William J. Blake: An American Looks at Karl Marx
The limits of the working day are very elastic. The capitalist buys labor-power for one working day. But how much is that indeterminate time to be computed as? Six, ten, sixteen hours? There are two practical limits. The worker cannot go on twenty-four hours a day. Even if he slept as little as the legendary Napoleon (four hours) he needs to eat, rest, etc. The maximum must allow for this need to recuperate so that he can work the next day.
Apart from his non-eating soul, man is a heat-machine like any other, for heat is a mode of motion, and that is what work is. As such his maximum expenditure of energy in a given day can be pretty well known.
Even a horse must stop. It is true that the amount of food with which this heat-machine is stocked is a variable. Then, too, the worker is a man, and in certain societies has human demands. He wants to have some fun, or, if he is a killjoy, he wishes to mourn his lot with fellow pessimists. He may even want to read. Some of the young workers like to be athletes or to dance. The physical and social limits are thus extremely indeterminate.
But the capitalist, as a businessman (whatever his personal magnanimity) is bound to seek to extend that time as far as the energy of the worker will produce an ascending amount of commodities. For the more time, the more value produced; the more value produced, the greater the ratio of surplus-value to the needs of the worker (which he replaces in short time).
If it is argued that by driving the worker too hard the capitalist impairs his purchase of labor-power the reply is that that may be true for any given worker, as a seller of labor-power, but the question here is social, the mass of sellers of labor-power against the mass of capitalists.
If the destruction of health and life of the workers is soon compensated by a new crop of sellers of labor-power, then the capitalist is losing profits by taking humanity into consideration.
It is only if the overdriving of labor and the extreme lengthening of the working day go beyond production limits, and if labor is not replaceable to advantage in the production process, that the capitalist must necessarily calculate humanely.
Simon Legree in Uncle Tom’s Cabin laments, “Lor’, I used to tend my niggers, fix ’em up when they was sick. But now I get what I can. Good niggers last five or six years, trashy ones gets used up in two or three.” That was because the slave trade and the breeders in the border states produced a constant supply so that Legree lost the interest in humanity that he had when that supply was not so abundant.
Capital is dead labor. It is the conversion of former effort into commodities. Marx says that it acts like a vampire, it sucks sustenance for its dead being out of living labor.1
There is no limit to the thirst for living blood by the dead. It is a horrible image, but it is graphic. That is Marx’s analysis in literary guise. The worker, on his part, seeks to reduce the working day to the minimum required to keep him going in good health, with the promise of longevity and allowing for the nourishment of healthy children. Any expenditure of labor-power that injures these needs, he resists. He knows that in one year’s expenditure of labor-power he may give up four potential years. He must save his energy just as a capitalist saves money. Accordingly he says to the capitalist, “I have sold you my labor-power, which you have bought the use of but not the abuse of. Pay me for my time but do not rob my future time. Value for value, that is all.”
Descartes once said that one man must be as good as another, for each thinks he is as good as the next and there is only God to decide between them! Here too economic science is of no use to us. Each side fights for its interests, and although there are extreme limits, perhaps sixteen hours a day on one side and four hours on the other, the difference is so large that it might as well be infinite. Force alone decides. “A fair day’s work for a fair day’s pay” is hollow rhetoric. Each side’s idea of fairness is determined by class interests and there is no common denominator in political economy.
Since the working day can never go to merely the time required for the worker to reproduce his labor-power, for then capitalist production stops, nor for so long as to destroy labor, the normal working day with which we have dealt is a historic category. In those terms, Marx reviews the “greed for surplus labor.”
The Evolution of Surplus-Value
Capital did not invent surplus labor. Wherever one class has a monopoly of the means of production the other, free or not free, must give up a part of its time to the sustaining of the masters. But where use-value and not exchange-value is the object of production, there is no need to drive labor beyond the particular wants of the masters. It was as soon as gold and silver became money, in Greece and Rome, that slavery took on its terrible shape. The slave was worked to death.
As soon as serfs or corvée workers (that is, persons who have to give a definite part of their time to working for a noble or for the state without recompense) produce goods for an international market, they too are given the least amount required to survive and worked to an early grave.
The slaves in the Southern states were treated with something like patriarchal kindness and they were so inefficient that Washington and Jefferson, themselves slaveholders, looked with hope to the speedy end of a wasteful system.
