The Logic of the Weavers' Piece-Rate Scales

The occupation of weaving during the second half of the nineteenth century comprised the single largest job category not only in textiles but in the entire manufacturing sector of the British and German economies.7 The construction of the piece-rate schedules for weavers provides a neglected but

singularly revealing piece of evidence about the inscription of contrasting suppositions in utilitarian practices. As a tool for extracting labor from weavers, the design of the scales would seem to depend only upon questions of force and pragmatism: How much were employers ready to pay workers for various types of cloth? To what extent could the resistance of weavers lead to modifications in the system's provisions? The physical dimensions of the weaving process and of its products did not provide natural or automatic measures of "how much" a worker produced or of "how much" the employer appropriated. Instead, cultural categories intervened to create contrasting forms of measurement in Germany and Britain. To isolate culture's arbitration, we must first construct a picture of the technical essentials of weaving, for the characteristics of weaving made the design of piece rates in this trade a kind of Rorschach test for industrial culture.

The weaver's job consisted of seeing to it that the weft thread in the loom's shuttle or shuttles moved horizontally back and forth across the vertical threads of the warp.8 As the shuttles laid their threads, a rotating beam underneath or out to the side of the loom unfolded more of the warp. The speed at which this beam let out the warp largely determined how tightly the weft threads would be woven: the slower the warp moved forward, the denser the weave.

From almost the earliest days of power loom weaving, mill owners in both Germany and Britain preferred to pay weavers by the piece.9 They maintained that this method of reward gave weavers an incentive to work without close supervision and thereby minimized the costs of superintendence.10 To be sure, employers in both countries granted time wages for

weavers if the machinery was untested or if weavers were so unaccustomed to the work that a production norm could not be estimated. But they reverted to remuneration by piece once these conditions passed.11 "If we did not pay them by piece and by results," a spokesman for Lancashire mill owners claimed in 1891, "the manufacturing concerns would not be able to keep above water twelve months."12 The economic environment limited the mode of payment, but cultural assumptions precipitated its form.

The mechanics of the weaving activity precluded the application of a unidimensional register of the labor spent on an output. If length of cloth alone were the index of output and criterion of pay, workers on cloth with a dense weave, which required the insertion of many weft threads, would earn no more per yard, and probably less per hour, than workers on looser cloth. Weavers on dense fabric in this hypothetical setting would be underpaid and would have an interest in advancing the warp rapidly to produce a looser weave than ordered. But if the number of weft threads inserted by the weaver were measured, weavers on dense fabric would be likely to be overpaid. The reason is clear enough: weavers producing loose cloth use up the warp more quickly than weavers on dense cloth. The removal of a finished warp and installation of a new one in the loom creates a major, uncompensated delay.

The predicaments in these two simplified ways of gauging output—length of cloth or number of weft threads inserted—disclose the unique characteristics of the weaving activity and of its product. Production required multi-dimensional gauges. In contrast to other manufacturing processes in which subvarieties of the product differ by gross size or shape, varieties of cloth differ by the mathematical functions that govern their density and pattern. The product is uniform and continuous, and it has a naturally inscribed metric along precisely measurable and equipollent dimensions: length, width, and number of weft threads. The labor activity itself consists of the regulated linkage of actions which have natural metrics as well: the number of times the shuttle crosses the warp, the number of times the beam rotates to let out the warp, the size and number of teeth on the gears that let out the warp, and so forth. Weaving offered the participants multiple and easily coded axes which could be picked out to define units of output and apportion pay, and it required them to combine these dimensions somehow to avoid the problems illustrated with the unidimensional measures. This natural indeterminacy makes weaving an ideal context in which historical analysts can discern the application of the schema by which factory owners and workers decided how they would measure output and outline the otherwise shapeless stuff called labor.

The model of labor in Britain was concretized in the Yorkshire piece-rate system, as illustrated in the schedule introduced in 1883 in Huddersfield and the Colne Valley (Figure 1). As the figure's vertical axis indicates, weavers were remunerated by length of fabric woven, with the standard interval equaling 180 feet of the warp. But the more weft threads woven into each inch of this standard length of warp, the higher the payment. The chart's horizontal axis specifies the requisite weft threads inserted per inch, which in the trade were called the "picks" or, more precisely, the "picks per inch." For basic weaving, with one shuttle and one beam, remuneration for a fixed length of cloth rose linearly as picks per inch rose. For more complicated weaves, with bonuses for extra shuttles, remuneration for a fixed length always rose with increases in density, but not at a constant rate (Figure 2). To calculate weavers' pay, the taker-in of the cloth from the weavers sampled the picks per inch or weighed the total piece to ensure that enough picks had been woven into the warp. (In the discussion which follows, bear in mind that "picks per inch" always refers to cloth density, not to its length. Density, a geometric concept, varies independently of the thickness of the weft yarn.) The Huddersfield

Figure 1.
British Data on British Axes, Huddersfield, Simple Weaves, 1883

scale, the best-known in Yorkshire, served as a benchmark for many others in the woolen trade.13 Until the First World War, weavers judged the fairness of their pay by this scale's standards.14

Figure 2.
British Data on British Axes, Huddersfield, Fancy Weaves,
Two Beams, Four Shuttles, 1883

To compare basic principles, a German pay table of 1911 from a wool firm in Euskirchen on the lower Rhine is shown in Figure 3.15 Rather than taking adjacent correlates of the weaver's activity—length and density of cloth—for the criteria of pay, as in Britain, the German system centered its categories directly on the weaver's primary activity of having the shuttle move back and forth. The weavers earned a sum for every thousand times their shuttle shot across the warp—that is, per thousand weft threads woven. The Germans called this system pay by the number of Schüsse , literally, pay by the number of "shots" of the shuttle. German managers said they preferred pay by shot over pay by length because it offered a more direct measure of the labor input.16 As Figure 3 shows, the

Figure 3.
German Data on German Axes, Euskirchen, 1911

remuneration per thousand shots rose linearly with decreases in the shots woven per centimeter. This feature of the scales compensated weavers for more frequent changes of the warp when producing low-density fabrics. On the Huddersfield schedule, one can also identify a linear increase, of course: for basic weaving, remuneration for a fixed length rose linearly as picks per inch rose.

Since the two pay systems manifested their linearity on different axes, they did not "say" the same thing with alternative vocabularies, but concretized fundamentally different statements about the remuneration of labor. On the horizontal axis, Figures 1 and 3 share a common metric, the density of the weave.17 On the vertical axis, however, the Euskirchen and

Huddersfield scales operated on different dimensions: pay by shot versus pay by length. In both German and English, the referents of ordinary language marked the immediacy of the association between the weft threads and the labor activity, since the words picks and Schüsse could pertain either to the shuttles' motion or to the product, the woven weft.18 When practice itself became a concrete form of language in the operation of the piece-rate scales, the choice of referent became unmistakable. Verbal utterances were multivocal, the silent language of production—the piece-rate mechanism—invariable. In comparing types of labor, the German and British systems designated distinct objects. The German piece-rate system centered its comparisons of different ways of weaving on the motion of inserting a pick, without respect to the visible length of the complete product. The British pattern compared the picks in different kinds of finished products rather than in motions.

The dimensions of linearity reveal the core axes of thought inscribed in the techniques of remuneration. It is impossible to translate the data from British weaving price lists onto the German dimensions of thought without altering the intelligibility of the distribution. To demonstrate this, in Figure 4 are shown the values for three types of English cloth on the Huddersfield scale but replotted on the German axes of thought, in pence per one thousand picks or Schüsse. Placing the British information on the German dimensions of thought yields two findings. First, the British data lose the shape of a line, in contrast with the German data in Figure 3; instead, as picks per inch decline, the points arrange themselves in a strange curve.19 The deformation of the line in Figure 1 to the curve in Figure 4 confirms that the British system of measurement embodied a concept of remuneration that began with the length of the materialized

Figure 4
British Data on German Axes, Huddersfield Scale, Woolens

product as an indicator of labor. The linearity on the native British axes would not have obtained if the producers had reflected upon the exchange of labor for a wage with another combination of axes.

The translation of the British data onto the German dimensions of thought also enables us to understand how the unpretentious language of practice—the concepts incarnated in the weavers' daily labor for a wage—guided the weavers' independent reflections upon the appropriation of labor. When British weavers had more than one shuttle or one warp beam in operation—which was very often the case—their payment per shot did not necessarily increase as the number of shots per inch declined on various

weaving jobs. Given a fixed length of cloth, although the net pay rose as the number of shots per inch rose, the pay per shot inserted—the measure of pay per effective motion—followed an erratic course. Figure 4 indicates that the more complex the weave, the more irregular and "irrational" the British method appears from a "German" point of view; that is, the more complex the weave, the more the graph deviates from the ideal pattern of higher earnings per shot as the number of shots per inch decreases.20 For example, on some types of fabric, the British weaver earned less per shot for weaving 56 weft threads per inch than for 62, although 56 weft threads per inch would take longer, per shot , to weave (because the warp would have to be changed more often). The difference in the cloth produced was slight; the difference in earnings significant and inequitable.21 What do these anomalies tell us about the producers' apperceptions?

It would seem that such an "obvious" source of inconsistent earnings in payment per weft thread inserted under the Huddersfield system could not have escaped the notice of the workers themselves. But somehow it did. Weavers in the Colne Valley alleged that the 1883 pay table lowered their wages, especially on the loosely woven cloth. They wrote dozens of letters to newspapers explaining their dissatisfaction with it. These workers astutely analyzed its rates and criticized the slope of the straight line on the British axes of thought.22 They made an effort to analyze the scale mathematically. But since they did not conceive the system in terms of pay per weft thread, they could not identify these inequities or frame them as "irregularities." They looked straight at the problem but did not see it, a remarkable demonstration of how their perception began with the length of the cloth as the basis for pay. Truly, their senses had "become directly in their practice theoreticians."

The weavers were not simpletons who self-effacingly obeyed the dictates of culture:23 as strategizing actors they knew that their net earnings

were higher if they put more picks into cloth of a fixed length (not taking pay per weft thread into account!). The workers' recognition of inequity and their resistance to exploitation were not given automatically by their resolve to pursue their interests. Rather, the weavers' very understanding of their interests depended on the cultural suppositions they called upon to interpret their predicament. The assumptions about labor through which they defined their situation derived from the signifying process embedded in the very operation of the piece-rate mechanism. Through the form of their everyday practice, the workers identified their human activity only as it appeared to them in the fantastic shape of the fabric's own properties.24

The British weavers could not have perceived the anomalies in their payment per weft thread from the experience of work. The earnings of most British and German weavers fluctuated greatly from week to week. The amount of their weekly pay depended on whether they wove their piece on the warp all the way to the end exactly on pay day or, alternatively, had a small swatch left to do on a large piece which could therefore not be finished and credited until the next pay period.25 The speed at which a worker finished a piece of cloth depended upon numerous shifting factors which combined in unpredictable ways: the dressing of the warp, the quality of the yarn, how well the warp was wound, the weather, and trouble-shooting by the overlooker. Then, too, weavers turned out a rapidly changing mix of product types.26 These conditions made it difficult for weavers to move from the phenomenal world of work to expected weekly wages for products of a specific number of picks per inch.

Weavers labored with approximate estimates of what they ought to earn and with only a tacit understanding of how it ought to be reckoned. "Wherever a scale, no matter what its base and no matter how the shuttling was arranged, ran to a good day's wage for a good day's work," said Ben Turner, the union secretary, "the weavers were content with it."27 Yet when weavers at mills that lacked comprehensive piece-rate charts had an opportunity to devise completely original schedules of their own, their choices revealed their assumptions. They proposed, as a matter of course, that earnings rise linearly for extra picks per inch, and they took pay by length as the unquestioned basis for remuneration. They did so even in regions lacking prior districtwide wage agreements to which they could refer.28

The length of cloth operated as the basis for remuneration in nearly all Yorkshire and Lancashire scales, both for the base rates with the simplest weaving and after the addition of more shuttles, beams, and healds to the job.29 The system of pay by length did not necessarily entail inconsistency in the rates of payment per weft thread inserted; but since British producers did not consciously guard against this defect, their system generated it. On the eve of the First World War, the most capable researcher in Yorkshire, George S. Wood, delivered a lecture to the Huddersfield Textile Society on "The Theory and Practice of Piecework." After finishing an extensive survey of pay systems' consistency, he told the Textile Society that "perhaps the best scale in the woollen trade is the famous Huddersfield Weaving Scale."30 Wood, in a strange illustration of history's vagaries, worked both as a representative for the employers' association and as an adviser to the textile workers' union. His testimony confirms that the Huddersfield table was no less sound than others in Britain.31

The method of comparing types of labor via the linear properties of the product also prevailed in Britain during a formal inquiry by the Bradford Chamber of Commerce into new methods for comparing weaving scales in Yorkshire. The chamber's conclusions reveal that even when British managers, overlookers, and weavers started afresh and reconsidered the principles behind their piece-rate scales, they took pay by length as an unquestioned given. The chamber, with committee representatives from the overlookers' and weavers' unions, considered in 1895 the feasibility of establishing average weaving scales for the various classes of goods in the city.32 A local journal in Bradford observed that the chamber had set itself a difficult task, because the city's numerous worsted mills produced an "infinite" number of fabric types which could hardly be grouped on a comprehensive schedule.33 To cope with this challenge, the chamber "set about the classification of the boundless variety of fabrics, from the point of view of the weaving labour involved.  . . . It ascertained, availing itself of all obtainable information, the average price per pick actually paid for weaving this kind of fabric."34 The dimensions of the printed scale which the Chamber of Commerce developed as a basis for comparison among firms reveal that it actually took "price per pick" to mean "price per pick per inch" for a fixed length of cloth.35 When the chamber set out to measure cloth in terms of labor, it ended up measuring labor in terms of cloth (or, more exactly, differences in labor in terms of differences in cloth).36 The Germans, by contrast, gauged cloth by labor motions. They called a group of one thousand Schüsse "the unit of labor," analyzing the product with this unit of activity.37

Anomalies in the rates of earnings per weft thread appeared in schedules from Lancashire as well.38 Shortly after the First World War, a British manufacturers' commission investigated the precision of pay scales in relation to

labor effort. A member of the committee on costs declared that "hardly one single weaving scale in existence is drawn up mathematically correctly in its relation to picks"—that is, in the effective payment per weft thread woven.39 These discrepancies occurred because the British method of classification captured the labor activity at a remove.40 Does this mean that the British point of view was backward or primitive? Before we rush to a conclusion, we must consider the disadvantages of pay by shot as the Germans practiced it. Any framework for viewing production also entails its own forms of blindness. The German way of defining the transfer of labor to employers carried distinctive inaccuracies of its own, which, from the British framework, would have seemed intolerable indeed.

Although German weavers received a higher reward per thousand shots if they wove less dense fabrics, their pay scales evaluated the looseness of the fabric only in approximate terms. If an analyst converts the German measure of fabric density—shots per centimeter—to English units, it turns out that the German scales graduated the increase in pay at intervals that were always larger than five picks per inch.41 Some German scales registered changes in fabric density only at intervals of eight picks to the inch, or by a few bifurcations of yarn types. (This feature represented a specific way of treating labor rather than an incidental feature which resulted from the specifications by which products were sold in the market. The commercial orders German manufacturers filled permitted no leeway in the number of picks per inch.)42

In contrast to German methods, British piece-rate scales adjusted the levels of remuneration to the fabric densities by intervals no larger than four picks to the inch, and normally they gauged the rates at intervals of one or two picks to the inch.

Proceedings in the court rolls indicate that English factory inspectors prosecuted mill owners who had their overlookers set the looms to insert two weft threads per inch more than the weavers knew of or were being paid for.43 A disparity of this magnitude, an issue of legal concern in Britain, made no difference at all in the rate of pay on most German charts. In fact, the odd irregularities in the Huddersfield scale, which turn up after calculating the rates of payment per thousand weft threads woven, fall in between the grosser intervals of German pay tables. The British focus on the product allowed them to make fine distinctions in the product to decide upon an appropriate price for it, but did not provide the categories for capturing the labor activity itself. In this affair the Germans were consistent but imprecise, the British the other way around. This contrast originated in the German focus on decomposing the labor activity versus the British focus on decomposing the cloth.

In some instances, the reason that the Germans gave less attention in their pay scales to alterations in picks per inch is that weavers received a small sum for helping to install a new warp. This meant they had less claim on compensation via measurement of looser densities of cloth, because some of the time devoted to more frequent changes of the warp on these orders was taken into account directly.44 Leaving aside the changing of the warp, there was no readily identifiable difference, on loose versus dense cloth, in the labor exercised to weave a thousand shots, apart from differences in the frequencies of yarn breakages due to the diameters of the yarn used to weave loose versus dense cloth. Thus, from the German view, there was less motivation to register the difference in cloth densities carefully; it was only necessary to capture the time lost in changing the warp and the gross differences in yarn types.45

How are we to account for the emergence of contrasts in the principles used to calculate weavers' earnings in Germany and Britain? The brute, physical fact that workers receive their compensation via piece rates does not reveal what it is about the products that makes them a suitable index for remuneration, or how the products are interpreted to serve as a measure of work. Workers in less commercialized societies, from ancient Greece to prerevolutionary France, received payment by piece rates, but they did not by any means imagine that they sold their labor as a commodity.46 The mechanism of payment by output does not entail a particular commodity form of labor. To ascertain the definition of labor as a commodity, one must expose the agents' own concepts as embedded in the symbolic form of the piece-rate schedules. A "Statement of Wages" was indeed a statement: the weavers' pay scales in the two countries attempted to combine two elements—the labor activity and the product of labor—in a relation not of mere correlation but of significance. In Germany the relation was conceived metaphorically and the activity of weaving taken as a model or paradigm for identifying and measuring the product. The scale classified the product as a mirror of the activity; cloth comprised the unit of observation, the insertion of the shots the true subject of analysis. As industrial sociologists from Germany have long taken care to emphasize, a piece-rate scale can use the product as a convenient surrogate for measuring the workers' action and need not accept the product as the object of payment itself.47 Or, as one student of wage forms in the German textile industry expressed it in 1924, the visible output could be

adopted for the sake of making an "empirical" reading, as distinguished from the actual labor for which the worker was in truth remunerated.48 If the Germans themselves interpreted the product as a "sign," not as the true object of remuneration, surely we are obligated to take their lead seriously.49

In Britain the relation between labor as a concrete activity and its product was conceived metonymically. The British pay scales codified the product as the result of labor but did not identify the value of the product by modeling it on the performance of the weaving. Instead, the product itself became the vessel by which labor was transferred; the materialized labor itself comprised the object of remuneration. The British quantified abstract labor by the substantial dimensions of the complete piece of cloth.50 As in Germany, workers delivered abstract labor, but in Britain the concrete product functioned as its sign.51

Both ways of conceiving the relation between labor and its product interpret a paradox in the employment relation. The worker's labor may generate the value of the finished product, but this labor, since it consists of an ongoing activity, is not a thing and has itself no exchange value. The weaver's action at the loom, because it does not exist before or after its appearance in the world, cannot as such be either sold or appropriated—although the products of this activity can be. "Labor," Marx wrote, "is the substance and immanent measure of value, but has itself no value."52 Labor as a visible activity produces but lacks value; labor as a commodity in the moment of exchange has value but does not produce it.53 To order the disparity between an action without exchange value and its sterling product, the Germans and the British drew upon different fictions. The British, with pay by length, first drew systematic (linear) relations between types of whole cloth and then projected these distinctions onto the weaving activity. The Germans took the use of the labor power, or the execution of the activity, as the basis for defining the relative values of fabrics. They did things the other way around from the British: they drew systematic (linear) differences between types of labor and then projected them onto the cloth.

If this interpretation of the contrasting structures of the German and British scales seems incautious, we need only consult the spontaneous evidence offered by the specimens' labels. As early as the 1830s, the tables posted in Germany for remunerating weavers bore the heading "Wage Tariff" or "Wage Table," even when the employees were hand weavers.54 In 1849, German textile workers called their proposal for a piece-rate system a "Table of Values for Labor Power."55 The scales for weavers in Britain were entitled "Statement of Prices" or "Weavers' Prices." The phrases hid nothing: the term price could just as well have designated the requisition of a product.

To explain the divergence in the structures of the weaving scales, let us start with solutions that treat the methods as naturally prompted adaptations to the immediate circumstances of production. We do not thereby privilege utili-

tarian reasoning and assign the symbolic a residual explanatory burden. Hypotheses that reduce social practice to a "rational" adjustment to the economic environment are neither more fundamental nor more parsimonious than arguments that accept the constitutive role of culture. But their inadequacies throw into relief the advantages of a cultural explanation.

The simplest conjecture, perhaps, is that the differences in the concepts used to construct the scales derived from the implements used to measure cloth. By the turn of the century, it had become a common technique in German firms to install on each loom a so-called Schussuhr , or "pick clock," which registered the number of shuttle "shots" as the weavers carried them out.56 The weavers then received their pay based upon readings of this device rather than upon an examination of their product.57 Pick clocks were virtually absent in Britain before the First World War.58 Could the difference between the countries in principles of remuneration have arisen due to the greater readiness or ability of German mill proprietors to install this newfangled gadget? No, because the adoption of pay by shot in the textile factories preceded the experimental introduction of the pick clock in the 1880s.59 Despite general reliance on pay by shot in Aachen, for example, the Free Textile Workers' Union reported in 1902 that only one company there had installed pick clocks.60 Of the ninety weaving mills which paid by shot that were represented at a national conference of German stuff weavers in 1910, only thirty-five had mounted these gadgets.61 The German system of pay was not, therefore, originally adopted to take advantage of this mechanical innovation.

