We declaim against the Virginian and
Carolinian
cotton-planters.
Marx - Capital-Volume-I
e.
The necessary labour which the Wallachian peasant does for his own maintenance is distinctly marked off from his surplus labour on behalf of the Boyard.
The one he does on his own field, the other on the seignorial estate.
Both parts of the labour-time exist, therefore, independently, side by side one with the other.
In the corve?
e the surplus labour is accurately marked off from the necessary labour.
This, however, can make no difference with regard to the quantitative relation of surplus labour to necessary labour.
Three days' surplus labour in the week remain three days that yield no equivalent to the labourer himself, whether it be called corve?
e or wage-labour.
But in the capitalist the greed for surplus labour appears in the straining after an unlimited extension of the working day, in the Boyard more simply in a direct hunting after days of corve?
e.
10
In the Danubian Principalities the corve? e was mixed up with rents in kind and other appurtenances of bondage, but it formed the most important tribute paid to the ruling class. Where this was the case, the corve? e rarely arose from serfdom; serfdom much more frequently on the other hand took origin from the corve? e. 11 This is what took place in the Roumanian provinces. Their original mode of production was based on community of the soil, but not in the Slavonic or Indian form. Part of the land was cultivated in severalty as freehold by the members of the community, another part - ager publicus - was cultivated by them in common. The products of this common labour served partly as a reserve fund against bad harvests and other accidents, partly as a public store for providing the costs of war, religion, and other common expenses. In course of time military and clerical dignitaries usurped, along with the common land, the labour spent upon it. The labour of the free peasants on their common land was transformed into corve? e for the thieves of the common land. This corve? e soon developed into a servile relationship existing in point of fact, not in point of law, until Russia, the liberator of the world, made it legal under presence of abolishing serfdom. The code of the corve? e, which the Russian General Kisseleff proclaimed in 1831, was of course dictated by the Boyards themselves. Thus Russia conquered with one blow the magnates of the Danubian provinces, and the applause of liberal cretins throughout Europe.
According to the --Re`glement organique,? as this code of the corve? e is called, every Wallachian peasant owes to the so-called landlord, besides a mass of detailed payments in kind: (1), 12 days of general labour; (2), one day of field labour; (3), one day of wood carrying. In all, 14 days in the year. With deep insight into Political Economy, however, the working day is not taken in its ordinary sense, but as the working day necessary to the production of an average daily product; and that average daily product is determined in so crafty a way that no Cyclops would be done with it in 24 hours. In dry words, the Re? glement itself declares with true Russian irony that by 12 working days one must understand the product of the manual labour of 36 days, by 1 day of field labour 3 days, and by 1 day of wood carrying in like manner three times as much. In all, 42 corve? e days. To this had to be added the so-called jobagie, service due to the lord for extraordinary occasions. In proportion to the size of its population, every village has to furnish annually a definite contingent to the jobagie. This additional corve? e is estimated at 14 days for each Wallachian peasant. Thus the prescribed corve? e amounts to 56 working days yearly. But the agricultural year in Wallachia numbers in consequence of the severe climate only 210 days, of which 40 for Sundays and holidays, 30 on an average for bad weather, together 70 days, do not count. 140 working days remain. The ratio of the corve? e to the necessary labour 56/84 or 66 2/3 % gives a much smaller rate of surplus value than that which regulates the labour of the English agricultural or factory labourer. This is, however, only the legally prescribed corve? e. And in a spirit yet more --liberal? than the English Factory Acts, the --Re`glement organique? has known
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how to facilitate its own evasion. After it has made 56 days out of 12, the nominal day's work of each of the 56 corve? e days is again so arranged that a portion of it must fall on the ensuing day. In one day, e. g. , must be weeded an extent of land, which, for this work, especially in maize plantations, needs twice as much time. The legal day's work for some kinds of agricultural labour is interpretable in such a way that the day begins in May and ends in October. In Moldavia conditions are still harder.
--The 12 corve? e days of the ? Re`glement organique' cried a Boyard drunk with victory, amount to 365 days in the year. ? 12
If the Re`glement organique of the Danubian provinces was a positive expression of the greed for surplus labour which every paragraph legalised, the English Factory Acts are the negative expression of the same greed. These acts curb the passion of capital for a limitless draining of labour-power, by forcibly limiting the working day by state regulations, made by a state that is ruled by capitalist-and landlord. Apart from the working-class movement that daily grew more threatening, the limiting of factory labour was dictated by the same necessity which spread guano over the English fields. The same blind eagerness for plunder that in the one case exhausted the soil, had, in the other, torn up by the roots the living force of the nation. Periodical epidemics speak on this point as clearly as the diminishing military standard in Germany and France. 13
The Factory Act of 1850 now in force (1867) allows for the average working day 10 hours, i. e. , for the first 5 days 12 hours from 6 a. m. to 6 p. m. , including 1/2 an hour for breakfast, and an hour for dinner, and thus leaving 101/2 working-hours, and 8 hours for Saturday, from 6 a. m. to 2 p. m. , of which 1/2 an hour is subtracted for breakfast. 60 working-hours are left, 101/2 for each of the first 5 days, 71/2 for the last. 14
Certain guardians of these laws are appointed, Factory Inspectors, directly under the Home Secretary, whose reports are published half-yearly, by order of Parliament. They give regular and official statistics of the capitalistic greed for surplus labour.
