John Stuart Mill asks:

“It is doubtful whether all the mechanical inventions yet made have lightened the day’s toil of any human being.”

But easing toil is not at all the purpose of machinery used by capital. Like every other development of the productive power of labour, it is meant to make goods cheaper, shorten the part of the working day the worker needs for themselves, and lengthen the part given to the capitalist for nothing. It is a means of producing surplus-value.

In manufacture, the change in production begins with labour-power; in large-scale industry, it begins with the means of labour. So we must ask what turns a tool into a machine, and what separates a machine from a handicraft tool. Only broad features can be given here: social epochs have no hard boundary lines, any more than geological epochs do.

Mathematicians and mechanics, followed here and there by English economists, call a tool a simple machine and a machine a compound tool. They see no essential difference, and even call levers, inclined planes, screws, wedges, and the like machines. Every machine is in fact made from such simple powers, however disguised and combined. But this explanation is worthless economically because it leaves out history.

Another test says that a person supplies the power for a tool, while an animal, water, wind, or another natural force supplies it for a machine. Then an ox-drawn plough would be a machine, while Claussen's circular loom, worked by one person and making 96,000 picks — passes of the weft thread — a minute, would be only a tool. The same loom would be a tool by hand and a machine by steam. Since animal power is among humanity's oldest inventions, machinery would then come before handicraft.

When John Wyatt announced his spinning machine in 1735, and with it the industrial revolution of the eighteenth century, he did not say that an ass would drive it instead of a person. Yet that was the ass's role. His plan was a machine to spin without fingers.

Every developed machine has three distinct parts: the prime mover — the part that sets the whole thing moving — the transmission system, and the tool or working machine. The prime mover may create its own force, as steam, caloric, and electromagnetic engines do, or receive force already found in nature, as a water-wheel does from falling water and a windmill from wind.

The transmission system of flywheels, shafts, gears, ropes, belts, and other parts controls the movement, changes its form when needed, and carries it to the working machine. The prime mover and transmission exist only to give that machine movement, so that it can take hold of the material and change it for a purpose. The industrial revolution of the eighteenth century begins with this tool or working machine. It still begins there whenever handicraft or manufacture is turned into machinery-based production.

Look closely at the working machine. Its equipment and tools are generally the same ones used by the handicraft worker or manufacturing worker, though often much changed. The difference is that they are no longer human tools; they are tools of a mechanism. The whole machine may be a changed mechanical version of an old handicraft tool, like a power-loom. Or its active parts may be familiar things: spindles, needles, saw blades, or knives.

These tools are even separate from the machine's body at their birth. They are still often made by handicraft or manufacture, then fitted onto the machine-made body of the working machine. The working machine is therefore a mechanism which, once it receives movement, uses its tools to perform the operations that a worker formerly performed with similar tools. Whether its power comes from a person or from another machine changes nothing essential. Once the working tool passes from the person to a mechanism, a machine replaces a mere tool.

The difference is plain even when a person remains the prime mover. A person can use only as many work tools at once as their own bodily organs allow. In Germany, people first tried to make one spinner run two spinning wheels with both hands and both feet; it was too exhausting. Later came a treadle wheel with two spindles, but people able to spin two threads at once were nearly as rare as two-headed people. The Jenny, by contrast, began with 12 to 18 spindles, and the stocking loom works with many thousand needles at once. The number of tools used at the same time by one working machine is free from the bodily limit that confines a handicraft worker's tools.

With many hand tools, the difference between a person as mere driving force and as the actual operator can be plainly seen. At a spinning wheel, the foot merely supplies force. The hand working the spindle draws and twists, and so performs the real spinning.

The industrial revolution first takes over this last part of the hand tool. At first it leaves the person the new work of watching the machine and correcting its mistakes by hand, along with the merely mechanical role of supplying force. Tools on which a person has always acted only as a simple driving force—turning a mill crank, pumping, moving bellows, or pounding with a mortar—soon bring in animals, water, and wind. Long before, and partly during, the manufacturing period, such tools here and there grew into machines without changing the mode of production.

Large-scale industry shows that they were already machines in their handicraft form. The pumps that pumped out Lake Haarlem in 1836 and 1837 followed the ordinary pump's principle; only cyclopean steam engines drove their pistons instead of human hands. In England, even the blacksmith's rough bellows is sometimes turned into a mechanical air pump by joining its arm to a steam engine.

The steam engine itself, invented at the end of the seventeenth century and remaining ineffective until the beginning of the 1780s, did not cause an industrial revolution. The order was the reverse: the creation of tool-machines made the revolutionized steam engine necessary. Once a person acts on a tool-machine only as its driving force, human muscle is an accidental disguise for that force; wind, water, or steam can take its place. That change can, of course, require major technical changes in a mechanism built for human force alone. Machines that still have to win their way, such as sewing and bread-making machines, are now built for both human and mechanical force, unless their purpose rules out small-scale use from the start.

The machine from which the industrial revolution begins replaces a worker handling one tool with a mechanism that uses a mass of the same or similar tools at once, driven by one motive power whatever its form. That is the machine, but only the simple element of machinery-based production.

Making the working machine larger and increasing the tools it works at once requires a larger driving mechanism. That mechanism needs more force to overcome its own resistance than a person can provide. A person is also a very poor instrument for steady, continuous motion. Once the person acts only as a motor and a working machine has taken the place of their tool, natural forces can replace them.

Of the great driving powers inherited from manufacture, horse-power was the worst: a horse has a will of its own, costs much, and can be used in factories only within narrow limits. Yet horses were widely used in large-scale industry's early days, as the complaints of contemporary agricultural writers and the surviving term horse-power show. Wind was too unsteady and uncontrollable. In England, the birthplace of large-scale industry, water-power had already prevailed during manufacture. In the seventeenth century, one water-wheel had been made to turn two pairs of millstones, but the enlarged transmission system soon conflicted with water-power that was no longer enough. This helped lead to closer study of friction. The uneven motion of mills driven by pushing and pulling levers likewise led to the theory and use of the flywheel. In this way manufacture developed the first scientific and technical elements of large-scale industry.

Arkwright's throstle spinning was driven by water from the beginning. But water-power could not be increased at will, could not be supplied where it was lacking, sometimes failed, and was above all local.

Watt's second engine, the double-acting one, was different. It made its own power by consuming coal and water and answered entirely to human control. It could move and serve transport. Unlike a water-wheel, it did not have to remain where the river was, so production could be gathered into towns instead of scattered through the countryside. It could be used almost anywhere.

Watt's genius appears in his patent of April 1784, which describes the steam engine not as an invention for one special use but as a generally usable prime mover for large-scale industry. It points to uses, such as the steam hammer, that arrived more than half a century later. Yet Watt doubted its use at sea. His successors, Boulton and Watt, displayed the most colossal steam engine for ocean steamers at the London Exhibition of 1851.

Once tools had changed from tools of the human body into tools of a mechanical apparatus, the motor too gained an independent form, wholly free of the limits of human strength. The individual working machine considered so far then sank to a mere element of machinery-based production. One motor could now drive many working machines at once.

As the number of working machines moved at the same time grows, the motor grows too, and the transmission system spreads into a wide apparatus.

Two things must now be distinguished: the cooperation of many similar machines, and a machine-system.

In the first case, one working machine does the whole job. It carries out all the operations that one handicraft worker once did with a tool, or that several workers with different tools did one after another, whether separately or as parts of a manufacture.

In making envelopes, for example, one worker folded the paper, another put on the gum, a third turned over the flap bearing the device, and a fourth embossed it. Each envelope had to pass from hand to hand. One envelope machine now does all this at once and makes 3,000 or more envelopes an hour. An American machine shown at the London Exhibition of 1862 cut, pasted, folded, and finished 300 paper bags a minute. A process divided and performed in sequence within manufacture is thus completed by one working machine using a combination of different tools.

Whether such a machine is a mechanical rebirth of a more complicated hand tool or a combination of different simple tools specialized by manufacture, simple cooperation reappears in the factory, the workshop based on machinery. Leaving workers aside for the moment, it first appears as many similar working machines gathered together and operating at once: many power-looms side by side in a weaving factory, or many sewing machines in one sewing factory. Yet there is a technical unity. All receive their impulse at the same time and equally from the beat of the same prime mover, through a transmission system that they partly share and that branches separately only for each working machine. As many tools are the organs of one working machine, many working machines are now similar organs of the same driving mechanism.

A real machine-system replaces independent machines only when the material being worked passes through a connected series of different stages, carried out by a chain of different working machines that supplement one another. The cooperation by division of labour found in manufacture returns here, but now as a combination of partial machines. The special tools of workers such as wool beaters, combers, shearers, and spinners become the tools of specialized machines, each with its own function in the combined mechanism. In the branches where it first enters, manufacture itself provides the ready-grown basis for dividing and organizing production.

But a major difference appears at once. In manufacture, workers, alone or in groups, must perform each separate process with hand tools. The worker is fitted to the process, but the process was first fitted to the worker. This subjective principle of division — one built around workers and their hands — disappears in machinery-based production. The whole process is now examined objectively, on its own terms rather than by how human hands will perform it, and analysed into its stages. The problem of carrying out and joining those stages is solved through mechanics, chemistry, and the like. Theory must still be improved through accumulated practical experience on a large scale.

Each partial machine supplies raw material to the next. Because all work at once, the product is always at different stages of its making and is always passing from one stage to another. In manufacture, direct cooperation among partial workers creates fixed numerical relations among worker groups. In the organized machine-system, the fact that partial machines keep each other continuously at work creates fixed relations among their number, size, and speed. The combined working machine becomes more complete as its overall process becomes more continuous: the less the raw material is interrupted from its first stage to its last, and the more the mechanism itself, rather than a human hand, carries it between stages. Manufacture rests on the isolation of separate processes; the developed factory requires their continuity.

A system of machinery, whether it rests on the cooperation of similar working machines as in weaving or on a combination of different ones as in spinning, is in itself a great automaton when a self-moving prime mover drives it. Yet even when a steam engine drives the whole system, individual working machines may still need a worker for certain movements, as the mule — a spinning machine — did before the self-acting mule and as fine spinning still does. Or parts may have to be guided by a worker like a tool, as in machine-building before the slide-rest became self-acting.

Once the working machine performs every movement needed to work the raw material without human help and needs only human assistance, there is an automatic system of machinery, though its details can keep being improved. A device that stops the spinning frame when a thread snaps, and one that halts a power-loom when it runs out of thread to weave with, are modern inventions.

The modern paper factory shows both continuous production and the automatic principle. Paper-making also lets us study different modes of production based on different means of production, and the connection between those means and social relations of production: old German paper-making shows handicraft production; Holland in the seventeenth century and France in the eighteenth show manufacture proper; modern England shows automatic production. China and India also preserve two different old Asian forms of the same industry.

As an articulated system of working machines that receive motion through the transmission system from a central automaton, machinery reaches its most developed form. In place of the individual machine stands a mechanical monster whose body fills whole factory buildings. Its demonic power, first hidden beneath the almost solemn, measured motion of its giant limbs, breaks out in the feverishly wild whirl of its countless working organs.

There were mules and steam engines before there were workers whose only job was to make mules and steam engines, just as people wore clothes before there were tailors. Vaucanson's, Arkwright's, Watt's, and similar inventions could be carried out only because the manufacturing period had already provided a large body of skilled mechanical workers. Some were independent handicraft workers in different trades; others were gathered in manufactures with a strict division of labour. As inventions and demand for new machines grew, machine-making split into many independent branches, while the division of labour inside machine-making manufactures grew as well.

Manufacture was therefore the direct technical base of large-scale industry. It produced the machinery by which large-scale industry first abolished handicraft and manufacture in the branches it seized. Machinery-based production thus grew naturally on a material foundation that did not suit it. At a certain stage it had to overturn this ready-made foundation, which had meanwhile been developed further in its old form, and create a new base suited to its own mode of production.

A single machine stays dwarfish while human beings move it, and a machine-system could not develop freely before the steam engine replaced the inherited powers of animals, wind, and even water. In the same way, large-scale industry was held back so long as its characteristic means of production, the machine itself, depended on personal strength and skill: on muscle, sharp eyesight, and the virtuoso hand with which the manufacturing detail-worker and the outside handicraft worker handled their dwarfish instruments. Apart from making machines dearer—a fact that consciously governs capital—the expansion of industries already run by machinery and machinery's entry into new branches depended entirely on the growth of a class of workers whose half-artistic work could increase only gradually, not by leaps.

At a certain stage, large-scale industry also came into technical conflict with its handicraft and manufacturing base. Motors, transmission systems, and working machines grew larger; their parts became more complex, varied, and strictly regular, as the working machine freed itself from the handicraft model that had first ruled its construction and gained a form determined only by its mechanical task. The automatic system developed, and materials hard to master, such as iron instead of wood, became ever more necessary. Every one of these naturally arising problems ran into personal limits, which even the combined workers of manufacture could break only in degree, not in kind. Manufacture could not produce machines such as the modern printing press, power-loom, and carding machine.

A revolution in the mode of production in one industrial sphere requires a revolution in another. This first holds for branches separated by the social division of labour, each producing its own commodity, but intertwined as phases of one overall process. Machine spinning made machine weaving necessary, and together they made mechanical and chemical change in bleaching, printing, and dyeing necessary. The revolution in cotton spinning, in turn, called forth the gin for separating cotton fibre from seed; only then could cotton be produced on the newly required large scale.

The change in industrial and agricultural production also required a change in the general conditions of the social process of production: communication and transport. In a society centered on small agriculture with domestic side-work and urban handicraft, the means of communication and transport could not meet the needs of manufacture, with its wider social division of labour, concentration of means of labour and workers, and colonial markets. They were therefore changed. The transport and communication inherited from manufacture soon became unbearable fetters on large-scale industry, with its feverish speed, massive scale, continual throwing of capital and workers from one sphere into another, and new world-market connections.

Apart from a radically changed sailing-ship industry, communication and transport were gradually fitted to large-scale industry's mode of production through river steamers, railways, ocean steamers, and telegraphs. But the huge masses of iron now needing to be forged, welded, cut, bored, and shaped in turn required cyclopean machines that manufacture-based machine-building could not create.

Large-scale industry therefore had to take hold of its own characteristic means of production, the machine, and make machines by machines. Only then did it create the technical base suited to it and stand on its own feet. As machinery expanded in the first decades of the nineteenth century, it gradually took over the making of working machines. But only in the last few decades did immense railway building and ocean steamship construction call into being the cyclopean machines used to build prime movers.

Making machines by machines required above all a motor capable of any degree of force while remaining wholly controllable. The steam engine already existed. But machine parts also had to be made with exact geometrical lines, planes, circles, cylinders, cones, and spheres.

Henry Maudslay solved that problem in the first decade of the nineteenth century with the slide-rest. It was soon made automatic and, in changed form, moved from the lathe for which it was first designed to other construction machines. This device replaces not one particular tool but the human hand itself: the hand that makes a definite form by holding, fitting, and directing the edges of cutting tools against or over material such as iron. It thus became possible to produce the geometrical forms of machine parts

with an ease, accuracy, and speed that no accumulated experience in the hand of the most skilled worker could provide.

Look now at the part of machine-building machinery that forms the actual working machine. The handicraft tool appears again, but on a cyclopean scale. The operator of a boring machine is an immense drill driven by a steam engine; without it, the cylinders of large steam engines and hydraulic presses could not be made. The mechanical lathe is the cyclopean rebirth of the ordinary foot lathe. The planing machine is an iron carpenter, working iron with the same tools that a carpenter uses on wood. The tool that cuts veneer in the London shipyards is a giant razor. The shearing machine's tool cuts iron as a tailor's scissors cut cloth: a monster pair of scissors. The steam hammer uses an ordinary hammer head, but one so heavy that Thor himself could not swing it.

One of Nasmyth's steam hammers weighs over 6 tons and falls vertically 7 feet onto an anvil weighing 36 tons. It can effortlessly crush a granite block to powder, yet can also drive a nail into soft wood with a succession of light blows.

As machinery, the means of labour takes on a material form that requires natural forces to replace human strength, and conscious natural science to replace rule-of-thumb practice. In manufacture, the work is held together by the workers themselves: it is a combination of people, each doing a part. In the machine-system, large-scale industry has a body of production that is already there before the worker is — a material condition of the work they are given, not an arrangement they make.

In simple cooperation, and even in cooperation specialized by the division of labour, replacing the isolated worker with the socialized worker still appears more or less accidental. With a few exceptions to be discussed later, machinery works only through directly socialized, common labour. The cooperative character of the labour process now becomes a technical necessity dictated by the nature of the means of labour itself.

The productive forces that come from cooperation and the division of labour cost capital nothing. They are natural forces of social labour. Steam, water, and similar natural forces also cost nothing when they are used in production.

But people need things made by human hands in order to use those forces productively: a water-wheel for water power, a steam-engine for steam. The same is true of science. Once discovered, the laws of electricity cost nothing; using them for telegraphy needs costly, extensive equipment.

The machine does not abolish the tool. It enlarges and multiplies the little tool of the human body into the tools of a mechanism made by people. Capital now has the worker work with a machine that handles its own tools.

So large-scale industry clearly raises labour's productivity by bringing huge natural forces and science into production. It is not equally clear whether this heightened productive power is bought by increased expenditure of labour elsewhere. Like every other part of constant capital, machinery creates no value. It only transfers its own value to the product it helps make. Because it has value and transfers it, it forms part of the product's value. Instead of making the product cheaper, it makes it dearer in proportion to its own value. Machines and systems of machines therefore carry far more value than the tools of handicraft and manufacture.

A machine goes into production as a whole thing, but into the product’s value only bit by bit. It transfers no more value than it loses, on average, through wear. So there is a large difference between the machine's total value and the part it transfers to the product in any period. There is also a large difference between the machine as a product-making thing and as a value-transferring thing. The longer the same machine serves in production, the larger that difference becomes.

Every real instrument of labour goes into production whole and passes into the product’s value only in pieces, in step with its average daily wear. But the gap between use and wear is much larger for machinery than for a tool. Machinery lasts longer because it is made of more durable material. Scientific laws govern its use, allowing greater economy in its parts and materials. Its field of production is also far larger.

After allowing for the daily value it transfers through wear, and for materials such as oil and coal, the machine and the tool both work without further cost, like natural forces that exist without human labour. The greater machinery's productive range compared with a tool's, the greater its free service. Only in modern industry do people learn to make the product of past, already embodied labour work on a large scale for free, like a natural force.

Cooperation and manufacture showed that general conditions of production, such as buildings, are used more economically when workers share them instead of each having separate ones. That can make the product less expensive.

Machinery works the same way. Many tools share one machine body, and many working machines share the same motor and part of the transmission system.

Given the difference between a machine's value and the value it transfers to one day's product, how much that transfer makes the product dearer depends first on how much product there is to spread it over — the wider the surface, the thinner the coat. In a lecture published in 1857, Mr. Baynes of Blackburn estimated:

“Each real mechanical horsepower drives 450 self-acting mule spindles with their preparation, or 200 throstle spindles, or 15 looms for 40-inch cloth, with the equipment for warping, sizing, and so on.”

In the first case, one horsepower's daily cost and the wear of the machinery it moves are spread over the day's output of 450 mule spindles; in the second, over 200 throstle spindles; in the third, over 15 power-looms. Only a tiny part of value is therefore transferred to a pound of yarn or a yard of cloth.

The steam-hammer works the same way. Its daily wear, coal use, and so on are spread over the enormous masses of iron it hammers each day. Only a small part of value attaches to each hundredweight of iron. That part would be very large if the gigantic tool were used to drive small nails.

Given the working machine's range, meaning the number of its tools or, where force is involved, their size, the amount it produces depends on how fast it works: how fast a spindle turns, for example, or how many blows a hammer gives in a minute. Some huge hammers give 70 blows a minute. Ryder's patented forging machine, which uses smaller steam-hammers to forge spindles, gives 700.