Pay by shot did not simplify the determination or recording of wages. Before the introduction of the pick clock, calculating the number of shots in

the manufactured cloth was complicated. The German takers-in or production accountants did not measure individually the tens of thousands of shots woven across the warp. They began with only the length or weight of the cloth and a sample of the density, in shots per centimeter. Then they reckoned backwards to arrive at the true object of analysis, the number of shots the weaver had cranked out.62 Less often, the shots put in were measured by the weft yarn used up, and weavers' pay tables were based on the length of this weft yarn consumed.63 In any case, the German system did not reduce the requisite calculations.64 To the contrary, one factory manager who said that pay by thousand shots was conceptually superior also complained that

it required more intricate computations.65 Yet the adoption of the method even among small woolen firms in Aachen and elsewhere which had negligible clerical staffs shows that company investments in accounting do not clarify the reasons for the diffusion of pay by shot in Germany.

Might it have been easier for the weavers to verify the calculation of their receipts under one system or the other? Weavers in both countries complained that they could not easily verify the length of the cloth they wove. The Germans' adoption of pay by shot could not have been intended to alleviate this problem, since they reckoned backwards to the shots after measuring the fabric's length. Often employers and workers even cited wages per meter of cloth turned in, when the evaluation of the value of a meter depended on the analysis of the shots. What is more, many German firms continued to invest in apparatuses which their takers-in used for measuring the length of the cloth, just like the gadgets used in Britain, even after these German companies had converted to pay by shot.66 The new system of pay did not result from technical convenience or forced adaptation to the physical instruments of calibration.

The divergent principles of the piece-rate systems could not have influenced the weavers' incentive to work. In both countries, once a weaver had a warp in the loom, the ratio of earnings to the cloth turned out remained constant whether the weaver completed the warp quickly or slowly. The marginal returns to effort in a given time period could diverge in the two countries between densities of cloth, not on a given piece of cloth mounted in the loom. Nor did the divergent construction of the German and British schedules lead to differences in the distribution of earnings among weavers in the two countries. True, when one converts the British piece rates to the German dimension of thought, one finds that British weavers earned less on the middle ranges of cloth density in comparison with either endpoint of the British scale than did German weavers on the middle ranges of cloth density in comparison with either endpoint of the German scale. That this formal incongruity created real differences between Germany and Britain in the distribution of earnings among weavers seems unlikely, however, for the range of fabric densities encompassed by the tables varied by company and by town. In other words, German weavers on middle densities of cloth did not always earn more than

those on middle densities in Britain, because the range of fabrics covered by each scale, and therefore what counted as the "middle," varied from scale to scale. Within the same town, the endpoint of one piece-rate chart might be the midpoint of the next. In the aggregate, the design of the schedules did not have an appreciable effect upon the distribution of earnings.

In a word, the difference between the principles adopted in Germany and in Britain cannot be explained by the ease or efficiency with which the piece-rate structures served the function of appropriating labor for a wage. The two systems served this purpose equally well; they differed, not in their material function, but in their intelligible form. If there were no concrete obstacles in the immediate environment of the labor process that prevented the British from paying weavers per shot of the shuttle like the Germans, could the difference in pay systems reflect nothing more than the lingering effect of business factors that had operated in the past? The utilitarian arguments considered so far attend only to contemporaneous settings. Suppose institutional inertia had frozen into place pay methods that conformed to the necessities of an earlier period?

Before the rise of the factory system, German weavers who worked at home had their remuneration calculated by a variety of payment systems, including the fabric's weight and, in some instances, its length, just as did their counterparts in Britain.67 The principle of pay by shot prevailed in Germany contemporaneously with the transition from the putting-out system to factory production.68 Could this endorsement of pay by shot have reflected the economic conditions under which the German factories initially emerged? By this kind of diachronic reasoning, the British might have transplanted the format of the handweaving scales into the newborn factories, where they took permanent root in collective understandings between employers' and workers' unions; whereas the Germans, who founded their factories later, could have started off with more "modern" thinking, shorn of the legacy of mercantile capitalism. This speculative reasoning merits consideration but collides with the evidentiary record.

To begin, comparative logic can rule out conjectures based on the timing of development. The Yorkshire woolen trade, unlike the precocious cotton districts of Lancashire, mechanized production no earlier than did many firms in regions of Germany such as the Wuppertal.69 When the Germans did mechanize, they passed through the same sequence of development as the British, moving from an extensive network of small manufactories and of home weaving under the putting-out system to a full-fledged factory system.70 The Germans adopted pay by shot whether they set up factories in regions such as Aachen, where small manufactories with handlooms preceded the factory system, or in regions such as urban Mönchengladbach or rural Silesia, where the path of development usually led directly from home weaving to factories.71 Therefore an analyst cannot explain the national differences in pay systems either by the timing of development or by the forms of the textile labor process that preceded mechanized production. In some areas the shift to pay by shot preceded the development of factories. In the areas around Aachen and in Berlin, for example, it appeared in artisanal workshops for handweavers during the 1860s, before these shops gave way to large factories with power looms.72 The change in methods of pay did not simply mirror changes on the shop floor itself. The close resemblance in the products and markets of firms in Aachen and Huddersfield assures us that no technical factor in Germany, which was absent in Yorkshire, spurred the factories in Aachen to move to pay by shot at an early date.

Nor can one attribute the difference in pay systems to the social origins or acquired business knowledge of the pioneering textile entrepreneurs who founded the earliest factories. As in Britain, so in Germany the largest portion of early mill owners had played a role as middlemen in the putting-

out system or had operated workshops for the dyeing, finishing, or fulling of cloth. They had gained an understanding of the organization of trade as mediators between home workers and merchants.73 The assiduous research of François Crouzet, among others, shows that few of the heads of leading merchant concerns in Britain became factory employers, compared to the preponderance of small workshop owners and of putters-out who had organized the day-to-day operations of domestic production.74 Such findings make it implausible to surmise that British factory practices based on the appropriation of materialized labor were handed down from the conceptions of employers who had started out as mere traders in finished goods and remained attached to this outlook.75 The factory pioneers in Britain had the experience of operating small manufactories or of acting as "manufactur-

ers," as the directors of the networks of domestic production were called in their day. Conversely, in the German setting both contemporaries and modern historians have emphasized the contributions of small traders and merchants to the founding of textile mills.76 The industrial commentator Alphons Thun complained in 1879 that German factory managers on the lower Rhine had commercial skills but less knowledge of production technology than their British counterparts.77 We need not swallow Thun's judgment whole, but the accumulated evidence casts doubt on the hypothesis that the social origins of German businessmen led to a greater focus on production than on relations of exchange.

Still another problem arises with an argument based on the original setting of development. An explanation based on the retention of assumptions about piece-rate schedules from the putting-out system into the late factory age takes it for granted that the principles of the schedules were immutable. What prevented the alteration of the lists? At many Yorkshire mills the weavers were so unorganized that employers could choose their own rules for defining the product and for establishing remuneration.78 Indeed, some owners chose not to release a pay table at all, but announced the value of a particular piece, as they fancied, after the weaver had completed the job.79 In these cases, obviously, there were no barriers to change in the reckoning of pay. In most regions of Yorkshire, the piece-rate tables

were negotiated separately in each factory. In Lancashire, to be sure, the power of a well-organized union movement which regulated the piece rates for weavers made it cumbersome to introduce modifications. But the Lancashire weavers declared their readiness to accept new means of calculating pay, so long as the "aggregate wage fund should not be lowered."80 The absence of insuperable institutional obstacles to changes in the derivation of rates suggests the operation of another principle: namely, the effect of the lived enactment of the tenet that labor was conveyed as it was embodied in a visible product.

The assumptions about labor that were implicit in the scales were reproduced endogenously by the scales' quotidian use. Not all workers were educated enough to compute exactly the pence or pfennigs owed them for cloth of a given design. No matter: through the scales' material operation they received the ideal definition of the sale of labor. Facta non verba : the principles were communicated in action by signifying practice, not by fine phrases. But in ordinary conversation, when British weavers from different factories described their pay scales to one another, they cited the pay for a density at a fixed length, called the "basis," and then stated by how much the pay rose or fell for each increase or decrease in picks per inch.81 When the British weavers suffered a reduction in rates, they said the factory employer was "pulling pence off" the picks, as if the remuneration inhered in the cloth.82 Whereas British workers thought in terms of exchanging the length of cloth for payment, the German workers could assert that pay by length was "categorically erroneous."83 Workers in

Germany sometimes calculated their output in terms of the number of shuttle motions completed per day, without reference to the length of fabric.84 They complained about the intensification of work quotas not in terms of cloth delivered, but in terms of the additional shots executed.85 The secret code embedded in practice became the workers' language of debate and deliberation.

The responses of German weavers to the transition to the principle of earnings per shot in the earliest days of the factory have left no traces. But the discussions of commercial experts, preserved in business newspapers, show that employers preferred this mode of piece rates because it captured the process of carrying out the work. Textile periodicals in the 1870s took pay by shot as a commonplace or described the abandonment of pay by length as a routine occurrence.86 They spun words around that which practice had already conceived.87 These journal articles did not mention any instrumental advantage from the shift, but they emphasized that the system seemed logical. Spokespersons for pay by shot considered this method more appropriate once producers had adopted the idea that weavers in the factory sold the disposition over the conversion of labor to labor power. As one proponent summed up his case, only remuneration by shots really paid the weaver "for the quantity of executed labor."88 When the Chamber of Commerce for the area of Aachen officially rejected pay by length in 1884, it reasoned that pay by shot offered the only "rational" system of measuring labor.89 Only with this new method, the chairman reported, "is the weaver paid for what he has really carried out."90 After the turn of the century, a factory owner from Gera, Saxony,

reiterated the causes for the triumph of pay by shot. He said in 1905 that among the city's factories, only one continued to pay weavers by cloth length. "The [length of] filled-in warp cannot be taken for the performance of labor by the worker," he explained.91 In sum, earnings by shot seemed to the employers more coherent, not necessarily more profitable.

By no means did pay by shot become a universal custom in Germany before the First World War. A great many instances can be found of German mills continuing to pay weavers by the piece or by weight. In borderlands such as the Münsterland, where many factory owners before the First World War were of Dutch origin, pay by shot emerged less frequently.92 Elsewhere, employers whose mills manufactured only coarse, undyed varieties of cloth sometimes did not specify picks per inch to the weaver or measure the total picks, but simply weighed the product and paid the weaver for putting a minimum weight of weft into the warp. Yet to varying degrees, pay by shot encompassed the major types of weaves and materials: wool, linen, cotton, and silk.93 Even if payment by shot was not universal in

Germany, it was predominant there, while it was unknown in Britain.94 In national surveys of German stuff and wool firms in 1910, 75 to 85 percent were found to pay weavers per thousand shots or by a correlatethe length of weft used to insert the shots.95 The prevalence of payment by shot in Germany marked the outstanding difference between the philosophies of

paying weavers presented in the two countries' business press.96 "Under any circumstances," concluded a German textile journal in 1910, "the wage calculation for fabric by a certain number of weft threads is more proper than by a piece of fabric or by a certain number of pieces."97

If the contrasting principles embedded in the operation of German and British piece-rate scales can be explained neither by the mute exigencies of the labor process nor by the legacy of earlier changes at the point of production, where are we to turn for an understanding of their development and significance? To construct weavers' piece-rate scales, managers in both Germany and Britain could not just measure the effort or time taken to weave a single type of cloth. They had to come up with a way of equating the different kinds of labor that went into different kinds of cloth. They could not accomplish this by empirical tests, because weaving was neither a simple process of tending a machine nor a matter of applying one's skill and energy directly as an artisan would, without the interposition of an unmastered technology. Either of these ideal types of production facilitates the empirical measurement of labor in terms of time or, what may amount to the same thing, in terms of the goods it takes a certain amount of time to produce. Weaving, by contrast, consisted of an interaction between the worker, unreliable tools, quirky raw materials, and weather, to turn out a large and changing array of patterns. In a single day a large mill could have over sixty types of cloth in its looms.98 The enormous variety of patterns and the interaction of such shifting and unmeas-

urable factors caused managers in both countries to declare it impossible to gauge from experience or trials the time taken to weave each type of fabric.99 The weavers themselves scarcely considered such an empirical procedure.100 British weavers sometimes learned to regret the imprecision: some of them who struck work and succeeded in obtaining a piece-rate schedule of their own design found that the scales they had expected to offer an improvement in rewards led instead to an appreciable decline in compensation.101 In short, the environment was so chaotic that it could not be mirrored in a coherent scale.

Neither lack of attention to the problem nor a naive wish for simplicity led economic agents to deploy a linear scheme for equating different kinds of weaving whose execution had never been individually timed, but a preference for quantifying labor on a linear scale did. The piece-rate tables incorporated a striking difference between specifications of labor as a commodity: in Germany, workers were remunerated for the conversion of labor power into a product; in Britain, they sold their labor as it was concretized in a product. This explanation not only suits the immediate evidence, but it also explains a whole constellation of differences between the institutions of German and British textile mills. By proceeding to show that other forms of practice, such as fines imposed on workers for defective cloth, the categories for wage records, and the transfer of jobs between workers in a single factory incarnated disparate views of labor as a commodity, we may enhance the plausibility and plenitude of a cultural explanation.

Defining Fines

Remuneration by piece rates confronted managers with a challenge: how could they ensure that weavers driven to increase the quantity of their output also took care to manufacture cloth of adequate quality? Owners in textiles, as in many nineteenth-century enterprises, found it expedient to impose fines for defective goods—or to hold this sanction in reserve—as a deterrent against workers who might otherwise maximize their earnings by focusing on product quantity alone. But the technology of production made this issue more salient in textiles.102 The power loom, one of the earliest and inherently clumsiest of mechanical technologies, remained so primitive up to the First World War that under the best conditions it regularly produced defects in the fabric. Managers believed that even well-run machines produced cloth with defects in one out of every ten pieces.103 Contemporaries therefore agreed that weavers did not have a responsibility to hand in perfect cloth, only to avoid creating severe irregularities or a greater than usual number of errors. Indeed, German and British employers sometimes introduced tolerance limits for the number of flaws that could appear in a run of cloth before fining began.104

In both countries, the norms for what factory owners might sell to merchants as premier quality and what they had to sell at a discount as "damaged" fluctuated with the business cycle. Since nearly all cloth was to some extent imperfect, the strength of consumer demand at a given moment influenced the stringency of merchants' standards. A merchant could find after making a purchase from the factory owner that a particular piece was too damaged to satisfy customers and would return the piece to the factory for a refund.105 Given the indeterminacy of what constituted "bad cloth" in the market, the standard for acceptable quality on the shop floor was estab-

lished through never-ending conflict and negotiation between employers and workers. Fining for bad output ranked as one of the concerns uppermost in textile workers' minds.106

The British managers distinguished themselves by sometimes delaying the imposition of a fine for faulty cloth until the effect of the damage had been assessed on the market. They routinely levied a retroactive charge upon the responsible weaver when it finally turned out that a damaged piece fetched a substandard price on the market (in addition to any fines the managers may have levied for faults detected at the moment the weaver handed in the piece). Where the company's cloth examiner was uncertain whether a piece with marginal damage would clear the market, however, he withheld the weaver's wage pending the merchants' inspections. The final deduction might occur many weeks after the weaver had been paid for the piece.107 A correspondent from Yorkshire, in an exasperated report on the uncertainty weavers experienced over whether they would receive the full price of a piece of fabric, testified, "I have known weavers wait six months for a piece wage."108 Workers at a firm in Brierfeld reported that their employer followed the market rationale to its conclusion. He notified weavers that they had to cover whatever deductions the merchant buyers in Manchester imposed:" One employer has commenced to give up fining workers for faulty cloth," the Cotton Factory Times reported in 1897, "but should anything be deducted from the piece at Manchester, the weaver has to bear the cost."109

Did the British system of delayed penalties for defective output arise to provide a special cloak for arbitrary and irregular exactions? This seems unlikely, since it obviously complicated record-keeping and since employers could raise fines even without demonstrating corresponding losses in the

market. If the system arose because the agents believed that the market functioned as the true arbiter of the value of the weaver's labor product in Britain, might weavers have benefited from the system? Did refunds accrue retroactively to weavers for cloth which, contrary to earlier expectations, managed to clear the market? This would indicate that the system followed an impartial logic that was not uniformly disadvantageous to workers. Refunds of punishments were not unheard of, but they seem to have been rare, as one might imagine. The Yorkshire Factory Times reported in 1889 that a weaver in Halifax had received a refund of a cloth fine. The in-house examiner had judged the piece defective, but it later passed muster with the firm's outside distributor.110

In contrast to their British counterparts, German owners made their deductions immediately inside the factory, based on their own judgment and, in some cases, on a posted scale of their invention (Stopf-Tarif ) that codified the withholdings for each variety of damage.111 Whereas the British employers set fines by the market evaluation of the product, the German employers set fines by in-house assessment of activity at the point of production. Even when German owners complained that customers had sent cloth back as defective, they did not make retroactive deductions.112 The German fining practices may have been influenced by the concepts of German civil law. The civil law book made a distinction between business contracts for the delivery of a product and employment contracts for the offering of a labor service (Dienstvertrag ). Jurists in Germany classified textile workers who received piece rates as persons who offered a "service," even if the remuneration system paid workers by the quantity of output.113 This status as an "employee" established the principles for imposing fines: a textile worker "could not be made responsible for defects in the delivered products, only for such, which he committed by reason of gross negligence or malicious intent."114 The immediate issue was not

whether the finished product was less than perfect or had less than the full market value; the issue was whether the work had been executed negligently or recklessly.

British courts never drew a principled distinction in the nineteenth century between the offering of a service by an employee and the delivery of a product by a trader. Accordingly, some employers required weavers to purchase and dispose of damaged cloth themselves.115 Textile employers in Britain who imposed fines for defects used the same expression as would be applied to contractors who delivered a product and had to make good the errors in workmanship. The employers announced, "All bad work must be paid for."116

Yet another aspect of some fining systems in Germany diverged from the principle of the exchange of a labor product in the market. German management journals in textiles declared that the fines levied on workers for flaws could not accurately measure the loss the owner would suffer in the market.117 The surviving fine books show how this assumption worked itself out in practice. They show that some mills standardized the amount withheld for damaged cloth at fifty pfennigs for every piece, as if the punishment functioned as a signal to workers rather than as a means for assessing the actual value of the damage.118 Since German owners treated the fines principally as a deterrent to poor-quality production rather than as compensation for a loss suffered in the market, they often chose an alternative method for giving weavers an incentive to maintain high standards of work: they paid a bonus for each unobjectionable piece.119 In the way they utilized the fines collected, too, German owners showed that they viewed the fine as a disciplinary measure rather than as a means of market compensation. Many German firms voluntarily altered their factory ordinances to give the money collected in dockages for faulty cloth to workers' welfare committees. In the Mönchengladbach factory district, forty-seven companies donated such fines to committees at the

turn of the century, although they could perfectly well have pocketed this type of fine.120

In sum, the fine for damages in Britain compensated the owner for market losses suffered upon disposing of the workers' labor product. In Germany, the fine disciplined the workers for the careless expenditure of their labor power. In Germany, the practice of assessing fines at the point of production reproduced the belief that workers sold the disposition over "labor power" in the production process; in Britain, the practice of delayed, market-based fining maintained the belief that workers transferred a quantity of labor as it was embodied in finished products. The British method of determining the appropriate fine asked what the product was worth, not how the product came to be.121

The implementation of adjustments in some piece-rate lists in Britain tallied with this view that workers were paid for bringing materialized labor to market. At most mills in Lancashire, the prices weavers received for each type of cloth were fixed by districtwide rather than firm-specific schedules. When a new list went into effect, it became valid on fabric delivered to the company warehouse after a specified date. The criterion was not when the labor power was expended, but when the product was brought into the sphere of circulation.122

The Circulation of Labor

The divergent German and British specifications of the transfer of labor under the wage contract guided the employers' bookkeeping systems for weavers' earnings. Since British factory proprietors thought of themselves as buying labor as it was embodied in the product, their accounting techniques credited funds only to the loom from which the product was delivered, not to the weaver who executed the labor activity. In both Lancashire and Yorkshire, the employers numbered their looms consecutively by row. Usually the wages books indicated only the number of the loom to which the pay went, not the weaver's name.123 If a weaver left the mill before

finishing a long piece, the company gave the full amount for the piece to the next weaver who came along and had the loom at the moment of completion.124 Even if the original weaver and the successor did not know each other, the company left it to the weavers to allocate the pay between themselves.125 When British employers levied fines for defective fabric, they deducted the penalty from the loom, not necessarily from the weaver who had been in charge of the machine when the work was executed.126 In the Colne Valley, women on the same looms as men worked at disadvantageous piecerate scales, allegedly because the men could do more tuning of the loom on their own and could carry away the finished pieces.127 But a man who took the loom of an ill woman as a temporary replacement received only the women's rate, because the loom number remained on the company books as a woman's.128 Each of these procedures treated the weavers as if they were connected to the mill not by a relation of servitorship but by their occupancy of a machine from which the mill received its deliveries.129

Like British employers, the Germans identified each loom by cipher and kept track of each loom's output by code in what they called the "weavers' book." In addition, however, they kept records by which they could ascertain the earnings of each weaver as an employee.130 In German weaving mills, if

one weaver took another's place as a temporary replacement, the firm gave the weavers the choice of allocating the wages themselves or of having the firm do it for them.131 The German mills directed the compensation to the executor of labor, not merely to the immediate supplier of a good.

The British textile mill owners' bookkeeping faced an unanticipated challenge after Parliament passed the Insurance Act of 1911. Under this law, employers had to transfer weekly deductions from workers' pay to the friendly societies and companies administering the insurance plan. In an address to the Batley Chamber of Commerce in 1912, one manufacturer said that "there was a difficulty arising out of the fact that many manufacturers did not pay the weaver but the loom."132 How could they know how much to deduct from each weaver's pay when they did not keep track of individual weavers' earnings? To meet the requirements of the act without changing their record system, employers improvised. They subtracted a standard amount regardless of how much the weaver actually earned, "leaving a few odd weavers to claim their penny or two" when the deductions overshot the mark.133 Despite this unintended intrusion from the state, British employers preserved the integrity of their method of appropriating materialized labor all the way up to the First World War.

