We started from the premise that labour-power is bought and sold at its value. Like any other commodity, the value of labour-power is determined by the working time necessary to produce it. So, if producing the worker's average daily means of subsistence — things consumed directly, like food — takes 6 hours, the worker must on average work 6 hours a day to produce their daily labour-power, or to reproduce the value received from its sale. The necessary part of the working day then amounts to 6 hours, and, other things being equal, is a given magnitude. But the overall length of the working day itself is not yet given by this.

Let us suppose the line a______b represents the length of the necessary working time — say, 6 hours. Depending on whether the working day is extended beyond a______b by 1, 3, or 6 hours, we get three different lines.

Further, since the proportion of surplus working time to necessary working time sets the rate of surplus-value, the latter is fixed by that ratio. In the three different working days, it amounts to 16 2/3, 50, and 100%, respectively. Conversely, the rate of surplus-value alone would not give us the overall length of the working day. If it were equal to 100%, for instance, the working day could be 8, 10, or 12 hours long. It would tell us that the two parts of the working day — necessary labour and surplus labour — are equal in size, but not how large each part actually is.

The working day is therefore not a constant, but a variable quantity. Admittedly, one of its parts is fixed by the working time required for the constant reproduction of the worker. But its total amount varies with the length or duration of the surplus labour. The working day can therefore be set, but it is not fixed by anything in itself — it has to be settled.

Even though the working day is not a fixed but a fluid quantity, it can on the other hand only vary within certain limits. Its minimum limit is, however, not determinable. Of course, if we set the extension b______c — the surplus labour — to zero, we get a minimum limit: the part of the day the worker must necessarily work just to maintain themselves. But on the basis of the capitalist mode of production, necessary labour can only ever form a part of the working day; the working day can therefore never shrink to this minimum.

Conversely, the working day has a maximum limit. It cannot be prolonged beyond a certain point. This maximum limit is determined in two ways. First, by the physical bounds of labour-power. A human being can only expend a certain amount of vital force during the natural day of 24 hours. Just as a horse can only work 8 hours a day, day in and day out. For part of the day the body must rest and sleep, and for another part the human being has other physical needs to satisfy — eating, washing, clothing, and so on.

Besides these purely physical bounds, the extension of the working day runs into moral bounds. The worker needs time to satisfy intellectual and social needs, the extent and number of which are determined by the general state of culture. The variation of the working day therefore fluctuates within physical and social bounds. But both these bounds are very elastic by nature and allow the widest possible latitude. So we find working days of 8, 10, 12, 14, 16, and 18 hours — that is, of the most varied lengths.

The capitalist has bought labour-power at its day-rate. To him belongs its use-value — the right to put it to use — for the duration of a working day. He has thus acquired the right to make the worker labour for him during a day. But what is a working day? At any rate, less than a natural life-day. By how much? The capitalist has his own view of this absolute end-of-the-earth, the necessary limit of the working day.

As a capitalist, he is only capital personified. His soul is the soul of capital. But capital has one single life-impulse: the drive to make itself grow (to valorize), to create surplus-value, and to make its constant part — the means of production (land, tools, and materials) — absorb the greatest possible mass of surplus labour. Capital is dead labour that only comes to life vampire-like by sucking in living labour, and the more it sucks, the more it lives. The time the worker spends working is the time the capitalist consumes the labour-power he has bought.

If the worker uses their own disposable time for themselves, they rob the capitalist.

The capitalist thus appeals to the law of commodity exchange. Like any other buyer, he tries to squeeze the greatest possible benefit out of the use-value of his commodity. But suddenly the voice of the worker rises up — a voice that had been silenced amid the storm and stress of the production process:

The commodity I sold you differs from the common run of goods in that its use creates value, and greater value than it costs itself. That was why you bought it. What appears on your side as making capital grow in value (its valorization) is, on my side, an excessive using-up of my labour-power. You and I know only one law on the marketplace: the law of commodity exchange. And the consumption of a commodity belongs not to the seller, who parts with it, but to the buyer, who acquires it. Therefore, the use of my daily labour-power belongs to you.

But by means of the daily price you pay for it, I must be able to reproduce it daily and sell it anew. Leaving aside natural wear and tear from age and so on, I must be able to work tomorrow with the same normal condition of strength, health, and freshness as today. You constantly preach the gospel of “economy” and “abstinence” to me. Very well! I will manage my only property — labour-power — like a rational, economical owner, and abstain from any reckless squandering of it. I will set only so much of it in motion each day, convert into work, as is compatible with its normal duration and healthy development.

By recklessly lengthening the working day, you can set in motion a greater quantity of my labour-power in one day than I can replace in three. What you gain in labour, I lose in the substance of my labour. The use of my labour-power and its robbery are two entirely different things. If the average lifespan an average worker can live under a rational measure of work is 30 years, the value of my labour-power that you pay me for one day is 1/365 × 30, or 1/10950 of its total value. But if you consume it in 10 years, you pay me daily 1/10950 instead of 1/3650 of its total value — only 1/3 of its daily value — and you therefore steal 2/3 of the value of my commodity daily. You pay me for one day's labour-power while you consume three days' worth. That is against our contract and the law of commodity exchange.

I demand a normal working day, and I demand it without appealing to your heart, because where money is involved, sentiment ends. You may be a model citizen, perhaps a member of the society for the prevention of cruelty to animals, and besides stand in the odour of sanctity. But the thing you represent opposite me has no heartbeat in its breast. What seems to beat there is my own heart. I demand the normal working day because I demand the value of my commodity, just like any other seller.

One sees that, leaving aside entirely elastic limits, no boundary of the working day — and therefore no boundary of surplus labour — arises from the very nature of commodity exchange itself. The capitalist asserts his right as a buyer when he seeks to make the working day as long as possible, and if possible to make two working days out of one. On the other hand, the specific nature of the commodity sold includes a limit on its consumption by the buyer, and the worker asserts his right as a seller when he seeks to restrict the working day to a specific normal size.

Here, therefore, is a genuine deadlock — an antinomy: right against right, both equally sealed by the law of commodity exchange. Between equal rights, force decides.

And so, in the history of capitalist production, the regulation of the working day presents itself as a struggle over the limits of the working day — a struggle between the collective capitalist, that is, the class of capitalists, and the collective worker, or the working class.

Capital did not invent surplus-labour. Wherever one part of society holds a monopoly over the means of production — the land, tools, and materials — the worker, whether legally free or unfree, must add extra working-time to the hours needed just to keep themselves alive. That extra time goes to producing the means of subsistence for the owner of the means of production.

Where what a product is useful for (its use-value) matters more than what it can be sold for (its exchange-value), surplus-labour is fenced in by a limited set of needs. No boundless hunger for surplus-labour springs from the character of production itself. In the ancient world, over-work turns horrific only where the goal is to win exchange-value in its pure money-form — the mining of gold and silver. There, working people to death by force is the official form of over-work. Diodorus Siculus describes it.

Still, these are exceptions in the ancient world. Then peoples whose production still moves in the lower forms of slave-labour or corvée-labour are dragged into a world market ruled by capitalist production. Selling their products abroad becomes the main interest. Now the civilized horror of over-work is grafted onto the barbaric horrors of slavery and serfdom.

So the labour of enslaved Black people in the southern states of the American Union kept a moderately patriarchal character as long as production was mainly for local use. But as cotton export became the vital interest of those states, the over-working of the enslaved — sometimes consuming a man's life in seven working-years — became a factor in a calculated, calculating system. The point was no longer to force a certain mass of useful goods out of him. It was now the production of surplus-value itself. It was the same with corvée-labour — for example, in the Danubian Principalities.

Comparing the hunger for surplus-labour in the Danubian Principalities with the same hunger in English factories holds a special interest, because in corvée-labour the surplus-labour has an independent, visibly perceptible form.

Suppose the working-day counts 6 hours of necessary labour and 6 hours of surplus-labour. Then the free worker gives the capitalist 6 x 6, or 36 hours, of surplus-labour every week. It is exactly the same as if he worked 3 days a week for himself and 3 days a week unpaid for the capitalist.

But this is not visible on the surface. Surplus-labour and necessary labour blur into each other. You can express the exact same relation by saying that in every minute the worker works 30 seconds for himself and 30 seconds for the capitalist.

With corvée-labour, it is different. The necessary labour a Wallachian peasant does for his own survival is spatially separated from his surplus-labour for the boyar. He does one on his own field and the other on the lord's estate. Both parts of the working-day exist independently, side by side. In the corvée-form, surplus-labour is strictly marked off from necessary labour.

This different form of appearance clearly changes nothing about the quantitative relation between surplus-labour and necessary labour. Three days of surplus-labour in a week remain three days of work that yield no equivalent for the worker, whether it goes by the name corvée-labour or wage-labour. What differs is how the hunger shows up: in the capitalist it appears as a drive toward a boundless extension of the working-day, in the boyar more simply as a direct hunt for days of corvée.

In the Danubian Principalities, corvée-labour was bound up with rents in kind and other accessories of bondage, but it formed the decisive tribute to the ruling class. Where that is the case, the corvée rarely arises from serfdom; rather, serfdom usually arises from the corvée. That is what happened in the Romanian provinces.

The original mode of production there rested on communal property — but not the Slavic or Indian kind. Part of the land was farmed by members of the community on their own, as free private property. Another part — the ager publicus, the common land — was worked by all of them together. What this common labour produced served two ends: partly a reserve fund against bad harvests and other accidents, partly a state treasury for the costs of war, religion, and other communal needs.

In time, military and clerical dignitaries seized the common property, and with it the labour owed to it. The labour of free peasants on their own communal land turned into corvée-labour for the men who had stolen that land. Serfdom grew up alongside this — but only in fact, not yet in law. Then Russia, claiming to abolish serfdom, made it law instead. The corvée code proclaimed by the Russian General Kisselev in 1831 was, of course, dictated by the boyars themselves. At one stroke Russia won over the magnates of the Danubian Principalities — and the applause of the liberal cretins of all Europe.

According to the “Règlement organique” — as that corvée code is called — every Wallachian peasant owes the so-called landlord, besides a mass of detailed payments in kind: (1) twelve working-days, (2) one day of field labour, and (3) one day of wood-carrying. Total: 14 days a year.

But — with deep insight into political economy — the working-day is not taken in its ordinary sense. It means the working-day needed to produce an average daily product. And that daily product is slyly defined so that no Cyclops could finish it in 24 hours. So, in the dry words of true Russian irony, the “Règlement” itself declares: 12 working-days shall mean the product of 36 days of manual labour; one day of field labour, three days; and one day of wood-carrying, likewise three times as much. Total: 42 corvée-days.

On top of this comes the so-called jobagie — services owed to the lord for extraordinary production needs. Each village must supply a fixed quota for the jobagie every year, in proportion to its population. For each Wallachian peasant this extra corvée is reckoned at 14 days. So the legally prescribed corvée comes to 56 working-days a year.

Because of the bad climate, the farming year in Wallachia counts only 210 days. Take away 40 for Sundays and holidays and, on average, 30 for bad weather — 70 days gone — and 140 working-days remain. The ratio of corvée to necessary labour is 56 to 84, or 66 2/3%. That is a much smaller rate of surplus-value than the one ruling the English farm or factory worker.

Yet this is only the corvée the law prescribes. And in an even more “liberal” spirit than the English Factory Acts, the “Règlement organique” knew how to ease its own evasion. Having turned 12 days into 56, it fixes the nominal day's work of each corvée-day so that some of it must spill over onto the following days. A stretch of land, say, is meant to be weeded in one day — but the job, especially on maize plantations, takes twice as long. The legal day's work for some farm tasks can be read so loosely that the “day” begins in May and ends in October. In Moldavia the rules are harsher still.

“The 12 corvée-days of the 'Règlement organique',” cried a victory-drunk boyar, “amount to 365 days in the year!”