Let us listen, for a moment, to the Factory Inspectors. 15
--The fraudulent mill-owner begins work a quarter of an hour (sometimes more, sometimes less) before 6 a. m. , and leaves off a quarter of an hour (sometimes more, sometimes less) after 6 p. m. He takes 5 minutes from the beginning and from the end of the half hour nominally allowed for breakfast, and 10 minutes at the beginning and end of the hour nominally allowed for dinner. He works for a quarter of an hour (sometimes more, sometimes less) after 2 p. m. on Saturday. Thus his gain is -
Before 6 a. m. , After 6 p. m. ,
At breakfast time, At dinner time,
Five days - 300 minutes, On Saturday before 6 a. m. ,
At breakfast time, After 2 p. m. ,
Total weekly,
15 minutes. 15 "
10 "
20 "
60 "
15 minutes. 10 "
15 "
40 minutes. 340 minutes.
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Or 5 hours and 40 minutes weekly, which multiplied by 50 working weeks in the year (allowing two for holidays and occasional stoppages) is equal to 27 working days. ? 16
--Five minutes a day's increased work, multiplied by weeks, are equal to two and a half days of produce in the year. ? 17
--An additional hour a day gained by small instalments before 6 a. m. , after 6 p. m. , and at the beginning and end of the times nominally fixed for meals, is nearly equivalent to working 13 months in the year. ? 18
Crises during which production is interrupted and the factories work --short time,? i. e. , for only a part of the week, naturally do not affect the tendency to extend the working day. The less business there is, the more profit has to be made on the business done. The less time spent in work, the more of that time has to be turned into surplus labour-time.
Thus the Factory Inspector's report on the period of the crisis from 1857 to 1858:
--It may seem inconsistent that there should be any overworking at a time when trade is so bad; but that very badness leads to the transgression by unscrupulous men, they get the extra profit of it. . . . In the last half year, says Leonard Horner, 122 mills in my district have been given up; 143 were found standing,? yet, over- work is continued beyond the legal hours. ? 19
--For a great part of the time,? says Mr. Howell, --owing to the depression of trade, many factories were altogether closed, and a still greater number were working short time. I continue, however, to receive about the usual number of complaints that half, or three-quarters of an hour in the day, are snatched from the workers by encroaching upon the times professedly allowed for rest and refreshment. ? 20
The same phenomenon was reproduced on a smaller scale during the frightful cotton-crises from 1861 to 1865. 21
--It is sometimes advanced by way of excuse, when persons are found at work in a factory, either at a meal hour, or at some illegal time, that they will not leave the mill at the appointed hour, and that compulsion is necessary to force them to cease work [cleaning their machinery, &c. ], especially on Saturday afternoons. But, if the hands remain in a factory after the machinery has ceased to revolve . . . they would not have been so employed if sufficient time had been set apart specially for cleaning, &c. , either before 6 a. m. [sic. ! ] or before 2 p. m. on Saturday afternoons. ? 22
--The profit to be gained by it (over-working in violation of the Act) appears to be, to many, a greater temptation than they can resist; they calculate upon the chance of not being found out; and when they see the small amount of penalty and costs, which those who have been convicted have had to pay, they find that if they should be detected there will still be a considerable balance of gain. . . . 23 In cases where the additional time is gained by a multiplication of small thefts in the course of the day, there are insuperable difficulties to the inspectors making out a case. ? 24
These --small thefts? of capital from the labourer's meal and recreation time, the factory inspectors also designate as --petty pilferings of minutes,? 25--snatching a few minutes,? 26 or, as the labourers technically called them, --nibbling and cribbling at meal-times. ? 27
It is evident that in this atmosphere the formation of surplus value by surplus labour, is no secret.
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--If you allow me,? said a highly respectable master to me, --to work only ten minutes in the day over-time, you put one thousand a year in my pocket. ? 28 --Moments are the elements of profit. ? 29
Nothing is from this point of view more characteristic than the designation of the workers who work full time as --full-timers,? and the children under 13 who are only allowed to work 6 hours as --half-timers. ? The worker is here nothing more than personified labour-time. All individual distinctions are merged in those of --full-timers? and --half-timers? 30
Section 3: Branches of English Industry Without Legal Limits to Exploitation
We have hitherto considered the tendency to the extension of the working day, the were-wolf's hunger for surplus labour in a department where the monstrous exactions, not surpassed, says an English bourgeois economist, by the cruelties of the Spaniards to the American red-skins31, caused capital at last to be bound by the chains of legal regulations. Now, let us cast a glance at certain branches of production in which the exploitation of labour is either free from fetters to this day, or was so yesterday.
Mr. Broughton Charlton, county magistrate, declared, as chairman of a meeting held at the Assembly Rooms, Nottingham, on the 14th January, 1860, --that there was an amount of privation and suffering among that portion of the population connected with the lace trade, unknown in other parts of the kingdom, indeed, in the civilised world . . . . Children of nine or ten years are dragged from their squalid beds at two, three, or four o'clock in the morning and compelled to work for a bare subsistence until ten, eleven, or twelve at night, their limbs wearing away, their frames dwindling, their faces whitening, and their humanity absolutely sinking into a stone-like torpor, utterly horrible to contemplate. . . . We are not surprised that Mr. Mallett, or any other manufacturer, should stand forward and protest against discussion. . . . The system, as the Rev. Montagu Valpy describes it, is one of unmitigated slavery, socially, physically, morally, and spiritually. . . . What can be thought of a town which holds a public meeting to petition that the period of labour for men shall be diminished to eighteen hours a day? . . . .
