Chapter 10: The Working Day

Joel Lazarus
Jan 29, 2018
10 min read

Well hello there, dear readers! It’s been a while! That long university winter break. But, we the Bristol Marx reading group are back and ready to get going again! Come join us!

To recap, we left off in Chapters Eight and Nine with Marx getting a bit technical and setting out some key terms: constant capital – the means of production (tools, machinery) whose quantity of value remains constant in a production process – and variable capital – labour-power which not only produces a quantity of value equal to its cost, but, crucially, an excess, i.e. surplus value. Then Marx showed how the rate of surplus value (the rate of exploitation) could be calculated with the formula s/v where s = surplus value and v = variable capital. In short, Marx provides the technical foundations for understanding our own specific historical form of class society – the capitalist mode of production – and the structural antagonistic capital-labour relation of exploitation that drives it. By antagonistic, I simply mean that, clearly, the capitalist wants the worker to work as long as possible for as little and the worker seeks the very opposite.

In Chapter Ten, then, Marx focuses on this structural antagonism in its harsh reality, i.e. how it becomes an historical and ongoing struggle to determine the length of the working day. He excavates the historical and contemporary record to reveal the gratutious and shocking brutality that capital’s insatiable thirst for surplus value produced and still produces today.

Chapter Ten: The Working Day

How long is a working day? Key factors at work determining the answer to this question are natural, physiological, cultural, and political. Ask a capitalist how long she thinks a working day is or should be...

‘The capitalist has his own views of this point of no return, the necessary limit of the working day. As a capitalist, he is only capital personified. His soul is the soul of capital. But capital has one sole driving force, the drive to valorise itself, to create surplus-value, to make its constant part, the means of production, absorb the greatest possible amount of surplus labour. Capital is dead labour which, vampire-like, lives only by sucking living labour, and lives more, the more labour it sucks. The time during which the worker works is the time during which the capitalist consumes the labour-power he has bought from him. If the worker consumes his disposable time for himself, he robs the capitalist.’

The capitalist ‘takes his stand on the law of commodity-exchange’ and, like any buyer, ‘seeks to extract the maximum benefit from the use-value of his commodity’. But, hold on! Here comes the worker and she has something different to say on the matter:

‘By an unlimited extension of the working day, you may in one day use up a quantity of labour-power greater than I can restore in three...Using my labour and despoiling it are two different things.’

She goes on to show how if you use up 30 years of labour-power in just ten then you’re only actually paying a third of its real value!

‘You may be a model citizen, perhaps a member of the RSPCA, and you may be in the odour of sanctity as well; but the thing you represent when you come face to face with me has no heart in its breast. What seems to throb there is my own heartbeat. I demand a normal working day because, like any other seller, I demand the value of my commodity.’

Wow! We’ve got one hell of a stand-off going on here, ain’t we! So, who wins out?

‘There is here therefore an antinomy, of right against right, both equally bearing the seal of the law of exchange. Between equal rights, force decides. Hence, in the history of capitalist production, the establishment of a norm for the working day presents itself as a struggle over the limits of that day, a struggle between collective capital, i.e. the class of capitalists, and collective labour, i.e. the working class.’

When social scientists or whoever talk about structural power relations, this is what they’re really talking about – the struggle over the length of the working, over levels of pay and conditions, over levels of taxation and public services, over how many calories it takes to survive. And who wins out is a matter of political power...always ultimately backed up by the threat of physical violence! Don’t believe me? From riot police breaking up strikes to security guards ‘escorting’ ‘clients’ out of the Job Centre, the capitalist class and the state it controls has ultimate recourse to violence.

