Class 6 Haitian Creole

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Class 6

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» NEIL SMITH: One of the striking things
for me always about that chapter was

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the extraordinarily precise mathematical logic of it.

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I mean, it comes closest to a mathematical dialectic.

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And sometimes that ability and that way of working
is why Marx gets tagged as in some ways as a structuralist

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» HARVEY: positivist!
» NEIL SMITH: or a positivist even, without people in the equation

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and so on. But of course by the time
you move on to chapter 10, "the working-day",

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the limits of that kind of analysis become obvious.

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And you see Marx's own method deriving.
So at some point he says:

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'If you've got equal rights,
the right of the labourer to sell

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their labour-power and the right of the employer

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to employ that labour-power —
between equal rights force decides.'

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So, what's the shift you see?
What's the value of all that discussion

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of the working-day, of wages, and of time?

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» HARVEY: Well I think that's where he
really does connect the idea that value

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is about socially necessary labour time.
And therefore time becomes crucial.

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So this chapter is about time.
He says: "Moments are the elements of profit";

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and therefore attempting to capture other people's
time becomes absolutely fundamental

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to what capitalism is about. And here we get
into something which is I think very interesting.

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Because we often think of time as a natural phenomenon,

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…it's there, you know.

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But what Marx is showing us is that time actually
shifts with the dynamics of a capitalist system

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—that capitalism creates a particular sense of time.

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It creates the idea of a working-day, of a working week,
of a working year, of a working life.

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It creates that idea; so that actually that notion of temporality
is something which is socially constructed.

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And this social construction of time
suddenly says that time is not natural at all.

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We're being told what time is, and all this stuff about
clocking in and clocking out,

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a system of fines, if you come too late,
because you offended against the temporal regime.

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So there's a lot in there, which is about
the temporal disciplining of a society.

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And a little bit about spaciality,
because a lot of this goes on inside of the factory.

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So it's inside of the factory where this is going on,
… and the bells.

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I often think: 'This is strange, why is it that universities,
for example, have a kind of factory regime?'

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The bell rings and you say: "Okay, this period of the math class is over,
and I now have to go do my French for another hour."

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And so the temporal regime of the university is very much of that sort;

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and education into time discipline becomes crucial.

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And even at the educational level, I remember, at some point or other,

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there was this usual thing about the deficiencies
of university education and teaching first-year students.

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So we get these people who come down from
Harvard to Johns Hopkins to tell us what to do;

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and what did they tell us? They said:
'The thing you should do in the first year

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of a student's life at universities—
you have to teach them time discipline.

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That is the most important thing. How do you do
that? You set them papers, and you don't accept

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the papers if they are late.'

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This is intellectual production! You and I know
you cannot produce work in that kind of way.

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And in fact there is a very funny… I always
had this on my desk for a long time…

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a very funny letter to Karl Marx from his publisher in Leipzig,

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where the publisher says: 'Dear Herr Doktor Professor,
it comes to our attention that you are

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6 months late with the manuscript of 'Das Kapital'.
If we do not receive the text within the next 6 months

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we will have to commission somebody else to write it.'

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But the point here is, that the chapter
on the working-day is really about

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why capitalism has this kind of temporality,
which is radically different from precapitalist societies

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—how they organize time; and one would hope
radically different from how

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a socialist society would organize time. But temporality
is really fiercely fixed under capitalism

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and it speeds up. It goes faster, so later on
in Capital we see this phenomena of speed-up,

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intensification. Why is capitalism always about that?
So we understand something about the logic

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of the system and the logic of its temporalities

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from that chapter, which is one of the
reasons I think it is such a fantastic chapter.

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We are going to do chapter 10 and 11.

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Chapter Ten: The working-day.

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I commented before on the fact
that Marx changes styles throughout Capital.

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And this chapter is really constructed in
a different kind of way than the chapters before.

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It's full of historical detail and information.

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It invokes a whole bunch of theoretical categories
that we have not encountered in the text so far.

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Because I think what Marx is interested in doing
here is outlining a real historical situation

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and narrative, that both sheds light upon the
fundamental theoretical apparatus that

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he's constructed, i.e. the theory of value,

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at the same time as you see how the theory
of value illuminates something about the history.

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Now, we've discussed before the relationship between history and theory
in this text, and this is a good chapter to reflect

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a little bit about on how it works. But it's
clear that the history that you are going to look at,

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is a history which involves a lot of
things, which are not yet in the theory.

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If you want them all to be in the theory, then you
got to get to the end of volume 3 of Capital,

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and even go beyond. But here he is invoking them,
because he wants to tell a real historical story.

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And the real historical story is about the history
of the struggle over the length of the working-day.

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And he starts off reminding us, and I think this
is always very important to do to remind yourself,

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about the distinction between the labour theory of value
and the value of labour-power.

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The value of labour-power is the value of a commodity.
It's a commodity in some respects like other commodities,

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but in other respects, as we've seen earlier
different from the normal run of commodities,

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because it encapsulates a historical, moral, civilizational element.

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And as we will see in this chapter, those questions about

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what is civilizational and what is not, come back into the picture.

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But having said that, he then is interested
in the distinction or the difference between

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what labour produces, the value it produces
and what the value of that labour-power is.

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And so he sets up this simple diagram at the beginning,

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that says: 'There is a fixed level of the working-day,
or rather… 'There is a fixed value of labour-power

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and that fixed value of labour-power is recorded
in the number of hours which are required

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to reproduce the equivalent of the value of that labour-power.'

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So that is fixed. As he said earlier,
when he was discussing the value of labour-power:

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'We know, in practice it varies a great deal,
depending upon which country you're in and what the

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historical moment is, and the degree of civilization
of the country, and the nature of class struggle,

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and all the rest of it. But at a given particular
situation we know what it is.' So we know what it is,

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and labour works that length which is going to
reproduce its labour-power —and then more.

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That is the surplus. And the big question is:
'How much more?

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How many hours more than that fixed amount that's
required to reproduce the value of labour-power?'

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And this is something which is not negotiable
through normal market exchange practices.

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It is something which is actually
set up in a way which is conflictual.

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And so he sets up a conversation
between the capitalist and the labourer;

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and the question is asked to the capitalist:
'What is a normal working-day?'

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And the capitalist says: 'Well, the working-day
should be as long as possible, because I'm buying

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this commodity labour-power, and I have a right
to it for as long as I want. And I am therefore

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going to insist upon my rights, and I'm going to say:
'I want as much of this as I can possibly get''.

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But of course there are certain limits. So Marx
immediately says: 'Well, there is a fluid element here,

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but there are obviously limits, one is: the
physical limits to labour-power. 'You can't work more

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than 24 hours a day. And well, you've got
to have less than that, for purely physical reasons.

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But then there are social limits,
and he introduces at the bottom:

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"The worker needs time in which to satisfy his
intellectual and social requirements, and the extent

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and the number of these requirements is conditioned
by the general level of civilization."

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You remember, that kind of civilizational thing
in the value of labour-power also.

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So this civilizational element comes in. So he says:
"The length of the working-day therefore fluctuates within

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boundaries both physical and social. But these
limiting conditions are of a very elastic nature…"

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On the next page —342— he says:
"The capitalist has his own views… As a capitalist…"

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—remember— "…he is only capital personified.
His soul is the soul of capital." Again this is Marx dealing

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with roles, not people. "But capital has one sole
driving force, the drive to valorize itself, to

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create surplus-value… So "Capital is dead labour which,
vampire-like…" and we're going to get lots

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of vampires, and werewolves, and all those other
kinds of persona introduced into Marx's account here,

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is "…vampire-like, lives only by sucking living
labour, and lives the more, the more labour it sucks.

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The time during which the worker works is the time
during which the capitalist consumes the labour-power

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he has bought from him. If the worker consumes
his disposable labour-time for himself, he robs

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the capitalist. The capitalist therefore takes
his stand on the law of commodity-exchange.

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[H]e seeks to extract the maximum possible benefit
from the use-value of his commodity." As anybody would.

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"Suddenly, however, there arises the voice of the worker…"
What the workers says is this:

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'Well, you could try to extract as much as you can,
but what happens if that shortens my working life?

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I don't think that's fair. I think there
should be a length of working-day that does not

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shorten my life.' And so, in this conversation,
the worker also takes a position, which is

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based upon the law of exchange. Now, this is
interesting, because Marx is not talking here about

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the lack of the validity of the exchange process.
He is saying: 'All right, we assume, both sides assume,

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the exchange system is OK, and it is fair;
equality against equality.

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Now, we have however the situation, of how much use-value
the labourer is going to give up.

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And the worker says 'I consider this to be against the laws of contract,

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and the law of commodity exchange, if you shorten my working life.'

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And a result of this is —on page 344—
he says that: "The capitalist

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maintains his rights as a purchaser when he tries
to make the working-day as long as possible,

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and, where possible, to make two working-days
out of one. On the other hand,

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the peculiar nature of the commodity sold implies
a limit to its consumption by the purchaser,

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and the worker maintains his right as a seller when
he wishes to reduce the working-day to a particular

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normal length. There is here therefore an antinomy,
of right against right, both equally bearing the seal

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of the law of exchange. Between equal rights, force decides.

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Hence in the history of capitalist production,
the establishment of a norm for the working-day

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presents itself as a struggle over
the limits of that day, a struggle between

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collective capital, i.e. the class of capitalists,
and collective labour, i.e. the working class."

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So finally, on page 344, we get class struggle. —Yeah, we are there!

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But there are some interesting things about this argument:

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First is that Marx considers this a battle
between equal rights, and it is a force relation.

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And as a result of this, Marx is actually very sceptical about rights-talk.

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You can't solve this problem by rights-talk.

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You can only resolve it through conflict, through struggle.

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And I think today we also have to recognize
the importance of this argument,

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because there is a lot of rights-talk around.

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And I think it's extremely interesting that Amnesty International,
which deals mainly with civil and political rights,

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every now and again says: 'We would like to extend this
into the world of economic rights.'

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But it can't get very far without taking sides in class struggle;

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either it sides with capital or it sides with labour.
Faced with that, Amnesty International

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withdraws from the discussion. Because they don't
want to be caught up in that particular politics.

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But you can see Marx's point, that actually here
we have a situation, in which there is no way

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in which you can solve the problem of 'who is right
or who is wrong'. You can't do it that way;

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through a discussion of rights. And the chapter ends up
with a very sceptical kind of statement about

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vague Magna Chartas about the universal rights of man,
as opposed to what will be achieved through class struggle.

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The second point about this, is that Marx talks about this,
and says: "Between equal rights force decides."

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Now, force here, can on occasion mean simply physical force,

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but actually the main thrust of the chapter
is not about that, it's about political force.

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It's about political achievement. It's about the capacity
to mobilize political power.

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So we're talking about force, which,
yes, in extremis, is going to be about

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violence and all the rest of it. But we're really talking here about

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political organization, political battle, class
struggle, and all the institutions of class struggle.

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He doesn't talk much about that in this chapter,
but nevertheless I think it's implied, that when

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we're talking in this way, we are going to say:
'This issue is going to be resolved in this particular way.'

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Now, at this point, I think we find something
that is interesting, and deserves some immediate comment.

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By setting things up this way, Marx is moving away
from the normal processes

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by which economists and political economists talk about the world.

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And I think, it's fascinating to ask yourself the question,
those of you who have taken an economics class:

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Did you talk about the length of the working-day as a big issue?

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It's ignored, except maybe in some labour economics class,
somewhere separate.

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The general theory of economics
does not deal with this issue.

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You can read your way through all of
classical political economy, and you won't find

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any kind of discussion over class struggle
over the length of the working-day.

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You can read John Locke, and you won't find anything
about struggle over the length of the working-day.

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But when you ask yourself the question historically:

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Has that been an important aspect of capitalist history?

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Is that still today a very significant fact,

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of what is going on around us, all of the time,
struggles over the length of the working-day,

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the working week, the working year, the working life?

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Ages of retirement; how many vacation
days you have; all of those kinds of things.

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These things are going on around us all the time.

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And from the 19th century onwards this has been
a very, very significant aspect about how

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capitalist societies have worked. And here
you have Marx moving straight in to say:

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'What my theory does, is immediately tell
you why that's the case, and how it is the case.'

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And in that sense you would say: 'Well, the next time one of you takes
—if you ever get to take— an elementary economics class,

0:19:28.570,0:19:34.610
why don't you ask questions about the length
of the working-day and how that is determined?'

