tions are of a very elastic nature, and allow the greatest latitude. So we find working days of 8, 10, 12, 14, 16, 18 hours, i.e., of the most different lengths.
The capitalist has bought the labour-power at its day-rate. To him its use-value belongs during one working day. He has thus acquired the right to make the labourer work for him during one day. But what is a working day?[1]
At all events, less than a natural day. By how much? The capitalist has his own views of this ultima Thule, the necessary limit of the working day. As capitalist, he is only capital personified. His soul is the soul of capital. But capital has one single life impulse, the tendency to create value and surplus-value, to make its constant factor, the means of production, absorb the greatest possible amount of surplus-labour.[2]
Capital is dead labour, that vampire-like, only lives by sucking living labour, and lives the more, the more labour it sucks. The time during which the labourer works, is the time during which the capitalist consumes the labour-power he has purchased of him.[3]
If the labourer consumes his disposable time for himself, he robs the capitalist.[4]
The capitalist then takes his stand on the law of the exchange of commodities. He, like all other buyers, seeks to get the greatest possible benefit out of the use-value of his commodity. Suddenly the voice of the labourer, which had been
- ↑ This question is far more important than the celebrated question of Sir Robert Peel to the Birmingham Chamber of Commerce; What is a pound? A question that could only have been proposed, because Peel was as much in the dark as to the nature of money as the "little shilling men" of Birmingham.
- ↑ It is the aim of the capitalist to obtain with his expended capital the greatest possible quantity of labour (d'obtenir du capital dépensé la plus forte somme de travail possible). J. G. Courcelle-Seneuil … Traité théorique et pratique des entreprises industrielles. 2nd ed. Paris, 1857, p. 63.
- ↑ "An hour's labour lost in a day is a prodigious injury to a commercial State.… There is a very great consumption of luxuries among the labouring poor of this kingdom: particularly among the manufacturing populace, by which they also consume their time, the most fatal of consumptions." An Essay on Trade and Commerce, &c., p. 47 and 153.
- ↑ "Si le manouvrier libre prend un instant de repos, l'économie sordide qui le suit des yeux avec inquiétude prétend qu'il la vole." N. Linguet. "Théorie des loix civiles, &c. London, 1767," t. II., p. 466.