The same principles governing the arrangement of numbers on the company ledgers regulated the assignment of workers to machinery. British weavers in charge of a set of looms were responsible for delivering products from the machines, but they did not have to offer their personal labor effort to do so. At many mills weavers escaped punishment for absence from the loom without permission so long as they sent a representative, possibly a family member, to take their place that day.134 Weaving "sick" became an

established occupation in Britain; that is, one might not have a permanent loom of one's own, but filled in for friends and neighbors who became ill.135 In Germany, the firms themselves sometimes kept spare hands around, called "springers"—to "spring in" for ill weavers.136 It was not unknown in Germany for weavers to dispatch their own substitutes, although the sources mention this much less frequently than in Britain.137 The meaningful difference, however, is this: the British weavers, unlike their German counterparts, sometimes did not need permission beforehand from the overlooker or manager to send a particular person in their stead.138 In fact, at mills in the Colne Valley, Yorkshire, the weavers reached arrangements with the factory owners to fetch substitutes of their choosing after the supper break if the machinery had to run overtime.139

The British weavers' retention of the disposition over their work capacity, so long as their machines delivered sufficient output, influenced the ordinary assignment of looms to their operators. A single set of looms could regularly be shared among several persons. For example, at a mill in the Buttershaw area of Yorkshire, two women in 1894 who needed only part-time work made a compact to alternate on a single set of looms in the course of the week.140 They could balance the demands of work with their domestic schedules. In Lancashire, a family as a whole could take on the management of a large group of looms and divide attendance among

themselves as they wished.141 At mills where weavers usually operated two looms each, they typically went down to one loom each when business slackened. They believed that under such conditions they had the right to opt instead for a buddy system with a friend. Each weaver doubled up with a partner and worked alternate days for the duration of the depression, each serving two looms during their turn in the mill.142 These arrangements ensured the provision of finished products to the factory owner without the commitment of the labor capacity lodged in the person of the weaver.143

As in weaving, so in spinning. An incident from the spinning department of a mill in Yeadon, Yorkshire, illuminates the British treatment of workers as the deliverers of the output from a machine. When the employer at a Yeadon factory restored in 1908 to night overtime, he did not require that the daytime mule spinners extend their own hours; instead, he authorized them to "engage the night men" on their own. The daytime spinners received piece rates for the entire output of their machine and themselves decided how to pay the men who tended it during the night shift. When the night-time workers went on strike in 1908, the Conciliation Board defined the day spinners, not the factory owner, as the strikers' "employers."144 In other situations, when mule spinners hired young assistants known as piecers, the courts recognized the mule spinners, not the mill proprietors, as the piecers' legal employers.145 The

factory spinners became middlemen who contracted to deliver materialized labor to the factory owner. In Germany, by contrast, mule spinners and other workers who directed the use of machinery or even selected their own underlings were generally viewed as employees who did not have the authority to assume the legal position of an employer.146 What differed was not the reliance on subcontracting per se but its cultural significance. Workers who selected their assistants in Germany could not assume the status of an employer, because they remained "in a dependent relation to the factory owner."147

Is it possible that the contrasts between the countries in the rules for staffing looms can be attributed to differences in the supply of labor? Perhaps British textile firms allowed weavers to send substitutes as a means of attracting workers when labor was scarce. Female workers in particular might have been more willing to undertake mill work if they had some flexibility to attend to family matters on occasion. This explanation does not accord with the economic conditions, however. In Bradford, for instance, companies accepted substitutes of the weavers' choosing even when they enjoyed the benefits of an overwhelming surplus of labor.148 The availability of labor fluctuated region by region, decade by decade in Britain, whereas the institutions for staffing machinery remained stable. In Germany, companies confronted with labor shortages attempted to recruit female workers by another means. They allowed women to leave the mill a half-hour early (and on the eve of some holidays) to manage the household meals.149 German employers thereby shortened the expenditure of labor in time but maintained a claim to the labor power lodged in the person of the worker during the worker's hours on duty.

The textile workers' idioms for employment in the two countries betrayed divergent understandings of the process by which they entered into the wage contract. In the narratives of the textile union newspapers in Germany, weavers who sought employment at a mill asked for "a position." In Britain, however, the weavers asked if the employer "had any looms to let."150 "Looking for a new pair of looms" stood for going on the job market;

"being given a loom" meant getting hired.151 British mule spinners who received a job said that they "had taken wheels."152 To get hired, weavers and spinners in both countries followed the same channels through overlookers and foremen. Yet the expressions of British workers connected them to the company primarily by their use of a machine, as if they were independent operators of equipment for whose output they were paid,153 whereas the language of the German workers emphasized the occupancy of a social "position" in a relation of servitorship.

The British appreciation of the sale of labor through the delivery of products influenced the language not only of hiring but of joblessness. After British weavers were dismissed from a stint, they said they lacked a loom, not that they were "unemployed." The term unemployment acquired wide currency only after the turn of the century, when political analysts launched the expression.154 To discharge a worker, gestures sometimes proved more powerful in Britain than speech. When a British overlooker or manager fired a weaver, he did not have to utter a word. In a movement which became a standard symbol, understood immediately by the weaver, upon completion of the piece the boss simply yanked the shuttles from the loom.155 Disabling the machine indicated the end of the weaver's tenure at the machine; nothing need be spoken to the person.

Traders and Capitalists

Did the differences between the exchange of "labor" in German and British textiles appear in other industries as well? In the mining industry of Britain, which employed more persons than any branch of manufacturing in the country, the understanding of labor delivered as it was materialized in a

product led to the creation during the nineteenth century of so-called sliding scales. Industrial experts of the time recognized this means of compensating workers as a distinctively British invention.156 Wage agreements under this system pegged the piece rates that miners received to the price of coal in the raw materials markets. In Cumberland, for example, piece rates in the 1880s rose 1.25 percent for every 1.5 percent rise in the price of coal. In keeping with the logic of transferring materialized labor, the valid selling price was registered at the moment the coal came on board ship or into storage at the colliery, not necessarily when the labor was executed.157 Calculation of wages as a proportion of the market value of the product had a long tradition in districts where miners and employers could come to agreements.158 In Germany miners argued that higher coal prices justified an increase in their wage, but no one supposed that a wage should be cast in the form of a standard portion of the selling price realized in the market.159

The British iron and steel industry, which employed almost as many persons as the textile trade, used scales that automatically adjusted piece rates to vending prices when circumscribed markets developed for standardized products such as nails and iron bars.160 Experts have despaired of dating with precision the origin of this institution, but they have concluded that by the 1830s, at the latest, puddlers' remuneration was indexed to the iron's selling price.161 The endurance of piece-rate scales pegged to the finished article's selling price did not depend on formal collective bargaining or

craft workers' power, since the system remained in place even in periods when the iron workers' unions were nearly extinguished, as in the late 1860s. For members of the steel smelters' union, these sliding scales, based on the selling prices of steel plates, were eventually "extended to practically every class of labour which could directly affect production."162 Workers supposed that under an adjustable scale they became suppliers of products rather than mere employees. The Association of Iron and Steel Workers, for example, advocated the indexing of piece rates on this ground. The president of this association testified in 1892 that he supported the use of sliding scales for pay because "it has been our custom in the North of England under our board, where it was possible, for every skilled man to be the contractor for his own work."163 In this respect, the aristocracy of skill did not remain privileged. By the beginning of the twentieth century, less qualified underhand workers, too, received their compensation as a percentage of the shifting contract rates for iron and steel.164

Both workers and employers believed that the indexing of piece rates was founded on the principles by which agents exchanged labor as a commodity. The practice did not represent a form of profit-sharing, for the prosperity of industries did not conform to the selling prices of their products.165 Workers saw that under the arrangement they sacrificed control over the price at which they disposed of their labor. "In the sliding scale principle," the secretary of the Association of Blast-Furnacemen said in 1891, "when the wages are regulated by the selling price per ton, in a sense a man gives up his right of sale of labor and puts it into his employers' power to sell it at what price he likes."166 Employers in the iron trade considered the sliding scales a logical means of assessing the value of the labor they purchased.

They claimed that "no better standard existed of the value of labour in the market than the price of the article produced."167 The system put employers in the role of merchants who resold finished products at a guaranteed margin rather than that of entrepreneurs who sought a profit by combining labor power with other resources.168 The British system of sliding scales astounded observes in Germany, where workers received wages for the expenditure of their labor power itself. Indeed, to economic agents in Germany, the fluctuating scales in Britain abolished such a thing as a "labor market," given the German understanding of labor as a commodity. "This type of pay agreement," the organ for Christian unions in Germany declared, "is not based on the supply and demand of labor power  . . . but on market relations of the product."169

Culture does not function as a steel curtain that bends practices into shape. The humble instrumentalities of manufacture result from the intersection of a cultural logic with the tangible materials of production. Accordingly, the assumption in Britain that abstract labor is exchanged as it is objectified in a product appeared under different guises among the country's industries, depending upon the concrete setting of the labor process. Textiles offers a sector of enterprise which, though not representative of industry as a whole, expresses its essential principles. The systems for remunerating workers in mining and iron-making enterprises indicate that the intervention of culture led not to uniformity but to isomorphisms in practice across different sectors of the British economy.

An employer who purchases labor power, rather than materialized labor, will have first claim to the profit that accrues from improvements in the efficient combination and use of the factors of production. But the sliding-scale system in Britain treated labor not as a raw input into a "value-added process" dependent on management and organization but as something purchased as a finished component. Even in British enterprises that did not use sliding scales, the employers could carry this premise into their procedures for keeping the production process in order. Some manuals for cost accounting show that British manufacturers believed their profits came from buying the

separate components of a product cheaply and then selling at least one of them dearly. Edward J. C. Swaysland, in an insider's book of advice for commercial success in the boot and shoe trade, claimed in 1905 that manufacturers could turn a profit on an order even if they accidentally purchased labor at a higher price than they could receive by reselling the same labor. Swaysland's guide showed manufacturers how to keep a card for each worker that debited the material and labor costs for each shoe order and credited the worker for the good's selling price: "His credit would be the result of his work, and may be divided into the results from the use of material and the value of his labour. It might happen that a loss on his labour would be more than counterbalanced by the gain on his use of material."170 Here the labor enters the equation already embodied in the shoe, so that the buying and selling price of that element can immediately be assessed. "The source of profit is too abstruse to be fully considered here," the author explained. "There may be no profit on the estimate of prime cost, but considerable profit on the purchase of material."171 In this depiction, the manufacturer survives like a mercantile trader who profiteers in the sphere of exchange.

When British textile employers reflected upon the hiring of auxiliary workers with time wages, they conceived this arrangement, too, as the appropriation of the labor materialized in goods, not as the purchase of labor power. From their standpoint, the time wage was only a different measure of the product to be acquired. As the business counsel George Wood put it, "We may define Time-Work as 'A Contract to sell all the produce of labour in a certain time.' "172 A leading organ for British managers, the Textile Mercury , emphasized in 1891 that the employment transaction comprised the renting out of a factory in return for products: "The unexpressed terms of this contract are that the employer shall provide a mill, machinery, motive power, materials to work up into fabrics, and orders for such fabrics; the weaver on his or her side, promising to attend the regulation time for working, and to perform the work given to him or her at the stipulated price."173

The journal's summary cast the employers as investors who get a return by furnishing the means of production, not as innovative organizers and controllers of the use of living labor.

British textile workers acquired a corresponding view of their employers. They expressed this in their response to the problems mill owners encountered at the start of the twentieth century when factories switched production to goods slightly different from those for which the machines had been designed. The owners of these factories in Lancashire requested that weavers accept piece rates lower than the official district wages. Employers in certain neighborhoods said they needed the reduction to cope with their "disadvantages" in the market, since the output on the machines was less than that of competitors. "But why in the world weavers should be expected to pay for local disadvantages is beyond me," a correspondent wrote in 1916 for The Power Loom , the journal of the Nelson Lancashire Weavers' Association. "If I own property with certain disadvantages attached to it, I must make allowances for these disadvantages before I can hope to get a tenant."174 In rejecting the employers' claims, the weavers treated the factory as property that the owner leased to the workers. They could have blamed the owners for poor command of management. Instead they reasoned as if the employers were landlords who rented out a run-down facility, not entrepreneurs who gathered and integrated resources.

The explications of the labor transaction in Britain contrast with the emphasis in the German commercial press upon the employer's purchase of the disposition over the work capacity.175 The organ of the association of Saxon businessmen, Sächsische Industrie , analyzed the transfer of labor in the employment relation in an essay from 1907 entitled, literally, "Labor-'Giver' and Labor-'Taker,' " a play on the German root words for the terms employer and employee (Arbeitgeber and Arbeitnehmer ). The article took care to define "the modern concept of labor" as " 'labor power' or 'labor execution.' " Nowadays, the article explained, "the concept of 'labor' in the modern economy has received another meaning in some contexts than pre-

viously. Labor is the expenditure of power which is supposed to lead to useful results."176 Given this more exact usage, it said, the German words for employer and employee were not to be taken literally. This journal's sophisticated emphasis on the "modern" definition of labor echoed that of German business economists. Hans Mangoldt, a pioneer in the development of the "theory of the firm," gave a succinct definition of the wage that highlighted the disposition over a potential. "The wage," he explained in his survey of economics, published in 1871, "is the compensation for the use of one's own labor power which has been entrusted to another person."177 Karl Marx exercised his wit upon the British employers' supposedly crude appreciation of the acquisition of labor. Had Marx turned back to his land of origin and investigated the understanding of labor as a commodity among employers in Germany, he might have experienced the shock of recognition.

The Strategy for Specifying Culture's Effect

This inquiry did not presuppose that textile factory practices ought to be analyzed as facts of culture. Instead, it used strategic comparisons to rule out alternative explanations that would attribute the shape of factory practices to the survival of customs from earlier stages of development or to forced adaptation to the business environment. The commodity of labor, a fiction of comparatively recent invention, did not assume a natural or generic form in economic exchange with the development of wage labor. It was fabricated out of historically specific concepts that shaped different practices in similar settings. The principle of pay by shot, for example, was rooted in utilitarian practice, but it did not derive from the functional requirements of practice. As a condition for carrying out the "material" exchange of labor for a wage, employers and workers construed the meaning of the transaction with a priori assumptions about what comprised the "labor" transfer.

Social theorists in general and anthropologists in particular have long recognized that agents call upon a symbolic order to organize the material processes of production and exchange. Yet to reaffirm the importance of a

cultural pattern, some analysts are content to argue that it is a necessary component for the realization of social institutions and for their investigation.178 The premise that culture provides the indispensable coordinates of conduct, if accepted, by itself reveals nothing about the causal significance of culture. It could well be the case that culture represents a necessary ingredient for the construction of institutions but that it is closely shaped by the demands of economic forces. In this instance, culture need not arise as a "reflection" of economic institutions—for, as a pool of symbolic resources, of ever reconstruable signs, it is not produced by those institutions—yet it is neither directive nor formative in its own right. By comparing factories that developed in similar environments, this study shows not only that culture was necessary for building the regimes of the factory but also that it was independent of the immediate economic environment and was constitutive of the form of practice. Only a controlled comparison can advance this more decisive point.

Let us be clear about the way in which this study attributes a causal significance to culture. It does not claim that culture set limits to organizational innovation—the business manager's view of culture as an irrational drag upon change.179 This approach to culture's effect lends it the force of dumb inertia and resistance, not that of a selective social logic. At illuminating junctures, such as the late creation de novo of piece-rate scales in Yorkshire or during the breakdown of labor-management institutions in diverse industries, we saw that "institutional inertia" alone cannot be invoked for the reproduction of forms of practice. Nor did this chapter unfold by showing that separate cultural beliefs attached to different domains of conduct fit together to form a consistent world view.180 This approach, like the structuralist understanding of culture, makes culture in the first instance a way of interpreting the capitalist production process rather than a principle composing it. Finally, we have not treated culture as a means of legitimating

institutions. Unlike Reinhard Bendix's landmark Work and Authority in Industry , this comparative inquiry does not show that ideas justified practices that originated this way or that. It does not show that culture upheld the survival of industrial systems from without; rather, the commodity form of labor constituted from within the form of industrial procedure. In the textile industry the operation of the weavers' piece-rate scales, the assignment of looms, the replacement of absent workers, the recording of earnings—all these instrumentalities assumed their shape and were reproduced by virtue of the definition of labor as a commodity they sustained. In a capitalist order which fragments culture and undermines the coherence of collective belief, we may not be able to show that numerous concepts fit together in the "minds" of the "subjects" to form a consistent world view. But we can examine one concept to see how it composes a consistent province of practice.

The discovery that factory techniques were arranged by cultural definitions of labor as a commodity places several questions on the agenda. How did the specifications of labor influence workers' relations with supervisors in the factory? How did these principles configure the techniques of time discipline and the employers' surveillance of the shop floor? The remainder of Part One resolves these issues. If German producers defined the employment transaction as the sale of the disposition over the expenditure of labor, and British producers defined it as the transfer of materialized labor, what were the historical origins of these opposing assumptions? Part Two, the middle portion of this work, presents the genesis of the cultural differences and advances a model of the creation of labor as a commodity of labor that applies to other European settings as well. Did the contrasting ways of commodifying labor influence the pattern of struggle between textile workers and their employers? Part Three, the study's last segment, shows how the workers' concepts of the sale of labor shaped the formulation of demands, the execution of strikes, and the ideological horizons of the trade unions. We will see that the divergent stipulations of labor organized the most fundamental dimensions of life at the site of production: time and space themselves.

Time Measurements

The production of the mechanical loom may have been sensible to the naked eye, but it could be intelligibly organized only through its cultural inscriptions. Power looms in England and Germany by the end of the nineteenth century ran at speeds of 70 to over 200 picks per minute.2 (This means that 70 to over 200 times per minute the looms' shuttles traveled across the warp.) Foremen and overlookers determined the exact rate by adjusting and locking the loom's speed mechanisms.3 If managers isolated two figures from the flux of production—how long it had taken to weave a length of cloth and the total number of picks that had been woven into it—they could compare the actual total of picks with the hypothetical total the shuttles would have woven if the loom had run perfectly during the time interval,

without interruption. Comparing the theoretically possible with the actual output revealed the proportion of time that had been "lost" due to stoppages, a ratio of relative "efficiency" (Nutzeffekt ). In the decades before the First World War, textile journals on both sides of the channel devoted increasing attention to managerial strategies for quickening the tempo of production. Yet only in Germany did the concept of the efficiency ratio gain currency.

The efficiency ratio formed part of both material practice and discourse in Germany. In the "question and answer" columns of the country's textile periodicals, mill directors exchanged their calculations of this percentage for various makes of looms and asked whether customary ratios existed for various classes of goods—even for a product so specialized as "colored, light jute," for instance.4 The number of published questions points to grass-roots interest in the topic, and the level of responses sent in by mill owners who drew their estimates from practical experience indicates that the efficiency ratio held a place in the conduct of their everyday business. Max Weber, in his neglected study of a Westphalian weaving mill, referred to the efficiency ratio as a statistic in habitual use among textile firms.5 Samples of German production ledgers contained columns for listing the total number of weft threads actually woven, for recording the maximum that could in theory have been cranked out, and for reckoning the proportion between the two.6 The underlying content of the question, "How much ought particular looms to turn out in practice?" could have been reasoned out and formulated only in terms of the average or expected length of cloth, rather than in terms of this percentage. But in Germany the expression of production in terms of

length frequently appeared in conjunction with calculations of the efficiency ratio.

In Britain, by contrast, the concept of an efficiency ratio was not endorsed in prewar publications about mill administration.7 An article about "Weavingshed Management" in the Textile Manufacturer of 1907 furnishes eloquent testimony about its absence. This essay offered technical and managerial advice on productivity and recommended that managers tally the length of cloth woven on each loom, so that variations in work among looms and among weavers could be investigated. Despite its concern with quantities of output, with record-keeping, and with precise calculation, the article ventured no definition of efficiency and no comparison of the theoretical limit of production with the real level.8

Equally instructive is an address which a Lancashire director, H. Dilks, delivered in 1916 to his peers in the British Association of Managers of Textile Works. He asked how the manager could abstract from the details of "daily routine" and represent to himself "the progress of the factory in a broader fashion"—in other words, how he could map factory productivity. Mr.Dilks argued that the graph he labeled Chart 3 (see Figure 5) offers a good way to picture day-to-day changes in efficiency. He explained: "It deals with individual loom stoppages, and indicates the cause of the stoppage and also its duration. It further shows graphically and clearly, by means of one curve, the total amount of loom stoppage in the shed from day to day." This diagram deals only with absolute quantities. It fails to convert these numbers into a ratio or percentage to tell us how much time has been lost, or what portion of possible production time has been lost. The author's description of his Chart 4 has the same feature: "The 'weavers average earnings' form an important measure of the efficiency of the individual loom or weaver, yet it may be high even when a proportion of the looms are stopped. It is therefore desirable to show also the total weavers' earnings for the whole shed—this is a figure that will probably be quite as useful as the other

Figure 5.
The Value of Graphical Charts in Weaving Mill Management

in forecasting the colour of the half-yearly balance sheet."9 Mr. Dilks, in keeping with the treatment of labor as an output rather than a conversion process, saw time not as a continuous function but as a sum of separate days, for he figured how many days each loom runs without breaking, not how much time is lost due to breakdowns. This British manager put into words what the output records of other firms display in their arrangement of numbers.10 In everyday accounting as well as in prescriptive theory, British managers measured production as a substance, in terms of gross quantities of output.11

The negotiations in Lancashire between managers and the powerful textile unions over the establishment of production norms for new varieties of cloth offer another context in which to search for mention of an efficiency quotient. The company managers and leaders of the textile unions met to conduct actual trial runs on the looms. To analyze the results of their tests, however, they measured only the number of threads that broke per hour and the total cloth length.12 When handbooks for weavers measured productivity, they calculated this in terms of pence per week per loom.13

It was impossible for the efficiency ratio used in Germany to remain completely unknown in Britain. The designers and manufacturers of looms,

who sold their machines in the international market, boasted that their inventions could sustain high levels of efficiency under test conditions.14 But British mill managers rarely adopted such a statistic in their everyday practice or professional conferences. In the exceptional cases where they did, they reformulated it to suit their cultural framework. At the Quarry Bank Mill in Styal, Cheshire, the accountants for the American-designed Northrop looms, installed after 1909, calculated "total efficiency" by comparing the sum of wages the weavers received as a group with their hypothetical earnings at 100 percent efficiency. This weaving department may have been unique in Britain for routine calculation of a version of an efficiency ratio before the First World War. The company records show that managers calculated this figure without considering the number of looms operated, however. Total looms in use at the mill fluctuated, so low earnings by weavers could result either from having fewer machines employed or from low productivity of each loom. The statistic measured success in obtaining a final output, not the process of using the equipment.15

If German administrators, in the course of computing wages, also had to ascertain every week the number of shots executed on each loom, they had on hand the key figures needed for determining the efficiency ratio. Did the Germans decide to calculate this percentage as an incidental consequence of their adoption of the system of pay by shot? After all, their clerks already had a tally of shots carried out that was lacking among the British accountants. Or did use of the ratio carry a meaning of its own, based on the German designation of labor as a commodity? To answer these questions, we need to consider the functions that might have been served by its calculation.

