VOLUME III, SEMESTER 1, CHAPTER 11
The Factory, How the Free Laborer Was Manufactured
Start with a person who has truly left the land at last, walked into the city, walked into a room called the factory, and who is free, and who stands sixteen hours a day. That person is where this chapter begins, because the last chapter left him still bound to the ground, and this chapter asks the question the textbook does not, why he left, and then walks in through the factory door after him.
The chapter comes in three sections.
The first section takes apart the textbook account that the farmer poured into the city because there was work there, showing it leaves out why he wanted to leave, since no one abandons his forefathers’ ground for a slum and a dangerous mill unless the country has become unlivable. What made it unlivable was the enclosure, which turned the common land, the poor man’s last board and last share of steady holding, into private property by the means of law, four thousand and more parliament bills enclosing more than a quarter of the tilled ground with not one fierce character, the same calm and orderly hand as the Zhou register and the Roman article, only pulling the board out from under a whole village. The driven-out either starved or became vagrants stuffed into prisons for wandering, first robbed of their ground and then jailed for having none, or went to the city and filled the new factories’ demand, which was no coincidence, since the factory system needs two premises, gathered capital and laborers with no means of production, and the enclosure made both ready at a stroke, the land setting into capital and the villagers into labor power. And the volume keeps its measure, that this is not an indictment but a structural description, the enclosure a legal mechanism shifting the ceding relation from shared commons to private land plus a labor market, neither good nor evil but the shape of wei in that age, holding nothing now but pulling out the board and opening a door you walk into yourself, the factory never entered of free will but the one road left when every other was blocked.
The second section walks in through that door, spreading out the 1842 report, the standard day of twelve to sixteen hours six days a week fifty two weeks a year, the 1833 Factory Act that first set a ceiling only for textile children, so that the intensity went past any serfdom in history since the worker’s whole week was his employer’s while the serf’s labor rent took only three days. Children were used because the account favored it, a wage a third to a quarter of a man’s, a body small enough to crawl under machines and into galleries, easy to manage, poorhouses full to contract from, not one reason hatred and every one reckoned, that position needing no bad man but a clear account. The report’s trapper, a child of five to ten alone at a pitch-dark ventilation door twelve hours, one five year old testifying he was afraid of the dark but must work or be beaten, is not the book’s brush but the writing on the record, no isolated case with child labor under ten about five in a hundred in the mines and over half in the textile mills. Measured by the rod it is not enslavement in law, the parents sending them of their own will, yet in substance the mechanism happened from age five, and the other end of that will was the whole family starving, since a man’s fifteen shillings could not keep a family that needed twenty to twenty five, so the wife and children went in too and fifteen and seven and three made twenty five, just enough, not one over, which is why the five year old was at the bottom of the mine.
The third section parts the right to say no from the means to say no. The worker’s freedom is real, no longer property, with a name and the right to sue and to sign a contract face to face, the first time in thousands of years the person is bound neither to a person nor to the land, and the volume discounts not one character of it. But the free person has no ground, no tools, no stored grain, no skill but the machine, and a family waiting, so when the boss demands two unpaid hours more he has the right to refuse while fifty wait outside for his place, and he says all right of himself, a free person’s all right. The rod is that formal freedom is the right to say no and substantive freedom is the means to say no, the board under the feet, the room in the hand, and a paper with freedom on it cannot catch a person who has no board. This is wei’s most beautiful evolution, the four steps shedding skin until the factory takes not even rent but only pays a wage just enough to return to work, moving the responsibility of keeping a person alive from the side that receives to the side that sends, cutting the last lifeline so that only a pay slip remains. And the factory owner is not the bad man either, driven by competition and profit and shareholders, his life held in the market’s hand as the opening master’s was held in the cook’s, the master’s position a constraint too and heavier, the slaveholder a slave too. The numbers are the final look, the worker’s labor buying only survival, cellars holding a hundred, cholera killing thousands, a mean life expectancy of seventeen in one industrial town and thirty to forty for adults against thirty eight in the country and sixty for the upper society, the person in the factory living half as long as the person tilling ground, the look of the word freedom once cashed in.
That is the method this chapter hands you. When a person is free on paper and cannot leave in fact, do not stop at the freedom, look for the board under his feet and the fifty waiting outside the gate. What you carry away is the rod of formal against substantive freedom, and the line beneath this layer, that a paper with freedom on it cannot catch a person who has no board under his feet, carried forward to today’s eight hour day and weekend won inch by inch, and to the number on the phone that says how much is due.
SECTIONS:
SECTION 1. Why the Farmer Left the Countryside
SECTION 2. Sixteen Hours a Day, the Five Year Old at the Bottom of the Mine
SECTION 3. Formal Freedom, and Substantive Freedom
Credit to the ancestors; the mistakes are mine: Tiger Lyon.