If the “Règlement organique” of the Danubian Principalities was a positive expression of the hunger for surplus-labour — every paragraph legalizing it — then the English Factory Acts are negative expressions of that same hunger. These laws curb capital's drive toward a boundless draining of labour-power by forcibly limiting the working-day by state decree, and the state in question is ruled by capitalist and landlord.

Putting aside a workers' movement that grew more threatening by the day, the limiting of factory labour was dictated by the very same necessity that poured guano onto English fields. The same blind lust for plunder that exhausted the soil in one case had seized the vital force of the nation by the roots in the other. Periodic epidemics spoke to this as clearly as the declining height of soldiers in Germany and France.

The Factory Act of 1850, now in force (1867), allows 10 hours for the average weekday. For the first 5 weekdays it allows 12 hours, from 6 a.m. to 6 p.m. — but half an hour for breakfast and one hour for dinner are legally subtracted, leaving 10 ½ working-hours. For Saturday it allows 8 hours, from 6 a.m. to 2 p.m. — minus half an hour for breakfast.

That leaves 60 working-hours: 10 ½ for each of the first five days, 7 ½ for the last. Special guardians of the law are appointed — Factory Inspectors, directly answerable to the Home Secretary, whose reports are published by order of Parliament every half-year. They provide a continuous, official record of the capitalist hunger for surplus-labour.

Let us listen for a moment to the Factory Inspectors.

That is 5 hours and 40 minutes a week — which, multiplied by 50 working-weeks (after deducting two for holidays or occasional stoppages), comes to 27 working-days.

“If the working-day is extended by 5 minutes a day beyond its normal length, that yields 2 ½ production-days in a year.”

“An extra hour a day, gained by snatching a bit of time here and another bit there, turns the 12 months of the year into 13.”

Crises — during which production is interrupted and the factories run only “short time,” just a few days a week — naturally do nothing to dampen the drive to extend the working-day. The less business is done, the larger the profit on the business that is done must be. The less time there is to work, the more of that time must be turned into surplus-labour-time. So the Factory Inspectors reported on the crisis period from 1857 to 1858:

“It may seem a contradiction that any over-work should take place when trade is so bad; but that very badness spurs unscrupulous people to transgress; they thus secure an extra profit ... ”

“At the same time,” says Leonard Horner, “when 122 factories in my district have been given up entirely, 143 stand idle, and all the rest are on short time, over-work beyond the legally set limit is still continued.”

“Though,” says Mr. Howell, “in most of the factories only half-time is being worked because of the bad state of business, I receive the same number of complaints as ever: that half an hour or three-quarters of an hour daily is snatched from the workers by encroaching on the times legally secured for meals and rest.”

The same phenomenon reappeared on a smaller scale during the frightful cotton crisis of 1861 to 1865.

“It is sometimes urged, when we catch workers inside during meal-times or otherwise outside legal hours, that they absolutely refuse to leave the factory, and that compulsion is needed to interrupt their work” (cleaning the machines, etc.), “especially on Saturdays. But if the 'hands' stay in the mill after the machinery is stopped, it is only because between 6 a.m. and 6 p.m., during the legally set working-hours, no time has been allowed for them to get such tasks done.”

“The extra profit to be made from over-work beyond the legal limit seems, to many manufacturers, a temptation too great to resist. They count on the chance of not being found out; and they calculate that even if discovered, the smallness of the fines and court costs still leaves them with a clear balance of gain.”

“Where the additional time is gained by a multiplication of small thefts over the course of the day, the inspectors face almost insuperable difficulties in proving a case.”

These “small thefts” of capital from the workers' meal- and rest-time the Factory Inspectors also call “petty pilferings of minutes,” “snatching a few minutes,” or, in the workers' own technical phrase, “nibbling and cribbling at meal times.”

In this atmosphere, plainly, the making of surplus-value through surplus-labour is no secret.

“If you let me,” a highly respectable master manufacturer said to me, “work just 10 minutes of over-time a day, you put £1,000 a year into my pocket.”

“Atoms of time are the elements of profit.”

Nothing from this point of view is more revealing than the names for workers who work full time — “full-timers” — and for children under 13 who may only work 6 hours — “half-timers.”

Here the worker is nothing more than personified labour-time. Every individual difference dissolves into the distinction between “full-timers” and “half-timers.”

So far, we have been looking at capital's drive to stretch out the working day — its werewolf-like hunger for surplus labour — in industries where monstrous excesses finally forced the law to step in and put capital in chains. One English bourgeois economist wrote that these excesses were not surpassed even by the cruelties the Spanish inflicted on the American native peoples.

Now let us turn to industries where the draining of labour-power is still free from all fetters today, or was so yesterday.

A local magistrate, Broughton, presided over a public meeting in Nottingham on January 14, 1860. He declared that among the people working in the lace trade, there is a degree of misery and deprivation unknown anywhere else in the civilized world.

Children of nine or ten are torn from their filthy beds at two, three, or four o'clock in the morning. They are forced to work for a bare subsistence until ten, eleven, or twelve at night. Their limbs waste away, their bodies shrink, their faces go blank, and their humanity completely hardens into a stone-like stupor — the mere sight of it is horrifying. Naturally, the manufacturers protested against any discussion of this.

The Rev. Montagu Valpy described the whole system as one of unrestricted slavery — socially, physically, morally, and intellectually. What are we to think of a city that holds a public meeting just to beg that the daily work for adults be limited to 18 hours? People denounce the planters in Virginia and Carolina. But is their slave market, with all the terrors of the whip and the trading in human flesh, really more revolting than this slow slaughter of human beings, carried out so that capitalists can profit from making veils and collars?

Over the last 22 years, the potteries of Staffordshire have been the subject of three separate parliamentary inquiries. The results are recorded in three reports: one by Scriven to the Children's Employment Commissioners in 1841, one by Dr. Greenhow in 1860, ordered by the medical officer of the Privy Council, and one by Longe from June 13, 1863.

For our purposes, it is enough to draw a few testimonies straight from the exploited children in the 1860 and 1863 reports. What happens to the children gives us a sense of what happens to the adults, especially the girls and women. This is an industry that makes even cotton-spinning seem like a pleasant, healthy business.

Wilhelm Wood is nine years old. He was seven years and ten months old when he started working. From the very beginning, his job was to "run moulds" — carrying the finished, shaped ware into the drying room and bringing the empty mould back.

He arrives at 6 a.m. every day and stops around 9 p.m. He says he works until 9 at night every day of the week, and has done so for the last seven or eight weeks. That is fifteen hours of work a day for a seven-year-old child.

M. Murray, a twelve-year-old boy, testifies: "I run moulds and turn the wheel. I come at 6, sometimes at 4 in the morning. I worked all night last night until 6 this morning. I have not been in bed since the night before. Besides me, eight or nine other boys worked straight through the night. All but one came back this morning. I get 3 shillings and 6 pence a week. I do not get any more for working all night. I worked two nights straight through last week."

Fernyhough, a ten-year-old boy:

"I do not always get a whole hour for lunch. Often I only get half an hour — every Thursday, Friday, and Saturday."

Dr. Greenhow reports that life expectancy in the pottery districts of Stoke-upon-Trent and Wolstanton is extremely short. In the Stoke district, only 36.6% of the male population over 20 works in the potteries; in Wolstanton, only 30.4%. Yet in Stoke, more than half of all deaths among men that age from chest diseases hit the potters. In Wolstanton, it is about two-fifths. Dr. Boothroyd, a doctor in Hanley, testifies:

"Each successive generation of potters is more stunted and weaker than the one before it."

Another doctor, McBean, agrees:

"Since I began my practice among the potters 25 years ago, the striking degeneration of this class has steadily shown up in their shrinking height and weight."

These statements are from Dr. Greenhow's 1860 report.

The following comes from the 1863 commissioners' report. Dr. J. T. Arledge, senior physician at the North Staffordshire Hospital, states:

"As a class, the potters — men and women alike — represent a degenerated population, both physically and morally. They are generally stunted, ill-shaped, and often deformed in the chest. They age prematurely and are short-lived. They are sluggish and bloodless, revealing their weak constitutions through constant attacks of indigestion, liver and kidney disorders, and rheumatism.

Above all, they are prey to chest diseases — pneumonia, tuberculosis, bronchitis, and asthma. One form of asthma is unique to them and is known as potter's asthma, or potter's consumption. Scrofula, a disease that attacks the glands, bones, and other body parts, afflicts more than two-thirds of all potters. The only reason the degeneration of the population in this district is not even worse is that they constantly recruit fresh workers from the surrounding countryside, who intermarry with healthier groups."

Charles Parsons, until recently a house surgeon at the same hospital, wrote in a letter to Commissioner Longe:

"I can only speak from personal observation, not from statistics, but I do not hesitate to say that my blood has boiled again and again at the sight of these poor children, whose health is being sacrificed to feed the greed of their parents and employers."

He lists the causes of potters' diseases and builds to a peak, closing with long hours.

The commission report expresses the hope that a manufacture that holds so prominent a place in the eyes of the world will not much longer bear the stain that its great success comes hand in hand with physical degeneration, widespread bodily suffering, and the early death of the workpeople whose labour and skill produced those results.

What is true of the potteries in England is also true of those in Scotland.

The manufacture of lucifer matches dates back to 1833, when phosphorus was first applied directly to the match stick. Since 1845, the industry has grown rapidly in England, spreading from the densely populated parts of London to Manchester, Birmingham, Liverpool, Bristol, Norwich, Newcastle, and Glasgow. Along with it spread the lockjaw that a Vienna doctor discovered in 1845 to be a disease unique to matchmakers.

Half the workers are children under thirteen and young people under eighteen. The trade is so notorious for being unhealthy and foul that only the most destitute layer of the working class — half-starved widows and the like — will send their children into it: ragged, half-starved, utterly neglected, uneducated children.

Of the witnesses Commissioner White examined in 1863, 270 were under 18, 40 were under 10, 10 were only 8, and 5 were only 6 years old. The working day swings from 12 to 14 or 15 hours. Night work is normal. Meals are irregular and mostly eaten right there in the workrooms, which are poisoned by phosphorus. Dante would find his most ghastly hellish fantasies surpassed in this industry.

In the wallpaper trade, the coarser sorts are printed by machine; the finer ones are printed by hand, a process called block-printing. The busiest months run from the beginning of October to the end of April. During this season, the work frequently goes on almost without interruption from 6 a.m. until 10 p.m., and often later into the night.

J. Leach testifies:

"Last winter" (1862) "six out of 19 girls were off sick at the same time from overwork. To keep them awake I have to shout at them."

W. Duffy: "The children often could not keep their eyes open from exhaustion — in fact, we ourselves could hardly manage it either."

J. Lightbourne: "I am 13 years old. We worked last winter till 9 in the evening, and the winter before that till 10. I used to cry almost every evening last winter from the pain in my sore feet."

G. Aspden: "When my boy was 7 years old I used to carry him on my back to and fro through the snow, and he used to work 16 hours! I have often knelt down to feed him while he stood at the machine, because he was not allowed to leave it or stop it."

Smith, the managing partner of a Manchester factory: "We" — meaning the "hands" who work for "us" — "work straight through with no break for meals, so that the day's work of 10 1/2 hours is finished by 4:30 in the afternoon, and everything after that is overtime."

Does this same Mr. Smith perhaps take no meal himself during 10 1/2 hours?

"We" — the same Smith — "rarely stop before 6 in the evening" — meaning the consumption of "our" labour-power machines — "so that we" — the same refrain again — "are in fact working overtime the whole year round. The children and adults alike" — 152 children and young persons under 18, and 140 adults — "have over the last 18 months averaged at the very least 7 days and 5 hours a week, or 78 1/2 hours weekly. For the six weeks ending May 2 of this year" (1863) "the average was higher — 8 days, or 84 hours a week!"