Given the rate at which machinery transfers value to the product, the size of that transferred part depends on the machine's own value. The less labour the machine itself contains, the less value it transfers to the product. The less value it gives up, the more productive it is, and the more its service resembles that of natural forces. But when machines produce machines, machinery becomes cheaper in relation to its scale and effect.

Comparing the prices of goods made by handicraft or manufacture with the prices of the same goods made by machinery generally shows this: in machine-made goods, the machine’s share of the value of, say, a pound of yarn goes up, while the actual amount of value it contributes goes down.

If making a machine costs as much labour as using it replaces, labour has only been moved around. The total labour needed to make the commodity has not fallen, and the productive power of labour has not increased. The difference between the labour a machine costs and the labour it saves — its degree of productivity — does not depend on the difference between its own value and the value of the tool it replaces. A machine is worth using, then, only while the labour it cost — and so the value it passes into the product — remains less than the value a worker with a hand tool would have added to the same material. A machine's productivity is measured by how far it replaces human labour-power.

According to Mr. Baynes, one horsepower drives 450 mule spindles with their preparation and needs 2½ workers. In a ten-hour day, each self-acting mule spindle produces 13 ounces of yarn. So 2½ workers spin 365⅝ pounds a week. Ignoring waste, about 366 pounds of cotton absorb only 150 hours of labour, or fifteen ten-hour days, when turned into yarn. With a spinning-wheel, if a hand-spinner needs 60 hours to make 13 ounces, the same cotton would absorb 2,700 ten-hour days, or 27,000 hours.

Where machine printing replaced hand block-printing, one machine with one man or boy prints in an hour as much four-colour calico as 200 men once did. Before Eli Whitney invented the cotton gin in 1793, separating the seed from one pound of cotton took an average day's labour. His invention let one negress clean 100 pounds of cotton a day, and the gin's effectiveness later rose greatly. A pound of cotton fibre that had cost 50 cents to produce was later sold at 10 cents with greater profit, because it included more unpaid labour.

In India, a man and a woman using the half-machine, half-tool called the churka clean 28 pounds a day. With Dr. Forbes's newer churka, one man and one boy produce 250 pounds a day. When oxen, steam, or water provide the power, only a few boys and girls are needed to feed the machine. Sixteen such ox-driven machines do in a day what 750 people formerly did on average.

A steam-engine used with a steam-plough does in one hour, at a cost of 3 pence or ¼ shilling, as much work as 66 people do at 15 shillings an hour. But the 15 shillings do not express all the labour those 66 people add in that hour. If surplus labour stood to necessary labour as 100% to 100%, the 66 workers would produce 30 shillings of value in an hour, although only 15 shillings — the equivalent of 33 of those labour-hours — appears as their wage.

Suppose a machine costs as much as the yearly wage-price of the labour-power of 150 workers it displaces: £3,000. That £3,000 does not express all the labour those 150 workers had added to what they worked on. It expresses only the part of their year's labour spent on themselves and represented by wages. The machine's £3,000, by contrast, expresses all the labour spent producing it, whatever part of that labour took the form of workers' wages and whatever part of surplus-value for capital.

So even if a machine costs as much as the labour-power it replaces, the labour embodied in the machine is still much less than the living labour it replaces.

Viewed only as a means of making the product cheaper, machinery can be used only when making it takes less labour than its use replaces. For capital, however, the limit is narrower. Capital pays not for the labour used, but the value of the labour-power used. Its use of a machine is therefore limited by the difference between the machine's value and the value of the labour-power it replaces.

Necessary and surplus labour are divided differently in different countries, at different times in the same country, and in different branches of work at the same time. The actual wage can fall below the value of labour-power or rise above it. The difference between the price of machinery and the wage-price of the labour-power it replaces can therefore vary greatly, even when the difference between the labour needed to make the machine and the total labour it replaces stays the same. But this price difference alone determines the product's cost for capital and, under the compulsions of competition, directs its action.

That is why machines invented in England today may be used only in North America; why machines invented in Germany in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were used only in Holland; and why some French inventions of the eighteenth century were used only in England. In older developed countries, machinery used in some branches creates such a surplus of labour in others that wages there can fall below the value of labour-power. This can prevent machinery from being used: capital's profit comes from reducing paid labour, not all labour employed, so the machine becomes needless and often impossible from capital's standpoint.

In parts of English wool manufacture, child labour has recently been greatly reduced or almost removed. Why? The Factory Act required two groups of children, one working six hours and the other four, or each working five. Parents would not accept a lower wage-price for half-timers than for full-timers. So machinery replaced the half-timers.

Before women and children under ten were barred from mine work, capital found the use of naked women and girls, often bound together with men in coal and other mines, fully consistent with its moral code and especially with its ledger. Only after the ban did it turn to machinery. The Yankees invented stone-breaking machines. The English do not use them because the “wretch,” the English political economy term for an agricultural worker, is paid for so little of his labour that machinery would make production dearer for capital.

In England, women are still sometimes used instead of horses to pull canal boats. The labour needed to produce horses and machines is a known quantity; the labour needed to maintain women from the surplus population is beyond calculation. Nowhere, then, is human labour-power squandered more shamelessly on such miserable purposes than in England, the land of machinery.

Modern industry begins with a revolution in the instruments of labour. Its most developed form is the organised system of machinery in a factory. Before considering how people are fitted into this objective system, consider its general effects on the worker.

When machinery makes muscular strength dispensable, it can employ workers with little strength or immature bodies but more flexible limbs. Women’s and children’s labour therefore became the first demand of capital’s use of machinery. This mighty substitute for labour and labourers turned at once into a means of increasing the number of wage-labourers, by placing every member of the worker’s family, without distinction of sex or age, under capital’s direct command. Compulsory work for the capitalist took the place not only of children’s play but also of free work at home, within moral limits, for the family itself.

The value of labour-power was set not only by the labour-time needed to maintain the adult worker, but by that needed to maintain the worker’s family. By throwing every family member onto the labour-market, machinery spreads the value of the man’s labour-power across the whole family and so depreciates it. Buying the labour-power of a family divided into four workers may cost more than buying the family head’s labour-power did, but four working days replace one, and their price falls in proportion to the four workers’ surplus-labour over the one worker’s. Four people must now provide not only labour but surplus-labour for capital if the family is to live. Machinery thus enlarges both the human material capital exploits and the degree of exploitation.

Machinery also overturns the formal contract between worker and capitalist. On the basis of commodity exchange, capitalist and worker had to face one another as free persons and independent owners of commodities: one with money and means of production, the other with labour-power. Now capital buys children and young persons under age. The worker once sold only his own labour-power, which he disposed of as a formally free person. He now sells wife and child. He has become a slave-dealer. The demand for children’s labour often even resembles the inquiries for negro slaves once printed in American newspaper advertisements.

An English factory inspector reports an advertisement from a major manufacturing town: 12 to 20 young people were wanted, not younger than could pass for 13, at 4 shillings a week.

Passing for 13 mattered because the Factory Act allowed children under 13 to work only 6 hours, and an officially appointed certifying surgeon had to certify their age. Manufacturers therefore wanted children who looked 13. Factory inspectors said the sometimes abrupt falls in the number of children under 13 employed over the previous 20 years were largely produced by certifying surgeons who overstated children’s ages to suit capital’s hunger for exploitation and parents’ need to traffic in them. In Bethnal Green, a public market met every Monday and Tuesday morning, where children of both sexes from age 9 hired themselves to London silk manufacturers for the usual terms: 1 shilling 8 pence a week for the parents, and 2 pence plus tea for the child; the contract lasted one week.

Women also took children from the workhouse and let them to any buyer for 2 shillings 6 pence a week. Despite legislation, more than 2,000 boys in Great Britain were sold by their own parents as living chimney-sweeping machines, though machines existed to replace them. The revolution machinery worked in the legal relation between buyer and seller of labour-power, which stripped the transaction of even the appearance of a contract between free persons, later gave Parliament its legal excuse to intervene in factories.

Whenever the law limited children’s labour to 6 hours in a new industry, manufacturers lamented that parents would sell children instead where freedom of labour still meant that children under 13 were forced to work like adults and could be sold for more. But capital demands equal conditions for exploiting labour in every sphere, so legally limiting children’s labour in one industry becomes a cause of limiting it in another.

The physical ruin of children and young people, and of women, has already been noted: machinery first subjects them directly in factories built on its basis, then indirectly in all other industries, to capital’s exploitation. One point remains: the enormous mortality of workers’ children in their first years. In 16 English registration districts, annual deaths among 100,000 living children under one averaged only 9,085, and in one district 7,047; in 24 districts they were over 10,000 but under 11,000, in 39 over 11,000 but under 12,000, in 48 over 12,000 but under 13,000, in 22 over 20,000, in 25 over 21,000, in 17 over 22,000, and in 11 over 23,000. Hoo, Wolverhampton, Ashton-under-Lyne, and Preston had over 24,000; Nottingham, Stockport, and Bradford over 25,000; Wisbeach 26,001; and Manchester 26,125.

Apart from local conditions, the official medical inquiry of 1861 attributed these high rates chiefly to maternal outside employment and its consequences: neglect and maltreatment, unsuitable food, insufficient food, and dosing with opiates. It also reported an unnatural estrangement of mothers from their children, followed by deliberate starvation and poisoning. Districts with minimal female employment had the lowest death-rates.

Yet the 1861 inquiry found that some purely agricultural districts by the North Sea nearly equalled the worst factory districts in deaths among children under one. Dr. Julian Hunter was sent to investigate, and his report entered the Sixth Report on Public Health. Malaria and other diseases of low, marshy land had been suspected, but the inquiry found the opposite:

The very change that drove out malaria—the conversion of winter marsh and scant summer pasture into fertile corn land—created the exceptional death-rate among infants.

The 70 medical practitioners questioned by Dr. Hunter were remarkably unanimous on this point. The revolution in cultivation had introduced the industrial system.

Married women working in gangs with girls and boys were hired out to farmers for a fixed sum by a man called the gang-master, who contracted for the whole gang. These gangs often travelled many miles from their villages. The report describes the women on the roads morning and evening in short petticoats, coats, boots, and sometimes trousers: strong and healthy in appearance, but, it says, corrupted by habitual licentiousness and heedless of what their preference for this active, independent life brought upon the children wasting away at home.

Every phenomenon of the factory districts appears again here, including still more concealed child murder and the dosing of children with opiates.

Dr. Simon, the medical officer of the Privy Council and editor of the Public Health reports, says that anyone who knows these evils will excuse the deep disgust he feels at any large-scale industrial employment of adult women. Factory inspector R. Baker says it would indeed be a blessing for England’s manufacturing districts if every married woman with a family were forbidden to work in any factory.

Engels, in The Condition of the Working Class in England, and other writers have already fully described the moral degradation arising from the capitalist exploitation of women and children. But intellectual desolation was also artificially produced when immature people were turned into mere machines for making surplus-value. It differs from natural ignorance, which leaves the mind fallow without destroying its ability to develop or its natural fertility. This desolation finally forced Parliament to make elementary education a legal condition of the “productive” consumption of children under 14 in every industry governed by the Factory Acts. The spirit of capitalist production showed itself in the careless drafting of the education clauses, the lack of any administrative machinery that made compulsory schooling largely illusory, manufacturers’ opposition to the law, and their tricks for evading it.

The legislature alone is to blame for passing a delusive law which, under the appearance of providing for children’s education, contained no provision able to secure that pretended purpose. It required only that children be shut for a stated number of hours—3 each day—inside four walls called a school, and that their employer receive a weekly certificate signed by someone calling themselves a schoolmaster or schoolmistress.

Before the amended Factory Act of 1844, school-attendance certificates were often signed by the schoolmaster or schoolmistress with a cross because they could not write.

On visiting one such school, an inspector was so struck by the schoolmaster’s ignorance that he asked whether the man could read. The answer was, “Aye, summat”—a bit. In his defence, the schoolmaster added: “At any rate, I stand before my pupils.”

While the Act of 1844 was being prepared, factory inspectors denounced the disgraceful state of places called schools whose certificates they still had to accept as legally valid. They obtained only this change from 1844 onward:

The figures in a school certificate had to be filled in by the schoolmaster’s own hand, and he had to sign his full first and last name himself.

Sir John Kincaid, factory inspector for Scotland, reports similar official experiences.

The first school Kincaid visited was run by Mrs. Ann Killin. Asked to spell her name, she began with C, then corrected herself and said it began with K; her signatures in the certificate books varied, and her handwriting showed she could not teach. She admitted that she could not keep the register. At another school, a room 15 feet long and 10 feet wide held 75 children gabbling something unintelligible. Nor were these the only miserable places where children received certificates without instruction. Even where a competent teacher was present, children from age 3 upward were crammed together in a confusing mass, while the teacher’s miserable income depended on packing in as many as possible. Scant furniture, too few books and materials, and foul, stifling air further burdened them. Kincaid saw whole rows of children doing nothing, yet this was certified as school attendance and counted in official statistics as education.

In Scotland, manufacturers tried as far as possible to exclude children who were required to attend school.

That effort to shut out school-going children is enough on its own to show the manufacturers’ hostility to the education clauses.

The hostility becomes grotesquely horrifying in print works, which were governed by their own Factory Act. Under that law:

Before employment in a print work, every child had to attend school for at least 30 days and 150 hours during the preceding 6 months; during employment, the same 30 days and 150 hours had to be completed in every new 6-month period. Attendance had to fall between 8 in the morning and 6 in the evening, and no day of less than 2½ or more than 5 hours counted toward the 150.

Under ordinary conditions, children attended morning and afternoon for 30 days, 5 hours a day; once they had made up their 150 hours, they returned to the print work for 6 months, then returned to school until another instalment of school attendance fell due. Many boys came back after those 6 months in the print work no further forward than when they began, having lost what school had given them.

In other cotton print works, schooling depended wholly on the business’s needs. The required hours were made up in instalments of 3 to 5 hours, perhaps scattered across all 6 months: one day from 8 to 11, another from 1 to 4, then several days absent; then from 3 to 6, perhaps 3 or 4 consecutive days or a week, then absent for 3 weeks or a month, and back for odd spare hours whenever the employer did not need the child. The child was, so to speak, buffeted from school to work and from work to school until the 150 hours were counted.

By adding women and children in overwhelming numbers to the combined workforce, machinery finally breaks the resistance that male workers in manufacture had still offered to capital’s despotism.

Machinery is the most powerful means of raising the productive power of labour, that is, of shortening the labour-time needed to make a commodity. But in capital’s hands, in the industries it directly takes over, it becomes the most powerful means of lengthening the working day beyond every natural limit. It creates both new conditions that let capital freely pursue this constant tendency and new motives that sharpen its hunger for others’ labour.

In machinery, the movement and activity of the instrument of labour become independent of the worker. It becomes an industrial perpetual-motion machine, and would keep producing without interruption if it did not meet natural limits in its human attendants: their bodily weakness and their self-will. Because the machine is capital—and in the capitalist the automaton has consciousness and will—it is driven to push that human limit, which resists but also gives way, down to the least resistance it can offer. The apparent lightness of machine work weakens that resistance further, as do women and children, whom capital treats as more pliable and more easily bent.

As already seen, the productive power of machinery stands in inverse relation to the part of value it transfers to the product. The longer it works, the larger the mass of products across which that transferred value is spread, and the smaller the share it adds to each commodity. A machine’s active lifetime depends on the length of the working day, or the duration of the daily labour-process multiplied by the number of days it is repeated.

A machine’s wear does not correspond exactly, in mathematical proportion, to its time of use. Even if it did, a machine working 16 hours a day for 7½ years covers as long a production period and transfers no more value to the total product than the same machine working 8 hours a day for 15 years. In the first case its value is reproduced twice as quickly, and in 7½ years the capitalist absorbs as much surplus-labour through it as otherwise in 15.

The material wear and tear of a machine is twofold. One kind comes from use, as coins wear down in circulation; the other comes from non-use, as an idle sword rusts in its sheath. This is wear caused by the elements. Wear from use is more or less directly proportional to use, while wear from non-use is, to a degree, inversely proportional to it.

Besides material wear, a machine is subject to what may be called moral depreciation. It loses exchange-value when machines of the same construction can be reproduced more cheaply or when better machines enter into competition with it. In either case, even if the machine is still young and vigorous, its value is no longer set by the labour actually embodied in it, but by the labour-time now needed to reproduce it or the better machine. It is therefore more or less devalued. The shorter the period in which its total value is reproduced, the less the danger of moral depreciation; and the longer the working day, the shorter that period. When machinery is first introduced into a branch of production, cheaper methods of reproducing it and improvements to its whole construction follow one another rapidly. In this first period of its life, this particular motive for lengthening the working day is most acute.

With all else unchanged and a given working day, exploiting twice as many workers requires twice as much constant capital laid out in machinery and buildings, as well as in raw materials and auxiliary materials. A longer working day expands the scale of production while the capital laid out in machinery and buildings remains unchanged. Surplus-value therefore rises, while the outlays needed to exploit it fall. This happens more or less with every extension of the working day, but matters more here because the capital converted into instruments of labour weighs more heavily. The development of machinery ties an ever larger part of capital to machinery that can continually be made to expand in value, yet loses use-value and exchange-value whenever its contact with living labour is broken. Mr. Ashworth, an English cotton magnate, instructed Professor Nassau W. Senior:

When a ploughman lays down his spade, he makes 18 pence of capital useless for that period. When one of our people leaves the factory, he makes capital that cost £100,000 useless.

Think of it! £100,000 of capital made useless for even a moment. It was indeed a “crying shame” that one of our people should ever leave the factory. Instructed by Ashworth, Senior discovers that the growing extent of machinery makes an ever greater lengthening of the working day desirable.

Machinery produces relative surplus-value not only by directly depreciating labour-power and indirectly cheapening it through the commodities needed for its reproduction. When machinery is first introduced only sporadically, it also turns the labour employed by its owner into labour of a higher degree, raises the social value of the machine-made product above its individual value, and lets the capitalist replace the daily value of labour-power with a smaller part of the day’s product. During this transition, when machinery is a kind of monopoly, profits are extraordinary. The capitalist therefore thoroughly exploits this first season of young love by extending the working day as far as possible. The size of the profit sharpens the hunger for more profit.

Once machinery becomes general in a branch of production, the social value of the machine-made product falls to its individual value. Then the law asserts itself that surplus-value comes not from the labour-powers the machine replaced, but from the labour-powers employed with it. Surplus-value comes only from the variable part of capital. Its amount depends on the rate of surplus-value and the number of workers employed at once; with a given working day, the rate depends on the division between necessary labour and surplus-labour, while the number of workers depends on the relation of variable to constant capital.

However much machinery increases surplus-labour at the expense of necessary labour by raising the productive power of labour, it does so only by reducing the number of workers a given capital employs. It turns capital formerly spent on living labour-power into machinery, into constant capital, which produces no surplus-value. Two workers cannot yield as much surplus-value as 24. If each of the 24 gives one hour of surplus-labour in a 12-hour day, together they give 24 hours of surplus-labour. The two, working 12 hours each, have only 24 hours of labour in total—and out of those they must first work long enough to reproduce their own value.

Applying machinery to produce surplus-value therefore contains an immanent contradiction: it can raise one factor, the rate of surplus-value, only by shrinking the other, the number of workers. Once machine-made commodities regulate the social value of all commodities of that kind, this contradiction drives capital, without capital being conscious of it, to the most violent lengthening of the working day, to compensate for the reduced relative number of exploited workers by increasing not only relative but also absolute surplus-labour.

