Labor and Monopoly Capital The Degradation of Work in the Twentieth Century

Chapter 11

Surplus Value and Surplus Labor

The atomized and competitive model of capitalism, in which the individual owner of capital (or family group, or small group of partners) and the capitalist firm were identical, and production in each industry was distributed among a reasonably large number of firms, is no longer the model of capitalism today. Economists and social observers of a variety of persuasions are in general agreement that it has been displaced by a substantially different structure, although they may disagree in their descriptions and analyses of the new structure. Marxists have used various names for this new stage of capitalism since it made its appearance: finance capitalism, imperialism, neocapitalism, late capitalism. But since it has been generally recognized that, as Lenin put it in one of the pioneer treatments of the subject, “the economic quintessence of imperialism is monopoly capitalism," it is the latter term that has proved most acceptable.' The most substantial recent discussion of this new stage from the Marxist point of view is found in Monopoly Capital, by Paul Baran and Paul M. Sweezy.²

Monopoly capital had its beginnings, it is generally agreed, in the last two or three decades of the nineteenth century. It was then that the concentration and centralization of capital, in the form of the early trusts, cartels, and other forms of combination, began to assert itself; it was consequently then that the modern structure of capitalist industry and finance began to take shape. At the same time, the rapid completion of the colonization of the world and the international rivalries and armed clashes over the division of the globe into spheres of economic influence or dominance opened the modern imperialist era. Monopoly capitalism thus embraces the increase of monopolistic organizations within each capitalist country, the internationalization of capital, the international division of labor, imperialism, the world market and the world movement of capital, and changes in the structure of state power.

It will already have been noticed that the crucial developments in the processes of production date from precisely the same period as monopoly capitalism. Scientific management and the whole “movement" for the organization of production on its modern basis have their beginnings in the last two decades of the last century. And the scientific-technical revolution, based on the systematic use of science for the more rapid transformation of labor power into capital, also begins, as we have indicated, at the same time. In describing these two facets of the activity of capital, we have therefore been describing two of the prime aspects of monopoly capital. Both chronologically and functionally, they are part of the new stage of capitalist development, and they grow out of monopoly capitalism and make it possible.

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It is unnecessary either to repeat or to attempt to summarize the description of the changes in capitalism to be found in Monopoly Capital, for obvious reasons, but also because not all the aspects which Baran and Sweezy analyze are of direct interest to us in this discussion. The angle of vision adopted in that work was the view of capitalist society as the producer of a gigantic and growing economic surplus, and the authors were concerned with the way that surplus is used, or “absorbed," in monopoly capitalism. And at the outset, they point out:

We do not claim that directing attention to the generation and absorption of surplus gives a complete picture of this or any other society. And we are particularly conscious of the fact that this approach, as we have used it, has resulted in almost total neglect of a subject which occupies a central place in Marx's study of capitalism: the labor process. We stress the crucial role of technological change in the development of monopoly capitalism but make no attempt to inquire systematically into the consequences which the particular kinds of technological change characteristic of the monopoly capitalist period have had for the nature of work, the composition (and differentiation) of the working class, the psychology of workers, the forms of working-class organization and struggle, and so on. These are all obviously important subjects which would have to be dealt with in any comprehensive study of monopoly capitalism.³

As this makes clear, Baran and Sweezy deal less with the movements of production than with the movements of its outcome, the product. But, as they point out, not only technological change but also a changing product bring about new and different processes of labor, a new occupational distribution of the employed population, and thus a changed working class. It is thus clear that the investigation of the movements of labor undertaken here are but another form of the investigation of the movements of value undertaken in Monopoly Capital.

The process by which the movement of value and the movement of labor go hand in hand was described by Marx in his exposition of the general law of capitalist accumulation:

With accumulation, and the development of the productiveness of labor that accompanies it, the power of sudden expansion of capital grows also. . . . The mass of social wealth, overflowing with the advance of accumulation, and transformable into additional capital, thrusts itself frantically into old branches of production, whose market suddenly expands, or into newly formed branches. . . . In all such cases, there must be the possibility of throwing great masses of men\* suddenly on the decisive points without injury to the scale of production in other spheres. . . . This increase is effected by the simple process that constantly “sets free" a part of the labourers; by methods which lessen the number of labourers employed in proportion to the increased production.