Yet the same Mr. Smith, who is so devoted to speaking in the royal "we," adds with a smile: "Machine work is easy." And the hand-block printing employers agree, insisting: "Hand labour is healthier than machine work." Across the board, these manufacturers are outraged at the very proposal to stop the machines at least during meal breaks.

Mr. Ottley, the manager of a wallpaper factory in the Borough of London, says: "A law allowing working hours from 6 a.m. to 9 p.m. would suit us very well, but the Factory Act hours of 7 a.m. to 6 p.m. do not suit us. Our machine is stopped during lunch" — what generosity — "Stopping it causes no significant loss of paper or colour." But he adds sympathetically: "I can understand that the loss of time it involves is not liked."

The commission's report naively observes that the fear of some leading firms — the fear of losing time, that is, the time they appropriate other people's labour, and thereby losing profit — is not a "sufficient reason" to let children under 13 and young people under 18 go without their lunch for 12 to 16 hours a day. Neither is it a reason to feed them their meals the way coal and water are fed to a steam engine, soap to wool, or oil to a wheel: as if the child were just one more supply added to the working machine while it runs.

No industry in England — leaving aside the recently introduced machine-baking of bread — has preserved such an archaic method of production right up to the present day as the bakery trade. Its methods are so old, in fact, that you can see them described in the poets of the Roman Empire — a pre-Christian mode of production.

But capital, as noted earlier, is at first indifferent to the technical character of the work it takes hold of - the tools and methods it finds. It takes the process exactly as it finds it.

The incredible adulteration of bread, especially in London, was first exposed by a House of Commons committee on the adulteration of food in 1855-56, and by Dr. Hassall's book Adulterations Detected. The result of these revelations was the Act of August 6, 1860, "for preventing the adulteration of articles of food and drink." It was a completely useless law, naturally, because it showed the utmost delicacy toward any free-trader who set out to "turn an honest penny" by buying and selling adulterated goods.

The committee itself more or less naively admitted its conviction that free trade essentially means trading in adulterated — or, as the English wittily call them, "sophisticated" — goods. This kind of sophistry knows better than the sophist Protagoras how to make black out of white and white out of black, and better than the Eleatic philosophers how to demonstrate right before your eyes that all reality is mere appearance.

In any case, the committee had drawn the public's attention to its "daily bread," and thus to the bakery trade itself. At the same time, public meetings and petitions to Parliament were ringing with the cries of London's journeyman bakers against overwork and the rest. The outcry grew so urgent that H. S. Tremenheere — also a member of the previously mentioned 1863 commission — was appointed as a royal investigator.

His report, along with the witness testimony, did not stir the public's heart, but it certainly turned the public's stomach. The Bible-reading Englishman knew very well that man, unless he happens to be a capitalist, landlord, or holder of a sinecure by the grace of God, is destined to eat his bread in the sweat of his brow. But he did not know that in his bread he had to eat a certain amount of human sweat every day, soaked with the discharge from boils, cobwebs, dead cockroaches, and putrid German yeast — not to mention the alum, sandstone, and other pleasant mineral ingredients.

So, with no regard for the holiness of "Free Trade," the bakery trade was placed under the supervision of state inspectors at the end of the 1863 parliamentary session. That same act also forbade work between 9 at night and 5 in the morning for any journeyman baker under 18. That last clause speaks volumes about the overwork in this quaint, old-fashioned trade.

A London journeyman baker's work usually begins at 11 at night. He mixes the dough at that hour — a strenuous job that takes half an hour or forty-five minutes, depending on the batch. Then he lies down on the kneading board — which also serves as the lid for the dough trough — with a flour sack under his head and another over his body, and sleeps for a few hours.

Then begins a rapid, unbroken five hours of work: throwing the dough, weighing it, shaping it, putting it in the oven, and taking it out again. The temperature inside a bakehouse ranges from 75 to 90 degrees Fahrenheit, and in the smaller bakehouses it is even hotter. Once the bread and rolls are done, he has to distribute them. A large portion of the day labourers, having already done that hard night work, then spend the day carrying the bread in baskets or pushing it in carts from house to house, sometimes working in the bakehouse in between. Depending on the season and the business, they finish between 1 and 6 in the afternoon, while another group stays in the bakehouse until late in the day.

During the London season, the journeymen for the "full-priced" bakers in the West End start at 11 at night. They bake the bread, with only one or two very short breaks, until 8 the next morning. Then they spend the day delivering bread, or sometimes baking biscuits, not finishing until 4, 5, 6, or even 7 in the evening. After all that, they might get six hours of sleep, and often only five or four.

On Fridays they always start earlier, around 10 at night. They work continuously, whether making or delivering bread, until 8 on Saturday evening — but usually right through until 4 or 5 on Sunday morning. Even in the fancy bakeries that sell their bread at the "full price," another four or five hours of prep work has to be done on Sunday for the next day.

The journeymen working for the "underselling masters" — who sell their bread below the full price, and who make up more than three-quarters of all London bakers — work even longer hours. Their work is almost entirely confined to the bakehouse, since their bosses only sell out of their own shops. By the end of the week, they start work at 10 on Thursday night, and with almost no breaks, they keep working right through into Sunday morning.

Even from a bourgeois standpoint, it is clear how these underselling masters operate: the unpaid labour of the men forms the very basis of their competition. And the "full-priced baker" denounces his underselling rivals to the investigating commission as thieves of other people's labour and as fraudsters.

"They only succeed," says the full-priced baker Cheeseman, "by defrauding the public and by squeezing 18 hours of work out of their men for the pay of 12 hours."

The adulteration of bread, along with the rise of a class of bakers that sells bread below the full price, began in England at the start of the 18th century. This happened as the old guild character of the trade collapsed, and a capitalist stepped in behind the nominal master baker — usually in the form of a miller or a flour-factor.

This laid the foundation for capitalist production in the trade: the unlimited stretching of the working day and night work. Night work only truly took hold in London itself in 1824.

Given all this, it is no wonder the commission's report classes journeyman bakers among the short-lived workers. Those who manage to survive the normal wave of childhood diseases that kills so many working-class children rarely reach the age of 42. And yet, the bakery trade is always overflowing with applicants. The supply of these labour-powers for London comes from Scotland, the western farming districts of England, and Germany.

From 1858 to 1860, the journeyman bakers in Ireland organized large meetings at their own expense, agitating against night work and Sunday work. The public passionately supported them, as seen at a huge meeting in Dublin in May 1860. Thanks to this movement, day-labour alone was successfully established in towns like Wexford, Kilkenny, Clonmel, and Waterford.

"In Limerick, where the suffering of the journeymen notoriously exceeded all bounds, the movement failed due to the opposition of the master bakers, especially the baker-millers. The defeat in Limerick caused a setback in Ennis and Tipperary as well. In Cork, where public outrage ran the highest, the masters crushed the movement simply by using their power to throw the men out of work. In Dublin, the masters offered the most determined resistance; by persecuting the journeymen who led the agitation, they forced the rest to give in and submit to night and Sunday work."

The English government, which is armed to the teeth in Ireland and generally knows how to show it, appointed a committee that now remonstrates in funereal, pleading tones against the implacable master bakers of Dublin, Limerick, and Cork.

The committee states: "The hours of labour are limited by natural laws that cannot be violated without punishment. By threatening them with dismissal, the masters force their workers to violate their religious convictions, to disobey the law of the land, and to disregard public opinion — all of which refers to Sunday work. This breeds bad blood between capital and labour, and sets an example dangerous to religion, morality, and public order.

The committee believes that extending the working day beyond 12 hours is a usurping intrusion into the domestic and private life of the worker, leading to disastrous moral results. It interferes with a man's home and his family duties as a son, brother, husband, and father. Work beyond 12 hours undermines the health of the worker, leads to premature aging and early death, and thus brings misery to working-class families, who are deprived of the support of their head of household exactly when they need it most."

We have just been looking at Ireland. On the other side of the channel, in Scotland, the agricultural labourer — the man behind the plough — is protesting against his 13- or 14-hour workday in the harshest climate, which includes an extra four hours of work on Sundays in this very land of Sabbath-worshippers!

At the exact same time, three railway employees are standing before a London coroner's jury: a passenger conductor, a locomotive driver, and a signalman. A massive railway accident has sent hundreds of passengers to their deaths, and the employees' negligence is blamed. They unanimously testify before the jury that 10 or 12 years ago, their work lasted only eight hours a day. But over the last five or six years, it has been screwed up to 14, 18, and 20 hours. During peaks in travel, like excursion seasons, it often lasts 40 or 50 hours without a break.

They testify that they are ordinary men, not Cyclops. At a certain point, their labour-power gives out. Stupor seizes them. Their brain stops thinking, and their eyes stop seeing.

The thoroughly "respectable" British jurymen reply with a verdict sending the men to trial for manslaughter. Then, in a gentle addendum, they express the pious wish that the capitalist magnates of the railways might in future be more extravagant in buying a sufficient number of "labour-powers" — and more "abstinent," more "self-denying," or more "thrifty" in their draining of paid labour-power.

From the motley crowd of workers of all trades, ages, and sexes pressing in on us — more eagerly than the souls of the dead pressed around Odysseus — we can pick out two figures. Without even checking the government Blue books under their arms, you can see the mark of overwork on them at a glance. Their striking contrast proves that before capital, all people are equal — a milliner and a blacksmith.

In the last weeks of June 1863, all the London daily papers carried a paragraph with the sensational headline: "Death from simple Overwork." It was about the death of Mary Anne Walkley, a twenty-year-old milliner. She worked in a highly respectable dressmaking shop, exploited by a lady with the cosy name of Elise.

It was the old, often-told story, newly discovered: these girls work an average of 16 1/2 hours a day, and during the season they often work 30 hours straight without a break. Whenever their "labour-power" is about to fail, they keep it going with occasional supplies of sherry, port wine, or coffee. It was exactly the height of the season. They had to conjure up magnificent dresses in no time at all, so noble ladies could wear them to a ball honoring the newly imported Princess of Wales.

Mary Anne Walkley had worked 26 1/2 hours without stopping, along with 60 other girls. Thirty of them worked in a single room that provided barely a third of the cubic feet of air they needed. At night, they slept two to a bed in one of the stifling holes that a bedroom had been partitioned into with wooden boards. And this was considered one of the better dressmaking establishments in London.

Mary Anne Walkley fell ill on Friday and died on Sunday — without, to Madame Elise's astonishment, even managing to finish the dress she was working on first. The doctor called too late to her deathbed, Dr. Keys, testified before the coroner's jury in dry, plain words:

"Mary Anne Walkley died from long working hours in an overcrowded workroom, and a bedroom that was too small and badly ventilated."

To teach the doctor a lesson in good manners, the coroner's jury then returned a verdict declaring:

"The deceased died of apoplexy, but there is reason to fear that her death was accelerated by overwork in an overcrowded workroom, and so on."

"Our white slaves," the Morning Star cried — that paper being the organ of the free-traders Cobden and Bright — "are toiled into the grave, and for the most part silently pine and die."

Working to death is the order of the day, not only in the milliners' rooms but in a thousand places — everywhere, nearly, where business is booming.

Take the blacksmith. If you believe the poets, no man is so full of life and good cheer. He rises early, strikes sparks before the sun, and eats, drinks, and sleeps like no other man. Physically speaking, with moderate work, he is in one of the best positions a human being can be in.

But follow him into the city and see the load of work piled onto that strong man. Where does he rank in the death-rate lists? In Marylebone — one of the largest districts of London — blacksmiths die at a rate of 31 per 1000 per year, which is 11 above the average mortality of adult men in England. The trade itself — almost an instinctive art, blameless in itself — becomes the destroyer of the man simply through excess of work.