The capitalist application of machinery creates new powerful motives for boundless lengthening of the working day, and changes both the way work is done and the character of the social working body so as to break resistance to that tendency. At the same time, by bringing in layers of the working class formerly inaccessible to capital and by throwing out the workers the machine displaces, it produces a surplus working population forced to accept the law capital dictates. Hence the remarkable fact in modern industry that machinery overturns every moral and natural limit on the working day. Hence the economic paradox: the most powerful means of shortening labour-time becomes the surest means of turning the whole lifetime of the worker and the worker’s family into disposable labour-time for capital’s expansion in value. Aristotle, the greatest thinker of antiquity, dreamed:

If every tool could perform its proper work when commanded, or even in advance, as Daedalus’s works moved by themselves and Hephaestus’s tripods went of their own accord to their sacred work; if weaving shuttles wove by themselves, master workers would need no assistants and masters no slaves.

Antipater, a Greek poet from Cicero’s time, welcomed the water-mill for grinding corn—the elementary form of all productive machinery—as the liberator of female slaves and maker of the golden age. Those heathens, as clever Bastiat and the still cleverer MacCulloch discovered, understood nothing of political economy and Christianity. Among other things, they did not understand that machinery is the surest means of lengthening the working day. They may have excused one person’s slavery as a means to another’s full human development. But they lacked the specifically Christian organ needed to preach the slavery of the masses so that a few crude or half-educated parvenus might become eminent spinners, extensive sausage-makers, and influential shoe-black dealers.

Machinery in capital’s hands first lengthens the working day without limit. In time, this brings a reaction from a society whose roots of life are threatened, and with it a normal working day limited by law. On that basis, intensity of labour, a phenomenon we have met before, becomes decisive. In examining absolute surplus-value, we first dealt with how long labour lasts and treated how hard it is worked as fixed. We must now look at how length turns into density.

As machinery spreads and a special class of machine workers gains experience, work naturally becomes faster and more intense. In England, for half a century, a longer working day went together with more intense factory work. But where work is repeated regularly, day after day, rather than done in temporary bursts, a tipping point must come: a longer day is compatible only with weaker intensity, and higher intensity only with a shorter day. Once the workers’ growing revolt forced the state to shorten working time and impose a normal working day on factories proper, producing more surplus-value by lengthening the day was cut off once and for all. Capital then threw itself, with all its power and full awareness, into producing relative surplus-value by speeding the development of machinery.

At the same time, the character of relative surplus-value changes. Generally, relative surplus-value is produced by raising labour’s productive power, so that the worker produces more in the same time with the same expenditure of labour. The same labour-time still adds the same value to the whole product, but that unchanged exchange-value now appears in more use-values, so the value of each commodity falls. It is different when compulsory shortening of the working day gives an enormous push to productive power and economy in production, while also forcing on the worker a greater expenditure of labour in the same time, a heightened straining of labour-power, and a denser filling of the pores of working time—that is, a condensation of labour to a degree attainable only within the shortened working day.

This condensation of a greater mass of labour into a given period counts for what it is: a greater quantity of labour. Alongside the measure of how long labour lasts now stands a measure of how densely it is packed. The more intense hour of the 10-hour working day contains as much or more labour, meaning expended labour-power, as the more porous hour of the 12-hour working day. Its product therefore has as much or more value as the product of 1⅕ of those porous hours. Apart from the rise in relative surplus-value through greater productive power, 3⅓ hours of surplus labour on 6⅔ hours of necessary labour now yield the capitalist the same mass of value that 4 hours of surplus labour on 8 hours of necessary labour yielded before.

The question now is: how is labour intensified?

The first effect of a shorter working day follows from the simple fact that labour-power works more effectively when it is used for less time. Within certain limits, what is lost in duration is gained in the force exerted. Capital makes sure that the worker really gives up more labour-power through its method of payment. In manufactures such as pottery, where machinery plays little or no part, the Factory Acts showed plainly that merely shortening the working day greatly increases labour’s regularity, uniformity, order, continuity, and energy. This seemed doubtful in the factory proper, where the worker’s dependence on the machine’s continuous, uniform motion had long created the strictest discipline. So, when a reduction below 12 hours was discussed in 1844, manufacturers almost unanimously declared:

Their overseers watched the different workrooms so that the hands lost no time; the workers' vigilance and attention could scarcely be increased; and, with the speed of machinery and every other condition unchanged, it was nonsense to expect any appreciable result from greater worker attention in a well-run factory.

Experiments disproved that claim. From 20 April 1844, R. Gardner had his two large Preston factories work 11 rather than 12 hours a day. After about a year, the result was:

The same quantity of product was obtained at the same cost, and all the workers earned as much wage in 11 hours as they had earned before in 12.

I leave aside the experiments in the spinning and carding rooms, because the machines there ran 2% faster. In the weaving department, however, where many kinds of light, patterned fancy goods were woven, there was no change at all in the objective conditions of production. The result was:

From 6 January to 20 April 1844, with a 12-hour working day, each worker’s average weekly wage was 10 shillings 1½ pence; from 20 April to 29 June 1844, with an 11-hour working day, it was 10 shillings 3½ pence.

More was produced in 11 hours than before in 12, solely because the workers' endurance was greater and steadier and their time was used more economically. They received the same wage and gained one free hour, while the capitalist received the same mass of product and saved an hour's spending on coal, gas, and so on. Horrocks and Jacson carried out similar experiments in their factories with the same success.

The shortening of the working day first creates the subjective condition of the condensation of labour—the worker’s capacity to release more force in a given time. Once that shortening is imposed by law, the machine becomes, in capital’s hands, the objective and systematically applied means of extorting more labour in the same time. This happens in two ways: machines run faster, and the same worker must supervise more machinery or a wider field of work. Better machine design is partly needed to put greater pressure on the worker, and it also accompanies intensified labour because the limit on the working day forces the capitalist to economize strictly in production costs. Better steam engines increase piston strokes per minute and, while using the same or less coal, let the same motor drive a larger mechanism. Better transmission reduces friction and reduces the diameter and weight of large and small shafts to a constantly falling minimum. Better working machines become smaller while running faster and working more widely, as in the modern power-loom; or they enlarge the frame, range, and number of tools, as in spinning machines; or small changes make their tools move faster, as when self-acting mules increased spindle speed by ⅕ in the middle of the 1850s.

In England, the reduction of the working day to 12 hours dates from 1832. As early as 1836, an English manufacturer declared:

Compared with earlier times, factory labour had increased greatly because the much faster machinery demanded greater attention and activity from the worker.

In 1844, Lord Ashley, now Lord Shaftesbury, presented the following documented figures in the House of Commons:

Lord Ashley reported that labour in manufacturing processes was now three times as great as when such operations began. Machinery had replaced the sinews and muscles of millions, but it had also prodigiously increased the labour of people ruled by its fearful movement. In 1815, following a pair of mules spinning yarn No. 40 for 12 hours meant walking 8 miles; in 1832 it meant 20 miles, often more. In 1825, the spinner had to make 820 stretches at each mule in 12 hours, or 1,640 in all. In 1832, the figure was 2,200 at each mule and 4,400 in all; in 1844, 2,400 at each and 4,800 altogether, and the required mass of labour was sometimes greater still. A document from 1842 showed that labour kept increasing not only because workers had farther to travel, but because more goods were produced while the number of hands fell in proportion, and because poorer cotton, which required more work, was often spun. In the carding room, one person now did work formerly divided between two. In weaving, where many workers were employed, mostly women, labour had risen by a full 10% in recent years because machinery ran faster. Weekly output rose from 18,000 hanks in 1838 to 21,000 in 1843. On the power-loom, picks per minute rose from 60 in 1819 to 140 in 1842.

Given the remarkable intensity that labour had already reached under the Twelve Hours Act by 1844, the English manufacturers then seemed justified in saying that any further advance in this direction was impossible, and that any further reduction of working time would mean less production. The apparent soundness of their reasoning is best shown by a statement made at the same time by their tireless censor, the factory inspector Leonard Horner:

Horner said that output was mainly governed by the speed of machinery. It was therefore in the manufacturer's interest to run it at the highest speed consistent with preventing machinery from wearing out too quickly, preserving the quality of the article made, and allowing the worker to follow the movement without greater exertion than could be kept up continuously. In haste, a manufacturer often drove machinery too fast; breakages and bad work then outweighed the gain in speed, and the pace had to be reduced. Since an active and intelligent manufacturer would find the attainable maximum, Horner concluded that 11 hours could not produce as much as 12. He also assumed that a piece-paid worker strained to the utmost as far as that degree of work could be continuously sustained.

Despite Gardner's experiments and the rest, Horner concluded that any further reduction below 12 hours had to reduce the quantity of product. Ten years later, he cited his concern of 1845 to show how little he had then understood the elasticity of machinery and human labour-power, both of which compulsory shortening of the working day stretched equally to their highest point.

We now come to the period after 1847, when the Ten Hours Act was introduced into the English cotton, woollen, silk, and flax factories.

Spindle speed rose by 500 revolutions a minute on throstles and by 1,000 on mules. A throstle spindle that made 4,500 revolutions a minute in 1839 made 5,000 in 1862; a mule spindle that made 5,000 made 6,000. That was an additional speed of 1/10 in the first case and 1/6 in the second.

In a letter to Leonard Horner in 1852, James Nasmyth, the celebrated civil engineer of Patricroft near Manchester, explained the improvements made in steam engines from 1848 to 1852. He noted that official factory statistics still measured steam horsepower by its effect in 1828, so it was now only nominal and could serve merely as an index of real power. He then said:

Steam machinery of the same weight, often the very same machines with only modern improvements, did on average 50% more work than before. In many cases, the same steam engines that produced 50 horsepower at the restricted speed of 220 feet per minute now produced over 100 with less coal. A modern steam engine of the same nominal horsepower was driven more forcefully because of improvements in its construction and the reduced size and construction of its boilers. The same number of hands might still be employed in proportion to nominal horsepower, but fewer were employed in proportion to the working machinery.

In 1850, factories in the United Kingdom used 134,217 nominal horsepower to move 25,638,716 spindles and 301,445 looms. In 1856, there were 33,503,580 spindles and 369,205 looms. If the horsepower required had remained the same as in 1850, 175,000 horsepower would have been needed in 1856. The official return gave only 161,435, more than 10,000 horsepower less.

The official return of 1856 showed that the factory system was spreading rapidly; the number of hands had fallen in proportion to machinery; steam engines drove a greater mass of machinery through economy of power and other methods; and improved working machines, changed methods of manufacture, faster machinery, and other causes produced more work. The great improvements in machinery had greatly increased its productive power. Shortening the working day had unquestionably spurred those improvements, and they, together with the worker's more intense exertion, meant that at least as much work was delivered in a day shortened by two hours, or 1/6, as had previously been delivered in the longer day.

The factory owners' growing wealth alongside more intensive exploitation of labour-power is shown by one fact: from 1838 to 1850, English cotton and similar factories grew by an average of 32 a year; from 1850 to 1856, they grew by 86 a year.

Great as English industry advanced in the 8 years from 1848 to 1856 under the 10-hour working day, the following 6 years, from 1856 to 1862, surpassed it by far. In silk factories, spindles rose from 1,093,799 in 1856 to 1,388,544 in 1862, and looms from 9,260 to 10,709; workers fell from 56,137 to 52,429. That was a 26.9% rise in spindles and a 15.6% rise in looms, with a 7% fall in workers. In worsted mills there were 875,830 spindles in 1850, 1,324,549 in 1856, an increase of 51.2%, and 1,289,172 in 1862, a decrease of 2.7%. If the doubling spindles counted in 1856 but not in 1862 are removed, the number of spindles stayed nearly unchanged after 1856. Yet since 1850, spindle and loom speeds had in many cases doubled. Power-looms in worsted mills rose from 32,617 in 1850 to 38,956 in 1856 and 43,048 in 1862. The workers employed were 79,737 in 1850, 87,794 in 1856, and 86,063 in 1862; children under 14 among them were 9,956, 11,228, and 13,178. So, despite the much greater number of looms in 1862 than in 1856, the total number of workers fell while the number of exploited children rose.

On 27 April 1863, the Member of Parliament Ferrand declared in the House of Commons:

Delegates from 16 districts of Lancashire and Cheshire, on whose behalf Ferrand spoke, had told him that factory work was constantly increasing because machinery was improved. Where one person with helpers had formerly tended two looms, one person now tended three without helpers, and tending four was not unusual. Twelve hours of work were now squeezed into fewer than 10 working hours. The toil of factory workers had therefore increased enormously in recent years.

The factory inspectors rightly and tirelessly praised the favourable results of the Factory Acts of 1844 and 1850. Yet they admitted that shortening the working day had already produced an intensity of labour that destroyed the workers' health and therefore labour-power itself.

In most cotton, worsted, and silk factories, the exhausting state of excitement needed for work at machinery whose motion had been so extraordinarily accelerated in recent years seems to be one cause of the excess deaths from lung disease shown by Dr. Greenhow in his recent admirable report.

There is not the slightest doubt that, once the law has cut off any further lengthening of the working day, capital's tendency to compensate itself through a systematic rise in labour intensity and to turn every improvement in machinery into a means for greater draining of labour-power must soon drive matters to another turning point, where a further reduction of working hours becomes unavoidable. On the other hand, the storming advance of English industry from 1848 to the present, during the 10-hour working day, surpasses the advance from 1833 to 1837, during the 12-hour working day, even more than that latter advance surpassed the half-century after the factory system was introduced, when the working day was unlimited.

At the start of this chapter, we considered the factory’s body: the structure of its machine system. Then we saw how machinery increases capital’s human material for exploitation by appropriating the labour of women and children; how it confiscates the worker’s whole lifetime through boundless extension of the working day; and how its progress, which permits an enormous product in ever shorter time, systematically gets more work done in each moment and exploits labour-power ever more intensely. Now we turn to the factory as a whole, in its most developed form.

Dr. Ure, who sings the automatic factory’s praises, gives two descriptions of it.

Ure’s first description calls the factory a cooperation of different kinds of workers, adults and children, who skillfully and diligently supervise a system of productive machines kept continuously at work by a central force, the prime mover.

Ure’s second description calls it a huge automaton made of countless mechanical and conscious organs, working together without interruption to produce one and the same object; all are subordinate to a moving force that moves itself.

Ure’s two descriptions are by no means identical. In the first, the combined collective worker, or social body of labour, is the overarching subject and the mechanical automaton its object. In the second, the automaton itself is the subject; workers are only conscious organs placed alongside its unconscious organs and, with them, subordinated to the central moving force. The first description applies to every possible large-scale use of machinery. The second characterizes its capitalist application, and thus the modern factory system. Ure therefore likes to present the central machine, from which motion proceeds, not only as an automaton but as an autocrat.

In these great workshops, Ure calls the power of steam benevolent: it gathers its myriads of subjects around itself.

The skill of using the tool passes from the worker to the machine. The tool’s power is freed from the personal limits of human labour-power. This removes the technical basis of the division of labour in manufacture. In the automatic factory, the hierarchy of specialised workers gives way to a tendency to level the work done by machine-minders; the artificial differences among detail workers give way mainly to the natural differences of age and sex.

When division of labour reappears in the automatic factory, it first distributes workers among specialised machines, and ungrouped masses of workers among the factory’s different departments. There they work at similar machine tools set side by side, so their cooperation is only simple. Manufacture’s organised group is replaced by the link between a head worker and a few helpers. The main division is between workers actually employed at the machine tools, including a few who watch or feed the motor, and their mere helpers, almost all of them children. These helpers include more or less all “feeders,” who only bring material to the machines. Alongside these main classes is a small group that supervises all the machinery and continually repairs it: engineers, mechanics, carpenters, and so on. They are a higher class of workers, partly trained in science and partly in a trade; they stand outside the factory-worker group and are only attached to it.

This division of labour is purely technical.

All work at a machine requires early training, so that the worker learns to adapt their own movement to an automaton’s uniform, continuous movement. When the machinery as a whole is a system of different machines working at once and together, the cooperation based on it also requires different groups of workers to be distributed among different machines. But machine operation removes the need to fix this distribution in the manner of manufacture by keeping the same workers permanently at the same function.

Because the factory’s overall movement comes not from the worker but from the machine, people can be continually changed without interrupting the work process. The relay system used during the English manufacturers’ revolt of 1848–1850 gives the clearest proof. And because young people learn machine work so quickly, there is no need to train a special class of workers solely for machine work.

In the factory, the work of mere helpers can partly be replaced by machines. Because it is completely simple, the people burdened with this drudgery can be changed rapidly and continually.

Although machinery technically overturns the old division of labour, it first lingers in the factory as a customary tradition from manufacture. Capital then systematically reproduces and fixes it in an even more repulsive form as a means of exploiting labour-power. The lifelong speciality of handling one partial tool becomes the lifelong speciality of serving one partial machine. Machinery is misused to turn the worker, from childhood onward, into part of a partial machine.

By doing this, capital not only greatly lowers the costs needed to reproduce the worker; it also completes the worker’s helpless dependence on the factory as a whole, and therefore on the capitalist. Here, as everywhere, we must distinguish the greater productivity owed to the development of the social production process from the greater productivity owed to its capitalist exploitation.

In manufacture and handicraft, the worker uses the tool; in the factory, the worker serves the machine. There, the motion of the means of labour starts from the worker; here, the worker must follow the machine’s motion. In manufacture, workers are limbs of a living mechanism. In the factory, a dead mechanism exists independently of them, and they are incorporated into it as living appendages.

The miserable routine of endless drudgery repeats the same mechanical process again and again. It is like Sisyphus’s work: the burden of labour, like the rock, keeps falling back on the exhausted worker.

Machine work attacks the nervous system to the utmost, suppresses the many-sided play of the muscles, and confiscates every bit of free physical and mental activity.

Even making labour easier becomes a means of torture, because the machine does not free the worker from labour; it strips the labour of content.

Every capitalist production process, insofar as it is not only a work process but also a process of making capital grow in value, shares this inversion: the worker does not employ the working condition; the working condition employs the worker. With machinery, this inversion first becomes technically palpable. Once the means of labour is made into an automaton, it confronts the worker during the work process as capital: dead labour that commands and drains living labour-power.

The separation of the intellectual powers of production from manual labour, and their transformation into capital’s powers over labour, is completed, as indicated earlier, in large-scale industry built on machinery. The detail skill of the individual, emptied machine worker vanishes beside the science, huge forces of nature, and social mass labour embodied in the machine system; together they form the power of the “master.”

This master, whose mind joins the machinery and the monopoly of it inseparably, contemptuously calls out to the “hands” when conflict arises:

The Master Spinners’ and Manufacturers’ Defence Fund tells factory workers to keep in wholesome remembrance that their work is a very low kind of skilled work. It says that no skill is easier to acquire, better paid for its quality, or more quickly and abundantly supplied after short training for the least experienced. It says that the master’s machinery matters far more in production than the worker’s labour and skill, which six months of training can teach and any farm labourer can learn.

Workers’ technical subordination to the uniform motion of the means of labour, together with a workforce made up of people of both sexes and widely different ages, creates barracks-like discipline. This develops into a complete factory regime and fully develops the earlier work of supervision: workers are divided into operatives and overlookers, private soldiers and non-commissioned officers of an industrial army.

Ure calls the main difficulty in the automatic factory the necessary discipline of making people give up their irregular work habits and identify with the unchanging regularity of the great automaton. He says that devising and successfully enforcing a discipline code suited to the automatic system’s needs and speed was a Herculean task: Arkwright’s noble work. Even now, he adds, when the system is organised in its full perfection, it is almost impossible to find useful helpers for the automatic system among workers past puberty.

In the factory code, capital writes its autocracy over its workers as private law and by its own will, without the division of powers the bourgeoisie otherwise likes, or the representative system it likes even more. This code is only capitalism’s caricature of the social regulation of the work process that becomes necessary with large-scale cooperation and the shared use of means of production, especially machinery.