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And people will look at you saying:
'I know what you've been reading.' And indeed

0:19:39.020,0:19:43.470
you'll say: 'Well, if you can't talk about that
in your theory, then you're missing

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out on something that is incredibly important
in terms of the political economy of the world,

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and we should be able to talk about it.'

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And Marx is of course saying: 'This is one
of the first issues that comes to my attention—

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which is: there is going to be a fight
over the length of the working-day.'

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And that this fight is vital for
understanding how capitalist society evolves,

0:20:09.410,0:20:14.070
and how it develops, and who wins and who loses,

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and who wins for a time, and then
loses out later, and what happens when

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capital moves somewhere else,
where they can institute a working-day of

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12 instead of 8 hours, instead of 6 hours.
Those kinds of things start to become absolutely important.

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This is one of the first points I think,
where, if you interrogate immediately,

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the utility, the use-value if you
want to call it that, of the concept of value

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you would say: 'One the useful things about it
is that it immediately focuses our attention

0:20:48.960,0:20:53.680
on this issue. And it does it in a certain way,
that reveals something, which is:

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this is not a market exchange process,
this is a class struggle process.

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Now, there are some dissident economic texts by
people like Joan Robinson, who actually

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introduce some aspects of this into their economic argument.
But of course they're dissident texts

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and I'm sure you won't find any of them taught in
any of the major schools in the United States when

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you're reading introductory economics.

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But Marx then points something else out,
which is in the second section.

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He says: 'All right, the extraction
of surplus-labour from one group in society

0:21:35.370,0:21:42.020
to the benefit of another group in society
is not something unique to capitalism.

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Etruscan theocrats did it, Athenians did it,
Egyptians did it, Aztec emperors did it.

0:21:53.330,0:22:00.370
So, the idea of surplus-labour,
which is taken away from one group

0:22:00.370,0:22:07.230
and becomes the property, or under the control,
of another group is not unusual at all.

0:22:07.230,0:22:11.930
But there's a big difference
between surplus-labour and surplus-value.

0:22:11.930,0:22:20.620
And the unique form of capitalism is
that it is concerned with surplus-value.

0:22:20.620,0:22:27.890
And it is surplus-value extracted from wage-labour,
as we've seen in previous discussions about

0:22:27.890,0:22:35.679
the theory of surplus-value. The thing about it is:
the wage-labourer can't identify it,

0:22:35.679,0:22:44.880
can't see it clearly; it is mystified; it is hidden behind
the fetish of the market exchange.

0:22:44.880,0:22:47.300
So, as we mentioned last time,

0:22:47.300,0:22:51.500
it's not as if a bell goes off after you've
reproduced the value of your labour-power,

0:22:51.500,0:22:54.000
and then you say: 'Okay, I'm working free
for the capitalist.'

0:22:54.000,0:23:01.740
In fact Marx introduces here the idea, that
actually, it's not as if it really is just:

0:23:01.740,0:23:9.770
that part of the day is reproduction of labour-power,
and that part is the surplus. In fact every 30 seconds

0:23:9.770,0:23:18.120
you are sort of going through that
'surplus production' + 'reproduction' process.

0:23:18.120,0:23:23.780
So you can't see it. Now, in other
societies of course you can see it.

0:23:23.780,0:23:29.080
Under a serf society, and he is
particularly interested in the corvée system,

0:23:29.080,0:23:32.130
and what the corvée system does.

0:23:32.130,0:23:38.870
And the corvée system is introduced in such a way,
that, yes, there's a certain amount of labour,

0:23:38.870,0:23:47.990
which you give to those who are going to control
the surplus. And you know how many days it is.

0:23:47.990,0:23:52.250
And Marx makes the point, that the evolution of that,
was not out of serfdom. Actually, serfdom

0:23:52.250,0:23:57.340
was produced through the corvée system,
rather than serfdom generated the corvée system.

0:23:57.340,0:24:03.370
The corvée system came in, and then serfdom arose out of it.

0:24:03.370,0:24:08.229
So again, we are not dealing with a serf society,
which then introduces this system.

0:24:08.229,0:24:15.330
We are looking at this system, which then produces states of serfdom.

0:24:15.330,0:24:19.720
But then he raises, I think,
what is a very interesting question:

0:24:19.720,0:24:23.810
What happens when a system of that kind

0:24:23.810,0:24:32.170
gets integrated with a capitalist system,
which is about the production of surplus-value?

0:24:32.170,0:24:35.320
What's the big difference?

0:24:35.320,0:24:37.970
The big difference is this:

0:24:37.970,0:24:41.120
Again, this argument has been made before.

0:24:41.120,0:24:44.800
There's a limit to which you can
accumulate use-values.

0:24:44.800,0:24:50.850
So, if you are just creating
use-values for the lord, there is a limit

0:24:50.850,0:24:56.250
to the amount the lord can absorb,
or is even interested in having.

0:24:56.250,0:25:02.490
But as soon as you monetize it, and you
recognize money as a form of social power,

0:25:02.490,0:25:04.720
there's no limit.

0:25:04.720,0:25:13.040
So the result, he says, is that any system of this kind,
which then gets in contact with the monetized

0:25:13.040,0:25:19.650
accumulation process of capital, which is
limitless in principle, you put immense pressure

0:25:19.650,0:25:25.320
on that corvée system, and you become extremely exploitative.

0:25:25.320,0:25:28.559
And this is part of his argument about what
happened to slavery in the American South;

0:25:28.559,0:25:34.480
it's also the argument he makes
in relationship to the corvée system.

0:25:34.480,0:25:41.480
But then there is something interesting, he points to here.

0:25:43.830,0:25:51.630
On page 347 he starts to talk about the 'Règlement Organique',

0:25:51.630,0:26:01.640
and he starts to talk about, that this requires 12 working-days.

0:26:01.910,0:26:7.920
But, here we start to see something else going on,
which is going to be critically important for how we

0:26:7.920,0:26:16.919
understand the dynamics of capitalism. Those 12 days
of labour are not necessarily measured in days.

0:26:16.919,0:26:21.220
They are measured in how much we can theoretically do in a day.

0:26:21.220,0:26:27.330
So you put that amount — and it turns out
that it takes 36 days to do 12 days labour.

0:26:27.330,0:26:34.990
And this goes on, and he goes through how the
calculations were made, and then he ends up

0:26:34.990,0:26:43.580
by saying on page 348: "The twelve corvée days of the Règlement Organique,
cried a boyar, drunk with victory,

0:26:43.110,0:26:55.920
amount to 365 days in the year." Now, I want
to draw your attention to something here, which is,

0:26:55.920,0:27:00.710
I think, very important, which is the temporality. What is time?

0:27:00.710,0:27:11.040
Because in effect, what the boyar is doing,
is redefining temporality and redefining what makes time.

0:27:11.040,0:27:19.880
And the whole definition of temporarily
really starts to enter into the discussion.

0:27:19.880,0:27:26.920
And the capitalist definition of temporality is special to capitalism.

0:27:26.920,0:27:32.000
Indeed, it expects the labourer to work 365 days a year.

0:27:32.000,0:27:37.640
Forget that it's 12 days labour, just 365 days a year.

0:27:37.640,0:27:47.169
That's what you expect—from a capitalist standpoint. The worker will say:
'I want time off! I want all kinds of things of that sort.'

0:27:47.169,0:27:55.040
So, what this chapter does is begin to talk
a bit more specifically

0:27:55.040,0:28:05.990
about how time is constructed and how it gets normalized
in a certain way. We'll come back to that.

0:28:05.990,0:28:14.710
We see here the idea that time can be redefined
by a social process in a certain way.

0:28:14.710,0:28:20.470
And the redefinition is itself a part of a class project.

0:28:20.470,0:28:25.060
That is: this redefinition wasn't just made by some
imperial ruler or something like that,

0:28:25.060,0:28:28.440
it's an outcome of a class project.

0:28:28.440,0:28:38.440
So, the redefinition of temporality is done in such a way,
as to advantage that class, which is going to extract

0:28:38.440,0:28:45.850
the surplus-labour and later on the surplus-value.

0:28:45.850,0:28:52.070
What Marx then does is to switch perspectives.
In the next passage he talks about

0:28:52.070,0:29:00.890
the opposite tendency, which is not to stretch time in
that kind of way, but to restrict it in another.

0:29:00.890,0:29:05.160
He introduces the idea of the English Factory Acts.

0:29:05.160,0:29:09.660
Which he says: "…are the negative expression of
the same appetite.

0:29:09.660,0:29:15.049
These laws curb capital's drive towards a limitless
draining of labour-power…" —again that limitless

0:29:15.049,0:29:23.600
draining of labour-power is significant against
the limitless capacity to accumulate money capital.

0:29:23.600,0:29:30.130
"…limitless draining away of labour-power by forcibly
limiting the working-day on the authority of the state,

0:29:30.130,0:29:36.950
but a state ruled by capitalist and landlord."

0:29:36.950,0:29:41.059
Then he says: "Apart from the daily more threatening
advance of the working-class movement,

0:29:41.059,0:29:48.020
the limiting of factory labour was dictated by the same necessity
as forced the manuring of English fields with guano.

0:29:48.020,0:29:53.399
The same blind desire for profit that in the one case
exhausted the soil had in the other case seized hold of

0:29:53.399,0:29:59.510
the vital force of the nation at its roots."

0:29:59.510,0:30:09.040
Now, this is interesting. A few interesting points here.

0:30:09.040,0:30:21.970
First: Why would a state ruled by capitalist and landlord
agree to limit the length of the working-day?

0:30:21.970,0:30:28.970
And to do so, apart from the fact that there's a working-class
movement that became more threatening?

0:30:30.440,0:30:40.640
And in effect, what Marx is going to do, is to talk about
class relations between these various groups in society,

0:30:40.640,0:30:51.880
and how those class relations intersected in this struggle around
the question of the regulation of the working-day.

0:30:51.880,0:31:07.200
He also immediately introduces here the idea of
'capitalists left to themselves are likely to go too far'.

0:31:07.200,0:31:14.649
And if you remember his arguments about wealth —not value—
the sources of wealth

0:31:14.649,0:31:25.280
are the earth, engendered by saying: "the earth is the mother,
and labour is the father of wealth".

0:31:25.280,0:31:29.110
These are the two basic sources of wealth,

0:31:29.110,0:31:34.590
and capitalists left to their own devices without
any regulatory regime, are likely to destroy both.

0:31:34.590,0:31:44.640
They'll destroy the environment, resource base,
as well as they will destroy the labour force

0:31:44.640,0:31:51.700
and the labour-power by super-exploitation,
unless they are checked.

0:31:51.700,0:31:58.530
So, there is an element here of class interest in
even checking themselves —and we will come back

0:31:58.530,0:32:05.630
to that later on— and a recognition that
you can push things a bit too far,

0:32:05.630,0:32:10.250
even on the part of the capitalist class.
Although we see in this chapter,

0:32:10.250,0:32:17.630
that was very little developed until towards the end
of the period that Marx is talking about.

0:32:17.630,0:32:22.890
But then, there is another element
which enters into here, which is the state.

0:32:22.890,0:32:26.190
Again, we haven't got a theory of the state here yet;

0:32:26.190,0:32:34.840
we've got an element of it in the chapter on money,
because the state is absolutely essential for the regulation of money.

0:32:34.840,0:32:39.790
But here, we see the state entering in another dimension.

0:32:39.790,0:32:46.790
And that dimension I think, is most
clearly spelled out in footnote 13.

0:32:46.830,0:32:51.930
Which is: the state has an interest in having

0:32:51.930,0:33:00.889
a working class, which is well-fed enough
and healthy enough to go to war.

0:33:00.889,0:33:07.320
And if they are so sick and they are so decimated
and they are so ill

0:33:05.410,
and they are consumptive, and all the rest of it,

0:33:07.320,0:33:12.020
and you put them into battle, they are
not going to be able to do much good.

0:33:12.020,0:33:22.820
So the state has an interest in maintaining
the basis for at least a healthy army.

0:33:22.820,0:33:28.530
And this became a singular pre-occupation
throughout much of the 19th century.

0:33:28.530,0:33:36.250
There was a general explanation given of how it was
that the German army rolled so easily

0:33:36.250,0:33:41.200
over the French army in 1870.

0:33:41.200,0:33:49.750
And that general explanation was that those Prussian peasants
were far better fed then the French were.

