Reading: Capital I, ch. 10-11
These chapters largely finish off Marx’s discussion of absolute surplus value by bringing us up through early- and late-modern European (mostly British) history into Marx’s period, in which industrial capitalism had established political-economic hegemony over the continent. His hint at the end of chapter 11 is that, while absolute surplus value was a method of exploiting labor-power even before the dominance of industrial capitalism, there are other more advanced methods contemporaneously (spoiler: relative surplus value).
But first, I thought section 5 of chapter 10 was fascinating. It covers the period from the 14th to the 18th centuries. His point is that, while there emerged a working-class movement in the 19th century to shorten the working day, the tendency up until the 18th century was to lengthen it. Marx states, “While the modern Factory Acts compulsorily shorten the working day, the earlier statues tried forcibly to lengthen it… Centuries are required before the ‘free’ worker, owing to the greater development of the capitalist mode of production, makes a voluntary agreement, i.e. is compelled by social conditions to sell the whole of his active life, his very capacity for labour, in return for the price of his customary means of subsistence, to sell his birthright for a mess of pottage.” (382) He traces the origin of this struggle by the emergent capitalist class to the Statute of Labourers in the 14th century, which was enacted in reaction to the “great plague” (presumably the Bubonic Plague), which decimated the population of Europe. Due to the ensuing labor shortage, employers struggled to compel workers to produce an adequate amount of surplus. They therefore used state power to begin compelling workers to work longer for standardized wages.
It took four centuries for the capitalists to establish dominance over the working class. Marx states, “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.” (389) Once the House of Terror had been established as the standard for capitalist industrial production, the countervailing class force entered the picture: the workers fought back and the capitalist state was forced to regulate production by limiting the extent to which the capitalists could extend the working day. Marx writes, “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.” (412-3)
But, while the motive force for the British factory acts of the early 19th century was class struggle, Marx also argues that the capitalist class has an interest in keeping exploitation within certain boundaries: “Apart from the daily more threatening advance of the working-class movement, 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)
It is not clear to me from this particular reading what connection Marx believes exists between class struggle and the realization by the capitalists of their long-term interests. I think one limiting factor to the capitalists’ ability to regulate their system comes from ideology, i.e. the tendency to objectify living labor as a commodity. This prevents them from seeing that they are dealing with real people and that, therefore, it is necessary to maintain these people and ensure that they continue to have enough of them to exploit. Perhaps it is class struggle that snaps the capitalists out of their ideological stupor and impresses on them the necessity to place limits on this exploitation because it forces them to briefly see that living labor is made up of actual humans with needs. I am not trying to “humanize” the capitalists and prove that “they have feelings too,” but instead show that capital yields nothing without a fight.
Once Marx has brought us through the enactment of the factory acts by 1850, he introduces us to the most prevalent method by which modern capitalist industry increases its exploitation of labor. Here, he writes, “The production of surplus-value in the form we have so far considered, by means of simple extension of the working day [absolute], appeared therefore independently of any change in the mode of production itself. It was no less effective in the old-fashioned bakeries than in the modern cotton factories.” (425) So, while there is a clear qualitative distinction between feudalism, which is not based on the production of surplus value, and capitalism, there is this in-between phase of emergent capitalism prior to the full development of mechanized production wherein the dominant method of surplus-value production was based on lengthening the working day.
Marx continues: “It is no longer the worker who employs the means of production, but the means of production which employ the worker. Instead of being consumed by him as material elements of his productive activity, they consume him as the ferment necessary to their own life-process, and the life-process of capital consists solely in its own motion as self-valorizing value.” (425) Whereas small-scale manufacture, which largely did not rely on advanced assembly lines, allowed the worker to control the implements of labor in the production process, modern industry instead controls the worker. Marx is clear to establish that, while there is truth to the fact that this giant machine uses up the worker and controls all of his movements, capital is in reality the capitalist personified. The capitalist class uses the means of production to control the workers.
So next time, relative surplus value, which is based on how capitalists use this advanced system to extract surplus value in a different way from lengthening the working day.
World of Lenidzky 