But no sooner was cotton a great cash export crop than the Legrees replaced the St. Clairs, and slave exploitation became increasingly vicious, and the softened domestic slave economy was confined to scattered gentry like Robert E. Lee.
It was no longer a question of getting use-values from the slave but of surplus-labor itself.
Corvée labor is the best primitive type for comparison with capitalist labor. The laws of Romania, for example, fixed the division of the labor-time between what the peasant could have for his own livelihood and what surplus time he must give for nothing to the noble.
Statute Limitations of the Working Day
The English Factory Acts, dating from the ten-hour law of 1850, show negatively that the greed for surplus-labor is so great that unless the workers are protected by statute they will be worked to death. For this law was passed only when it was obvious that the English race was actually collapsing in physique.
Despite this Act, won by the English labor movement (the first aggressive labor movement in history),2 the mill-owners consistently evaded it and snatched ten minutes here and quarter-hours there on pretexts, or in the hope of influencing factory inspectors. This shows the vital importance of labor-time to capitalists.
But the protected industries were very few. It was the waste of life and the driving to illness and death of men, even in healthy occupations, like blacksmithing, which showed what capital must do when it is unrestricted. The contrast was complete, for the ten-hour industries and the “free” industries existed side by side. Day and night shifts, the relay system, etc., extracted incredible amounts of surplus-labor from the workers.
If labor, asks Marx, was conceived of as anything else than a commodity, as labor-power, how could this history be explained? Nor can the capitalist be kind. For whatever he may feel (and thousands of such men are humane), the competition of less scrupulous capitalists makes it impossible for him to survive except at the level of overtime brought about by the pace-setters, the sharpest, exploiting employers.
He must follow the immanent laws of capitalism. As a class, he (the employer) cannot negate them. If it be objected that some employers are better than others, Marx replies that (1) they are a minority, and that (2) frequently they operate in trades where the threat of still further concessions that would be wrung by the workers prompts this forced generosity.
Marx’s chamber of horrors, bristling with hideous examples, apart from his economic theories, was the inspiration of the restriction-of-hours acts throughout the world and especially in America, where German immigrant labor, highly skilled and educated, made his dread bundles of fact part and parcel of the trades-union baggage. Today the memory of that epoch in industrial history is so dreadful that no one any longer contests the picture Marx drew so vividly. It is his humane service, and is respected by those who dissent wholly from his political economy.
He reviewed historically the constant efforts made by parliaments from the fourteenth century on to compel the workers to toil longer hours. Wages were fixed at a maximum, but the time worked could not be less than a certain number of hours.
But not until free labor was driven off the land, and capitalism could employ the helpless, was this compulsion to work longer hours made a social fact. It was abused so terribly and so fast that within a few decades the current set in the other direction, and parliamentary and legislative action has since aimed at restricting maximum hours instead of imposing a minimum labor-time.
Within a short time the restrictions on child labor and regulation of female labor and humaner hours regulations saved the English race and so saved English industry which, despite the “profit is in the last hour” economists, entered a period of a fifty-year boom.3
Example preaches louder than arguments and soon the British hours-restriction acts were enacted, in even more liberal form, in American states. We shall see in the study of imperialism that the gain of British labor was partly at the expense of native colonial labor. But even so it measured a large social advance.
The Reality behind Free Labor
Marx comments on the question of the working day, that the laborer comes out of the process of production a different man than he entered it. In the market he theoretically is the free owner of a commodity, labor-power, which he sells to the capitalist, without constraint. Once sold, the time, for which he is free to sell his labor-power, is the time for which he is forced to sell it. He defends himself not as a contractor but as a class, and uses the statute books and collective bargaining as his historic weapons. This is the reality behind free labor.
1. The superstition of the vampire is common in Hungary. The belief is that corpses haunt the world, take on the shape of bats, but can be seen also in their former human shape. They cast no shadow nor are reflected in a mirror, but they need the blood of living people so as to keep going, and therefore suck it from them.
2. It is necessary to recall the sturdy example of British labor to its brethren everywhere at a time when it is the fashion to tar all Englishmen with the reactionary brush.
3. All of them, to their honor, later admitted their error. “The people were right and we were wrong.”