A Companion to Marx's Capital. David Harvey
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fetishism of market exchange hides it). Marx uses the corvée system in central Europe as an illustration. Here, the laborer was forced to contribute a certain number of labor days to the landowner such that the appropriation of surplus labor is totally transparent. The freeing of the serfs through the Russian edict of 1831 actually created a situation in which the corvée system that replaced it, organized under the Règlement organique, allowed certain definitions of a day’s work to be made fluid and open. The landowners (the boyars) argued that a day’s labor is not measured by an actual day, but by how much work should be accomplished. This work requirement could not possibly be done in a day, so that it took more and more actual days to do a formal day’s work, until “the 12 corvée days of the Règlement organique … amount to 365 days in the year” (348).
There is the germ of a very important idea here which we are going to encounter several times in Capital. The measure of time is flexible, it can be stretched out and manipulated for social purposes. In this instance, 12 labor days become 365 actual days. This social manipulation of time and temporality is a fundamental feature of capitalism also. As soon as the extraction of surplus labor-time becomes fundamental to the replication of class relations, then the question of what time is, who measures it, and how temporality is to be understood moves to the forefront of analysis. Time is not simply given; it is socially constructed and perpetually subject to reconstruction (just think, for example, how time horizons for decision making in, say, the financial sector have shifted in recent years). In the Règlement organique case, the stretching of time was obvious. Laborers knew full well how much surplus labor they were giving up to the lord and how time stretching by a ruling class contributed to this result. But the thrust of the Factory Acts in Britain in the nineteenth century—the centerpiece of much of this chapter—was very different: it was to “curb capital’s drive towards a limitless draining away of labour-power by forcibly limiting the working day on the authority of the state, but a state ruled by capitalist and landlord” (348).
Marx’s formulation poses an important question: why would a state ruled by capitalist and landlord agree to, or even contemplate, curbing the length of the working day? So far in Capital we have only encountered the figures of the laborer and the capitalist, so what on earth is the landlord doing here? Clearly, as Marx seeks to analyze a real historical situation, he has to look at the existing class configuration and how class alliances might work when the workers do not have direct access to state power. The British state in the first half of the nineteenth century was essentially organized through the power relation of capitalists and landlords, and it would have been impossible to analyze the politics of the period without paying attention to the role of the landed aristocracy. The power of the working-class movement was in the background. “Apart from the daily more threatening advance of the working-class movement,” Marx writes,
the limiting of factory labour was dictated by the same necessity as forced the manuring of English fields with guano. The same blind desire for profit that in the one case exhausted the soil had in the other case seized hold of the vital force of the nation at its roots. Periodical epidemics speak as clearly on this point as the diminishing military standard of height in France and Germany. (348)
If labor is a key resource, like the land, in the creation of national wealth, and if it is overexploited and degraded, then the capacity to continue production of surplus-value is undercut. But it is also in the state’s interest to have laborers who can become an effective military force. The health and fitness of the working classes is therefore of political and military interest (as is remarked in the lengthy footnote [348–9]). In the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–1, for example, the rapid defeat of the French at the hands of the Germans was in part attributed to the superior health of the German peasantry relative to the impoverished French peasantry and working class. The political implication is that it is militarily dangerous to permit the degradation of the working classes. This issue became important in the US during World War II, particularly when it came to mobilizing elements from impoverished and in some instances racially distinct populations.
The British Factory Acts, which Marx focuses on, were imposed by the state and designed for both economic and political/military reasons, to limit the exploitation of living labor and prevent its excessive degradation. The law is one thing, but enforcement is another. This brings us to the important figure of the factory inspectors: who were they and where did they came from? They were certainly not radical Marxists! They came from the professional bourgeoisie. They were civil servants. But they did a pretty good job of collecting information, and they pushed hard to discipline the industrial interest according to state requirements. Marx would not have been able to write this chapter without the abundant information they supplied. So why would a state regulated by capital and landlords employ factory inspectors to do this work? This is where “the degree of civilization in a country” enters into the picture, as well as bourgeois morality and the military concerns of the state. In nineteenth-century Britain, there were strong currents of bourgeois reformism (e.g., Charles Dickens) that thought some of the labor practices then in play should not exist in any civilized society. This introduces into the discussion that same “historical and moral element” which affects the value of labor-power. So while the working-class movement was indeed growing stronger, it would not have gotten as far as it did without the assistance of bourgeois reformism, particularly that strain 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