Class 8: Capital Chapter 8: The Working Day

(light dramatic music) - [Paul] Today, we are going to find out what a capitalist is. Aren't you excited? He doesn't have that much good to say. Our friend Marx, a capitalist, buys labor power at its daily value. This is 205. You'll notice that he repeats himself a lot. That's I guess to help you, but also because he's always adding a little bit to the argument. So in the working day chapter page 205, a capitalist buys labor power at its daily value. The labor power belongs to him for the duration of one working day. This is just, he's positing this. He has obtained the right to put the worker to work during this time. But what is a working day? Here's where we get out of value, surplus value or out-of-variable capital surplus value. The capitalist has his own view on this ultima thule, the necessary limit of a workday, first limit, temporal limit, also a tautological limit. 24 hours is 24 hours and it will never be more, capital would like tautologies and ontology to be changed such that 24 could be more, but it just happens to be a mathematical limit, a tautological limit, a limit of our imagination so far, dimensionality, physical dimensionality. You know, if you could overcome that and 24 hours was more than 24 hours, capital would be all for that and is probably funding those projects as we speak. As a capitalist, he is merely capital personified. Step one, his soul is the soul of capital which knows only one drive in life. The drive to valorize itself to create surplus value, to use its constant part, the means of production to absorb the greatest possible quantity of surplus labor. Now, he's about to demonstrate with lots of historical examples, legal examples, examples from the history of worker movements, how this was actually carried out. It's messy, but the laws remain. These laws, he calls them laws that is the capitalist, is the personified version of capital which has a drive to absorb the greatest possible quantity of surplus labor. Whatever it needs to do that, using up populations, using children with nice little hands, it will do that. Capital is dead labor that acts like a vampire. It comes to life only when it drinks living labor. The more living labor it drinks, the more it comes to life. The time when a worker is working is the time when the capitalist consumes the labor power he has bought. So a capitalist is a kind of a zombie that has a soul outside of itself, not a person. Capitalists are not people. They are functions of capital that act like zombies whose soul is outside of themselves. The soul is actually in the valorization of value. If your soul has desires in it that wants to acquire things or love things or keep desiring, depending how you think about it, if you're a nietzschean or a utilitarian, you're a person. If capital is your soul and you embody the drive to increase it, you're a zombie. Capitalists are also vampires because they drink up the living labor, they consume laborers. So this is Marx's metaphorology and it's strong and it's gothic, but it also isn't wrong. It helps you come to see the very different position of the capitalist and you'll see exactly how that works in more material terms, they have these levers that they push, okay, we can't get anymore out of this guy. We'll bring in another guy, we'll bring in this other guy. We double our variable capital outlay and we double our surplus value ingress returned. So if we can get more out of one laborer, it's much better to labor. Well, how long will they last in a day, in a week, in a month? This is the operational material mechanism of the vampirism of a capitalist. A capitalist, as Marx says, may perfectly well be a good person. At home, they may give to all sorts of charities. What can you do with all that money? Jim Simons, you give it to education and other things, but where it's coming from is the lives of the people

that you try to halfheartedly repair through charitable donations. This is Marx's argument and we're working through them. You'll notice he has moments in which the different personified functions of capital speak. Don't forget that this is a funny double operation in which these are not people, these are operations, but they're treated as though, for Marx, they can speak. A worker doesn't speak, you speak, a person speaks, a speaker speaks, a worker works. When the worker speaks, they are speaking from their function in capital as a kind of puppet of capital. So he lets the different functions of capital speak and sometimes, he can't help himself but insult them a lot. A capitalist is a soulless engine that sucks living labor out of living workers and transfers it to dead labor. That's my line. Labor is labor power, a commodity that the capitalist has purchased and it needs to be consumed fully. This we talked about in the last episode, lesson lecture. For Marx, the capitalist is all drive, the capitalist carries the drive of the capital system is the drive engine in a way that workers are more like the fuel or the instrument, their own internal drive. Their energy is part of the machine, but the drive comes from capitalist and the worker that the capitalist, uses the worker to satisfy the drive of capital. But the worker is also an impediment to satisfying the drive of capital. The worker is a limit, one of the limits that capital wants to eat. And you'll notice in the vampirism metaphor, it eats the worker slowly. If capital could get rid of workers altogether, it would, we'll see later why it can't. You can imagine from here why it can't. Can you say why it can't get rid of labor? A basic Marxist basic, yeah, it's a source of all surplus. You would have no valorization of value if you didn't have labor. The extreme of this is if you got rid of all labor and you only had machines, how would the