We declaim against the Virginian and Carolinian cotton-planters. Is their black- market, their lash, and their barter of human flesh more detestable than this slow sacrifice of humanity which takes place in order that veils and collars may be fabricated for the benefit of capitalists? ? 32
The potteries of Staffordshire have, during the last 22 years, been the subject of three parliamentary inquiries. The result is embodied in Mr. Scriven's Report of 1841 to the --Children's Employment Commissioners,? in the report of Dr. Greenhow of 1860 published by order of the medical officer of the Privy Council (Public Health, 3rd Report, 112-113), lastly, in the report of Mr. Longe of 1862 in the --First Report of the Children's Employment Commission, of the 13th June, 1863. ? For my purpose it is enough to take, from the reports of 1860 and 1863, some depositions of the exploited children themselves. From the children we may form an opinion as to the adults, especially the girls and women, and that in a branch of industry by the side of which cotton-spinning appears an agreeable and healthful occupation. 33
William Wood, 9 years old, was 7 years and 10 months when he began to work. He --ran moulds? (carried ready-moulded articles into the drying-room, afterwards bringing back the empty mould)
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from the beginning. He came to work every day in the week at 6 a. m. , and left off about 9 p. m. --I work till 9 o'clock at night six days in the week. I have done so seven or eight weeks. ?
Fifteen hours of labour for a child 7 years old! J. Murray, 12 years of age, says: --I turn jigger, and run moulds. I come at 6. Sometimes I come at 4. I worked all night last night, till 6 o'clock this morning. I have not been in bed since the night before last. There were eight or nine other boys working last night. All but one have come this morning. I get 3 shillings and sixpence. I do not get any more for working at night. I worked two nights last week. ?
Fernyhough, a boy of ten:
--I have not always an hour (for dinner). I have only half an hour sometimes; on Thursday, Friday, and Saturday. ? 34
Dr. Greenhow states that the average duration of life in the pottery districts of Stoke-on-Trent, and Wolstanton is extraordinarily short. Although in the district of Stoke, only 36. 6% and in Wolstanton only 30. 4% of the adult male population above 20 are employed in the potteries, among the men of that age in the first district more than half, in the second, nearly 2/5 of the whole deaths are the result of pulmonary diseases among the potters. Dr. Boothroyd, a medical practitioner at Hanley, says:
--Each successive generation of potters is more dwarfed and less robust than the preceding one. ? In like manner another doctor, Mr. M'Bean:
--Since he began to practice among the potters 25 years ago, he had observed a marked degeneration especially shown in diminution of stature and breadth. ?
These statements are taken from the report of Dr. Greenhow in 1860. 35
From the report of the Commissioners in 1863, the following: Dr. J. T. Arledge, senior physician of the North Staffordshire Infirmary, says:
--The potters as a class, both men and women, represent a degenerated population, both physically and morally. They are, as a rule, stunted in growth, ill-shaped, and frequently ill-formed in the chest; they become prematurely old, and are certainly short-lived; they are phlegmatic and bloodless, and exhibit their debility of constitution by obstinate attacks of dyspepsia, and disorders of the liver and kidneys, and by rheumatism. But of all diseases they are especially prone to chest- disease, to pneumonia, phthisis, bronchitis, and asthma. One form would appear peculiar to them, and is known as potter's asthma, or potter's consumption. Scrofula attacking the glands, or bones, or other parts of the body, is a disease of two-thirds or more of the potters . . . . That the ? degenerescence' of the population of this district is not even greater than it is, is due to the constant recruiting from the adjacent country, and intermarriages with more healthy races. ? 36
Mr. Charles Parsons, late house surgeon of the same institution, writes in a letter to Commissioner Longe, amongst other things:
--I can only speak from personal observation and not from statistical data, but I do not hesitate to assert that my indignation has been aroused again and again at the sight of poor children whose health has been sacrificed to gratify the avarice of either parents or employers. ? He enumerates the causes of the diseases of the potters, and sums them up in the phrase, --long hours. ? The report of the Commission trusts that --a manufacture which has assumed so prominent a place in the whole world, will not long be subject to the remark that its great success is
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accompanied with the physical deterioration, widespread bodily suffering, and early death of the workpeople . . . by whose labour and skill such great results have been achieved. ? 37
And all that holds of the potteries in England is true of those in Scotland. 38
The manufacture of lucifer matches dates from 1833, from the discovery of the method of applying phosphorus to the match itself. Since 1845 this manufacture has rapidly developed in England, and has extended especially amongst the thickly populated parts of London as well as in Manchester, Birmingham, Liverpool, Bristol, Norwich, Newcastle and Glasgow. With it has spread the form of lockjaw, which a Vienna physician in 1845 discovered to be a disease peculiar to lucifer-matchmakers. Half the workers are children under thirteen, and young persons under eighteen. The manufacture is on account of its unhealthiness and unpleasantness in such bad odour that only the most miserable part of the labouring class, half-starved widows and so forth, deliver up their children to it, --the ragged, half-starved, untaught children. ? 39
Of the witnesses that Commissioner White examined (1863), 270 were under 18, 50 under 10, 10 only 8, and 5 only 6 years old. A range of the working day from 12 to 14 or 15 hours, night- labour, irregular meal-times, meals for the most part taken in the very workrooms that are pestilent with phosphorus. Dante would have found the worst horrors of his Inferno surpassed in this manufacture.
In the manufacture of paper-hangings the coarser sorts are printed by machine; the finer by hand (block-printing). The most active business months are from the beginning of October to the end of April. During this time the work goes on fast and furious without intermission from 6 a. m. to 10 p. m. or further into the night.
