Chapter IV: Karl Marx (3)

These are only some of the evils Marx lays at the door of piecework; he has many more charges. From rendering the superintendence of labour unnecessary, it leads to abuses like the sub-contracts known in this country as "the sweating system," or what is a variety of the same, to contracts of the employer with his manager, whereby the latter becomes responsible for the whole work, and employs and pays the men. From making it the pecuniary interest of the labourer to work overtime, piecework induces him to overstrain his powers, and both to transgress the legal or normal limits of the day of labour, and to raise or exceed the normal degree of the intensity of labour. Marx, quoting from Dunning, says that it was customary in the engineering trade in London for employers to engage a foreman of exceptional physical powers, and pay him an extra salary per quarter to keep the men up to his own pace; an expedient which, he adds, is actually recommended to farmers by Morton in his "Agricultural Encyclopaedia." He attributes to piecework, especially in its operation on women and children, the degeneration of the labouring class in the potteries, which is shown in the Report of the Commission on the Employment of Children. But while Marx thus objects to piecework because it leads to overwork, he objects to it also because it leads to underwork. It enables employers to engage more hands than they require, when they entertain perhaps only an imaginary expectation of work, for they know they run no risk, since paying by the piece they pay only for what is done. The men are thus imperfectly employed and insufficiently paid.

6. _Relative Over-population._ One of the worst features of modern industrial development is the vast number of labourers whom it constantly leaves out of employ. This Marx calls relative over-population. Of absolute over-population he has no fear. He is not a Malthusian. He holds that there is no population law applicable to all countries and times alike. Social organisms differ from one another as do animals and plants; they have different laws and conditions. Every country and age has its own law of population. A constant and increasing over-population is a characteristic of the present age; it is a necessary consequence of the existing method of carrying on industry; but it is nothing in the nature of an absolute over-growth; it is only, to Marx's thinking, a relative superfluity. There is plenty of work for all, more than plenty. If those who have employment were not allowed to be overwrought, and if work were to-morrow to be limited to its due amount for every one according to age and sex, the existing working population would be quite insufficient to carry on the national production to its present extent. Even in England, where the technical means of saving labour are enormous, this could not be done except by converting most of our present "unproductive" labourers into productive. There is therefore, Marx conceives, no reason why any one should be out of work; but at present, what with the introduction of new machinery, the industrial cycles, the commercial crises, the changes of fashion, the transitions of every kind, we have always, besides the industrial army in actual service, a vast industrial reserve who are either entirely out of employment or very inadequately employed. This relative over-population is an inevitable consequence of the capitalistic management of industry, which first compels one-half of the labouring community to do the work of all, and then makes use of the redundancy of labour so created to compel the working half to take less pay. Low wages spring from the excessive competition among labourers caused by this relative over-population. "Rises and falls in the rate of wages are universally regulated by extensions and contractions in the industrial reserve army which correspond with changes in the industrial cycle. They are not determined by changes in the absolute number of the labouring population, but through changes in the relative distribution of the working class into active army and reserve army--through increase or decrease in the relative numbers of the surplus population--through the degree in which it is at one time absorbed and at another dismissed." The fluctuations in the rate of wages are thus traced to expansions or contractions of capital, and not to variation in the state of population. Marx ridicules the theory of these fluctuations given by political economists, that high wages lead to their own fall by encouraging marriages, and so in the end increasing the supply of labour, and that low wages lead to their own rise by discouraging marriages and reducing the supply of labour. That, says Marx, is very fine, but before high wages could have produced a redundant population (which would take eighteen years to grow up), wages would, with modern industrial cycles, have been up, down, and up again through ordinary fluctuations of trade.

Relative over-population is of three kinds: current, latent, and stagnant. Current over-population is what comes from incidental causes, the ordinary changes that take place in the every-day course of industry. A trade is slack this season and brisk the next, has perhaps its own seasons, like house-painting in spring, posting in summer. Or one trade may from temporary reasons be busy, while others are depressed. In the last half year of 1860 there were 90,000 labourers in London out of employment, and yet the factory inspectors report that at that very time much machinery was standing idle for want of hands. This comes from the labourer being mutilated--that is, specialized--under modern subdivision of labour, and fit for only a single narrow craft. Another current cause of over-population is that under the stress of modern labour the workman is old before his years, and while still in middle life becomes unfit for full work, and passes into the reserve. Marx says this is the real reason for the prevalence of early marriages among the working class. They are generally condemned for being improvident, but they are really resorted to from considerations of providence, for working men foresee that they will be prematurely disabled for work, and desire, when that day comes, to have grown-up children about them who shall be able to support them. Other current causes are new inventions and new fashions, which always throw numbers out of work. Latent over-population is what springs from causes whose operation is long and slow. The best example of it is the case of the agricultural labourers. They are being gradually superseded by machinery, and as they lose work in the country they gather to the towns to swell the reserve army there. A great part of the farm servants are always in this process of transition, a few here, and a few there, and a few everywhere. The constancy of this flow indicates a latent over-population in the rural districts, and that is the cause of the low wages of agricultural labourers. By stagnant over-population Marx means that which is shown in certain branches of industry, where none of the workmen are thrown back entirely into the reserve, but none get full regular employment.