Considered on the scale of the century that has passed since Marx, the “methods which lessen the number of labourers employed in proportion to the, increased production" have “set free” workers in vast numbers. The figures for the United States, which are by no means untypical of the major capitalist countries, indicate, as we have already pointed out, that employment in the nonfarm industries devoted to the production of goods began in the 1920s to drop from its traditional 45 to 50 percent of urban employment, and had fallen to 33 percent by 1970. But at the same time the proportion of the working population occupied in agriculture, which amounted to approximately 50 percent in 1880, had by 1970 sunk to less than 4 percent of total employment. Since agriculture, together with manufacturing, construction, and their accompanying extractive industries, occupied three-fourths of the population in 1880 and by 1970 had fallen to only about three-eighths, the mass of labor to be traced is indeed huge; millions of jobs for those who, “freed" from agriculture and “freed” from manufacturing industries, are nevertheless occupied in some way in the social division of labor. In tracing this mass of labor, we will be led not only to “newly formed branches of production" in Marx's sense, but also, as were Baran and Sweezy, into branches of nonproduction, entire industries and large sectors of existing industries whose only function is the struggle over the allocation of the social surplus among the various sectors of the capitalist class and its dependents. In this process, capital which “thrusts itself frantically" into every possible new area of investment has totally reorganized society, and in creating the new distribution of labor has created a social life vastly different from that of only seventy or eighty years ago. And this restless and insatiable activity of capital continues to transform social life almost daily before our eyes, without heed that by doing so it is creating a situation in which social life becomes increasingly impossible.

The surplus we seek, because it is a surplus of labor rather than of value, is somewhat different from the surplus Baran and Sweezy sought to trace. For example, for their purpose it was perfectly proper to include in the economic surplus the enormous and apparently irreducible military establishment maintained by capital at great social expense. This is of course one of the chief ways in which the abundance created by modern production is absorbed, drained off, wasted, beneficially for capital though with great injury to society. But insofar as this military establishment involves the bolstering up of demand for the products of manufacturing industry, the labor so utilized is already accounted for in the manufacturing sector of the economy. The fact that labor is used in the making of useless or harmful products does not for the moment concern us. It is the surplus of labor that has been drawn into new forms of production or of nonproduction that concerns us, since it is in this way that the occupational structure and thus the working class have been transformed.

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\* Marx here uses the word Menschenmassen, which in this context would more properly translate as “human masses” or “masses of people." Since the masses dragooned for the new branches of capitalist industry are now more often women than men, it is all the more necessary to call attention to the male linguistic bias which in this case, as in others, has affected the translation of Marx.

We have already described the manner in which occupations within the manufacturing industries are rearranged and the balance is shifted toward indirect labor so that labor in the mass, as it is applied directly in production, may be lessened in numbers and controlled in its activities. This shift creates a small proportion of technical jobs, most of them closely linked to management, and a larger proportion of lower-grade routinized technical or unskilled clerical jobs. It is now necessary to focus not on the occupational shifts within these traditional industries but rather on the industrial shifts, the movements that change the entire social division of labor. In doing this we are following the course of capital, and the paths along which it has drawn labor. And for this we must attempt to sketch some of the broad social forces at work, and the social changes which are themselves nothing but the results of the rapid accumulation of capital in the monopoly era, as well as the conditions of further accumulation.