The actual conditions of weaving on the shop floor contradicted the mathematical premises of the ratio in several respects. Given two looms of identical make, supplied with the same yarn and patterns, the loom with a low efficiency ratio could actually produce more than the loom with a high one. This contradiction arose because in the early twentieth century looms remained unreliable contrivances. They presented managers with a trade-

off between speed and stoppages: the higher the picks per minute, the more frequently weft or warp threads broke and became entangled.16 The efficiency quotient rested on an image of a self-contained machine whose operating speed was regular and given in advance. Looms of the era, in contrast to this ideal, had to be coaxed and felt out.17 Raising the speed of the shuttles might cause more stoppages and lower the efficiency ratio, yet result in more cloth at the end of the day.18 Taken too far, however, preoccupation with the shuttles' speed alone might lower output. "I have been in many factories where they pointed to their high speeds," one German manager remarked about his country, "but usually I could reply that I would let the looms run slower and bet that in each loom I would weave more cloth per day."19

The efficiency quotient furnished an inaccurate index for a second reason: it supposed that weaving consisted solely of attending to the shuttles. In truth, weaving was not a uniform activity. Up to a quarter of the loom's possible running time could be "lost" while weavers took care of other essential jobs such as twisting in new warps or having the gears that regulated the warp beam changed.20 The shorter the warp, the greater the proportion of time consumed by these tasks, independent of any efforts of the weaver or the overlooker. The efficiency ratio could not measure different

weaving processes with a common yardstick, because the ratios for warps of differing lengths were incommensurable.21 Even within the same mill, Max Weber concluded, the efficiency ratio was unusable for comparisons of work on different types and lengths of warps.22

We cannot leap to the conclusion that British methods remained intellectually backward in contrast with those of the Germans. Since the efficiency ratio mirrored the realities of production so poorly, its use cannot be explained as a rational adaptation to the circumstances of production. When Quarry Bank Mill installed American-designed Northrop looms with pick clocks on the eve of the First World War, and even paid their weavers by the shot, they still did not adopt the German form of the statistic. This indicates that the categories used for measuring production did not derive from convenience of calculation once the mode of payment was in place. Instead, the appreciation of production, too, depended upon the intervention of different concepts of labor as a commodity. But with all the imprecision and misrepresentations it introduced, how could the Germans have maintained an interest in their efficiency quotient at all?

Despite the inaccuracies of the ratio, German accountants used it to distribute production costs. Where the measure of the theoretically possible output embraced net factory time, the ratio served as an approximation in distributing overhead and general expenses to determine the manufacturing costs of various classes of goods. If accountants knew the firm's ratios of efficiency for diverse kinds of cloth, they could estimate how long it would take to weave a particular fabric on a loom and would know what level of general expenses or conversion expenses the cloth should bear. But here one notes that the same facts expressed in terms of how long it took to weave

cloth of a certain length could have served just as well to distribute the costs. As we have seen, the Germans had information about the length of the cloth on hand anyway, since they reckoned the number of shots on this basis. At least in this context, the efficiency ratio was not uniquely suited for the function.23 Its utility was more apparent than real and rested on the assumption that total output ought to be gauged by the actual versus the maximum possible output in a time period rather than, as the British preferred, by gross quantity of output during that period.

The German agents' use of the efficiency ratio to help construct piece-rate scales furnishes another context in which the ratio's utility was culturally defined. To find a base point for graduating the piece-rate scales for weavers, German business experts believed, the employer ought to proceed by first measuring the normal efficiency ratio of a loom at a certain speed to see on average how many shots weavers performed per day. Then to reach a target wage the managers would choose the pay per thousand shots.24 An observer outside the system notices, again, that the efficiency ratio remains arithmetically superfluous in this operation: one only needs to compute the average length of cloth produced per day to choose the pay per thousand shots. Yet German articles about the construction of weaving scales begin with the need to calculate the efficiency ratio, even those articles written by experienced mill directors who otherwise eschewed elaborate formulas. Here the efficiency ratio does not by itself convey any information or criteria of success that could not have been coded just as accurately in a statement about how much cloth of a certain type could be produced during a certain time interval.25

In some instances the Germans employed the efficiency ratio, not to convey information about the known, but as a way of coping with the unknown. When factory owners accepted an order for a pattern of fabric they had not produced before on a large scale, they needed some way of moving from the amount of time taken to weave a similar pattern in the past to estimate how long it would take to weave the novel pattern. They carried out this operation by gathering together their hunches based on prior experience and by estimating then how much down time the new pattern would probably cause in comparison with the similar pattern. Once they had ascertained the picks per minute of the loom, they could calculate how long it would take, in comparison with the similar good, to make the requisite number of shots to fill the order.26 The fundamental yardstick they used to order their experience about relative weaving difficulty and comparative success was differential down time, not, like the British, simply differential output.27

Let us not confound form and content: the Germans' greater concern for a particular concept of efficiency did not denote greater concern for the thing itself. On the eve of the First World War, the "Gospel of Efficiency" had become a standard turn of phrase in Britain.28 British managers manifested their interest in efficiency in their concern with the small details of production and with the causes of machine stoppages.29 Germany and Britain competed in the same export markets, especially in those for wool manufactures, where the British more than held their own in the decade before the First World War.30

Managers in Britain calibrated output at each loom only between the start of a new piece of cloth and its completion. At some mills, their weavers complained that the warps were not marked with chalk or other signs at

standard intervals so that the weavers could judge how close they had come to the end of their piece.31 Managers tied measurement to the discrete events of assigning a fabric order to the loom and receiving delivery. In the German case, by contrast, managers conceived of production as a continuous function. One reason they gave for using the pay-by-shot system was that it permitted them to divide the worker's activity and output into minutely small segments. In later years, the introduction of the Schussuhr ("pick clock") permitted the output of the loom to be calculated or read daily.32 German managers urged workers to work at a regular pace and hoped that workers would even monitor themselves hourly or daily in order to learn how to do so.33 The workers obliged, but with unforeseen consequences. They became attuned to the manipulation of their labor power and used the efficiency ratio as an index of exploitation. At a meeting to induct weavers into the German Textile Workers' Union in Haan in 1899, a weaver warned that the wages workers received should be compared to the efficiency with which their labor power was used. An increase in take-home pay, he cautioned, might not equal capitalists' added profit "if manufacturers achieve a gain of 12 to 16 percent in efficiency."34

It would be simple, but also simplistic, to conclude that the method of pay per shot, the reliance on the efficiency ratio, or, in later years, the use of the pick clock allowed German managers to impose tighter production quotas on workers than could their British counterparts. The timing of the introduction of pay by shot in German factories indicates that the practice did not originate as a strategy to control workers on the shop floor. For the new scales went into effect in Germany well before experts began to advocate "scientific management" or Taylorist methods to monitor the execution of labor. Moreover, the British elaborated their own methods for keeping track of the efficiency of individual workers. Especially in Lancashire, but in Yorkshire as well, British overlookers posted the weekly output of the weavers in their charge.35 The contrast between the countries arose not from the degree of surveillance but from its form.

For all the inaccuracies the efficiency ratio introduced, the Germans still favored a statistic that they could relate directly to the execution of labor during a time period and to the use of a timed potential. When British managers measured output by weavers' wages, they effectively took the price of the labor as a marker for the quantity of labor delivered.36 Had British analysts focused on the process of transforming a labor capacity into an output, however, they might have realized that such an index can be misleading: weavers on fancy patterns can earn high wages with only one loom in operation while they wait for repair of others in their allotment. On these grounds, Max Weber, in his study of a weaving shed, rejected wages as a measure of labor effort.37 Weber, like German manufacturers, recommended instead computing the total picks inserted. But principles for denoting output through time did not remain sequestered on paper; what bookkeepers wrote in the internal ledgers was externalized on the gates of the factory.

Time Jurisdiction

British managers marked the beginning and close of the daily cycle of production by subjecting their workers to exceedingly rigid controls on entry into and exit from the factory. The most common, though not universal, practice at mills in Yorkshire and Lancashire was to latch the doors at the start of the workday, compelling latecomers to return home.38 Only at the

breakfast or lunch break several hours after, when the factory as a whole made a ritual of stopping and resuming activity, could latecomers pass through the factory portal and commence work.39 Interviews with former workers and the complaints published in the union newspapers provide dramatic accounts of workers having the mill door literally shut in their face as they dashed to enter exactly at starting time. Many employers in Britain instructed their porters to secure the gate forcefully even if workers running to it were within sight. "At six o'clock, bang, that's it, shut the gate," remembered a spinner from Halifax. "The man there, his job was to pull it through a yard at once."40 A female winder in Preston, Lancashire, reported to her union in 1915 that the manager apprehended her entering the mill just as the door began to close. He "mangled and bruised" her arms:

To be sure, some textile mills, especially in Lancashire, imposed fines for tardiness, generally standard amounts that served as a disciplinary tool

rather than as a carefully graduated form of recompense for the employer.42 Yet oral testimony and workers' newspapers show that locking out represented the expected and predominant routine.43 Mills also combined fines with locking out; workers less than, say, fifteen minutes overdue could pay a penny for admittance, before other latecomers were excluded for good.44

In some instances textile firms carried the practice of locking out to such an extreme that latecomers were prohibited from entering the mill for the day. "This morning I was about five minutes late," a Lancashire weaver complained to the union in 1912. "The watchman would not let me through."45 Some mills prohibited latecomers from waiting near the mill entrance for access and instead sent them all the way home.46 In Lancashire the union received several complaints from weavers who were denied entrance to the mill for several days or even a week because of inconsequential tardiness.47 For example, in Preston a female weaver complained to the union in 1908 that when she arrived late one day the manager spied her as she was "going through the watch-house" and told her to stay home for the week.48 These severe penalties applied to the Lancashire mule spinners as well, the masculine "barefoot aristocrats" of the mills.49

It would be tempting to explain the practice of bolting the gate as an historical residual, a carryover of primitive management technique from the early industrial age. Stories about locked gates abound in the folklore about the days of violent industrial change at the end of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth.50 When a Marsden woolen spinner, born in 1901, complained that the mill gateway resembled "a gaol—with spikes on top," his words echoed the exact comparison that cotton workers in Lancashire had voiced about the gates more than a century earlier.51 Could the legacy of this earlier transition in England at large have left its traces even in regions such as Yorkshire, which mechanized much later? The historical record does not support such a hypothesis.

So far as the textile unions could tell, during the two decades before the war the practice of locking the gate became more widespread. The Yorkshire Factory Times at the beginning of the twentieth century followed the exten-

sion of the practice to several mills previously free from its rigidities.52 One of Yorkshire's most popular dialect poets, James Burnley, in his tour of Bradford textile plants in the late 1880s found one instance in which a firm then shut tardy workers out but in earlier years had fined them.53 What is more, in these years the new generation of managers who had formal business education sometimes initiated the practice as they took over the reins of directorship.54 They did so even in neighborhoods where firms suffered from competition for scarce supplies of labor.55 Locking workers out in Britain thus by no means represented a survival from a previous era.

Could the heads of the British mills have imposed the practice to inculcate time discipline that would pay off in the long run by inducing prompt attendance? In contrast to their predecessors at the dawn of the factory age, mill directors in the late nineteenth century no longer thought it necessary to break an unruly work force to the novel stringency of indoor factory work. The businessmen's forum, the Textile Mercury , concluded that over the long term, the "diligence and punctuality of textile workers may be said certainly to have improved, and it is to their credit that their current lapses from perfection still shew favorably against those recorded in some trades."56 Even so, mill directors might have reasoned that bolting latecomers out would deter workers from arriving even the slightest bit late.57 It was not unusual for a mill to have a tardy worker every day.58 Many workers lacked the time-keeping devices necessary for precise adjustment of conduct to the employers' sanctions.

Had mill proprietors in Britain sought only a display of authority or a demonstration of their power to deny wages, they could have used more apt means. They could, for example, have imposed exceptionally severe fines for tardiness, but also have let latecomers onto the premises. This technique

might have encouraged punctuality without loss of labor power. British mill owners sacrificed some of the labor time available to them, even as they complained of labor shortages.59 Sometimes the services they cast away remained invisible. If workers were not sure they could get to the mill on time, they might not bother going at all until after the morning break.60 Shutting workers out also made it more difficult for managers to tell in the morning whether an absent worker had no intention of showing up or had simply met a latched door and might return at lunch time. But the "waste" of labor would have been palpable when, as was sometimes permitted, latecomers waited near the mill for the gates to open rather than make the journey home and back again before breakfast.61 The excluded labor could reach substantial levels. In Burnley, Lancashire, when the porter at one mill in 1897 allegedly shut the gate two minutes early, sixty-seven weavers who found themselves outside could not work until after the breakfast break.62 Since employers excluded tardy supervisory workers as well, they denied themselves the vital services of loom tuners who were not instantly replaceable.63 For example, the minutes of the Halifax Overlookers' Society indicate that in 1897 an overlooker was locked out for arriving a single minute late.64

It is conceivable, but undemonstrable, that locking out conferred economic advantages upon British mill employers. If the humiliating experience of total exclusion at the gate stimulated punctuality much better than payment of any fine, locking out may have more than made up for the incidental loss of labor. Whatever the case, the influence of culture cannot be identified automatically in any departure from utilitarian ploys, only in the consistent symbolic forms through which agents strategize.

Could the practice of sending workers home have indicated nothing more than that the British employers did not want the bother of keeping records of fines for lateness or that they did not want to bear the expense of employing a porter to staff the front gate all day long? Oral testimony as well as the tips published in the Textile Manufacturer indicate that the porter at-

tended the entrance at all hours anyway, to receive salesmen and other visitors. During his free moments he did basic paperwork or small craft jobs such as covering rollers. In sum, a system that monitored workers' exact moment of arrival would have added no significant enforcement costs. Most telling of all, when tramways became a means of commuting to the mill for some workers at the beginning of the twentieth century, factory owners exempted workers from the lock-out rule if they arrived late through no fault of their own but because of transit breakdowns.65 In view of the administrative complications this exception introduced, it becomes clear that the practice of bolting workers out rested on an ideal standard rather than on a strategy of convenience.

British directors, as well as the workers themselves, viewed the technique of bolting latecomers out as part of the logic of running a factory.66 One manager from Marsden, who had worked his way up from the position of a simple weaver, formulated an explanation for shutting workers out. "If they're not here on time," he was fond of repeating, "they don't deserve to work."67 This Marsden manager became known for sending latecomers home even if they were his friends and neighbors. The British technique supposed that the worker had a responsibility to deliver products to the firm in prompt fashion. By locking workers out the British employers did not treat the workers' time itself as a form of property for whose loss they claimed restitution.68 Shutting workers out did not lay claim to the labor power lodged in the person of the offenders but treated them as though they were contractors who had not taken due care to meet delivery deadlines and therefore deserved suspension of the contract. The struggle was over the acquisition of the product. "Discipline," an early employer declared, "was to produce the goods on time."69 The ritual of locking workers out diverged

from the artisanal ideal of freedom to choose one's hours of work. Industrial practice did not develop from the habitual carryover of routines from the era of domestic and independent artisanal production but was shaped by the form labor assumed as a commodity in the industrial present.

The British workers themselves may have preferred being locked out to being fined, because the lock-out at least maintained the fiction that workers sold the product of their labor. In the earliest days of the factory system, workers reasoned that since they sold merely their output, the employer had no grounds to impose a penalty for lateness. For example, a writer for The Poor Man's Advocate complained in 1832 about the fines for tardiness at a cotton spinning mill: "The machines may not work while the workman is absent; but how can the employer lose, when he only pays for the work that is done?"70 This reasoning viewed the employment transaction as the delivery of output, not the guarantee of a capacity. At the end of the century, the editorial columns and correspondents' reports of the textile workers' newspaper still maintained that employers had no right to fine workers for lost labor time. The newspapers of the textile unions depicted the hardships imposed by the alternative technique of locking out but did not articulate any objection in principle to the custom. If workers failed to arrive promptly, they lost merely the right to continue the delivery transaction. Fining, by contrast, implied to the workers that the employer controlled the disposition over their labor power and could demand compensation for the loss of the owned time.71

On occasion, workers' own actions expressed their acceptance of locking out more clearly than the exclamations of their newspapers did. Workers at a mill in the Colne Valley went on strike in 1910 to demand that latecomers who had been delayed by breakdowns in the public transport system on which they relied be exempted from the shut-out rule. Although the majority of workers there commuted to the mill by foot, they turned out on strike in solidarity with the tram riders until the factory owner granted the riders' demand. The workers never pressed for elimination of lock-outs altogether or for their liberalization by, say, having the employer introduce a grace period for all workers.72

Whether locking out represented a spontaneous reflex by managers or a calculated policy, its principle did reach formal exposition. A popular Yorkshire handbook of the era, How to Make a Woollen Mill Pay , argued that the "enforcement of punctuality at work" represented the first and essential prerequisite for the enactment of a "mill routine."73 Discipline seemed not to rest on workers' mere presence at work, but on their ceremonial entering and exiting of the premises. In Germany, where the workday was conceived as the elapse of continuous time, not just a temporal succession, time discipline placed more emphasis upon the duration of production than on its beginning and end points.

The German approach could lead to anomalous time accounting. When the introduction of a stricter commercial code in Germany required that manufacturers issue factory rules in 1891 listing exact hours of work, German factory inspectors found that almost all mills already had definite starting and stopping hours. Yet many textile factories did not.74 They had been content until then with specifying that production would begin "in the morning" or "after sunrise" and last for a certain period. These cases revealed that the organization of a meaningful production process had not required a rigid starting point as an anchor for the passage of time.75

German employers treated unpunctual attendance as a denial of labor power whose loss could be calibrated and precisely counterbalanced. Many textile factories applied a sliding scale of fines which either adjusted the penalty to the worker's average earnings or specified percentages of aver-

age earnings to be levied as fines for various periods of tardiness.76 This not only graduated the fine to the worker's ability to pay, but it also gauged the value of the lost time.77 Other mills in Germany applied a standard fine for each fraction of an hour lost.78 Rather than fixing the penalty at nominal amounts for gross intervals of tardiness—that is, rather than using the fine as a simple tool of discipline—the Germans thereby monetized the lost time itself and froze it with a metric. Due perhaps to their greater interest in minute-by-minute accounting, rather than in marking only gross intervals, textile mills in Germany introduced punch-in clocks on a wide scale at the turn of the century.79 German managers did not see punctual arrival as an unconditional preliminary for

undertaking work in the factory.80 The time of living labor became a form of property for whose loss employers exacted a refined compensation.

Whereas British textile workers who worked in the textile mills before the First World War drew spontaneously in interviews upon many emotional memories about the lock-outs, former German textile workers described the controls of the threshold in the same period as relatively incidental.81 One woman's response from the Wuppertal was echoed by others: "Fines? Of course you got fined if you came late. That was not so terrible."82 Like the first generation of factory workers in Britain, the German home weavers who rebelled against the newly emergent factories labeled the mills "prisons."83 The derisory term for undertaking factory labor was "going to Spandau." In cultural comparisons, the form in which a grievance is articulated may prove more revealing than the simple occurrence of a complaint. In their indictment of the unprecedented indignities of centralized manufacture, the German workers focused on the state of internment rather than, as the British did, on appurtenances such as the locked doors

and spiked gates encountered in passing across the border.84 For the German workers, unlike the British, the procedure of entering the mill did not comprise a charged ritual that exemplified the industrial wage-labor transaction.85

Can we discern statutory interdictions which prevented German directors from adopting the same practice of locking out as their British counterparts? Employers' work rules offer an answer from the domain of practice. The archives of many German cities safeguard a complete set of the factory rules submitted to the police for obligatory inspection. Of the several hundred work codes available from textile companies before World War One, only a handful exclude latecomers.86 In one of these rare instances, from a

silk mill near Bielefeld, the employer revised the ordinance from locking out in 1892 to fining latecomers in 1894.87 An exception such as this one, studied and approved by inspectors, demonstrates the absence of state constraints upon employers wishing to shut workers out. Legal experts and industrial

courts agreed that German employers, so long as they included this provision in their work code, had the right to block entry.88 In contrast with their British counterparts, however, they generally chose not to do so.89

An investigator determined to find a utilitarian explanation for the difference in entrance customs between Germany and Britain might try to explain them by the balance of power between workers and employers. If, say, German textile employers suffered from a relative shortage of labor, this might have discouraged them from locking workers out or from stringently marking the start of the day for fear of provoking workers to transfer to other firms. We can reject this hypothesis by relying on comparisons within Germany itself. A comparison of regions that had surpluses of highly skilled workers, such as Krefeld, with areas such as the Münsterland, where directors complained of shortages, reveals no difference in the entrance customs.90 Conversely, as was noted above, British mill directors locked workers out even during periods when workers were scarce.