0:33:49.750,0:33:59.530
They were much healthier, and the French working class was
absolutely incapable of carrying a rifle.

0:33:59.530,0:34:07.300
So there was this concern. And actually, you'll find
this concern in World War II.

0:34:07.300,0:34:11.979
when people started to try to recruit people
into the armed services,

0:34:11.979,0:34:16.339
they found many people were not healthy enough
to go into the armed services.

0:34:16.339,0:34:22.849
This was true in Britain; they had a lot of the people
coming out of the East End [of London],

0:34:22.849,0:34:26.279
impoverished areas, who were simply not fit enough to go to war.

0:34:26.279,0:34:36.259
And to some degree, that led into the construction of
a consensus around more socialist politics after World War II.

0:34:36.259,0:34:42.679
Again, partly for these militaristic reasons,
but then also for other reasons.

0:34:42.679,0:34:53.129
So, these issues about the super-exploitation
of the labour force have some resonance.

0:34:53.129,0:35:01.400
And it is at this point also, that Marx introduces
into his story the figure of the factory inspectors.

0:35:01.400,0:35:03.780
Marx could not have written this chapter without

0:35:03.780,0:35:11.280
the testimony of the factory inspectors.
He relies very heavily on the factory inspectors.

0:35:11.280,0:35:18.699
While the capitalist classes, he mentions towards
the end, when they got so angry about all

0:35:18.699,0:35:22.059
the stuff the factory inspectors were producing.

0:35:22.059,0:35:31.390
They basically described them as 'commies' and 'reds'
and like the Convention of the French revolutionary period.

0:35:31.390,0:35:36.209
You have to ask yourself again the question:
why in the absence of

0:35:36.209,0:35:41.409
political power on the part of the working-class
did parliament actually set up

0:35:41.409,0:35:47.519
a factory inspectorate and why did the factory inspectorate
actually push things pretty hard?

0:35:47.519,0:35:53.369
When you look at their testimony you got to say
they're not just standing there,

0:35:53.369,0:35:59.009
saying: 'Oh well I'm not really going to be bothered'.
Its not as if they become patsies like

0:35:59.009,0:36:02.959
OSHA (Occupational Safety and Health Administration)
has now become, from Reagan to Bush

0:36:02.959,0:36:06.640
and all the rest of it. That they're not prepared
to challenge anything.

0:36:06.640,0:36:11.509
They're challenging a tremendous amount in this literature.

0:36:11.509,0:36:16.249
What Marx is tapping into here is something
which is important politically

0:36:16.249,0:36:24.339
and he mentions it just by passing;
which is a sense of bourgeois reformism

0:36:24.339,0:36:32.729
which was quite strong in 19th century Britain.
And it goes back to that idea 'what is civilized?'

0:36:32.729,0:36:35.119
What is civilized?

0:36:35.119,0:36:45.029
The bourgeoisie segments of it, being truly shocked at
the uncivilized situations they saw in the factories.

0:36:45.029,0:36:50.289
And they were shocked at what they saw as the immorality,
they were shocked at the conditions of labour,

0:36:50.289,0:36:57.879
they were shocked at all these kinds of things
and so there was a bourgeois reformist tendency.

0:36:57.879,0:37:02.309
and it was there, is was pretty strong.

0:36:59.729,0:37:07.109
You see it today as people go protesting about sweatshop labour

0:37:07.109,0:37:11.769
many of the people protesting against that
are not workers themselves,

0:37:11.769,0:37:17.329
they're middle-class bourgeois elements
who are saying that should not be the case,

0:37:17.329,0:37:24.939
we should not be wearing clothes which are made
by unpaid Guatemalan children of 14 years old.

0:37:24.939,0:37:27.019
That's wrong.

0:37:27.019,0:37:32.009
So you will find a persistent history of that sense of

0:37:32.009,0:37:37.890
civilized morality. Marx is actually benefiting
from that because in part that was

0:37:37.890,0:37:44.389
where the factory inspectors were coming from
but they're also coming from

0:37:43.579,0:37:54.709
out of the concrete history of struggle
which we will get into shortly.

0:37:54.709,0:38:10.459
This then leads Marx to look more closely at
how the working-day is actually determined.

0:38:10.459,0:38:19.539
He gets out of this, one crucial singular principle which is
again going to connect us back to the theory of value.

0:38:19.539,0:38:33.169
And this is laid out best on page 352,
where he talks about the way in which

0:38:33.169,0:38:38.549
—again this is the testimony of the factory inspectors—

0:38:38.549,0:38:45.900
about how capital engages, he says: "These 'small thefts'
of capital from the workers' meal-times

0:38:45.900,0:38:51.029
and recreation times are also described
by the factory inspectors

0:38:51.029,0:38:57.739
as 'petty pilferings of minutes', 'snatching a few minutes'
or, in the technical language of the workers,

0:38:57.739,0:39:01.539
'nibbling and cribbling at meal-times'.

0:39:01.539,0:39:09.369
It is evident that in this atmosphere the formation
of surplus-value by surplus-labour is no secret…",

0:39:09.369,0:39:16.369
and then he quotes somebody saying:
"moments are the elements of profit".

0:39:19.209,0:39:24.109
Now that idea that moments are
the elements of profit is important

0:39:24.109,0:39:31.890
because what it suggests is that capitalists
are vitally interested in every moment

0:39:31.890,0:39:38.650
that the worker is in the factory. They want to survey
every moment, control every moment.

0:39:38.650,0:39:45.689
This comes back to the fact that value
is socially necessary labour time.

0:39:45.689,0:39:52.869
Therefore if the worker goes to the bathroom too much
the capitalist is losing value

0:39:52.869,0:40:03.309
and surplus-value; if the worker spends too much
time over lunch, tea breaks or whatever,

0:40:03.309,0:40:09.359
it's a loss of value to the capitalists;
a loss of surplus-value.

0:40:09.359,0:40:16.749
Therefore the capitalist becomes absolutely
concerned with time and management,

0:40:16.749,0:40:22.909
the management of the workers' time.

0:40:22.909,0:40:32.319
and this becomes a general capitalist principle
which carries over into all aspects of society.

0:40:32.319,0:40:42.119
I remember, once being instructed by a group of
supposedly very wise Harvard professors

0:40:42.119,0:40:49.640
on how to teach an incoming class of undergraduates
how to survive in the university.

0:40:49.640,0:40:54.439
And the first principle they laid out,
and they spent most of their time talking about,

0:40:54.439,0:41:01.359
was time-management. And I said to them:
'You mean this is a factory or what?'

0:41:01.359,0:41:07.069
— 'No, if they can't manage their time…
And as an instructor you have to instruct them

0:41:07.069,0:41:11.379
on time management. You have to watch their time management
and if they're failing on their time management

0:41:11.379,0:41:15.759
you have to tell them immediately that they've got
a problem with their time management.'

0:41:15.759,0:41:22.170
This has now become a general principle of capitalist society.
But Marx is talking about it inside the factory;

0:41:22.170,0:41:27.229
this is crucial. Moments are the elements of profit.

0:41:27.229,0:41:33.709
What this means is that there is continual pressure
within the capitalist system to try to capture

0:41:33.709,0:41:41.749
more and more of those moments and to make sure of
how those moments are utilised.

0:41:41.749,0:41:50.889
I love those old 1940s films where people call up
the operator and have a chat with the operator

0:41:50.889,0:41:52.949
and then get along somewhere, you know.

0:41:52.949,0:41:57.439
You try having a chat with an operator on AT&T these days

0:41:57.439,0:42:07.539
They have to handle a certain number of calls per hour
and if they don't meet that schedule they're fired.

0:42:07.539,0:42:11.619
And each time the number of calls [is raised, there's less time to talk].

0:42:11.619,0:42:15.279
So if you have a real problem and you want to talk
to them about something they hang up on you

0:42:15.279,0:42:18.890
because they can't afford to.
This happens! Happened to me last week.

0:42:18.890,0:42:24.890
I had a problem with my phone, I was trying to get it fixed
and nobody would answer. After the thing became a bit more complicated

0:42:24.890,0:42:33.589
they hung up and then you had to go through all of the phone messages again
in order to get back in and say: 'Look I've been hung up on twice now.'

0:42:33.589,0:42:42.549
This is the kind of world in which we live, where moments
are the elements of profit and that's all that matters.

0:42:42.549,0:42:45.959
So Marx is, I think, connecting that to this idea.

0:42:45.959,0:42:49.589
Moments are the elements of profit,
that's what the labour theory of value tells you

0:42:49.589,0:42:57.049
and that's what the theory of surplus-value tells you,
is going to be mobilized in the production process.

0:42:57.049,0:43:00.889
This then leads him to look at how
this works in many different areas

0:43:00.889,0:43:04.000
and I'm not going to talk about them. We're talking about

0:43:04.000,0:43:13.899
the pottery industry, the match manufacture,
baking bread industry, all of those things.

0:43:13.899,0:43:23.819
He then talks about railway accidents and the way
in which when many people have to work

0:43:23.819,0:43:26.339
30 hours continuously they make mistakes.

0:43:26.339,0:43:31.049
There's this example of the railway accident where
people had been working for that length of time

0:43:31.049,0:43:35.709
and even even the coroner said "well maybe
you shouldn't have done it, but…"

0:43:35.709,0:43:40.519
and then there's the famous case of "…Mary Anne Walkley, 20 years old,

0:43:40.519,0:43:46.279
employed in a highly respectable dress making establishment,
exploited by a lady with the pleasant name of Elise.

0:43:46.279,0:43:49.890
The old often-told story was now revealed once again.

0:43:49.890,0:43:55.390
These girls work, on an average, 16 1/2 hours without a break,
during the season often 30 hours,

0:43:55.390,0:44:00.989
and the flow of their failing 'labour-power' is maintained by
occasional supplies of sherry, port or coffee."

0:44:00.989,0:44:07.949
"Mary Anne Walkely had worked uninterruptedly 26 1/2 hours, with
sixty other girls, thirty in each room."

0:44:07.949,0:44:11.099
"…at night the girls slept in pairs…"

0:44:11.099,0:44:15.749
"…Mary Anne Walkley died from long hours of
work in an over-crowded workroom,

0:44:15.749,0:44:19.539
and a too small and badly ventilated bedroom."

0:44:19.539,0:44:29.140
Now, dying from overwork is not an uncommon phenomenon.

0:44:29.140,0:44:31.739
But as in this case,

0:44:31.739,0:44:38.940
I guess the coroner said it was apoplexy,
which maybe had been exacerbated by the work-conditions.

0:44:38.940,0:44:47.109
I can't remember the actual term for it, the Japanese
actually have a word for dying from too much hard work [Karōshi],

0:44:47.109,0:44:51.889
and there is a category in Japan, which they're willing
to utilize. We don't use that category

0:44:51.889,0:44:55.829
in this country, so you would not be
able to go to the statical data and find

0:44:55.829,0:44:58.239
out how many people die from hard work.

0:44:58.239,0:45:09.380
But if you care to inquire, I think you would find
that would be a significant category

0:45:09.380,0:45:13.539
in our society. In any case, as he ends up the
chapter he really talks about

0:45:13.539,0:45:21.279
the diminished life expectancy; that somebody
instead of living until 50 dies at 37.

0:45:21.279,0:45:24.939
Now, life expectancy tables are extremely interesting.

0:45:24.939,0:45:29.919
For instance in the steel industry in
Baltimore in 1970 or so

0:45:29.919,0:45:36.219
the life expectancy of the steelworkers was 64
years, as opposed to 72 or whatever it was on average.

0:45:36.219,0:45:40.579
And even if you compare it with the African-
American community, which has a lower life expectancy,

0:45:40.579,0:45:46.309
because many of the steel workers were African-American,
you still find a diminished life expectancy

0:45:46.309,0:45:49.529
in that industry. And we will find the same thing in many

0:45:49.529,0:45:54.029
areas of work like coal mining, and all the
rest of it. So the whole question of

0:45:54.029,0:46:02.849
life expectancy, of dying from overwork,
is a very significant element within the system.

0:46:02.849,0:46:09.249
This then takes us into section 4, where
Marx talks about day work and night work.

0:46:09.249,0:46:15.390
And the point here is something which we've hit before;

0:46:15.390,0:46:21.540
which is the idea that once capitalists have
money wrapped up in machines and capital,

0:46:21.540,0:46:28.849
they want to get it back as soon as possible. That is:
they want that capital to be fully employed 24 hours a day.