This long chapter is devoted to an historical account of the struggle to establish a ‘normal’ working day over the period between the mid-14th Century and the 1860s when Marx is writing. It is a horrifying and traumatic account, devoted as it is to reveal the mental and physical torture and deaths of hundreds of thousands of men, of women, and, yes, of children. We begin in branches of English industry without legal limits to exploitation. How about this description of the lace trade in Nottingham, 1860, by Mr Charlton Broughton, county magistrate documented by that most radical of newspapers the Daily Telegraph!!:

‘Children of nine or ten years are dragged from their squalid beds at two, three, or four o’clock in the morning and compelled to work for a bare subsistence until ten, eleven, or twelve at night, their limbs wearing away, their frames dwindling, their faces whitening, and their humanity absolutely sinking into a stone-like torpor, utterly horrible to contemplate...The system...is one of unmitigated slavery, socially, physically, morally, and spiritually...What can be thought of a town which holds a public meeting to petition that the period of labour for men shall be diminished to eighteen hours a day?...We declaim against the Virginian and Carolinian cotton-planters. Is their black-market, their lash, and their barter in human flesh more detestable than this slow sacrifice of humanity which takes place in order that veils and collars may be fabricated for the benefit of capitalists?’

Next, Marx shows how capitalists introduce the shift system in order to get maximum use out of their machines and workers and to keep their ‘constant’ and ‘variable’ capital in perpetual use. He documents how capitalists justify this practice according to the costs that they have to incur, e.g. Mr E.F. Sanderson of Sanderson Bros & Co, steel-rolling mills and forges:

‘Great difficulty would be caused by preventing boys under 18 from working at night. The chief would be the increase of cost from employing men instead of boys.

Marx then commences properly with his ‘longue duree’ analysis of the ‘struggle for a normal working day’. He begins with a poetic and devastating critique of capital’s perspective on this issue:

“What is a working-day? What is the length of time during which capital may consume the labour-power whose daily value it buys? How far may the working-day be extended beyond the working-time necessary for the reproduction of labour-power itself?” It has been seen that to these questions capital replies: the working-day contains the full 24 hours, with the deduction of the few hours of repose without which labour-power absolutely refuses its services again. Hence it is self-evident that the labourer is nothing else, his whole life through, than labour-power, that therefore all his disposable time is by nature and law labour-time, to be devoted to the self-expansion of capital. Time for education, for intellectual development, for the fulfilling of social functions and for social intercourse, for the free-play of his bodily and mental activity, even the rest time of Sunday (and that in a country of Sabbatarians!) [72] — moonshine! But in its blind unrestrainable passion, its were-wolf hunger for surplus-labour, capital oversteps not only the moral, but even the merely physical maximum bounds 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 higgles over a meal-time, incorporating it where possible with the process of production itself, so that food is given to the labourer as to a mere means of production, as coal is supplied to the boiler, grease and oil to the machinery. It reduces the sound sleep needed for the restoration, reparation, refreshment of the bodily powers to just so many hours of torpor as the revival of an organism, absolutely exhausted, renders essential. It is not the normal maintenance of the labour-power which is to determine the limits of the working-day; it is the greatest possible daily expenditure of labour-power, no matter how diseased, compulsory, and painful it may be, which is to determine the limits of the labourers’ period of repose. Capital cares nothing for the length of life of labour-power. All that concerns it is simply and solely the maximum of labour-power, that can be rendered fluent in a working-day. It attains this end by shortening the extent of the labourer’s life, as a greedy farmer snatches increased produce from the soil by robbing it of its fertility.’

Marx offers the example of slave purchase and ownership in the US. When slaves were readily replacable they were overworked to a swift death. When their ‘supply’ dried up, they had to be more carefully managed. Mutato nomine de te fabula narratur (The name changes but the story is the same) in the factories of England. Marx shows how surplus agricultural labour in the South were transported through ‘flesh agents’ on behalf of the Poor Law Commissioners to the factories needing this surplus labour in the North.