Notes

Chapter 12

The Modern Corporation

The first of these forces is to be found in the changed structure of the capitalist enterprise. The foundations for the theory of the monopolistic corporation were laid by Marx when he described the tendency of capital to agglomerate in huge units. This comes about in the first instance by the concentration of capital, which Marx defined as the natural result of the accumulation process: each capital grows and with it grows the scale of production it carries on. The centralization of capital, on the other hand, changes the distribution of existing capitals, bringing together “capitals already formed,"by means of“destruction of their individual independence, expropriation of capitalist by capitalist, transformation of many small into few large capitals. .. . Capital grows in one place to a huge mass in a single hand, because it has in another place been lost by many."' This centralization may be accomplished, as Marx points out, either through competition or through the credit system, whereby many owners make their capital available to a single control.

The scale of capitalist enterprise, prior to the development of the modern corporation, was limited by both the availability of capital and the management capacities of the capitalist or group of partners. These are the limits set by personal fortunes and personal capabilities. It is only in the monopoly period that these limits are overcome, or at least immensely broadened and detached from the personal wealth and capacities of individuals. The corporation as a form severs the direct link between capital and its individual owner, and monopoly capitalism builds upon this form. Huge aggregates of capital may be assembled that far transcend the sum of the wealth of those immediately associated with the enterprise. And operating control is vested increasingly in a specialized management staff for each enterprise. Since both capital and professional managementat its top levels—are drawn, by and large, from the same class, it may be said that the two sides of the capitalist, owner and manager, formerly united in one person, now become aspects of the class. It is true that ownership of capital and the management of enterprises are never totally divorced from each other in the individuals of the class, since both remain concentrated in a social grouping of extremely limited size: therefore, as a rule, top managers are not capital-less individuals, nor are owners of capital necessarily inactive in management. But in each enterprise the direct and personal unity between the two is ruptured. Capital has now transcended its limited and limiting personal form and has entered into an institutional form. This remains true even though claims to ownership remain, in the last resort, largely personal or familial in accordance with the rationale and juridical structure of capitalism.

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To belong to the capitalist class by virtue of ownership of capital, one must simply possess adequate wealth; that is the only requirement for membership in that sense. To belong to the capitalist class in its aspect as the direct organizer and manager of a capitalist enterprise is another matter. Here, a process of selection goes on having to do with such qualities as aggressiveness and ruthlessness, organizational proficiency and drive, technical insight, and especially marketing talent. Thus while the managerial stratum continues to be drawn from among those endowed with capital, family, connections, and other ties within the network of the class as a whole, it is not closed to some who may rise from other social classes, not through the acquisition of wealth on their part but through the co-optation of their talent on the part of the capitalist organization which they serve. In this case the ownership of capital later follows from the managerial position, rather than the other way around. But this is exceptional, not just because top management is drawn as a rule from within the class, but also because the stratum as a whole is not a large one.

While the title of “manager" is bestowed in various statistical classifications upon a great variety of jobs, the possession of this title has, for most, nothing to do with the capitalist management of the substantial corporations of the country. For example, the Bureau of the Census classified almost six and one-half million persons, out of some 80 million, as “managers and administrators, except farm," in the census of 1970. But this included perhaps a million managers of retail and service outlets, and as much as another million self-employed petty proprietors in these same fields. It included buyers and purchasing agents, officials and administrators at the various levels of government, school administration, hospitals and other such institutions; postmasters and mail superintendents; ships' officers, pilots, and pursers; building managers and superintendents; railroad conductors; union officials; and funeral directors. Since such categories consume almost half of the entire classification, it is clear without further analysis of the rest that the managerial stratum of true operating executives of the corporate world is quite a small group.

