Working Day

Reading Capital: The Production of Absolute Surplus-Value

The eighth entry in a section-by-section reading of Marx’s Capital, covering the whole of Part Three — Chapters Seven through Eleven, the analytical and moral heart of the book. Having passed through the door marked ‘No admittance except on business,’ Marx shows how surplus-value is actually produced in the workshop, how it is measured, and how the hunger for it turns the length of the working day into a battlefield. The word that governs the part is absolute: here surplus is squeezed out by the crudest method, lengthening the day. The objections run from the transformation problem to automation to the historical fall in working hours.