The slave-driver’s lash is replaced by the overlooker’s book of penalties. Every punishment becomes a fine or a deduction from wages; the factory’s law-making ingenuity makes workers’ violation of its rules, where possible, more profitable to the factory lawgivers than workers’ obedience.

We can only point to the material conditions in which factory work is done. Every sense is harmed by artificially raised temperature, air laden with raw-material waste, deafening noise, and danger to life and limb among machinery packed close together, which issues its bulletins of the killed and wounded in the industrial battle as regularly as the seasons.

The economy of social means of production, first forced to maturity like a hothouse plant in the factory system, becomes in capital’s hands systematic robbery of the worker’s conditions of life while at work: space, air, light, and personal protection against dangerous or unhealthy conditions of production, not to mention arrangements for the worker’s comfort.

Is Fourier wrong to call factories “tempered bagnos”

?

The struggle between capitalist and wage-worker begins with the capital relation itself. It rages on throughout the whole manufacturing period.

But only since the introduction of machinery does the worker fight the instrument of labour itself: capital's material mode of existence. The worker revolts against this particular form of the means of production because it is the material foundation of the capitalist mode of production.

In the seventeenth century, nearly all of Europe saw workers revolt against the ribbon-loom, a machine for weaving ribbons and braid.

At the end of the first third of the seventeenth century, a wind-driven sawmill built by a Dutchman near London fell to mob excesses. Even at the beginning of the eighteenth century, water-driven sawmills in England only with difficulty overcame parliament-backed popular resistance. When Everet built the first water-driven wool-shearing machine in 1758, it was set on fire by 100,000 people who had been thrown out of work. Fifty thousand workers who had hitherto lived by wool-carding petitioned Parliament against Arkwright's scribbling mills—machines for rough carding—and his carding machines.

The mass destruction of machinery in England's manufacturing districts during the first fifteen years of the nineteenth century, especially through the employment of the power-loom, offered, under the name of the Luddite movement, a pretext to the anti-Jacobin government of Sidmouth, Castlereagh, and others for the most reactionary and violent measures. Workers need time and experience before they learn to distinguish machinery from its capitalist application, and so learn to transfer their attacks from the material means of production itself to its social form of exploitation.

Wage struggles within manufacture assume manufacture; they are by no means aimed at its existence. Insofar as the formation of manufactures is opposed, the opposition comes from guild masters and privileged towns, not wage-workers. Writers of the manufacturing period therefore mostly understood the division of labour as replacing workers only in the imagination—workers who would otherwise have been needed—not as actually displacing workers already at work.

If 100 million people would be needed in England to spin with the old spinning-wheel the cotton that 500,000 now spin by machine, this does not mean that machinery took the place of millions who never existed. It means that many millions of workers would be needed to replace the spinning machinery. But if the power-loom threw 80,000 weavers onto the streets in England, an existing number of workers was in fact replaced or displaced by machinery.

During the manufacturing period, handicraft, though broken up, remained the foundation. The new colonial markets could not be satisfied by the relatively small number of town workers inherited from the Middle Ages. Manufacture also opened new fields of production to rural people driven from the land as feudal ties to the soil dissolved. So at that time it was the positive side of the division of labour and of co-operation in workshops that stood out: they made workers already in employment more productive.

Source note: the German text here reads 80,000; both English translations print 800,000. The local German transcription is pending verification against the MEW print.

When co-operation and the combination of instruments of labour in a few hands are applied to agriculture, they bring great, sudden, and violent revolutions in the mode of production, and therefore in the living conditions and means of employment of the rural population. In many countries this happened long before large-scale industry. Originally, however, the struggle is more between large and small landowners than between capital and wage-labour.

Insofar as workers are displaced by instruments of labour—sheep, horses, and so on—direct acts of violence are initially the precondition of the industrial revolution. First the workers are driven off the land; then come the sheep. Theft of land on a large scale, as in England, first creates the field for large-scale agriculture.

In its beginnings, this agricultural upheaval therefore has more the appearance of a political revolution.

As a machine, the instrument of labour immediately becomes the worker's direct competitor.

Capital's self-expansion through machinery is directly proportional to the number of workers whose conditions of existence it destroys. The whole capitalist system rests on the worker selling labour-power as a commodity. The division of labour narrows that labour-power into the wholly particularised skill of handling one partial tool. Once the machine takes over handling that tool, the use-value of the worker's labour-power is extinguished, and its exchange-value goes with it. The worker becomes unsaleable, like paper money withdrawn from circulation.

Machinery turns part of the working class into a surplus population relative to capital's needs—people no longer directly required for its self-expansion. One part goes under in the unequal struggle of old handicraft and manufacture against machine production. Another part floods the branches of industry still easy to enter, overcrowds the labour market, and lowers the price of labour-power below its value.

Two things are supposed to console the impoverished workers. First, that their suffering is only “temporary”—“a temporary inconvenience.” Second, that machinery takes over a whole field of production only by degrees, which blunts the reach and force of its destruction. One consolation defeats the other. Where machinery takes over gradually, it produces chronic misery among the workers competing with it. Where the change is rapid, it acts massively and acutely. History offers no more terrible sight than the slow death of the English hand-loom cotton weavers, stretched over decades and sealed in 1838. Many starved to death; many vegetated for years with their families on two and a half pence a day.

English cotton machinery, in contrast, acted acutely on East India. In 1834/35, its Governor-General recorded:

“The misery finds scarcely a parallel in the history of trade. The bones of the cotton weavers bleach the plains of India.”

In turning these weavers out of this “temporal” world, machinery caused them no more than “temporary” trouble. Yet machinery's “temporary” effect is permanent, in that it constantly takes over new fields of production. The capitalist mode of production makes the conditions of labour, and the product of labour itself, stand over against the worker as something separate and alien. With machinery that standing-over develops into complete opposition.

Therefore, with machinery comes for the first time the worker's brutal revolt against the instrument of labour.

The instrument of labour strikes down the worker. This direct clash is indeed clearest when newly introduced machinery competes with traditional handicraft or manufacture. But within large-scale industry, the continual improvement of machinery and the development of the automatic system continue to act in the same way.

“The constant aim of improved machinery is to reduce hand-labour, or to complete a link in the factory production chain by replacing human apparatus with iron apparatus.”

“Applying steam- and water-power to machinery once moved by hand happens every day. Smaller improvements are also constant. They may save motive power, improve the product, produce more in the same time, or replace a child, a woman, or a man. They may seem minor, but they have important results.”

“Wherever a task needs great skill and a steady hand, it is taken as quickly as possible from the too-skilled worker, who is often prone to irregularities of every kind. It is given to a special mechanism, so well regulated that a child can oversee it.”

“Under the automatic system, the worker's talent is gradually pushed aside.”

“The improvement of machinery does not merely mean that fewer adult workers are needed for a given result. It replaces one kind of worker with another: the less skilled replace the skilled, children replace adults, and women replace men. These changes cause constant fluctuations in the wage rate.”

“Machinery keeps throwing adult workers out of the factory.”

Owing to accumulated practical experience, machinery already at hand, and constant technical advance, the machine system showed us its extraordinary elasticity in its storm-march under the pressure of a shortened working day. But who, in 1860, the high point of the English cotton industry, could have foreseen the galloping machine improvements and corresponding displacement of hand-labour produced over the next three years under the spur of the American Civil War? A few examples from the factory inspectors' official reports are enough. A Manchester manufacturer says:

“Instead of 75 carding engines, we now need only 12 to produce the same amount, of equally good if not better quality. We save £10 a week in wages and 10% in cotton waste.”

At a Manchester fine-spinning mill:

“By increasing speed and introducing several self-acting processes, a quarter of the workers in one department and more than half in another have been removed. The combing machine, replacing the second carding machine, has also greatly reduced the hands formerly employed in the carding room.”

Another spinning mill estimates its overall saving in “hands” at 10%. Messrs. Gilmour, spinners in Manchester, say:

“In our blowing department, we reckon the new machinery has saved us a full third in wages and in hands. In the jack-frame and drawing-frame room, expense and hands are about one-third lower; in the spinning room, expense is about one-third lower. But that is not all. When our yarn now goes to the weavers, new machinery has improved it so much that they produce more and better cloth than from the old machine yarn.”

Factory Inspector A. Redgrave remarks:

“The reduction of workers alongside increased production is advancing quickly. A new reduction recently began in woollen factories and continues. A schoolmaster near Rochdale told me that the great decline in the girls' schools comes not only from the pressure of the crisis, but also from machinery changes in woollen mills, which have brought an average reduction of 70 short-timers.” Short-timers are children allowed to work only half the day.

The following table shows the overall result of mechanical improvements in the English cotton industry brought about by the American Civil War:

Between 1861 and 1868, 338 cotton factories therefore disappeared; that is, more productive and larger-scale machinery became concentrated in the hands of fewer capitalists. The number of power-looms fell by 20,663, yet their product increased at the same time, so an improved loom did more than an old one. Finally, the number of spindles rose by 1,612,547 while the number of workers fell by 50,505. The “temporary” misery with which the cotton crisis crushed the workers was intensified and entrenched by the rapid and sustained advance of machinery.

Source note: the local German table prints 13.97.546 for Scotland's 1868 spindles; both English translations print 1,397,546, and the table arithmetic agrees. In the following paragraph, the local German and the table arithmetic give a spindle increase of 1,612,547; both English translations print 1,612,541. The MEW print has not yet been verified.

Machinery does not act only as an overwhelming competitor, always ready to make the wage-worker “superfluous.” Capital proclaims and handles it, loudly and tendentially, as a power hostile to the worker. It becomes capital's most powerful weapon of war for crushing the periodic revolts and strikes that workers direct against the autocracy of capital.

According to Gaskell, the steam-engine was from the first an antagonist of “human power,” one that enabled the capitalist to crush the workers' rising demands, which threatened to drive the young factory system into crisis.

A whole history could be written of inventions since 1830 that came into being solely as capital's instruments of war against workers' revolts. Above all, we recall the self-acting mule, because it opened a new epoch of the automatic system.

Nasmyth, the inventor of the steam-hammer, gave the following testimony before the Trades Unions Commission about machine improvements he introduced after the great, long strike of machine-workers in 1851:

“The characteristic feature of our modern mechanical improvements is the introduction of self-acting tool machines. What a mechanical worker now has to do, and what any boy can do, is not to work himself, but to watch the machine's beautiful work. The whole class of workers who depended solely on their skill has now been done away with. I once employed four boys to each mechanic. Thanks to these new mechanical combinations, I have cut the number of adult men from 1,500 to 750. The result was a considerable increase in my profit.”

Ure says of a machine for colour printing in calico works:

“At last the capitalists sought to free themselves from this intolerable slavery”—he means the terms their workers had contracted for, which the capitalists found irksome—“by calling on the resources of science, and they were soon restored to their legitimate rights: those of the head over the other parts of the body.”

Of an invention for dressing warps, whose immediate cause was a strike, Ure says:

“The horde of malcontents, who thought themselves invincibly entrenched behind the old lines of the division of labour, found themselves taken in the flank. Modern mechanical tactics destroyed their means of defence. They had to surrender at discretion.”

Of the invention of the self-acting mule, Ure says:

“It was called upon to restore order among the industrial classes … This invention confirms the doctrine we have already set out: capital, by pressing science into its service, always forces the rebellious hand of labour into docility.”

Although Ure's book appeared in 1835, when the factory system was still relatively weakly developed, it remains the classic expression of the factory spirit. This is not only because of its open cynicism, but also because it naively blurts out the thoughtless contradictions of the capital-brain. After laying down, for example, the “doctrine” that capital, with the help of science it has taken into its pay,

“always forces the rebellious hand of labour into docility,” he is outraged that, “in some quarters, the mechanical and physical sciences are accused of lending themselves to the despotism of rich capitalists and becoming a means of oppressing the poor classes.”

After preaching at length about how greatly the rapid development of machinery benefits workers, Ure warns them that their resistance, strikes, and so on accelerate that development.

“Such violent revolts,” he says, “show human short-sightedness in its most contemptible form: the person who makes himself his own executioner.”

A few pages earlier, he says the opposite:

“Without the violent collisions and interruptions caused by the mistaken views of the workers, the factory system would have developed far more quickly and far more beneficially for all concerned.”

Then he exclaims again:

“Fortunately for the people of Britain's factory districts, improvements in machinery happen only gradually.” “It is wrongly said,” he says, “that machines reduce adult workers' wages by displacing some of them, so that their numbers exceed the demand for labour. But machines increase the demand for child labour and thereby raise its wage rate.”

That same dispenser of comfort, however, defends children's wages for being low by saying that “they keep parents from sending their children into factories too early.” His whole book is a defence of the unrestricted working day. His liberal soul is reminded of the darkest times of the Middle Ages when the law forbids 13-year-olds to drudge more than 12 hours a day. Yet he calls on factory workers to thank Providence, which through machinery has granted them “the leisure to think of their immortal interests.”

A whole series of bourgeois economists, including James Mill, MacCulloch, Torrens, Senior, and John Stuart Mill, claim that every machine which displaces workers simultaneously and necessarily frees enough capital to employ those same identical workers.

Suppose a capitalist employs 100 workers in a wallpaper factory at £30 a year each. His yearly variable capital is therefore £3,000. He dismisses 50 workers and employs the remaining 50 with machinery costing £1,500. Leave buildings, coal, and so on out of account, and suppose that the raw material still costs £3,000 a year.

Has this metamorphosis “freed” any capital? Before it, the total £6,000 was half constant and half variable capital. Now £4,500 is constant capital—£3,000 for raw material and £1,500 for machinery—and only £1,500 is variable capital. The variable part has fallen from one half to one quarter of the whole. Capital has not been freed; it has been bound in a form that no longer exchanges for labour-power: variable capital has become constant capital. With everything else unchanged, the £6,000 can never again employ more than 50 workers, and every improvement in the machinery employs fewer. If the new machinery cost £1,000 rather than £1,500—less than the displaced labour-power and implements—£1,000 of variable capital would be converted into constant capital and £500 freed. At the same yearly wage, that £500 would form an employment fund for about 16 workers—while 50 have been dismissed—and in truth far fewer than 16, because part must again become constant capital, leaving only part for labour-power.

Even if making the new machinery employed more mechanics, would that compensate the wallpaper workers thrown onto the streets? At best, making it employs fewer workers than using it displaces. The £1,500 that had only represented the dismissed wallpaper workers’ wages now represents the value of the means of production used to make the machine, the mechanics’ wages, and the surplus-value going to their “master.” Once made, the machine need not be replaced until it dies. To keep the extra mechanics employed permanently, one wallpaper manufacturer after another must displace workers with machines.

These apologists do not mean that capital is freed in this way. They mean the dismissed workers’ means of subsistence. In this example, machinery does free 50 workers and make them “available,” while also cutting off their connection with means of subsistence worth £1,500 and thus “setting free” those means. The plain fact that machinery frees workers from their means of subsistence is dressed up economically as machinery freeing means of subsistence for workers, or turning them into capital for their employment. Everything turns on the wording. Nominibus mollire licet mala: names can soften evils.

On this theory, the £1,500 of means of subsistence was capital expanded by the labour of the 50 dismissed wallpaper workers. Once the 50 get their forced holiday, that capital loses its employment and cannot rest until it finds a new “investment” where those same 50 can consume it productively again. So, the apologists conclude, capital and workers must sooner or later meet again, and compensation is complete—the workers' suffering being, on this account, as fleeting as the riches of this world.

The £1,500 of means of subsistence never confronted the dismissed workers as capital. What confronted them as capital was the £1,500 now turned into machinery. That sum represented part of the wallpaper produced each year by the 50 dismissed workers, which their employer paid them as wages in money rather than in kind. They used that money to buy £1,500 worth of means of subsistence. These were commodities, not capital, to them; in relation to those commodities they were buyers, not wage-labourers. Machinery has “freed” them from means of purchase and changed them from buyers into non-buyers. Demand for those commodities falls. Voilà tout. Unless demand rises elsewhere to make up for it, their market price falls. If this lasts and spreads, workers producing those commodities are displaced. Some capital formerly producing necessary means of subsistence is reproduced in another form, and, while prices fall and capital shifts, those workers too are “freed” from part of their wages. Far from proving that machinery turns means of subsistence into capital for the further employment of dismissed workers, the apologist’s law of supply and demand proves the opposite: machinery throws workers onto the streets not only where it is introduced, but also where it is not.

The real facts, travestied by economic optimism, are these. Workers displaced by machinery are driven from the workshop onto the labour market, where they increase the number of labour-powers already available for capitalist exploitation. Part Seven will show that this effect of machinery, presented here as compensation for the working class, on the contrary strikes the worker as the most terrible scourge. For now: workers cast out of one industry can seek work in another. If they find it and renew their link with means of subsistence, this happens through new, additional capital seeking investment, never through the capital that had employed them and has now become machinery. Even then their prospects are poor. Crippled by the division of labour, these poor devils are worth so little outside their old field that they can enter only a few low branches, always overcrowded and underpaid.

Every industry yearly draws in a new stream of people to fill regular replacements and provide for growth. Once machinery frees some workers in a given industry, the replacement workers are redistributed and absorbed elsewhere, while the original victims, during the transition, largely starve and perish.

It is beyond doubt that machinery in itself is not responsible for “setting workers free” from means of subsistence. It makes the product cheaper and more plentiful in the branch it takes over, while at first leaving unchanged the mass of means of subsistence produced elsewhere. After its introduction, society therefore has as much, or more, food for displaced workers as before, apart from the enormous part of the yearly product wasted by non-workers. And here is the punchline of economic apologetics! The contradictions and antagonisms inseparable from the capitalist application of machinery do not exist, because they arise not from machinery itself but from its capitalist application! Because machinery in itself shortens labour-time while capitalistically applied it lengthens the working day; in itself eases labour while capitalist application raises its intensity; in itself is a human victory over natural forces while capitalist application subjugates human beings through those forces; in itself increases the producer's wealth while capitalist application impoverishes the producer, the bourgeois economist simply declares that considering machinery in itself proves precisely that all these palpable contradictions are mere appearance in ordinary reality and do not exist in themselves, and therefore not in theory. He thus saves himself further thought and, moreover, burdens his opponent with the stupidity of fighting not the capitalist application of machinery, but machinery itself.

The bourgeois economist by no means denies that temporary inconveniences result; but where is there a medal without a reverse side! He cannot imagine any use of machinery other than its capitalist exploitation. To him, exploitation of the worker by the machine is the same as exploitation of the machine by the worker. Whoever reveals how matters really stand with the capitalist application of machinery therefore does not want its application at all; he is an enemy of social progress!

It is exactly the reasoning of the famous cut-throat Bill Sikes—Dickens's murderer, staged here to speak the economist's part:

“Gentlemen of the jury, this commercial traveller has certainly had his throat cut. But that is not my fault; it is the knife's fault. Must we abolish the use of the knife for such temporary inconveniences? Think of it! Where would agriculture and handicraft be without the knife? Is it not as beneficial in surgery as it is instructive in anatomy? It is also a willing helper at a cheerful meal. Abolish the knife, and you hurl us back into the deepest barbarism.”

Machinery necessarily displaces workers in the branches where it is introduced, yet it can increase employment in other branches. That effect has nothing in common with the so-called compensation theory. Since every machine-made article—for example, a yard of machine-woven cloth—is cheaper than the hand-made article of the same kind it displaces, an absolute law follows: if the total quantity made by machine equals the total quantity of the handicraft or manufacture article it replaces, the total labour used falls. The extra labour needed to make the means of labour themselves—machinery, coal, and so on—must be less than the labour removed by using machinery, or the machine product would cost as much as, or more than, the hand product. In fact, the total machine product made by fewer workers grows far beyond the total hand product displaced. Suppose 400,000 yards of machine-woven cloth are made by fewer workers than 100,000 yards of hand-woven cloth. The fourfold product contains four times as much raw material, so raw-material production must be quadrupled. With consumed means of labour—buildings, coal, machinery, and so on—the limit within which extra labour can grow varies with the difference between the mass of the machine product and the mass the same number of workers could make by hand.