But though proportionately small in the total population, this stratum has become very large in comparison with the pre-monopoly situation. Speaking of the early part of the nineteenth century, Pollard says: "The large-scale entrepreneur of the day began with very limited managerial, clerical or administrative staff: he wrote his own letters, visited his own customers, and belaboured his men with his own walking stick." The small number of clerks employed even in large establishments did not only bookkeeping but timekeeping, quality control, traveling, and draftsmanship. For years, says Pollard, Watt made all his drawings himself, and he gives this remarkable statistic: “The Arkwrights, in 1801-4, employed only three clerks to look after 1,063 workers, nearly all of whom, again, were paid by complicated piece rates."² In the United States, Alfred D. Chandler points out: “Before 1850 very few American businesses needed the services of a full-time administrator or required a clearly defined administrative structure. Industrial enterprises were very small, in comparison with those of today. And they were usually family affairs. The two or three men responsible for the destiny of a single enterprise handled all its basic activities—economic and administrative, operational and entrepreneurial."3

The institutionalization of capital and the vesting of control in a specialized stratum of the capitalist class corresponds chronologically to an immense growth in the scale of management operations. Not only is the size of enterprises growing at a great paceto the point where a few enterprises begin to dominate the productive activity of each major industry——but at the same time the functions undertaken by management are broadened very rapidly. We have already traced this development in the sphere of production. When fully reorganized in the modern corporation, the producing activities are subdivided among functional departments, each having a specific aspect of the process for its domain: design, styling, research and development; planning; production control; inspection or quality control; manufacturing cost accounting; work study, methods study, and industrial engineering; routing and traffic; materials purchasing and control; maintenance of plant and machinery, and power; personnel management and training; and so on.

But if the engineering organization was the first requirement, it was soon outstripped in functional importance by the marketing apparatus. The first great integrated corporations, which began to appear in the United States in the 1880s and 1890s, were constructed on the basis of a new approach to the marketing problem, and it is not too much to say that after the assurance of basic engineering requirements it was this revolutionary marketing approach that served as the basis for the monopolistic corporation. The earlier pattern had been one of buying and selling through commission agents, wholesalers, and the like. The growing scope of the market, based upon improvements in transport and communications as well as upon the rapid increase in the size of cities created by the growth of industry, showed itself not only through increases in volume but also in geographical dispersion. The fundamental corporate innovation in this area was the national marketing organizations they established as part of their own structures, organizations which were soon to become international.4

The transportation network was the first arena for the giant corporation. The railroads and shipping organizations, by virtue of their demand for steel rails, plate, and structural shapes, drew in their wake the steel industry which had just begun to become proficient in the manufacture of steel at a price and quantity that made these developments possible.

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Special adaptations of the means of transport to food shipping, in the form of insulated and refrigerated compartments (at first iced, later mechanically cooled), made possible the long-distance movement of the most essential commodities required by the rapidly growing urban centers. The cities were released from their dependence on local supplies and made part of an international market. Gustavus Swift began in the mid-1870s to market Western meat in the Eastern region, and by the end of the century his organization had become a giant vertically integrated manufacturing, shipping, and marketing empire. This lead was soon followed by a number of other meatpackers, as well as by Andrew Preston who, beginning with bananas in the 1890s, had laid the foundation for the United Fruit Company by the end of the decade.

In general, the industrialization of the food industry provided the indispensable basis of the type of urban life that was being created; and it was in the food industry that the marketing structure of the corporationembracing sales, distribution, and intensive consumer promotion and advertisingbecame fully developed. The canning industry had come into being in the 1840s with the development of stamping and forming machinery for producing tin cans on a mass basis. The expansion of this industry to embrace national and international markets did not come, however, until the 1870s, when further technical developments, including rotary pressure cookers and automatic soldering of cans—not to speak of the development of rail and sea transport made it possible." And soon thereafter, in the 1890s, the automatic-roller process for milling grain formed the basis for the international marketing of centrally produced flour.

Apart from food, various other industries based themselves upon the urban pattern of life that was coming into being. Steel-frame construction in the cities brought about a demand which supplemented and soon replaced the railroads as the prime market for steel. The production of petroleum was perforce localized, while its use was international, and the marketing apparatus of the oil industry corresponded to this. The tobacco industry is another example: cigarettes were smoked almost entirely in the cities. The cigarette rolling machine devised in 1881 furnished the technical basis upon which Duke raised a national and international sales organization.