0:46:28.849,0:46:35.739
Which leads immediately into the need to have labour available
24 hours a day. How's that going to be done?

0:46:35.739,0:46:48.079
It's going be done through the relay system.
And this relay system becomes a significant aspect

0:46:48.079,0:46:54.169
of the mobilisation of labour. And again,
it can disguise in some ways the stresses that attach

0:46:54.169,0:46:59.829
to certain notions of length of the working day.
You can start to split the relay system up into pieces.

0:46:59.829,0:47:07.149
People do different pieces at different times.
And this too becomes a very strong pressure,

0:47:07.149,0:47:14.149
which has to be resisted on the part of workers.

0:47:14.799,0:47:29.130
Then we come in section 5, which starts at page 375,
into "the struggle for a normal working-day".

0:47:29.130,0:47:57.890
And this struggle for a normal working-day
entails us, in trying to understand

0:47:48.629,0:47:57.890
the dynamics of how the capitalist
approaches the labour question.

0:47:57.890,0:48:02.359
So he starts off by saying,

0:48:02.359,0:48:06.319
as far as the capitalist is concerned "… it is self-
evident that the worker is nothing other than

0:48:06.319,0:48:09.229
labour-power for the duration of his whole life,

0:48:09.229,0:48:15.299
and that therefore all his disposable time is
by nature and by right…" —notice: by right—

0:48:15.299,0:48:19.769
"…labour-time to be devoted to the
self-valorization of capital.

0:48:19.769,0:48:26.309
Time for education, for intellectual development,
for fulfilment of social functions, for social intercourse,

0:48:26.309,0:48:33.819
for the free play of the vital forces of his body and his mind,
even the rest time of Sunday —what foolishness!

0:48:33.819,0:48:40.389
But in his blind and measureless drive, its insatiable appetite
for surplus-labour, capital oversteps not only the moral

0:48:40.389,0:48:44.609
but even the merely physical limits of the working-day.
It usurps the time for growth, development

0:48:44.609,0:48:46.839
and healthy maintenance of the body.

0:48:46.839,0:48:50.390
It steals the time required for the consumption
of fresh air and sunlight.

0:48:50.390,0:48:56.659
It haggles over the meal-times, where possible
incorporating them into the production process itself…"

0:48:56.659,0:48:59.609
For those of you've seen Charlie Chaplin's "Modern Times"

0:48:59.609,0:49:05.619
you'll remember his great spoof of trying
to eat while he is in the machine more or less.

0:49:05.619,0:49:09.349
"…so that food is added to the worker as a mere
means of production, as coal is supplied to

0:49:09.349,0:49:12.299
the boiler, and grease and oil to the machinery.

0:49:12.299,0:49:16.349
It reduces the sound sleep needed for the restoration,
renewal and refreshment of the vital forces to

0:49:16.349,0:49:22.849
the exact amount of torpor essential to
the revival of an absolutely exhausted organism."

0:49:22.849,0:49:26.639
"It is not the normal maintenance of labour-power
which determines the limits for the working-

0:49:26.639,0:49:30.690
day here, but rather the greatest possible
daily expenditure of labour-power,

0:49:30.690,0:49:38.519
no matter how diseased, compulsory and painful it may be,
which determines the limits of the workers period of rest.

0:49:38.519,0:49:42.099
Capital asks no questions…" —and after all, why should it?—

0:49:42.099,0:49:45.939
"…about the length of life of labour-power.
What interests is purely and simply the maximum

0:49:45.939,0:49:50.349
of labour-power that can be set in motion in a working-day.

0:49:50.349,0:49:53.389
It attains this objective by shortening the life of labour-power,

0:49:53.389,0:50:02.729
in the same way as a greedy farmer snatches more produce
from the soil by robbing it of its fertility."

0:50:02.729,0:50:06.219
He then says in the next 2 paragraphs:

0:50:06.219,0:50:14.589
'Now at some point even capitalists may recognize
that this is a stupid thing to do,

0:50:14.589,0:50:21.529
that you're destroying the source of value and of wealth.'

0:50:21.529,0:50:30.369
//So he suggests on page 377, that you would think
a rational capitalist would seem therefore to have… //

0:50:30.369,0:50:38.559
He says: "it would seem therefore that the interests of capital itself
points in the direction of a normal working-day."

0:50:38.559,0:50:41.929
He then switches to talk about the slave owner and he says:

0:50:41.929,0:50:54.640
The slave owners guard their slaves but do so only
when it is hard for them to procure replacements.

0:50:54.640,0:51:00.659
If it is easy for them to get replacements then
they just kill them off and just buy some more,

0:51:00.659,0:51:04.380
why should they care?

0:51:04.380,0:51:08.449
And then he says on page 378:
"For slave trade, read labour market,

0:51:08.449,0:51:18.539
for Kentucky and Virginia, Ireland and the agricultural
districts of England, Scotland and Wales, for Africa, Germany."

0:51:18.539,0:51:37.179
What he's beginning to introduce here is the idea that a labour surplus
has a crucial role to play in how this dynamic works.

0:51:37.179,0:51:46.159
He first talks about the way in which a labour surplus
or a 'surplus-population' in the South was sent to the North

0:51:46.159,0:51:49.409
under the aegis of the Poor Law Commissioners.

0:51:49.409,0:51:57.619
In other words: you needed labour up north,
people were in the agricultural districts of the south

0:51:57.619,0:52:01.559
maintained in the "Poor Law". So as soon as they went
on the "Poor Law", the commissioners round them up and

0:52:01.559,0:52:06.579
shipped them north and put them in the factories.

0:52:06.579,0:52:14.179
This then leads on page 380, to a very important argument:

0:52:14.179,0:52:20.209
"What experience generally shows to the capitalist
is a constant excess of population,

0:52:20.209,0:52:27.099
i.e., an excess in relation to capital's need
for valorization at a given moment,

0:52:27.099,0:52:32.270
although this throng of people is made up of generations
of stunted, short-lived and rapidly replaced human beings,

0:52:32.270,0:52:35.719
plucked, so to speak, before they were ripe."

0:52:35.719,0:52:39.519
"Experience shows to the intelligent observer how rapidly and firmly

0:52:39.519,0:52:44.289
capitalist production has seized the vital forces of
the people at their very roots".

0:52:44.289,0:52:47.529
He then talks about "the degeneration of the industrial population

0:52:47.529,0:52:54.529
which is retarded only by the constant absorption
of primitive and natural elements in the countryside."

0:52:56.789,0:53:02.699
Now this theme of the labour surplus is critical.

0:53:02.699,0:53:09.629
It's something that is going to come back
again and again throughout Capital.

0:53:09.629,0:53:17.949
That it's only when you have a large labour surplus
that you're in a position to discipline the existing labourers

0:53:17.949,0:53:29.749
and also replace them as you need to,
at relatively low wages.

0:53:29.749,0:53:36.899
This leads Marx to say that, what this does
in a situation where a population of this sort exists,

0:53:36.899,0:53:43.999
the capitalists have a simple way of thinking.
Which he suggests on page 381:

0:53:43.999,0:53:50.170
"Après moi le déluge! is the watchword of every capitalist
and of every capitalist nation.

0:53:50.170,0:53:56.890
Capital therefore takes no account of the health and
the length of life of the worker, unless society forces it to do so.

0:53:56.890,0:54:03.099
Its answer to the outcry about the physical and mental degradation,
the premature death, the torture of over-work, is this:

0:54:03.099,0:54:08.239
Should that pain trouble us, since it increases our pleasure (profit)?

0:54:08.239,0:54:15.569
But looking at these things as a whole, it is evident that this does not
depend on the will, either good or bad of the individual capitalist.

0:54:15.569,0:54:26.179
Under free competition, the immanent laws of capitalist production
confront the individual capitalist as a coercive force external to him."

0:54:26.179,0:54:38.519
Here also there's a very important theme, what Marx calls the coercive laws of competition.
Individual capitalists don't have a choice;

0:54:38.519,0:54:45.969
If I'm an individual capitalist and I want to be nice to my workers,
pay them a lot, only employ them 6 hours a day,

0:54:45.969,0:54:51.769
and I'm competing with somebody who's paying them very little
and working them 12 hours a day,

0:54:51.769,0:54:56.669
how can I possibly stay in business?

0:54:56.669,0:55:05.419
So Marx is saying here, 'look, it doesn't matter if you're
a nice capitalist or a greedy, horrible, disgusting, sadistic capitalist.

0:55:05.419,0:55:08.369
You're all going to have to come down to the same level

0:55:08.369,0:55:12.880
because that's where the coercive laws the competition push you.

0:55:12.880,0:55:17.289
And this theme of the coercive laws of competition as a mechanism

0:55:17.289,0:55:29.759
that disciplines individual capitalists is also
going to be important in the rest of this book.

0:55:35.289,0:55:43.839
This then takes him into the next section
on the establishment of a normal working-day,

0:55:43.839,0:55:53.399
which he is going to talk about, as a result of centuries
of struggle between the capitalist and the worker.

0:55:53.399,0:56:00.399
He starts off with what I think is an extremely interesting point.

0:56:00.609,0:56:05.369
That the initial legislation about
the length of the working-day

0:56:05.369,0:56:17.769
was about trying to socialize and discipline the worker
into the idea of a normalized working-day.

0:56:17.769,0:56:30.059
And he goes back to Statute of Labourers from 1349
and then he tracks through all of that legislation.

0:56:30.059,0:56:37.039
Now, what he's talking about here is
the socialization of wage-labour

0:56:37.039,0:56:45.499
to a disciplinary regime around
a certain notion of temporality.

0:56:45.499,0:56:51.399
The history he tells here is interesting
because it suggests it wasn't easily done.

0:56:51.399,0:56:56.419
It actually took a lot of state action,

0:56:56.419,00:57:03.599
most people faced with the prospect of wage-labour
said it's better to be a beggar or a vagabond or

0:57:03.599,0:57:10.149
engage in crime and all the rest of it.

0:57:10.149,0:57:14.109
So what that took was the state to come in
and actually round people up who were not

0:57:14.109,0:57:20.759
good wage-labourers and whip them publicly
or put them in the stocks or do horrible things to them

0:57:23.079,0:57:26.479
in order to absolutely indicate to them
that the only way they could really survive,

0:57:26.479,0:57:30.339
if they had been forced off the land,
was to become wage-labourers.

0:57:30.339,0:57:36.399
And that to become a wage-labourer meant to accept
a certain kind of time discipline.

0:57:36.399,0:57:44.059
One of the most interesting places where you'll find
this thing thought out is amongst colonial administrators.

0:57:44.059,0:57:51.419
Again and again, colonial administrators say:
'The trouble with these people is they don't have the time discipline.

0:57:51.419,0:57:55.089
They work for a few hours, and then they disappear,

0:57:55.089,0:57:59.139
well they work for a week and we think they're fine,
and then they disappear. We can't keep them here.'

0:57:59.139,0:58:05.019
So there was tremendous literature in the colonial office
about what kinds of tribal groups

0:58:05.019,0:58:10.950
were susceptible to time discipline and what weren't
and who you could discipline easily

0:58:10.950,0:58:14.259
and who you had to whip into order.

0:58:14.259,0:58:21.169
And actually one of the big issues for colonial
administrations was precisely time discipline

0:58:21.169,0:58:26.689
and what was so interesting about this
is the way in which the notion of temporality

0:58:26.689,0:58:34.849
had to be normalized and workers had to be normalized
and had to accept normality.

0:58:34.849,0:58:46.659
And this has become a generalized social aspect of society.
We all accept a certain kind of time discipline.

0:58:46.659,0:58:56.389
We figure: 'well yeah this nine-to-five work' or 'OK, I've got to be
in college at this time and out by that time'.

0:58:56.389,0:59:03.599
You wouldn't tolerate it if your teachers gave speeches
like Fidel Castro does, which go on for 12 hours.

0:59:03.599,0:59:09.539
You would start looking at the clock. 8:30, look at the clock.
Time discipline steps in and you know we've all normalized it.

0:59:09.539,0:59:18.399
So in fact it constructs our lives and we've accepted that normalization.
But what Marx is talking about, is a world in which that was not the case.

0:59:18.399,0:59:27.259
That this time discipline had not been accepted.
And it took a lot of violence, a lot of social pressure.

