Marx on the Factory Acts Marx’s writings on the factory acts in Capital are justly famous. I want to pick up a few questions and themes from the immense richness of these writings. The discussion of the Factory Acts poses questions about the relationship between ’theory’ and ‘history’, ‘the abstract and the concrete’, even ‘the base and the superstructure’. In his 1978 critique of Althusser (‘The poverty of theory’), E P Thompson suggested that Marx, in Capital, had become trapped inside the categories of the political economy he was critiquing, stressing structures at the expense of a focus on the historical development of human consciousness and activity. Political economy, he suggested, lacks the categories to explore and discuss many activities and relations (‘of power, consciousness, sexual, cultural, normative’): [Capital] remains a study of the logic of capital, not of capitalism. [The] social and political dimensions of the history, the wrath, and the understanding of the class struggle arise from a region independent of the closed system of economic logic. [Thompson, 1978: 254, 257] In his writings on the Factory Acts, at least, Marx would seem to escape from Thompson’s strictures. There’s a question about how he does this. A good deal of the analysis in Capital does indeed follow the rules of ‘form analysis’ or ‘logic of capital’. This involves Marx in following the procedures of political economy in one important respect. The figures who populate the landscape Marx gradually reveals are abstractions (Leszek Novak termed them ‘cartoon characters’): the buyer and seller of commodities, the worker, the capitalist (later differentiated into the industrial, merchant, banking and landed capitalist). These figures mostly lack personality, history, language, culture, etc. They are no more than ‘bearers of production relations’, the operative parts of a system that determines their roles and for which they bear little responsibility. This kind of analysis has indeed little or no room for Thompson’s ‘social and political dimensions of history’, and has no categories for exploring them. Furthermore, the pattern of movement it’s possible to delineate within ‘political economy’ consists of ‘tendencies and counter-tendencies of development’, but not ‘events’ ‘decisions’ ‘struggles’ and the like. And, mostly, this is the way that Marx proceeds in the three volumes of Capital, as he reveals the contours of the ‘organic system’, the mode of production, the prison-house that is the capitalist system as a whole.

But in the chapter on the working day, Marx leaps out of this set of constraints and procedures to a different level and kind of analysis. Importantly, he finds a way to bridge the gap between ‘theory’ and ‘history’. We might say that he manages a vital shift from the ‘base’ or the ‘abstract’ to the ‘superstructure’ or the ‘concrete’, in other words to the realm in which real people ‘fight it out’. Marx finds a route from the analysis of the system, from a world of ‘structures and functions’ in which the dramatis personae who populate it are mere ‘bearers of social relations’ to a more concrete, historical world where actual people are compelled to make sense of the contradictory situations they face and to attempt to resolve those contradictions by ‘conscious, sensuous practical activity’. Marx identifies a contradiction to which no ‘logical’ solution’ can be found. Its very existence sets up a series of practical problems for society’s members, and they struggle for ways to identify and resolve them. The study of how they do this requires Marx to write history. The contradiction with which Marx begins is that capitalism generates, necessarily, an inherent conflict of rights – between capital, which has the ‘right’ to use its hired labour-power as long and as intensively as it wants, and the workers who demand the ‘right’ that the end of the working day should leave their labour-power in a condition in which they can hire it out again in useable form. Between these opposed claims to right, he suggest, the only solution lies in the exercise of force, a struggle between the opposed parties – ‘a protracted and more or less concealed civil war between the capitalist class and the working class’ [C 1: 412]. The inherent logic of Marx’s argument drives him to shift from one level of analysis to another, and from one form of analysis (‘form-derivation’) to another (‘historical’). Once that shift is made, we perceive ‘a change in the physiognomy of our dramatis personae’. Those who were mere ‘bearers of social relations’, grey abstractions, now take on life and colour. They are now capitalists manufacturing particular commodities in a definite country and at definite historical times; but they are also aristocratic and middle-class politicians, landowners, magistrates, factory inspectors, Home Office officials, workers – men, women, children. They’re embedded in complex webs of social relations and social statuses. They think, feel and speak. They struggle to make sense of their situations with the resources provided to them by definite historical cultures. They cooperate and struggle with each other, in eventful sequences that have more or less transformative effects on their own situations and their own characters and potentials. Sometimes their individual voices are heard.

