How are we to interpret the politics of all this? My own view is to agree with the proposition that a certain empowerment of the workers’ movement is socially necessary for capitalism to function effectively, and that the sooner the capitalists recognize this and submit to it, the better off they will be. There is plenty of historical evidence to support this conclusion, even to the point where the state, as happened in the United States during the New Deal, deliberately empowered the trade-union movement in order not to overthrow capitalism but to help stabilize it. Struggles over the value of labor-power and over the length of the working day are fundamental to the achievement of a modicum of stability within capitalism for social and political as well as purely economic reasons. It is perhaps no accident that the phase of strong social-democratic governance in the 1950s and 1960s in Europe and the social compact between capital and labor in the United States were associated with strong capitalist growth and that the Scandinavian states with their strong social support systems have remained relatively successful competitors on the international stage even during the recent turn toward neoliberalism elsewhere. Marx will also insist that this finding as to the socially necessary state of class struggle has to be inserted theoretically into an otherwise silent bourgeois political economy in order to understand the dynamics of capitalism.
But there is also a point at which struggle over the length of the working day and the empowerment of a working-class movement can go beyond trade-union consciousness and morph into more revolutionary demands. It is one thing to say that the working day should be limited to ten or eight hours, but what happens when it drops to four? At that point, capitalists get a little jumpy. As happened in France, even a thirty-five-hour week and six weeks’ mandated vacation time have been seen as excessive and sparked a strong movement on the part of the capitalist class and their allies for much greater “flexibility” in labor laws. The question here is, at what point does reform go too far and actually challenge the very basis of capitalism?
If there is an equilibrium point for class struggle, it is not fixed, nor is it known. But it does depend on the nature of the class forces and the degree of flexibility that capitalists have in relation to new requirements. For example, a far shorter working day permits capitalists to push toward intensification and increasing efficiency of labor in ways that compensate for the shorter hours. It is virtually impossible to maintain a high level of intensity over a twelve-hour workday. An interesting example of this occurred in the miner’s strike against the Edward Heath government in Britain in the early 1970s. In the face of power shortages, Heath mandated a three-day workweek, but the subsequent evidence showed that productive activity did not diminish in the same proportion. He also mandated no television broadcasting after ten at night, which ensured he got booted out at the next election (there was also, I recall, an interesting blip upward in the birthrate some nine months later).
I cannot resist ending consideration of this chapter with a few comments on its relevance to contemporary conditions. Plainly, the dynamics of class struggle (including class-alliance formation) have continued ever since Marx’s time to play a crucial role in the determination of working days, weeks, years and lifetimes as well as in the degree of regulation of working conditions and levels of wages. While in certain places and times, the more horrendous and appalling conditions that Marx dwells on at length have been very much circumscribed, the general issues he describes (such as much lower life expectancies than average in many occupations such as mining, steel and construction) have never disappeared. But over the past thirty years, with the neoliberal counterrevolution that places much greater emphasis on deregulation and the pursuit of more vulnerable workforces through globalization, there has been a recrudescence of the sorts of conditions that the factory inspectors so graphically described in Marx’s time. By the mid-1990s, for example, I would give the students in my Capital class the following exercise. I would ask them to imagine they had had a letter from home that noted they were taking a course on Capital and that commented that while the book perhaps was historically relevant, the conditions it describes had long ago been superseded. I gave the students bundles of excerpts from official reports (by the World Bank, for instance) and clippings from respectable newspapers (the New York Times, etc.) describing working conditions in plants producing Gap clothing in Central America, Nike plants in Indonesia and Vietnam or Levi Strauss products in Southeast Asia and describing how that great lover of children Kathy Lee Gifford was shocked to find that her line of clothing for Wal-Mart was produced either in plants in Honduras employing young children at almost no wages or in sweatshops in the New York region where people had not been paid for weeks. The students wrote great essays, though they balked when I suggested they might like to send them home.
Regrettably, conditions have grown worse. In May 2008, an Immigration and Customs Enforcement raid on an Iowa meatpacking plant netted 389 suspected illegal immigrants, several of whom were underage and many of whom worked twelve-hour days six days a week. The immigrants were treated as criminals; many of the 297 convicted were jailed for five months or more prior to deportation, while the authorities only began slowly to move against the company for its appalling labor practices as the moral outrage began to build through public exposure. As the students in my class had also concluded, it is all too easy to insert any number of contemporary accounts of labor practices into Marx’s chapter on the working day without noticing the difference. This is where the neoliberal counterrevolution and the loss of power on the part of the labor movement have brought us. Sad to report, Marx’s analysis is all too relevant to our contemporary condition.
CHAPTER 11: RATE AND MASS OF SURPLUS-VALUE
Chapter 11 is a typical link chapter. It moves out of one set of questions in order to pose another. Marx’s method returns to the somewhat dryly algebraic before taking a substantive twist. Capitalists, he suggests, are most interested in maximizing the mass of surplus-value because their individual social power depends on the total money power they command. The mass of surplus-value is given by the rate of surplus-value multiplied by the number of laborers employed. If the number of laborers employed diminishes, the same mass of surplus-value can be gained by increasing the rate of surplus-value. But there is a limit on the rate of surplus-value given not only by the twenty-four hours in a day but also by all the social and political barriers discussed earlier. Faced with this limit, capitalists can increase the number of laborers employed. But at some point, another limit is encountered, which is the total variable capital available and the total supply of the laboring population. The outer limit here would be, of course, the total population, but again there are reasons why the available workforce is far less than this. Faced with these two limits, capital has to come up with an entirely different strategy for increasing the mass of surplus-value.
As often happens in transitional chapters, Marx provides us, in capsule form, with a conceptual map as to where we have been and where we are going:
Capital developed within the production process until it acquired command over labour, i.e. over self-activating labour-power, in other words the worker himself. The capitalist, who is capital personified, now takes care that the worker does his work regularly and with the proper degree of intensity … [But] capital also developed into a coercive relation, and this compels the working class to do more work than would be required by the narrow circle of its own needs. (424–5)
Capital personified, in its thirst for surplus labor and its incessant pursuit of surplus-value,
surpasses all earlier systems of production … in its energy and its quality of unbounded and ruthless activity … [But] at first capital subordinates labour on the basis of the technical conditions within which labour has been carried on up to that point in history. It does not therefore directly change the mode of production. The production of surplus-value in the form we have so far considered, by means of simple extension of the working day, appeared therefore independently of any change in the mode of production itself. (425)
But all that is about to change, both logically and historically. When “we view the production process as a process of valorization,” then the means of production are changed into “means for the absorption of the labour of others. It is no longer the worker who employs the means of production, but the means of production which employ the worker.” This historical and logical reversal lies at the core of an astonishing