laborers buy the products? You'd have to give them money, which they then gave back to you. That would reveal the total absurdity of capitalism, right in that stroke, right? No laborers, they're just sitting around. So on what criteria and do does this person get to buy an iPhone and that a banana? No value. No value in a totally technical system. So the capitalist needs the worker, can't get over the worker, but tries to get over the worker all the time. The capitalist drives to valorize, which turns the production process into the valorization process. And that's what we're studying here historically, the capitalist drives to valorize and the worker struggles to survive. This makes survival have a very particular meaning under capital. They struggle to survive the pressures put on them by the work they have to do to subsist. This is where Marx talks about two equal rights and where the scene of historical struggle comes in. That sets the scene for chapter eight. The capitalist is a buyer. And what does a buyer mean under our conventions and habits and attitudes? A buyer is someone who has the right to consume the product they've bought. The seller has the right to get what they, the value of their product back. That's the way the system works. An exchange of equivalents, the seller's right to specify the use value of the product is what's in question here. Insofar as the seller of labor power, the worker says, has makes no claim on the use value of their product, of their labor says, "Here's my labor power. Use it until I die. " The capitalist is happy. But worker movements teach workers and Marx teaches workers also to set limits on the use of their, the use value of their product that they're selling. To say, you've bought my labor power for 10 hours, but I have to have two breaks. food. I can't work on Saturday.

That's specifying the use value of labor power. But that one is the weaker right in our system and is not the subject of regulation. It's the subject of regulation, but only after struggle. It's not a logical issue. Okay, so let's just say what the limits are. Limits to capital's valorization, we're calling it that now, come from labor. They're posed first by the workers' very existence. Physical, moral, and social. That is, I can only do this much physically. I'm only willing to do this much morally or the society says this is bad. And socially, I need certain sorts of things that aren't just physical like Netflix. It's limited by the quality of labor on the market. There's an incentive for capital to increase the quality of labor to fund education, to be okay with public education. And then there's other times where it's better for them to be not okay with public education, especially if public education is Marxist. It's true. Or where there's a racial division of labor and you're teaching emancipatory wisdom about the history of Black folks in America that has to go because it doesn't serve the racial division of labor which favors White laborers. A limit to capitalists use of labor is the consciousness of the labor which gets educated, or informed and can make decisions. So less consciousness about labor and this whole process is better. This is where Marxist book is making a kind of revolutionary entry. I don't personally believe that consciousness raising has a lot of effect, but it certainly has good effects when it has effects. The stamina of laborers, which has to do primarily with their relative stage of life, young, adult, or old. But also, you'll see that Marx thinks of the 19th century way that gender is a factor here. Women have less stamina and women have other roles by nature. Marx and Engels are, they go back and forth on those stereotypes as they do often with stereotypes of other peoples based on race. A limit to capital's ability to exploit labor comes from the workers' other economic options. Can they take another job? Can they retrain? Can they become management? Have they inherited money? Are they paying the lion's share of taxes? Obviously, the cost of necessary labor, the cost of labor power, variable capital is a limit. The more that the capitalist can drive that down, do you see where all the limits are? These limits are also the levers. A limit is a lever for a capitalist, where the limit in the absolute day is 24 hours. The lever is drive down the value of labor power 'cause then, you get more of the day as surplus value and effectively, you stretch the day beyond 24 hours. Does that make sense? If it costs you six hours of the worker's labor to pay them, right, the workers paying themselves, don't forget this. If you drive that down to four hours, you have in a 12-hour workday, then eight hours of surplus value being produced for yourself, collective action is a limit placed on capital. But you'll notice in this chapter that it has its double-edged and laws, of course, are limits placed on capital too. Laws and regulations. It has limits placed on it, not just from labor, but also by its own logic. First of all, the tautological limit a day is 24 hours. It will never be more, or X intensity is X intensity. That's a limit placed on it by Kha'Zix, you could say, there's limits placed on it by the stage of technical development. Obviously, that doesn't necessarily mean that extremely advanced technologies allow the production of more surplus value, not necessarily, the cycle of higher and lower surplus value production doesn't map on exactly to technical progress. In fact, the less constant capital you use, the more likely it is you can drive labor to more surplus value. I wanna just say in talking about technical limits on capital's valorization, it's not just machines I'm talking about, it's also populations. Populations are developed, they're enlarged, they're reduced, they're moved around populations of laborers.