The German directors' rejection of shutting workers out becomes all the more significant when placed in its legal context. After 1891, German law forbade employers from holding in their general till the monies collected through fines. Factory directors in Germany had to put such withholdings into special funds devoted to the welfare of workers, such as factory health insurance funds or welfare committees.91 The German reliance on fining and the British reliance on locking out are the very reverse of the outcomes that would be expected if the employers had obeyed only the crude monetary incentives of the environment. In truth, the legislation in Germany merely affirmed from above what had already been settled from below: since the era of small shop production under subcontracting systems, German textile employers had deposited workers' fines into insurance and support funds,92

although they knew perfectly well they were not required to do so.93 German practice ostensibly hearkened back to the guild ideal of depositing fines for infractions of artisanal rules into the association's treasury.94 British mill owners, under the same circumstances, could pocket disciplinary and restitutive fines as they pleased.95

Since employers and workers in Germany conceived of work time as a continuous process of converting labor power into an output, they treated it as something that could be abstracted from its context and transferred. In the earliest days of the factory system, German workers themselves had proposed that tardy arrivals be allowed to make up lost minutes by working late.96 Many factory directors gave their work force the option of taking off early from work during unofficial religious or communal holidays under the condition that the lost hours be made up by working an hour of over-

time during the following days.97 There was nothing surreptitious about this practice, no attempt by managers in this fashion, at least, to gain hours for the week in excess of those allowed by law. Textile directors had specified in early factory ordinances that they could shift hours among the days of the week, so long as the total remained unchanged.98 In Britain, production time was anchored in discrete beginning and ending points and remained bound to this concrete setting.99

The German managers' floating starting points for the measurement of the workday and their reliance on efficiency ratios both rested on their premise that time was transferable and unfastened. The efficiency ratios attempted an "objective" comparison between the use of time on different days, in different years, or in industrial eras that lay decades apart. Rather than comparing technological progress in terms of the length of the cloth manufactured per loom in the course of a day or of a year, as the English did, the Germans looked at progress in terms of the utilization of time. "If the old weaving mills used to get along with 50 percent efficiency," one journal contributor commented in 1914, "that does not come close to yielding a profit at the end nowadays."100 A German mill director judged the success of his tenure by looking for improvements in efficiency ratios rather than seeking only an increase in the value of output per loom, as

his British counterpart did.101 In truth, the physical characteristics of the weaving process did not permit any valid comparison of efficiency ratios for looms running at different speeds. The decision to contrast past and present in terms of this ratio therefore derived from an a priori assumption that change ought to be conceived as the differential utilization of abstract time.

The systems for controlling workers' entrances and exits in the textile industry can be generalized to other trades with large work premises. In Germany tardy metal workers and engineers were simply fined,102 whereas the custom of shutting late workers outside the factory gate emerged in many enterprises in Britain. In the metal-working industry a British manager judged in 1899 that "the usual practice" across the land was to shut latecomers out until breakfast.103 "The best timekeepers," he added, "are usually retired soldiers, who are accustomed to strict discipline."104 Likewise, a guide to the "commercial management of engineering works" recommended in 1899 that employers pare their disciplinary rules to keep them simple and memorable. But its author insisted upon the draconian exclusion of latecomers from the premises until the start of the next shift.105 The adoption of the custom in diverse circumstances—whether the work force consisted predominantly of men or women, whether labor was centralized under one roof early or late in the industrial revolution—implies that the practice embodied a fundamental premise.106

Frontiers of Discipline

The entrance to the textile mill served not just as a regulator of the passage of time but as a marker of territory, the boundary of the employer's domain. In each country the walls of the factory furnished an empty slate on which contrasting messages were inscribed. British mill owners manipulated the doorways of the mill to emphasize their jurisdiction over the borderline of the domain. If workers threatened to strike, the employers impounded them by locking the gate.107 When an amendment to the Factory Acts in 1902 shortened the legal working hours on Saturdays, an employer in Leeds ordered that the workroom doors, previously locked only from the inside, henceforth be locked from the outside as well.108 Since only top supervisors had keys to unlock the doors from the inside anyway,109 his action may have been intended more as a signal than as a real safeguard: if this mill director could not choose the duration of labor as he pleased, he could in this fashion display his claim to prohibit movement across the frontier of the labor space during the workday. Other proprietors responded to the forced reduction in hours with the same tactic of heightened border controls.110 "Some say it is like being locked in York Castle," the textile union newspaper reported from Ravensthorpe.111 Command over the entry points represented the critical point of confrontation.

Since the factory proprietors rarely had contact with workers in the course of the daily cycle of production, the entryway itself remained as their primary zone of contact, at once symbolic and material. Both employers and workers viewed the threshold this way.112 Sir Titus Salt positioned his guests by the mill gate so that they could watch the ceremony

of the workers leaving.113 Salt's factory must be counted among the largest in Britain, offering less chance for exchanges between the employer and ordinary workers. For this reason, the ritual of entering Salt's mill took on added importance: if workers arrived late to his mill in the morning, they "knew they dealt not with delegated authority, but with the master himself."114 Isaac Holden, an owner in Bradford, listed as one of his key management principles for a mill he owned that "the hands going in and coming out must go tranquilly."115 Among workers at Crossley's Dean Clough Mill in Halifax, the legend persisted that the elderly mother of the owner had had a mirror installed in her room so that she could inspect the crowds of workers daily as they entered and exited the mill. From their countenances, the story maintained, she could deduce their current attitudes.116 This tale indicates, all the more so if untrue, the way workers at this mill saw entering as a ritual moment of contact with employers and point of exposure to scrutiny.

The everyday experience of the entry controls made the doorway a potent vehicle in popular thought for condensing relations between employers and workers.117 A tale circulated in the heavy woolen district of Yorkshire illustrates the displacement in folk culture of the mill owner's exercise of authority onto the entranceway:

Former textile workers recalled in their interview that one boss or another always stood at the office window peering out over the mill gate.119 When workers quit their job in anger or rejected an employer's authority, they cried out, "I'll not be passing through your gateway again!"120 "The gate" did not just become a familiar turn of phrase but came to signify an opening into the life of the textile worker. A periodical about life in the north of England, which began publication in Manchester in 1905, chose the image of the entryway for its title: The Millgate. The editors' column of observations in each issue of this journal bore the heading "From the Mill Window." A magazine edited by a Huddersfield socialist contrasting the factory of the present with the society of the future called itself The Gateway.

By comparison with Britain, the form in which labor was commodified in Germany depreciated the importance of the doorway as a zone of contact with employers. At many German mills the managers relinquished central responsibility for recording entry and shifted the onus of keeping track of workers' attendance and punctuality to the individual overlookers.121 Was

not the heart of the matter control of the workers' labor power, not of their crossing a line?122 In some instances the company rules for conduct in Germany defined late arrival as failure to set one's machinery in motion by the specified minute.123 The overlookers' prospects for keeping their jobs depended on their ability to make sure that the workers in their charge appeared at their machines on time.124

The Factory Acts restricting the length of workdays in Britain defined the workers' period of labor by their presence in the factory, defined as including any area within the confines of the mill gates. Space marked the boundaries of employment. In Germany, by contrast, the laws regulating the length of employment in the factory referred to attendance at machines or in manual production. Accordingly, the courts determined that the period of work was determined by use of the employees' labor in the manufacturing process.125 They reasoned that workers could remain on the premises of the mill for any period if they were not engaged in material production.126 The courts naturally feared that employers might coerce workers to undertake miscellaneous tasks at all hours, so they were reluctant to exempt all categories of workers from time limits if they were not engaged in manufacture. In contrast to the unambiguous classification in Britain based on the

position of the worker in space, however, the German limits on time focused on the use of the labor capacity.

In regulating border crossings, British employers made more of a claim to the workers' presence in the confines of the factory than to their time at the loom. The most popular treatise on "scientific" management published before the war, Edward Elbourne's Factory Administration and Accounts , took care to define the worker's arrival as his standing on company property, not as being positioned at the machine.127 The Textile Manufacturer reported in 1901 in a matter-of-fact tone that directors did not force workers to begin work promptly after they were inside the gate. "Most men weavers consider it a disgrace to be in their places waiting for the engines to start," the journal claimed. "They knock the ashes out of their pipes just as the gates are being closed, and then saunter leisurely to their work."128 In this instance, crossing the border zone between the inside and outside of the mill carried more significance than beginning to produce.

In each country the workers' clothing on factory premises complemented the border controls. In Germany textile workers typically arrived at the mill in their street clothes and changed into work clothes before they reported to their machines.129 Sometimes the firm designed, procured, and washed the work clothing.130 The alteration in German workers' exterior signaled

the consignment of their labor power to the factory owner's dominion. British workers, who transferred labor time in products but not the labor power in their person, rarely changed their pants, skirts, or blouses when they entered and exited the mill.131 Even if work inside the mill coated them with waste, they wore the same clothes home.132 No wonder the lack of changing rooms was never debated in Britain as it was in Germany, where having to remove clothing in the mill became an important grievance among female workers where facilities for changing in private were lacking.133 Female textile workers in Britain, like their male co-workers, of course removed their outerwear, such as shawls or vests, but as a rule did not change to a company outfit. In Britain employers emphasized the momentary regulation of workers' bodies as workers stepped over the factory threshold. In Germany the dressing ritual used workers' bodies as a marker of the continuous alienation of the labor power lodged in the person of the worker.

The emphasis on the control of border points that characterized British textile factories prevailed in other trades. The general manager of the Salford Rolling Mills, in an 1896 guide to the administration of iron mills, devoted an

entire chapter to the layout and use of "The Entrance Gates." His depiction of the factory perimeter employed the military analogy of a citadel:

The ideal of a walled fortress to which this writer referred influenced not only the use of factory buildings but the ponderable design of the structures themselves.

The Partitioning of Space

The differing physical layouts of British and German textile mills in the late nineteenth century furnished contrasting stage settings—true "foundations"—for labor's transmission. Technical manuals of the nineteenth century treated the selection of mill architecture as part of the "science" of manufacturing.135 Modern British woolen and worsted mills stereotypically were arranged like closed, defensive fortresses: the various rooms for spinning, for assembling the warps, and for weaving formed a ring enclosing a central courtyard or "mill yard." The entrance gate, often set under an archway, offered the only opening from the outside that led into this yard and into the workrooms (see Figure 6). Otherwise, the factory presented a solid barrier to the surrounding world, sometimes with no windows on the ground floor.136 The layout could also call upon a row of workers' dwellings

Figure 6.
Model British Weaving Mill
Source: D. R. H. Williams,  Textile Factory
Organization and Management  (Manchester:
Emmott & Co., 1934)

on one or more sides of its perimeter to form part of the barricaded zone. Naturally, these houses on the boundary had no openings into the mill yard.137

The fortress-like enclosure of a mill yard by the workrooms appeared in the design of mills in Lancashire and elsewhere in the northwest, once factory design had come into its own.138 The arrangement became an emblem not only in the actual conduct of manufacturing but in the fancies of literature. The frontispiece to Andrew Ure's famous tract The Philosophy of Manufactures , published in 1835, portrayed a factory whose wings were shaped to enclose a courtyard. The assumptions of this graphic depiction achieved verbal expression. Ure, an advocate of the mill system's satanic regimen during the youthful phases of industrial growth, emphasized the textile workers' encapsulation by referring to the hapless operatives as "factory inmates."139

To be sure, the enveloping design occurred more frequently in built-up urban areas, where the need to mark off one's own territory and to guard against intrusions was greater than in the countryside, where isolated mills, which expanded incrementally, sometimes consisted of small, scattered buildings, without a comprehensive model. Therefore the castle design was far from universal and, indeed, was realized in pure form in only a minority of cases.140 Yet it represented something of an architectural stereotype, a

layout which appeared when unprompted by the environment.141 For instance, Sir Titus Salt in the 1870s built his mill in the middle of an undeveloped parcel of land large enough to accommodate an entire town, yet he, too, adopted the fortress structure.142 This arrangement struck German observers of British developments as representative of British thinking.143 Once it was crystallized in factory layouts in the north of England, the British carried it to contexts where land values, the landscape, and the infrastructure were far different. For example, in his treatise on mill construction William Fairbairn presented a blueprint for building a woolen factory in the open countryside of a foreign country, Turkey. He incorporated the classic sealed yard into the design of the U-shaped building itself.144 The Platt Brothers' plans for integrated cotton mills in Brazil at the beginning of the twentieth century came in various sizes, but they arranged the workrooms in an unbroken circle around a secured yard.145 The transference of this pattern into such diverse habitats offers a hint that it conformed, not to the physical requirements of the surroundings, but to a cultural model.

Apart from their structural emphasis on control of access points, British mills were distinguished from German ones by the attention they gave to the design of the main portal. The entrance exterior was some-

times flanked by imposing towers or crowned by intricate ornamentation.146 On the inside, the entrance hallway might feature extra doors which managers used as backup devices to seal off access to the main workrooms or, from the other direction, access to the main gate. This design appeared in the very earliest mills. The Poor Man's Advocate investigated a spinning mill in 1832 where the gates were "numerous, being placed one within the other, in order, we suppose, that if any of the wretched inmates should escape through the first they may be secured by the next."147 Similar arrangements appeared in later facilities. At the West Vale textile works near Halifax, constructed during the last quarter of the nineteenth century, owners even installed a special lever for the gatekeeper which ran from his office perch to a second door on the inside of the entry corridor, permitting him to inspect the arrivals a second time in the corridor and decide whether to let them proceed.148

What information did the factory's design encode? Let us extract the elementary structure behind the visible architecture by mapping the passages between rooms on the premises. Figure 7 delineates the apertures between the compartments of the illustrative floorplan.149 The diagrams reveal, first, that the fortress design could turn the mill yard into a nodal point. The yard served not just as an unloading or storage area but as a connector for human traffic. In fact, movement even between work rooms that were contiguous frequently had to flow through the central yard. Each of the major rooms is organized as a self-sufficient space, which opens to the others via an interchange that serves every room in the

Figure 7.
Traffic Structure of Model British Mill

complex. In sum, once workers negotiated the entry passage into the facility, the design gave them easy access to every corner of the interior. This basic principle underlay the design of some mills, such as that of the Blackburns in Batley, Yorkshire, even when at first glance the mill buildings did not seem to be arranged as a castle, but all of whose rooms nonetheless fed into two courtyard passages.150 The layout created an encompassing perimeter while permitting rapid movement in the interior.

Surveillance of the central yard could give a comprehensive view of important traffic at a glance.151 To take advantage of this, British textile

directors occasionally incorporated large lookouts or jutting bay windows into their mill offices. These impressive windows did not face away from the factory perimeter for an enjoyable view, but looked instead toward the interior mill yard.152 At Grecian mills in Bolton, Lancashire, the management offices had such an obtrusive bay window facing the main gate that it may well have shunted entering traffic to the side.153 At Bean Ing mills in Leeds, Yorkshire, the surveillance windows were placed at the curved tip of a projection that pointed toward the middle of the inner yard.154 A visitor to a coarse cloth factory at Knightsbridge during the 1840s described a more elaborate contrivance at a rotunda-like factory: "On the summit of the building, at a considerable elevation, is a small square room, provided with windows on all four sides. From this an extensive view may be obtained in every direction."155 Of course, a simple window peering inward could serve as the observation site almost as well: the strategy was to position the management complex so that it could receive vendors and customers from without but also scan the interned laborers within.156

When the Germans constructed their facilities, they consciously imitated other, superficial features of British mill design, such as styles of ornamentation.157 The Germans also followed the English methods of

transmitting power from the steam engine to the machines.158 But they incorporated different structural principles into the layouts of the buildings themselves. Their factories did not arrange the workrooms to cordon off the outside world and impound laborers inside. Where German mill owners fenced in their property, as was often the case, this did not form an integral part of the design of the building itself.159 Rather than arrange workrooms as a fortress to accentuate the frontier between outside and in, the German facilities emphasized the constriction of movement once laborers were engaged in the labor process. Except for the essential transport of materials, the German building layout segregated the principal workrooms from each other and from the ancillary rooms that housed processes such as carding raw cotton or preparing warps for the looms. Moving from one corner of the mill to another required workers to proceed through intermediate chambers of the interior. Figure 8 reproduces the floor plan of a German mill. Figure 9 diagrams its basic structures.160 In contrast to the British mills, traffic does not converge on a nodal point but flows among links on a chain. There is no "center" from which the privileged observer can inspect traffic on the premises as a whole, yet the lack of central oversight is balanced by greater obstacles to movement between distant points.161 Counterfeit instances of symmetrical fortress-like structures appear in Germany.162 With one plan, sketched in 1849 for

Figure 8.
Model German Weaving Mill
Source: Ludwig Utz,  Moderne Fabrikanlagen
(Leipzig: Uhlands technischer Verlag, 1907)

Figure 9.
Traffic Structure of Model German Mill

a Saxon village, the castle layout may have fit an aesthetic ideal of a noble court, but it actually contained multiple entrances and was ill adapted for forming an impenetrable perimeter.163 With another, the Spinning and Weaving Factory Ettlingen in Baden, erected in 1838, the constructor designed the mill according to the same plan he had drawn up earlier for an army barracks.164 The mill was inserted in a complex that created numerous openings and did not direct traffic through the central court. This was representative: the editor of one set of German mill plans even boasted that an exemplary weaving building was accessible from three separate points after workers had entered the grounds.165 When large German complexes were erected at once around a central space, such as the Flax Mill of Schoeller, Mevissen, & Bücklers in Düren, they could have emphasized the enclosure of workers and observation of their movement through a central yard. Instead, they opened up onto the adjacent gardens and fields.166 In Britain, the fortress design could be employed in "rationalized" mills, where each processing room was located around the perimeter for the most efficient movement of raw materials, as well as in haphazardly organized older mills, where the stages of processing the materials were not necessarily assigned sequentially in adjacent work rooms.167

German commentators believed that contrasts in building materials and climate could not account for differences in structural design between their country and Britain. Taste, they said, determined the ultimate format.168 As early as 1844, the engineer Ludwig Kufahl of Berlin observed a crucial difference between British and German plans:

Kufahl did not think that work processes should be combined or connected to a single open space simply for the sake of comprehensive oversight of workers from afar. He considered it sufficient to organize traffic to move components through the mill in a logical sequence.170 The German factory designs were "cellular," with numerous partitions and no centralized pathway for movement between chambers.

The fortress layout in Britain rested upon a combination of technological limits and opportunities. It took the liberty of breaking up the total production space of a factory premises into smaller units to form the fortress wings. Given the engineering techniques of the day, this represented a useful way of partitioning the land parcel. The width of work rooms in multistory spinning mills had in any case been limited by reliance upon iron frameworks to support the weight of the building. Rooms were long and narrow, a shape that was easy to configure around a large court. Beginning in the second half of the nineteenth century, however, an increase in the size of machines and in the scale of production made it preferable to unify floor space.171 Cotton spinning

mules, for example, reached a length of 140 feet, so that the width of new buildings had to triple to organize aisle space efficiently.172 Meeting this requirement became possible only with changes in construction methods. The introduction of steel girders and new techniques for supporting weight in the 1890s permitted the development of huge, squarish rooms that used space efficiently but were no longer arrangeable around a yard.173

These innovations in engineering changed the visible edifice of the labor process in newly constructed spinning facilities in Britain. Yet the principles of the underlying structure were preserved and manifested in fresh ways. The cavernous new buildings built in the British towns that were still expanding production were distinguished by an absence of dividing walls between the work processes.174 Managers in the Bolton cotton trade, for instance, suggested that the preparatory processes be housed on the first floor without boundaries between the drawing, slubbing, and jack frames and the carding engines.175 At Gil mill, expansion of the mill allowed the preparatory and spinning processes to be installed in the same room as the weaving machines without partitions. By contrast, German mills of equal capacity retained internal walls between departments.176 This became a characteristic difference between British and German mills that did not escape the notice of contemporaries. A technical writer based in Manchester presented a cotton mill plan in 1897 borrowed from the Continent but made a suggestion on how to adapt the foreign blueprint to British expectations: "The supervision and management of the mill is greatly facilitated," he said, if "the whole of the machinery can readily be

seen. If desired  . . . the internal division walls can be removed and columns substituted."177 As with the fortress design, the undivided British layout in giant mills depreciated control over the rapid circulation of workers once they were inside the mill, but it lent the observer a sweeping view of their movement.178 In contrast to the "cellular" design of German factories, the British designs were "circumferential," emphasizing the outer boundary but not partitions within.