As machine production expands in one industry, it first raises production in the other industries that supply its means of production. Given the length of the working day and the intensity of labour, how far the number of employed workers grows depends on the composition of the capital used: the ratio of its constant to its variable parts. That ratio itself changes greatly according to how far machinery has already taken hold of, or is taking hold of, those supplying trades. The number of people condemned to coal and metal mines rose enormously with the advance of English machine industry, though in recent decades new mining machinery has slowed that increase.

A new kind of worker comes into being with the machine: its maker. We already know that machine production itself takes over this branch of production on an ever more massive scale.

As for raw material, the rapid advance of cotton spinning unquestionably pushed cotton growing in the United States with hothouse force, along with the African slave trade, and made slave-breeding (Negerzucht) the chief business of the so-called border slave states. At the first slave census in the United States, in 1790, their number was 697,000; by 1861 it was nearly four million. On the other hand, it is no less certain that the rise of mechanized wool factories, together with the progressive conversion of arable land into sheep pasture, caused the mass expulsion and “making surplus” of agricultural labourers. Ireland is still undergoing the process of reducing its population, already nearly halved since 1845, still further to the exact level required by its landlords and the English wool manufacturers.

When machinery takes over preliminary or intermediate stages that a material must pass through before its final form, demand for labour grows, together with the material, in the handicraft or manufacturing trades into which the machine product enters. Machine spinning, for example, supplied yarn so cheaply and abundantly that hand-weavers could at first work full time without increased outlay. Their earnings rose.

People therefore flowed into cotton weaving, until the 800,000 cotton weavers brought into being in England by the Jenny, Throstle, and Mule were finally struck down by power-looms. In the same way, the abundance of machine-made clothing materials increases the number of tailors, dressmakers, seamstresses, and needleworkers, until the sewing machine appears.

As machine production supplies growing masses of raw materials, semi-finished goods, instruments of labour, and so on with relatively few workers, the working-up of these materials splits into countless sub-branches. The variety of social branches of production grows. Machine production drives the social division of labour much further than manufacture does, because it increases the productive power of the trades it takes over to a far greater degree.

The next result of machinery is to enlarge surplus-value and the mass of products in which it appears. The capitalist class and its hangers-on live on that mass, and so those layers of society grow too. Their growing wealth, together with the relatively and steadily falling number of workers needed to produce basic necessities, creates new luxury needs and new means of satisfying them. A larger part of the social product becomes surplus-product, and a larger part of the surplus-product is reproduced and consumed in refined and varied forms. In other words, luxury production grows.

The refinement and variety of products also arise from the new world-market relations created by large-scale industry. Not only are more foreign articles of consumption exchanged for home products; greater quantities of foreign raw materials, ingredients, semi-finished goods, and so on enter home industry as means of production. These world-market relations increase demand for labour in transport and split it into many new branches.

The growth of means of production and means of subsistence, alongside a relative fall in the number of workers, drives an expansion of labour in industries whose products—canals, commercial docks, tunnels, bridges, and so on—bear fruit only far in the future. Entirely new branches of production and new fields of labour arise either directly from machinery or from the general industrial revolution corresponding to it. Even in the most developed countries, however, their share of total production is by no means significant. Their number of workers grows directly with the recurring need for the crudest manual labour. The chief industries of this kind at present are gasworks, telegraphy, photography, steamship service, and railways. The Census of 1861 for England and Wales gives 16,211 people in gas industry, 2,399 in telegraphy, 2,366 in photography, 3,570 in steam navigation, and 70,599 in railways, including about 28,000 more or less permanently employed “unskilled” earthworkers alongside the whole administrative and commercial staff. The total in these five new industries is 94,145.

Finally, the extraordinary increase in productive power in large-scale industry, accompanied by intensified and extended exploitation of labour-power in all other spheres of production, allows an ever larger part of the working class to be used “unproductively”—that is, in labour yielding capital no surplus-value. It thus reproduces the ancient household slaves on an ever larger scale under the name of the “servant class”: servants, maids, lackeys, and so on. According to the Census of 1861, England and Wales had 20,066,224 people: 9,776,259 male and 10,289,965 female. Deduct those too old or too young to work; all “unproductive” women, young people, and children; the “ideological” estates—government, parsons, lawyers, military, and so on; all whose sole business is consuming others’ labour as ground rent, interest, and so forth; and finally paupers, vagabonds, and criminals. In round numbers, 8 million of both sexes and every age remain, including every capitalist functioning in production, trade, finance, or similar work. Of these 8 million:

All workers in textile factories together with those in coal and metal mines number 1,208,442. Textile-factory workers together with the staff of all metalworks and manufactures number 1,039,605. Both totals are lower than the 1,208,648 modern household slaves. What an uplifting result of machinery exploited by capital!

All responsible representatives of political economy admit that introducing new machinery strikes like a plague at workers in the old crafts and manufactures with which it first competes. Almost all lament the factory worker’s slavery. But what is their great trump card? That, after the horrors of its introduction and development, machinery ultimately increases rather than decreases the Arbeitssklaven—labour-slaves. Political economy rejoices in this atrocious theorem: even the factory founded on machinery, after a period of growth and a shorter or longer transition, grinds down more Arbeitssklaven—labour-slaves—than it first threw onto the pavement.

Examples such as the English worsted and silk factories had already shown that, at a certain stage, an extraordinary expansion of factory branches can go with not merely a relative but an absolute fall in the number of workers employed. In 1860, when Parliament ordered a special census of every factory in the United Kingdom, R. Baker’s districts in Lancashire, Cheshire, and Yorkshire had 652 factories. Of these, 570 contained 85,622 power-looms, 6,819,156 spindles excluding doubling spindles, 27,439 horsepower in steam engines, 1,390 in waterwheels, and 94,119 employed persons. In 1865 the same factories had 95,163 looms, 7,025,031 spindles, 28,925 steam horsepower, 1,445 water horsepower, and 88,913 employed persons. From 1860 to 1865, power-looms rose 11%, spindles 3%, and steam horsepower 5%, while employed persons fell 5.5%.

Between 1852 and 1862 the English woollen manufacture expanded considerably, while the number of workers employed in it remained almost unchanged.

“This shows how greatly newly introduced machinery had displaced the labour of earlier periods.”

In actual cases, the increase in factory workers is often only apparent. It does not come from the expansion of factories already run by machinery, but from gradually annexing connected branches. From 1838 to 1858, the rise in mechanical looms and in factory workers employed by them came in the British cotton factory simply from the expansion of that branch. In other factories it came from the new use of steam power for carpet, ribbon, linen, and other looms that had previously been driven by human muscle.

So the increase in these factory workers only expressed a fall in the total number employed. Left entirely out of account here is that everywhere except in metal factories, young workers under 18, women, and children make up by far the largest part of factory personnel.

Despite the mass of workers machinery actually drives out and virtually replaces, factory workers can eventually outnumber the manufacturing workers and craftspeople they displaced, as more factories of the same kind are built or existing ones enlarged. Under the old method, a weekly capital of £500 might consist of 2/5 constant and 3/5 variable capital: £200 spent on means of production and £300 on labour-power, say £1 per worker. With machinery, the total capital’s composition changes to 4/5 constant and 1/5 variable capital, so only £100 is spent on labour-power and two-thirds of the formerly employed workers are discharged.

If the factory expands, while other conditions of production remain the same, and total capital grows from £500 to £1,500, it employs 300 workers, as many as before the industrial revolution. If capital then grows to £2,000, it employs 400 workers, one-third more than under the old method. The number employed has risen by 100 in absolute terms, but has fallen by 800 relatively, measured against the total capital advanced: under the old method, £2,000 would have employed 1,200 workers rather than 400. A relative fall in employed workers can therefore coexist with their absolute increase.

We assumed above that, as total capital grows, its composition stays the same because the conditions of production remain constant. But with every advance in machinery, the constant part of capital—machinery, raw material, and so on—grows, while the variable part spent on labour-power falls. In no other method of production is improvement so constant, and the composition of total capital so variable. Yet this continual change is continually interrupted by resting points and by merely quantitative expansion on a given technical basis. Then the number of employed workers grows. In 1835 all workers in the United Kingdom’s cotton, wool, worsted, flax, and silk factories numbered only 354,684; in 1861 power-loom weavers alone, of both sexes and every age from eight onward, numbered 230,654. This growth looks less large when we remember that British hand-cotton weavers, together with the families they employed, still numbered 800,000 in 1838, apart from those displaced in Asia and on the European continent.

Source note: The German printing breaks off mid-sentence here, after “weil die Produktionsbedingungen.” The words “because the conditions of production remain constant” follow Moore–Aveling's English, which completes the clause.

In the few remarks still to be made on this point, we partly touch simply factual conditions to which the theoretical account itself has not yet led us.

As machinery expands in an industry at the expense of old handicraft or manufacture, its success is as certain as that of an army armed with firearms against an army of bowmen. This first period, when machinery conquers its field, matters greatly because it helps produce extraordinary profits. Those profits accelerate accumulation and also draw a large part of the social additional capital that is constantly being formed and seeking new investment into the favoured sphere. The special advantages of this first storm-and-stress period return wherever machinery is newly introduced.

Once the factory system has gained a certain breadth and maturity—once machinery itself is made by machinery, coal and iron mining, metalworking, transport, and the general conditions of large industry have been revolutionised—it acquires an elasticity, a capacity for sudden leaps of expansion, limited only by raw material and the market. Machinery directly increases raw material too, as the cotton gin increased cotton production.

The cheapness of machine-made goods, together with transformed transport and communications, becomes a weapon for conquering foreign markets. By ruining their handicraft production, machinery forcibly turns those markets into fields producing its raw material. East India was thus compelled to produce cotton, wool, hemp, jute, indigo, and so on for Great Britain.

The continual making of workers supernumerary in countries of large industry promotes hothouse-like emigration and the colonisation of foreign lands. Those lands become plantations of raw material for the mother country, as Australia became a plantation of wool.

A new international division of labour arises, suited to the main centres of machinery. It turns one part of the globe mainly into an agricultural field of production for another part that is mainly industrial. This revolution is connected with changes in agriculture that need not be examined further here.

At Mr Gladstone's prompting, on 18 February 1867 the House of Commons ordered a return of all grain crops, grain, and flour of every kind imported into and exported from the United Kingdom from 1831 to 1866. The summary result is given in the table. Flour is reduced to quarters of grain.

The factory system’s enormous capacity for sudden expansion, together with its dependence on the world market, necessarily produces feverish production and then overfilled markets. When markets contract, paralysis follows. Industrial life becomes a sequence of moderate activity, prosperity, over-production, crisis, and stagnation. The insecurity and instability to which machinery subjects workers’ employment, and therefore their whole conditions of life, become normal with these periodic changes of the industrial cycle.

Except in prosperous periods, capitalists fight fiercely for each one’s individual share of the market. That share is directly related to the cheapness of the product. Alongside this rivalry in using improved machinery that replaces labour-power and new methods of production, a point is repeatedly reached where cheaper commodities are sought by forcibly pressing wages below the value of labour-power.

Growth in the number of factory workers therefore requires a proportionately much faster growth of the total capital invested in factories. But this process occurs only within the ebb-and-flow periods of the industrial cycle. It is also continually interrupted by technical progress, which sometimes virtually replaces workers and sometimes actually drives them out. This qualitative change in machinery continually removes workers from the factory or shuts its gate against the fresh stream of recruits, while merely quantitative expansion of factories absorbs fresh contingents alongside those thrown out. Workers are thus continually repelled and attracted, hurled to and fro, while the sex, age, and skill of those recruited continually change.

The fate of the factory worker is best illustrated by a rapid survey of the fortunes of the English cotton industry.

From 1770 to 1815 the cotton industry was depressed or stagnant for only 5 years. During this first 45-year period, English manufacturers held the monopoly of machinery and the world market. From 1815 to 1821 there was depression; 1822 and 1823 were prosperous; in 1824 the Combination Laws were repealed and factories expanded greatly everywhere; 1825 brought crisis; and 1826 great misery and uprisings among cotton workers. There was slight improvement in 1827; in 1828 power-looms and exports increased greatly; in 1829 exports, especially to India, surpassed every earlier year; in 1830 markets were overfilled and distress was severe; and from 1831 to 1833 pressure continued, while trade with East Asia, India and China was taken from the East India Company’s monopoly.

In 1834 factories and machinery grew greatly, and there was a shortage of hands. The New Poor Law promoted the migration of agricultural workers into factory districts. Rural counties were swept of children. There was a white slave trade. In 1835 there was great prosperity and, at the same time, the starvation of hand-loom cotton weavers; 1836 also brought great prosperity. In 1837 and 1838 there was depression and crisis; 1839 revival; 1840 great depression, uprisings, and military intervention; 1841 and 1842 terrible suffering among factory workers. In 1842 manufacturers locked workers out of the factories to force the repeal of the Corn Laws. Workers streamed by many thousands to Yorkshire, were driven back by the military, and their leaders were tried at Lancaster. In 1843 there was great misery; 1844 revival; 1845 great prosperity. In 1846 there was first continued expansion and then signs of reaction, along with the repeal of the Corn Laws. In 1847 came crisis and a general wage cut of 10% and more in celebration of the “big loaf”; in 1848 pressure continued and Manchester was under military protection.

There was revival in 1849 and prosperity in 1850. In 1851 commodity prices fell, wages were low, and strikes frequent. Improvement began in 1852, but strikes continued and manufacturers threatened to import foreign workers. In 1853 exports rose; Preston endured an eight-month strike and great misery. In 1854 there was prosperity and overfilled markets; in 1855 reports of bankruptcies poured in from the United States, Canada, and East Asian markets; in 1856 great prosperity; in 1857 crisis; in 1858 improvement; and in 1859 great prosperity and more factories. In 1860 English cotton industry reached its zenith. Indian, Australian, and other markets were so overfilled that by 1863 they could scarcely absorb the whole lot. There was the French trade treaty and enormous growth of factories and machinery. In 1861 the upturn continued for a while, then came reaction, the American Civil War, and cotton famine. From 1862 to 1863 there was complete collapse.

The history of the cotton famine is too characteristic not to pause over it. The condition of world markets in 1860 and 1861 shows that the cotton famine suited manufacturers and was partly advantageous to them. This was acknowledged in reports of the Manchester Chamber of Commerce, proclaimed in Parliament by Palmerston and Derby, and confirmed by events.

Among the United Kingdom’s 2,887 cotton factories in 1861, there were many small ones. Factory Inspector A. Redgrave’s district included 2,109 of them. Of these, 392, or 19%, used under 10 steam horsepower; 345, or 16%, used 10 and under 20; and 1,372 used 20 horsepower or more.

Most small factories were weaving sheds, built during the prosperous period since 1858, mostly by speculators: one supplied the yarn, another the machinery, and a third the building. They were run by former overlookers or other people without means. These small manufacturers mostly went under. The commercial crisis that the cotton famine forestalled would have destroyed them in any case. Though they made up one-third of manufacturers, their factories absorbed a far smaller share of the capital invested in cotton production.

As for the scale of paralysis, authentic estimates for October 1862 put 60.3% of spindles and 58% of looms idle. This was for the whole industry and naturally differed greatly by district. Very few factories worked full time, 60 hours a week; the rest worked intermittently. Even the few workers employed full time at the usual piece-rate necessarily lost weekly wages as better cotton was replaced by worse: Sea Island by Egyptian cotton in fine spinning, American and Egyptian by Surat from East India, and pure cotton by mixtures of cotton waste and Surat. Surat’s shorter fibre, its dirt, the greater breakage of its threads, and the replacement of flour by all kinds of heavy ingredients in sizing warp yarn slowed machinery or reduced the number of looms one weaver could oversee. They increased work caused by machine errors and, by reducing output, limited piece-rates. With Surat cotton and full employment, workers lost 20%, 30%, and more. Most manufacturers also cut the piece-rate by 5%, 7½%, and 10%. One can therefore understand the position of workers employed only 3, 3½, or 4 days a week, or only 6 hours a day. Even after a relative improvement in 1863, weekly wages for weavers, spinners, and others were 3s. 4d., 3s. 10d., 4s. 6d., 5s. 1d., and so on.

Even under these agonising conditions, the factory owner’s inventiveness in wage deductions did not stop. Some deductions were imposed as penalties for faulty work caused by his bad cotton or unsuitable machinery. Where he owned the workers’ cottages, he reimbursed himself for house rent by deductions from nominal wages. Factory Inspector Redgrave tells of self-acting minders, who supervise a pair of self-acting mules:

“At the end of a fortnight of full work they earned 8s. 11d.; house rent was deducted from this sum, though the factory owner returned half of it as a gift, so that the minders took the full 6s. 11d. home. During the final period of 1862, the weekly pay of weavers ranged from 2s. 6d. upward.”

Even when workers were employed only for a short time, house rent was often deducted from their wages.

No wonder that a kind of famine fever broke out in parts of Lancashire. More characteristic still was how the production process was remade at the worker’s expense. Formal experimenta in corpore vili were carried out, like anatomists’ experiments on frogs.

Factory Inspector Redgrave says: “Although I have given the workers’ actual earnings in many factories, one must not conclude that they receive the same amount week after week. Workers suffer the greatest fluctuations because of the manufacturers’ continual experimentalising. Their incomes rise and fall with the quality of the cotton mixture: at one time they come within 15% of their former earnings, and in the next or following week they fall by 50% to 60%.”

These experiments were not made only at the expense of workers’ food. All five of their senses had to pay for them.

A factory report records: “Workers opening the cotton tell me that its intolerable smell makes them ill. In the mixing, scribbling, and carding rooms, the released dust and dirt irritate every opening of the head, bring on coughing and make breathing difficult. Because the fibre is short, a large amount of material is added to the yarn during sizing, with all kinds of substitutes instead of the flour formerly used. Hence weavers’ nausea and dyspepsia. Bronchitis is common because of the dust, as is inflammation of the throat; there is also a skin disease caused by irritation from the dirt in Surat cotton.”

The substitutes for flour, on the other hand, were a Fortunatus’s purse for factory owners because they increased the yarn’s weight. They made “15 pounds of raw material, when woven, weigh 20 pounds.”

The factory inspectors’ report of 30 April 1864 says:

“Industry now uses this resource to a truly indecent extent. On good authority, I know of an eight-pound fabric made from 5¼ pounds of cotton and 2¾ pounds of sizing. Another fabric weighing 5¼ pounds contained two pounds of sizing. These were ordinary shirtings for export. In other kinds, 50% sizing was sometimes added, so that factory owners can boast—and really do boast—that they grow rich by selling cloth for less money than the nominal yarn contained in it costs.”

Workers suffered not only from factory owners’ experiments inside the factories and from municipalities outside them. They suffered wage cuts and unemployment, want and alms, and the praises of lords and members of the House of Commons.

Chief Constable Harris reports: “Unfortunate women, made unemployed by the cotton famine, became outcasts of society and remained so. The number of young prostitutes has increased more than at any time in the last 25 years.”

In the first 45 years of British cotton industry, from 1770 to 1815, there were only 5 years of crisis and stagnation; but this was the period of its world monopoly. In the second period, the 48 years from 1815 to 1863, there were only 20 years of revival and prosperity against 28 years of pressure and stagnation. From 1815 to 1830, competition with continental Europe and the United States began. Since 1833, the expansion of Asian markets has been forced by what the reports call the “destruction of the human race”—the wiping out of the Indian hand-loom weavers. Since the repeal of the Corn Laws, from 1846 to 1863, 8 years of moderate activity and prosperity stand against 9 years of pressure and stagnation. An 1863 appeal by cotton workers seeking emigration funds shows that even in prosperity many adult men could find no factory work on any terms.

