They assumed they could bend former peasants and their children to the discipline of unskilled machine minding, 26 while relying on drawing men trained as artisans into the factories for more skilled work. For these reasons, Marx, who dealt at length with primitive accumulation and the treatment of workers in the factories, virtually ignored the problem for capitalists of getting a labour force with the right physiques and skills. Yet by the time of his death, the spread of capitalist industry to ever newer new sectors of production was making the supply and management of labour power-outside as well as inside the factory-something of increasing concern to those promoting capitalist accumulation.
The individual capitalist aimed to pay the individual worker just enough by the hour, day or week to keep him or her fit and motivated to work. But this did not cater for a number of important things if labour power of the right quantity and quality was going to be available for the capitalist class as a whole over time. It did not take into account the need for workers to learn necessary skills nor did it sustain them through periods of unemployment so as to be able to supply their labour power when the crisis ended. It did not deal with the problem of workers temporarily losing their capacity to be productively exploited through illness or injury. And it did not provide for the upbringing of working class children who would be the next generation of labour power.27
There were various ad hoc attempts to deal with each of these problems through the 19th century. Religious and other charitable funds provided some relief for the unemployed or the sick. Pressure was put on working class women to bear the burden of child rearing through the propagation of ideologies that treated men as the wage earner and men's wages as a "family wage" (even though working class women always worked to some extent and a man's wage was rarely adequate to keep a family).28 Some firms would provide housing under their own control-and sometimes minimal health facilities as well-for their workforces. Groups of skilled workers would run funds to provide for periods of unemployment or sickness. Firms would incorporate into the factory system a version of the apprenticeship system of pre-capitalist artisanship, with youngsters learning a trade by working under skilled workers for five or seven years on minimal wages.
But over time it became clear that the ad hoc methods were inadequate and that the state had to take over many of the tasks from private capitalists and charitable concerns. In Britain it intervened as early as the 1834 Poor Law to ensure that the conditions under which the unemployed or the infirm could get poverty relief were so arduous that those who could work would, however low the pay. In 1 848 it established a Board of Health to act against the spread of diseases in working class areas-which was affecting richer areas too. Over the decades it was cajoled into limiting the working hours of children and barring women from occupations that might damage their capacity to bear and bring up the next generation. In the 1 870s it moved to set up a state system of elementary education and to encourage the building of homes for skilled workers. Then in the first decade of the 20th century it made the first moves to coordinate the various ad hoc measures of the previous 70 years into national structures to provide minimal social insurance benefits for unemployment, old age and sickness. 29 The impetus to do so came from the shock of discovering in the course of recruitment for the Boer War how few of the working class were healthy enough to undertake military service. Ann Rogers has summarised the reaction of the upper and middle class:
State Spending and the System
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