He can strike so many hammer-blows a day, walk so many steps, draw so many breaths, do so much work, and live on average, say, 50 years. He is forced to strike that many more blows, walk that many more steps, breathe that much more often each day — increasing his total daily expenditure of life by a quarter. He makes the attempt, and the result is that for a limited period he does a quarter more work — and dies at 37 instead of 50.

Seen from capital's own standpoint — the standpoint of making value grow — constant capital, the means of production, exists for one reason: to absorb labour, and with every drop of labour, a proportional amount of surplus labour. When they fail to do this, their mere existence is a negative loss for the capitalist, because while they sit idle, they represent a useless advance of capital. This loss becomes positive the moment the interruption forces extra spending to restart the works.

Stretching the working-day past the limits of the natural day into the night only acts as a palliative; it only partially stills the vampire thirst for the living blood of labour. Appropriating labour during all 24 hours of the day is the inherent drive of capitalist production. But doing this to the exact same labour-power day and night without pause is physically impossible. To get past this physical obstacle, you need an alternation between the labour-power consumed by day and the labour-power consumed by night.

This relay system — this alternation of workers — allows various methods. It can be arranged so that part of the workforce does day-shift one week and night-shift the next. This system held full sway in the vigorous youth of the English cotton industry, and currently flourishes in the cotton mills of the Moscow district.

Today, this 24-hour production process still exists as a system in many still “free” branches of British industry: blast-furnaces, forges, rolling mills, and other metalworks across England, Wales, and Scotland. The working process here takes up not just the 24 hours of the six working-days, but largely the 24 hours of Sunday too. The workers are men and women, adults and children of both sexes. The children's ages run through every range from 8 — sometimes 6 — up to 18. In some branches, girls and women also work through the night alongside the men.

Putting aside the generally harmful effects of night-work, keeping the production process running unbroken for 24 hours offers a very welcome chance to break the limits of the nominal working-day. In these extremely exhausting industries just mentioned, the official working-day for each worker is usually 12 hours, whether by day or by night. But the over-work pushed past this limit is, in many cases — to use the words of the English official report — “truly fearful”.

“No human mind,” the report states, “can realise the amount of work described in the following passages as being performed by boys of from 9 to 12 years of age ... without coming irresistibly to the conclusion that such abuses of the power of parents and of employers can no longer be allowed to exist.”

“The practice of boys working at all by day and night turns either in the usual course of things, or at pressing times, seems inevitably to open the door to their not unfrequently working unduly long hours. These hours are, indeed, in some cases, not only cruelly but even incredibly long for children. Amongst a number of boys it will, of course, not unfrequently happen that one or more are from some cause absent. When this happens, their place is made up by one or more boys, who work in the other turn. That this is a well understood system is plain ... from the answer of the manager of some large rolling-mills, who, when I asked him how the place of the boys absent from their turn was made up, ‘I daresay, sir, you know that as well as I do,’ and admitted the fact.”

“At a rolling-mill where the proper hours were from 6 a.m. to 5½ p.m., a boy worked about four nights every week till 8½ p.m. at least ... and this for six months.” Another, at 9 years old, sometimes made three 12-hour shifts running, and, when 10, has made two days and two nights running. A third, “now 10 ... worked from 6 a.m. till 12 p.m. three nights, and till 9 p.m. the other nights.” Another, now 13, worked from 6 p.m. till 12 noon next day for a week together, and sometimes three shifts together, e.g., from Monday morning till Tuesday night. Another, now 12, worked in an iron foundry at Stavely from 6 a.m. till 12 p.m. for a fortnight on end; could not do it any more.

George Allinsworth, age 9, came here as cellar-boy last Friday; next morning we had to begin at 3, so I stopped here all night. Live five miles off. Slept on the floor of the furnace, over head, with an apron under me, and a bit of a jacket over me. The two other days I have been here at 6 a.m. Aye! it is hot in here. Before I came here I was nearly a year at the same work at some works in the country. Began there, too, at 3 on Saturday morning — always did, but was very gain [near] home, and could sleep at home. Other days I began at 6 in the morning, and gi’en over at 6 or 7 in the evening,” and so forth.

Let us now hear how capital itself regards this 24-hour system. The system's extremes — its abuse for the “cruel and incredible” extension of the working-day — are naturally passed over in silence. Capital speaks only of the system in its “normal” form.

Messrs. Naylor & Vickers, steel manufacturers, employ between 600 and 700 persons, among whom only 10 per cent are under 18, and of those, only 20 boys under 18 work in night sets. They express themselves as follows:

“The boys do not suffer from the heat. The temperature is probably from 86° to 90°. In the forges and in the rolling mills the hands work night and day, in relays, but all the other parts of the work are day-work, from 6 a.m. to 6 p.m. In the forge the hours are from 12 to 12. Some of the hands always work in the night, without any alternation of day and night work. We do not find any difference in the health (the health of Messrs Naylor & Vickers?) of those who work regularly by night and those who work by day, and probably people can sleep better if they have the same period of rest than if it is changed. About 20 of the boys under the age of 18 work in the night sets. We could not well do without lads under 18 working by night. The objection would be the increase in the cost of production. Skilled hands and the heads in every department are difficult to get, but of lads we could get any number. From the small proportion of boys that we employ, the subject is of little importance or interest to us.”

Mr. J. Ellis, one of the firm of Messrs. John Brown & Co., steel and iron works, employs 3,000 men and boys, with part of the heavy steel and iron work going “night and day, in relays.” He states that in the heavier steel work one or two boys are employed to two men. Their concern employs 500 boys under 18, of whom about 1/3, or 170, are under 13. Regarding the proposed alteration of the law, Mr. Ellis says:

“I do not think it would be very objectionable to require that no person under the age of 18 should work more than 12 hours in the 24. But I do not think that any line could be drawn over the age of 12, at which boys could be dispensed with for night-work. We would sooner be prevented from employing boys under the age of 13, or even under 15, at all, than be forbidden to employ boys that we do have at night. Those boys who work in the day sets must take their turn in the night sets also, because the men could not work in the night sets only; it would ruin their health. We think, however, that night-work in alternate weeks is no harm.”

Messrs. Naylor & Vickers, on the other hand, in conformity with the interests of their business, believed the reverse: that periodically changed night-labour might possibly do more harm than continual night-labour.

“We find the men who do the alternating night-work just as healthy as those who work only by day. Our objections to not allowing boys under 18 to work at night would be on account of the increase of expense, but this is the only reason.” What cynical naïveté! “We think that the increase would be more than the trade, with due regard to its successful execution, could fairly bear.” What mealy-mouthed phraseology! “Labour is scarce here, and might fall short if there were such a regulation.”

That is, Ellis, Brown & Co. might fall into the fatal perplexity of having to pay the full value of labour-power.

The “Cyclops” Steel and Iron Works — named for the one-eyed giants — of Messrs. Cammell & Co. are carried out on the same large scale as those of the aforementioned John Brown & Co. The managing director handed his evidence in writing to Government Commissioner White, but later found it convenient to suppress the manuscript when it was returned to him for revision.

However, Mr. White has a tenacious memory. He remembers very clearly that for these gentlemen of the Cyclops works, forbidding the night-work of children and young persons “would be a thing of impossibility; it would be tantamount to stopping their works,” and yet their business employs little more than 6% boys under 18, and only 1% under 13!

On the same subject, Mr. E. F. Sanderson, of the firm Sanderson, Bros. & Co., steel rolling-mills and forges, in Attercliffe, says:

“Great difficulties would arise from preventing boys under 18 from working at night. The chief difficulty would be the increase in cost from employing men instead of boys. I cannot say how much this would be, but probably it would not be enough to enable the manufacturer to raise the price of steel, and consequently the loss would fall on him, as the men” — what obstinate folk! — “would naturally refuse to bear it.”

Mr. Sanderson does not know how much he pays the children, but “perhaps it is 4s. to 5s. a head per week. The boys’ work is of a kind for which the strength of boys is generally (‘generally,’ of course not always ‘specifically’) just sufficient, and consequently there would be no gain from the greater strength of the men to compensate for the loss, or at least only in the few cases where the metal is very heavy. The men would also prefer to have boys under them, as men are less obedient. Besides, boys must begin young to learn the trade. Restricting boys to mere day-work would not fulfil this purpose.”

And why not? Why could boys not learn their handicraft in the daytime? Give your reason?

“Because the men, working days and nights in alternate weeks, would be separated half the time from their boys, and would lose half the profit they make from them. The training they give the boys is reckoned as part of the wages of those boys, and thus enables the men to get boy-labour cheaper. Each man would lose half his profit.”

In other words, Messrs. Sanderson would have to pay part of the wages of adult men out of their own pockets instead of paying it through the night-work of boys. The Sandersons’ profit would drop a little on this occasion, and this is the good Sandersonian reason why boys cannot learn their handicraft in the daytime. Furthermore, this would throw regular night-work onto the men who are now relieved by the boys, and they could not stand it. In short, the difficulties would be so great that they would probably lead to the complete abolition of night-work.

“As far as the making of steel itself is concerned,” says E. F. Sanderson, “it would not make the slightest difference, but!”

But the Messrs. Sanderson have more to do than make steel. Steel-making is a mere pretext for surplus-value-making. The smelting furnaces, rolling mills, buildings, machinery, iron, coal, and so forth have more to do than transform themselves into steel. They are there to absorb surplus-labour, and naturally absorb more in 24 hours than in 12. By grace of God and law, they give the Sandersons a claim on the working-time of a certain number of hands for all 24 hours of the day, and they lose their character as capital — becoming a pure loss for the Sandersons — the instant their function of absorbing labour is interrupted.

“But then there would be the loss from so much costly machinery lying idle half the time, and for such a mass of products as we are capable of turning out under the present system, we would have to double the premises and the machinery, which would double the outlay.”

But why do precisely these Sandersons claim a privilege over other capitalists, who are only allowed to work by day and whose buildings, machinery, and raw materials therefore lie “idle” at night?

“It is true,” answers E. F. Sanderson on behalf of all the Sandersons, “that this loss from idle machinery strikes all manufactures where work is carried on only by day. But the use of the furnaces would, in our case, cause an extra loss. If they are kept going, fuel is wasted” — whereas now the workers' means of subsistence is wasted — “and if they are not kept going, there is a loss of time in relighting the fire and getting up the necessary degree of heat” — while the loss of sleep-time, even for eight-year-olds, is a gain of working-time for the Sanderson clan — “and the furnaces themselves would suffer from the change of temperature” — while those very same furnaces suffer nothing from the alternation of day and night work.

What is a working-day? How long may capital consume the labour-power it pays a daily wage for? How far can the working-day be stretched past the hours the worker needs just to reproduce that labour-power?

Capital's answer is clear: the working-day claims all 24 hours, minus only the bare hours of rest without which labour-power absolutely refuses to keep going. The worker is nothing but labour-power, so every scrap of disposable time belongs by nature and by right to working-time — to the self-expansion of capital. Time for education, for mental development, for social life, for the free play of bodily and mental energies — even Sunday rest — counts as pure moonshine.

But in its blind, unrestrainable passion — its were-wolf hunger for surplus-labour — capital oversteps not only the moral but the purely physical maximum bounds of the working-day. It seizes the time the body needs for growth, development, and healthy maintenance. It steals the time for fresh air and sunlight. It haggles over meal-times, pushing them into the production process where possible, so that food is fed to the worker as to a mere means of production — as coal is fed to a boiler, grease and oil to machinery. It cuts the sound sleep needed to restore and refresh the vital forces down to just so many hours of torpor as an absolutely exhausted organism cannot revive without.

It is not the normal maintenance of labour-power that sets the limit to the working-day. Just the reverse: the greatest possible daily expenditure of labour-power — no matter how diseased, forced, and painful — sets the limit to the worker's rest. Capital does not ask how long labour-power lasts. What concerns it is solely the maximum of labour-power that can be set flowing in a single working-day. It reaches that goal by shortening the working-life of labour-power, exactly as a greedy farmer gets more produce out of the soil for a time by robbing it of its fertility.