0:59:27.259,0:59:38.109
And that social pressure was organized through the state,
but it was also organized through all manner of institutions

0:59:38.109,0:59:45.109
and it was partly also normalized through recognizing
—as Marx does towards the end of this chapter—

0:59:45.109,0:59:52.020
that actually, what capitalists insist upon is
that you shouldn't pay people too much

0:59:52.020,1:00:00.309
because if you paid them too much they wouldn't work
for 6 days or whatever it was, they'd only work for 5.

1:00:00.309,1:00:05.779
So if you paid them less, then they would work.
Because labourers are inherently lazy,

1:00:05.779,1:00:10.409
they don't want to go to work, they don't want to spend
the whole week down the coal mines,

1:00:10.409,1:00:12.309
they want to do something else.

1:00:12.309,1:00:19.079
There was a terrible problem of labour discipline in France
because there was something called 'blue Monday'

1:00:19.079,1:00:26.349
on which the artisan class in particular would get so roaring drunk on Sunday,
they couldn't possibly go to work on Monday.

1:00:26.349,1:00:34.419
So there was nothing that could be done on Monday.
So the attempts to wean them away from those habits.

1:00:34.419,1:00:37.049
And disciplinarians would go in there and start talking about

1:00:37.049,1:00:41.459
the iniquities of getting drunk on Sundays
and they would try to mobilize

1:00:41.459,1:00:46.659
family ideals and so on, against the guys going out
and getting totally smashed on Sundays.

1:00:46.659,1:00:52.089
It turned out it wasn't only the guys who were doing it,
the women were doing it too which was considered even worse

1:00:52.089,1:00:58.009
by the bourgeoisie. So there's tremendous questions
about labour discipline in the 19th century

1:00:58.009,1:01:04.709
and Marx is, I think, pointing out those problems.

1:01:04.709,1:01:09.909
Then the institutional arrangements at the end,
that he talks about are very interesting.

1:01:09.909,1:01:15.669
He says, it's not only this general kind of assault, but also

1:01:15.669,1:01:25.299
there are specific kinds of institutions and in particular,
there is what he calls on page 388, "an ideal workhouse".

1:01:25.299,1:01:28.929
"an ideal workhouse must be made a 'House of Terror',

1:01:28.929,1:01:35.990
and not an asylum for the poor 'where they are to be plentifully fed,
warmly and decently clothed, and where they do but little work.'

1:01:35.990,1:01:40.150
In this “House of Terror,” this “ideal workhouse,
the poor shall work 14 hours in a day,

1:01:40.150,1:01:46.069
allowing proper time for meals, in such manner that
there shall remain 12 hours of neat-labour.' "

1:01:46.069,1:01:53.509
Then right at the end: "The “House of Terror” for paupers only dreamed of
by the capitalist mind in 1770, was brought into being a few years later

1:01:53.509,1:01:59.329
in the shape of a gigantic 'workhouse' for
the industrial worker himself, it was called the Factory.

1:01:59.329,1:02:04.749
And this time the ideal was a pale shadow compared with the reality."

1:02:04.749,1:02:12.089
Now, what is interesting here, is to reflect on the way
that somebody like Foucault, for example,

1:02:12.089,1:02:19.289
talks about the disciplinary apparatuses that came into being
in the 17th, 18th centuries in particular,

1:02:19.289,1:02:31.169
as part and parcel of creating a self discipline in ourselves
which made governmentality so much easier for the bourgeois state.

1:02:31.169,1:02:36.139
And what Foucault does in many ways, it seems to me,
is to extend this whole idea here,

1:02:36.139,1:02:43.309
Through books like 'Madness and civilization', 'Through the birth of the clinic'
and particularly 'Through discipline and punish'.

1:02:43.309,1:02:49.150
Now there's a very interesting way in which Foucault is often viewed
as somehow or other being anti-marxist.

1:02:49.150,1:02:54.150
Well, he was anti-Maoists and anti-Trotskyists
and he was anti-Communist Party,

1:02:54.150,1:03:00.539
but it is very clear when you read this and you read
that literature, that this is his starting point.

1:03:00.539,1:03:08.959
And those French intellectuals really started from a very good understanding
of this and this is the kind of passage that,

1:03:08.959,11:03:13.619
it seems to me, Foucault takes, and says 'Okay, I can extend that'.

1:03:13.619,1:03:19.119
I had to say when I first read all that literature by Foucault,
I didn't see it in anyway antagonistic to Marx at all.

1:03:19.119,1:03:25.960
I thought it was an extension, it was an elaboration
and with some transformation involved too

1:03:25.960,1:03:30.289
but that this was a wonderful way in which
to start to think about the sorts of

1:03:30.289,1:03:35.849
issues that Marx is talking about here.
The creation of a disciplinary apparatus

1:03:35.849,1:03:39.859
of socialization pressures, institutional arrangements.

1:03:39.859,1:03:47.359
In Foucault's case: the panopticons, asylums and workhouses
as well, all of those become part of

1:03:47.359,1:03:54.139
this disciplinary apparatus which is trying to normalize us
into accepting a certain temporality,

1:03:54.139,1:03:59.449
a certain disciplinary apparatus, as being part and parcel
of our daily lives.

1:03:59.449,1:04:07.180
So this is, I think a very important element to do and I think
it's very important to read Foucault alongside of this,

1:04:07.180,1:04:13.110
and realize exactly how Foucault is elaborating on this
and to what extent he later on became,

1:04:13.110,1:04:18.730
as it were, more separated from what Marx was talking about.

1:04:18.730,1:04:26.979
But in his early stuff certainly there was an elaboration of
many of these ideas rather than a disputation against them.

1:04:26.979,1:04:30.880
We should stop here and take a little break

1:04:30.880,1:04:36.619
and finish off the chapter next.

1:04:38.059,1:04:45.619
He gives an account of the struggle
over the length of working-day

1:04:45.619,1:04:57.819
in Britain from the 1820s up to the 1850s, 1860s.

1:04:57.819,1:05:07.039
I don't propose to go over this dynamic
in too much detail from the text.

1:05:07.039,1:05:15.269
But I want to try to clarify the background to the story.

1:05:15.269,1:05:22.359
What you had in Britain in the 1820s in particular
was a political power-structure

1:05:22.359,1:05:29.380
that was dominated by an agricultural aristocracy
by landed interest.

1:05:29.380,1:05:36.559
And at the same time you had a rising bourgeoisie,
partly merchant but increasingly industrial,

1:05:36.559,1:05:44.069
in the industrial districts. And what we see coming out here
is the importance of what you might call

1:05:44.069,1:05:51.809
the Manchester school of economic thinking,
which is very much associated with the rise

1:05:51.809,1:06:01.799
of the cotton industry as a major force in industrial production
but also in British political and economic life.

1:06:01.799,1:06:08.529
So the industrial interest and the industrial bourgeoisie
is relatively disempowered however

1:06:08.529,1:06:16.869
in relationship to this landed aristocracy.

1:06:16.869,1:06:24.449
And they started to try to push, pretty hard,
towards gaining more democratic power.

1:06:24.449,1:06:31.549
The way, for example, the landed aristocracy was dominating
was by a system of what was called 'rotten boroughs'.

1:06:31.549,1:06:33.059
For those of you who know what that is,

1:06:33.059,1:06:42.759
there would be a place where there's almost no population
which would return one or some cases three members of parliament,

1:06:42.759,1:06:49.459
and that place happened to be on the landed estate
or in the pocket of, it was called a 'pocket borough',

1:06:49.459,1:06:53.249
one or other of the landed aristocrats
who on election day would take

1:06:53.249,1:06:58.399
5 or 7 or 20 of the retainers and they would go there
and they'd vote this person into parliament.

1:06:58.399,1:07:01.259
So this is how majority was maintained, in parliament.

1:07:01.259,1:07:05.379
So there's a movement towards parliamentary
reform to get rid of the rotten boroughs

1:07:05.379,1:07:06.819
and all those kinds of things,

1:07:06.819,1:07:10.840
which is attracting a certain amount of bourgeois support.

1:07:10.840,1:07:16.249
It was also attracting a certain amount of working-class support.

1:07:16.249,1:07:23.449
And the industrial bourgeoisie was actually
very interested in trying to attract

1:07:23.449,1:07:27.359
popular support from the working class.

1:07:27.359,1:07:37.890
And so politically the working class was divided into
an artisan group, that was highly literate, self-educated

1:07:37.890,1:07:45.949
and then a mass of the population, agrarian base,
who were not literate and therefore not [self-educated].

1:07:45.949,1:07:56.299
And so, the industrial bourgeoisie was particularly interested
in trying to attach to it the support of the artisan class

1:07:56.299,1:07:59.799
in a program towards parliamentary reform.

1:07:59.799,1:08:03.930
In which it was envisaged that you'd have
much more democratic form of government,

1:08:03.930,1:08:08.469
in which it was envisaged that certain reforms would be instituted,

1:08:08.469,1:08:19.719
among which would be some kind of legislation to curb
the worst aspects of industrial labour.

1:08:19.719,1:08:25.230
So there was a proposal for factory acts and so on.

1:08:25.230,1:08:32.259
Well, the great reform thing finally passed,
and there was a great reform of 1832,

1:08:32.259,1:08:38.169
which for the working-class stand point was
quickly dubbed 'the great betrayal'.

1:08:38.169,1:08:40.829
And 'the great betrayal' was first of all:

1:08:40.829,1:08:47.179
the reform of the voting structure didn't empower
anybody significantly within the working class.

1:08:47.179,1:08:55.239
It only in effect, got rid of the artificial power
of the landed aristocracy

1:08:55.239,1:09:03.420
and empowered more and more of the industrial bourgeoisie
and those members of the middle classes that had

1:09:03.420,1:09:06.829
significant assets and significant properties.

1:09:06.829,1:09:16.399
So in effect, it was a reform that favoured the property-owning classes.
And immediately the property-owning classes

1:09:16.399,1:09:21.359
passed a very weak factory act,
one which was not significant at all.

1:09:21.359,1:09:29.369
And that indeed was part of the reason why the workers
themselves started to get extremely disillusioned

1:09:29.369,1:09:37.609
with the alliance they might have had with the industrial bourgeoisie,
and increasingly start to go against the industrial bourgeoisie.

1:09:37.609,1:09:44.789
But the industrial bourgeoisie had something else
on its agenda, which is the reform of the 'Corn Laws'.

1:09:44.789,1:09:47.600
Now, 'corn' in English is 'wheat'.

1:09:47.600,1:09:57.530
And what that meant was that the tariffs on imported grains
were going to be reduced very significantly.

1:09:57.530,1:10:02.739
Because this was, again, in the industrialists' interests.

1:10:02.739,1:10:08.730
Because cheap grain meant cheap bread which meant lower wages.

1:10:08.730,1:10:12.280
They went to the working-class and said:
'Would you be interested in cheap bread?'

1:10:12.280,1:10:18.430
But by then the working-class recognized
that maybe cheap bread also meant lower wages.

1:10:18.430,1:10:24.349
By then they figured out a little suspicion.
But they actually tried to again mobilize the working-class

1:10:24.349,1:10:31.539
around the abolition of the tariffs on imported grains.

1:10:31.539,1:10:39.530
But the trouble with that is, when you abolish that,
you abolish a lot of the power of the landed aristocracy in Britain.

1:10:39.530,1:10:44.110
In other words, their agrarian interests
were very severely threatened.

1:10:44.110,1:10:53.390
//And they were thoroughly pissed off, to put it mildly,
with the industrial bourgeoisie and what it was doing.

1:10:53.390,1:10:59.099
So one of the ways in which it figured it could get
back against the industrial bourgeoisie,

1:10:59.099,1:11:04.780
was to start to actually act like they were 'Noblesse oblige'
with respect to the working class and

1:11:04.780,1:11:11.599
say 'Well you know we are not those people who are doing
these awful things to you down the mines

1:11:11.599,1:11:16.929
and in the factories and so on,
we're going to try to help you over these factory acts.'

1:11:16.929,1:11:21.360
So they started to go into an alliance with
the working class to put pressure on the factory acts.

1:11:21.360,1:11:26.880
And out of that there came some of this progressive movement
in the 1840s towards instituting

1:11:28.070,1:11:31.960
some regulation on the factory acts.

1:11:31.960,1:11:36.449
Initially of course, a lot of this was taken up,

1:11:36.449,1:11:41.589
on a kind of a moral basis which was primarily concerned
with the employment of women and children.