The definition of labor as a commodity did not conjure the factory layouts out of thin air, but started from the technical preconditions of building design. Despite changes in these requirements in the late nineteenth century, the tangible materials of production could still be sculpted into shapes that carried the same implications for the treatment of labor as a commodity.179 Mill architecture and rituals for entering the factory in Germany and in Britain reified contrasting fictions about the employment relation—again, the disposition over labor power versus the appropriation of labor incorporated into products. In Germany, the production process was conceived as the continuous transformation in time of labor power into a product. In this process the worker's labor activity was consumed inside the factory owner's domain, so the divide between inside and out

did not become marked as the crucial zone of subordination.180 The layout of the German mills corresponded to an emphasis on the overlooker's responsibility for attaching the worker to the machine and a comparative depreciation of controls at the perimeter of the building. In Britain, by contrast, the workers retained ownership of their labor power but conveyed labor through products that were appropriated; since the workers' labor was not incorporated into the employers' domain through a continuous process in time , it was incorporated at a discrete moment through the ritual event of entering the factory. Rather than being transformed in the factory, labor was merely circumscribed and observed at a distance, by emphasizing the boundary between the factory and the world outside. Both the centripetal paths for traffic in older British mills and the atrophy of room partitions in the newer cotton spinning mills relaxed controls over rapid movement. Within the German factory, by contrast, the workers were segregated in compartments that curtailed passage between various corners of the mill. Their activity itself was appropriated in space.181

Because German and British factory buildings concretized information about the labor transaction, they could take on the task of imparting and reproducing—truly, "holding in place"—definitions of labor among the

workers. To receive this knowledge, the participants did not study messages; they enacted and lived them. In the critical mind of the analyst, the tendency for a conformation between architecture and accounting, between spatial and temporal demarcations, makes for a charming coincidence; in the experience of the producers it created an encompassing constellation. For those who lived through the procedures of entry and the partitioning of space under the factory roof, concepts of labor became influential not because they were embodied in literature but because they were literally embodied. The enclosed mill yard and internment of workers in a centripetal space characterized factories in other British trades, including leather-making and sewing.182 Vide et crede: the fictive inventions of labor as a commodity were written in stone.

Theory in the Mill Yard

The present study suggests that powerful impressions of labor as a commodity, which showed prominent variations between countries, were not deliberately generated by formal organizations for the dissemination of ideas. They were not subsidized by the state or by a class but were born in the producers' lived experience at the point of production. Cultural formulations are transmitted through the form of instrumental practice, in addition to conventional verbal communication. For example, the procedures for entering the mill comprised both a humdrum action of individuals' daily routine and a public ritual through which the meaning of labor was communicated and re-endorsed in a shared setting.183 The ideologies of labor as a commodity were sustained not because they were consistent with or corresponded to everyday procedures but because they were part and parcel of them, brought to life because practice was designed as a mode of communication. Unless analysts reconstruct the signifying function of the forms assumed by the instrumentalities of everyday life, they will pass over the lived context in which verbal discussion assumed its meaning and its power. Furthermore, they will necessarily miss the lucid ideas of a culture that are incarnated in material techniques, transferred from enactment to enactment

and visibly articulated without passing through a moment of verbal elucidation.184 Individual agents borrowed the specifications of labor but never became their appropriators and owners, for these designs remained lodged in the shared house of public, sensuous practice.

Imagining the Overlookers' Contribution

The purchase of labor in the capitalist enterprise confronts social agents with a paradox when they analyze expenses and earnings. The moment workers expend their efforts, their labor no longer belongs to them and cannot be sold. Therefore as a visibly constructive activity, labor lacks an exchange value. It exists as a commodity in the marketplace as a projected activity or as it is materialized in another good—in effect it is brought to market before it is created and remunerated as it disappears into another object.6

Yet textile directors had to quantify this apparition. To establish the receipt of labor at a cost, textile employers in Britain and Germany confronted a challenge more difficult than the one they encountered in draw-

ing up scales for the weavers. To establish the price of weavers' labor, owners resorted to measuring the product, either as an index of activity or as a vessel for materialized labor, and on either basis compared the value of fabrics that differed only in their formal properties. For the overlookers' pay scales, however, it was not immediately evident to employers and workers whether there was in fact any "product" of the overlookers' activity to take as an emblem for labor. Overlookers assisted in manufacturing but did not accomplish the weaving themselves. Employers relied upon fictive concepts of labor as a commodity to identify the contribution of the overlookers' activity to the company's overall production effort. To isolate the independent effect of these shared concepts on owners' decisions, we must appreciate the overlookers' visible functions in the weaving process.

In contrast with such enterprises as mining or steel, where an owner needed the overlookers to guide and coordinate the labor of work teams, the role of overlookers in weaving rested more exclusively on an immediate technical demand: namely, the need of prewar power looms for frequent repair, for replacement of worn parts, and for adjustment to each change in fabric pattern. Certainly up to the time of the First World War, looms required constant repair. Even for the most experienced weavers, the loom's output in experimental trials varied considerably with the attention given by the overlooker to the instrument's ongoing adjustment.7 Textile directors in both Germany and Britain assigned each overlooker responsibility for maintaining a number of looms grouped together in a section of the weaving room. Having a team of overlookers take collective responsibility for all the looms in a room proved impossible, for each machine in the mill had its quirks and idiosyncratic history of repairs. Overlookers worked most efficiently on machines they knew individually.8 At mills that manufactured short runs of different kinds of fabric the overlookers might also take responsibility for assigning warps to particular weavers.9

The weaving overlookers in Germany and Britain also shared the same position in the factory hierarchy. Above them stood the foremen, usually assigned one to a department. Below stood only the weavers themselves. Depending on the difficulty of the pattern and the fragility of the materials, a weaver served from one to four looms: in cotton, four represented the norm; in worsteds, two; and in woolens, one. Any attempt to formulate these averages in a straightforward manner brings out a host of exceptions. Yet in both countries these assignments were the typical ones.

Just as the ratios of looms to weavers corresponded in Germany and Britain, so did the ratios of looms to overlookers. Although employers in both countries saw the overlookers as the key agents responsible for the maintenance of discipline in the mill, the need for adjusting the machinery rather than the need for oversight set the major boundaries for the hiring and allocation of overlookers within the factory. Hardly any manager considered hiring more overlookers than necessary for servicing the looms, although additional superintendents might have offered tighter surveillance over the weavers and greater opportunity to catch faults before weavers ruined a run of cloth. One director of a Yorkshire woolen mill said, "It is far better that the [overlooking] staff should be inadequate rather than too numerous, for men are never so discontented as when they have too little work to do."10 The precise ratio of overlookers to looms depended primarily on the design of the machine.11 In both countries, according to oral reports and technical journals, an overlooker for, say, narrow, plain cotton cloth had in his section eighty to one hundred looms and, for checked cotton cloth, fifty to seventy.12 Due perhaps to relative stagnation in mechanical design in the decades near the turn of the century, these ratios remained stable from at least the 1880s until the

First World War.13 In silk mills, both German and British businessmen considered fifty looms per overlooker the maximum.14 In the woolen trade, an overlooker might have charge of fewer than twenty-five looms.15 The matched numbers of looms per German and English overlooker across the wool, cotton, and silk branches suggests that the actual division of labor in weaving followed down-to-earth technical imperatives in the two countries.

Contemporaries believed that the supply of capable overlookers by far exceeded the demand.16 Until the First World War, weaving overlookers seldom received specialized technical training, apart from optional attendance at night school.17 The earliest German investigations into the availability of overlookers, undertaken by the factory inspectorate in 1887, concluded that in Germany as a whole employers very seldom complained of shortages of skilled overlooking applicants.18 Overlookers' associations in Germany had members on call to fill in or to take up permanent positions.19

In Bradford, Yorkshire, the weaving overlookers' union considered the surplus of overlookers so serious that after the turn of the century it periodically prohibited its members from taking on apprentices, even their own sons.20 The abundance of qualified overlookers in Yorkshire can also be assessed from the circumstance that some owners there, to take advantage of the competition for overlooking jobs, opened bids from candidates for a position and hired the person making the lowest offer.21 The overlookers may have dominated their underlings, but above the overlookers there towered a forbidding market.

In view of the parallels in weaving overlookers' technical responsibilities and market predicaments in the two countries, it ought not to occasion surprise that German and British weaving overlookers also shared about the same levels of pay, reckoned as a proportion of that received by an average weaver under them. The Board of Trade in the United Kingdom found in its survey of 1906 that overlookers in the north of England earned 50 to 75 percent more than an average weaver.22 Local surveys and company wage books in Germany reveal about the same differential.23

If the level of compensation for overlookers was proportionately equal between the two countries, the business procedures for conceiving it followed contrasting principles. In Lancashire, by "universal custom,"24 an overlooker received the whole of his pay in the form of a commission. It was reckoned as a fraction of all the pay received by the weavers in his section. An overlooker earned a certain amount—from a shilling and twopence up to a shilling and fourpence—on each pound sterling of the weavers' take-home pay. This equaled a commission of 5 to 7 percent.25 The participants called this the "poundage" system (referring to the unit of currency, of course, not that of weight). Elsewhere in the north of England the methods by which overlookers received their pay varied. In Yorkshire, only 8 percent of overlookers received their wage exclusively in the form of a commission.26 More often, each received a minimum weekly sum, supplemented by a bonus determined by the earnings of their subordinate weavers.27

A variety of payment conventions for textile overlookers also arose in Germany, but remuneration purely by commission was extremely rare.28 German weaving overlookers, including the lowest loom fixers, generally

worked for a fixed weekly wage.29 They also received year-end salary bonuses.30 In contrast to arrangements in Britain, a major portion of the German textile overlookers' compensation seldom fluctuated with the productivity of the immediate underlings they assisted.

How did German and British employers imagine they received the commodity of labor from overlookers? In the case of the overlookers, unlike the weavers, the product could not be decomposed to serve as a model for the activity put into it. For the overlookers we must look beyond the form of remuneration to consider how employers apportioned the cost of overlooking wages in their company books. Since each textile enterprise manufactured a spectrum of products, companies had to estimate the expense of producing each type of fabric. With the maturing of the industry and the consequent crowding of the yarn and cloth markets, cost accounting became increasingly important for the survival of the enterprises in both Germany and Britain. "Many mill men will say with pride that they can tell what it costs to produce a pound of yarn, or a yard of cloth, to a small fraction of a penny," the Textile Manufacturer reported in 1907. Although directors and

their scriveners tallied labor expenses with great precision, they used contrasting reasoning in Germany and England when they conjectured about the expense of overlooking for different fabrics.

Managers in Yorkshire who cared to reckon their expenses with precision used different methods than in Lancashire, yet in both districts they followed a logic that was generically different from that used in Germany. In Lancashire, the system of pay directly reveals the accounting method in use: owners automatically lumped the overlooker's wage together with the weaver's wage in the cost of each piece. If the employer wanted to handle not only the weaver's labor but also the supervisory and technical contribution of the overlooker as a commodity embodied in the finished product, this method was the most suitable. It offered a formal advantage in the event of a downturn: not only did overlookers' wages decline automatically, but they did so exactly proportionately to weavers' wages, as if to buy exactly so much "labor" from the overlookers as was necessary for the productive tasks at hand. In terms of Weber's criterion of formal calculability, this system of pay ranks as the most rational: it makes supervisory "labor" a totally flexible production factor.31 The employer remained free to buy only so much "labor" as he needed at the moment and could shift all the uncertainties of the demand for labor onto the overlookers themselves.

Although the Lancashire system had a high degree of formal rationality, its measure of the "labor" purchased had little to do with the substantive realities of production. Because it piggybacked an overlooker's wages onto those of the weavers, the Lancashire procedure gave an overlooker a bonus when the weavers in his section wove cloth with complicated patterns, which required more skill and thus commanded higher wages. But the overlooker might not be called upon to do proportionately more tuning for the weavers in this case; he received a bonus for their skill unrelated to his own input of time or effort.32 (Furthermore, an overlooker might let the machinery fall into a poor state of repair and then move to another shop, reaping the pay in the short term for the completed fabric and avoiding the long-term investment in equipment maintenance.)33 No matter what the conse-

quences, the Lancashire system looked at the value of the labor embodied in the product and reckoned backwards to surmise the overlookers' contribution embodied in the product.

The Yorkshire costing method shared the premise of the Lancashire system that the overlookers' wages ought to be figured as if their labor were embodied in the fabric like other workers'. In Yorkshire, the textile book-keepers costed the production expenses of a particular run of cloth by adding the overlooking wages onto the cloth in the same manner as finishing and burling wages: by length of the fabric. The firm took its total cloth production for a year, in yards, and divided this by the overlookers' wage bill for the year. (Less often, the average costs were tallied separately for several major varieties of fabric.)34 For purposes of costing a particular fabric, Yorkshire mill accountants treated overlookers' salaries as "Productive Wages," together with those of the finishers and burlers and with those of the weavers.35 Company records show that the overlookers' costs were distributed per piece of fabric, adjusted for length.36

In Germany, standard accounting procedures separated the overlookers' wages from those of the subordinate workers. The clerks merged the costs of overlookers' salaries with the costs of machinery, insurance, property taxes, energy, and so forth into a category called Regiekosten. A modern accountant might translate this as "administrative overhead," but the term also connotes something like "costs of directing production." Having created this general classification, German factory owners relied upon two different methods to distribute the costs of supervision onto a weaving mill's product. With the first method, German accountants calculated how long it took a loom to turn out a particular length of cloth, based on the average efficiency ratio for the firm as a whole or for that particular kind of cloth; then the annual overhead, including the overlookers' salaries, was added to the cloth based on how much of the loom's time, including the changing of the warp, the piece would have been expected to claim.37 The

German accountants apportioned the wage costs of the ordinary weavers by a different means than they used for the overlookers; they simply read off the amount specified on the piece-rate scales for fabric of a certain grade. But they did not merge overlooking outlays with these expenses, because they did not regard the costs of overlooking as a form of wages (Arbeitslöhne ).38

German accountants also used another system for distributing overlooking costs. This second method distributed weaving overlookers' wages, like other overhead costs, as a percentage of material costs and ordinary workers' wages. The firm recorded its total annual expenditure for ordinary wages and materials and then calculated the ratio of this total expenditure to the yearly overhead expenses, including overlooking. For each piece of cloth, then, the company first considered the cost of the materials that went into it, plus the piece-rate wages for the weaving and warping and the average per meter for burling and finishing. Then the firm assumed that for this particular length and type of cloth, the ratio of these primary costs to overhead costs should be the same as for the mill's output in general, so the firm added on this standard percentage to arrive at the cost of that cloth.39

Both German methods merged funds expended on overlooking with general overhead, processing overlooking expenses as part of the underlying cost of maintaining the firm, not, as in England, as an ingredient, like weavers' labor, that was used up and embodied in a length of cloth. Neither German method distributed overlooking outlays as a separate component per length of the cloth, as the Yorkshire and Lancashire systems did. In particular, the first of the German methods considered only the time required to turn out a number of shots with a given efficiency ratio rather than the length, that is, rather than the product.40 This German method

operated more accurately at a given juncture in the business cycle than the Yorkshire method, in that its focus on the activity also properly measured the time taken up by producing the various densities of cloth, whereas the British either proceeded by length alone or by only a few benchmark densities for which separate yearly tallies could be kept. The Yorkshire method, however, ran with greater accuracy than the German over long time periods, in that overlooking outlays were distributed per length as a separate component rather than as capital investments, which might not behave like overlooking costs through the business cycle.

What, then, were the practical implications of the methods of allocating overlooking expenses? British costing rested on the assumption that overlooking represented a cost that fluctuated with output: under the Lancashire procedure, if a mill turned out more fabric than the previous year and improved its efficiency, overlooking expenses in costing procedures for the following year remained constant per cloth length.41 This also meant that overlooking costs rose both absolutely and, since capital overhead for machinery would decline per length, as a proportion of total manufacturing costs per length as well. The system treated the overlooker's contribution as an ingredient embedded in the product. Cloth had the same "amount" of this input even if efficiency improved.42 The Yorkshire costing procedure assumed that overlookers' pay would behave like the pay of other ordinary workers, that is, would remain stable per length of cloth.43

Under the German accounting system, if the factory improved its efficiency after the course of a year, then for costing purposes in the following year the expenses of overlooking, like other overhead, would decline as a proportion of total manufacturing costs per length. Companies treated overlookers' supervision as a precondition for production, part of the "base" for manufacturing, rather than as a quantity which was incorporated into the product. This procedure incarnated a cultural procedure more than it corresponded to the actual conditions of production; in practice, the Germans dismissed overlookers in the event of a business downturn, so overlookers' pay did not represent a fixed cost like that of a standing loom or like the company's key clerical staff.

Can we derive the difference in these procedures from the demands of the business environment? Is it plausible that the German costing procedures in textiles, which fused overlooking costs with general fixed expenses, resulted from a greater tolerance for high or invariable outlays on supervision? German business manuals argued that if a firm confronted a need to reduce manufacturing costs, it caused less turmoil in the factory to cut the salaries of the overlookers than the piece rates of the workers.44 German business magazines stressed the need to cap outlays for overlooking.45 Want ads in German professional journals sometimes specified a preference for unmarried applicants among candidates for overlooking positions, presumably so that the applicant could accept a lower salary or undertake repair work during the evenings as needed.46 The contrast in accounting logic for overlooking outlays did not mirror thrifty administration in Britain and prodigal management in Germany.

To attribute the difference in modes of payment to Britain's "earlier" industrial development would be fashionable but unduly facile. The British arrangement resembles systems of management which have been called "subcontracting" or "indirect control." In many branches of industry, the pioneering factory owners, unable or unwilling to take direct command of production on the shop floor, started by delegating authority to their foremen, whom they paid by the turn-out of goods (and who in turn hired and

controlled their own workers). Research in a range of historical settings, from Europe to Japan, has found that in the early industrial era, systems which paid overlookers as subcontractors predominated in many trades.47 At a time when manufacturing still depended on craft knowledge or on the secret know-how of the overlookers and foremen, graded monetary sanctions gave owners the only feasible check on, and evaluation of, the overlookers' loyalty and efficiency. An explanation of the British method of paying weaving overlookers based on this ground seems especially plausible since Lancashire, the earliest center of the textile industry, also offered the practice's clearest expression.48

Yet such an argument based on the timing of development does not apply to the question at hand. The Wuppertal, a forerunner for the rest of Germany, moved only a few decades behind Lancashire in mechanizing its weaving mills; indeed, in wool weaving it kept pace with Yorkshire.49 But the Wuppertal had a pure salary system for overlookers and allocated overlooking costs as a fixed expense.50 Even if payment by results first arose in an earlier stage of development, its survival depended on active propagation, not institutional inertia. Management experts contended that the commissions graded by weavers' wages "stimulated" overlookers' interest in efficient production and encouraged them to be punctual.51 At J. T. and T. Taylor's mill at Batley, Yorkshire, in 1912 managers shifted the overlook-

ers to pay based solely on output.52 The methods British owners used to remunerate overlookers resulted from contemporaneous reasoning rather than unexamined tradition inherited from an earlier phase of development.

A final utilitarian approach to the difference between Germany and England might dissect the consequences of the payment methods for production costs. The textile industry was exposed to price fluctuations on both the input and the output side. On the input side, since the trade's raw materials consisted of vegetable and animal products, their prices varied with the weather and growing conditions. Raw cotton prices could change by as much as 50 percent in a few months, and prices for wool yarn fluctuated even more severely.53 Merchants and manufacturers alike speculated in the market for these raw commodities.54 On the output side, the fortunes of many firms and of whole branches depended, season to season, on unforeseeable shifts in clothing fashions.

If a company cut back on production, the Lancashire and Yorkshire systems, by basing the overlookers' wages on those of the weavers, automatically reduced overlooking expenses.55 At first blush, the German technique would seem to rigidify overlookers' salaries; but in the event of a downturn owners simply laid overlookers off.56 In 1893 and 1894, members of the German overlookers' and foremen's union (which, to be sure, included non-textile overlookers) reported nearly eight hundred cases of changes of employers; of these, 60 percent were due to the employer having given notice.57

Alternatively, mill directors could reduce the days of work and pay of those German overlookers on weekly wages.58 In short, the German procedure featured a degree of elasticity. The two systems did not diverge greatly in their ability to conform to the business cycle.

Finally, mills in both countries specializing in long runs of fabric for which demand was relatively stable did not deviate from the standards set by firms with fluctuating orders. The same accounting logic prevailed regardless of the market niche in which the firm operated, from simple towel makers to fancy goods manufacturers.59 It also applied to the spinning branch.60 This relative invariance within each country makes it implausible to contend that the variation in accounting systems evolved to cope with differing business experiences.

The owners' payment of overlookers and their procedures for allocating overlooking expenses fit the commodity forms of labor German and British producers used in carrying out production. As in the construction of weavers' piece-rate scales, so with overlookers the British relied upon the fiction that owners buy the labor embodied in completed products. The employers paid overlookers so much per length of cloth received and calculated the cost as if it represented labor incorporated as a fixed expense in each portion of cloth. As a British textile accountant put it, all machine workers "expend direct labor," because their work is "seen in the finished product."61 The guidelines for discharging weaving overlookers in Britain also confirmed that overlookers received their payment for materialized labor. In many districts, a weaving overlooker was not to leave his place of employment until the weavers he had supervised had turned in all the cloth he had

superintended.62 Otherwise, the overlooker had not "delivered" his labor and did not receive credit for it.

As in the measurement of weavers' activity, so with the overlookers the German producers relied upon the fiction that employers had the right of disposal over the workers' capacity and effort. The German procedure for adding up production expenses mixed the elements of supervisory labor and capital expenditure in apportioning overhead costs. In an accounting manual written in 1903, a costing expert from Aachen saw no incongruity in combining these elements: he suggested a 50 percent cost addition for a category called "overlookers' salaries, electricity, and steam" and joined together supervisory costs and the depreciation costs of looms.63 The German accountants handled the overlookers' labor capacity as a kind of "human capital," a conveyable resource rather than a substance received in a product.64

Belabored Fictions

To trace the construction of a "commodity" out of the ephemeral activity of the overlookers we have so far relied upon the cultural assumptions inscribed in manufacturing practice. In contexts where these suppositions had to be articulated explicitly, they can be found in discursive practice as well. The assumption in Germany that textile supervisors sold the disposition over their work activity, not merely objectified labor, came to light in the judicial interpretation of overlookers' employment contracts. The most arresting legal question for German mill owners in 1911, gauging by the coverage given it by the trade's professional journals, centered on a complaint filed by an overlooker in a town near Düsseldorf. Today the minutiae of this conflict seem, in a word, dull—but not the participants' perception of the facts. The news accounts indicate that the owner of a silk mill hired a certain Herr K. in 1910 to oversee his dyeing department.65 By the terms of the four-year contract they concluded, the foreman held the title of Obermeister (chief foreman) and headed the whole department. He agreed to obey the firm's production directives under all circumstances. Twelve months after the start of the agreement, the owner found it necessary to divide the velvet section from the remainder of the dyeing department, and

he entrusted supervision of the new section to another person. Herr K. retained his title and salary. Yet he charged the owner with a violation of the employment contract on the grounds that the owner had to let him keep the entire department or dismiss him altogether. Before the provincial court in Düsseldorf, Herr K. demanded payment in full of his remaining (three years') salary, since the contract specified that this was due to him in case of dismissal.