Capitalist production is essentially the production of surplus-value — the absorption of surplus-labour. So by stretching the working-day it produces not only the deterioration of human labour-power, robbed of its normal moral and physical conditions of development and activity. It produces the premature exhaustion and death of labour-power itself. It extends the worker's production-time during a given stretch by shortening his life-time.

The value of labour-power includes the value of the goods needed to reproduce the worker — or to keep the working class going. So if the unnatural lengthening of the working-day, which capital necessarily drives toward in its boundless passion for self-expansion, shortens the life of individual workers and therefore the working-life of their labour-power, the used-up forces must be replaced faster. The wear-and-tear costs entering into the reproduction of labour-power go up — just as the part of a machine's value that has to be reproduced every day is larger the faster the machine wears out.

Capital seems therefore, by its own interest, pointed toward a normal working-day.

The slave-owner buys his worker the way he buys his horse. If he loses a slave, he loses capital that has to be replaced by fresh outlay on the slave-market.

But, as Cairnes says: the rice-fields of Georgia and the swamps of Mississippi may be fatally destructive to the human constitution, yet that destruction of human life is not so great that it cannot be repaired from the teeming preserves of Virginia and Kentucky. Considerations of economy, which might offer some guarantee for the humane treatment of the slave — because they link the master's interest to preserving the slave — turn, once the slave-trade is introduced, into reasons for driving the slave to absolute ruin. For the moment his place can be filled from foreign preserves, the length of his life matters less than its productivity while it lasts.

It is therefore a maxim of slave management in slave-importing countries that the most effective economy consists in squeezing the greatest possible amount of exertion out of the human chattel in the shortest possible time. It is in tropical cultivation, where the annual profits often equal the whole capital of the plantations, that negro life is most recklessly sacrificed. The agriculture of the West Indies — for centuries the cradle of fabulous wealth — swallowed up millions of the African race. It is in Cuba today, with revenues counted in millions and planters who are princes, that we see the slave class, besides the coarsest food and the most exhausting, unceasing toil, partly destroyed every year directly through the slow torture of over-work and want of sleep and rest.

Change the name, and the story is about you! For slave-trade read labour-market; for Kentucky and Virginia read Ireland and the agricultural districts of England, Scotland, and Wales; for Africa read Germany.

We heard how over-work sweeps the London bakers away; yet the London labour-market is always overstocked with German and other candidates for death in the bakeries. Pottery is one of the shortest-lived industries. Is there therefore a lack of potters? Josiah Wedgwood, the inventor of modern pottery, himself originally a common worker, stated before the House of Commons in 1785 that the whole trade employed 15,000 to 20,000 people. By 1861 the population of the town centres of this industry in Great Britain alone stood at 101,302.

Ferrand put it bluntly in the House of Commons: "The cotton trade has existed for ninety years... In three generations of the English race it has devoured nine generations of cotton-workers."

True, in certain epochs of feverish boom the labour-market shows dangerous gaps — 1834, for instance. But the manufacturers then proposed to the Poor Law Commissioners that the "surplus-population" of the agricultural districts be sent north, explaining that "the manufacturers would absorb and consume it." Those were their very words.

Agents were appointed in Manchester with the consent of the Poor Law Commissioners. Lists of agricultural workers were drawn up and sent to those agents. The manufacturers called at the offices, picked out what suited them, and the families were shipped from the south of England. These human bundles were delivered, ticketed like so many bales of goods, by canal and wagon — some trudged on foot, and many wandered lost and half-starved in the manufacturing districts. This grew into a regular trade.

The House of Commons will scarcely believe it, but this regular trade, this traffic in human flesh, kept going: people were bought and sold by the Manchester agents to the Manchester manufacturers as regularly as negroes were sold to the cotton-growers of the southern states. The year 1860 marked the zenith of the cotton industry. Hands were short again. The manufacturers turned once more to the flesh-agents, who scoured the downs of Dorset, the hills of Devon, and the plains of Wiltshire — but the surplus-population had already been devoured.

The "Bury Guardian" lamented that 10,000 extra hands could be absorbed once the Anglo-French commercial treaty was signed, and that soon 30,000 or 40,000 more would be needed. After the agents and sub-agents of the flesh-trade had swept the agricultural districts in 1860 with little result, "a deputation of manufacturers waited on Mr. Villiers, President of the Poor Law Board, asking that the supply of poor and orphan children from the workhouses be allowed again."

What experience generally shows the capitalist is a constant surplus-population — surplus, that is, relative to capital's momentary need for expansion — even though that surplus is made up of stunted, short-lived, rapidly replaced generations of human beings, plucked, so to speak, before they are ripe.

To the perceptive observer, experience shows on the other hand how swiftly and deeply capitalist production — historically speaking, hardly dating from yesterday — has seized the people's vitality at its very root. The degeneration of the industrial population is only slowed by the constant absorption of fresh, natural elements of life from the countryside. Even the rural labourers, despite the free air and the powerful principle of natural selection that lets only the strongest survive, are already beginning to die off.

Capital has "good reasons" to deny the suffering of the worker generations around it. In practice, the prospect of humanity rotting away in the future, of an ultimately unavoidable depopulation, moves it as little as the possible fall of the earth into the sun. In every stock-swindle everyone knows a crash must come, but everyone hopes it will strike his neighbour's head after he himself has caught the shower of gold and stashed it safely away. "Après moi le déluge!" — After me, the flood! — is the watchword of every capitalist and every capitalist nation. Capital is therefore reckless about the worker's health and length of life, where society does not force it to be careful.

To complaints about physical and mental degeneration, premature death, the torture of over-work, its answer is: Should this torment trouble us, since it increases our pleasure (profit)?

But on the whole, none of this depends on the good or ill will of the individual capitalist. Free competition makes the inherent laws of capitalist production bear down on each individual capitalist as an external coercive law.

The establishment of a normal working-day is the result of centuries of struggle between capitalist and worker. But the history of that struggle shows two opposed currents. Compare, for instance, modern English factory legislation with the English Labour Statutes from the 14th century deep into the middle of the 18th. While the modern Factory Act forcibly shortens the working-day, those earlier statutes tried forcibly to lengthen it.

The demands of capital in its embryo state — when it is just forming, and secures its right to absorb a sufficient quantity of surplus-labour not yet by the mere force of economic conditions but with the help of state power — look thoroughly modest compared to the concessions it makes, growling and struggling, in its maturity. It takes centuries before the "free" worker, thanks to the fully grown capitalist production, voluntarily agrees — that is, is compelled by social conditions — to sell his entire active lifetime, indeed his very capacity for work, for the price of his customary means of subsistence: to sell his birthright for a mess of pottage.

It is therefore natural that the lengthening of the working-day which capital, from the middle of the 14th to the end of the 17th century, tries to impose on adult workers by state power roughly coincides with the limit on working-time that the state, in the second half of the 19th century, here and there draws to stop children's blood from being coined into capital. What is today proclaimed — for instance in Massachusetts, until recently the freest state of the North American republic — as the state's limit on the labour of children under 12, was in England still in the middle of the 17th century the normal working-day of able-bodied artisans, robust farm-servants, and giant blacksmiths.

The first "Statute of Labourers" (23 Edward III, 1349) found its immediate pretext — not its cause, since legislation of this kind goes on for centuries without the pretext — in the great plague, which decimated the population. As one Tory writer put it, "the difficulty of setting men to work on reasonable terms" — that is, at prices that left their employers a reasonable quantity of surplus-labour —

"became in fact intolerable." Reasonable wages were therefore legally imposed, and so was the limit of the working-day. The point that alone interests us here reappears in the Statute of 1496 (under Henry VII). For all artisans and field-labourers from March to September, the working-day was then supposed to last — though this was never enforced — from 5 in the morning to between 7 and 8 in the evening. But meal-times amounted to 1 hour for breakfast, 1½ hours for dinner, and ½ hour for afternoon refreshment — exactly twice as much as under the Factory Act now in force. In winter, work was to run from 5 in the morning until dark, with the same breaks.

A statute of Elizabeth from 1562, covering all labourers "hired for daily or weekly wage," leaves the length of the working-day untouched but tries to limit breaks to 2½ hours in summer and 2 in winter. Dinner is to last only one hour, and the "afternoon nap of ½ hour" is allowed only between mid-May and mid-August. For every hour of absence, 1d. is to be deducted from wages. In practice, however, things were much more favourable for the workers than in the statute-book. William Petty, the father of political economy and to some extent the inventor of statistics, says in a work published in the last third of the 17th century:

"Labouring men" — meaning at that time field-labourers — "work 10 hours daily and take 20 meals a week, namely three a day on working-days and two on Sundays; from which it is clear that if they would fast on Friday evenings and eat lunch in an hour and a half instead of the two they now take, from 11 to 1, then by working 1/20 more and consuming 1/20 less, the tenth part of the aforementioned tax could be raised."

Was the factory apologist Dr. Andrew Ure not right, then, to decry the Twelve Hours Bill of 1833 as a relapse into the dark ages? True, the rules in the statutes and in Petty apply also to apprentices. But the state of child labour even at the end of the 17th century is clear from this complaint:

"Our youth, here in England, do nothing at all until the time they become apprentices, and then naturally they need a long time — seven years — to become perfect tradesmen."

Germany, by contrast, is praised because there the children are brought up from the cradle with at least "a little employment."

Even during most of the 18th century, right up to the era of large-scale industry, capital in England had not managed — by paying the weekly value of labour-power — to lay hold of the worker's whole week, agricultural labourers excepted. The fact that workers could live on four days' wages for the whole week did not seem to them sufficient reason to work the other two days for the capitalist. One camp of English economists, in capital's service, denounced this stubbornness furiously; another side defended the workers. Listen, for example, to the polemic between Postlethwayt — whose commercial dictionary enjoyed the same reputation then as similar works by MacCulloch and MacGregor do today — and the author of the "Essay on Trade and Commerce" already quoted.

Postlethwayt says among other things:

"I cannot finish these few remarks without taking notice of the trite saying in the mouths of so many: that if the industrious poor can get enough to live on in five days, they will not work the full six. Hence those people infer the need to raise the price even of necessary food, through taxes or any other means, to compel the artisan and manufacturer to unbroken six-day labour every week. I must beg leave to differ from those great politicians who champion the perpetual slavery of the working people of this kingdom. They forget the proverb, 'all work and no play.' Have not the English boasted of the ingenuity and dexterity of their artisans and manufacturers, which have hitherto given British wares universal credit and reputation? What was this due to? Probably nothing other than the way our working people know how to relax in their own way. Were they forced to toil all year round, all six days of the week, in constant repetition of the same work, would that not blunt their ingenuity and make them stupid and sluggish instead of alert and dexterous? And would our workers under such eternal slavery not lose their reputation rather than keep it? ... What sort of craftsmanship could we expect from such hard-driven animals? ... Many of them do as much work in four days as a Frenchman does in five or six. But if Englishmen are to be eternal drudges, it is to be feared they will degenerate below the French. If our people are famed for bravery in war, do we not say it is due on one hand to the good English roast beef and pudding in their bellies, and on the other no less to our constitutional spirit of freedom? And why should the superior ingenuity, energy, and dexterity of our artisans and manufacturers not be due to the freedom with which they relax in their own way? I hope they will never again lose those privileges, nor the good living from which their capacity for work and their courage equally spring!"