1:11:41.589,1:11:49.870
And that is what the first part of the agitation
was really dedicated to.

1:11:49.870,1:11:54.770
Marx points out is that this complicated jousting

1:11:54.770,1:12:01.129
of class alliances, and the shift of class alliances
from a class alliance between workers

1:12:01.129,1:12:05.559
and industrialists to get the reform act through
and then after that an alliance,

1:12:05.559,1:12:11.579
which emerged between the agrarian, landed aristocracy
and working class pressures.

1:12:11.579,1:12:14.719
And as working-class independent organization through

1:12:14.719,1:12:25.130
something called the Chartist movement started to become much stronger.
So what you would then see towards the end of the 1840s

1:12:25.130,1:12:32.050
was a considerable alliance which was really beginning
to push the capitalist bourgeoisie to concede

1:12:32.050,1:12:36.959
something on the length of the working-day.

1:12:36.959,1:12:42.179
And eventually they conceded things and then
they tried to subvert it by all of these games.

1:12:42.179,1:12:51.480
Again, there's a wonderful phrase Marx uses: 'If you eradicate child-labour,
there's a big question of when do you stop being a child.'

1:12:51.480,1:12:55.889
And capitalist anthropology said '9 years old',

1:12:55.889,1:13:00.350
and other people said 'no it's later'.
So, the whole question of

1:13:00.350,1:13:07.789
the temporality gets in here, and then also
the way in which the capitalists started to use

1:13:07.789,1:13:09.759
all sorts of things. For instance,

1:13:09.759,1:13:14.699
if you limited it to 10 hours, what does that
10 hours include, does that start

1:13:14.699,1:13:18.979
outside the factory gate or inside the factory?

1:13:18.979,1:13:25.760
And by the way, if workers don't have timepieces,
you set the factory clock,

1:13:25.760,1:13:30.030
and they're supposed to be there at 6 o'clock,
but actually you put it so

1:13:30.030,1:13:34.469
it says 6 o'clock when it's actually a quarter to 6.

1:13:34.469,1:13:37.610
And then when the workers want to leave, they look
at the clock and it says 6 o'clock

1:13:37.610,1:13:41.960
when actually it's a quarter past 6. So, in that way,
all sorts of things like that were going on.

1:13:41.960,1:13:47.349
And it became clear, and this is where the factory
inspectors, who had largely come out of

1:13:47.349,1:13:50.320
this kind of 'Noblesse oblige', kind of support from

1:13:50.320,1:13:53.980
the landed aristocracy, the factory inspectors
then started to say 'This is not operative,

1:13:53.980,1:13:59.220
it's not working, and we gotta do something about it'.
So they tried to take it to the courts and then,

1:13:59.220,1:14:02.440
as always happens when you take it to
the supreme court, you lose.

1:14:02.440,1:14:07.239
Oh, that's wrong, when you take it to the English courts,
not the supreme court.

1:14:07.239,1:14:09.870
Of course you win in this supreme court, right?

1:14:09.870,1:14:10.480
Okay.

1:14:10.480,1:14:14.739
You lose, so there's no point going to the courts
and even the factory inspectors

1:14:14.739,1:14:17.370
who were taking these to the courts, said 'There's no point',

1:14:17.370,1:14:25.599
Horner says 'I've taken 8 cases and I've only won 1
and this is just a waste of time,

1:14:25.599,1:14:28.789
nothing is going to happen out of this'.

1:14:28.789,1:14:34.440
But then there happens a significant event of 1848.

1:14:34.440,1:14:38.659
And in 1848 there is

1:14:38.659,1:14:44.689
a massive crisis of over-accumulation of capital
and there's massive unemployment that results.

1:14:44.689,1:14:54.039
And you get revolutions breaking out all over Europe.
As Marx says:

1:14:54.039,1:15:03.900
'The bourgeois capitalists waged a campaign
against the factory act but they couldn't make it work.

1:15:03.900,1:15:08.059
But then they they had this fortuitous event of 1848.'

1:15:08.059,1:15:13.959
I have to read this bit to you, an interesting way of putting it.

1:15:13.959,1:15:18.419
He says: "the preliminary campaign of capital",
this is on page 397,

1:15:18.419,1:15:26.829
"the preliminary campaign of capital thus came to grief,
and the Ten Hours' Act came into force May 1st, 1848.

1:15:26.829,1:15:32.469
Meanwhile however the fiasco of the Chartist party
whose leaders had been imprisoned, and whose organization dismembered,

1:15:32.469,1:15:35.869
had shattered the self-confidence
of the English working-class.

1:15:35.869,1:15:40.570
Soon after this the June insurrection
in Paris and its bloody suppression united,

1:15:40.570,1:15:44.199
in England as on the Continent,
all fractions of the ruling classes,

1:15:44.199,1:15:50.210
landowners and capitalists, stock-exchange sharks
and small timeshop-keepers, Protectionists and Freetraders,

1:15:50.210,1:15:58.590
government and opposition, priests and freethinkers,"
and I have no idea why they are in here: "young whores and old nuns,

1:15:58.590,1:16:04.569
under the common slogan of the salvation of Property,
Religion, the Family and Society."

1:16:04.569,1:16:12.320
Now, have you heard that recently?
"Property, Religion the Family and Society?"

1:16:12.320,1:16:16.570
Whenever the bourgeoisie gets threatened what does it do?
It always appeals to these categories

1:16:16.570,1:16:21.989
of Property, Religion, the Family and Society.

1:16:21.989,1:16:28.329
The result of this, Marx goes on to say: "Everywhere, the working-class
is outlawed, anathematized, placed under the 'loi des suspects'.

1:16:28.329,1:16:35.590
The manufacturers no longer needed to restrain themselves.
They broke out in open revolt,

1:16:35.590,1:16:40.000
not only against the Ten Hours' Act, but against
all the legislation since 1833

1:16:40.000,1:16:44.340
that had aimed at restricting to some extent
the 'free' exploitation of labour-power.

1:16:44.340,1:16:50.309
It was a pro-slavery rebellion in miniature carried on for over two years
with a cynical recklessness and a terroristic energy

1:16:50.309,1:17:01.230
which were so much the easier to achieve in that
the rebel capitalist risked nothing but the skin of his workers."

1:17:01.230,1:17:04.150
Now this situation, you know,

1:17:04.150,1:17:10.149
if you want a really good piece by Marx, you go
and read 'The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte',

1:17:10.149,1:17:17.179
which is a fantastic story of shifting class
alliances around the revolution of 1848 in Paris.

1:17:17.179,1:17:20.090
But here we're getting a similar kind of story,

1:17:20.090,1:17:28.469
about the shifting nature class alliances in and around
factory acts and how this was being worked out.

1:17:28.469,1:17:34.380
And we see that events at some point or other,
when all property owners get threatened,

1:17:34.380,1:17:41.530
when the bourgeoisie suddenly comes together and consolidates around
a single program, which is to oppress the workers.

1:17:41.530,1:17:44.739
Which was effectively what happened in June

1:17:44.739,1:17:50.980
of 1848 in Paris, when the working-class
revolution in Paris was violently suppressed.

1:17:50.980,1:17:54.959
And in effect, it didn't have to be
violently repressed in Britain,

1:17:54.959,1:18:01.689
it was peacefully repressed, if you like,
but it gave the opportunity to the capitalists to reverse

1:18:01.689,1:18:06.789
almost all of those progressive moves that had been made.

1:18:06.789,1:18:08.659
Again there are certain parallels

1:18:08.659,1:18:15.249
you've only got to look for example how the decisions
made by the National labour Relations Board in this country,

1:18:15.249,1:18:17.920
up until the point where Reagan took power

1:18:17.920,1:18:23.739
and after Reagan took power, all of the OSHA legislation
or all of the National labour Relations Board legislation

1:18:23.739,1:18:26.449
became totally pro capitalistic.

1:18:26.449,1:18:31.500
And I think in about 3 years,
the National labour Relations Board reversed about

1:18:31.500,1:18:39.289
70 percent of all the decisions that had been made earlier,
after Reagan appointed the commissioners in the early 1980s.

1:18:39.289,1:18:44.530
So what we find here again, when you look back at that,
you would do an analysis,

1:18:44.530,1:18:49.010
a bit like Marx is doing. 'What were the class forces,

1:18:49.010,1:18:54.379
behind this and what were the political conditions
which allowed something like that to happen?

1:18:54.379,1:19:02.249
And why did it happen in particular way it did?'
I think this framework of analysis Marx sets up for historical inquiry,

1:19:02.249,1:19:08.679
is one which, interesting to think about for those of you
who are interested in understanding contemporary events.

1:19:08.679,1:19:15.360
You don't think about individuals so much
as you start to look at class forces, class interests,

1:19:15.360,1:19:24.479
how they get mobilized behind this position. How they shift,
how deals get cut and how things actually shift around.

1:19:24.479,1:19:37.480
Then Marx goes on to tell the story after 1850,
and what we find is that after 1850

1:19:37.480,1:19:47.699
there is a growing recognition that some
sort of compromise about this working-day is necessary.

1:19:47.699,1:19:54.280
In part for the reasons we've discussed,
that if you push things, they just get out of hand,

1:19:54.280,1:20:02.780
and even the industrialists start to think
that things have gone a little bit too far.

1:20:02.780,1:20:10.979
And result of that is that by time you get to 1853,
and he takes this up on page 408.

1:20:10.979,1:20:21.599
By time you get to 1853, the factory legislation which had been
initially targeted just on a few select industries,

1:20:21.599,1:20:29.649
there's the recognition that more and more industries
are being organized along these intensely capitalistic lines,

1:20:29.649,1:20:35.160
and these intensely capitalistic lines mean that
the regulatory regime has to be extended across

1:20:35.160,1:20:37.780
nearly all industries.

1:20:37.780,1:20:42.279
By 1853 you get to this point where Marx says:
"Nevertheless, the principle had triumphed

1:20:42.279,1:20:49.689
with its victory in those great branches of industry which form
the most characteristic creation of the modern mode of production.

1:20:49.689,1:20:53.560
Their wonderful development from 1853 to 1860",

1:20:53.560,1:21:01.599
The irony being that after this legislation was introduced,
you get this boom.

1:21:01.599,1:21:06.320
"went hand-in-hand with the physical
and moral regeneration of the factory workers,

1:21:06.320,1:21:09.860
and this was visible to the weakest eyes."

1:21:09.860,1:21:13.060
How many times has this happened historically?
It's a wonderful story.

1:21:13.060,1:21:18.770
"The very manufacturers from whom the legal limitation and regulation
of the working-day had been wrung step by step

1:21:18.770,1:21:23.080
in the course of a civil war lasting
half a century now pointed boastfully

1:21:23.080,1:21:27.479
to the contrast with the areas of exploitation
which were still 'free'.

1:21:27.479,1:21:30.579
The Pharisees of 'political economy' now proclaimed

1:21:30.579,1:21:34.530
that their newly won insight into the necessity
for a legally regulated working-day

1:21:34.530,1:21:38.900
was a characteristic achievement of their 'science'.

1:21:38.900,1:21:42.909
It will easily be understood that after
the factory magnates had resigned themselves and submitted

1:21:42.909,1:21:47.599
to the inevitable, capital's power of resistance gradually weakened,

1:21:47.599,1:21:51.239
while at the same time the working class's power of attack grew

1:21:51.239,1:21:56.730
with the number of its allies…", again allies,
the allies of the working class become crucial here.

1:21:56.730,1:22:01.300
"…in those social layers not directly
interested in the question.

1:22:01.300,1:22:05.000
Hence the comparatively rapid progress since 1860."

1:22:05.000,1:22:11.159
Now, Marx doesn't say what those social layers were,
not directly interested in the question.

1:22:11.159,1:22:19.820
And this was not so much the landed aristocracy,
as it was professional middle-classes,

1:22:19.820,1:22:29.839
professional middle-class interests seeing the situation,
had decided that they were going to

1:22:29.839,1:22:37.420
not put up with living in a kind of country
where these sorts of practices were allowed.

1:22:37.420,1:22:40.340
So, again, the allies become significant.

1:22:40.340,1:22:44.790
And the allies were significant because
the working-class did not have the vote

1:22:44.790,1:22:52.399
until after 1867 in Britain.
Male working-class, that is, in 1867.

1:22:52.399,1:23:00.629
So it was not working-class vote that did this, it was
a parliament that then became attached to a regulatory regime.

