by the establishment of an authoritarian regime which became the Second Empire, led by Louis Bonaparte in 1852.
In Britain, events were not so dramatic, but the fear of unrest was widespread. There,
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 shopkeepers, Protectionists and Freetraders, government and opposition, priests and free-thinkers, young whores and old nuns [frankly, I have no idea what they had to do with it] under the common slogan of the salvation of property, religion, the family and society. (397)
It is amazing to contemplate how frequently “property, religion, the family and society” gets trotted out as an ideological mantra in the quest to protect the established bourgeois order. We don’t have to look much further than the recent history of the United States, where the Republican Party in particular would not exist were it not for its vehement declaration of loyalty to these principles. In Britain in 1848 it meant that “everywhere the working class was outlawed, anathemized, placed under the ‘loi des suspects’. The manufacturers no longer needed to restrain themselves” and “broke out in open revolt” against “all the legislation since 1833 that had aimed at restricting to some extent the ‘free’ exploitation of labour-power.” This “rebellion” was prosecuted “with a cynical recklessness and a terroristic energy which were so much the easier to achieve in that the rebel capitalist risked nothing but the skin of his workers” (397–8). All of which sounds very much like the Reagan/Thatcher neoliberal counterrevolution of the 1980s. Under the Reagan administration, much of the work that had been done on labor relations (via the National Labor Relations Board and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration) was reversed or left unenforced. In this case, too, it was the shifting character of class power and class alliances within the state apparatus that played the vital role.
In Britain, something interesting happened after 1850. The
apparently decisive victory of capital was immediately followed by a counter-stroke. So far, the workers had offered a resistance which was passive, though inflexible and unceasing. They now protested in Lancashire and Yorkshire in threatening meetings. The so-called Ten Hours’ Act, they said, was thus mere humbug, a parliamentary fraud. It had never existed! The factory inspectors urgently warned the government that class antagonisms had reached an unheard-of degree of tension. Some of the manufacturers themselves grumbled: ‘On account of the contradictory decisions of the magistrates, a condition of things altogether abnormal and anarchical obtains. One law holds in Yorkshire, another in Lancashire; one law in one parish of Lancashire, another in its immediate neighbourhood.’ (405)
What the capitalists had in effect done was to use the law to fragment decisions here, there and everywhere so that actually the law was no longer consistent. But the serious threat of unrest in 1850 forced a
compromise between manufacturers and men, given the seal of parliamentary approval in the supplementary Factory Act of 5 August 1850. The working day for ‘young persons and women’ was lengthened from 10 to 10½ hours for the first five days of the week, and shortened to 7½ hours on Saturdays. (405)
Certain groups, such as the silk manufacturers, procured exemptions, and there the children “were quite simply slaughtered for the sake of their delicate fingers” (406). But by 1850,
the principle had triumphed with its victory in those great branches of industry which form the most characteristic creation of the modern mode of production. Their wonderful development from 1853 to 1860, hand-in-hand with the physical and moral regeneration of the factory workers, was visible to the weakest eyes. 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 in those social layers not directly interested in the question. (408–9)
Who were these allies? Marx does not say, but it probably comes back mainly to professional classes and the progressive wing of the reformist bourgeoisie. These were crucial elements in a situation where the working classes did not vote. “Hence the comparatively rapid progress since 1860” (409).
While Marx does not comment on it, this reformism was not confined to the conditions of factory labor, and to the degree that it became clear that they, too, could benefit, even the industrial interest increasingly participated. This was best symbolized by the Birmingham industrialist Joseph Chamberlain, who became mayor of the city and was often then referred to as “Radical Joe” because of his commitments to municipal improvements in education, infrastructure (water supply, sewage, gas lighting, etc.) and better housing for the poor. At least a segment of the industrial bourgeoisie had learned by the 1860s that it did not necessarily have to be reactionary on these topics if it was to maintain its profits.
This whole dynamic calls for some commentary. It’s clear from the data that up until 1850 or so, the rate of exploitation in the British industrial system was horrendous and that the hours of work were equally horrendous, with dreadful consequences for the conditions of working and living. But this super-exploitation slackened after 1850 without any marked negative effect on profitability or output. This occurred in part because the capitalists found another way to gain surplus-value (to be taken up shortly). But they also discovered that a healthy and efficient labor force, on a shorter working day, could be more productive than an unhealthy, inefficient, falling-apart, constantly turning-over and dying-off labor force of the sort that it had utilized during the 1830s and 1840s. The capitalists could then trumpet this discovery and their benevolence and sometimes overtly support a certain level of collective regulation and state interference to limit the effects of the coercive laws of competition. If, from the standpoint of the capitalist class as a whole, curbing the length of the working day turned out to be a good idea, then what does this say about the struggle by workers and their allies to limit it? It says that workers may well be doing capital a favor. Capitalists get pushed into a reform which is not necessarily against their class interest. In other words, the dynamics of class struggle can just as easily help equilibrate the system as disrupt it. Marx in effect concedes here that capitalists, when they finally succumbed after fifty years of struggle to the idea of regulating the working day, found it worked for them just as well as it did for the workers.
In section 7, Marx examines the impact of British factory legislation on other countries, chiefly France and the United States. In so doing, he first recognizes that a mode of analysis that focuses merely on the individual worker and his or her contract is insufficient.
The history of the regulation of the working day in certain branches of production, and the struggle still going on in others over this regulation, prove conclusively that the isolated worker, the worker as ‘free’ seller of his labour-power, succumbs without resistance once capitalist production has reached a certain stage of maturity. The establishment of a normal working day is therefore the product of a protracted and more or less concealed civil war between the capitalist class and the working class. (412–13)
In other countries, this struggle is affected by the nature of political traditions (the “French revolutionary method,” for example, is far more heavily dependent on declarations of “universal rights”) and actual conditions of labor (in the United States, under conditions of slavery, “labour in a white skin cannot emancipate
