A Companion to Marx's Capital. David Harvey
workers. The industrial bourgeoisie got most of the reforms it wanted, while the working classes got nothing very much. The first Factory Act regulating the length of the working day in 1833 was weak and ineffectual (although it did set the precedent of state legislation on the topic). The workers, angered by the betrayal, organized a political movement, called Chartism, which started to agitate against the conditions of life of the mass of the population as well as against the appalling conditions of industrial labor. During this time, the landed aristocracy became even more antagonistic toward the rising power of the industrial bourgeoisie (read a Dickens or a Disraeli novel and this tension is omnipresent). They were therefore inclined to support the workers’ demands in part on the grounds of the national (military) interest but also through the typical aristocratic politics of noblesse oblige, depicting themselves as the good paternalistic folk who don’t exploit people the way those nasty industrialists do. This was, in part, where the factory inspectors are coming from. They were being promoted by the landed aristocracy in order to curb the power of a ruthless industrial bourgeoisie. By the 1840s, the industrial bourgeoisie was being pushed hard by this coalition of landed aristocracy and a working-class movement that was “daily more threatening,” as Marx puts it (348). Stronger versions of the Factory Act were mooted and passed in 1844, 1847 and 1848.
There is, however, another piece in this jigsaw puzzle of class relations and alliance formation. The Manchester School of economics was a great advocate of laissez-faire and free trade. This led to a struggle over the Corn Laws (N.B., in Britain at that time “corn” referred to “wheat” and not, as in America, to what the British called “maize”). High tariffs on imported wheat protected the incomes of the landed aristocracy from foreign competition. But the result was a high cost of bread, a basic foodstuff for the working classes. The industrial bourgeoisie launched a political campaign, led by Cobden and Bright in Manchester, for the abolition of the Corn Laws, pointing out to the workers that this would mean cheaper bread. Attempts were made (not very successful, since workers remembered the “great betrayal” all too well) to forge an alliance with workers. Eventually there were Corn Law reforms in the 1840s which reduced tariffs on wheat in ways that seriously impacted the wealth of the landed aristocracy. But when bread became cheaper, the industrial bourgeoisie reduced wages. In Marx’s terms, since the value of labor-power is determined in part by the price of bread, cheaper imports of wheat lead to lower bread prices which lead in turn (other things being equal) to a fall in the value of labor-power. The industrialists could pay their workers less because the workers needed less money to buy their daily bread! At this point in the 1840s, the Chartist movement strengthens, and workers’ demands and worker agitation escalate, but there is not a solid alliance against them because of the intense division between industrial (bourgeois) and landed (aristocratic) interests.
The industrial bourgeoisie sought to undermine the operation of the Factory Acts of the 1840s. Like the boyars, they played around with notions of temporality. Since the workers did not have timepieces, the employers altered the factory clock times to get extra labor-time. The employers organized work schedules to work in bits, “hounding him hither and thither, in scattered shreds of time” (403), so that, like an actor on the stage, they participated for ten hours of work but had to be present for fifteen. Workers had “to gulp down [their] meals in a different fragment of time” (404). The employers used the relay system to confuse the times and “denounced the factory inspector as a species of revolutionary commissioner reminiscent of the Convention, who would ruthlessly sacrifice the unfortunate factory workers to his mania for improving the world” (396–7). The earlier legislation tended to focus particularly on the employment of women and children, which sparked a debate as to the age at which children become adults. “According to the anthropology of the capitalists, the age of childhood ended at 10, or, at the outside, 11” (392). So much for the degree of civilization among the industrial bourgeoisie! And as one of the factory inspectors, Leonard Horner, vociferously complained, there was no point going to the courts, since all they ever did was to exonerate the employers. But as Marx notes, “the Tories”—the landed aristocracy—“were panting for revenge” (395) over the Corn Laws and pushed through a new Factory Act that would limit the working day to ten hours in 1848.
But in 1848, there erupted one of those periodic crises of capitalism, a major crisis of overaccumulation of capital, a huge crisis of unemployment across much of Europe that sparked intense revolutionary movements in Paris, Berlin, Vienna and elsewhere; at the same time, Chartist agitation in Britain peaked. In the face of this, the whole of the bourgeoisie got nervous about the revolutionary potential of the working class. In Paris, in June of 1848, there was a violent repression of working-class movements that had asserted power, followed by the establishment of an authoritarian regime which became the Second Empire, led by Louis Bonaparte in 1852.
In Britain, events were not so dramatic, but the fear of unrest was widespread. There,
the fiasco of the Chartist party whose leaders had been imprisoned and whose organization dismembered, had shattered the self-confidence of the English working class. Soon after this the June insurrection in Paris and its bloody suppression united, in England as on the Continent, all fractions of the ruling classes, landowners and capitalists, stock-exchange sharks and small-time shopkeepers, Protectionists and Freetraders, government and opposition, priests and free-thinkers, young whores and old nuns [frankly, I have no idea what they had to do with it] under the common slogan of the salvation of property, religion, the family and society. (397)
It is amazing to contemplate how frequently “property, religion, the family and society” gets trotted out as an ideological mantra in the quest to protect the established bourgeois order. We don’t have to look much further than the recent history of the United States, where the Republican Party in particular would not exist were it not for its vehement declaration of loyalty to these principles. In Britain in 1848 it meant that “everywhere the working class was outlawed, anathemized, placed under the ‘loi des suspects’. The manufacturers no longer needed to restrain themselves” and “broke out in open revolt” against “all the legislation since 1833 that had aimed at restricting to some extent the ‘free’ exploitation of labour-power.” This “rebellion” was prosecuted “with a cynical recklessness and a terroristic energy which were so much the easier to achieve in that the rebel capitalist risked nothing but the skin of his workers” (397–8). All of which sounds very much like the Reagan/Thatcher neoliberal counterrevolution of the 1980s. Under the Reagan administration, much of the work that had been done on labor relations (via the National Labor Relations Board and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration) was reversed or left unenforced. In this case, too, it was the shifting character of class power and class alliances within the state apparatus that played the vital role.
In Britain, something interesting happened after 1850. The
apparently decisive victory of capital was immediately followed by a counter-stroke. So far, the workers had offered a resistance which was passive, though inflexible and unceasing. They now protested in Lancashire and Yorkshire in threatening meetings. The so-called Ten Hours’ Act, they said, was thus mere humbug, a parliamentary fraud. It had never existed! The factory inspectors urgently warned the government that class antagonisms had reached an unheard-of degree of tension. Some of the manufacturers themselves grumbled: ‘On account of the contradictory decisions of the magistrates, a condition of things altogether abnormal and anarchical obtains. One law holds in Yorkshire, another in Lancashire; one law in one parish of Lancashire, another in its immediate neighbourhood.’ (405)
What the capitalists had in effect done was to use the law to fragment decisions here, there and everywhere so that actually the law was no longer consistent. But the serious threat of unrest in 1850 forced a
compromise between manufacturers and men, given the seal of parliamentary approval in the supplementary Factory Act of 5 August 1850. The working day for ‘young persons and women’ was lengthened from 10 to 10½ hours for the first five days of the week, and shortened to 7½ hours on Saturdays. (405)
Certain groups, such as the silk manufacturers, procured exemptions, and there the children “were quite simply slaughtered for the sake of their delicate fingers” (406). But by 1850,
the principle had triumphed with its victory in those great