So that is a technical development in the productivity of labor as well. So you can see that capital, the capital system has a lot invested in the management of populations, birth rates rising and lowering, et cetera, et cetera. And all of these limits interact with one another as do the modes of exploitation. So at any moment, you can look as you do in chapter eight and say, "Ah, the limit of the working day is this. The amount of intensity of work is this. The laws are regulating this, technical advancement is this, these are the ways capital can get more value out at this moment. " Does that make sense? Cool. Questions about that? Isn't it nice that we're talking about actual workers and not just commodities, except that actual workers are just functions of capital. So... Yeah. - I have a question. So I think in the early chapters when he's talking about other commodities, like with Katona, he's using the prices and in this chapter, like in Parker talking about labor as a commodity that's being bought and sold, why isn't he talking explicitly about how much they're paid and like by expanding the working there, shortening it? Why aren't we talking about what the changes are? - Yeah, he's not really giving you numbers here. I think that's just because two of his major, many major discoveries here, he identified them as being surplus value and the way valorization takes over under capital, the fetish and then later what he calls the wage form. So there are chapters dedicated to the wage form and its particular illusion. I think he couldn't really talk about the price, the cost of labor in numbers until he showed how the, what do you call it? The con worked there. If the commodity is a con, it makes you think it's a kind of social thing. The wage form is a con because it makes you think you're getting paid for the value you're putting out when you're only getting paid for the value you cost. It's a particularly confounding number, the wage form. Good question. Others? Okay, let's, we're gonna move through chapter eight, the relatively quick clip. You'll notice that he spends a long time talking about non-capitalist moss of production, especially Corvee labor, which is interesting in itself. This is not only to illustrate that capital is not the only economic form that produces surplus or in which the dominators are trying to push out more surplus. Here's a good example in corvee labor. Corvee labor is the extra production that Serfs had to do yearly for the Lords that lent them the land. The Lords in this case in eastern Europe are called Boyars. They're not capitalist because they don't have to produce value or exchange on a market. They use the things for themselves, but it is exploitative. So lest you think capital invented everything, it didn't. It's just a different arrangement of it. And once valorization becomes the main motive, everything changes qualitatively and the wasting of lives becomes the standard rather than the exception. So in the example of the Wallachian boyars, which I'm probably butchering the pronunciation of Wallachia, was a land that is now Romania, or used to be Romania between the Upper Danube and the Carpathian mountains. It was a place that was cut in a funny time warp, but also in a political crunch between the Ottomans to the south, the Russians to the north east and the Hapsburg empire to the west, such that wars always needed to be fought and you needed surplus. You don't need surplus because you're making your money only from your serfs. You have treasure. You inherit treasure, give other modes of making money too, but you needed it because this is, there's a material reason for it