J. Leach deposes:
--Last winter six out of nineteen girls were away from ill-health at one time from over-work. I have to bawl at them to keep them awake. ? W. Duffy: --I have seen when the children could none of them keep their eyes open for the work; indeed, none of us could. ? J. Lightbourne: --Am 13 We worked last winter till 9 (evening), and the winter before till 10. I used to cry with sore feet every night last winter. ? G. Apsden: --That boy of mine when he was 7 years old I used to carry him on my back to and fro through the snow, and he used to have 16 hours a day . . . I have often knelt down to feed him as he stood by the machine, for he could not leave it or stop. ? Smith, the managing partner of a Manchester factory: --We (he means his --hands? who work for --us? ) work on with no stoppage for meals, so that day's work of 101/2 hours is finished by 4. 30 p. m. , and all after that is over-time. ? 40 (Does this Mr. Smith take no meals himself during 101/2 hours? ) --We (this same Smith) seldom leave off working before 6 p. m. (he means leave off the consumption of --our? labour-power machines), so that we (iterum Crispinus) are really working over-time the whole year round. For all these, children and adults alike (152 children and young persons and 140 adults), the average work for the last 18 months has been at the very least 7 days, 5 hours, or 78 1/2 hours a week. For the six weeks ending May 2nd this year (1862), the average was higher - 8 days or 84 hours a week. ?
Still this same Mr. Smith, who is so extremely devoted to the pluralis majestatis [the Royal --we,? i. e. , speaking on behalf of his subjects], adds with a smile, "Machine-work is not great. ? So the employers in the block-printing say: --Hand labour is more healthy than machine work. ? On the
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whole, manufacturers declare with indignation against the proposal --to stop the machines at least during meal-times. ?
--A clause,? says Mr. Otley, manager of a wall-paper factory in the Borough, --which allowed work between, say 6 a. m. and 9 p. m. in would suit us (! ) very well, but the factory hours, 6 a. m. to 6 p. m. , are not suitable. Our machine is always stopped for dinner. (What generosity! ) There is no waste of paper and colour to speak of. But,? he adds sympathetically, --I can understand the loss of time not being liked. ?
The report of the Commission opines with nai? vete? that the fear of some --leading firms? of losing time, i. e. , the time for appropriating the labour of others, and thence losing profit is not a sufficient reason for allowing children under 13, and young persons under 18, working 12 to 16 hours per day, to lose their dinner, nor for giving it to them as coal and water are supplied to the steam-engine, soap to wool, oil to the wheel - as merely auxiliary material to the instruments of labour, during the process of production itself. 41
No branch of industry in England (we do not take into account the making of bread by machinery recently introduced) has preserved up to the present day a method of production so archaic, so - as we see from the poets of the Roman Empire - pre-christian, as baking. But capital, as was said earlier, is at first indifferent as to the technical character of the labour-process; it begins by taking it just as it finds it.
The incredible adulteration of bread, especially in London, was first revealed by the House of Commons Committee --on the adulteration of articles of food? (1855-56), and Dr. Hassall's work, --Adulterations detected. ? 42 The consequence of these revelations was the Act of August 6th, 1860, --for preventing the adulteration of articles of food and drink,? an inoperative law, as it naturally shows the tenderest consideration for every Free-trader who determines by the buying or selling of adulterated commodities --to turn an honest penny. ? 43The Committee itself formulated more or less nai? vely its conviction that Free-trade meant essentially trade with adulterated, or as the English ingeniously put it, --sophisticated? goods. In fact this kind of sophistry knows better than Protagoras how to make white black, and black white, and better than the Eleatics how to demonstrate ad oculos [before your own eyes] that everything is only appearance. 44
At all events the Committee had directed the attention of the public to its --daily bread,? and therefore to the baking trade. At the same time in public meetings and in petitions to Parliament rose the cry of the London journeymen bakers against their over-work, &c. The cry was so urgent that Mr. H. S. Tremenheere, also a member of the Commission of 1863 several times mentioned, was appointed Royal Commissioner of Inquiry. His report. 45 together with the evidence given, roused not the heart of the public but its stomach. Englishmen, always well up in the Bible, knew well enough that man, unless by elective grace a capitalist, or landlord, or sinecurist, is commanded to eat his bread in the sweat of his brow, but they did not know that he had to eat daily in his bread a certain quantity of human perspiration mixed with the discharge of abscesses, cobwebs, dead black-beetles, and putrid German yeast, without counting alum, sand, and other agreeable mineral ingredients. Without any regard to his holiness, Free-trade, the free baking- trade was therefore placed under the supervision of the State inspectors (Close of the Parliamentary session of 1863), and by the same Act of Parliament, work from 9 in the evening to 5 in the morning was forbidden for journeymen bakers under 18. The last clause speaks volumes as to the over-work in this old-fashioned, homely line of business.
--The work of a London journeyman baker begins, as a rule, at about eleven at night. At that hour he ? makes the dough,' - a laborious process, which lasts from
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half an hour to three quarters of an hour, according to the size of the batch or the labour bestowed upon it. He then lies down upon the kneading-board, which is also the covering of the trough in which the dough is ? made'; and with a sack under him, and another rolled up as a pillow, he sleeps for about a couple of hours. He is then engaged in a rapid and continuous labour for about five hours - throwing out the dough, ? scaling it off,' moulding it, putting it into the oven, preparing and baking rolls and fancy bread, taking the batch bread out of the oven, and up into the shop, &c. , &c. The temperature of a bakehouse ranges from about 75 to upwards of 90 degrees, and in the smaller bakehouses approximates usually to the higher rather than to the lower degree of heat. When the business of making the bread, rolls, &c. , is over, that of its distribution begins, and a considerable proportion of the journeymen in the trade, after working hard in the manner described during the night, are upon their legs for many hours during the day, carrying baskets, or wheeling hand-carts, and sometimes again in the bakehouse, leaving off work at various hours between 1 and 6 p. m. according to the season of the year, or the amount and nature of their master's business; while others are again engaged in the bakehouse in ?