How is it that this course of events, whose unfolding makes today for such pedestrian reading, managed to hold the interest of contemporaries? The manner in which the business community endowed the conflict with significance represents an odd fact; its strangeness offers a riddle about the culture of production.

Although the courts ultimately resolved the suit through an evaluation of the pettiest terms of the employment contract, the business community thought that the case raised a basic question about the nature of the factory staff's employment contract. Owners and staff asked whether Herr K. might not have "the right to fully utilize his own capacity for work."66 One technical journal summed up the issue at stake this way: "A company official, who has bound himself by a contract, naturally has the duty to place his full abilities at the disposal of the enterprise; but it is not so automatic that he also has the right to see that his capacity for work is taken advantage of to the full."67 Certainly this organ's coverage of the affair threw the foreman's right into question. Yet in its analysis the magazine formulated the possibility of the right as the reverse side of the foreman's contractual obligations. And in so doing the journal, like the foreman's lawyer, revealed something about the business community's understanding of the labor transaction that was set in motion by the employment contract.

In formulating Herr K.'s rights, the press assumed that he offered for remuneration, not the successful turn-out of a quantity of dyed materials, but the disposition of his activity. The business community took the foreman's Arbeitskraft as the basis of the exchange, applying the same generic term for the factory official's productive capacities as for those of ordinary workers. This focus on the sale of the capacity for executing work, rather than on its external outcomes, was widespread: in discussions of the legal fine points of hiring factory staff, German business periodicals did not state,

for example, that by accepting a position factory officials obligated themselves to do the best job they could for the owner; they said that the staff had to devote all their abilities and knowledge to the interests of the owner.68 Only with the premised sale of "labor power" in view could the foreman's lawyer possibly have articulated his client's complaint in terms of a "right to the full exploitation of his labor power."69 Since the owner understood that he bought the foreman's full capacity, the argument went, he could not alter that capacity's sphere of operation or application. The contract's provision that the owner still had to pay Herr K.'s full salary even in case of dismissal also follows the supposition that the contract covers the disposition of the activity rather than of the output: Herr K. offered up his full capacities and therefore deserved compensation for having offered them even after he was released from the firm.

In its decision the provincial court of Düsseldorf in 1911 sided with Herr K. The owner appealed the decision on the grounds that it interfered with his prerogative to manage his own business. Finally in 1912 the imperial court at Berlin ruled for the owner; it judged that if the owner had the right to dispense with the foreman's services (at the cost of paying him his full salary), then the owner also had the right to dispense with a part of the foreman's services. In this instance the court ranked the right to full exploitation of one's labor capacity as subordinate to another principle—the owner's management authority. For my cultural analysis the fact of primary significance is simply that the conflict was expressed in terms of the sale of Arbeitskraft at all.70

My interpretation of the German courts' emphasis on labor power, far from representing a kind of philosophic abstraction, does nothing more than follow the thoughts of the participants themselves. In an age when owners usually regarded the small stratum of professional employees as a species apart from the manual workers under command, the owners nonetheless used the term labor power for a factory official's technical services.71 Only

on the basis of logical assumptions about labor activity on behalf of the enterprise in general could they have abstracted this essential similarity between types of action whose overt appearances and prestige seemed otherwise so discrepant.

If the history of Herr K. discloses something about Germans' perception of the labor activity in general, as opposed to something about the status of overlookers, then we ought to be able to find analogous cases for lower grades of workers. This poses a special challenge, since most factory labor codes governing the employment relation specified the owner's right to switch ordinary workers to another machine or task. Yet a German technical journal in 1900 described a dispute involving a lower worker that offers a close parallel to Herr K.'s case.72

The facts of the case were these: a regular factory hand in Berlin stayed on the job after a portion of his company's work force began a strike. The management suspected the worker of organizing support for the strikers at the shop. It requested that he cease actual labor but continue to show up briefly at the company's desk twice each day. In this fashion the firm could isolate him from his fellows but avoid freeing him for an entire day to earn money elsewhere. These check-ins were to continue during four weeks, because, according to the factory labor code issued by the owner, both worker and owner had to give four weeks' notice if they wanted to terminate the employment contract. During this period the firm offered to continue paying the worker his full wage. But the worker objected that unless he worked, he was not obligated to check in at the office at all. After the firm fired him, he complained in court that four weeks' pay was due him for his unjustified removal. His employer argued in court that by requesting that the worker check in, he had simply wished to verify the worker's readiness to work (Arbeitsbereitschaft ). In any event, the employer reasoned, a worker had to report in twice during a regular workday, so the firm was not demanding anything exceptional of him. In the dangerous atmosphere of a strike and at a court which was not known for its support of workers' interests, the judge ruled in favor of the worker. "The plaintiff had a right during the [four-week] interim period not just to payment of his wages," the judge decided, "but to the carrying out of his contractual employment as well."73

The Berlin court's decision attached the complex of legal norms to the employee as a bearer of work capacity, not to a person who merely received pay. In a similar case a decade later, the business court of the city of Chemnitz judged that the employment contract required the owner to use the workers' labor capacity and not merely to guarantee compensation.74 In Britain, by contrast, the laws pertaining to employment were the same as those covering agreements for the delivery of products. Workers could be dismissed without obligation, even if the employment contract required prior notice, so long as they received compensation for the work they could otherwise have completed. The concepts of labor that the manufacturers enacted in practice, the courts sanctified in words.

Forms of Authority

German and British weaving overlookers shared the same dependencies and capabilities with respect to employers above and weavers below. In each country the structure of the production site generated similar conflicts among these parties. Yet due to the understandings of labor as a commodity, the paradigms on which people could draw for interpreting friction varied between Germany and Britain, endowing identical problems with contrasting significance. The British and German definitions of labor as a commodity hold contrasting implications for the owner's authority in the workplace. The German view of employment as the command of "labor power" made the exercise of authority over the execution of work an integral part of the process of earning a profit. The German view unified the relations of appropriation and domination. When capitalists purchased "labor power," their receipt of a profit depended on how successfully they converted that labor capacity into labor itself. Without the immediate domination of the worker, the owner did not appropriate a surplus. Marx believed as a matter of theory, not of rhetoric, that the capitalist organization of work was despotic. Although profit may have been realized through exchange on the market, it was generated and appropriated in production.

The purchase of embodied labor in Britain, by contrast, denied any necessary connection between the exercise of authority and the generation of profit. The producers may certainly have believed that the factory proprietor took advantage of his command over capital to pay workers less than he ought. Even so, the owner secured a surplus through an exchange relation

set up by the trade of resources rather than in an immediate relation of domination. The generation and appropriation of surplus were accomplished at a remove, not through the owner's command over the labor potential and person of the worker and not through the owner's authority over social relations in the factory.

Weaving offers an exemplary environment in which to explore the influence of these concepts of labor as a commodity, because the technical characteristics of the labor process made the overlooker's role more ambiguous in this than in many other industries. Weavers worked on their own when all was well with their looms; the overlooker did not coordinate the work of machines or of people, nor was he required to show initiative in leading a team of workers. He did not have to exercise authority as an intrinsic part of his technical function. Furthermore, the overlooker did not contribute to output by combining in his department diverse outputs or mechanical procedures; he only aggregated outputs from similar machinery. Production was the sum of the individual loom outputs, a feature which made it easier to think of the overlooker as bestowing his labor upon the lengths of cloth rather than as acting in the capacity of a manager. Textile businessmen in Britain referred to their weaving overlookers as machine "operatives," even when they gave overlookers the right to hire and fire subordinates.75 Finally, in comparison with a metal-working plant, where each of a company's overlookers might have command over a set of different machine tools and make different kinds of products, a weaving mill had many weaving overlookers, each with a quota of similar kinds of machinery. Because they could compare overlookers who did the identical jobs and they hired many different overlookers for the same job, owners could equate the overlookers' labor and think of it as a homogeneous "input" bestowed upon the fabric.

In this complex situation, how did people on the shop floor define the role of the overlooker? The words used in Britain to designate the overlooker's occupation offer evidence of the participants' emphasis on his role as a technical and productive one. Mill workers in Yorkshire, and on some occasions the owners as well,76 called their weaving overseers tuners , a title which put these employees' technical function before their supervisory one. The word overlooker may have appeared in management journals and social

scientific descriptions, but not in the ordinary language of the people on the shop floor. Their interviews and their union newspapers' descriptions of mill life used the word tuner. In Lancashire the popular term was tackler , a metonymic derivative that referred to the overlooker's tools—his tackle—rather than to his authority and place in the chain of command.77

The evolution of textile production from home weaving to the centralized factory allows the analyst to place the dimensions of the overlookers' role—the exercise of a technical skill and the exercise of authority over other people—in a diachronic progression. Loom tuning or tackling had become a recognized occupation in England and on the Continent before the rise of the factory system. By the early nineteenth century handlooms had become complicated enough that special tuners made house calls to fix or adjust them.78 In this era the fixers were commonly called loomers. (If the fixer specialized in dobby looms, which had parts called witches, the occupation's popular title carried a pun: "witch doctors.")79 The chore of overseeing workers' conduct was added to the "looming" occupation with the rise of factory production. But when the occupation acquired a new popular name in the transition, the workers did not apply to the overlookers the range of terms, such as gaffer or simply boss , that they used for persons in higher authority.

In Germany, despite a path of structural evolution similar to Britain's, the overlookers' titles did refer to their supervisory responsibilities rather than to their technical function alone. The lowest-level weaving overlooker, who had responsibility for a certain section of looms, the workers called the Webmeister ("weaving master") or Reviermeister ("section master"). In contrast to the English weaving overlooker, the German overlooker bore a title that placed him in an integrated system of supervision, part of a hierarchy of officials. The system gave higher-level foremen the title of Saalmeister ("room master") or Werkmeister ("shop master").

These phrases were not empty punctilios; they betrayed the essence of the overlookers' performance in Germany. German officials articulated

the overlookers' role when they were called upon to elucidate a new pension law for "professional technical workers." The law, which took effect in 1913, was based on the longstanding proviso that employers contribute to a comprehensive pension and insurance fund for white-collar workers. It extended this requirement to cover higher-level workers in the workshops as well (technische Angestellte ). Government administrators had to decide exactly which persons the law admitted to the pension system as professional technical workers. According to the district reports submitted to the German Foremen's Union, the owners of large weaving mills recognized the weaving overlookers (Webmeister ) as such professionals for insurance purposes without hesitation.80 But some employers tried to evade requests for insurance coverage by changing the overlookers' occupational titles from Meister of various sorts to mere Vorarbeiter ("preparatory workers").81

To adjudicate the resulting disputes, the imperial insurance bureau in Berlin studied in detail the functions of overlookers in the weaving branch. How could this office decide whom to designate as a professional, not just as a schooled technical expert? In the end officials took the employees' exercise of an oversight function, rather than their level of technical expertise, as the critical requirement for classification as a professional.82 If weaving overlookers did simple manual work such as installing the warps, they were still higher-level professional workers so long as they also were in charge of watching the weaving process, distributing warps, or enforcing the factory work codes.83 In another illustration of the importance given to authority, the imperial insurance bureau decided that in departments smaller than the weaving rooms, such as those for carding or dyeing, supervisors had to have at least two workers under them to be classified as tech-

nical professionals (technische Angestellte ).84 Income levels and the time intervals by which the salary was calculated were judged to be irrelevant.85 Command over other workers was considered the distinctive part of the overlookers' work role. Even technically trained foremen complained that they were viewed by some employers "only as a driver of the employed workers."86

When the German courts were called upon to interpret the overlookers' labor contracts, they too made the exercise of authority delegated by the owner an essential part of the employment relation. By the provisions of the German business law, overlookers, unlike ordinary workers, could be dismissed without the usual notice required by contract if they were proven "disloyal" in their service.87 What constituted "disloyal" conduct? The construals of the courts discloses the conventional interpretation of the labor transaction. An industry journal, in an article about the legal definition of an overlooker that appeared in 1912, asserted that an overlooker, by the implicit terms of the labor contract, "obligated himself to devote his skills fully and completely to the interests of the employer."88 In this magazine's view, overlookers became instruments of the owners' will, and to support this claim it cited legal verdicts. The German courts had ruled that overlookers, unlike ordinary workers, could not give notice together at a firm. Giving such notice would amount to an attempt to bargain collectively for better employment conditions and therefore would mean that the overlookers were no longer acting "faithfully" to advance the proprietors' interests.89

The employment contract was void if the overlookers did not minister to the owners as servants.

This bond of service let the courts designate overlookers as literal agents of the owners. According to German law, if a worker grossly insulted the employer, he or she could be dismissed immediately. The statutes, however, did not specifically address the question of whether overlookers, like owners, enjoyed this privilege. When the courts were called upon for an interpretation, they decided that even the lowest-level overlooker ought to be regarded as an "agent of the employer." On these grounds, disrespect toward an overlooker equaled a direct insult to the owner.90 The German judicial review for business courts reprinted the rulings of the imperial court in Berlin that emphasized the view that overlookers were agents of the proprietors. The review in 1901 summed up the precedents: "The authority of the employer is transferred to the foreman, for without the accompanying carryover of the 'prestige' of the owner, the transfer of part of the owner's legitimate authority would be unthinkable, otherwise it [the transfer] would directly contradict the interests of the employer, for whose protection the transfer is consummated."91 The authority of the employer was distilled in the overlooker's everyday activities.

Although the specification of the overlooker's labor as a ware differed between Germany and Britain and the exercise of authority by overlookers carried different implications, the responsibilities of the overlookers in the two countries did not diverge. Even in the most important area in which overlookers exercised authority—in hiring—the German and the British overlookers occupied approximately equivalent positions. To be sure, one finds great variation within each country in the weaving overlookers' responsibilities for production. There were two benchmark systems. Under the first, the owners or mill directors took responsibility for recruiting and hiring new workers and assigned them to overlookers as

they pleased.92 Under the second system, overlookers or departmental foremen did the hiring entirely on their own.93 This could lead to extreme decentralization: at a mill near Bradford, a female weaver whom an overlooker fired in 1902 for acting as a ringleader in a "disturbance" immediately found a job under a different overlooker at the same firm.94 These two pure systems of responsibility for hiring, in which either factory directors or the overlookers themselves took sole responsibility for hiring, formed in both countries the exception rather than the rule. Between the two extremes lay various mixtures of authority between overlookers and higher managers. At many factories, the overlooker did the hiring, but the director exercised veto power or carried out an interview with each worker before the final decision.95 At others the manager did the hiring but restricted the main field of candidates to people recruited or recommended by the overlooker.

In these mixed systems of hiring the producers never arrived at consistent rules for finding new hires. If a manager happened to see a vacant loom one morning, he might immediately put someone on without asking the overlooker, yet assume that the overlooker as a matter of routine would fill

other empty looms.96 This vague apportionment of responsibility for hiring at mills in northern England could result in overlookers and managers at a firm promising the same loom to more than one person.97 Workers in Yorkshire complained that when they wanted to leave the firm they did not know to whom they should give notice.98 Likewise in Germany the weavers said they were unsure about which of their supervisors was "really the master" and whose permission they needed to take a day off.99 In Germany, on the one hand the newspapers of the textile workers criticized overlookers for abusing their arbitrary powers of dismissal; on the other, the papers acknowledged that in effect overlookers also needed, but did not always get, upper management's consent to fire a worker.100 In both countries the compass of the overlooker's jurisdiction was ill-marked and specified more by imputation than by official notice.

If the exact boundaries of the overlooker's responsibility for hiring remained unclear, his influence was nonetheless real. In light of their command over people, how could British producers have crystallized the overlooker's activity as the delivery of materialized labor? Even where British overlookers hired weavers themselves, this could be seen as a technical function, a means of equipping looms with weavers, not weavers with looms. James Burnley, a textile worker and well-known dialect poet, described overlookers' roles in mill life after he revisited a Bradford weaving company: "There are several overlookers in the room, each of whom has the superintendance of a certain number of looms. Their duties are to keep the looms in repair and to supply them with weavers."101 Burnley, who had a

firsthand acquaintance with weaving, expressed himself with precision—and his choice of words made the looms, rather than the workers, the overlooker's real object of attention.102 Then, too, the ultimate means by which overlookers supported or dismissed weavers was not that of official commands but of covert deeds. If a weaver got on the wrong side of the overlooker, he or she might as well leave the firm, even if the overlooker said nothing. When a piqued overlooker began to withhold prompt technical assistance, the earnings of the ancillary weaver declined quickly. The authority of the overlooker could be transmitted through their care of the machinery as much as through a chain of command.103

The specification of the overlooker's transmission of labor did not alter the overlookers' functions and responsibilities in Germany or Britain, but it provided the template for workers to formulate their grievances about superiors. For a ground-level view of workers' complaints, I coded the local reports that appeared in the newspapers of the textile workers in Britain and Germany. In Britain, the Yorkshire Factory Times focused its coverage on the everyday concerns of textile workers.104 This journal, whose premier edition appeared in 1889, devoted most of its pages to a feature called "Echoes from Mills and Workshops." Each week this revue described incidents at factories in more than a dozen towns and villages, based on correspondents' reports and on letters and tip-offs sent in by workers. Nowhere else, the paper boasted, could one find "so true an index of the life of the textile factory."105

In Germany, reports from textile factories reached two newspapers. In 1889 the "free" (or Social Democratic) trade union of the textile workers began publishing the complaints workers submitted to union officials or voiced at meetings.106 The Christian union for German textile workers fol-

lowed suit with a similar publication in 1898.107 I coded the complaints of workers about practices on the shop floor from the earliest surviving volumes of each of these newspapers. In both countries, these early volumes had the richest and most extensive coverage of problems on the shop floor. The British sample covers the years from 1890 through 1893, the German sample the years from 1899 through 1902. I coded the complaints concretely, with over one hundred separate categories.108 With such a naive procedure, I could register problems ranging from the cleanliness of the toilets to the timbre of the factory bells used to dismiss the labor force.

The catalog of major complaints listed in Table 1 suggests that in many respects the immediate grounds for conflict were parallel in the two countries. In both, the four most frequent complaints concerned the level of pay, reductions in pay, the fines imposed for allegedly "bad" work, and the disrespectful attitude of supervisors toward their workers. Since the question of interest is how complaints varied within manufacturing processes that were organizationally and technologically alike, I compared the distribution of complaints between countries within the same occupation. The most significant divide is that of the weavers versus those in other textile occupations. In both countries, about two-thirds of the grievances recorded in the newspapers came from the weaving branch (66 percent in Britain, 68 percent

in Germany). Table 2 compares the twelve complaints that appeared most frequently among weavers alone. The non-weavers were fragmented among so many labor processes that the sample does not allow for such comparisons across other occupations. The figures serve as one piece of evidence among many, not as an arbiter of hypotheses. I cannot derive the meaning of problems as they appeared to the weavers themselves from a set of codings. What appears to have been the "same" complaint for German and British weavers may have come to life in substantially different cultural forms.

To help us begin to appreciate the cross-national differences in the import of complaints, in Table 3 I compare the distribution of persons blamed in the newspapers for workplace problems in all branches of textiles. The Germans assigned blame to the "firm" as a whole for problems nearly twice as often as the British. On the face of it, the meaning of this divergence remains uncertain. It could imply that the German papers considered it less important to censure particular categories of persons, as opposed to the "system," as the cause of problems. Assigning responsibility to the "firm" might also serve as just another way of blaming the firm's owner.109 If we leave aside complaints about the "firm," the German papers blamed owners and managers in 75 percent of the cases, compared to 54 percent of the cases in the British paper. Rather than looking upward to the top of the company to assign blame, the incidents reported in the British papers stayed closer to the persons with whom workers labored side by side. Among the complaints that blamed particular categories of persons, the British paper blamed the overlookers in 30 percent of the cases, whereas the German paper assigned only fifteen percent of problems to that lower-level party. If we treated complaints about the "firm" as referring to owners and higher managers, the German complaints would appear even more top-heavy. Finally, the same table shows that within the German sample, the Christian and socialist newspapers assigned blame among the factory personnel in almost identical proportions. If these two journals, which originated in markedly contrasting ideological milieus, assign blame to the same categories of persons in the workplace, we have more secure grounds for supposing that the stories to some extent replicated the workers' formulations, not just the agendas of the editors who processed the stories in their offices.

The German workers' tendency to focus more often on higher-ups is slightly more pronounced among weavers than among the sample as a whole (Table 4). This only accentuates the question of how factories that appear similar not only from the standpoint of organizational structure and technology but in the sorts of conflicts and disagreements they generate can differ significantly as institutions that "produce" a human experience of the labor activity. We need to rely on contextual evidence to assess the cultural significance of the German assignment of responsibility to overlookers. One of the most frequently voiced complaints, that concerning the supervisors' disrespectful manners, illustrates how British and German workers attached different meanings to complaints that appear categorically similar.