To this the author of the "Essay on Trade and Commerce" replies:

"If setting apart the seventh day of the week as a holiday is supposed to be a divine institution, this implies that the other days of the week belong to labour" — he means capital, as will soon be clear — "and it cannot be called cruel to enforce this command of God... That mankind in general is naturally inclined to comfort and indolence we fatally experience in the behaviour of our manufacturing populace, who on average do not work more than four days a week, except when provisions happen to be dear... Suppose a bushel of wheat represents all the worker's necessaries, costs 5 shillings, and the worker earns a shilling a day by his labour; then he needs to work only five days a week — only four if the bushel costs 4 shillings... But since wages in this kingdom stand much higher compared to the price of necessaries, the manufacturer who works four days has a surplus of money with which he lives idly for the rest of the week... I hope I have said enough to show that moderate labour for six days a week is no slavery. Our agricultural labourers do it, and to all appearance they are the happiest among the labouring poor; the Dutch do it in their manufactures and appear a very happy people. The French do it, too, except when the many holidays intervene... But our populace has got the fixed notion in its head that, as Englishmen, they enjoy a birthright privilege to be freer and more independent than the working people of any other country in Europe. Now, that idea, as far as it affects the bravery of our soldiers, may be of some use; but the less the manufacturing poor have of it, the better for them and for the State. Workers should never think themselves independent of their superiors... It is extremely dangerous to encourage mobs in a commercial state like ours, where perhaps seven parts out of eight of the whole population are people with little or no property... The cure will not be complete until our manufacturing poor are content to labour six days for the same sum they now earn in four."

To that end — and to "eradicate idleness, debauchery, and romantic freedom-fantasies," as well as "to reduce the poor-rate, promote the spirit of industry, and lower the price of labour in manufactures" — capital's faithful guardian proposes the tried-and-true remedy: lock up workers who fall on public charity — in a word, paupers — in an "ideal workhouse." "Such a house must be made a House of Terror." In this "House of Terror," this "ideal workhouse," the poor are to work "14 hours daily, including however proper meal-times, so that 12 full working-hours remain."

Twelve working-hours a day in the "Ideal Workhouse," the "House of Terror" of 1770! Sixty-three years later, in 1833, when the English Parliament reduced the working-day for children of 13 to 18 in four branches of industry to 12 full hours, the day of judgement for English industry seemed to have dawned!

In 1852, when Louis Bonaparte tried to secure his bourgeois footing by shaking up the legal working-day, the French working people cried out with one voice: "The law that limits the working-day to 12 hours is the only good thing the legislation of the Republic left us!" In Zürich the work of children over 10 is limited to 12 hours; in Aargau in 1862 the work of children between 13 and 16 was reduced from 12½ hours; in Austria in 1860, for children between 14 and 16, likewise to 12 hours. What "progress since 1770!" Macaulay would shout with exultation.

The "House of Terror" for paupers, dreamt of by the soul of capital back in 1770, rose a few years later as a gigantic "workhouse" for the manufacturing workers themselves. It was called the factory. And this time the ideal paled before the reality.

It took capital centuries to stretch the working day to its maximum limits, and then past them, up to the natural limit of 12 hours. But with the birth of large-scale industry in the last third of the eighteenth century came an avalanche-like, violent, and reckless surge. Every barrier of custom and nature, age and sex, day and night, was smashed. Even the ideas of day and night, simple enough in the old farm-based laws, got so blurred that an English judge in 1860 still needed Talmudic cleverness to declare legally what day and night actually were. Capital was celebrating its orgies.

As soon as the working class, deafened at first by the roar of production, came back to its senses, resistance began in the birthplace of modern industry: England. But for three decades, the concessions they wrung out were purely nominal. Parliament passed five labour acts between 1802 and 1833, but was clever enough not to vote a single penny to enforce them, or to pay for the officials needed to do so. The laws remained a dead letter.

The fact is that before the Act of 1833, children and young people were worked all night, all day, or both, just as employers pleased.

Only from the Factory Act of 1833 — which covered cotton, wool, flax, and silk factories — does a normal working day for modern industry date. Nothing captures the spirit of capital better than the history of English factory legislation from 1833 to 1864.

The 1833 law declared that the ordinary factory working day should run from 5:30 in the morning to 8:30 at night. Within these limits — a 15-hour span — it was legal to employ young people, meaning those between 13 and 18, at any time of day, provided no single young person worked more than 12 hours in a day, with a few specific exceptions. The 6th section of the Act required that every such person whose hours were restricted be given at least 1 1/2 hours for meals. The labour of children under 9 was forbidden, with a later exception. The work of children from 9 to 13 was limited to 8 hours a day. Night work — defined by this law as work between 8:30 PM and 5:30 AM — was forbidden for everyone between 9 and 18.

The legislators were so far from wanting to touch capital's freedom to drain adult labour-power — or, as they called it, "the freedom of labour" — that they cooked up a special system to prevent what they saw as the outrageous consequence of the factory act.

"The great evil of the factory system, as it is currently arranged," said the first report of the Central Board of the Commission on June 25, 1833, "is that it creates the need to stretch child labour to the utmost length of the adult working day. The only remedy for this evil, without restricting the labour of adults — which would create an evil greater than the one we are trying to prevent — seems to be the plan of working double sets of children."

So this "plan" was carried out under the name of the relay system — "relay" meaning the changing of post-horses at different stations. For instance, one set of children between 9 and 13 would be hitched up from 5:30 in the morning to 1:30 in the afternoon, and another set from 1:30 in the afternoon to 8:30 at night, and so on.

To reward the factory masters for having defied all the child-labour laws passed over the last 22 years with the utmost bare-faced cheek, Parliament now gilded the pill for them. Parliament decreed that after March 1, 1834, no child under 11, after March 1, 1835, no child under 12, and after March 1, 1836, no child under 13, could work more than 8 hours in a factory! This "liberalism," so considerate of "capital," was all the more remarkable because Dr. Farre, Sir A. Carlisle, Sir B. Brodie, Sir C. Bell, Mr. Guthrie, and so on — in short, the most distinguished physicians and surgeons of London — had testified before the House of Commons that there was danger in delay. Dr. Farre put it even more bluntly.

"Legislation is just as necessary to prevent death in every form in which it can be prematurely inflicted, and certainly this [the factory mode] must be viewed as one of the cruellest methods of inflicting it."

The very same "reformed" Parliament that, out of tender regard for the factory masters, chained children under 13 for years to the hell of 72 hours of factory work a week, flatly forbade planters — in the Emancipation Act, which also doled out freedom drop by drop — from working any enslaved African more than 45 hours a week!

Unplacated, capital opened a noisy, years-long campaign. It revolved mainly around the age of those who, classed as children, were restricted to 8 hours and subjected to compulsory schooling. According to capitalist anthropology, childhood ended at 10, or at most 11. As the deadline for the full enforcement of the Factory Act approached — the fateful year of 1836 — the mob of manufacturers raged ever more wildly. They actually managed to intimidate the government so much that in 1835 it proposed lowering the age of childhood from 13 to 12. But the pressure from without grew dangerously. The House of Commons lost its nerve. It refused to throw 13-year-olds under the Juggernaut car of capital for more than 8 hours a day, and the Act of 1833 came into full force. It remained unchanged until June 1844.

During the decade when the Act regulated factory work — first partly, then wholly — the official reports of the factory inspectors overflowed with complaints that it was impossible to enforce. Because the 1833 law left the lords of capital free during the 15 hours from 5:30 AM to 8:30 PM to have any "young person" or "child" begin, pause, and end their 12 or 8 hours of work whenever they liked, and to assign different meal hours to different people, the gentlemen soon cooked up a new "relay system." Under this system, the labour-horses were not changed at fixed stations, but constantly re-harnessed at ever-shifting ones. We will not dwell on the beauty of this system here, since we must return to it later. But at first glance it is clear that it abolished the whole Factory Act not only in spirit but in its very letter. How were factory inspectors supposed to enforce the legal working hours and legal meals with this complicated bookkeeping for every single child and young person? In large parts of the factories, the old brutal abuses soon flourished again, unpunished.

At a meeting with the Home Secretary in 1844, the factory inspectors proved that control under the newly-invented relay system was impossible. By then, however, circumstances had greatly changed. Since 1838 especially, the factory workers had made the Ten Hours Bill their economic rallying cry, just as they had made the Charter their political one. Even some of the manufacturers who had run their factories according to the 1833 Act bombarded Parliament with petitions about the immoral "competition" of their "false brethren," who managed to break the law thanks to greater audacity or luckier local conditions. Moreover, however much individual manufacturers might give free rein to their old greed, the spokesmen and political leaders of the manufacturing class took a changed stance and used a changed language toward the workers. They had launched their campaign to repeal the Corn Laws and needed the workers' help to win! So they promised not only to double the loaf of bread, but to pass the Ten Hours Bill under the thousand-year reign of Free Trade. They could therefore hardly fight a measure meant simply to make the 1833 Act a reality. Threatened in their holiest interest — land rent — the Tories finally thundered with philanthropic indignation against the "infamous practices" of their enemies.

That is how the supplementary Factory Act of June 7, 1844 came about. It went into effect on September 10, 1844. It brought a new category of workers under protection: all women over 18. In every respect they were put on the same level as the young persons. Their working time was limited to 12 hours, night work was forbidden, and so on. For the first time, legislation saw itself forced to directly and officially control the labour of legal adults. As the Factory Report of 1844/1845 noted ironically:

"Not a single case has come to our knowledge where adult women complained about this infringement of their rights."

The working hours of children under 13 were reduced to 6 1/2 hours a day and, under certain conditions, 7 hours.

To wipe out the abuses of the false "relay system," the law laid down, among other things, the following important detail provisions:

"The working day for children and young persons shall be counted from the moment any child or young person begins work in the factory in the morning."

So if worker A starts work at 8:00 AM and worker B starts at 10:00 AM, B's working day must still end at the same hour as A's. The start of the working day must be marked by a public clock — say, the nearest railway clock — which the factory bell must follow. The factory owner must hang up a large printed notice stating the start, finish, and breaks of the working day. Children who begin their morning shift before 12:00 noon cannot be used again after 1:00 PM. The afternoon shift must therefore consist of different children than the morning shift.

The 1 1/2 hours for meals must be given to all protected workers at the same periods of the day, with at least one hour falling before 3:00 PM. Children, young persons, or women may not be employed for more than 5 hours before 1:00 PM without at least a half-hour break for a meal. Children, young persons, or women may not stay in any factory room where a labour process is underway during meals, and so on.

As we have seen: these minute provisions, regulating the period, limits, and pauses of work with such military uniformity by the strike of a clock, were by no means the products of parliamentary fancy. They developed gradually out of the real conditions as natural laws of the modern mode of production. Their formulation, official recognition, and state proclamation were the outcome of a prolonged class struggle.

One of their immediate side-effects was that, in practice, the working day of adult male factory workers was also subjected to the same limits, since in most production processes the cooperation of children, young persons, and women is indispensable. On the whole, then, during the period from 1844 to 1847, the 12-hour working day became general and uniform across all branches of industry under factory legislation.

The manufacturers did not allow this "progress" without a compensating "retrogression." At their urging, the House of Commons lowered the minimum age of the children to be processed from 9 to 8, securing the "additional supply of factory children" due to capital by divine and legal right.

The years 1846 and 1847 mark an epoch in the economic history of England. The Corn Laws were repealed, import duties on cotton and other raw materials were abolished, and Free Trade was declared the guiding star of legislation! In short, the thousand-year reign had arrived. On the other hand, in those very same years, the Chartist movement and the Ten Hours agitation reached their peak. They found allies in the vengeance-snorting Tories. Despite the fanatical resistance of the army of oath-breaking Free Traders, led by Bright and Cobden, the long-sought Ten Hours Bill passed through Parliament.

The new Factory Act of June 8, 1847 set out that on July 1, 1847, there would be a preliminary shortening of the working day for "young persons" (from 13 to 18) and all female workers to 11 hours, and that on May 1, 1848, the definitive limit of 10 hours would take effect. For the rest, the Act was merely an amending supplement to the laws of 1833 and 1844.