This shift in levels of abstraction demands a different set of concepts and a different set of linguistic registers. Here we need ways to talk about activity, consciousness, learning, language, movements, politics. Writers like Bertell Ollman, who stress the importance of levels of analysis in Marxist theory, need also to stress this shift in terminologies between levels. (The use of the zoom function on ‘Google Earth’ can provide a rough-and-ready image of how changing levels of abstraction provide different kinds of foci of attention, and reuire different languages.) In Thompson’s terms, we need different categories. Marx explores a second contradiction in the nature of capital, which takes other forms as well. Capital, and above all developed capital - based on factories and machinery - has an inherent tendency to destroy its own productive foundations. In his discussion of the Factory Acts, tht is revealed in capital’s tendency to use up labour-power faster than it can be reproduced, thus undermining its own future use. The same contradiction Marx identifies in capitalist farming, which tends to wear out the fertility of the soil. Today, of course, the various factors making up capitalism’s ‘ecological crisis’ reveal the same tendencies in even more destructive form. Nothing guarantees that capital will be compelled to limit its own depredations, for the motto of the individual capitalist is ‘apres moi le deluge’. Left to its own devices, 19th century capitalist manufacturers threatened to so reduce the condition of workers that the working class in the industrial towns might not reproduce itself, with a physically weakened labour-force needing to be constantly reproduced by workers imported from outside. Epidemics were rife. Capital risked destroying the geese that laid its own golden eggs. The capitalist class cannot solve these contradictions by itself, for its ‘members’ are divided by competition. It becomes apparent – unevenly, cloudily, against immense resistance – that capital must be compelled to limit its own pursuit of surplus-value (more precisely, to find new ways to continue that pursuit), even against its own immediate interests. But as to how that realisation emerges, and in what form an uneasy new and more complicated pattern of relations between capital and wage-labour may develop, cannot be deduced from the laws and tendencies of political economy alone. A shift to history is needed to explore such questions. In his history, however, Marx in a sense takes for granted a whole set of assumptions which he has not explored, and whose presence in his narrative he does not step aside to explain. The most obvious of these is the state, or more precisely the British state. Towards the end of his life Hegel criticised Britain for its lack of an interventionist state. Within a few years of Hegel’s death in 1831, his criticism was outdated. The 19th century witnessed a major set of

‘remakings’ of state institutions and activities – extension of the suffrage, new forms of bureaucratic intervention in ‘civil society’, new methods of official inquiry into the condition of society, displacement of old forms of government (e.g. the magistracy), etc. In Marx’s chapter, the most obvious sign of this ‘state remaking’ is a new figure: the factory inspector. The inspectorate was created in 1833. From 1833, a group of paid state servants were employed to go into factories, initially in a limited number of industries that then expanded, to enforce the law regarding working hours. They were empowered to initiate prosecutions where employers were found to be in breach of the law. Their role was ‘educative’, with the use of prosecution as part of the educational machinery applied to the manufacturing bourgeoisie. They published six-monthly reports, which provided all manner of evidence, as Marx remarks, of ‘capital's monstrous outrages’ and its ‘were-wolf like hunger’ for surplus labour (C 1: 353). Marx never directly addresses how and why such figures became a necessary part of the British capitalist state machinery, though he gives sufficient materials for us to offer some suggestions. The capitalist class cannot ‘govern’ directly, since it is itself divided by competition, so that it is always difficult for it to develop a ‘general interest’ out of its ‘particular interests’. Indeed, in Marx’s account of the struggle over the working day, he cites some capitalists (e.g. Josiah Wedgwood) who specifically demanded that they be placed under some external law. The state’s limitations on capital were, from the beginning, deeply contradictory, for that state was, simultaneously, ‘ruled by capitalist and landlord’. The employers regularly impeded the inspectors. When they were prosecuted, the cases were often heard by magistrates who themselves were tied to them by business and friendship links. A long struggle ensued. Advances were made, through workers’ agitation, sometimes by means of class alliances, both with employers during their struggle to repeal the Corn Laws, and also with landowning interests who sought to punish the manufacturers. Thus factional infighting within ruling-class circles aided the workers’ claims. After the defeat of Chartism, the manufacturers again went on the attack. Only in the later 1850s and the 1860s did workers recover their position, producing what the inspectors referred to, in warning tones, as a situation where ‘the antagonism of classes had arrived at an incredible tension’. Marx credited the eventual compromises and victories achieved by 1867 with the ‘physical and moral regeneration of factory workers’. The manufacturers learned to live with the Acts, not least as their eye turned more to alternative

ways of increasing exploitation, above all by improved machinery (i.e. by the pursuit of relative surplus value). They learned to value ‘equality in the conditions of competition, i.e. ... equal restraint on all exploitation of labour’. Capital’s representatives were educated in the idea that their own long term interests required ‘a normal working day’. In a sense, the point arises in capitalist production where the working class itself is required to set limits to capital’s destructive tendencies by organising itself as an opposing force. The struggle to achieve this was not a simple linear process, but one mediated by the fortunes of movements, by setbacks and progress, by coalitions and compromises, etc. Several problems remain, all still requiring further development. Marx’s brilliant chapter poses more questions than it answers. I will mention three. First, Marx records how the state was compelled to define ‘childhood’, against bitter resistance from manufacturers [C 1: 392, 395]. From 1844 the employment of adult women (over 18) began to be limited. Feminist and socialist historians have explored the ways that the working-class family was ‘reconstructed’ in Britain during the 19th century, in ways that impacted strongly on the political capacities of popular movements – and, indeed on the way that discourses about ‘class’ were framed right through to the end of the 1960s. This topic I can’t explore here, though the struggles over the Factory Acts were important moments. Second, what relation is there between Marx’s account – in which the work of the official inspectors, state bureaucrats of a relatively new kind in British government, is mostly presented in a very favourable light – and other writings by Marx in which he condemns illusions in the possibility of solution to social ills through state officialdom? Third, what were the potentials and the limits of the forms of association and organisation achieved by workers in this period? Marx gives a mostly very positive account of the work of the factory inspectors. Marx writes of Leonard Horner, inspector from 1833 to 1859, His services to the English working class will never be forgotten. He carried on a life-long contest, not only with the embittered manufacturers, but also with the Cabinet, to whom the number of votes cast in their favour by the masters in the House of Commons was a matter of far greater importance than the number of hours worked by “hands” in the mills. [C 1: 334] He is equally generous in his treatment of the reports of Medical Officers of Health.