In the Danubian Principalities the corve? e was mixed up with rents in kind and other appurtenances of bondage, but it formed the most important tribute paid to the ruling class. Where this was the case, the corve? e rarely arose from serfdom; serfdom much more frequently on the other hand took origin from the corve? e. 11 This is what took place in the Roumanian provinces. Their original mode of production was based on community of the soil, but not in the Slavonic or Indian form. Part of the land was cultivated in severalty as freehold by the members of the community, another part - ager publicus - was cultivated by them in common. The products of this common labour served partly as a reserve fund against bad harvests and other accidents, partly as a public store for providing the costs of war, religion, and other common expenses. In course of time military and clerical dignitaries usurped, along with the common land, the labour spent upon it. The labour of the free peasants on their common land was transformed into corve? e for the thieves of the common land. This corve? e soon developed into a servile relationship existing in point of fact, not in point of law, until Russia, the liberator of the world, made it legal under presence of abolishing serfdom. The code of the corve? e, which the Russian General Kisseleff proclaimed in 1831, was of course dictated by the Boyards themselves. Thus Russia conquered with one blow the magnates of the Danubian provinces, and the applause of liberal cretins throughout Europe.
According to the --Re`glement organique,? as this code of the corve? e is called, every Wallachian peasant owes to the so-called landlord, besides a mass of detailed payments in kind: (1), 12 days of general labour; (2), one day of field labour; (3), one day of wood carrying. In all, 14 days in the year. With deep insight into Political Economy, however, the working day is not taken in its ordinary sense, but as the working day necessary to the production of an average daily product; and that average daily product is determined in so crafty a way that no Cyclops would be done with it in 24 hours. In dry words, the Re? glement itself declares with true Russian irony that by 12 working days one must understand the product of the manual labour of 36 days, by 1 day of field labour 3 days, and by 1 day of wood carrying in like manner three times as much. In all, 42 corve? e days. To this had to be added the so-called jobagie, service due to the lord for extraordinary occasions. In proportion to the size of its population, every village has to furnish annually a definite contingent to the jobagie. This additional corve? e is estimated at 14 days for each Wallachian peasant. Thus the prescribed corve? e amounts to 56 working days yearly. But the agricultural year in Wallachia numbers in consequence of the severe climate only 210 days, of which 40 for Sundays and holidays, 30 on an average for bad weather, together 70 days, do not count. 140 working days remain. The ratio of the corve? e to the necessary labour 56/84 or 66 2/3 % gives a much smaller rate of surplus value than that which regulates the labour of the English agricultural or factory labourer. This is, however, only the legally prescribed corve? e. And in a spirit yet more --liberal? than the English Factory Acts, the --Re`glement organique? has known
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how to facilitate its own evasion. After it has made 56 days out of 12, the nominal day's work of each of the 56 corve? e days is again so arranged that a portion of it must fall on the ensuing day. In one day, e. g. , must be weeded an extent of land, which, for this work, especially in maize plantations, needs twice as much time. The legal day's work for some kinds of agricultural labour is interpretable in such a way that the day begins in May and ends in October. In Moldavia conditions are still harder.
--The 12 corve? e days of the ? Re`glement organique' cried a Boyard drunk with victory, amount to 365 days in the year. ? 12
If the Re`glement organique of the Danubian provinces was a positive expression of the greed for surplus labour which every paragraph legalised, the English Factory Acts are the negative expression of the same greed. These acts curb the passion of capital for a limitless draining of labour-power, by forcibly limiting the working day by state regulations, made by a state that is ruled by capitalist-and landlord. Apart from the working-class movement that daily grew more threatening, the limiting of factory labour was dictated by the same necessity which spread guano over the English fields. The same blind eagerness for plunder that in the one case exhausted the soil, had, in the other, torn up by the roots the living force of the nation. Periodical epidemics speak on this point as clearly as the diminishing military standard in Germany and France. 13
The Factory Act of 1850 now in force (1867) allows for the average working day 10 hours, i. e. , for the first 5 days 12 hours from 6 a. m. to 6 p. m. , including 1/2 an hour for breakfast, and an hour for dinner, and thus leaving 101/2 working-hours, and 8 hours for Saturday, from 6 a. m. to 2 p. m. , of which 1/2 an hour is subtracted for breakfast. 60 working-hours are left, 101/2 for each of the first 5 days, 71/2 for the last. 14
Certain guardians of these laws are appointed, Factory Inspectors, directly under the Home Secretary, whose reports are published half-yearly, by order of Parliament. They give regular and official statistics of the capitalistic greed for surplus labour.
Let us listen, for a moment, to the Factory Inspectors. 15
--The fraudulent mill-owner begins work a quarter of an hour (sometimes more, sometimes less) before 6 a. m. , and leaves off a quarter of an hour (sometimes more, sometimes less) after 6 p. m. He takes 5 minutes from the beginning and from the end of the half hour nominally allowed for breakfast, and 10 minutes at the beginning and end of the hour nominally allowed for dinner. He works for a quarter of an hour (sometimes more, sometimes less) after 2 p. m. on Saturday. Thus his gain is -
Before 6 a. m. , After 6 p. m. ,
At breakfast time, At dinner time,
Five days - 300 minutes, On Saturday before 6 a. m. ,
At breakfast time, After 2 p. m. ,
Total weekly,
15 minutes. 15 "
10 "
20 "
60 "
15 minutes. 10 "
15 "
40 minutes. 340 minutes.