Machinery abolishes cooperation based on handicrafts and manufacture based on the division of handicraft work. A mowing machine replaces cooperation among mowers. A needle-making machine shows the other case. In Adam Smith’s time, 10 men using divided work made more than 48,000 needles a day. One machine makes 145,000 in an 11-hour day. One woman or girl watches four such machines on average, so with machinery she makes about 600,000 needles a day and more than 3,000,000 a week.

When one machine replaces cooperation or manufacture, it can itself become the basis of a handicraft business. But this machine-based reproduction of handicraft production is only a transition to the factory system. That system normally arrives when steam or water, rather than human muscles, drives the machines. Small-scale work can also, only for a time, use mechanical power by renting steam, as in some Birmingham manufactures, or by using small caloric engines, as in some weaving branches.

In Coventry silk weaving, the experiment of "cottage factories" grew up on its own. An engine house for the steam engine stood in the middle of square-built rows of cottages, and shafts linked it to the looms in the cottages. The steam was rented, for example at 2½ shillings for each loom, and the rent was due weekly whether the looms ran or not. Each cottage had 2 to 6 looms, owned by workers, bought on credit, or rented. The fight between the cottage factory and the factory proper lasted more than 12 years and ended in the complete ruin of all 300 cottage factories.

Where the process did not itself require large-scale production, new industries of the last decades, such as envelope-making and steel-pen making, generally passed first through handicraft and then through manufacture, both short-lived stages on the way to the factory. This change is hardest when manufacture brings together not a sequence of developing processes but many separate ones. That long blocked the steel-pen factory. Yet about 15 years ago an automatic machine was invented that does six separate processes at once. Handicraft supplied the first 12 dozen steel pens in 1820 at £7 4s.; manufacture supplied them in 1830 at 8s.; the factory now supplies the wholesale trade at 2d. to 6d.

With the factory system and the agricultural revolution that accompanies it, production in all other industries not only expands; it also changes character. The factory principle becomes determining everywhere: break production into its constituent stages, then solve the problems this creates through mechanics, chemistry, and the natural sciences. Machinery therefore forces itself into manufacture, now in one partial process, now in another. The rigid crystallisation of its organisation, inherited from the old division of labour, dissolves and gives way to continual change.

The make-up of the combined workforce also changes from the ground up. Unlike the manufacturing period, the plan of the division of labour is now based, wherever possible, on women’s labour, children of every age, unskilled workers—in short, on "cheap labour," as the English call it. This applies not only to all large-scale combined production, with or without machinery, but also to so-called domestic industry, whether it is done in workers’ homes or small workshops.

This so-called modern domestic industry has nothing in common with the old-fashioned form except its name. The old form presupposed independent urban handicraft, independent peasant farming, and above all a home for the worker’s family. That old-fashioned industry has now been converted into an outside department of the factory, the manufactory, or the warehouse. Alongside the factory workers, manufacturing workers, and handicraftsmen whom it concentrates in large masses and commands directly, capital uses invisible threads to set another army in motion: domestic workers scattered through the great towns and across the countryside. Messrs. Tillie’s shirt factory in Londonderry, Ireland, employs 1,000 factory workers and 9,000 domestic workers scattered through the country.

The exploitation of cheap and immature labour-power is more shameless in modern manufacture than in the factory proper because the technical basis found in the factory—the replacement of muscular power by machinery and the relatively light character of the work—largely falls away in manufacture, while female and immature bodies are exposed without scruple to poisonous substances and the like.

It is more shameless still in so-called domestic work than in manufacture. Workers’ power to resist declines when they are scattered. A whole series of plundering parasites pushes itself between the real employer and the worker. Domestic work must compete with machine-based or at least manufacture-based work in the same branch. Poverty takes away the most necessary conditions of work: space, light, and ventilation. Employment becomes more irregular. And in these last refuges of those whom large-scale industry and agriculture have made ‘overnumerary’, competition among workers necessarily reaches its maximum.

Machinery first systematically developed economy in the means of production. From the start, it also meant the most ruthless waste of labour-power and theft of the normal conditions for work. This antagonistic and murderous side now comes out more sharply in a branch of industry the less its social productive power and its technical basis for combined processes are developed.

A few examples can show these conditions. The chapter on the working day has already provided many. In Birmingham and nearby metal manufactures, 30,000 children and young people, along with 10,000 women, are used for mostly very heavy work. They work in unhealthy brass foundries, button factories, and enamelling, galvanising, and varnishing works. Owing to excessive labour imposed on adults and non-adults, certain London houses where newspapers and books are printed have secured the honourable name ‘the slaughter-house’. The same excesses recur in bookbinding, where the slaughter victims are chiefly women, girls, and children. Young people do heavy work in rope-making, night work in salt works, candle works, and other chemical manufactures; there is a murderous consumption of boys in non-mechanised silk weaving to turn the looms.

Sorting rags is among the most shameful, dirty, and badly paid work, and young girls and women are used for it by preference. Britain receives not only its own countless rags but rags from all over the world: from Japan, the most distant states of South America, and the Canary Islands. Its main sources are Germany, France, Russia, Italy, Egypt, Turkey, Belgium, and Holland. The rags are used as manure, for bedflocks, for shoddy, and as raw material for paper. The women who sort them serve as the media by which smallpox and other infectious diseases spread; they are their first victims.

Brick and tile making, like mining and coal production, is a classic example of overwork, hard and unsuitable labour, and the resulting brutalisation of workers used from childhood onward. In England, the newly invented machine was still used only sporadically in 1866. From May to September, work lasts from 5 in the morning to 8 at night; where drying is done in the open air, it often lasts from 4 in the morning to 9 at night. A day from 5 in the morning to 7 at night counts as ‘reduced’ and ‘moderate’. Boys and girls of 6, and even of 4, are employed. They work the same hours as adults, often longer. The work is hard, and summer heat adds to the exhaustion. At a tile-field in Mosley, a woman of 24 made 2,000 tiles a day with the help of two young girls. They carried the clay and stacked the tiles, hauling 10 tons every day up the slippery sides of a pit 30 feet deep and then for 210 feet.

“It is impossible for a child to pass through the purgatory of a tile-field without great moral degradation. ... The vile language heard from the tenderest age, and the filthy, indecent, shameless habits amid which they grow up ignorant and wild, make them lawless, abandoned, and dissolute in later life. ... A frightful source of demoralisation is the way they live. Each moulder”—the skilled worker and head of a group—“supplies his gang of 7 with food and lodging in his hut or cottage. Whether they are family or not, men, boys, and girls sleep in the cottage. It usually has 2 rooms, only exceptionally 3, all on the ground floor and with little ventilation. Their bodies are so exhausted by the heavy sweating of the day that no rules of health, cleanliness, or decency are observed. Many of these cottages are models of disorder, filth, and dust. ... The greatest evil in using young girls for this work is that it usually chains them from childhood through their later lives to the most abandoned rabble. They become rough, foul-mouthed boys before nature has taught them that they are women. Clothed in a few dirty rags, with their legs bare far above the knee and their hair and faces smeared with dirt, they learn to treat every feeling of decency and shame with contempt. At mealtimes they lie stretched out in the fields or watch boys bathe in a nearby canal. When their heavy day’s work is finally done, they put on better clothes and go with the men to public houses.”

It is only natural that the greatest insobriety, from childhood onward, prevails throughout this whole class.

‘The worst is that brickmakers despair of themselves. You might as well,’ said one of the better kind to the chaplain of Southallfield, ‘try to raise and improve the devil as a brickie, Sir!’

Official and very full material on how capital economises on working conditions in modern manufacture—meaning here all large workshops except factories proper—appears in the Fourth (1861) and Sixth (1864) "Public Health Reports." The descriptions of workshops, especially those of London printers and tailors, outdo the most loathsome fantasies of romance writers. Their effects on workers’ health need no explanation. Dr. Simon, the chief medical officer of the Privy Council and official editor of the "Public Health Reports," says:

‘In my fourth report’ (1861), ‘I showed that workers are practically unable to insist on their first sanitary right: whatever work their employer gathers them for, the work, so far as it depends on him, should be free of every avoidable unhealthy condition. I showed that, while workers are practically unable to secure this sanitary justice for themselves, they can obtain no effective help from the paid administrators of sanitary policing. ... The lives of myriads of working men and women are now uselessly tortured and shortened by the endless physical suffering produced by their mere occupation.’

To show how workrooms affect health, Dr Simon gives the following mortality list.

I now turn to so-called domestic work. To see the horrors of this sphere of capital’s exploitation, built on the background of large industry, look at the apparently idyllic nail-making carried on in a few remote English villages. Here, examples from lace-making and straw-plaiting branches not yet run by machinery, or competing with machinery and manufacture, will suffice.

Of the 150,000 people employed in English lace production, about 10,000 fall under the Factory Act of 1861. The immense majority of the remaining 140,000 are women, young persons, and children of both sexes; men are only weakly represented. The health of this cheap exploitation material is shown by the following table from Dr Trueman, physician at Nottingham General Dispensary. Among 686 lace-maker patients, mostly aged 17 to 24, the following proportions had consumption.

This progress in the rate of consumption should satisfy even the most optimistic progressist and the most lie-spewing German free-trade bagman.

The Factory Act of 1861 regulates the actual making of lace where machinery does it, which is the rule in England. Looking only at so-called home workers, not workers concentrated in manufactories or warehouses, the branches divide into: first, finishing, the final adjustment of machine-made lace, with many further subdivisions; second, pillow-lace making.

Lace finishing is done as domestic work either in so-called mistresses’ houses or by women, alone or with their children, in their private homes. The women who keep the mistresses’ houses

are poor themselves. The workroom is part of their private home. They take orders from manufacturers and warehouse owners, and employ women, girls, and young children according to the size of their rooms and the changing demand of the business. Some places employ 20 to 40 women; others, 10 to 20. Children usually begin at six, though some begin below five. Ordinary hours run from 8 in the morning to 8 at night, with 1½ hours for meals, taken irregularly and often in the stinking work-holes themselves. When business is good, work often runs from 8, sometimes 6, in the morning until 10, 11, or 12 at night. English barracks allow each soldier 500–600 cubic feet, and military hospitals 1,200; these work-holes allow 67–100 cubic feet per person. Gaslight consumes the air’s oxygen. To keep the lace clean, children often have to take off their shoes, even in winter, although the floor is paving or brick.

“In Nottingham it is not unusual to find 15 to 20 children packed into a small room, perhaps no more than 12 feet square, working 15 hours out of 24 at labour exhausting in itself through tedium and monotony, and carried on under every possible health-destroying condition. ... Even the youngest work with strained attention and astonishing speed, hardly ever letting their fingers rest or move more slowly. If asked a question, they do not raise their eyes from the work, for fear of losing a moment.”

The long stick serves the mistresses as a stimulus in proportion as the working day is extended.

“The children gradually tire and grow as restless as birds toward the end of their long confinement to work that is monotonous, hard on the eyes, and exhausting through the sameness of the body’s position. It is true slave labour.” (“Their work is like slavery.”)

Where women work at home with their own children—in the modern sense, in a rented room, often an attic—the conditions may be even worse. This work is given out within 80 miles of Nottingham. When a child employed in the warehouses leaves at 9 or 10 at night, it is often given a bundle to take home and finish. The capitalist Pharisee, through one of his wage-servants, naturally adds the unctuous phrase, “that is for mother,” while knowing perfectly well that the poor child must sit up and help.

Pillow-lace making is carried on mainly in two English farming districts: the Honiton lace district, 20 to 30 miles along Devonshire’s south coast, including a few places in North Devon; and another covering much of Buckingham, Bedford, and Northampton, with neighbouring parts of Oxfordshire and Huntingdonshire. Farm labourers’ cottages are usually the workrooms. Some manufacturers employ over 3,000 such home workers, mainly children and young people, all female. The conditions of lace finishing return here, except that poor women run so-called lace schools in their cottages instead of mistresses’ houses. From age five, sometimes younger, until 12 or 15, children work in these schools: the youngest work four to eight hours in their first year, and later from 6 in the morning until 8 or 10 at night.

“The rooms are generally the ordinary living rooms of small cottages, with the fireplace blocked to keep out draughts. Sometimes even in winter the people inside are warmed only by their own animal heat. In other cases these schoolrooms are like small storage rooms, without a fireplace. ... The overcrowding of these holes and the resulting poisoned air are often extreme. There are also the harmful effects of drains, privies, rotting matter, and other refuse, usually in the approaches to the smaller cottages.”

As to space:

“In one lace school there are 18 girls and a mistress, with 33 cubic feet for each person; in another, where the stench is unbearable, 18 people have 24½ cubic feet each. In this industry one finds children of two and two-and-a-half employed.”

Where lace-making ends in rural Buckingham and Bedford, straw-plaiting begins. It covers much of Hertfordshire and the western and northern parts of Essex. In 1861, 48,043 people worked in straw-plaiting and straw-hat making: 3,815 males of all ages; the rest females, including 14,913 under 20 and about 7,000 children. Lace schools are replaced by straw-plait schools. Children usually begin learning to plait straw in their fourth year, sometimes between their third and fourth; of course, they receive no education. The children call ordinary elementary schools natural schools, as distinct from these blood-sucking institutions, where they are simply kept at work to make the task set by their half-starved mothers, usually 30 yards a day. Their mothers often make them work at home until 10, 11, or 12 at night. The straw cuts their fingers and mouths, which they constantly use to moisten it. Dr. Ballard reports the general view of London medical officers that 300 cubic feet is the minimum space for each person in a bedroom or workroom. In these schools the allowance is even smaller than in lace schools: 12⅔, 17, 18½, and under 22 cubic feet per person.

“The smaller of these figures,” says Commissioner White, “represent less space than half of what a child would occupy if packed into a box measuring 3 feet in every direction.”

Such is the children’s enjoyment of life until age 12 or 14. Their wretched, degraded parents think only of getting as much as possible out of them. Once grown, the children naturally care nothing for their parents and leave them.

“It is no wonder that ignorance and vice overflow in a population raised this way. ... Their morality stands at the lowest level. ... A large number of the women have illegitimate children, and some at so immature an age that even people familiar with criminal statistics are appalled.”

And the homeland of these model families is Europe’s Christian model country—so says Count Montalembert, certainly competent in Christianity.

Wages in these industries are miserable in any case—the exceptional maximum wage of children in straw-plait schools is 3 shillings—but the truck system, especially widespread in the lace districts, pushes them far below their nominal amount.

Cheapening labour-power through the mere abuse of women and immature workers, the theft of every normal condition of work and life, and the sheer brutality of overtime and night work eventually meets natural limits that cannot be crossed. So does the cheapening of commodities and capitalist exploitation in general that rest on these conditions. Once that point is finally reached—and it takes a long time—the hour comes for machinery and for the now rapid conversion of scattered domestic work (or also manufacture) into factory production.

The most colossal example of this movement is the production of wearing apparel. In the classification of the Children’s Employment Commission, it includes straw-hat and ladies’-hat makers, cap-makers, tailors, milliners and dressmakers, shirt-makers and seamstresses, corset-makers, glove-makers, shoemakers, and many smaller branches such as neckties and collars. In England and Wales in 1861, it employed 586,298 women, at least 115,242 under 20 and 16,560 under 15. The number of these women workers in the United Kingdom was 750,334. In England and Wales, 437,969 men worked in hat-making, shoemaking, glove-making, and tailoring: 14,964 under 15, 89,285 aged 15 to 20, and 333,117 over 20. Many related smaller branches are missing from these figures. Even so, the 1861 census gives England and Wales a total of 1,024,267 people in these industries, about as many as agriculture and livestock raising employ. One begins to understand why machinery helps conjure up such immense masses of products and “release” such immense masses of workers.

Wearing apparel is produced by manufactories that reproduce inside themselves a division of labour whose membra disjecta they found ready-made; by smaller master craftsmen who no longer work for individual consumers, but for manufactories and warehouses, so that whole towns and regions may specialise in shoemaking and similar branches; and, on the largest scale, by so-called home workers, the outside department of manufactories, warehouses, and even smaller masters. Large industry supplies the masses of working material, raw material, semi-finished goods, and so on. Its cheap human material (taillable à merci et miséricorde—delivered up to grace and mercy) consists of people “released” by large industry and agriculture. These manufactories arose chiefly because capitalists needed a ready army at hand for every movement of demand. Yet they let scattered handicraft and domestic work continue as their broad foundation. Their great production of surplus-value and the continuing cheapening of their articles rest chiefly on wages no higher than needed for miserable existence, joined to the maximum working time humanly possible. The cheapness of human sweat and blood turned into commodities constantly widened the market, especially England’s colonial market, where English habits and tastes also prevailed. At last a critical point came: the old method of sheer brutal exploitation of the workers, more or less joined to systematically developed division of labour, no longer met the growing market and the still faster-growing competition of capitalists. The hour of machinery struck. The decisively revolutionary machine that takes hold equally of all these countless branches, including millinery, tailoring, shoemaking, sewing, and hat-making, is—the sewing machine.

Its immediate effect on workers is roughly that of all machinery which, in the period of large industry, takes over new branches of trade. Children at the most immature ages are removed. Machine workers’ wages rise compared with home workers’ wages, though many of the latter belong to the poorest of the poor. The wages of better placed craftsmen who compete with the machine fall. The new machine workers are exclusively girls and young women. With mechanical power they destroy male labour’s monopoly in heavier work and drive masses of old women and immature children out of lighter work. Overwhelming competition kills the weakest hand workers. The hideous growth of death from starvation in London during the last decade runs alongside the spread of machine sewing. The new sewing-machine workers, who drive the machine by hand and foot or by hand alone, sitting or standing according to its weight, size, and kind, expend great labour-power. Their work is unhealthy because of the duration of the process, although the process is usually shorter than under the old system. Wherever the sewing machine enters already narrow and overcrowded workshops, as in shoemaking, corset-making, and hat-making, it adds to the unhealthy influences.

“The effect,” says Commissioner Lord, “when entering low-ceilinged workrooms where 30 to 40 machine workers work together, is unbearable. ... The heat, partly caused by gas ovens for warming the irons, is dreadful. ... Even where such rooms have so-called moderate hours, from 8 in the morning to 6 in the evening, 3 or 4 people still regularly faint every day.”

The revolution in the social way of working, the necessary result of changing the means of production, takes place through a varied tangle of transitional forms. They vary with how far and how long the sewing machine has taken hold of a branch; with workers’ previous situation; with the weight of manufacture, handicraft, or domestic work; and with the rent of workrooms. In millinery, for example, where work was already mainly organised through simple cooperation, the sewing machine first becomes only a new factor in manufacture. In tailoring, shirt-making, shoemaking, and similar trades, every form crosses with every other. Here is factory production proper. There middle operators receive raw material from the capitalist en chef and group 10 to 50 or more wage workers around sewing machines in chambers or attics. Finally, as with all machinery that forms no articulated system and can be used on a small scale, craftsmen or home workers, with their own families or a few outside workers, use sewing machines that belong to them. In England, however, the prevailing system is that the capitalist concentrates a larger number of machines in his own buildings and distributes their products among an army of home workers for further processing.