1:23:00.629,1:23:04.810
This regulatory regime didn't only apply to this area.

1:23:04.810,1:23:08.729
This was an era, where there was a lot of public health legislation.

1:23:08.729,1:23:12.909
Because that was the only way
you could deal with the cholera epidemics,

1:23:12.909,1:23:23.250
you get stuff about water supply, in Birmingham,
you get the beginnings of a new regime of governance.

1:23:23.250,1:23:28.199
Which is structured by Joseph Chamberlain,
an industrialist, conservative industrialist

1:23:28.199,1:23:37.429
who insisted on public education, housing for low-income populations,
clean water, good sewage, all those sort of things.

1:23:37.429,1:23:43.340
He was called 'radical Joe'.
So you get a new climate of activity in Britain,

1:23:43.340,1:23:51.780
in the 1860s that recognizes that the abuses that
have occurred have to be eliminated.

1:23:51.780,1:23:53.749
But at the same time,

1:23:53.749,1:23:56.769
we're also going to find is that this

1:23:56.769,1:24:03.439
extension of the working-day in this way
mattered less and less for the capitalists,

1:24:03.439,1:24:08.780
because they found another way to construct surplus-value.

1:24:08.780,1:24:16.020
And that other way is relative surplus-value,
which we're going to get into next week.

1:24:16.020,1:24:22.670
And what we see is the struggle over
the length of the working-day,

1:24:22.670,1:24:35.689
forcing capitalists into a reform which
is not necessarily against their interest.

1:24:36.840,1:24:42.239
And Marx then talks about the way in which
this reform, not only affected England,

1:24:42.239,1:24:48.479
but also spread around the world to some degree.

1:24:48.479,1:24:59.340
In particular, he's interested in the cases of France,
in the next section, and of the United States.

1:24:59.340,1:25:04.019
And he sees clearly that in America,
as he says on page 414:

1:25:04.019,1:25:10.649
"Labour in a white skin cannot emancipate itself
where it is branded in a black skin.

1:25:10.649,1:25:18.399
However, a new life immediately arose from the death of slavery."
Unfortunately, it wasn't as dead as Marx was assuming.

1:25:18.399,1:25:24.459
And then he talks about the General Congress of Labour
held in Baltimore in August 1866,

1:25:24.459,1:25:34.630
and the general pressure towards regulation
of the length of working-day in this country.

1:25:34.630,1:25:38.199
This leads to a conclusion and I think we should discuss this.

1:25:38.199,1:25:44.649
"It must be acknowledged", he says, "that our worker emerges from
the process of production looking different from when he entered it.

1:25:44.649,1:25:50.179
In the market, as owner of the commodity 'labour-power',
he stood face to face with other owners of commodities,

1:25:50.179,1:25:52.579
one owner against another owner.

1:25:52.579,1:26:00.150
The contract by which he sold his labour-power to the capitalist
proved in black and white, so to speak that he was free to dispose of himself.

1:26:00.150,1:26:03.949
But when the transaction was concluded,
it was discovered that he was no 'free agent,

1:26:03.949,1:26:07.359
that the period of time for which he is free
to sell his labour-power is the period of time

1:26:07.359,1:26:10.959
for which he is forced to sell it,

1:26:10.959,1:26:17.869
that in fact the vampire will not let go 'while there remains a single
muscle, sinew or drop of blood to be exploited'.

1:26:17.869,1:26:23.599
For the 'protection' against the serpent of their agonies,
the workers have to put their heads together

1:26:23.599,1:26:28.840
and, as a class, compel the passing of a law,
an all-powerful social barrier

1:26:28.840,1:26:31.920
by which they can be prevented from selling themselves
and their families into slavery

1:26:31.920,1:26:35.579
and death by voluntary contract with capital.

1:26:35.579,1:26:39.529
In the place of the pompous catalogue
of the 'inalienable rights of man'

1:26:39.529,1:26:43.529
there steps the modest Magna Carta
of the legally limited working-day,

1:26:43.529,1:26:52.960
which at last makes clear 'when the time which the worker
sells is ended, and when his own begins.' "

1:26:52.960,1:27:04.429
Now there are a couple of issues I want to raise
about this conclusion and discuss with you.

1:27:04.429,1:27:09.769
First, there is the issue of the inalienable rights of man
and we've talked a little bit about that,

1:27:09.769,1:27:17.229
and how you cannot approach this
through the discourse of rights.

1:27:17.229,1:27:25.049
You can't expect the courts to decide,
it's going to be an outcome of this struggle.

1:27:25.049,1:27:31.179
And here again for the first time Marx is saying
that workers have to put their heads together.

1:27:31.179,1:27:43.349
And how they put their heads together is going
to have a huge impact upon this particular issue.

1:27:43.349,1:27:47.210
But then when you look at it and you reflect upon it,

1:27:47.210,1:27:51.800
what you see also is that the capitalists
left to their own devices

1:27:51.800,1:27:56.460
are going to undermine their own class interest.
The coercive laws of competition

1:27:56.460,1:28:02.340
are going to force individual capitalists
to behave in such a way as to destroy

1:28:02.340,1:28:06.929
the capacity of their own class reproduction,
at the end of the day.

1:28:06.929,1:28:11.079
If you went on and on in unlimited ways,
and you kill all your workers off,

1:28:11.079,1:28:17.579
what's going to happen? Where are you going
to get your surplus-value from?

1:28:17.579,1:28:25.389
So there's a sense in which, workers by putting their heads
together and forcing this law,

1:28:25.389,1:28:31.189
actually save capital from their own stupidity.

1:28:31.189,1:28:38.030
In other words, workers putting their heads
together, in this chapter,

1:28:38.030,1:28:47.889
seems to have the effect of stabilizing
the capitalist system, not overthrowing it.

1:28:47.889,1:28:54.760
Now this is a difficult conclusion to reach, right?
Because Marx is a revolutionary thinker who,

1:28:54.760,1:28:58.199
presumably, wants to overthrow it.

1:28:58.199,1:29:05.910
But he's not talking about overthrowing it here,
he's talking about accommodating to it in such a way

1:29:05.910,1:29:15.589
that you get a fair wage for a fair day's work,
a modest Magna Carta.

1:29:15.589,1:29:21.770
You get that, and the capitalist survives,
but the capitalist survives in a better condition

1:29:21.770,1:29:26.609
then they would have survived if they would have been
allowed to let the coercive laws of competition,

1:29:26.609,1:29:33.199
to force them to engage in this 'Après moi, le déluge' behaviour.

1:29:33.199,1:29:37.589
You can make the same argument
by the way about environmental regulation.

1:29:37.589,1:29:43.610
The environmental movement, there's a certain aspect of it
which forces capital to accommodate

1:29:43.610,1:29:51.379
in such a way as to avoid its own stupidities
and what happens under the coercive laws of competition.

1:29:51.379,1:29:59.050
So, there's an interesting issue here.
In part Marx gets to that point,

1:29:59.050,1:30:10.590
for the very simple reason that at the very beginning
of the chapter, he's accepted that the law of exchange

1:30:10.590,1:30:14.189
is the law within which we're going to discuss.

1:30:14.189,1:30:23.439
And it is within the law of exchanges that equal rights can be defined,
and about which class struggle could unfold.

1:30:23.439,1:30:33.859
So in a sense, he has limited his argument,
to a world in which the law of exchanges hold and hold good.

1:30:33.859,1:30:39.239
And in so doing, he's ended up
with this Magna Carta position.

1:30:39.239,1:30:47.340
Now, how do we respond to it?
My own view is that, yes, I think

1:30:47.340,1:30:54.409
a lot of worker organization, trade union activity,
pressures and so on,

1:30:54.409,1:31:03.369
has often played a very significant role in stabilizing
an inherently unstable capitalist system.

1:31:03.369,1:31:08.319
And that struggles over the length of the working
day, which are central in that,

1:31:08.319,1:31:13.739
are a part of that stabilization.

1:31:13.739,1:31:21.739
Stabilization, for all sorts of social, political,
economic reasons. But there is also a point

1:31:21.739,1:31:29.340
at which the struggle over the length of the working
day can start to move into a revolutionary mode.

1:31:29.340,1:31:35.529
In other words, you could imagine
we have a 10-hour working-day

1:31:35.529,1:31:40.860
but we reduce it to 8 hours.

1:31:40.860,1:31:45.630
the French reduced their working week, to what, 35 hours?

1:31:45.630,1:31:49.369
They're now pushing it in the other direction.

1:31:49.369,1:31:55.989
But what if you reduced the working week to 5 hours?

1:31:55.989,1:32:06.089
In other words, this theme of limiting
the length of the working-day,

1:32:06.089,1:32:14.420
you can push it to a point where it really,
severely impedes the accumulation of capital.

1:32:14.420,1:32:20.060
So you can move from what we would consider to be
a reformist view of it, which is a stabilizing form of it,

1:32:20.060,1:32:28.999
into a revolutionary mode of it. When you got into 35 hours a week,
why don't we go to 30 hours a week?

1:32:28.999,1:32:37.210
And one of the responses on the part of capital
when they got faced with that would be, as Marx points out in here,

1:32:37.210,1:32:41.049
what happened as they reduced the length
of the working-day was:

1:32:41.049,1:32:48.849
the capitalists started to increase
the intensity of labour.

1:32:48.849,1:32:53.399
That is, you can't keep people working for 12 hours
or something like that at the same intensity

1:32:53.399,1:32:57.440
but if they're only employed for 6, you can work them
extremely intensely,

1:32:57.440,1:33:02.809
and probably get as much labour out of them in 6
as you might have otherwise got out had they done 9.

1:33:02.809,11:33:09.219
So the intensity issue becomes rather significant.

1:33:09.219,1:33:13.330
And there was a wonderful moment when this happened in British history,

1:33:13.330,1:33:25.699
during the first miner strike against
Edward Heath's conservative government back in 1973-1974

1:33:25.699,1:33:31.169
Edward Heath basically proclaimed a lockout
and then he did a terrible thing,

1:33:31.169,1:33:34.219
that is, he decided they would save electricity

1:33:34.219,1:33:37.959
and they would save it by closing all the factories
down except for 3 days a week.

1:33:37.959,1:33:41.010
So every one of them went on a 3-day week.

1:33:41.010,1:33:44.340
Then he made a terrible, terrible, terrible mistake,

1:33:44.340,1:33:51.289
which was to say that the electricity was going be cut off
at 10 o'clock at night and you couldn't watch television.

1:33:51.289,1:33:56.340
And the whole populace threw him out of the government,
a few years later.

1:33:56.340,1:34:05.679
The irony about that was, the birthrate went up
very significantly some 9 months later,

1:34:05.679,1:34:12.659
after this period when nobody could watch television at night.

1:34:12.659,1:34:22.389
So this dynamic however is an interesting question:
how revolutionary is the struggle about the length of the working-day?

1:34:22.389,1:34:26.800
And like I say, I think there's a stabilizing side of it,
a reformist side of it,

1:34:26.800,1:34:31.380
but then, there's also a radicalising side of it,
when you really start to push it further.

1:34:31.380,1:34:38.370
But, again, capitalists have all kinds of responses
in terms of productivity, intensity and alike.

1:34:36.260,1:34:41.569
So, again, you have to watch out for what those responses might be.

1:34:41.569,1:34:46.520
Let's stop here for a little bit and talk about
anything that has animated you

1:34:46.520,1:34:53.540
or questions you've got about this chapter.
It's a long empirical chapter, different in style, historical.

1:34:51.540,1:35:02.669
» STUDENT: I'm trying to think of an anti-capitalist argument
on behalf on these sorts of reforms.

1:35:02.669,1:35:16.669
To take the issue of climate change, the alternative is untenable.
If there is no environmental regulation, we're done for.

1:35:16.669,1:35:20.669
I'm curious to hear what you think of that.

1:35:20.669,1:35:32.669
On the other hand, if we do stabilize the environment
by putting in reforms, capital will adapt.

1:35:32.669,1:35:41.530
» HARVEY: Yeah, I don't think regulating rather
fiercely in the name of climate change

1:35:41.530,1:35:45.400
is going cause the end of capitalism.
There will be rapid adaptations.

1:35:45.400,1:35:49.139
The problem is that there are certain sectors
of the economy that will boom

1:35:49.139,1:35:52.469
and certain interests that will boom.
But again you've got an alliance of forces,

1:35:52.469,1:35:55.859
and I think the way you would analyse it is in terms of,

1:35:55.859,1:36:00.179
Marx's way of looking at it and say:
What are the class interests behind

1:36:00.179,1:36:04.479
why Bush is refusing to do anything significant about it?

