{"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":"190 / 191","pdf_page":108,"physical_index":108,"physical_index_base":0,"printed_page_status":"recognized","page_sha256":"eac90e23912817c0b3e54102a25c8b293f95b88294577bb16a2555c5cffa7846"},"chapter":"Acknowledgments","content":"Most purchased foods came into the urban home in their natural, unprocessed, uncanned, unpackaged state. Perhaps the majority of wives undertook a strenuous annual bout of preserving, pickling, canning, and jelly-making, and most baking was done in the family kitchen. Among 7,000 working-class families investigated by the U. S. Bureau of Labor between 1889 and 1892, less than half purchased any bread, and almost all bought huge amounts of flour, an average of more than 1,000 pounds per family per year. Even among the families of skilled craftsmen, who earned more than most other workingmen, one fourth bought no bread, and flour consumption averaged over two pounds per family per day.\n\nNo respectable home in 1890 was without a well-used sewing machine—one of the first items widely sold on the installment plan. Most men's clothing was bought, but most of the clothing of women and children was still made at home. In addition, there were curtains and sheets to be hemmed, caps and sweaters and stockings to be knitted and darned. Every prospective mother was expected to knit and sew a complete wardrobe for her first child, and to replenish it thereafter as needed.²\n\nBefore the present stage of capitalism, food processing was the province on the one side of the farm family, and on the other of the household. The role of industrial capital was minimal, except in transportation. But during the last hundred years industrial capital has thrust itself between farm and household, and appropriated all the processing functions of both, thus extending the commodity form to food in its semi-prepared or even fully prepared forms. For example, almost all butter was produced on farms in 1879; by 1899 this had been reduced to well under three-fourths, and by 1939 little more than one-fifth of butter was being made on farms. Livestock slaughter moved away from the farm both earlier and more rapidly. The proportion of flour used by commercial bakeries climbed rapidly from only one-seventh in 1899 to more than twofifths by 1939. And during the same period, the per capita production of canned vegetables multiplied fivefold, and of canned fruits twelve times over.³ As with food, so with clothing, shelter, household articles of all sorts: the range of commodity production extended itself rapidly.\n\nThis conquest of the labor processes formerly carried on by farm families, or in homes of every variety, naturally gave fresh energy to capital by increasing the scope ofits operations and the size of the “labor force\" subjected to its exploitation. The workers for the new processing and manufacturing industries were drawn from the previous sites of these labor processes: from the farms and from the homes, in great part in the form of women progressively transformed in ever larger numbers from housewives into workers. And with the industrialization of farm and home tasks came the subjugation of these new workers to all the conditions of the capitalist mode of production, the chief of which is that they now pay tribute to capital and thus serve to enlarge it.\n\nThe manner in which this transition was accomplished includes a host of interrelated factors, not one of which can be separated from the others. In the first place, the tighter packing of urbanization destroys the conditions under which it is possible to carry on the old life. The urban rings close around the worker, and around the farmer driven from the land, and confine them within circumstances that preclude the former self-provisioning practices of the home. At the same time, the income offered by the job makes available the wherewithal to purchase the means of subsistence from industry, and thus, except in times of unemployment, the constraint of necessity which compelled home crafts is much weakened. Often, home labor is rendered uneconomic as compared with wage labor by the cheapening of manufactured goods, and this together with all the other pressures bearing on the working-class family, helps to drive the woman out of the home and into industry. But many other factors contribute: the pressure of social custom as exercised, especially upon each younger generation in turn, by style, fashion, advertising, and the educational process (all of which turn “homemade\" into a derogation and “factory made\" or “store bought\" into a boast); the deterioration of skills (along with the availability of materials); and the powerful urge in each family member toward an independent income, which is one of the strongest feelings instilled by the transformation of society into a giant market for labor and goods, since the source of status is no longer the ability to make many things but simply the ability to purchase them.\n\nBut the industrialization of food and other elementary home provisions is only the first step in a process which eventually leads to the dependence of all social life, and indeed of all the interrelatedness of humankind, upon the marketplace. The population of cities, more or less completely cut off from a natural environment by the division between town and country, becomes totally dependent upon social artifice for its every need. But social artifice has been destroyed in all but its marketable forms. Thus the population no longer relies upon social organization in the form of family, friends, neighbors, community, elders, children, but with few exceptions must go to market and only to market, not only for food, clothing, and shelter, but also for recreation, amusement, security, for the care of the young, the old, the sick, the handicapped. In time not only the material and service needs but even the emotional patterns of life are channeled through the market.\n\n190\n\nLabor and Monopoly Capital\n\nThe Universal Market\n\n191","previous_page":107,"next_page":109}