The variety of these transitional forms does not hide the tendency towards conversion into actual factory production. The sewing machine itself pushes previously separate branches into one building and under the command of the same capital; preparatory needlework and some other operations are best done where the machine is located; and craftsmen and home workers who produce with their own machines are inevitably expropriated. This fate has already reached some of them. The ever-growing capital invested in sewing machines drives production and creates market stoppages, which signal home workers to sell their machines. Overproduction of the machines themselves forces producers eager to sell to rent them out weekly, creating deadly competition for small machine owners. Constant changes in construction and falling prices continually depreciate old machines, which only large capitalists can then use profitably after buying them cheaply in masses. Replacing human beings with the steam engine finally decides the matter. At first steam meets merely technical barriers—machines shaking, difficulty controlling their speed, rapid damage to lighter machines—but experience soon overcomes them. The concentration of many work machines in larger manufactories drives the use of steam; competition between steam and human muscle speeds the concentration of workers and machines in large factories. England is thus now seeing the conversion of manufacture, handicraft, and domestic work into factory production in wearing apparel and most other trades, after these forms, wholly changed, broken apart, and distorted by large industry, had long reproduced and even exceeded all the monstrosities of the factory system without its positive elements of development.

This industrial revolution, proceeding spontaneously, is artificially accelerated when the Factory Acts are extended to all branches of industry in which women, young persons, and children work. The compulsory legal regulation of the working day—its length, pauses, beginning and end, the shift system for children, the exclusion of all children below a certain age, and so on—requires more machinery and the replacement of muscle by steam as motive power. To gain in space what is lost in time, it also stretches the means of production used in common—furnaces, buildings, and the rest—bringing greater concentration of the means of production and a corresponding greater gathering of workers. The chief objection, repeated passionately by every manufacture threatened by the Factory Act, is that maintaining business at its old scale requires greater capital outlay. But for the intermediate forms between manufacture and domestic work, and for domestic work itself, their ground sinks as soon as limits are set to the working day and child labour. Unlimited exploitation of cheap labour-power forms the sole basis of their competitiveness.

An essential condition of factory production, especially once the working day is regulated, is normal certainty of the result: producing a fixed quantity of goods or a desired useful effect in a given time. Legal pauses also assume that sudden, periodic stoppages do not damage the work being processed. This certainty of the result and the capacity to interrupt the work are naturally easier to achieve in purely mechanical trades than where chemical and physical processes matter, such as pottery, bleaching, dyeing, baking, and most metal manufactures. Under the slovenly unrestricted working day, night work, and free destruction of human beings, every natural obstacle soon counts as an eternal natural barrier to production. No poison destroys vermin more surely than the Factory Act destroys such natural barriers. No one shouted louder about impossibilities than the pottery gentlemen. In 1864 the Factory Act was imposed on them, and all impossibilities had vanished 16 months later. The Factory Act produced the

“improved method of making potters’ slip by pressure instead of evaporation, the new construction of ovens for drying unfired ware, and so on: events of great importance in pottery, marking a progress the last century could not show. The temperature of the ovens has been greatly reduced, with a considerable fall in coal consumption and a quicker effect on the ware.”

Despite every prediction, the cost price of earthenware did not rise; the quantity produced did. Exports in the 12 months from December 1864 to December 1865 exceeded the average value of the previous three years by £138,628. In match-making it counted as a natural law that boys, even while gulping down their dinner, had to keep dipping matches into a warm phosphorus mixture whose poisonous vapour rose into their faces. By making the saving of time necessary, the Factory Act of 1864 forced a dipping machine whose vapours cannot reach the workers. In lace-manufacturing branches not yet under the Act, it is now claimed that meal times cannot be regular because different lace materials need different drying times, from three minutes to an hour or more. To this the Commissioners of the Children’s Employment Commission reply:

“The circumstances are the same as in wallpaper printing. Some leading manufacturers in this branch argued strongly that the nature of the materials used and the variety of processes they pass through would not permit a sudden stop for meals without great loss. ... Clause 6 of section 6 of the Factory Acts Extension Act of 1864 gave them an 18-month period from the Act’s passage, after which they had to follow the meal pauses specified by the Factory Act.”

No sooner had the law received parliamentary sanction than the manufacturers discovered:

“The inconveniences we expected from introducing the Factory Act have not appeared. We do not find production hindered in any way. In fact, we produce more in the same time.”

It is clear that the English Parliament, which no one will accuse of genius, has learned from experience that a compulsory law can simply dictate away all the supposed natural obstacles to limiting and regulating the working day. When the Factory Act enters a branch of industry, manufacturers are therefore given six to eighteen months to remove the technical obstacles. Mirabeau’s “Impossible? Ne me dites jamais ce bête de mot!”—“Impossible? Never tell me that silly word!”—applies especially to modern technology. When the Factory Act ripens, as in a hothouse, the material elements needed to turn manufacture into factory production, it also speeds the downfall of the smaller masters and the concentration of capital through the need for greater capital outlay.

Beyond purely technical obstacles that technology can remove, regulating the working day encounters workers’ irregular habits, especially where piece wages prevail and time wasted in part of a day or week can be made up by later overtime or night work. This method brutalises the adult worker and ruins the immature and female companions. Although this irregular spending of labour-power is a natural, rough reaction to the tedium of monotonous drudgery, it comes to a far greater degree from anarchy in production, which itself presupposes capital’s unrestrained exploitation of labour-power. Alongside the general periodic fluctuations of the industrial cycle and each branch’s particular market fluctuations comes the so-called season: either favourable seasons for shipping, or fashion and sudden large orders that must be completed in the shortest time. Railways and telegraphs extend the habit of such orders.

“The extension of the railway system through the country,” says a London manufacturer, “has greatly encouraged short orders. Buyers now come from Glasgow, Manchester, and Edinburgh every 14 days or so to the City warehouses we supply for wholesale purchases. They give orders that must be completed at once instead of buying from stock, as they used to. In earlier years we could always work in slack times for the demand of the next season; now no one can predict what the demand will be then.”

In factories and manufactories not yet under the Factory Act, the season brings periodic and most fearful overwork through sudden orders. In the outside department of factory, manufactory, and warehouse—in domestic work, already entirely irregular—workers depend wholly on the capitalist’s whims for raw material and orders. Here the capitalist is not held back by concern for the value of buildings and machines, and risks nothing from a stoppage except the workers’ skin. A constantly disposable industrial reserve army is systematically reared: during one part of the year it is decimated by the most inhuman compulsion to work; during the other, it is left to go ragged for lack of work.

“Employers,” says the Children’s Employment Commission, “exploit the habitual irregularity of domestic work to force it, whenever extra work is needed, up to 11, 12, or 2 at night—indeed, as the usual phrase goes, at all hours—and in places where ‘the stench is enough to knock you down. You may go to the door and open it, but shudder at going any further.’” “Our employers are funny fellows,” says one examined witness, a shoemaker. “They think it does a boy no harm if he is worked to death for half a year and then is almost forced to loaf for the other half.”

Just as technical obstacles were, and still are, so-called business habits—“usages which have grown with the growth of trade”—are claimed by interested capitalists as natural barriers to production. This was a favourite cry of the cotton lords when the Factory Act first threatened them. Although their industry depends more than any other on the world market and thus on shipping, experience proved them false. Since then English factory inspectors have treated every alleged business obstacle as hollow nonsense. The thorough, conscientious investigations of the Children’s Employment Commission prove that, in some industries, regulation of the working day would only spread the labour already used more evenly across the whole year; that it is the first rational curb on fashion’s murderous, meaningless whims, themselves unsuited to the system of large industry; that ocean shipping and means of communication in general have removed the real technical basis of seasonal work; and that all other supposedly uncontrollable circumstances are removed by additional buildings, additional machinery, an increased number of workers employed at once, and the resulting changes in wholesale trade. Yet capital, as it repeatedly declares through its representatives, accepts such changes only “under the pressure of a General Act of Parliament” that compulsorily regulates the working day.

Factory legislation is the first conscious and planned reaction of society against the spontaneously formed shape of its production process. As we have seen, it is as necessary a product of large industry as cotton yarn, self-acting mules, and the electric telegraph. Before turning to its general extension in England, we must briefly note some clauses of the English Factory Act that do not concern the length of the working day.

Apart from their wording, which makes evasion easy for capitalists, the health clauses are very meagre. They amount to rules on whitewashing, a few other cleanliness measures, ventilation, and protection from dangerous machinery. We shall return in Book III to manufacturers’ fanatical fight against the clause that forces them to spend a little to protect the limbs of their ‘hands’. Once again, the free-trade dogma is splendidly confirmed: in a society of opposed interests, each person promotes the common good by pursuing private interest. One example is enough. In the last 20 years, flax production and the Irish scutching mills that beat and break flax have grown greatly; in 1864 there were about 1,800 mills. Periodically in autumn and winter, young persons and women—the sons, daughters, and wives of nearby small tenant farmers, all wholly unfamiliar with machinery—are taken from fieldwork to feed flax into their rollers. The accidents, in scale and intensity, are wholly without precedent in the history of machinery. At the Kildinan mill near Cork, six deaths and 60 severe mutilations occurred from 1852 to 1856; simple devices costing a few shillings could have prevented every case. Dr W. White, the certifying surgeon for factories at Downpatrick, says in an official report dated 16 December 1865:

“Accidents in scutching mills are of the most terrible kind. In many cases a quarter of the body is torn from the trunk. Death, or a future of miserable incapacity and suffering, are common results of these wounds. The growth of the mills in this country will naturally extend these dreadful results. I am convinced that suitable state supervision of scutching mills could avert great sacrifices of life and limb.”

What better characterises capitalist production than the need to impose even the simplest devices for cleanliness and health on it by a coercive law of the state?

The factory inspectors’ report records: “The Factory Act of 1864 has whitewashed and cleansed more than 200 workshops in the potteries, after twenty years’ or complete abstinence from any such operation” (this is capital’s ‘abstinence’) “in places where 27,878 workers were employed, who breathed, during excessive day-work and often night-work, a mephitic atmosphere that impregnated an otherwise comparatively harmless occupation with disease and death. The Act has greatly increased ventilation.”

This branch of the Factory Act also shows plainly how capitalist production, by its very nature, excludes every rational improvement beyond a certain point. English doctors have repeatedly noted, with one voice, that 500 cubic feet of air space per person is the barely sufficient minimum for continued work. If the Factory Act, indirectly through all its coercive measures, hastens the conversion of smaller workshops into factories, hence indirectly encroaches on the property rights of smaller capitalists and secures monopoly for the great ones, then legally imposing the necessary air space for every worker in a workshop would directly expropriate thousands of small capitalists at one stroke. It would attack capitalist production at its root: the self-valorisation of capital, large or small, through the ‘free’ purchase and consumption of labour-power. Factory legislation runs out of breath before these 500 cubic feet of air. Health authorities, industrial commissions, and factory inspectors repeatedly state both the need for them and the impossibility of imposing them on capital. They therefore declare consumption and other lung diseases among workers to be conditions of capital’s life.

Meagre as the education clauses of the Factory Act are as a whole, they proclaim elementary schooling a compulsory condition of labour. Their success first proved that schooling and gymnastics can be combined with manual work, and manual work with schooling and gymnastics. By questioning schoolmasters, factory inspectors soon found that factory children, though they received only half as much instruction as regular day pupils, learnt as much and often more.

“The matter is simple. Those who spend only half the day at school are always fresh and almost always able and willing to receive instruction. Half work and half school make each activity a rest and recovery from the other, and so make both much more suitable for the child than continuing either without a break. A boy who has sat at school from early morning, especially in hot weather, cannot compete with one who comes alert and lively from work.”

Further evidence appears in N. W. Senior’s speech to the Social Science Congress at Edinburgh in 1863. He also shows how the one-sided, unproductive, prolonged school day of children in the upper and middle classes uselessly increases teachers’ work while wasting the children’s time, health, and energy not only fruitlessly but with absolute harm. From the factory system, as one can trace in detail in Robert Owen, sprang the germ of the education of the future, which for every child over a certain age will combine productive labour with instruction and gymnastics—not merely as a way to increase social production, but as the only method of producing fully developed human beings.

Modern industry technically abolishes the manufacturing division of labour, which annexed a whole person for life to one detail operation, while its capitalist form reproduces that division even more monstrously. In the factory proper, it turns the worker into the conscious appendage of a part-machine. Elsewhere, it does so partly through sporadic machinery and machine work, and partly by making women’s work, child labour, and unskilled work the new basis of the division of labour. This contradiction forces itself forward. One form of it is the dreadful fact that a great part of the children in modern factories and manufactures are fastened from the tenderest age to the simplest tasks and exploited for years without learning any work that could later make them useful even in the same factory or manufacture. English printing houses once moved apprentices from easier to more substantial work. They learned their way until they became finished printers, and reading and writing were required for the trade. The printing machine changed all this. It uses one adult machine attendant and machine boys, mostly aged 11 to 17, whose sole task is to put sheets under the machine or take printed sheets away. In London especially, they do this drudgery for 14, 15, or 16 uninterrupted hours on several days of the week, and often for 36 hours in succession, with only two hours for meals and sleep. Many cannot read and are generally ‘utterly wild, abnormal creatures’.

“To fit them for their work, no intellectual training of any kind is needed. There is little room for skill and still less for judgement. Their wages, though somewhat high for boys, do not grow in proportion as they grow up. The great majority have no prospect of the better-paid and more responsible post of machine overseer, because each machine has only one attendant and often four boys.”

As soon as they are too old for this childish work, at the latest in their 17th year, the printing house dismisses them. They become recruits of crime. Attempts to find them work elsewhere fail because of their ignorance, coarseness, and bodily and mental degradation.

What applies to the division of labour inside the manufacturing workshop also applies to the division of labour inside society. So long as handicraft and manufacture are the general basis of social production, tying producers to an exclusive branch and breaking up the original variety of their work is a necessary step in development. On that basis, each branch works out an empirically suitable technical form, perfects it slowly, and, once it reaches maturity, quickly crystallises it. Apart from new material supplied by trade, change comes only through gradual changes in tools. Once experience has settled a tool’s suitable form, it ossifies, often passing unchanged for thousands of years from one generation to another. Until the eighteenth century, the separate trades were called mysteries, whose darkness only the practically and professionally initiated could enter. Large industry tore away the veil that hid people’s own social production process and made its naturally separate branches riddles to one another, even to those initiated in each branch. Its principle—breaking every process into its elements, at first without regard to the human hand—created modern technology. The motley, seemingly unconnected, ossified forms of the social production process became conscious, planned applications of natural science, set apart according to the useful result sought. Technology also found the few basic forms of movement that all productive activity by the human body must take despite the many tools used, just as mechanics sees the repeated simple powers beneath the greatest complexity of machinery. Modern industry never treats a given form of production as final. Its technical basis is therefore revolutionary, while earlier modes were essentially conservative. With machinery, chemical processes, and other methods, it continually overturns the technical basis of production, workers’ functions, and the social combinations of the labour process. It also continually revolutionises the division of labour in society, throwing masses of capital and masses of workers from one branch into another. The nature of large industry therefore requires alternation of labour, a flow of functions, and the worker’s all-round mobility. Yet in its capitalist form it reproduces the old division of labour with its rigid specialisations. We have seen how this absolute contradiction destroys every calm, firmness, and security in the worker’s life; how it constantly threatens to strike the means of subsistence from the worker’s hand along with the means of labour—‘You take my life when you take the means whereby I live’—and threatens to make the worker superfluous with the worker’s detail-function. It rages in the unbroken sacrifice of the working class, the boundless wasting of labour-powers, and the devastation of social anarchy. That is the negative side. For now alternation of labour prevails only as an overpowering natural law, with the blindly destructive force of a natural law that meets obstacles everywhere. Through its catastrophes, large industry itself makes it a question of life or death to recognise alternation of work—and hence the greatest possible versatility of workers—as a general social law of production, and to adapt conditions to its normal working. It makes it a question of life or death to replace the monstrosity of a miserable, disposable worker population kept in reserve for capital’s changing needs of exploitation with the whole person’s capacity for changing demands of work; to replace the partial individual, the mere bearer of one social detail-function, with the fully developed individual, for whom different social functions are alternating kinds of activity. Technical and agricultural schools, together with vocational schools where working-class children receive some teaching in technology and in using different tools of production, are naturally arising parts of this change. Factory legislation, the first concession wrung from capital, combines only elementary schooling with factory work. But with the inevitable conquest of political power by the working class, theoretical and practical technological instruction will also take its place in workers’ schools. There can be no doubt that the capitalist form of production and the worker’s economic conditions that correspond to it stand in the sharpest contradiction to such ferments of upheaval and to their aim: abolishing the old division of labour. Yet the development of the contradictions of a historical form of production is the only historical path to its dissolution and reshaping. ‘Ne sutor ultra crepidam’—‘shoemaker, stick to your last’—the highest wisdom of handicraft became dreadful nonsense as soon as the watchmaker Watt invented the steam-engine, the barber Arkwright the throstle, and the working jeweller Fulton the steamship.

As long as Factory legislation regulates work in factories, manufactures, and similar places, it appears only as interference with capital’s rights of exploitation. But regulating so-called home work at once appears as a direct attack on patria potestas, paternal power—that is, in modern terms, parental authority. The tender-hearted English Parliament long pretended to recoil from this step. The force of facts finally compelled it to admit that large industry, by destroying the economic foundation of the old family and its corresponding family work, also dissolves the old family ties themselves. The rights of children had to be proclaimed.

“Unhappily,” says the final report of the Children’s Employment Commission of 1866, “the whole body of evidence shows that children of both sexes need protection against no one so much as against their parents.” The system of boundless exploitation of child labour in general, and of home work in particular, is “maintained because parents exercise an arbitrary and ruinous power over their young and tender offspring without curb or control ... Parents must not have the absolute power to make their children mere machines for earning so much weekly wage ... Children and young persons have a right to protection by legislation against the misuse of parental power, which breaks their physical strength too early and degrades them in the scale of moral and intellectual beings.”

It was not the misuse of parental power that created capital’s direct or indirect exploitation of immature labour-power. On the contrary, the capitalist mode of exploitation, by abolishing the economic basis that corresponded to parental power, turned that power into misuse. However terrible and disgusting the dissolution of the old family within the capitalist system may appear, large industry nevertheless creates a new economic basis for a higher form of the family and of relations between the sexes by assigning women, young persons, and children of both sexes the decisive role in socially organised production outside the household. It is as absurd to treat the Christian-German form of the family as absolute as to treat the ancient Roman, ancient Greek, or Eastern forms that way; these themselves form a historical series of development. It is equally clear that the composition of the combined workforce from people of both sexes and very different ages—although, in its spontaneously brutal capitalist form, where the worker exists for the production process and not the production process for the worker, it is a pest-source of corruption and slavery—must under suitable conditions conversely become a source of humane development.

The need to turn the Factory Act from an exceptional law for spinning and weaving—the first products of machine production—into a law for all social production arises from the historical course of large industry. Against its background, the inherited forms of manufacture, handicraft, and home work are completely transformed. Manufacture continually turns into factory production, handicraft into manufacture, and the spheres of handicraft and home work become, in a remarkably short time, dens of misery where the wildest excesses of capitalist exploitation have free play. Two circumstances finally decide the matter. First, whenever capital is subject to state control only at individual points on the social periphery, it compensates itself all the more boundlessly at the other points. Second, capitalists themselves cry out for equality in the conditions of competition, that is, equal limits on labour exploitation. Let us hear two heartbeats on this. Messrs W. Cooksley of Bristol, makers of nails, chains, and similar goods, voluntarily introduced Factory Act rules into their own business.

“Because the old, irregular system continues in neighbouring works, they are exposed to the hardship of seeing their working boys enticed to continue work elsewhere after 6 p.m. ‘This,’ they naturally say, ‘is an injustice and a loss to us, because it exhausts part of the boys’ strength, whose full advantage belongs to us.’”

Mr J. Simpson, a London paper-box and bag maker, tells the commissioners of the Children’s Employment Commission:

“He would sign every petition for introducing the Factory Acts. As things are, he always feels restless at night, after closing his workshop, at the thought that others may work longer and snatch orders away from under his nose.” The Children’s Employment Commission sums up: “It would be unjust to the larger employers to subject their factories to regulation while, in their own branch, small businesses face no legal restriction of working hours. Along with the injustice of unequal conditions of competition over hours, the larger factory owners would also lose young and female labour to workshops spared by the law. Finally, this would encourage the multiplication of smaller workshops, which are almost without exception the least favourable for health, comfort, education, and the people’s general improvement.”