1:36:04.479,1:36:08.319
But then there are class forces even about the responses.

1:36:08.319,1:36:14.619
Carbon trading is a ridiculous idea,
creating a market out of that

1:36:13.619,1:36:19.329
but you know that's where we're headed
for ideological reasons, so the big question is:

1:36:19.329,1:36:25.260
why did the Clintonites and everybody else agree
that the market solution is the only one which is possible?

1:36:25.260,1:36:30.539
And that may actually lead us into other kinds of disasters.

1:36:30.539,1:36:37.620
So the way we would analyse something like that,
if you come out of this way of thinking

1:36:37.620,1:36:41.750
is to start to build where the alliance is, and who's pushing what

1:36:41.750,1:36:46.510
and how's it working. And that's the way
the mode of analysis of Marx is pretty good.

1:36:46.510,1:36:51.119
And I think, for instance, this chapter on the working-day
and the 'Eighteenth Brumaire'

1:36:51.119,1:36:56.030
and some of the studies on class-struggle in France
are really terrific pioneering pieces

1:36:56.030,1:37:01.489
on how to do a class analysis of a historical dynamic.

1:37:01.489,1:37:06.099
And they're very worthwhile readings, simply because

1:37:06.099,1:37:12.560
they do that and they allow us to see. But you'll also notice,
and this is something I've emphasized before,

1:37:12.560,1:37:15.860
the fluidity of the response of capital

1:37:15.860,1:37:23.110
when faced with, in this case it's not an environmental problem,
it's a social problem

1:37:23.110,1:37:27.699
and the fluidity of their response is,
at some point or other, to give and then claim

1:37:27.699,1:37:31.369
they were the ones who agreed with it all along.

1:37:31.369,1:37:35.829
And they were the ones who created this all along,
and aren't they the good people?

1:37:35.829,1:37:41.380
I mean, we've seen plenty of that with corporate responsibility
on the environment going on right now.

1:37:41.380,1:37:47.349
Beyond Petroleum, once BP, still BP
but you know, they tried to…

1:37:47.349,1:37:50.690
and they made a nice green logo and all that kind of stuff.

1:37:50.690,1:37:57.010
So, it's the framework of analysis which is really interesting here.

1:37:57.010,1:38:02.640
Of course, much of this doesn't fit in the sense of
the theoretical categories we've got

1:38:02.640,1:38:06.959
apart from this connectivity between time control
and socially necessary labour time,

1:38:06.959,1:38:09.659
as being the core of what value is about.

1:38:09.659,1:38:15.099
There you do see a strong connectivity between
what Marx is almost bound to look at,

1:38:15.099,1:38:20.189
given the nature of that theoretical beginning.

1:38:20.189,1:38:24.650
» STUDENT: With this line of thinking, are we talking about

1:38:24.650,1:38:28.670
//people having to struggle towards
the expropriation of private property,

1:38:28.670,1:38:31.670
the eradication of private property,
right now in this moment?

1:38:31.670,1:38:36.029
Or is there a way to use this human rights' framework,

1:38:36.029,1:38:42.449
in a way that pushes —the way the struggle did with the working-day—

1:38:42.449,1:38:46.679
and then keep pushing or is there something
that has to happen more radically?

1:38:46.679,1:38:49.090
What exactly would Marx say, about something like that?

1:38:49.090,1:38:53.309
» HARVEY: Well, there are two ways in which you can approach
something like the housing question.

1:38:53.309,1:39:00.699
And that is, you go and you earn a wage,
and your wage is then applied to living and housing

1:39:00.699,1:39:02.999
and that is how the market works.

1:39:02.999,1:39:05.590
Or you can have a collective struggle

1:39:05.590,1:39:10.010
around social housing and say:
We have to put a floor around us.

1:39:10.010,1:39:13.389
The same would be true of healthcare or education,
or any of these areas.

1:39:13.389,1:39:22.099
This is the thing: none of those things are
automatically delivered through the market.

1:39:22.099,1:39:28.079
And what Marx is drawing attention to here
is that all the time you remain just (…)

1:39:28.079,1:39:30.499
and this is what neoliberalism is about.
It says you are personally responsible for

1:39:31.499,1:39:33.309
the education, you are personally responsible

1:39:33.309,1:39:38.859
for healthcare and your housing and that kind of stuff.
It's a personal responsibility system.

1:39:38.859,1:39:43.619
Whereas what Marx would argue is, if you are in that system,
you are likely to get shafted,

1:39:43.619,1:39:47.190
it's likely you'll get very little,
because the amount of wages you've got

1:39:47.190,1:39:50.919
are not going to be adequate to purchase whatever you need.

1:39:50.919,1:39:54.330
And then after that come the band-aid solutions,
'well what do we do with all those poor people.'

1:39:54.330,1:39:59.540
'Well OK, we have Medicaid' or something like that
or 'OK we'll have housing vouchers,

1:39:59.540,1:40:02.670
we'll have education vouchers' or something of that kind.

1:40:02.670,1:40:05.039
So, you start to mess around a bit with the market,

1:40:05.039,1:40:10.690
whereas the socialized solution, in say Scandinavia
and so on, was 'well we have a class struggle

1:40:10.690,1:40:13.380
and we actually build socialized housing and we just go live in it.'

1:40:13.380,1:40:18.489
You know, and we live in it at minimum cost.

1:40:18.489,1:40:24.229
There's an analogy, if you like, between Marx's argument
about the struggle over the length of the working-day,

1:40:24.229,1:40:28.009
over in effect the struggle over what is a real wage,

1:40:28.009,1:40:32.869
and the real wage can be one or two ways:
that is you can raise your individual wages and then

1:40:32.869,1:40:40.029
go out and spend what you like.
Or you can get a real wage by this social action.

1:40:40.029,1:40:42.229
» STUDENT: So you're talking about a floor…

1:40:42.229,1:40:47.229
» HARVEY: Yeah, and this again comes back to civilizational element,
which is in this situation.

1:40:47.229,1:40:50.229
» STUDENT: But isn't that reformist?

1:40:50.229,1:40:54.760
» HARVEY: Yes. Well again, it can be reformist
but then we can go further.

1:40:54.760,1:41:00.699
In effect, you have to ask yourself the question,
in the 1950s and 1960s,

1:41:00.699,1:41:06.679
the welfare states of Europe and even the expanded welfare system
that was being structured in this country,

1:41:06.679,1:41:11.800
in terms of anti-poverty programs and all the rest of it,
did a tremendous job in stabilizing the economy.

1:41:11.800,1:41:15.710
It played a tremendous role in actually
the rapid growth of these economies.

1:41:15.710,1:41:23.580
So it's totally untrue to say that the development
of a welfare state is antagonistic to economic growth.

1:41:23.580,1:41:27.889
In fact, the rate of economic growth was very strong
in the 1950s and 1960s when you

1:41:27.889,1:41:33.829
have a maximum investment going collectively into
these public forms of expenditures.

1:41:33.829,1:41:35.529
You then get the counter-attack,

1:41:35.529,1:41:39.639
which had nothing to do with growth,
had everything to do with class power.

1:41:39.639,1:41:43.670
Which then counter-attacks that, which says:
You now have to go into

1:41:43.670,1:41:49.649
this private responsibility system and
that has been going on for the last 30 years.

1:41:49.649,1:41:56.149
Again, the question is: Why is there not
a stronger class force to resist it?

1:41:56.149,1:41:59.999
And part of that goes back to the fact
that the working-class has been

1:41:59.999,1:42:05.800
dismembered in this country by the movement to China
and the de-industrialization,

1:42:05.800,1:42:10.039
attacks upon union power and all the rest of it.
this has gone on in Europe as well.

1:42:10.039,1:42:17.639
So, it's a question about class struggle and
class dynamics. And again, who are the allies?

1:42:17.639,1:42:21.380
And it's clear that there is a coalition, if you like, allies,

1:42:21.380,1:42:25.709
which are around this idea that the market
is the way in which we should go.

1:42:25.709,1:42:28.449
But the market does not deliver growth,

1:42:28.449,1:42:33.849
and certainly it's made conditions worse off
for a large chunk of the world's population.

1:42:33.849,1:42:37.609
But it's made it much, much better off
in terms of accumulation of capital.

1:42:37.609,1:42:41.300
Which is what Marx is saying,
capitalists are committed to doing.

1:42:41.300,1:42:44.679
They want to maximize their extraction of surplus-value.

1:42:44.679,1:42:48.869
That's what they're doing, as much as they can.

1:42:48.869,1:42:53.260
We have 5 minutes, I just want to do the next chapter.

1:42:53.260,1:42:57.960
I'm not going to spend much time on it.

1:42:57.960,1:43:00.860
It's a transitional chapter,

1:43:00.860,1:43:03.009
Marx does what he usually does.

1:43:03.009,1:43:10.170
He says: 'Okay, there's the rate of surplus-value,
and there's the number of labourers you employ,

1:43:10.170,1:43:14.059
or variable capital you invest.
Therefore the mass of capital depends upon

1:43:14.059,1:43:17.999
the rate of surplus-value times
the number of labourers you employ.

1:43:17.999,1:43:21.820
If you reduce the rate of surplus-value,
you can compensate by

1:43:21.820,1:43:25.900
increasing the number of labourers.
If you reduce the number of labourers,

1:43:25.900,1:43:29.880
you can compensate by increasing the rate of exploitation.

1:43:29.880,1:43:32.969
Now he's here pointing out
and this is a significant transition:

1:43:32.969,1:43:36.959
capitalists are interested in the mass of surplus-value.

1:43:36.959,1:43:44.479
Why? Because the mass of surplus-value is social power.

1:43:44.479,1:43:50.170
And the mass of surplus-value means that,
you're always thinking, as a capitalist,

1:43:50.170,1:43:55.109
about how many labourers I employ and
what the rate of exploitation is.

1:43:55.109,1:43:59.630
But then he introduces the idea that there are limits.

1:43:59.630,1:44:02.009
This is why this chapter is transitional.

1:44:02.009,1:44:09.709
There's a limit to the rate of surplus-value,
which we've discussed, social and physical.

1:44:09.709,1:44:13.829
If I decrease my labourers to 1,
and I try to increase the rate of surplus-value

1:44:13.829,1:44:17.769
to 5,000 percent, I'll never make it.
You just can't do it that way,

1:44:17.769,1:44:20.179
there's a limit to that.

1:44:20.179,1:44:27.769
There's then a limit to the amount of capital
you can invest in variable capital,

1:44:27.769,1:44:31.749
and when you aggregate this up to
the total population and everything else,

1:44:31.749,1:44:35.639
what you see is there's a limit
to the number of labourers you employ,

1:44:35.639,1:44:42.479
which is: the total population of available labourers.

1:44:42.479,1:44:49.829
So we end up in this chapter with this idea,
that there are these 2 limits to capital accumulation:

1:44:49.829,1:44:54.320
total population, rate of exploitation,

1:44:54.320,1:45:03.650
and another limit, internal to capital, which is
the amount which can be spent on variable capital.

1:45:05.210,1:45:17.669
But capitalism does not like limits, and by definition
they're looking for limitless ways to accumulate.

1:45:17.669,1:45:23.219
So, you have here a contradiction:
how do you have a limitless way of accumulating

1:45:23.219,1:45:27.840
in the face of these limits?

1:45:27.840,1:45:32.539
And that's the question which then gets posed,
which is going to be answered

1:45:32.539,1:45:37.849
in the next chapter, which says:
'There's another way of gaining surplus-value.

1:45:37.849,1:45:44.019
It's not absolute surplus-value, it's relative surplus-value.'

1:45:44.019,1:45:49.499
So, next week then we're going to read chapter 12,
on relative surplus-value.

1:45:49.499,1:45:58.289
This is an intense theoretical chapter and you have to read it
very closely and get it right.

1:45:58.289,1:46:03.550
It's very easy to get it wrong, and a lot of people don't get it.

1:46:03.550,1:46:09.099
it's not too hard when you get it, but getting it is sometimes hard.

1:46:09.099,1:46:14.969
And then we're going to read the chapter on cooperation
and the chapter on division of labour.

1:46:14.969,11:46:18.119
So, 12, 13 and 14 for next time.

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