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Or 5 hours and 40 minutes weekly, which multiplied by 50 working weeks in the year (allowing two for holidays and occasional stoppages) is equal to 27 working days. ? 16
--Five minutes a day's increased work, multiplied by weeks, are equal to two and a half days of produce in the year. ? 17
--An additional hour a day gained by small instalments before 6 a. m. , after 6 p. m. , and at the beginning and end of the times nominally fixed for meals, is nearly equivalent to working 13 months in the year. ? 18
Crises during which production is interrupted and the factories work --short time,? i. e. , for only a part of the week, naturally do not affect the tendency to extend the working day. The less business there is, the more profit has to be made on the business done. The less time spent in work, the more of that time has to be turned into surplus labour-time.
Thus the Factory Inspector's report on the period of the crisis from 1857 to 1858:
--It may seem inconsistent that there should be any overworking at a time when trade is so bad; but that very badness leads to the transgression by unscrupulous men, they get the extra profit of it. . . . In the last half year, says Leonard Horner, 122 mills in my district have been given up; 143 were found standing,? yet, over- work is continued beyond the legal hours. ? 19
--For a great part of the time,? says Mr. Howell, --owing to the depression of trade, many factories were altogether closed, and a still greater number were working short time. I continue, however, to receive about the usual number of complaints that half, or three-quarters of an hour in the day, are snatched from the workers by encroaching upon the times professedly allowed for rest and refreshment. ? 20
The same phenomenon was reproduced on a smaller scale during the frightful cotton-crises from 1861 to 1865. 21
--It is sometimes advanced by way of excuse, when persons are found at work in a factory, either at a meal hour, or at some illegal time, that they will not leave the mill at the appointed hour, and that compulsion is necessary to force them to cease work [cleaning their machinery, &c. ], especially on Saturday afternoons. But, if the hands remain in a factory after the machinery has ceased to revolve . . . they would not have been so employed if sufficient time had been set apart specially for cleaning, &c. , either before 6 a. m. [sic. ! ] or before 2 p. m. on Saturday afternoons. ? 22
--The profit to be gained by it (over-working in violation of the Act) appears to be, to many, a greater temptation than they can resist; they calculate upon the chance of not being found out; and when they see the small amount of penalty and costs, which those who have been convicted have had to pay, they find that if they should be detected there will still be a considerable balance of gain. . . . 23 In cases where the additional time is gained by a multiplication of small thefts in the course of the day, there are insuperable difficulties to the inspectors making out a case. ? 24
These --small thefts? of capital from the labourer's meal and recreation time, the factory inspectors also designate as --petty pilferings of minutes,? 25--snatching a few minutes,? 26 or, as the labourers technically called them, --nibbling and cribbling at meal-times. ? 27
It is evident that in this atmosphere the formation of surplus value by surplus labour, is no secret.
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--If you allow me,? said a highly respectable master to me, --to work only ten minutes in the day over-time, you put one thousand a year in my pocket. ? 28 --Moments are the elements of profit. ? 29
Nothing is from this point of view more characteristic than the designation of the workers who work full time as --full-timers,? and the children under 13 who are only allowed to work 6 hours as --half-timers. ? The worker is here nothing more than personified labour-time. All individual distinctions are merged in those of --full-timers? and --half-timers? 30
Section 3: Branches of English Industry Without Legal Limits to Exploitation
We have hitherto considered the tendency to the extension of the working day, the were-wolf's hunger for surplus labour in a department where the monstrous exactions, not surpassed, says an English bourgeois economist, by the cruelties of the Spaniards to the American red-skins31, caused capital at last to be bound by the chains of legal regulations. Now, let us cast a glance at certain branches of production in which the exploitation of labour is either free from fetters to this day, or was so yesterday.
Mr. Broughton Charlton, county magistrate, declared, as chairman of a meeting held at the Assembly Rooms, Nottingham, on the 14th January, 1860, --that there was an amount of privation and suffering among that portion of the population connected with the lace trade, unknown in other parts of the kingdom, indeed, in the civilised world . . . . Children of nine or ten years are dragged from their squalid beds at two, three, or four o'clock in the morning and compelled to work for a bare subsistence until ten, eleven, or twelve at night, their limbs wearing away, their frames dwindling, their faces whitening, and their humanity absolutely sinking into a stone-like torpor, utterly horrible to contemplate. . . . We are not surprised that Mr. Mallett, or any other manufacturer, should stand forward and protest against discussion. . . . The system, as the Rev. Montagu Valpy describes it, is one of unmitigated slavery, socially, physically, morally, and spiritually. . . . What can be thought of a town which holds a public meeting to petition that the period of labour for men shall be diminished to eighteen hours a day? . . . .
