A Companion to Marx's Capital. David Harvey
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have a technical term for it, karōshi. People do die from overwork, and many people’s lifetimes are shortened through the overwork they suffer or from the work conditions they encounter. In 2009, the United Farm Workers sued California Occupational Safety and Health Administration for not protecting farmworkers in the state from deadly heat, citing three cases of needless death from heat exhaustion.
Marx is here describing what happens when the power relationship between capital and labor becomes so lopsided that the labor force is reduced to a position of degradation and even driven to untimely deaths. This problem is exacerbated by the rise of the relay system described in the fourth section of this chapter. Unemployed capital is lost capital, and capital, recall, is not a machine or a sum of money, but value in motion. If a machine is not being used, it’s dead capital, so there is pressure to use it all the time. The continuity of the production process becomes important, particularly in those industries, such as blast furnaces and heavy-metal engineering, employing large amounts of fixed-capital equipment. The need to keep the fixed capital employed mandates a twenty-four-hour workday. Since individual workers cannot work twenty-four hours, the relay system is devised and then supplemented by night work and the shift system. Remember: workers not only produce surplus-value, they reanimate constant capital. The result is night-shift work via the relay system. There is, therefore, no such thing as a “natural working day,” only various constructions of it in relation to the capitalist requirement to maintain a continuity of flow at all costs.
Section 5 takes up the struggle for a normal working day. What is the length of time during which capital may consume the labor-power whose daily value it has paid for? Capital, plainly, is going to take as much as it can get. For capital,
it is self-evident that the worker is nothing other than labour-power for the duration of his whole life, and that therefore all his disposable time is by nature and by right labour-time, to be devoted to the self-valorization of capital [i.e., the production of surplus-value]. Time for education, for intellectual development, for the fulfilment of social functions, for social intercourse, for the free play of vital forces of his body and his mind, even the rest time of Sunday … what foolishness! But in its blind and measureless drive, its insatiable appetite for surplus labour, capital oversteps not only the moral but even the merely physical limits of the working day. It usurps the time for growth, development and healthy maintenance of the body. It steals the time required for the consumption of fresh air and sunlight. It haggles over the meal-times, where possible incorporating them into the production process itself. (375–6)
I always remember the assembly-line scenes from Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times when I read these passages. Capital
reduces the sound sleep needed for … restoration, renewal and refreshment … [It] asks no questions about the length of life of labour-power. What interests it is purely and simply the maximum of labour-power that can be set in motion in a working day. It attains this objective by shortening the life of labour-power, in the same way as a greedy farmer snatches more produce from the soil by robbing it of its fertility. (376)
The parallel between exhaustion of the soil and of the vital powers of the laborer echoes the formulation in chapter 1 where Marx cites William Petty’s comment that “labour is the father of material wealth, the earth is its mother” (134). But this also implies that excessive exploitation of the resources required to produce all wealth poses a danger for capitalism itself. At some point or other, the capitalist will also think that a normal working day might not be a bad idea.
If then the unnatural extension of the working day, which capital necessarily strives for in its unmeasured drive for self-valorization, shortens the life of the individual worker, and therefore the duration of his labour-power, the forces used up have to be replaced more rapidly, and it will be more expensive to reproduce labour-power, just as in the case of a machine, where the part of its value that has to be reproduced daily grows greater the more rapidly the machine is worn out. It would seem therefore that the interest of capital itself points in the direction of a normal working day. (377)
The problem, however, is that individual capitalists in competition with one another cannot stop pushing toward the overexploitation of their fundamental resource bases, labor and the land. The potential exists for a conflict between the class interest of capitalists in a “sustainable” labor force and the short-term individual behaviors of capitalists faced with competition. Therefore some limit has to be put on competition between them.
Slave owners, Marx points out, can, if they wish, afford to kill off their slaves through excessive work provided they have a new source of cheap slaves at hand. But this is also true for the labor market:
for slave trade, read labour-market, for Kentucky and Virginia, Ireland and the agricultural districts of England, Scotland and Wales, for Africa, Germany. We have heard how over-work has thinned the ranks of the bakers in London. Nevertheless, the London labour-market is always overstocked with German and other candidates for death in the bakeries. (378)
Marx here 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