because it's a conflictual area. A boyar is, as I said, the equivalent to an English lord. Land possession was hereditary, but they also owed tributes to the prince. And so those tributes often came from extracting even a little bit more from their serfs. What Marx uses the boyars to show is how elastic the nominal limits to fair recompense were in this region. Corvee labor required intermittent unpaid labor. Unpaid labor is a good way to talk about surplus value. Today, we talk about it a lot. I won't tell you how much unpaid labor Yale gets out of a professor, but I'm sure you're familiar with it from your own labors. All sorts of things are involved, including getting to work. What an insane idea that you wouldn't be paid for getting to work. You're not getting to work for you, you are and you aren't. Corvee labor required, intermittent unpaid labor, which was a number of days per year. It came from a Roman practice of requiring of the plebs who couldn't pay their taxes. Public work, opera publicy, which is often working on public works like roads and bridges in Rome. So it's an ancient practice. It came into prominence in futile Europe because they fought so many damn wars. This is the most savage group of people that you'll ever encounter. They were constantly fighting wars, so they needed to get unpaid labor out of, out of the lower classes, the working classes. But the work was often not onerous. It was extra, but it was part of the deal. You got your stuff, you worked a few extra days, but look what Marx shows. Mars shows that a day, if you didn't finish what you were working in a day would take another two or three days. A day was a kind of nominal, not fixed-temporal limit, but an amount of work that needed to be done. If you couldn't do it in a day, it would stretch out and so they could stretch it out. In fact, days were not fixed in the middle ages in the way that we think of them as fixed now by mathematical clock time. You could see already that there's a bottomless appetite for labor under certain political conditions, right? Like in a war, everybody goes to work. The good of corvee labor, according to Marx, which you will have read, is that unlike in capital, the extortion, you can use this land if you give a one day of labor a year, and he shows how it was one day and that it was three days and then it turned out to be 48 days and because of the weather, those 48 days were like 40% of the working time you have. And the other problem for Corvee labor incidentally, is that what was corvee labor on? On the Lord's fields, when do you harvest the Lord fields, at harvest time when you're supposed to be harvesting your own fields? So there were great conflicts where people's own crops would go to waste because they had to do the corvee labor for the Lord. This was not always, let's say, beneficial in every way to the worker, but it was positive, Marx says, in the sense that it was obvious to everyone what was going on. It was necessary. It was agreed to in advance. The workers knew by tradition that this was gonna be pushed out of them to a certain limit, but there was no need for it to be pushed out of them beyond all limits. There was no need for a boyar to eat the limits, just to stretch them a little bit. Economic limits, labor limits are very plastic, unfortunately, not like a battery that runs down and when it's out, it's out. I want you to keep in mind also that Marx's other example is chattel slavery, which he was very sensitive to, although at times, he is not as progressive and critical as he should be. He's often very bold about chattel slavery and in these sections he talks, he's always mentioning the absolute horrors of North American slavery. He doesn't really talk about Brazil much or the Caribbean. He recognizes the horrors of slavery and particularly how they increased when cotton became the engine of world capital. It says this very clearly here, where the slave horror, which was already a horror, became a murderous race to make Black lives expendable. (coughing softly) That is one place chattel slavery in North America and in South America and the Caribbean, where the law does not limit the exploitation of labor.

