of a ruthless industrial bourgeoisie. By the 1840s, the industrial bourgeoisie was being pushed hard by this coalition of landed aristocracy and a working-class movement that was “daily more threatening,” as Marx puts it (348). Stronger versions of the Factory Act were mooted and passed in 1844, 1847 and 1848.
There is, however, another piece in this jigsaw puzzle of class relations and alliance formation. The Manchester School of economics was a great advocate of laissez-faire and free trade. This led to a struggle over the Corn Laws (N.B., in Britain at that time “corn” referred to “wheat” and not, as in America, to what the British called “maize”). High tariffs on imported wheat protected the incomes of the landed aristocracy from foreign competition. But the result was a high cost of bread, a basic foodstuff for the working classes. The industrial bourgeoisie launched a political campaign, led by Cobden and Bright in Manchester, for the abolition of the Corn Laws, pointing out to the workers that this would mean cheaper bread. Attempts were made (not very successful, since workers remembered the “great betrayal” all too well) to forge an alliance with workers. Eventually there were Corn Law reforms in the 1840s which reduced tariffs on wheat in ways that seriously impacted the wealth of the landed aristocracy. But when bread became cheaper, the industrial bourgeoisie reduced wages. In Marx’s terms, since the value of labor-power is determined in part by the price of bread, cheaper imports of wheat lead to lower bread prices which lead in turn (other things being equal) to a fall in the value of labor-power. The industrialists could pay their workers less because the workers needed less money to buy their daily bread! At this point in the 1840s, the Chartist movement strengthens, and workers’ demands and worker agitation escalate, but there is not a solid alliance against them because of the intense division between industrial (bourgeois) and landed (aristocratic) interests.
The industrial bourgeoisie sought to undermine the operation of the Factory Acts of the 1840s. Like the boyars, they played around with notions of temporality. Since the workers did not have timepieces, the employers altered the factory clock times to get extra labor-time. The employers organized work schedules to work in bits, “hounding him hither and thither, in scattered shreds of time” (403), so that, like an actor on the stage, they participated for ten hours of work but had to be present for fifteen. Workers had “to gulp down [their] meals in a different fragment of time” (404). The employers used the relay system to confuse the times and “denounced the factory inspector as a species of revolutionary commissioner reminiscent of the Convention, who would ruthlessly sacrifice the unfortunate factory workers to his mania for improving the world” (396–7). The earlier legislation tended to focus particularly on the employment of women and children, which sparked a debate as to the age at which children become adults. “According to the anthropology of the capitalists, the age of childhood ended at 10, or, at the outside, 11” (392). So much for the degree of civilization among the industrial bourgeoisie! And as one of the factory inspectors, Leonard Horner, vociferously complained, there was no point going to the courts, since all they ever did was to exonerate the employers. But as Marx notes, “the Tories”—the landed aristocracy—“were panting for revenge” (395) over the Corn Laws and pushed through a new Factory Act that would limit the working day to ten hours in 1848.
But in 1848, there erupted one of those periodic crises of capitalism, a major crisis of overaccumulation of capital, a huge crisis of unemployment across much of Europe that sparked intense revolutionary movements in Paris, Berlin, Vienna and elsewhere; at the same time, Chartist agitation in Britain peaked. In the face of this, the whole of the bourgeoisie got nervous about the revolutionary potential of the working class. In Paris, in June