Cyrus McCormick's vast agricultural-machinery enterprise was built upon his own worldwide marketing and distribution organization, as was William Clark's Singer Sewing Machine Company. In these cases, as in the cases of the many machine-building and electrical-equipment companies that came into existence in the early period of monopoly capitalism, the need for a self-operated marketing organization was imposed, in addition to those factors we have already discussed, by two further reasons. First, the orders, specifications, and uses of the products became more technical and complicated, and demanded a specially trained sales organization which could work closely with the engineering division. And second, the new machines could not be sold without the provision of maintenance, service, and in many cases installation. This made it difficult for the manufacturer to be represented on the spot by existing trade facilities. Factors such as the need to provide service and replacement parts virtually dictated to the new automobile industry the construction of its own marketing network.

Thus marketing became the second major subdivision of the corporation, subdivided in its turn among sales, advertising, promotion, correspondence, orders, commissions, sales analysis, and other such sections. At the same time, other functions of management were separated out to form entire divisions. Finance, for example, although not as a rule large in size, became the brain center of the entire organism, because here was centralized the function of watching over capital, of checking and controlling the progress of its enlargement; for this purpose, the finance division has its own subdivisions for borrowing, extending credit, collections, supervising cash flow, stockholder relations, and overall supervision of the financial condition of the corporation. And so on, throughout the various functions and activities of the corporation, including construction and real estate, legal, public relations, personnel and labor relations, etc.

Each of these corporate subdivisions also requires, for its own smooth functioning, internal departments which reflect and imitate the subdivisions of the entire corporation. Each requires its own accounting section, ranging from the complex cost accounting of the manufacturing divisions to the simpler budgeting functions required of even the smallest divisions. Each often controls its own hiring through its own personnel department; many require separate maintenance and cleaning sections, as well as traffic and routing, office management, purchasing, planning, correspondence, and so forth. Thus each corporate division takes on the characteristics of a separate enterprise, with its own management staff.

The picture is rendered still more complex by the tendency of the modern corporation to integrate, vertically as well as horizontally. Thus, by growth and by combination, the manufacturing corporation acquires facilities for the production of raw materials, for transportation, semi-banking institutions for the raising of capital or extending of credit, etc. At the same time, horizontal integration brings together a variety of products under the aegis of a single aggregate of capital, sometimes assembling under one overall financial control products and services bearing no discernible relation to each other except in their function as sources of profit. Each of these massive sub-corporations requires a complete management structure, with all of its divisions and subdivisions.

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184 Labor and Monopoly Capital

As Chandler has related, the eventual outcome of this pyramiding was the need for decentralization, and the result was the modern decentralized corporate structure pioneered by Du Pont, General Motors, Standard Oil of New Jersey, and Sears Roebuck in the 1920s, and much imitated since. The essence of the policy has been best explained, in brief form, by Alfred P. Sloan, long-time operating head of General Motors and the person responsible, more than any other, for the adaptation of this method to that corporation. It places, he said, “each operation on its own foundation . . . assuming its own responsibility and contributing its share to the final result."The final result is of course the accumulation of capital. Each section “develops statistics correctly reflecting the relation between the net return and the invested capital of each operating divisionthe true measure of efficiency. . . ."This “enables the Corporation to direct the placing of additional capital where it will result in the greatest benefit to the Corporation as a whole. 6

From this brief sketch of the development of the modern corporation, three important aspects may be singled out as having great consequences for the occupational structure. The first has to do with marketing, the second with the structure of management, and the third with the function of social coordination now exercised by the corporation.

The overall purpose of all administrative controls is, as in the case of production controls, the elimination of uncertainty and the exercise of constraint to achieve the desired result.\* Since markets must remain the prime area of uncertainty, the effort of the corporation is therefore to reduce the autonomous character of the demand for its products and to increase its induced character. For this purpose, the marketing organization becomes second in size only to the production organization in manufacturing corporations, and other types of corporations come into existence whose entire purpose and activity is marketing.

