Marx begins with a worker who has already been paid. The capitalist has bought his labour-power at its full value, and replacing what he needs each day takes, say, six hours of work. Those six hours are fixed. The rest of the day is not. Stretch the line by one, three or six hours and you get days of seven, nine and twelve hours, with rates of surplus-value of 16 2/3, 50 and 100 per cent. So the working day is a variable, and only two things hold it back. The body must sleep, eat and wash, and the worker needs time for the thinking and company his age expects. Both limits are elastic, which is why real days run from eight hours to eighteen. Inside that space the capitalist speaks first. He is only capital in human form, and capital is dead labour that lives like a vampire by sucking living labour. Any hour the labourer keeps for himself is an hour robbed from the buyer. Then the labourer answers, in a speech Marx writes for him. He has been told to save and to abstain, so he will, and he will spend his only wealth slowly. If he could last thirty years and is used up in ten, he is paid a third of his daily value and gives three days for the price of one. He asks for a normal day, and he asks without any appeal to the capitalist's heart. Each side stands on the law of exchange, and each is right. Between equal rights force decides, so the length of the day is fought out between the class of capitalists and the working class.
Capital did not invent the hunger for surplus-labour. The well-to-do Athenian, the Roman citizen, the Norman baron and the Wallachian boyard all lived on it. But where goods were made for use, a household's wants set a limit. The limit vanishes when goods are made for money, which is why the cotton trade pushed Southern slave-owners to use up enslaved lives, sometimes in about seven years. The Danubian peasant makes the theft easy to count, because his days on the lord's land are kept apart from the days on his own field. The code of 1831, issued under the Russian General Kisseleff and dictated by the boyards themselves, demanded twelve days of labour, one of field work and one of wood-carrying. Then it declared that the twelve days meant the product of thirty-six, and it multiplied the other two by three. With the extra service called jobagie, the total came to 56 days. A boyard drunk with victory said that the twelve days amounted to 365. England has no boyard, only a law that curbs the same greed, and the inspectors who enforce it record how the greed gets round it. Under the Factory Act of 1850 the day is ten and a half hours, but the fraudulent mill-owner starts a quarter of an hour before six, stops a quarter of an hour after, and takes minutes from breakfast and dinner. The inspectors add it up: 340 minutes a week, or 27 working days a year. The workers call it 'nibbling and cribbling'. Slack trade does not slow the nibbling, because when business is bad each hour has to yield more. In the crisis of 1857 and 1858 Leonard Horner counted 122 mills given up and 143 standing idle in his district, and the complaints of stolen minutes still came in. One respectable master told Marx that ten minutes of overtime a day put a thousand a year in his pocket. Even the labels give the game away: adults are 'full-timers', children under thirteen are 'half-timers', and the worker becomes personified labour-time. In 1836 magistrates at Dewsbury heard that mill-owners had kept five boys at work for thirty hours in the dust of the 'shoddyhole'. The owners, who were Quakers, said they had offered the boys four hours' sleep and the children would not go to bed. They were fined £20. Where no law reaches, the picture is worse. At a meeting in Nottingham in January 1860, the magistrate Mr. Broughton Charlton described lace-making children of nine and ten pulled from their beds at two, three or four in the morning to work until ten, eleven or twelve at night. In the Staffordshire potteries William Wood, aged nine, ran moulds from six in the morning to nine at night. J. Murray, aged twelve, worked all night and was paid nothing extra, and Dr Greenhow found that each generation of potters was smaller and weaker than the last. Of the witnesses from the match trade, where phosphorus causes a lockjaw peculiar to the workers, 50 were under ten and five were only six. In a wallpaper works, a partner named Smith said his hands worked through their meals, so that a day of ten and a half hours was done by half past four and the rest was 'over-time'. For eighteen months, he admitted, the average had been seventy-eight and a half hours a week.
