How we cite our quotes: (Chapter.Section.Paragraph) or (Chapter.Paragraph)
Quote #1
If the Règlement organique of the Danubian Principalities was a positive expression of the appetite for surplus labour which every paragraph legalized, the English Factory Acts are the negative expression of the same appetite. These laws curb capital's drive towards a limitless draining away of labour-power by forcibly limiting the working day on the authority of the state, but a state ruled by capitalist and landlord. Apart from the daily more threatening advance of the working-class movement, the limiting of factory labour was dictated by the same necessity as forced the manuring of English fields with guano. The same blind desire for profit that in the one case exhausted the soil had in the other case seized hold of the vital force of the nation at its roots. Periodical epidemics speak as clearly on this point as the diminishing military standard of height in France and Germany. (10.2.6)
The Factory Acts in England in the 19th century regulated the length of the working day. The working class was able to pressure the government to pass them for justice, in part because limiting the working day was actually in the interest of business (a rested worker is more productive) and in part because landowners allied with the workers to oppose their common enemy, the industrialists.
Quote #2
These 'small thefts' of capital from the workers' meal-times and recreation times are also described by the factory inspectors as 'petty pilferings of minutes', 'snatching a few minutes' or, in the technical language of the workers, 'nibbling and cribbling at meal-times'. (10.2.14)
Basic elements of workers' lives were being interfered with, and when the foundations of people's lives are disrupted, they're less willing to be complacent. That's a problem for all involved.
Quote #3
Moments are the elements of profit. (10.2.15)
This was the organizing principle behind the injustice that the working class fought against in seeking passage of laws limiting the length of the working day. The industrialists sought to control every moment of workers' lives in order to maximize their profit.
Quote #4
In this connection, nothing is more characteristic than the designation of the workers who work full time as 'full-timers', and the children under 13 who are only allowed to work six hours as 'half-timers'. The worker is here nothing more than personified labour-time. All individual distinctions are obliterated in that between 'full-timers' and 'half-timers'. (10.2.16)
Treating people as personified labor-time strips them of their dignity and regards them as cogs in the capitalist machine. Historically, working-class movements generally fight for more humanist views of people.
Quote #5
By extending the working day, therefore, capitalist production, which is essentially the production of surplus-value, the absorption of surplus labour, not only produces a deterioration of human labour-power by robbing it of its normal moral and physical conditions of development and activity, but also produces the premature exhaustion and death of this labour-power itself. It extends the worker's production-time within a given period by shortening his life. (10.5.2)
When working conditions are very obviously endangering workers, they may be more inspired to seek justice by drastic measures. Are unjust working conditions more or less evident today than in Marx's 19th-century Europe? Whose conditions?
Quote #6
Capital therefore takes no account of the health and the length of life of the worker, unless society forces it to do so. Its answer to the outcry about the physical and mental degradation, the premature death, the torture of over-work, is this: Should that pain trouble us, since it increases our pleasure (profit)? But looking at these things as a whole, it is evident that this does not depend on the will, either good or bad, of the individual capitalist. Under free competition, the immanent laws of capitalist production confront the individual capitalist as a coercive force external to him. (10.5.8)
Marx thinks that capitalists won't improve working conditions and decrease the length of the working day unless forced to do so by a working-class movement. Is that the case today?
Quote #7
The preliminary campaign of capital thus came to grief, and the Ten Hours' Act came into force on 1 May 1848. Meanwhile, however, the fiasco of the Chartist party, whose leaders had been imprisoned and whose organization dismembered, had shattered the self-confidence of the English working class. Soon after this the June insurrection in Paris and its bloody suppression united, in England as on the Continent, all fractions of the ruling classes, landowners and capitalists, stock-exchange sharks and small-time shopkeepers, Protectionists and Freetraders, government and opposition, priests and free-thinkers, young whores and old nuns, under the common slogan of the salvation of property, religion, the family and society. (10.6.20)
The working-class movement successfully got the Ten Hours' Act passed to limit the length of the working day. But the Chartist movement—to win universal suffrage for men—failed, and its leaders were imprisoned. Then the bloody outcome of the June Revolution in Paris in 1848 united seemingly everyone against what came to be seen as the dangerous working-class movement. Its opponents thought it would overturn cherished traditions that communists had other ideas about: property, religion, family, society.
Quote #8
But what was the point of summoning the manufacturers to appear before the courts when the courts, in this case the county magistrates, acquitted them? In these tribunals the manufacturers sat in judgment on themselves. (10.6.29)
Fighting for justice in the courts does no good if the judges are corrupt. Marx is saying that the judges were comprised of manufacturers in many cases when the question of working conditions entered the judicial system. Talk about a conflict of interest.
Quote #9
For 'protection' against the serpent of their agonies, the workers have to put their heads together and, as a class, compel the passing of a law, an all-powerful social barrier by which they can be prevented from selling themselves and their families into slavery and death by voluntary contract with capital. (10.7.7)
The strength of the working class is its size. Workers outnumber capitalists by the millions. However, workers are often too busy fighting one another—men versus women, Democrats versus Republicans, religions versus religions—to recognize common economic interests.
Quote #10
In the place of the pompous catalogue of the 'inalienable rights of man' there steps the modest Magna Carta of the legally limited working day, which at last makes clear 'when the time which the worker sells is ended, and when his own begins'.(10.7.7)
Marx is saying that the 18th century declarations of rights—which were based on the idea of the inalienable rights of man—were pompous documents that were not as practically useful as the successfully passed, modest law limiting the length of the working day that gave people more time to spend away from work.