These marketing organizations take as their responsibility what Veblen called “a quantity-production of customers."His description of this task, while couched in his customarily sardonic language, is nevertheless a precise expression of the modern theory of marketing: "There is, of course, no actual fabrication of persons endowed with purchasing power ad hoc . . . ; nor is there even any importation of an unused supply of such customers from abroad,—the law does not allow it." Rather, as he points out, there is “a diversion of customers from one to another of the competing sellers." But, from the point of view of each seller, this appears as “a production of new customers or the upkeep of customers already in use by the given concern. So that this acquisition and repair of customers may fairly be reckoned at a stated production-cost per unit; and this operation lends itself to quantity production." Veblen goes on to point out that “the fabrication of customers can now be carried on as a routine operation, quite in the spirit of the mechanical industries and with much the same degree of assurance as regards the quality, rate and volume of output; the mechanical equipment as well as its complement of man-power employed in such production of customers being held to its work under the surveillance of technically trained persons who might fairly be called publicity engineers."8

Moreover, within the manufacturing organization, marketing considerations become so dominant that the structure of the engineering division is itself permeated by and often subordinated to it. Styling, design, and packaging, although effectuated by the producing part of the organization, represent the imposition of marketing demands upon the engineering division. The planning of product obsolescence, both through styling and the impermanence of construction, is a marketing demand exercised through the engineering division, as is the concept of the product cycle: the attempt to gear consumer needs to the needs of production instead of the other way around. Thus through the direct structure of the marketing organization, and through the predominance of marketing in all areas of the corporation's functioning, a large amount of labor is channeled into marketing.

Second, the change in the overall structure of management: We have already described the specialization of the management function, and the reorganization of management from a simple line organization—a direct chain of command over operations from executive head through superintendent and foremaninto a complex of staff organizations suited to a subdivision of authority by various specialized functions. It must now be noted that this represents the dismemberment of the functions of the enterprise head. Corresponding to the managing functions of the capitalist of the past, there is now a complex of departments, each of which has taken over in greatly expanded form a single duty which he exercised with very little assistance in the past. Corresponding to each of these duties there is not just a single manager, but an entire operating department which imitates in its organization and its functioning the factory out of which it grew. The particular management function is exercised not just by a manager, nor even by a staff of managers, but by an organization of workers under the control of managers, assistant managers, supervisors, etc. Thus the relations of purchase and sale of labor power, and hence of alienated labor, have become part of the management apparatus itself. Taken all together, this becomes the administrative apparatus of the corporation. Management has become administration, which is a labor process conducted for the purpose of control within the corporation, and conducted moreover as a labor process exactly analogous to the process of production, although it produces no product other than the operation and coordination of the corporation. From this point on, to examine management means also to examine this labor process, which contains the same antagonistic relations as are contained in the process of production.\* The effects of this will become clearer when we examine the evolution of clerical work.

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\* Seymour Melman says: "The explanation of the rather homogeneous increase in the administrative type of overhead will be found, we suggest, in the growing variety of business activities which are being subjected to controls, both private and public. As administrators have sought to lessen the uncertainty of their prospects, by controlling more and more of the factors which determine the advantage of their plants and firms, they have attempted to control, in ever greater detail, production costs, intensity of work, market demands for products, and other aspects of firm operation. Following this hypothesis, the evolution of the business process towards the expansion of controlled areas of activity by management comprises the basis for the additions to administrative functions, and, thereby, the enlarged administration personnel."7