You could put that as the absolute limit. And so for Marx, it's always there in the background. Like am I talking about slavery? Slavery the, the prototype, but he's really working on wage labor. Is wage labor, wage slavery? Again, he's using this example in ways that are very forward for his time. But we but have been called into question and critiqued. A good person to read on this is Stephanie Smallwood, a historian, but many others. Slavery is one area where the law did not regulate exploitation driving towards overwork. Another area was until we get to our period, working children, why would you work your children? Well, I often feel like I would like them to do a little more. They get lower wages, mainly because the main bug, not because their work is any less hard or any less productive. In fact, in a way, it's more productive, which we'll hear. But because the bulk of the family's needs are taken care of by the adult workers, usually in the 19th century, the man, but moving into also women. So they could just be paid lower wages, right? You can see how wages are not tied to need. They're tied to the cost of reproducing the labor power. And that's partly already taken care of. He talks here about the length of the day as a place where the law does not limit exploitation, not the absolute length of the day, but where you would exploit someone. Let's say a child who if they worked past five hours, would start to have their development scented or would not be able to go to school. These are the kinds of subtle interstices of exploitation that Marx wants to lay out for you here. There's many and capital starts to exploit them, right? Obviously, let's say you don't wanna work a child past 12 hours. We're talking in absurdities here for us. But you know that the children were laboring until in England until 1933 under the age of 15. So it did not end in the 19th century. There's a question of the absolute length of the day and there's the question of the length of the day that exploits in a particular way which prevents, let's say a child from getting enough fresh air, that's not regulated at this time at least, the fresh air regulations were not in effect. So for a child or for others or for me, I have to tell you, even a shorter length of work would stunt my growth and development. So he talks about the potteries, for example, which you read about, which shorten life-expectancy. Even if the amount, the absolute amount of labor time for the children working in them is small, it shortens life-expectancy much more dramatically. So actually, the question of exploitation is industry-specific. So parliamentary laws often don't take that into account or take it into account, took it into account negatively by saying we're restricting all child labor to 10 hours pottery or newspaper delivery, but working in the silk industry because it's the only way we can get this work done. They can work as long as they need to work. You heard about the match manufacturers, which contaminated children's lungs with sulfur, wallpaper industry. You heard about things where they're getting more out of the day by adulterating and also the adulteration that happens by people sleeping on the job and sweating and bleeding into the food. It's pretty disgusting. (coughs softly) So it's not only long hours, but particularly punishing hours. Also, the time of day in which you work is a kind of exploitation that is not regulated. What's the difference between working from 9:00 AM to 5:00 PM and 5:00 PM to what would it be? 1:00 AM. The difference is your rhythms are different. It would take you some time to get on that rhythm and it might not lead to a good life ultimately. Well, you miss everything that's happening in the evening. Just like if you work a night shift and sleep a day shift, you're missing all of the social goods that would otherwise get. So do you see how there are times in which the law is not regulating, even if it's regulating the overall length of time? Yeah. Okay. A few more things. Questions about that? Yeah, AJ. - It's just exceptions that problem that was making

but like, okay, we're regulating, you know, we're working in all industries except that (indistinct), okay? - Well, yes and no. What is the law? The law is not everything is prohibited, but will, these are the things we'll allow. The law is like someone says, oh we have to regulate this and if they're lucky, they regulate that and nothing else has been touched. - Yeah. - This is what Hobbes and I think the most chilling line ever written in political theory called the silence of the laws. All the abuses happen in It turns out they happen in the speaking of the laws too, but that's another issue. So what Marx is saying is these are places the law didn't even recognize to regulate, the practices go way beyond the laws. - Yeah. I have two questions. Is has to do with the labor right. (indistinct) the term or I need to (indistinct) like civil kind of a corvee labor, it doesn't, like corvee labor is something so that (indistinct) that (indistinct) master dogs, right? Whereas travaglio is what is about seven dogs for it (indistinct and speaker began to buffer) - Travaglio is like an extra requisition kind of labor, so that beyond the regularly contracted corvee labor, the Lord can say, "Oops, we have this project, it's a travaglio, it's a day labor. You gotta come do this, and you more or less have to throw down your stuff. Second question. - I mean really is this sector, right? I mean what extrapolate for, I mean abstract extrapolate, will you see matches here making a distinction being enable to a valley, valley of out that patients like you, she seem to be shown eating newbies. I mean just all that. Anything? (indistinct and buffering) - Can you ask that again? - The