But in doing so, capitalism shortens the "duration" of the "labour power" of the individual worker, so making it necessary to replace this more quickly than otherwise, so that:
the sum of the expenses for the reproduction of labour power will be greater; just as in a machine the part of its value to be reproduced every day is greater the more rapidly the machine is worn out. It would seem therefore that the interest [of] capital itself points in the direction of a normal working day.19
Did this mean that capitalists flocked to campaign for shorter working hours and more humane conditions in the factories and working class localities? A few, more farsighted about the long term needs of capital as a whole, did. Most, however, campaigned against any restrictions on hours, even for children who would one day become more productive, adult, labour power.
Again Marx summed up the capitalist logic at work:
In every stockjobbing swindle everyone knows that some time or other the crash must come, but everyone hopes that it may fall on the head of his neighbour, after he himself has caught the shower of gold and placed it in safety. Apres moi le deluge! [After me, the flood] is the watchword of every capitalist and of every capitalist nation. Hence Capital is reckless of the health or length of life of the labourer, unless under compulsion from society. To the outcry as to the physical and mental degradation, the premature death, the torture of overwork, it answers: Ought these to trouble us since they increase our profits?20
It took concerted pressure on capital from the outside, by successive acts of legislation enacted by the state-in part in response to workers' agitation-for the reproduction of labour power to be protected from the ravages of those who exploited it. It took some 80 years before anything like fully adequate protection of such reproduction was in place-and as we saw in Chapter Five it required the difficulties in military recruitment to bring home to the state the harm which capital had done to its cannon fodder by its lack of concern with supplies of labour power.
Exactly the same logic as that described by Marx is found in the attitude of capital to the pumping out of climate change gases today. Capitalist politicians make beautiful speeches about the need to do something, set up commissions and intergovernmental meetings, promise to reshape their own behaviour-and then bow down before interests which say that this or that measure to deal with climate change will be too costly for the economy to bear.
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