The question is thus posed, in a sense: does Marx’s discussion of the Factory Acts suggest a softening in his view of state officialdom, and indeed of the possibilities of a state-reformist politics? In 1844, in The King of Prussia and Social Reform, Marx declared roundly that ‘impotence is the natural law of administration’. Yet the discussion of the Factory Acts does suggests that state administration can, in some measure, ameliorate the worst excesses of capital, and indeed that it becomes part of the interests of ‘capital in general’ that it do so. Might state action not just ‘temper’ capitalism, but contribute to its supersession? Bernstein thought so, in the late 19th century, and similar themes resurface in other writers. David McGregor (Hegel, Marx and the Modern State, Toronto 1992: 296) suggests that Marx, saw Leonard Horner and other members of the Factory Inspectorate not as servants of an oppressive regime, but as instruments of [the] Hegelian vision of the state. The development of ‘welfare states’ within capitalism – a topic barely broached in Marx or Engels, or even in Luxemburg, Lenin or Trotsky – poses similar questions on a more extended scale. Marx does establish that capitalism is compatible with large-scale state-organised and -enforced programmes to ameliorate the material and social condition of the working class – though, as our own period manifests all too strongly, any gains made are always subject to challenge and clawback. Still, four years after writing Capital vol 1, Marx celebrated the Paris Commune’s challenge to all forms of bureaucratic state machinery, writing in 1872 a new preface to the Manifesto. There he and Engels declared that the Commune showed that the working class ‘cannot simply lay hold of the readymade state machinery, and wield it for its own purposes’. Did Marx in Capital retreat in part from his ‘revolutionary’ view of the state? We don’t have even an outline of what Marx thought should be included in his projected volume on the state, in a ‘continuation’ of Capital, so the question can’t be settled ‘textually’. But we can note, thirdly, that Marx’s history offers only a thin evaluation of the workers’ movement as it fought for legislation to control the working day. He does, however, offer a comparison, between the French and the English movements, albeit very sketchily. In England, the movement mostly fought in a fragmented fashion, industry by industry. And the workers were very weak. Marx cites an interesting moment in the examination of witnesses about the inspection of mines (in 1862?): ‘Are not you workmen in Lancashire able to take care of your own interests without calling the Government in?’

‘No’ [C 1: 634]. By comparison, in France, which ‘limps slowly behind England’, it took the February Revolution to place the twelve hour day on the statute book. Yet, Marx writes, ,,, the French revolutionary method has its own peculiar advantages. At one stroke it dictates limits to the working day in all shops and factories without distinction, whereas the English legislation yields reluctantly to the pressures of circumstances, now on this point, now on that.... Moreover, the French law proclaims as a principle what in England was only won in the name of children, minors and women, and has only recently been claimed, for the first time as a universal principle.’ [C 1: 414]. And he concludes his chapter on the working day by remarking that all that has been won, after immense effort, is not a charter proclaiming ‘the inalienable rights of man’ but a Magna Carta of the legally limited working day which makes clear – in the form of notices posted in factories – ‘when the time which the worker sells is ended, and when his own begins’ [C 1: 416]. Leonard Horner’s immense services to the working class were, in the end, services provided to a working class that was in no position to enforce its own collective solution. In the end, it was a weak working class that needed such friends. The inspectors were never the agents of the working class. Marx does not bring this side out in his discussion of the English legislation. But what he said about the French workers’ movement in 1848 could be applied even more strongly to the English movement. The Parisian workers after February 1848 not only forced through a 'bourgeois republic' but 'a republic surrounded by social institutions' - notably a Commission 'charged with finding means of improving the situation of the working classes!' He goes on to say that this working class, however, was not yet in a position to conduct theoretical investigations into its tasks, or to carry out its own revolution. Due to the relatively low level of development of French capital, they were still relatively weak, and not yet able to draw the petty bourgeoisie and the peasants behind their own independent banner (Marx, ‘The class struggles in France’ (1850) 1973: 45). Marx’s view was, surely, that workers must become strong enough to be their own inspectors, to make their own state power.