Part 3: Chapter 10

This chapter, “The Working Day,” is probably the greatest in the book, because it depicts so thoroughly the workings of the capitalist system of production: the role of individuals therein, the opposition of the classes, the lack of autonomy of all parties, and the tendency of exploitation.

There are a few take-away additions to the system and the terminology in this chapter:

*The Capitalist*
The capitalist, we are told repeatedly, “is only capital personified.” Thus, the often-seen formation, “capital seizes upon…” The “driving force” of capital is “the drive to valorize itself,” and so the individual capitalist has no ability to reverse or mitigate this drive. Thus, “capital” itself becomes the subject of all these descriptions, rather than “the capitalist” or “industry.” The capitalist is a dead thing, which “vampire-like, lives only by sucking living labor,” and who confronts the worker as a “thing…with no heart in its breast. What seems to throb there is [the worker’s] heartbeat.”

*The Length of the Working Day*
The length of the working day is a site of class struggle. "In the history of capitalist production, the establishment of a norm for the working day presents itself as a struggle over the limits of that day, a struggle between collective capital, i.e. the class of capitalists, and collective labour, i.e. the working class."

*Surplus labor*
Capital, Marx says, did not invent surplus labor: the Athenian aristocrat, the Etruscan theocrat, the civis romanus, the Norman baron, the American slave-owner, etc.--all of these exploit the worker beyond the amount of labor necessary for his maintenance. So there is a pre-history to surplus labor prior to capitalism.

***
This long chapter demonstrates a few things: 1) the mystification of the bourgeois economists as to the source of value, at the same time 2) as capital unconsciously perfects the extraction of that value from workers' labor, 3) an extended catalog of the worst horrors of this exploitation and the capitalists' success in evading legislation to restrict the work day, 4) the substitutions (of child labor, women's labor, machines) for the time lost to legislative restrictions, 5) the disregard of capital for the health of the worker, a dialectical inversion whereby productivity and vigor of labor change from beneficial to production into their opposite, something to be undermined by capital, 6) the helplessness of the "free" citizen-laborer under this system, i.e. his compulsion to sell his labor-power and inability to negotiate the price of this commodity, 7) the beginning of the organization of the class struggle and the need for protection of the workers as a class.

***
I have been thinking a lot about this (Das Kapital, dialectics) in the shower lately, and of course the "insight" I had one day was a mundane repetition of a gem from the Communist Manifesto, but here goes anyways. I have been trying to come up with a great example of Marxian dialectics. This is not the best one [which is, by the way, the self-consciousness of the worker *as* commodity], but it's nice and succinct. The idea of the left, of revolution, or even of liberal reformism, is everywhere opposed in vulgar thought to "conservatism" and the rule of the market. So, extreme fiscal conservatives are seen as "reactionary," as advocates of stability, etc. What Marxism teaches us is the complete folly of this picture. It is rather the case that the forces of capitalism, the necessities of the market, of technology, of the upheavals and crises of the world economy, of the denigration and exploitation of a global class, are the most radical and persistent change of all, in fact, the "static laws" of the free market, of finance, create a constant revolution of the forms of life.

Of course, I am not so original--what I think is clever while showering, Marx has already said much better (in the Communist Manifesto):

Constant revolutionising of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.