We declaim against the Virginian and Carolinian cotton-planters. Is their black- market, their lash, and their barter of human flesh more detestable than this slow sacrifice of humanity which takes place in order that veils and collars may be fabricated for the benefit of capitalists? ? 32
The potteries of Staffordshire have, during the last 22 years, been the subject of three parliamentary inquiries. The result is embodied in Mr. Scriven's Report of 1841 to the --Children's Employment Commissioners,? in the report of Dr. Greenhow of 1860 published by order of the medical officer of the Privy Council (Public Health, 3rd Report, 112-113), lastly, in the report of Mr. Longe of 1862 in the --First Report of the Children's Employment Commission, of the 13th June, 1863. ? For my purpose it is enough to take, from the reports of 1860 and 1863, some depositions of the exploited children themselves. From the children we may form an opinion as to the adults, especially the girls and women, and that in a branch of industry by the side of which cotton-spinning appears an agreeable and healthful occupation. 33
William Wood, 9 years old, was 7 years and 10 months when he began to work. He --ran moulds? (carried ready-moulded articles into the drying-room, afterwards bringing back the empty mould)
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from the beginning. He came to work every day in the week at 6 a. m. , and left off about 9 p. m. --I work till 9 o'clock at night six days in the week. I have done so seven or eight weeks. ?
Fifteen hours of labour for a child 7 years old! J. Murray, 12 years of age, says: --I turn jigger, and run moulds. I come at 6. Sometimes I come at 4. I worked all night last night, till 6 o'clock this morning. I have not been in bed since the night before last. There were eight or nine other boys working last night. All but one have come this morning. I get 3 shillings and sixpence. I do not get any more for working at night. I worked two nights last week. ?
Fernyhough, a boy of ten:
--I have not always an hour (for dinner). I have only half an hour sometimes; on Thursday, Friday, and Saturday. ? 34
Dr. Greenhow states that the average duration of life in the pottery districts of Stoke-on-Trent, and Wolstanton is extraordinarily short. Although in the district of Stoke, only 36. 6% and in Wolstanton only 30. 4% of the adult male population above 20 are employed in the potteries, among the men of that age in the first district more than half, in the second, nearly 2/5 of the whole deaths are the result of pulmonary diseases among the potters. Dr. Boothroyd, a medical practitioner at Hanley, says:
--Each successive generation of potters is more dwarfed and less robust than the preceding one. ? In like manner another doctor, Mr. M'Bean:
--Since he began to practice among the potters 25 years ago, he had observed a marked degeneration especially shown in diminution of stature and breadth. ?
These statements are taken from the report of Dr. Greenhow in 1860. 35
From the report of the Commissioners in 1863, the following: Dr. J. T. Arledge, senior physician of the North Staffordshire Infirmary, says:
--The potters as a class, both men and women, represent a degenerated population, both physically and morally. They are, as a rule, stunted in growth, ill-shaped, and frequently ill-formed in the chest; they become prematurely old, and are certainly short-lived; they are phlegmatic and bloodless, and exhibit their debility of constitution by obstinate attacks of dyspepsia, and disorders of the liver and kidneys, and by rheumatism. But of all diseases they are especially prone to chest- disease, to pneumonia, phthisis, bronchitis, and asthma. One form would appear peculiar to them, and is known as potter's asthma, or potter's consumption. Scrofula attacking the glands, or bones, or other parts of the body, is a disease of two-thirds or more of the potters . . . . That the ? degenerescence' of the population of this district is not even greater than it is, is due to the constant recruiting from the adjacent country, and intermarriages with more healthy races. ? 36
Mr. Charles Parsons, late house surgeon of the same institution, writes in a letter to Commissioner Longe, amongst other things:
--I can only speak from personal observation and not from statistical data, but I do not hesitate to assert that my indignation has been aroused again and again at the sight of poor children whose health has been sacrificed to gratify the avarice of either parents or employers. ? He enumerates the causes of the diseases of the potters, and sums them up in the phrase, --long hours. ? The report of the Commission trusts that --a manufacture which has assumed so prominent a place in the whole world, will not long be subject to the remark that its great success is
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accompanied with the physical deterioration, widespread bodily suffering, and early death of the workpeople . . . by whose labour and skill such great results have been achieved. ? 37
And all that holds of the potteries in England is true of those in Scotland. 38
The manufacture of lucifer matches dates from 1833, from the discovery of the method of applying phosphorus to the match itself. Since 1845 this manufacture has rapidly developed in England, and has extended especially amongst the thickly populated parts of London as well as in Manchester, Birmingham, Liverpool, Bristol, Norwich, Newcastle and Glasgow. With it has spread the form of lockjaw, which a Vienna physician in 1845 discovered to be a disease peculiar to lucifer-matchmakers. Half the workers are children under thirteen, and young persons under eighteen. The manufacture is on account of its unhealthiness and unpleasantness in such bad odour that only the most miserable part of the labouring class, half-starved widows and so forth, deliver up their children to it, --the ragged, half-starved, untaught children. ? 39
Of the witnesses that Commissioner White examined (1863), 270 were under 18, 50 under 10, 10 only 8, and 5 only 6 years old. A range of the working day from 12 to 14 or 15 hours, night- labour, irregular meal-times, meals for the most part taken in the very workrooms that are pestilent with phosphorus. Dante would have found the worst horrors of his Inferno surpassed in this manufacture.
In the manufacture of paper-hangings the coarser sorts are printed by machine; the finer by hand (block-printing). The most active business months are from the beginning of October to the end of April. During this time the work goes on fast and furious without intermission from 6 a. m. to 10 p. m. or further into the night.