Capital launched a preliminary campaign to stop the Act from coming into full force on May 1, 1848. And the workers themselves, supposedly wised up by experience, were to help destroy their own work. The moment was cleverly chosen.

"It must be remembered that owing to the terrible crisis of 1846/47, great suffering prevailed among the factory workers, because many factories were running only part-time and others stood entirely still. A considerable number of the workers were therefore in the most dire straits, and many were in debt. It could therefore be assumed with some certainty that they would prefer the longer working hours to make up for past losses, perhaps to pay off debts, get their furniture out of pawn, replace sold belongings, or buy new clothes for themselves and their families."

The factory masters tried to boost the natural effect of these circumstances with a general wage cut of 10%. This happened, so to speak, as the inauguration ceremony of the new Free Trade era. Then came a further cut of 8 1/3% as soon as the working day was reduced to 11 hours, and double that once it was definitively cut to 10 hours. Wherever conditions allowed, there was a wage cut of at least 25%.

With the chances so favourably prepared, they started a campaign among the workers to repeal the 1847 Act. No trick of fraud, seduction, or threat was spared, but all in vain. Regarding the half-dozen petitions where workers had to complain about "their oppression by the Act," the petitioners themselves declared under oral questioning that their signatures had been forced out of them. "They were oppressed, but by someone other than the Factory Act."

But when the manufacturers failed to get the workers to say what the manufacturers wanted, they just shouted all the louder in the press and in Parliament in the name of the workers. They denounced the factory inspectors as a kind of Convention commissars, ruthlessly sacrificing the unfortunate worker to their crank scheme for saving the world. That manoeuvre failed too. Factory inspector Leonard Horner personally, along with his sub-inspectors, held numerous witness interviews in the factories of Lancashire. About 70% of the workers questioned declared themselves for 10 hours, a much smaller percentage for 11, and a completely insignificant minority for the old 12 hours.

Another "amicable" manoeuvre was to have the adult male workers work 12 to 15 hours and then declare this fact to be the truest expression of the proletarian heart's desire. But the "merciless" factory inspector Leonard Horner was on the spot again. Most of the "overtime" workers testified, "they would by far prefer to work 10 hours for lower wages, but they had no choice; so many of them were unemployed, so many spinners forced to work as mere piecers, that if they refused the longer hours, others would immediately take their places, so that the question for them stood: either work the longer hours or lie on the pavement."

Capital's first campaign had failed, and the Ten Hours' Act went into effect on May 1, 1848. But the defeat of the Chartist party (the workers' mass movement for the vote) — its leaders locked up, its organization shattered — had already broken the confidence of the English working class. Right after that, the Paris uprising of June 1848 and its bloody crushing united every faction of the ruling class across Europe and England. Landlords and capitalists, stock-exchange wolves and shopkeepers, protectionists and free-traders, government and opposition, priests and freethinkers, young whores and old nuns — all of them rallied around a single cry to save Property, Religion, the Family, and Society!

The working class was everywhere denounced, outlawed, and placed under a virtual law of suspects. The manufacturers no longer needed to hold back. They broke into open revolt — not just against the Ten Hours' Act, but against the entire body of legislation since 1833 that had tried to put some curb on the "free" bleeding of labour-power. It was a pro-slavery rebellion in miniature, carried out for over two years with cynical recklessness and terrorist energy — all the cheaper because the rebelling capitalist risked nothing but the skin of his workers.

To grasp what happens next, keep in mind that the Factory Acts of 1833, 1844, and 1847 all remained legally in force, except where one amended another. None of them limited the working day of a male worker over 18. And since 1833, the legal "day" remained a 15-hour window from 5:30 in the morning to 8:30 at night. It was only within that window that the 12 hours — and later 10 hours — of work by young persons and women had to be performed under the required conditions.

The manufacturers started by firing some — sometimes half — of the young persons and women they employed. In their place, they brought back the nearly forgotten practice of night-work for adult men. The Ten Hours' Act, they cried, left them no other choice!

The manufacturers' second move targeted the legally required meal breaks. Listen to the factory inspectors.

"Since the working hours were limited to 10, the factory occupiers claim — even though they have not fully pushed this to its conclusion in practice — that if work runs, say, from 9 in the morning to 7 at night, they satisfy the law by giving one hour for meals before 9 a.m. and a half hour after 7 p.m. That adds up to 1½ hours. In some cases they now allow a half hour or full hour for dinner, but they insist at the same time that they are absolutely not obligated to grant any part of that 1½ hours during the actual 10-hour working day."

So the manufacturers argued that the strict 1844 rules on meal breaks merely gave the workers permission to eat and drink at home — before entering the factory and after leaving it! And why shouldn't workers eat their midday meal before 9 in the morning? The crown lawyers, however, ruled that the required meal breaks must fall as pauses within the actual working day, and that working 10 hours straight from 9 a.m. to 7 p.m. without a break is illegal.

After these good-natured demonstrations, capital opened its real revolt with a step that matched the exact letter of the 1844 law — and was therefore perfectly legal.

The 1844 law certainly forbade using children aged 8 to 13 after 1 p.m. if they had been used before noon. But it said absolutely nothing about the 6½ hours of work for children whose shift began at noon or later! An eight-year-old child who started at noon could legally be put to work from 12 to 1 (1 hour), from 2 to 4 p.m. (2 hours), and from 5 to 8:30 p.m. (3½ hours) — adding up perfectly to the legal limit of 6½ hours.

Or even better. To make the children's labor match the adult males' shift right up to 8:30 p.m., the manufacturers simply had to give them no work until 2 in the afternoon. Then they could keep them locked in the factory without interruption until 8:30 at night.

"And it is now expressly admitted that a practice has crept into England: driven by greed to run their machinery for more than 10 hours, mill-owners are keeping children of both sexes, aged 8 to 13, at work alongside adult men — after all the young persons and women have left the factory — right up to 8:30 p.m., if they so choose."

Workers and factory inspectors protested on sanitary and moral grounds. But capital answered:

"My deeds upon my head! I demand my right!

The penalty and forfeit of my bond!"

In truth, according to statistics laid before the House of Commons on July 26, 1850, despite all the protests, 3,732 children in 257 factories were subjected to this exact "practice" on July 15, 1850. But that was not enough. The lynx-eye of capital discovered that the 1844 Act forbade five straight hours of morning work without at least a 30-minute break for refreshment, but laid down no such rule for the afternoon! So capital demanded and fought for the right not only to force eight-year-old children to drudge without stopping from 2 p.m. to 8:30 p.m., but to keep them starving the entire time.

"Yes, the breast! So says the bond."

This clinging, like Shakespeare's Shylock to his bond, to the letter of the 1844 law over child labor was only meant to serve as a bridge. The real target was an open revolt against that same law where it regulated the labor of young persons and women. Remember that wiping out the "false relay system" was the whole point and main substance of that 1844 law.

The manufacturers opened this revolt with a simple declaration. They announced that the sections of the 1844 Act — which stopped them from slicing the 15-hour factory day into whatever random fractions they liked to use young persons and women — had been "comparatively harmless" as long as the workday was limited to 12 hours. But now, under the Ten Hours' Act, those same rules were an intolerable "hardship."

So they coolly informed the inspectors that they intended to ignore the letter of the law and simply bring back the old system on their own authority. They claimed to be acting in the interest of the poorly-advised workers themselves, "in order to be able to pay them higher wages." "It was the only possible plan," they said, "to maintain the industrial supremacy of Great Britain under the Ten Hours' Act." And as for the difficulty of catching violations under the relay system? "What of that? Is the great manufacturing interest of this country to be treated as a secondary matter just to save the factory inspectors and sub-inspectors a little trouble?"

Naturally, none of these tricks did any good on their own; the factory inspectors took them to court. But soon such a dust-cloud of petitions from the manufacturers buried the Home Secretary, Sir George Grey, that on August 5, 1848, he issued a circular. In it, he instructed the inspectors generally not to prosecute for violating the letter of the Act, so long as the relay system was not proven to have been abused to force young persons and women to work beyond 10 hours.

Following this, factory inspector J. Stuart allowed the so-called relay system to operate throughout Scotland during the 15-hour factory day, and it quickly flourished there exactly as before. The English factory inspectors, on the other hand, declared that the Home Secretary possessed no dictatorial power to suspend the laws, and they kept hauling the pro-slavery rebels into court.

But what good is a court summons when the courts — in this case, the county magistrates — simply acquit the offenders? In these courts, the manufacturers sat in judgment over themselves. Here is an example. A certain Eskrigge, a cotton-spinner for the firm Kershaw, Leese & Co., had submitted a relay-system schedule for his factory to the local inspector. When it was rejected, he lay low at first. A few months later, an individual named Robinson — also a cotton-spinner, and if not Eskrigge's man Friday, certainly his relative — appeared before the borough magistrates in Stockport. He was charged with introducing the exact identical relay plan invented by Eskrigge. Four judges sat on the bench, three of them cotton-spinners, headed by the inescapable Eskrigge himself. Eskrigge acquitted Robinson, declaring that what was right for Robinson was only fair for Eskrigge. Backed by his own legally binding verdict, Eskrigge immediately introduced the system into his own factory. The very makeup of this court was, of course, an open violation of the law.

Inspector Howell exclaimed: "These judicial farces urgently call for a remedy... either the law must be adapted to fit these verdicts, or let it be administered by a less fallible tribunal, one that adapts its decisions to the law... in all such cases. How I long for a paid judge!"

The crown lawyers declared the manufacturers' interpretation of the 1848 Act to be absurd, but the saviours of society would not be deterred.

Leonard Horner reported: "Having tried to enforce the law through 10 prosecutions across 7 different magisterial districts, and being supported by the magistrates in only a single case... I consider further prosecution for evading the law useless. The part of the Act designed to create uniformity in working hours... no longer exists in Lancashire. Neither my sub-agents nor I possess any means to ensure that factories operating under the so-called relay system are not working young persons and women for more than 10 hours... By the end of April 1849, 114 factories in my district were already using this method, and the number is currently exploding. In general, they now work 13½ hours, from 6 a.m. to 7:30 p.m.; in some cases 15 hours, from 5:30 a.m. to 8:30 p.m."

Back in December 1848, Leonard Horner already held a list of 65 manufacturers and 29 factory overlookers who unanimously declared that no system of supervision could stop the most extreme overwork under this relay system. Children and young persons were constantly shuffled from the spinning-room to the weaving-room, and even pushed from one factory to another over a span of 15 hours. How can anyone control a system "which abuses the word 'relay' to shuffle the hands around in endless variety like a deck of cards, shifting the hours of work and rest for different individuals every day, so that the exact same complete set of hands never works together in the same place at the same time!"

But putting actual overwork entirely aside, this so-called relay system was an offspring of capitalistic fantasy that the utopian socialist Fourier himself never surpassed in his humorous sketches of "short sessions" — except here the attraction of labor has been twisted into the attraction of capital. Just look at the manufacturers' schedules, which the respectable press praised as models of "what a reasonable degree of care and method can accomplish." The workforce was sometimes divided into 12 to 15 categories that were themselves constantly changing. During the 15-hour factory day, capital pulled the worker in for 30 minutes here, an hour there, only to push him right back out, dragging him in and thrusting him out again, chasing him back and forth in scattered shreds of time without ever letting go of him until the full 10 hours of work were done.

Like stage actors, the same people had to appear in turn across different scenes of different acts. But just as an actor belongs to the stage for the whole duration of the play, the workers now belonged to the factory for 15 hours straight — not even counting the time it took to get there and back. Their hours of rest were thus turned into hours of forced idleness, driving the young men to the pub and the young women to the brothel. With every new trick the capitalist invented to keep his machinery running 12 or 15 hours without hiring more workers, the laborer had to choke down his meals in one random fragment of time or another.

