A Companion to Marx's Capital. David Harvey
an outer limit of twenty-four hours—which is impossible because of “the physical limits to labour-power,” and because “the worker needs time in which to satisfy his intellectual and social requirements … The length of the working day therefore fluctuates within boundaries both physical and social” (341).
Marx then sets up a fictitious discussion between a capitalist and a laborer. The capitalist, as purchaser of the labor-power, says he has the right to use it as long as he can. He is, after all, “only capital personified” (recall that Marx deals with roles, not persons). “His soul is the soul of capital,” and “capital has one sole driving force, the drive to valorize itself, to create surplus-value.” Capital, Marx says, “is dead labour which, vampire-like”—and this is a chapter where we’ll get a lot of vampires and werewolves running around, a major departure from usual modes of political-economic theorizing—“lives only by sucking living labour, and lives the more, the more labour it sucks.” If the laborer calls time-out or takes time off, “he robs the capitalist … The capitalist therefore takes his stand on the law of commodity-exchange. Like all other buyers, he seeks to extract the maximum possible benefit from the use-value of his commodity” (342).
Workers, unlike machines and other forms of constant capital, answer back. They note that they own this property called labor-power and that their interest is to conserve its value for future use. The capitalist has no right to squeeze so much out of them in each day as to shorten their working life. This is, says the worker,
against our contract and the law of commodity exchange. I therefore demand a working day of normal length, and I demand it without any appeal to your heart, for in money matters sentiment is out of place … I demand a normal working day because, like every other seller, I demand the value of my commodity. (343)
Notice, both workers and capitalists take their positions according to the laws of exchange. Marx is not, as you might expect from a revolutionary thinker, advocating abolition of the wages system, but has both the workers and the capitalists agree to abide by the laws of market exchange, equivalent for equivalent. The only issue concerns how much use-value (the capacity for congealing values in commodities) the laborer is going to give up to the capitalist. Marx makes this move because, as I have emphasized, a key objective in Capital is to deconstruct the utopian propositions of classical liberal political economy on their own terms. “The capitalist maintains his right as a purchaser when he tries to make the working day as long as possible,” and
the worker maintains his right as a seller when he wishes to reduce the working day to a particular normal length. 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. (344)
So finally, after 344 pages, we get to the idea of class struggle. Finally!
There are a number of issues that call for clarification here. The acceptance by both sides of a notion of “rights” is a statement of fact concerning the hegemony of bourgeois notions of rights. But Marx immediately indicates that the problem of the length of the working day cannot be solved by appeal to rights and the laws and legalities of exchange (this parallels his earlier attack on Proudhon’s concept of eternal justice). Issues of this kind can be resolved only through class struggle, in which “force” decides between “equal rights.” This finding has ramifications for understanding the politics of contemporary capitalism. In recent times, there has been a remarkable upsurge in “rights talk,” and a lot of political energy has been invested in the idea that the pursuit of individual human rights is a way (if not the way) to shape a more humane capitalist system. What Marx is signaling here is that there is no way that many of the important questions posed in rights terms can be resolved without being reformulated in class-struggle terms. Amnesty International, for example, deals well enough with political and civil rights but has a hard time extending its concerns to economic rights because there is no way that these can be resolved without taking a side, either that of capital or that of labor. So you can see Marx’s point. There is no way to adjudicate “fairly” between equal rights (both bearing the seal of the law of exchange). All you can do is to fight for your side of the argument. This chapter therefore ends on a very skeptical note about some “pompous catalogue of ‘the inalienable rights of man’,” as opposed to what can be achieved through class struggle (416).
“Force,” in this context, doesn’t necessarily mean physical force (though there have clearly been instances when this has been crucial). The main thrust of this chapter concerns political force, the capacity to mobilize and to build political alliances and institutions (such as trade unions) to influence a state apparatus that has the power to legislate a “normal” working day. In Marx’s account, there are moments of possibility that can be grasped or lost, depending on the contingencies of the political situation and the relations of force in play. The technique here is similar to that so superbly represented in Marx’s study in The Eighteenth Brumaire of how Louis Bonaparte came to power in France in the wake of the failed 1848 revolution in Paris. The materials in this chapter shed a special light on Marx’s way of jointly pursuing a theory of a capitalist mode of production on the one hand and a deep understanding of processes of historical transformation of actually existing capitalist social formations on the other. Class-struggle outcomes are not determined in advance.
The introduction of class struggle marks a radical departure from the tenets of both classical and contemporary economic theory. It radically changes the language in which the economy is depicted and shifts the focus of concern. Introductory courses in economics are unlikely ever to focus on the length of the working day as a serious issue. It was not discussed in classical political economy, either. Yet historically there has been a monumental and ongoing struggle over the length of the working day, the working week, the working year (paid vacations) and the working life (the retirement age), and this struggle is still with us. This is clearly a fundamental aspect of capitalist history and a central issue in a capitalist mode of production. What are we to make of economic theories that ignore it?
Marx’s value theory, in contrast, leads directly into this central question. This is so because value is socially necessary labor-time, which means that time is of the essence within capitalism. As the old saying has it, “Time is money!” Control over time, other people’s time in particular, has to be collectively fought over. It cannot be traded. Class struggle therefore has to move center stage in political-economic theory as well as into all attempts to understand the historical and geographical evolution of capitalism. It is at this point in Capital that we can start to appreciate the “use-value” of Marx’s labor theory of value and of surplus-value. And while it would be wrong to treat this as some kind of empirical proof of the theoretical apparatus, it certainly illustrates its utility when it comes to the practice of theoretically informed empirical inquiry.
So how, then, does Marx lead us through this history of struggle over the length of the working day? He begins by noting that capitalism is not the only kind of society in which surplus labor and a surplus product is extracted for the benefit of some ruling class:
Wherever a part of society possesses the monopoly of the means of production, the worker, free or unfree, must add to the labour-time necessary for his own maintenance an extra quantity of labour-time in order to produce the means of subsistence for the owner of the means of production. (344)
But under capitalism, surplus labor is converted into surplus-value. So the production of a surplus product is a means for the capitalist to gain surplus-value. This imposes particular qualities on capitalist exploitation because value accumulation in money-form, as we earlier saw, is without limit.
In any economic formation of society where the use-value rather than the exchange-value of the product predominates, surplus labour will be restricted by a more or less confined set of needs, and … no boundless thirst for surplus labour will arise from the character of production itself. (345)
Furthermore, because this appropriation occurs in a society characterized by wage labor, laborers are not