J. Leach deposes:
--Last winter six out of nineteen girls were away from ill-health at one time from over-work. I have to bawl at them to keep them awake. ? W. Duffy: --I have seen when the children could none of them keep their eyes open for the work; indeed, none of us could. ? J. Lightbourne: --Am 13 We worked last winter till 9 (evening), and the winter before till 10. I used to cry with sore feet every night last winter. ? G. Apsden: --That boy of mine when he was 7 years old I used to carry him on my back to and fro through the snow, and he used to have 16 hours a day . . . I have often knelt down to feed him as he stood by the machine, for he could not leave it or stop. ? Smith, the managing partner of a Manchester factory: --We (he means his --hands? who work for --us? ) work on with no stoppage for meals, so that day's work of 101/2 hours is finished by 4. 30 p. m. , and all after that is over-time. ? 40 (Does this Mr. Smith take no meals himself during 101/2 hours? ) --We (this same Smith) seldom leave off working before 6 p. m. (he means leave off the consumption of --our? labour-power machines), so that we (iterum Crispinus) are really working over-time the whole year round. For all these, children and adults alike (152 children and young persons and 140 adults), the average work for the last 18 months has been at the very least 7 days, 5 hours, or 78 1/2 hours a week. For the six weeks ending May 2nd this year (1862), the average was higher - 8 days or 84 hours a week. ?
Still this same Mr. Smith, who is so extremely devoted to the pluralis majestatis [the Royal --we,? i. e. , speaking on behalf of his subjects], adds with a smile, "Machine-work is not great. ? So the employers in the block-printing say: --Hand labour is more healthy than machine work. ? On the
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whole, manufacturers declare with indignation against the proposal --to stop the machines at least during meal-times. ?
--A clause,? says Mr. Otley, manager of a wall-paper factory in the Borough, --which allowed work between, say 6 a. m. and 9 p. m. in would suit us (! ) very well, but the factory hours, 6 a. m. to 6 p. m. , are not suitable. Our machine is always stopped for dinner. (What generosity! ) There is no waste of paper and colour to speak of. But,? he adds sympathetically, --I can understand the loss of time not being liked. ?
The report of the Commission opines with nai? vete? that the fear of some --leading firms? of losing time, i. e. , the time for appropriating the labour of others, and thence losing profit is not a sufficient reason for allowing children under 13, and young persons under 18, working 12 to 16 hours per day, to lose their dinner, nor for giving it to them as coal and water are supplied to the steam-engine, soap to wool, oil to the wheel - as merely auxiliary material to the instruments of labour, during the process of production itself. 41
No branch of industry in England (we do not take into account the making of bread by machinery recently introduced) has preserved up to the present day a method of production so archaic, so - as we see from the poets of the Roman Empire - pre-christian, as baking. But capital, as was said earlier, is at first indifferent as to the technical character of the labour-process; it begins by taking it just as it finds it.
The incredible adulteration of bread, especially in London, was first revealed by the House of Commons Committee --on the adulteration of articles of food? (1855-56), and Dr. Hassall's work, --Adulterations detected. ? 42 The consequence of these revelations was the Act of August 6th, 1860, --for preventing the adulteration of articles of food and drink,? an inoperative law, as it naturally shows the tenderest consideration for every Free-trader who determines by the buying or selling of adulterated commodities --to turn an honest penny. ? 43The Committee itself formulated more or less nai? vely its conviction that Free-trade meant essentially trade with adulterated, or as the English ingeniously put it, --sophisticated? goods. In fact this kind of sophistry knows better than Protagoras how to make white black, and black white, and better than the Eleatics how to demonstrate ad oculos [before your own eyes] that everything is only appearance. 44
At all events the Committee had directed the attention of the public to its --daily bread,? and therefore to the baking trade. At the same time in public meetings and in petitions to Parliament rose the cry of the London journeymen bakers against their over-work, &c. The cry was so urgent that Mr. H. S. Tremenheere, also a member of the Commission of 1863 several times mentioned, was appointed Royal Commissioner of Inquiry. His report. 45 together with the evidence given, roused not the heart of the public but its stomach. Englishmen, always well up in the Bible, knew well enough that man, unless by elective grace a capitalist, or landlord, or sinecurist, is commanded to eat his bread in the sweat of his brow, but they did not know that he had to eat daily in his bread a certain quantity of human perspiration mixed with the discharge of abscesses, cobwebs, dead black-beetles, and putrid German yeast, without counting alum, sand, and other agreeable mineral ingredients. Without any regard to his holiness, Free-trade, the free baking- trade was therefore placed under the supervision of the State inspectors (Close of the Parliamentary session of 1863), and by the same Act of Parliament, work from 9 in the evening to 5 in the morning was forbidden for journeymen bakers under 18. The last clause speaks volumes as to the over-work in this old-fashioned, homely line of business.
--The work of a London journeyman baker begins, as a rule, at about eleven at night. At that hour he ? makes the dough,' - a laborious process, which lasts from
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half an hour to three quarters of an hour, according to the size of the batch or the labour bestowed upon it. He then lies down upon the kneading-board, which is also the covering of the trough in which the dough is ? made'; and with a sack under him, and another rolled up as a pillow, he sleeps for about a couple of hours. He is then engaged in a rapid and continuous labour for about five hours - throwing out the dough, ? scaling it off,' moulding it, putting it into the oven, preparing and baking rolls and fancy bread, taking the batch bread out of the oven, and up into the shop, &c. , &c. The temperature of a bakehouse ranges from about 75 to upwards of 90 degrees, and in the smaller bakehouses approximates usually to the higher rather than to the lower degree of heat. When the business of making the bread, rolls, &c. , is over, that of its distribution begins, and a considerable proportion of the journeymen in the trade, after working hard in the manner described during the night, are upon their legs for many hours during the day, carrying baskets, or wheeling hand-carts, and sometimes again in the bakehouse, leaving off work at various hours between 1 and 6 p. m. according to the season of the year, or the amount and nature of their master's business; while others are again engaged in the bakehouse in ?
