A Companion to Marx's Capital. David Harvey
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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 itself where it is branded in a black skin”) (414). But in 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