However, as ever within capitalism, there arises a contradiction because if the capitalist ‘extends the worker’s production-time within a given period by shortening his life’ then he inadvertently also raises the overall general cost of labour-power. Consequently, the individual capitalist, and his class as a whole, though she may not see it, has an interest in establishing a normal working day. Unfortunately, however, individual capitalists are confronted by the immanent competitive laws of the system and are unable to temper their actions. This means that, tragically, the ‘watchword of every capitalist and every capitalist nation’ is ‘apres moi le deluge!’ (After me the flood). Ultimately, this means that ‘capital...takes no account of the health and length of life of the worker, unless society forces it to do so’ and this social compulsion is achieved through a struggle that takes place, with its ups and downs, over centuries. Just as it took centuries of the emergence of the capitalist mode of production for capital to ensure that the ‘free’ worker is in a position to ‘make a voluntary agreement, i.e. is compelled by social conditions…, to sell his birthright for a mess of potage’, so to did it take centuries for the capitalist class to impose the same length of working day on children in the second half of the 19th Century as was the longer working day for men from the 14th to 17th Centuries.

This is such a long, drawn-out battle for many reasons, but perhaps the most fundamental is the simple fact that, given a choice, human beings and communities tend to choose leisure over work, that is, they choose a subsistence path in which they labour enough to reproduce themselves and enjoy their freedom and time rather than work longer to produce a large surplus. Hence, one English bourgeois political economist acknowledges that ‘if the industrious poor can obtain enough to maintain themselves in five days, they will not work the whole six’. To which another insists that ‘the cure [to the poor knowing their place] will not be perfected till our manufacturing poor are contented to labour six days for the same sum which they now earn in four days’. The goal for achieving this is to turn the workhouse into a ‘House of Terror’:

‘The ‘House of Terror’ for paupers, 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.’

Marx then moves on to cover the raft of factory legislations that were passed between 1833 and 1864. These were passed because of a struggle that emerged as soon as the working class, initially ‘stunned by the noise and turmoil of the new system of production’...’began to offer resistance’. Marx documents the Chartists political and economic movement which focused on the demand for a maximum ten hours working day. This movement and this struggle came to a head in 1846-7 – an ‘epoch-making’ period in the ‘economic history of England, for it was this moment in which the bourgeois class was able to end the ‘Corn Law’s, the protectionist tarriffs on agricultural imports imposed by the Tory landed class, and move to the era of ‘free trade’. The Chartists shared the bourgeois desire for cheaper bread, but then the Tories got their revenge by passing the Ten Hours Bill and Factory Act that, legally at least, limited the working day to ten hours.

Remember that ‘between equal rights, force decides’. The capitalists were having none of this ten hours limitation and they had the power to get their way. They began by cutting wages by almost 25%!! Then they used evidence of demand for overtime to claim that workers wanted to work longer. Of course, workers had to because they’d just had their wages slashed! They then demonised the factory inspectors while the government ensured there weren’t enough inspectors to enforce the legislation. Finally, in the aftermath of the failed 1848 revolutions across Europe, the bourgeoisie took its chance to imprison the leaders of the Chartist party, ‘shatter the self-confidence of the English working class’, and conduct an all-out ‘pro-slavery rebellion in miniature’. And yet, ultimately, there came some form of compromise in 1850 in the supplementary Factory Act of 1850 and a ‘normal’ working day was, temporarily at least, settled on.

Marx summarises the findings of this long chapter by arguing that ‘The establishment of a normal working day is...the product of a protracted and more or less concealed civil war between the capitalist class and the working class’. He also offers a brief overview of the developments in this regard in France and the US where he declares that ‘Labour in a white skin cannot emancipate itself where it is branded in a black skin’. Finally, he states 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.’

Now it’s clear why bosses don’t want unionised workers!

Conclusion

A big part of our discussion as a group on this chapter was the chapter's continued relevance. After 150 years, do children still labour in factories? Are the health and lives of workers still compromised and threatened each day in each country in the world? Are the improvements that have occured thanks to the benevolence of bosses or the struggles and sacrifices of workers?

This is an incredible chapter of historic and lasting magnitude. It’s about time itself and the class relations of struggling over the control of time. It shows that we need to establish a society in which value is defined as social wealth experienced as disposal time.