During the Ten Hours' agitation, the manufacturers had screamed that the working mob was petitioning only in hopes of getting 12 hours' wages for 10 hours of work. Now they had flipped the coin. They paid 10 hours' wages for 12 or 15 hours of disposal over their labour-power! That was the heart of the matter; that was the manufacturers' version of the Ten Hours' Act. And these were the exact same unctuous free-traders, dripping with love for humanity, who had spent 10 full years during the Anti-Corn-Law agitation preaching to the workers — down to the exact pennies — that with free importation of corn and the power of English industry, a 10-hour workday was plenty to enrich the capitalists.

After two years, this revolt by capital was finally crowned by a verdict from one of the four highest courts of justice in England. On February 8, 1850, the Court of Exchequer ruled in a test case that while the manufacturers were definitely acting against the spirit of the 1844 Act, the Act itself contained certain words that rendered it meaningless. "With this decision, the Ten Hours' Act was abolished." A swarm of manufacturers who had previously been afraid to use the relay system for young persons and women now grabbed it with both hands.

But with this seemingly final victory for capital, an immediate reversal set in. Until now, the workers had offered passive resistance — stubborn and renewed every day, but still passive. Now they erupted in massive, threatening protest meetings across Lancashire and Yorkshire. The supposed Ten Hours' Act was a fraud, a parliamentary swindle, and it had never really existed! The factory inspectors urgently warned the government that class antagonism had stretched to an unbelievable breaking point. Even a section of the manufacturers themselves began to grumble.

"Because of the contradictory decisions by the magistrates, a completely abnormal and anarchic state of things now prevails. One law applies in Yorkshire, another in Lancashire; one law applies in one parish of Lancashire, and a different one right next door. The manufacturer in the big cities can dodge the law, but the one in the country villages can't find the necessary staff for the relay system, let alone to shift workers from one factory to another," and so on.

And equal exploitation of labour-power is the first human right of capital.

Under these conditions, a compromise was reached between the manufacturers and the workers, sealed by Parliament in a new supplementary Factory Act on August 5, 1850. For "young persons and women," the working day for the first five days of the week was actually raised from 10 to 10½ hours, and limited to 7½ hours on Saturday. Work had to take place within the period from 6 a.m. to 6 p.m., with 1½-hour pauses for meals, which had to be given at the same time and under the same conditions laid down in 1844. With this, the relay system was ended once and for all. The 1844 law remained in force for child labor.

One group of manufacturers secured special feudal-style seigneurial rights over proletarian children for themselves this time, just as they had before. These were the silk manufacturers. In 1833, they had howled threateningly that "if the liberty of working children of any age for 10 hours a day was taken away, it would stop their works." They claimed it was impossible to buy enough children over the age of 13. They extorted the privilege they wanted. The pretext later turned out to be an outright lie, but that did not stop them from spending a decade spinning silk for 10 hours a day out of the blood of little children who had to be stood on stools just to do the work.

The Act of 1844 "robbed" them of the "liberty" to work children under 11 for more than 6½ hours, but in exchange it guaranteed them the privilege of working children aged 11 to 13 for 10 hours a day, while cancelling the compulsory schooling required for all other factory children. This time, the pretext was:

"The delicacy of the fabric requires a lightness of touch that can only be secured by entering the factory at an early age."

For the sake of those delicate fingers, the children were slaughtered entirely, like horned cattle in Southern Russia slaughtered for their hides and tallow. Finally, in 1850, the privilege granted in 1844 was restricted just to silk-twisting and silk-winding departments. But to compensate capital for the loss of its "freedom," the working time for children aged 11 to 13 in those departments was raised from 10 to 10½ hours. The pretext: "Labor in silk mills is lighter than in other factories, and in no way as harmful to health." Official medical investigations later proved that, on the contrary, "the average death rate in the silk districts is exceptionally high, and among the female part of the population even higher than in the cotton districts of Lancashire."

Despite the protests of the factory inspectors repeated every six months, the abuse continues to this hour.

The Act of 1850 only changed the 15-hour period — from 5:30 a.m. to 8:30 p.m. — into a 12-hour period from 6 a.m. to 6 p.m. for young persons and women. It did not do this for children. Children could still be used for a half hour before this period began, and for 2½ hours after it ended, provided their total work did not exceed 6½ hours. During the debates over the law, the factory inspectors presented Parliament with statistics showing the infamous abuse of this anomaly. But it was no use. The lurking intention in the background was to use the children to ratchet the adult male workers' day back up to 15 hours during years of booming business.

Experience over the next three years showed that any such attempt would fail because of the resistance of the adult male workers. Finally, in 1853, the Act of 1850 was supplemented by banning the use of children in the morning before, or in the evening after, the young persons and women. From then on, with a few exceptions, the Factory Act of 1850 regulated the working day of all workers in the industries under its control. Half a century had now passed since the first Factory Act was issued.

Legislation first stretched beyond its original sphere with the "Printworks' Act" of 1845 (a law covering cotton-printing, etc.). The reluctance with which capital tolerated this new "extravagance" speaks from every line of the Act! It limits the working day for children aged 8 to 13 and for women to 16 hours, between 6 a.m. and 10 p.m., without any legal break for meals whatsoever. It permits male workers over 13 to be worked arbitrarily, day and night. It is a parliamentary abortion.

Nevertheless, the principle had won now that it had triumphed in the great industries — the very creations of the modern mode of production. Their marvelous development from 1853 to 1860, hand in hand with the physical and moral regeneration of the factory workers, was visible to the blindest eye. The manufacturers themselves, who had the legal limit and regulation of the working day torn from them step by step through half a century of civil war, now pointed boastfully to the contrast with the spheres of still "free" exploitation.

The Pharisees of "political economy" now proclaimed the recognition of the need for a legally regulated working day as a characteristic new triumph of their "science." It is easy to understand that once the factory magnates had bowed to the inevitable and reconciled with it, the resistance of capital gradually weakened, while at the same time the attacking power of the working class grew alongside the number of its allies in layers of society not directly affected. Hence the relatively rapid progress since 1860.

Dye-works and bleach-works were brought under the Factory Act of 1850 in 1860, and lace-factories and stocking-knitting mills in 1861. Following the first report of the "Commission on the Employment of Children" in 1863, the same fate met the manufacture of all earthenware (not just pottery), matches, percussion caps, cartridges, wallpaper, cotton-velvet cutting, and a host of processes grouped under the heading "finishing." In 1863, "open-air bleaching" and baking were placed under their own special Acts, the first of which, among other things, banned night-work for children, young persons, and women from 8 p.m. to 6 a.m., and the second banned the use of bakers' assistants under 18 between 9 p.m. and 5 a.m. We will return later to the later proposals of this Commission, which, with the exception of agriculture, mining, and transport, threaten to rob all the important branches of English industry of their "freedom."

Remember the standing assumption of the chapter: making surplus-value — extracting surplus labour — is the specific content and purpose of capitalist production, quite apart from any later transformation of the mode of production itself that might follow once labour is subordinated to capital. Remember, too, that at this point we are dealing only with the independent worker — a worker legally of age — selling a commodity and striking a deal with the capitalist. So if our historical sketch has put modern industry in a starring role on the one hand, and on the other has dwelt on the labour of people who are physically or legally underage, that is because the one served us as a particular sphere, and the other as a particularly striking example of the suction of labour. Without anticipating later development, the mere connection of these historical facts brings us to several conclusions.

First. The drive of capital for a boundless and reckless extension of the working day is first satisfied in those industries earliest revolutionised by water, steam, and machinery — the first creations of the modern mode of production, the cotton, wool, flax, and silk spinning-mills and weaving-sheds.

It is the changed material mode of production, together with the correspondingly changed social relations of the producers, that first creates this measureless excess, and then, in opposition, calls forth social control, which legally limits, regulates, and makes uniform the working day and its breaks.

So that control appears, in the first half of the nineteenth century, simply as exception-law — aimed only at those particular, leading industries. But as soon as it had conquered the original territory of the new mode of production, it turned out that in the meantime many other branches of production had entered the actual factory regime.

It turned out, too, that older manufactures with more or less out-of-date methods — potteries, glassworks — and old-fashioned handicrafts like baking, and finally even scattered so-called domestic industries like nail-making, had long since fallen just as completely under capitalist exploitation as the factories.

Legislation was therefore forced to gradually strip off its exceptional character. Or else, where it proceeds case by case, in the old legal style, as in England, to declare any house where work is done a "factory" whenever it chooses.

Second. The history of the regulation of the working day in some branches of production, and the struggle still going on in others to get that regulation, prove conclusively that the isolated worker — the worker as the "free" seller of his labour-power — succumbs without resistance once capitalist production reaches a certain stage of maturity.

The creation of a normal working day is therefore the product of a protracted, more or less hidden civil war between the capitalist class and the working class. As the struggle opens in the arena of modern industry, it first breaks out in the home country of that industry: England.

The English factory workers were the champions not only of the English working class but of the modern working class as a whole, just as their theorists were the first to throw down the gauntlet to the theory of capital.

That is why Ure, the philosopher of the factory, denounces it as an indelible disgrace that the English working class inscribed "the slavery of the Factory Acts" on its banner against a capital that was manfully fighting for the "perfect freedom of labour."

France limps slowly behind England. It took the February Revolution to give birth to the twelve-hour law, and that law is much more defective than its English original.

All the same, the French revolutionary method asserts its own peculiar advantages. At a single stroke it dictates the same barrier on the working day to all workshops and factories without distinction, whereas English legislation reluctantly gives way to the pressure of circumstances at one point or another, and is well on the way to hatching a new tangle of legal rats.

On the other hand, the French law proclaims as a principle what in England was only won in the name of children, minors, and "womenfolk" — and has only recently been claimed as a general right.

In the United States of North America, every independent labour movement was paralysed so long as slavery disfigured a part of the Republic. Labour in a white skin cannot emancipate itself where it is branded in a black skin.

But from the death of slavery new life immediately sprang up. The first fruit of the Civil War was the eight-hours agitation, striding with the seven-league boots of the locomotive from the Atlantic to the Pacific, from New England to California.

The General Congress of Labour at Baltimore (August 1866) declared:

"The first and great necessity of the present, to free the labour of this country from capitalist slavery, is the passing of a law by which 8 hours shall be the normal working day in all the States of the American Union. We are resolved to put forth all our strength until this glorious result is attained."

At the same time (early September 1866) the International Working Men's Congress at Geneva, on the proposal of the London General Council, resolved: "We declare the limitation of the working day a preliminary condition, without which all further efforts at emancipation must fail ... We propose 8 working hours as the legal limit of the working day."

Thus the workers' movement on both sides of the Atlantic — a movement that sprang instinctively from the relations of production themselves — seals the saying of the English factory inspector R. J. Saunders:

"Further steps towards the reform of society can never be carried out with any hope of success, unless the working day be limited and its prescribed barrier strictly enforced."

It must be acknowledged that our worker leaves the production process changed from how he entered it. On the market he confronted other commodity-owners as the owner of the commodity "labour-power" — dealer against dealer. The contract by which he sold his labour-power to the capitalist proved, so to speak, in black and white that he freely disposed of himself.

Once the bargain is struck, it is discovered that he was "no free agent," that the very time when it is free for him to sell his labour-power is the time when he is forced to sell it, and that his vampire-sucker in fact does not let go "so long as there is a muscle, a tendon, a drop of blood to exploit."

For "protection" against the serpent of their torments, the workers must band together and, as a class, compel a state law — an overpowering social barrier that will prevent the workers themselves from selling, by voluntary contract with capital, themselves and their generation into death and slavery.

In place of the pompous catalogue of "inalienable human rights" comes the modest Magna Charta of a legally limited working day, which "finally makes clear when the time the worker sells is ended and when his own time begins." Quantum mutatus ab illo! (What a great change from that time!)