A Companion to Marx's Capital. David Harvey
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a good day’s labor was defined as a workday of twelve hours in the first such statutes, which date from 1349. This was how labor discipline was imposed in Britain. You will find similar issues being raised by colonial authorities during the nineteenth century and later. They would report that, say, the problem in India or Africa is that you can’t get the indigenous population to work a “normal” working day, let alone a “normal” working week. They typically work for a bit and then disappear. The local notion of temporality doesn’t fit with the idea of clock time and hinders the ability of capitalists to extract value as moments that are the elements of profit. The lack of time discipline of local populations was a frequent complaint among colonial administrators, and tremendous efforts were made to instill labor discipline and an appropriate sense of temporality. (I have heard contemporary university administrators make similar complaints about students and even once suffered a course from the educational geniuses of Harvard, who insisted that the first thing we had to do to teach undergraduates properly was to instill a proper sense of time discipline.)
There is now an extensive literature on the medieval and late-medieval attitude toward time, as well as on the transitions that occurred in temporality with the rise of capitalism (or, as some prefer to speak of it, of “modernity”). For instance, we all too easily forget that the hour was largely an invention of the thirteenth century, that the minute and the second became common measures only as late as the seventeenth century and that it is only in recent times that terms like “nanoseconds” have been invented. These are not natural but social determinations, and their invention was not irrelevant to the transition from feudalism to capitalism. When Foucault talks about the rise of governmentality, what he is really talking about is that moment when people started to internalize a sense of temporal discipline and to learn to live by it almost without thinking. To the degree that we all have internalized this sense, we become captive to a certain way of thinking about temporality and the practices that attach thereto. For Marx, this temporality arises in relationship to the emergence of value as socially necessary labor-time. And for him, the role of class struggle is central in ways that Foucault tends to evade or downplay. Says Marx,
It has been seen that these highly detailed specifications, which regulate, with military uniformity, the times, the limits and the pauses of work by the stroke of the clock, were by no means a product of the fantasy of Members of Parliament. They developed gradually out of circumstances as natural laws of the modern mode of production. Their formulation, official recognition and proclamation by the state were the result of a long class struggle. (394–5)
It is no longer a matter of saying that “between equal rights, force decides,” but of recognizing the class character of hegemonic forms of temporal thinking about the world. And it is not only temporality that is involved here, because the issue of spatiality also arises. To ideologists like the anonymous author of An Essay on Trade and Commerce of 1770, the problem is a “fatal” inclination to “ease and indolence” on the part of the working population (387). Marx quotes the essay:
‘The cure will not be perfect, till our manufacturing poor are contented to labour six days for the same sum which they now earn in four days.’ To this end, and for ‘extirpating idleness, debauchery and excess’, promoting a spirit of industry [and] ‘lowering the price of labour in our manufactories’ … our ‘faithful Eckart’ … ‘proposes the well-tried method of locking up workers who become dependent on public support … in ‘an ideal workhouse’. Such an ideal workhouse must be made a ‘House of Terror … [where] the poor shall work 14 hours in a day, allowing proper time for meals, in such a manner that there shall remain 12 hours of neat labour.’ (388)
Marx then makes his reply. The equivalent of such a House of Terror for paupers, he writes,
only dreamed of by the capitalist mind in 1770, was brought into being a few years later in the shape of a gigantic ‘workhouse’ for the industrial worker himself. It was called the factory. And this time the ideal was a pale shadow compared with the reality. (389)
Spatial organization is part of the disciplinary apparatus brought to bear on the worker. This almost certainly inspired Foucault’s various studies of spatially organized disciplinary apparatuses (with the panopticon as his template) in books like Madness and Civilization, Discipline and Punish and The Birth of the Clinic. It is ironic, I think, that Foucault is so often viewed in the English-speaking world as a thinker radically at odds with Marx when he so clearly takes Marx’s analysis of the working day as one of his inspirations. Foucault does a magnificent job, in my view, of generalizing Marx’s argument and giving it substance. Although in some of his later works he departs from what the Marxists (and more particularly the Maoists and Communists in France at the time) were saying, his early fundamental texts about asylums, prisons and clinics should, in my view, 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