difference between the labor to value as we've been seeing the previous capital, right? Also like gesturing towards the material value and yeah, it seems like he's talking about the power, the value of labor power itself, right? What would that work? - Labor theory of value. Okay, the question is what's different in these chapters in Marx's object is it no longer the labor theory of value, which I think I would argue is never his object. It doesn't really exist until after and people wanna cancel Marx and the value of labor power. We are definitely talking about, we're not even talking here about the value of labor power. We are talking about the capitalist's interest, which is surplus value and the limits and affordances that actual workers and actual industries provide to capitalists. How do we get to the working day? We get there from the rate of surplus value. If it's the capitalist interest to increase the rate of surplus value. We'll see in a minute. It's really the amount of surplus value that they want to increase, not the rate, 'cause the rate doesn't always increase the amount, but if they wanna increase the rate leading to the amount or the amount of surplus value, they have to face actual workers. And he is showing you the different limits and the different levers. Because it isn't unlike, let's say a logical system. It doesn't run in the abstract. It is actually the content of the limits is always changing as is the content of the affordances or the freedoms of capital, if that makes sense. We are going to actually now in the next sections, so we should be more or less up to chapter nine now, we will turn to the relationship between the value of labor power and surplus value. How they actually press out more surplus value capitalists and drive down the value of labor power where it's in their interest to eviscerate populations and produce a surplus population and to keep populations on hold for the sake of new industries and shifts in productivity where whole populations are thrown out of work. And all of that is really about the value, of ultimately about the value of labor power. That's the turns out to be

once you reach the 24-hour natural limit, turns out to be one of the most important levers for ratcheting up the production of surplus value. Richard, do you? - I have other question about, you said that the limit of the capitalist system is a worker. Like what happens to people who cannot be workers? So you're, they're disabled altering (indistinct). - Are they're either dependent on a worker or they're left to die. Now states step in to a certain degree and started to at the end of the 19th century, but the history of welfare is the history of avoiding revolutions. So it turns out to be cheaper to give minimal healthcare. This is the end of the 19th century. Even a little bit after Marx wrote this, starting with the Bismarck really invented the welfare state for the purposes of keeping people from revolting for a better system. When you capitalize welfare, other things start to happen. That's the state we live in now, where the welfare of the people is largely capitalized. We have for now social security, Medicare and Medicaid. But for now. Many of those are already contracted, you know, to capitalizing producers. It's grim. (coughing softly) Okay, where are we? Corvee labor. But it turns out just to keep telling this horror story, this fairytale is like grim in the grim sense of (indistinct) grim and it doesn't turn out well. It turns out nobody ever worked a whole day. (laughs softly) It's a total invention of the capital system. Nobody ever worked a whole day. It took centuries. Three and a half centuries, according to Marx, maybe more, to get people working through the day, an entire week. Why would you work an entire week? at all if you didn't have to? But certainly, you would minimize it. So Marx shows you in section five how factory laws and work laws from the 14th century to the end of the 18th century were about getting people to go to work. And there were all sorts of government practices and individual independent business practices that try to get people to work longer. And you will see a lot of those in the so-called original accumulation chapters at the end. How do you get people to normalize working that many hours in a row, that many days in a row, not to mention making work into a value in itself? Well, you expropriate what they already have, so they have to go to work. You dispossess them, then you extort them into the labor by holding onto the means of production. So if they're gonna do labor, they have to come to you and labor for you. (audience coughs loudly) It's making it sound like I have a moral judgment of capitalists. I do not, some of my best friends are capitalists. (crowd laughs loudly) And I'm a capitalist myself, to some degree my retirement funds are invested in all sorts of things I don't believe in, but in fact they have no choice but to do this, if you're gonna be a capitalist, you have to have workers, you gotta get them off the land. How it happened is a topic for history. You expropriate, you extort, you move populations around to produce available populations for working, the city, in short, the normal work, what we think of as a normal working day, which has now been regulated down to whatever. Although when I was looking up Connecticut's labor laws, they have all sorts of regulations about children, but adults can work themselves 24 hours if they want to. I don't think I knew that. It's only practices. Like you would not go to a job that asked you to work 15 hours a day. Would you finance people? In any cases, the normal working day- No way. (alarm ringing out loudly) Until next time. It's the capitalists. (laughs happily) (light intense music)