Finally, there is the corporate function of social coordination. The complexity of the social division of labor which capitalism has developed over the past century, and the concentrated urban society which attempts to hold huge masses in delicate balance, call for an immense amount of social coordination that was not previously required. Since capitalist society resists and in fact has no way of developing an overall planning mechanism for providing this social coordination, much of this public function becomes the internal affair of the corporation. This has no juridical basis or administrative concept behind it; it simply comes into being by virtue of the giant size and power of the corporations, whose internal planning becomes, in effect, a crude substitute for necessary social planning. Apart from the federal government, for example corporations are the largest employing and administrative units in the United States. Thus the five hundred largest industrial corporations employ almost 15 million persons, or three-quarters of the persons employed by all industrial corporations. The internal planning of such corporations becomes in effect social planning, even though, as Alfred P. Sloan explained, it is based upon the "net return" on “invested capital," which he calls “the true measure of efficiency." The rapid growth of administrative employment in the corporations thus reflects the urgency of the need for social coordination, the general absence of such coordination, and the partial filling of the gap by the corporation operating on a capitalist basis and out of purely capitalist motivations. The expansion of governmental functions of social coordination in recent decades is another expression of this urgent need, and the fact that such government activities are highly visible, in comparison with those of the corporation, has led to the notion that the prime exercise of social control is done by government. On the contrary, so long as investment decisions are made by the corporations, the locus of social control and coordination must be sought among them; government fills the interstices left by these prime decisions.

Notes

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\* In the words of one observer: "The corporation is a society which accomplishes its work through division of labor—a proposition now so much taken for granted that it is surprising to think it once represented a discovery. In the modern industrial corporation, division of labor has been carried to great lengths. Not only are there broadly separate functions tied to classes of individuals—marketing, production, finance, law, accounting, technology, management—but within each of these there are many subdivisions, any one of which may constitute a career. This functionalism rests on the clear description of the varied, interrelated tasks that make up the corporation's work. The ‘job description’ is a statement of task meant to be independent of the individual who fills the job. Individuals become personnel' or ‘manpower' in relation to such job descriptions. . . .

“In the twentieth century we have become increasingly aware of the tendency of this industrial functionalism to take on the characteristics of the production process itself. Not only is the complex work of the corporation divided into many discrete tasks performed by discrete individuals, but there has been a strong tendency to make these tasks consist of simple, uniform, repeatable elements capable of at least partial mechanization."9"

The Universal Market

It 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.

Industrial 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

Behind 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

In 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."

So 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:

Except 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."

Though 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.

Chapter 13

The Universal Market

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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.

No 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

Before 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.

This 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.

The 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.

But 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.

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It thereby comes to pass that while population is packed ever more closely together in the urban environment, the atomization of social life proceeds apace. In its most fundamental aspect, this often noticed phenomenon can be explained only by the development of market relations as the substitute for individual and community relations. The social structure, built upon the market, is such that relations between individuals and social groups do not take place directly, as cooperative human encounters, but through the market as relations of purchase and sale. Thus the more social life becomes a dense and close network of interlocked activities in which people are totally interdependent, the more atomized they become and the more their contacts with one another separate them instead of bringing them closer. This is true, for related reasons, also of family life. Apart from its biological functions, the family has served as a key institution of social life, production, and consumption. Of these three, capitalism leaves only the last, and that in attenuated form, since even as a consuming unit the family tends to break up into component parts that carry on consumption separately. The function of the family as a cooperative enterprise pursuing the joint production of a way of life is brought to an end, and with this its other functions are progressively weakened.

This process is but one side of a more complex equation: As the social and family life of the community are weakened, new branches of production are brought into being to fill the resulting gap; and as new services and commodities provide substitutes for human relations in the form of market relations social and family life are further weakened. Thus it is a process that involves economic and social changes on the one side, and profound changes in psychological and affective patterns on the other.

The movement of capitalist society in this direction is bound up, on the economic side, with the capitalist drive to innovate new products, new services, new industries. The surplus produced first of all in the manufacturing industries in the form of concentrations of wealth is matched on the side of labor by the relative decline in demand for workers in those same industries as they are mechanized. The ample streams of capital meet the “freed" labor in the marketplace upon the ground of new products and industries. This results first of all in the conversion into a commodity of every product of human labor, so that goods-producing labor is carried on in none but its capitalist form. Then new commodities are brought into being that match the conditions of life of the urban dweller, and are put into circulation in the forms dictated by the capitalist organization of society. Thus a plentiful supply of printed matter becomes a vehicle for corporate marketing, as do scientific marvels of the twentieth century such as radio and television. The automobile is developed as an immensely profitable form of transportation which in the end destroys the more practical forms of transportation in the interest of profit. Like machinery in the factory, the machinery of society becomes a pillory instead of a convenience, and a substitute for, instead of an aid to, competence.