In its final report, the Children’s Employment Commission proposes bringing more than 1.4 million children, young persons, and women under the Factory Act. About half of them are exploited in small businesses and home work.

“If Parliament accepts our proposal in its full extent,” it says, “there can be no doubt that such legislation would have the most beneficial influence not only on the young and weak, whom it first concerns, but on the still greater mass of adult workers who fall directly (women) and indirectly (men) within its scope. It would impose regular and reduced hours of work on them. It would husband and accumulate the store of physical strength on which their own well-being and that of the country so greatly depend. It would protect the rising generation from early over-exertion, which undermines their constitution and leads to premature decay. Finally, at least through the age of 13, it would provide the chance of elementary schooling and end the incredible ignorance so faithfully described in the Commission reports, which can be viewed only with the most painful feeling and a deep sense of national humiliation.”

The Tory ministry announced in the Speech from the Throne of 5 February 1867 that it had formulated the proposals of the Industrial Commission of Inquiry into Bills. To reach this point required another 20-year Experimentum in corpore vili—an experiment on a worthless body. A parliamentary commission to investigate child labour had already been appointed in 1840. Its report of 1842 unfolded, in the words of N. W. Senior:

“The most dreadful picture of the avarice, selfishness, and cruelty of capitalists and parents, and of the misery, degradation, and destruction of children and young persons, ever to strike the eye of the world ... One may suppose that the report describes the atrocities of a past age. Unfortunately, however, reports are at hand that these atrocities continue, as intensely as ever. A pamphlet published by Hardwicke two years ago declares that the abuses censured in 1842 are today” (1863) “in full bloom ... This report” (of 1842) “lay unnoticed for 20 years, during which those children, grown up with neither the slightest idea of what we call morality, nor of schooling, religion, or natural family love, were allowed to become the parents of the present generation.”

Meanwhile, the social situation had changed. Parliament did not dare to reject the demands of the Commission of 1863 as it had once rejected those of 1842. Therefore, already in 1864, when the Commission had published only part of its reports, the earthenware industry, including pottery, the making of wallpaper, matches, cartridges and percussion caps, and velvet cutting were placed under the laws that applied to the textile industry. In the Speech from the Throne of 5 February 1867, the Tory cabinet then announced further Bills based on the Commission’s final proposals, after it had completed its work in 1866.

On 15 August 1867, the Factory Acts Extension Act received Royal Assent; on 21 August, the Workshops' Regulation Act did. The first regulates large industries, the second small ones.

The Factory Acts Extension Act covers blast furnaces; iron and copper works; foundries; machine factories and metal workshops; gutta-percha, paper, glass, and tobacco works; printing works and bookbinding. It also covers all industrial workplaces of this kind where 50 or more people work at the same time for at least 100 days a year.

The following legal definitions show how wide the field covered by this law is.

In this law, handicraft means any manual work done as a trade or for gain in making, altering, decorating, repairing or finishing for sale any article or part of one.

A workshop means any room or place, covered or open to the air, where a child, young worker or woman carries on handicraft, and where the person employing them has the right of access and control.

Employed means working at a ‘handicraft’, whether paid or unpaid, under a master or a parent, as specified in more detail below.

A parent means a father, mother, guardian, or anyone who has guardianship or control over any … child or young worker.

Clause 7 fines people for employing children, young workers, and women against the Act. It fines not only the occupier of the workshop, whether or not that occupier is a parent, but also

the parents or other people who have the child, young worker, or woman in their care, or who gain directly from that person's work.

The Factory Acts Extension Act covers large establishments, but it falls short of the Factory Act through many wretched exceptions and cowardly compromises with capitalists.

Wretched in every detail, the Workshops' Regulation Act remained a dead letter in the hands of the town and local authorities charged with enforcing it. In 1871 Parliament took that power from them and gave it to factory inspectors, adding more than 100,000 workshops and 300 brickworks to their district at a stroke. Yet it added only eight assistants to a staff that was already far too small.

The striking thing about English legislation in 1867 is that the parliament of the ruling classes was forced in principle to accept extraordinary and wide measures against the abuses of capitalist exploitation. But it put those measures into effect with half-heartedness, resistance, and mala fides.

The Inquiry Commission of 1862 also proposed new rules for mining. Mining differs from other industries because landlords and industrial capitalists there go hand in hand. Their conflict had helped factory legislation; the absence of that conflict is enough to explain the delays and chicanery in mine legislation.

The Inquiry Commission of 1840 made revelations so dreadful and outrageous, and caused such a scandal across Europe, that Parliament had to save its conscience with the Mining Act of 1842. It limited itself to forbidding underground mine work by women and by children under 10.

Then came the Mines' Inspection Act of 1860. It required specially appointed public officers to inspect mines, and barred boys aged 10 to 12 from employment unless they had a school certificate or attended school for a set number of hours. The Act became a complete dead letter because there were absurdly few inspectors, their powers were tiny, and for other reasons that will appear later.

One of the newest Blue Books on mines is the Report from the Select Committee on Mines, together with ... Evidence, 23 July 1866. A committee of members of the House of Commons, empowered to summon and question witnesses, produced this thick folio. Its Report itself takes only five lines: the committee has nothing to say and more witnesses must be questioned.

The way witnesses are examined recalls court cross-examinations, where a lawyer uses shameless, confusing questions in every direction to unsettle a witness and twist words in the witness's mouth. Here the parliamentary examiners themselves are the advocates, among them mine owners and exploiters; the witnesses are mine workers, mostly coal miners. The whole farce is too characteristic of the spirit of capital not to give some extracts. For clarity, I arrange the results under headings. In the English Blue Books each question and required answer is numbered, and the witnesses quoted are coal-mine workers.

1. Boys from age 10 in the mines. Their work, including the required journey to and from the mines, usually lasts 14 to 15 hours, sometimes longer: from 3, 4, or 5 in the morning until 4 or 5 in the evening (n. 6, 452, 83). Adults work in two shifts of eight hours, but boys get no such change because it would cost money (n. 80, 203, 204). Younger children chiefly open and shut ventilation doors in different parts of the mine; older ones do heavy work, carrying coal and so on (n. 122, 739, 740). These long underground hours last until age 18 or 22, when proper mining work begins (n. 161). Children and young people are worked harder now than in any earlier period (n. 1663-1667). Almost all mine workers demand an Act of Parliament banning mine work before age 14. Hussey Vivian, himself a mine exploiter, then asks:

Vivian asks whether this demand depends on how poor the parents are. Mr Bruce asks whether, where a father is dead or maimed, it would be hard to take this resource from the family, and whether they would ban underground work before 14 in every case. The answer is: in every case (n. 107-110). Vivian asks whether parents would then send children to factories. The answer is: generally, no (n. 174).

A worker says that opening and shutting doors looks easy but is very painful work. Apart from the constant draught, the boy is imprisoned as surely as in a dark prison cell. Bourgeois Vivian asks whether the boy cannot read while watching the door if he has a light. The answer is that he would first have to buy candles, and besides would not be allowed to read: he is there to watch his work and perform his duty. The worker has never seen a boy reading in the pit (n. 139, 141-160).

2. Education. Mine workers demand a law making children's schooling compulsory, as in factories. They call the 1860 Act's certificate requirement for boys aged 10 to 12 purely illusory. The ‘painful’ interrogation by capitalist examining judges becomes truly droll here.

At n. 115, the question is whether the Act is needed more against employers or parents. The answer is: against both. Asked at n. 116 whether it is needed more against one than the other, the worker answers: how can I answer that? At n. 137, employers are asked whether they want to adjust work hours to schooling: never. At n. 211 the question is whether mine workers later improve their education. The answer is that they generally get worse, take up bad habits, drink and gambling, and become completely shipwrecked.

Asked at n. 454 why children do not go to evening schools, the worker says that most coal districts have none, and that after long overwork their eyes close with tiredness. The bourgeois concludes that they are against education. The answer is: certainly not, but so on. At n. 443, employers are legally required to demand school certificates for children aged 10 to 12, but they do not do it; at n. 444, the clause is not carried out at all. At n. 717 and 718, the great majority of mine workers are said to care deeply about education and to want the law enforced.

Why, at n. 720, do workers not enforce it? A worker may want to refuse boys without certificates, but then he becomes a marked man, a gezeichneter Mann. Marked by whom? By his employer (n. 721). Would employers persecute a man for obeying the law? The answer is: they would (n. 722). Why do workers not refuse to employ such boys? It is not left to their choice (n. 723). At n. 1634, the worker demands compulsory parliamentary action if anything effective is to be done for mine workers' children. Asked whether this should cover all workers in Great Britain, he says he is there to speak for mine workers. Their children are an exception because of their physical condition: overwork in the mines gives them fewer chances for day or Sunday schooling, not a greater need for education than other boys (n. 1636-1640). Questions of this kind cannot be treated absolutely (n. 1644). There are not enough schools (n. 1646); if the State requires every child to attend, the schools will arise as circumstances require (n. 1647). The great majority of both the children and adult mine workers can neither write nor read (n. 705, 726).

3. Women's labour. Since 1842 women have no longer been used underground, but they are used above ground: loading coal, pulling tubs to canals and railway wagons, sorting coal, and so on. Their employment has grown greatly in the last three or four years (n. 1727). They are mostly women, daughters, and widows of mine workers, from age 12 to 50 or 60 (n. 647, 1779, 1781).

Asked what mine workers think of women's employment at mines, the answer is that they generally condemn it (n. 648). Asked why, the worker says they see it as degrading to the sex: women wear a kind of men's clothes; in many cases all shame is suppressed; some smoke; the work is as dirty as work in the pits; and many married women cannot fulfil their household duties (n. 649, 651 ff., 701). Asked whether widows can find equally profitable work elsewhere, earning 8 to 10 shillings a week, the answer is: I cannot say (n. 709). Heart of stone! The question then asks whether they are still resolved to cut off this livelihood. The answer is: certainly (n. 710).

Asked where this feeling comes from, the worker says: we mine workers have too much respect for the fair sex to see it condemned to the coal pit. Much of the work is very hard; many of these girls lift 10 tons a day (n. 1715). Asked whether women employed at mines are less moral than factory women, the answer is that the proportion of bad ones is greater. Asked whether the worker is satisfied with morality in factories, he says no. Does he then want to prohibit women's factory work? No: it is more honourable and suitable for women. Is it still harmful to their morality? No, far less than pit work. The worker says he speaks not only on moral grounds, but on physical and social ones. The girls' social degradation is wretched and extreme; when they become miners' wives, men suffer deeply from it, leave home, and take to drink (n. 1736).

Would the same not apply to women in ironworks? The worker cannot speak for other trades. What difference is there between women in ironworks and mines? He has not studied it. Can he find a difference between the two classes? He has established nothing about that, but from visiting house to house he knows the shameful state of things in his district (n. 1737, 1740, 1741). Would he like to abolish women's work wherever it is degrading? Yes: children's best feelings must come from maternal training. But does that not also apply to agricultural work by women? That lasts only two seasons, while here women work all four, sometimes day and night, wet through to the skin, their constitutions weakened and their health broken (n. 1750, 1751). Has he not failed to study women's employment generally? He says he has looked around him and found nowhere anything parallel to women's work at coal mines. It is men's work, work for strong men. The better mine workers, who seek to rise and become more humane, are pulled down by their women instead of finding support in them (n. 1753, 1793, 1794, 1808).

After the bourgeois have asked still more crooked questions, the secret of their sympathy for widows, poor families, and so on finally comes out:

The answer explains: ‘The coal owner appoints certain gentlemen to supervise the works, and their policy, to win approval, is to put everything on the cheapest possible footing. The girls employed receive 1 shilling to 1 shilling 6 pence a day, where a man would have to receive 2 shillings 6 pence’ (n. 1816).

4. Coroner's juries.

Asked whether workers trust coroner's inquests—investigations by the coroner—after accidents, the answer is no (n. 360). Why not? People put on the juries know absolutely nothing about mines. Workers are never called except as witnesses. The jurors are usually local shopkeepers, under the influence of mine owners who are their customers, and they do not even understand the technical words used by witnesses. Workers demand that mine workers make up part of the jury; on average, the verdict goes against the evidence (n. 361-375).

Must juries not be impartial? Yes (n. 378). Would workers be impartial? The witness sees no reason why not: they have technical knowledge (n. 379). Would they tend to give unfairly harsh verdicts for workers? No, he does not think so (n. 380).

5. False measures and weights. Workers demand weekly instead of fortnightly pay, payment by weight instead of by the cubic capacity of tubs, and protection against false weights.

At n. 1071 the examiner asks: if tubs are fraudulently enlarged, can a man not leave after fourteen days' notice? The worker answers that wherever he goes he finds the same thing. Can he not leave the place where the wrong is done? ‘It is generally prevailing’ (n. 1072). Can he leave each respective place after fourteen days' notice? Yes (n. 1073).

Sprinkle sand over it!

6. Mine inspection. Workers suffer not only from accidents caused by exploding gases.

A worker says that the bad ventilation in coal mines leaves people barely able to breathe and unfit for any work. In the part of the mine where he works, foul air has put many people in bed for weeks. The main passages usually have enough air, but not the places where they work. If a man complains to the inspector about ventilation, he is dismissed and becomes a marked man who can find no work elsewhere. The Mining Inspection Act of 1860 is a mere paper rag. There are far too few inspectors: one may make a formal visit only once in seven years. Their inspector is an incapable man of 70, responsible for more than 130 coal mines. They need more inspectors and subinspectors.

Asked at n. 280 whether the government should keep an army of inspectors able to do everything workers demand without information from workers themselves, the answer is no: that is impossible, but inspectors should come to the mines and get their information there. Asked at n. 285 whether this would shift responsibility (!) for ventilation from mine owners to government officials, the worker says no: their job must be to enforce the laws already in force. Asked whether subinspectors mean people on lower pay and of lower quality, he says he does not want them lower if better people can be had (n. 294). Do they want more inspectors or a lower kind? They need people who move about the mines themselves and are not afraid for their own skin (n. 295). Would inferior inspectors create dangers through lack of skill? No: the government must appoint suitable people (n. 297).

This kind of examination finally becomes too much even for the president of the investigating committee.

He interrupts: you want practical people who look around in the mines themselves and report to the inspector, who can then use his higher scientific knowledge. Would ventilating all these old workings not cost much? Yes, costs might arise, but human lives would be protected (n. 531).

At n. 581, a coal worker protests against Section 17 of the Act of 1860:

If a mine inspector finds part of a mine unfit for work, he must report it to the mine owner and the Home Secretary. The owner then has 20 days to consider the matter and may refuse any alteration. If the owner refuses, he writes to the Home Secretary and proposes five mining engineers, from whom the Secretary must choose arbitrators. In this way, workers say, the mine owner virtually appoints his own judges.

At n. 586, the bourgeois examiner, himself a mine owner:

This is a purely speculative objection. So you have a very poor opinion of mining engineers' integrity? The worker answers that the arrangement is certainly unfair and unjust. Do mining engineers not have a public character that puts them above the partial decisions feared? The worker refuses to answer about their personal character. He is convinced that they act very partially in many cases, and that they should not hold this power where human lives are at stake (n. 588, 589).

The same bourgeois has the audacity to ask:

Do you not think that mine owners also suffer losses in explosions?

Finally, at n. 1042:

Can you workers not look after your own interests without calling on the government's help? No.

In 1865 Great Britain had 3,217 coal mines and 12 inspectors. A Yorkshire mine owner himself calculated in the Times of 26 January 1867 that, apart from office work that took all their time, an inspector could visit each mine only once in ten years. No wonder that in recent years, especially in 1866 and 1867, catastrophes grew in number and scale, sometimes costing 200 to 300 workers. These are the beauties of ‘free’ capitalist production!

However defective it was, the Act of 1872 was the first to regulate the working hours of children employed in mines and to make exploiters and mine owners responsible, to some extent, for so-called accidents.

The Royal Commission of 1867, which investigated the employment in agriculture of children, young people, and women, published several very important reports. Attempts have been made to apply the principles of factory legislation to agriculture in a modified form, but all have so far failed completely. What matters here is the existence of an irresistible tendency toward the general application of those principles.

Once the general extension of factory legislation has become unavoidable as physical and mental protection for the working class, it also generalises and speeds the change from scattered, dwarf-scale work processes to combined work processes on a large social scale. It therefore speeds the concentration of capital and the exclusive rule of the factory system. It destroys the ancient and transitional forms behind which capital's rule still partly hides, replacing them with its direct, unveiled rule. It thereby also generalises the direct struggle against that rule.

While it forces uniformity, regularity, order, and economy inside individual workshops, the huge spur that limits and rules on the working day give to technique increases the anarchy and catastrophes of capitalist production as a whole, the intensity of labour, and the competition of machinery with the worker. By destroying small-scale and domestic production, it destroys the last refuges of the ‘redundant population’ and with it the social mechanism's former safety valve. Along with the material conditions and social combination of production, it matures the contradictions and antagonisms of capitalist production, and thus at the same time the elements of a new society and the forces that overturn the old one.

The revolution large industry brings to agriculture and to the social relations of its producers can be shown only later. For now, a brief indication of a few anticipated results is enough. Agricultural machinery is largely free of the physical harms it brings factory workers, yet it makes workers redundant more intensely and without counter-stroke, as we shall later see in detail. In Cambridge and Suffolk, the cultivated area expanded greatly over the previous twenty years, while the rural population fell not only relatively but absolutely. In the United States, agricultural machinery has so far replaced workers only virtually: it lets producers cultivate a larger area without actually driving out workers already employed. In England and Wales in 1861, 1,034 people made agricultural machines, while only 1,205 agricultural workers were employed on steam and working machines.

In agriculture, large industry is most revolutionary because it destroys the "peasant," the old society’s bulwark, and substitutes the wage-labourer. The countryside’s need for social transformation and its conflicts are thereby brought level with those of the towns. The most habitually slothful and irrational way of running agriculture gives way to the conscious, technological application of science. Capitalist production completes the breaking of the original family bond between agriculture and manufacture, which had enclosed the childishly undeveloped form of both. At the same time, it creates the material conditions for a new, higher synthesis: the union of agriculture and industry on the basis of forms each has developed in opposition to the other.

By gathering an ever larger urban population in great centres, capitalist production concentrates society’s historical driving force. But it also disrupts the material metabolism between humanity and the earth: soil constituents consumed by people as food and clothing do not return to the soil, though that return is the lasting natural condition of soil fertility. It thereby also destroys urban workers’ physical health and rural workers’ intellectual life. Yet by destroying the conditions in which this metabolism arose naturally, it compels its systematic restoration as a regulating law of social production, in a form adequate to full human development.

In agriculture as in manufacture, capital’s transformation of the production process is at the same time the martyrology of the producers. The instrument of labour becomes a means of the worker’s subjugation, exploitation, and impoverishment; the social combination of labour processes becomes the organised suppression of the worker’s individual vitality, freedom, and independence. The scattering of rural workers over larger areas also breaks their power of resistance, while concentration increases that of urban workers. As in urban industry, modern agriculture buys greater productive power and greater fluidity of labour by laying waste to and consuming by disease labour-power itself. Every advance in capitalist agriculture is an advance not only in the art of robbing the worker but also in the art of robbing the soil; every advance in raising fertility for a given period is also an advance in ruining the lasting sources of that fertility. The more a country, like the United States, begins its development with large industry as its background, the faster this destruction proceeds. Capitalist production therefore develops the technique and combination of the social production process only by simultaneously undermining the springs of all wealth: the earth and the worker.