{"resolved":true,"match_type":"uuid","source_type":"original_book","book_id":"bde76793-4c65-415a-a237-6ccacc2e0802","title":"Labor and Monopoly Capital The Degradation of Work in the Twentieth Century","author":null,"edition":null,"publisher":null,"year":null,"isbn":"0853459401","requested_by":"printed_page","book":{"source_type":"original_book","book_id":"bde76793-4c65-415a-a237-6ccacc2e0802","id":"bde76793-4c65-415a-a237-6ccacc2e0802","uuid":"bde76793-4c65-415a-a237-6ccacc2e0802","title":"Labor and Monopoly Capital The Degradation of Work in the Twentieth Century","normalized_title":"laborandmonopolycapitalthedegradationofworkinthetwentiethcentury","author":null,"edition":null,"publisher":null,"year":null,"isbn":"0853459401","isbns":["0853459401"],"parsed":true,"ai_readable":true,"document_type":"book","page_count":183,"navigation_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/ai/book/bde76793-4c65-415a-a237-6ccacc2e0802","title_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/ai/title/Labor%20and%20Monopoly%20Capital%20The%20Degradation%20of%20Work%20in%20the%20Twentieth%20Century","fixed_page_url_template":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/ai/book/bde76793-4c65-415a-a237-6ccacc2e0802/page/{printed_page}","path_api_url_template":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/book/bde76793-4c65-415a-a237-6ccacc2e0802/page/{printed_page}","read_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/read/bde76793-4c65-415a-a237-6ccacc2e0802","page_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/books/bde76793-4c65-415a-a237-6ccacc2e0802/page","search_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/books/bde76793-4c65-415a-a237-6ccacc2e0802/search"},"page":{"printed_page":"189 / 188","pdf_page":107,"physical_index":107,"physical_index_base":0,"printed_page_status":"recognized","page_sha256":"422920b58212261e53e9f48f28bb00ff0699ea8b293d0ec5ffe43e534ace3072"},"chapter":"Acknowledgments","content":"The Universal Market\n\nIt is only in its era of monopoly that the capitalist mode of production takes over the totality of individual, family, and social needs and, in subordinating them to the market, also reshapes them to serve the needs of capital. It is impossible to understand the new occupational structure—and hence the modern working class—without understanding this development. How capitalism transformed all of society into a gigantic marketplace is a process that has been little investigated, although it is one of the keys to all recent social history.\n\nIndustrial capitalism began with a limited range of commodities in common circulation. On the household level these included the basic foodstuffs in more or less unprocessed form, such as grains and meals, fish and meats, dairy products, vegetables, distilled and fermented liquors, bread and biscuits, and molasses. Other regular household needs included tobacco, coal and candles, lamp oils and soap, tallow and beeswax, paper and printed matter. Clothing production was in its infancy, but the market in the early part of the nineteenth century was already well developed for thread and textiles, including knit goods, and boots and shoes. Household items also included the lumber products of sawmills and planing mills, iron hardware, bricks and stone, clay and glass products, furniture, furnishings, china and utensils, musical instruments, tinware and silverware, cutlery, clocks and watches, apothecary chemicals and drugs. fa the\n\nBehind these were the commodities required as raw materials for the manufacture of such articles: iron and nonferrous ores and metals, raw lumber, tar, pitch, turpentine, potash, furs, hemp, quarry products, and so forth. Transportation required the manufacture of carts, wagons, coaches and carriages, ships and boats, casks and barrels. And the industries which produced tools and implements, such as scythes, plows, axes, and hammers, had just begun to produce machinery in the form of pumps, steam engines, spinning and weaving equipment, and the early machine tools. uipu\n\nIn this earliest stage of industrial capitalism, the role of the family remained central in the productive processes of society. While capitalism was preparing the destruction of that role, it had not yet penetrated into the daily life of the family and the community; so much was this the case that one student of United States industrial history described this as the “family stage, in which household manufacturing was supreme. Practically all of the family's needs were supplied by its members. The producer and consumer were virtually identical. The family was the economic unit, and the whole system of production was based upon it. Before 1810 this stage was common throughout many sections of the country; after this date it became more or less localized.\"\n\nSo long as the bulk of the population lived on farms or in small towns, commodity production confronted a barrier that limited its expansion. On the United States farm, for example, much of the construction work (apart from basic framing, as a rule) was accomplished without recourse to the market, as was a good deal of house furnishing. Food production, including the raising of crops and livestock and the processing of these products for table use was of course the daily activity of the farm family, and in large measure so also was the home production of clothing. The farmer and his wife and their children divided among them such tasks as making brooms, mattresses, and soap, carpentry and small smith work, tanning, brewing and distilling, harness making, churning and cheese making, pressing and boiling sorghum for molasses, cutting posts and splitting rails for fencing, baking, preserving, and sometimes even spinning and weaving. Many of these farm activities continued as the natural mode of life of the family even after the beginnings of urbanization and the transfer of employment from the farm to the factory or other city job. Here is a description of the life of workers around the turn of the century which indicates the extent of the transformation that has taken place in the last seventy or eighty years:\n\nExcept in the crowded tenement districts of the large citieswhich housed a small fraction of the total urban populationtown and city dwellers often produced some of their own food. Especially in the coal and steel regions, the grounds around the urban and suburban house sometimes looked much like a rural farmyard. Many families kept chickens or rabbits, sometimes pigs or goats, and even a cow or two, and raised vegetables and fruits in their own garden plots. A study of 2,500 families living in the principal coal, iron, and steel regions in 1890 suggests that about half of them had livestock, poultry, vegetable gardens, or all three. Nearly 30 percent purchased no vegetables other than potatoes during the course of a year. Describing the anthracite coal region of Pennsylvania in 1904, Peter Roberts wrote that “it is interesting to pass along the Schuylkill and Tremont valleys and see the many little farms which are cultivated by mine employees of the Philadelphia and Reading Coal and Iron Company. In the strike of 1902, hundreds of mine employees' families could not have carried on the fight were it not for the small farms and large gardens they cultivate.\"\n\nThough only a few miles from the center of the greatest metropolis in the land, Queens County and much of Brooklyn were still semirural in 1890, and many families were as dependent on small-scale agriculture as on the industrial or commercial employment of the men in the family. North of what is now the midtown area, Manhattan itself was more bucolic than urban, and pigs and goats were often seen along the East River as far south as Forty-second Street. At a time when men worked ten or twelve hours a day, six days a week, much of the care of urban livestock and gardens inevitably fell to womenquite apart from the fact that such tasks were theirs by tradition.\n\nChapter 13\n\nThe Universal Market\n\n189\n\n188","previous_page":106,"next_page":108}