all cases, the laborer who appears as a “free agent” in the marketplace discovers he is no free agent in the realm of production, where “the vampire will not let go ‘while there remains a single muscle, sinew or drop of blood to be exploited’” (415–16) (here Marx quotes Engels). The lesson that must be learned is that
for ‘protection’ against the serpent of their agonies, the workers have to put their heads together and, as a class, compel the passing of a law, an all-powerful social barrier by which they can be prevented from selling themselves and their families into slavery and death by voluntary contract with capital. In place of the pompous catalogue of the ‘inalienable rights of man’ there steps the modest Magna Carta of the legally limited working day, which at last makes clear ‘when the time which the workers sells is ended, and when his own begins’. (416)
There are a couple issues that arise from this conclusion. Marx’s dismissal of the “inalienable rights of man” is a reaffirmation that “rights talk” is not going to be able to address fundamental issues, such as the determination of the length of the working day. The courts cannot do it, either. But here, for the first time, Marx argues that workers have to “put their heads together” and work as a class, and how they do so is going to have a huge impact on the conditions of labor and the dynamics of capitalism. This struggle is central to the very definition of freedom itself. I here quote from the third volume of Capital:
The realm of freedom really begins only where labour determined by necessity and external expediency ends; it lies by its very nature beyond the sphere of material production proper. Just as the savage must wrestle with nature to satisfy his needs, to maintain and reproduce his life, so must civilized man, and he must do so in all forms of society and under all possible modes of production. This realm of natural necessity expands with his development, because his needs do too; but the productive forces to satisfy these expand at the same time. Freedom, in this sphere, can consist only in this, that socialized man, the associated producers, govern the human metabolism with nature in a rational way, bringing it under their collective control instead of being dominated by it as a blind power; accomplishing it with the least expenditure of energy and in conditions most worthy and appropriate for their human nature. But this always remains a realm of necessity. The true realm of freedom, the development of human powers as an end in itself, begins beyond it, though it can only flourish with this realm of necessity as its basis. The reduction of the working day is the basic prerequisite.1
But we also see that capitalists, impelled onward by the coercive laws of competition, are likely to behave in such a way as to seriously impair the prospects for their reproduction as a class. If the laborers organize as a class, and thereby force the capitalists to modify their behavior, then the collective power of the workers helps save the capitalists from their own individual stupidity and short-sightedness, thus forcing them to recognize their class interest. The implication is that collective class struggle can be a stabilizer within the capitalist dynamic. If workers are completely powerless, then the system goes awry because Après moi le déluge! is no way to run a stable capitalist economy. Clearly, the coercive laws of competition that drive the capitalists down such a self-destructive path need to be contained. This is as serious a problem with respect to the super-exploitation of the land and the pillaging of natural resources as it is for the qualities and quantities of labor supply.
Now, this is a difficult conclusion to reach since Marx is purportedly a revolutionary thinker. In this chapter, he hemmed himself in by the initial assumption that both capital and labor pursue their rights in terms of the laws of exchange. In these terms, the only possible outcome for the workers is a “modest Magna Carta” of a fair day’s wage for a fair day’s labor. There is no overthrow of the capitalist class or abolition of class relations here. Class struggle merely equilibrates the capital-labor relation. Class struggle can all too easily be internalized within the capitalist dynamic as a positive force that sustains the capitalist mode of production. While this does mean that class struggle is both inevitable and socially necessary, it sheds very little light on the prospects for a revolutionary overthrow of capitalism.
How are we to interpret the politics of all this? My own view is to agree with the proposition that a certain empowerment of the workers’ movement is socially necessary for capitalism to function effectively, and that the sooner the capitalists recognize this and submit to it, the better off they will be. There is plenty of historical evidence to support this conclusion, even to the point where the state, as happened in the United States during the New Deal, deliberately empowered the trade-union movement in order not to overthrow capitalism but to help stabilize it. Struggles over the value of labor-power and over the length of the working day are fundamental to the achievement of a modicum of stability within capitalism for social and political as well as purely economic reasons. It is perhaps no accident that the phase of strong social-democratic governance in the 1950s and 1960s in Europe and the social compact between capital and labor in the United States were associated with strong capitalist growth and that the Scandinavian states with their strong social support systems have remained relatively successful competitors on the international stage even during the recent turn toward neoliberalism elsewhere. Marx will also insist that this finding as to the socially necessary state of class struggle has to be inserted theoretically into an otherwise silent bourgeois political economy in order to understand the dynamics of capitalism.
But there is also a point at which struggle over the length of the working day and the empowerment of a working-class movement can go beyond trade-union consciousness and morph into more revolutionary demands. It is one thing to say that the working day should be limited to ten or eight hours, but what happens when it drops to four? At that point, capitalists get a little jumpy. As happened in France, even a thirty-five-hour week and six weeks’ mandated vacation time have been seen as excessive and sparked a strong movement on the part of the capitalist class and their allies for much greater “flexibility” in labor laws. The question here is, at what point does reform go too far and actually challenge the very basis of capitalism?
If there is an equilibrium point for class struggle, it is not fixed, nor is it known. But it does depend on the nature of the class forces and the degree of flexibility that capitalists have in relation to new requirements. For example, a far shorter working day permits capitalists to push toward intensification and increasing efficiency of labor in ways that compensate for the shorter hours. It is virtually impossible to maintain a high level of intensity over a twelve-hour workday. An interesting example of this occurred in the miner’s strike against the Edward Heath government in Britain in the early 1970s. In the face of power shortages, Heath mandated a three-day workweek, but the subsequent evidence showed that productive activity did not diminish in the same proportion. He also mandated no television broadcasting after ten at night, which ensured he got booted out at the next election (there was also, I recall, an interesting blip upward in the birthrate some nine months later).
I cannot resist ending consideration of this chapter with a few comments on its relevance to contemporary conditions. Plainly, the dynamics of class struggle (including class-alliance formation) have continued ever since Marx’s time to play a crucial role in the determination of working days, weeks, years and lifetimes as well as in the degree of regulation of working conditions and levels of wages. While in certain places and times, the more horrendous and appalling conditions that Marx dwells on at length have been very much circumscribed, the general issues he describes (such as much lower life expectancies than average in many occupations such as mining, steel and construction) have never disappeared. But over the past thirty years, with the neoliberal counterrevolution that places much greater emphasis on deregulation and the pursuit of more vulnerable workforces through globalization, there has been a recrudescence of the sorts of conditions that the factory inspectors so graphically described in Marx’s time. By the mid-1990s, for example, I would give the students in my Capital class the following exercise. I would ask them to imagine they had had a letter from home that noted they were taking a course on Capital and that commented that while the book perhaps was historically relevant, the conditions it describes had long ago been superseded. I gave the students bundles of excerpts from official
