They employ a mass of young girls – there are said to be 15,000 of them in all – who sleep and eat on the premises, come usually from the country, and are therefore absolutely the slaves of their employers. During the fashionable season, which lasts some four months, working-hours, even in the best establishments, are fifteen, and, in very pressing cases, eighteen a day; but in most shops work goes on at these times without any set regulation, so that the girls never have more than six, often not more than three or four, sometimes, indeed, not more than two hours in the twenty-four, for rest and sleep, working nineteen to twenty-two hours, if not the whole night through, as frequently happens! The only limit set to their work is the absolute physical inability to hold the needle another minute. (CWCE, 217)
Here’s another example of long working hours that Engels describes:
Other manufacturers were yet more barbarous, requiring many heads to work thirty to forty hours at a stretch, several times a week, letting them get a couple of hours of sleep only, because the night-shift was not complete, but calculated to replace a part of the operatives only. […] The consequences of these cruelties became evident quickly enough. The Commissioners mention a crowd of cripples who appeared before them, who clearly owed their distortion to the long working hours. This distortion usually consists of a curving of the spinal column and legs. (CWCE, 161–162)
What Engels analyses here is the method of absolute surplus-value production. Capitalists have the interest to make workers produce commodities for as many hours per day and per week as possible for as little wage as possible. Long hours and small wages promise high profits.
Absolute surplus-value production is also an important method of surplus-value production in 21st-century digital capitalism. In the period from 1992 until 2019, the number of agricultural workers in China decreased from 350 million to 120 million, the number of manufacturing workers increased from 180 million to 200 million, and the number of service workers went from 120 million to 440 million<sup>1</sup>. Unlike economic development in Western capitalism, where the rise of the service and information industries was accompanied by the shrinking of agriculture and manufacturing, China’s capitalism with Chinese characteristics (Harvey 2005, chapter 5) combines industrialisation and informatisation as simultaneous processes.
Chapter Two | Friedrich Engels in Digital Capitalism
51
The Digital Condition of the Working Class Today
1 Data source: ILO World Employment and Social Outlook, http://www.ilo.org/wesodata