In a society where labor power is purchased and sold, working time becomes sharply and antagonistically divided from nonworking time, and the worker places an extraordinary value upon this “free” time, while on-the-job time is regarded as lost or wasted. Work ceases to be a natural function and becomes an extorted activity, and the antagonism to it expresses itself in a drive for the shortening of hours on the one side, and the popularity of labor-saving devices for the home, which the market hastens to supply, on the other. But the atrophy of community and the sharp division from the natural environment leaves a void when it comes to the “free” hours. Thus the filling of the time away from the job also becomes dependent upon the market, which develops to an enormous degree those passive amusements, entertainments, and spectacles that suit the restricted circumstances of the city and are offered as substitutes for life itself. Since they become the means of filling all the hours of “free" time, they flow profusely from corporate institutions which have transformed every means of entertainment and “sport" into a production process for the enlargement of capital.\* By their very profusion, they cannot help but tend to a standard of mediocrity and vulgarity which debases popular taste, a result which is further guaranteed by the fact that the mass market has a powerful lowest-common-denominator effect because of the search for maximum profit. So enterprising is capital that even where the effort is made by one or another section of the population to find a way to nature, sport, or art through personal activity and amateur or “underground" innovation, these activities are rapidly incorporated into the market so far as is possible.

The ebbing of family facilities, and of family, community, and neighborly feelings upon which the performance of many social functions formerly depended, leaves a void. As the family members, more of them now at work away from the home, become less and less able to care for each other in time of need, and as the ties of neighborhood, community, and friendship are reinterpreted on a narrower scale to exclude onerous responsibilities, the care of humans for each other becomes increasingly institutionalized. At the same time, the human detritus of the urban civilization increases, not just because the aged population, its life prolonged by the progress of medicine, grows ever larger; those who need care include childrennot only those who cannot “function” smoothly but even the “normal" ones whose only defect is their tender age. Whole new strata of the helpless and dependent are created, or familiar old ones enlarged enormously: the proportion of “mentally ill" or "deficient," the “criminals," the pauperized layers at the bottom of society, all representing varieties of crumbling under the pressures of capitalist urbanism and the conditions of capitalist employment or unemployment. In addition, the pressures of urban life grow more intense and it becomes harder to care for any who need care in the conditions of the jungle of the cities. Since no care is forthcoming from an atomized community, and since the family cannot bear all such encumbrances if it is to strip for action in order to survive and “succeed” in the market society, the care of all these layers becomes institutionalized, often in the most barbarous and oppressive forms. Thus understood, the massive growth of institutions stretching all the way from schools and hospitals on the one side to prisons and madhouses on the other represents not just the progress of medicine, education, or crime prevention, but the clearing of the marketplace of all but the “economically active" and "functioning" members of society, generally at public expense and at a handsome profit to the manufacturing and service corporations who sometimes own and invariably supply these institutions.

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\* A story datelined Los Angeles in the New York Times of February 20, 1973, tells of a car-smashing derby attended by almost 24,000 persons: “Around a centerpiece of wrecked automobiles, a Cadillac Eldorado bearing a red sign: See Parnelli Jones destroy this car,'a Rolls Royce Silver Shadow, a Lincoln Continental Mark IV and some \$50,000 worth of other late-model cars bashed each other into junk here yesterday. Billed as the 'world's richest demolition derby,' it ended in a limping, sputtering confrontation between a battered Ford LTD and a Mercury station wagon. . . .

“I figure it's a little like the last of the Roman Empire,’George Daines said as he bought tickets (at \$8 for adults and \$4 for children) for himself and his son. I wanted to be here to watch the last of the American empire.'