For weavers and for textile workers in general, the British newspaper complained more about the disrespectful treatment workers received from supervisors than about any other difficulty. The late-nineteenth-century factory provided a setting in which overlookers could indulge in severe verbal abuse of their underlings. Employers considered it something of a prerequisite for maintaining discipline that overlookers be able to swear in the local dialect.110 A reporter from Elland said that some overlookers treated their spot in the mill as a "privileged place." In the overlooker's corner, the reporter said, a female underling might hear "a voice addressing

her in language known as profane, and which, if used on the public streets by a drunken man, would see him taken in hand by the police."111 The textile workers' unions tried without great success to elicit the cooperation of the overlookers' unions in restraining the corrupt language.112 They had better

luck in securing the assistance of the courts. One judge in Dewsbury, Yorkshire, ruled in 1913 that a worker who objected to a supervisor's lewd comments could quit work without waiting to give proper notice.113

German workers complained that managers addressed them in military-style, "barracks" language.114 They claimed that the supervisors' dictionary of abusive terms included "scoundrel" (Halunke ), "rogue" (Spitzbube ), and "old ass" (alter Esel ).115 At a spinning mill in the Mönchengladbach district, workers testified that a supervisor had "badly cursed even older people." The workers at this mill, trying to discover whether the supervisor could be prosecuted for such conduct, sought the advice of police, who would, they supposed, be knowledgeable about the law.116

Not surprisingly, workers picked out their immediate supervisors, with whom they had the most contact, as the most frequent users of humiliating expressions.117 In both countries, overlookers received a greater share of complaints about rude conduct than about other problems. British workers blamed overlookers for the ill treatment in about two-thirds of the reported incidents in the Yorkshire Factory Times. In Germany, overlookers received the blame for harsh manners less frequently, in about 42 percent of such complaints. Yet German overlookers received the blame for poor language more often than did managers or owners (see Table 5).

The raw numbers do not show that British workers reviled their overlookers more than the German their own. Rather, they provide clues whose meaning for the participants can be reconstructed by examining the style of the evidence. The British newspaper framed its comments about the overlookers differently than did the German papers. In Britain, workers criticized the overlookers as individuals; their complaints portrayed the

personalities of the overlooker. The epithets applied to the overlookers reproduces this personalistic framework. Many of the insults refer to the physical appearance of the overlooker, such as "Golden Whiskers," "Little Darkey Tuner," or "the fancy-moustache stroker."118 Others summed up the conduct of the supervisor with nicknames such as "Growler & Howler," "Woman Hater," or "Sleepy."119 The British workers' conflict with their overlookers rested on a foundation of familiarity. The British complaints also characterized the behavior of the overlookers by comparing them to animals: a "puddledog that can do nothing but bark," a "bull terrier," a "wild bear."120 These analogies removed the overlookers' conduct from the context of the factory hierarchy. They emphasized the overlookers' personal failings rather than their exercise of the authority that inhered in their office.121 One story about an unpleasant overlooker (which cited an unfortunate cliché) captured the way workers attributed problems to an unchangeably bad character: "How true it is," the correspondent wrote, "the black man cannot wash his face white, nor a bad-tempered man forget his ways."122

German workers also used epithets for their overlookers, but of a less personal sort. They labeled their overlookers with general names in popular circulation, such as "brute" (Grobian ), "beast" (Vieh ), and "ape" (Affe ).123 These were the impersonal insults that might well be applied to an over-bearing stranger. The German newspapers criticized overlookers as the occupiers of an office who insisted on exercising their authority in the name of the owner. Overlookers, they claimed, had nothing better to do than to demonstrate a "service of love" for their employers.124 "One constantly observes that the overlooker at every moment supports only the interests of his master employer," the Textil-Arbeiter reported. "Direct personal contact with the owner," it added, "is suited, like no other practice, to illustrate the superiority of the position of overlooker."125

Another major complaint points to different understandings of the exercise of authority in Britain and Germany. As is shown in Table 2, twenty-three complaints about people who squealed to higher-ups in the factory appeared in my British sample for the weaving branch. Sixty percent of these cases identified overlookers as the culprits. A story from a mill in Dewsbury, published in 1893, conveys the spirit of these reports:

The story illustrates the belief that the overlooker's conduct violates the norm against tattling. Its concluding question hints that the overlooker, by snitching on his underlings, will suffer the censure of his friends.127 The account also suggests that workers and overlookers were co-producers, enough on a level for them to form joking relationships.

Most of the tales British overlookers took to superiors concerned the alleged errors weavers made in production or the slow pace of their production. An overlooker who tattled became known as a "greasy" tuner, a "greasehorn."128 The British complaints regarding tattling about production foul-ups reflect the workers' assumption that the overlooker should not have acted as if he were merely an agent of the owner. The British weavers believed that the lower-level overlookers ought to support their efforts to labor with a degree of autonomy.129

In contrast to the frequent complaints about snitching in the British sampling, the German cases revealed only one example. In this exception, from the Bergisches region, the workers had already launched a movement against the authority of the central management. They complained that an overlooker had informed on the weaver who he believed had given a signal to the others to stop work at their looms before the rest period. The account mentioned the overlooker's conduct only as a detail in its narrative of the work stoppage.130 The significant comparison to draw about tattling is this: in Germany, no grievances appeared regarding overlookers' informing about everyday production errors or about workers' demeanor. Instead, the German workers' comments about the overlookers' "service of love" indicate that workers took it for granted that overlookers would keep the owner informed.

The frequency of complaints about the rude manners of overlookers in Britain suggests that overlookers and workers stood in a closer, more equal relation to each other in Britain than in Germany. British workers, in comparison with their German counterparts, expected overlookers to classify workers as colleagues and were perhaps more sensitized to disrespect. Respondents from Yorkshire said that supervisors and weavers drank at the same pubs.131 Indeed, the textile workers' newspaper in Yorkshire complained that weavers who shared pub rooms with the overlookers tried to get better warps for themselves or jobs for their relatives by buying drinks for their overlooker.132 Yorkshire weavers expected their overseers to socialize with them and accused them of "putting on airs" if

they did not.133 British weavers were familiar enough with their overlookers to play practical jokes on them without fear of reprisal when the perpetrators revealed themselves.134 As a weaver correspondent from Bingley expressed it, "Tuners are only workers like ourselves."135 A spinner from Halifax in an interview put it even more simply: "We was one."136

A careful reading of the textile workers' newspapers in Germany provides insight into a different set of relations in Germany. To be sure, the workers there complained that some of their colleagues used all manner of tactics to bribe overlookers for preferential treatment. They alleged, for example, that some workers gave overlookers free pies and turkeys or agreed to buy trinkets from overlookers at inflated prices.137 In their coverage of these incidents, however, the German newspapers did not mention an equivalent to the British workers' tactic of tipping a drink side by side at the pub, perhaps a relationship more intimate or socially reciprocal than the German overlookers would have tolerated. A respondent from Oerlinghausen in Westfalen, for example, volunteered the insight that the overlookers and weavers in town drank at separate inns and that social mixing would have broken an unspoken law.138

The farewell gifts workers gave their overlookers also serve as an index of national differences in relations between these groups. The workers' newspapers in Britain reported that weavers frequently took up collections to provide farewell presents for tuners and managers who were retiring or

transferring between mills.139 Since the gifts went only to departing supervisors, they could not be reciprocated in favors at work. By all accounts, British workers offered the gifts spontaneously and apart from those bestowed by management.140 In Germany, by contrast, stories about unsolicited collective presents from workers to exiting supervisors seem practically unobtainable.

According to German journals of the textile trade, many German owners preferred to hire supervisors from distant areas, on the grounds that strangers could better maintain their distance from the lower workers.141 A respondent from Barmen, who became a loom tuner himself, said weavers believed that the manager "deliberately" hired outsiders from other towns as supervisors, with the aim of keeping them separate from the workers.142 By comparison with this explicit discussion in Germany, the professional literature for textiles in Britain remained silent about this tactic. Factory ordinances issued by German employers warned that each overseer had the duty "to protect his prestige against the workers."143 Indeed, the separation

of overlookers from workers in Germany took the most solid form possible: factories' architectural design. A number of mills in Germany provided toilets or eating rooms for supervisors separate from those for workers.144

The pattern of fining for indiscipline also betrays the greater emphasis placed on the overlooker's authority in Germany. In both Germany and Britain, workers received petty fines for "misconduct." For example, overlookers and foremen punished workers by withholding earnings for offenses such as looking out the window, talking, or letting bobbing lie on the floor.145 All of these fines might be explained, perhaps, as measures to ensure high output or to provide greater safety on the shop floor. Beside the fines that bore upon output, however, the German supervisors, unlike their British counterparts, also imposed disciplinary fines for actions they perceived as insults to their authority.146 At a firm in Mönchengladbach, for example, the foreman fined a weaver who once forgot and twice refused to take off his cap upon greeting the foreman.147 At a firm in Birgden, near Geilenkirchen, a weaver who expressed irritation at the overlooker for not adjusting the loom received a fine for disrespectful conduct.148 German managers listed these punishments into "fine books," which include entries for "insolence," "insult," "is always coarse toward me," and "affront."149

German overlookers also charged their underlings in court with having affronted them. In fact, the records of the local arbiters from textile towns indicate that this was not uncommon. In Odenkirchen, a textile center in the Rhineland, the summary transcripts show that the legal complaints during a twelve-year period at the turn of the century included charges of insult brought against employees by the following supervisors: a spinning overlooker, a weaving overlooker, a carding room supervisor, two foremen, a maintenance overlooker, and a factory director.150 Where such records also specify the location of the alleged offense, they often refer to the factory itself.151 The overlookers took seriously the supposition that they shared in the employer's dignity.152

The lists of mill complaints in the Yorkshire Factory Times , and, less frequently, in the Cotton Factory Times might have been expected to mention fining for "affronts" to overlookers' authority. Yet accounts of such incidents are wanting. To the contrary, workers seem to have teased their supervisors to their face. The autobiographies of textile workers describe how workers mocked their overseers. One female weaver from Bradford mentioned her encounter with her overlooker, Harry:

Weavers near Baxenden played a game with authoritarian overlookers to shame them. They handed such overlookers the gift of a whip, ridiculing them as slave drivers.154 Perhaps the most telling demonstration of British workers' assertion of their equality with overlookers came from Great Harwood, Lancashire. The weavers who struck a mill there in 1893 succeeded in having their overlookers sign an apology, which said, "We, the undersigned, do admit that we have been guilty of driving and humbugging the weavers employed under us.  . . . We herewith guarantee that in future we will not speak to any weaver when going round with the slate or when fetched to tackle their looms."155 The autobiographical stories of British workers leave no doubt that they were exposed to tyrannical abuse from some overlookers. At issue is not the degree of cooperation or conflict but the intimate and equalitarian framework British workers used to condemn mishandling.156

The factory owner's first motivation for hiring an overlooker, according to the working-class press in Germany, was not to acquire the skills of a technical expert; it was to obtain an agent through which he could exercise his authority

over the factory.157 As the Textil-Arbeiter said, "The owner of the production shop naturally says to himself that it is in his interest to place the tasks of the workers under control by putting a person there  . . . so that a mere glance from this personage will spur workers to the strictest fulfillment of their duties."158 The German practice of fining workers for mere "affronts" to supervisors reproduced the view that the overlookers' exercise of authority in the name of the owner was essential to the extraction of surplus. In Britain, on the other hand, since the overlookers did not act merely to extend the owners' authority, the extraction of a profit for the owner of the factory was severed from the exercise of authority on the shop floor. The Northern Pioneer , a journal for the labor and the "liberal radical" movements in the Colne Valley, expressed the view that the exercise of authority was not an essential aspect of the employment relation and extraction of profit. Textile workers and factory owners, it said in 1883, were merely exchanging their commodities. "Employers should not want to be masters anymore than the men should want to be masters," it concluded.159 For the British textile workers, as for artisanal workers in an earlier age, the exchange of labor as a commodity could be not only separated from but contrasted with the exercise of authority. "You are no master of mine," a rule-maker told his employer in the 1840s, "but only a man who buys my labour for a good deal less than it's worth."160 The formulation acknowledged a relation that included both formal equality in the marketplace and real exploitation.

It would be simple but superficial to imagine that the differences between practices at the point of production in the two countries resulted from a greater emphasis in general in German society upon authority for building social relations. Such an approach would confuse the ideologies celebrated in the public sphere with actual practice on the shop floor. If the famed tradition of liberalism in British political discourse lent support to notions of individual liberty and autonomy, such ideals did not have any elective

affinity with actual use of the British idea of labor as a commodity. After all, the confinement of inmates in fortress-like enclosures scarcely embodied the notion of liberalism. The specification of labor as a commodity in Britain did not inhibit employers from attempting to exercise control episodically in heavy-handed fashion on the shop floor. Although the practice formed no part of the usual organization of production, British employers, if it struck their fancy, fired underlings without warning for looking at them "the wrong way."161

The contrasts between factory procedures in the two countries were based not on degrees of authoritarianism but on the modalities by which employers asserted their domination. British employers devoted no less attention to cultivating a paternalist regime in pliant neighborhoods outside the factory as their German counterparts did. Rather than consecrating their mastery of the transformation of labor power into a product at the site of production, British employers displayed their superordinancy in the community, where they could influence workers' mobility and sense of dependency.162 The Strutt family, acclaimed in the early nineteenth century as factory pioneers, watched over their employees' morality by imposing fines for such mischievous behavior outside the workplace as maltreating a neighbor's dog.163 In the second half of the nineteenth century, British factory owners did not just support recreational and educational clubs at the mill site. They subsidized workers' clubs, schools, and churches in the community at large.164 Interviews with former textile workers from Lancashire

and Yorkshire towns reveal that into the first decade of the twentieth century many workers still felt compelled to attend the same church or chapel as their employer.165 Even in large towns with an adequate stock of housing, some British textile employers (like several of their German counterparts) erected company homes and required subordinates to occupy them.166 British textile workers in employer-provided housing denounced the "tyranny" of their dependency.167 But the textile industry was in this respect typical of British business.168

The prominent commitment of British employers to molding an obedient community outside the point of production attracted the criticism of German employers. As a businessman from the German wool trade judged in 1886, "To encourage the factory director to exercise surveillance over his people even beyond the work hours in order to look after their moral health—this is one English institution that has been taken too far. By this means one develops only empty-headed workers."169 We should not accede unreservedly to the national contrast this executive wished to draw. But his sentiments undermine the presumption that German employers were automatically more custodial. What differed fundamentally between British and German employers was not the general readiness to supervise or control workers but the catego-

ries of social consciousness by which they defined the exchange of labor at the point of production. If the emphasis on the disposition over labor power in the German factory had derived from a general cultural emphasis on authority, we would expect the authoritarianism to carry over into all contexts. Instead, in the community, where social relations were mediated by capitalist relations of production but not cast directly in their image, British employers appear no less interested than their German counterparts in controlling subordinates' leisure, religion, and education.170

Culture's Contemporaneous Effect

This chapter has compared structurally equivalent cases to identify the distinct contribution of cultural assumptions to the status of overlookers. In both Germany and Britain, weaving overlookers occupied an ambiguous position between workers and owners. On the one hand, they sold their labor for a wage, like a worker; on the other, they exercised authority over the production process, like an employer. The production process in textile factories was sufficiently standardized by the late nineteenth century that it offers the comparative analyst approximate controls for differences in the social organization of work. Weaving overlookers in Germany and Britain had the same technical roles, similar locations in the factory hierarchy, similar positions in the labor market, matching levels of pay, and the same responsibilities for supervising workers. Given these structural parallels, the divergent cultural definitions of labor as a commodity in Germany and Britain intervened to give overlookers different statuses. In Britain, the view that labor was sold via its products accentuated the aspect of the overlookers' activity that corresponded to that of a productive agent. In Germany, the view that labor was sold as a service placed an emphasis on the overlookers' exercise of authority in the name of the owner rather than on the delivery of a product; in this manner, the German view defined the overlooker's role as essentially unlike that of a worker.171

Historians of late-nineteenth-century factory organization have often emphasized the willingness of British employers to dedicate the real control of production on the shop floor to the workers themselves, particularly to those with craft skills. Compared to capitalists in other countries of the time, economic historians reason, British employers generally enjoyed greater access to pools of highly trained workers who inherited their know-how from the country's generations-long edge in manufacture. Since many British enterprises were founded early in the nineteenth century, when entry costs were lower, British companies in branches of production such as iron and steel production or metal work were smaller and more numerous than counterpart firms in later-developing countries. These circumstances made it more difficult for British firms to muster the great resources needed for investing in new technology and management organization in the course of the century and made it less costly for them to rely instead on the technical and organizational skills of their workers.172 By this line of reasoning, the British specification of labor as a commodity could well have emerged as a natural reflection of an organizational structure in which employers were compelled to renounce control in reality, not just in ideology, over the conversion of labor power to a product.

A comparative study of the textile industry reveals the limitations of this approach. As we have seen, no prominent organizational differences existed between Germany and Britain in key branches of wool textile production. Yet important cultural differences did arise between them, revealing that the immediate institutional context is not responsible for differences between the materialized specifications of labor as a commodity. At most historical junctures before 1914 in the Yorkshire textile industry, where trade unions were comparatively weak, and at critical moments in the craft trades, such as metal-working after the wholesale defeat of unions in 1898, British employers had carte blanche to reorganize practices on the shop floor to match the self-conscious conversion of labor power to a product.173 They did not try. What is more, analysts' reasoning in terms of adaptation to inherited constraints and opportunities fails to explain the structure of practices in large, recently founded companies in new branches of produc-

tion, such as motor vehicles. The Engineering Employers' Federation successfully combated the establishment of formal collective bargaining in the British auto industry. Despite the freer rein given to employers to reorganize shop-floor practices in this innovative business, especially after 1922, management left control in the hands of craft workers and relied on payment by results to stimulate productivity.174 Surely the employers' premises about the labor transaction, not just structural constraints, contributed to these outcomes.

In view of the visible decline in competitiveness among most branches of British industry since 1914, it is all too easy to read history backwards, attributing the differences between German and British practice before 1914 to German owners' greater push for efficiency. But certainly up to 1914, German textile mills did not operate more successfully than their British rivals. In the branches of wool textiles in 1907, the length of cloth produced annually from a loom in Germany approximately equaled that produced in Britain.175 Among the European competitors, Britain's share of world trade in wool fabric rose in the decade before 1914.176 In the cotton branch, German businessmen who measured output in Britain near the turn of the century had no doubt that British weaving mills produced more cloth

per loom than German contenders did.177 The difference in the specification of labor as a commodity did not cause the British to fall behind in production.178

In both countries the character of textile technology before 1914 discouraged contemplation of the systematic conversion of "labor power" into a product. The raw materials could not be manipulated by the available technology according to standard rules, only by knack that defied analysis. "The loom of today is practically identical with the loom of fifty years ago," the Textile Mercury complained in 1912. "The loom may be ranked today as the crudest piece of widely used mechanism extant."179 The technician Charles Vikerman remarked in the 1894 edition of his manual on woolen spinning that "no significant technical advance" had occurred in spinning during the preceding fifty years.180 Technical experts in Germany voiced similar opinions.181 In the hands of workers with only general experience in a textile branch, the equipment that twisted fiber and finished cloth operated too harshly for satisfactory results. Each town became a specialist in a different range of types of yarn and fabric, due to the mysteriously acquired knack of local labor for pushing obstinate varieties of fibers and yarns through the insensitive machinery. Even in the same neighborhood, however, a manufacturer sometimes failed to turn out a particular weave while the nearest challenger down the street, relying on the same kind of loom and material, succeeded.182

The reliance on the workers' knack for product specialties led the participants in the trade to think of fabrics as the result of confecting rather than of manufacturing. Factory managers drew analogies between the spinning

of yarn and the distilling of fine drinks. To produce yarn suited for different kinds of twistings, a director from Bolton explained, "one mill may have five or six different 'mixings,' as they are called, each mixing [of cotton types] more or less skillfully adapted to the requirements of the yarn. This is as important, in its way, as the blending of teas, wines, or spirits."183 Like the distiller who coped with seasonal variation in the character of the grapes harvested, the spinner dealt with crops of cotton and wool that differed in unpredictable ways, year to year, lot by lot, depending on the season's conditions for growing cotton and raising sheep.184 Textile production depended on nature in other ways. The direction of the wind affected humidity and temperature and thus yarn breakages, so workers learned to pace their motions in response to the weather. At a mill sheltered behind a hill they learned a different rhythm of work than in a neighboring establishment exposed to the wind.185

By reason of this technical foundation, the textile industry developed in both countries into a "folk" trade, dependent on native lore and resistant to systematization.186 The relatively stagnant design of equipment and the reliance on hit-or-miss tinkering indicates that the specification of labor as a commodity in German textiles did not arise as a consequence of attempts to keep pace with technical change or to rationalize the use of technology.187 As the introduction of pay by shot first suggested, the German producers imported the definition of labor into the labor process in the early days of the factory system. They maintained their focus on the transfer of labor power to the employer although the surprisingly primitive technology of textile production during the second half of the nineteenth century discouraged employers from methodizing the conversion of labor power into a product. The adoption of a particular concept of labor in Germany did not reflect utilitarian demands but served as a premise for meeting them. The specification of labor was reproduced, not by its conformity with the tech-

nological environment, but through the symbolic configuration of micro-practices that communicated labor's definition.

In this chapter, as in the two preceding, I have relied on three forms of argument to demonstrate that the cross-national divergences in textile factory institutions had a cultural origin. Most important, I have compared similar business environments in detail to rule out alternative, utilitarian explanations for differences in factory procedures—in this instance, the allocation of overlooking costs—or for differences in the ascription of authority. In particular, my comparisons have excluded explanations based on the timing of the founding of textile mills, on adaptation to the business cycle, or on national variation in the factory directors' commitment to improving efficiency. Second, I have shown that the differing views of labor as a commodity in Britain and in Germany extended into minutiae of factory life where variation did not bear strategic consequences, such as the formal methods for distributing overlooking wages over various types of cloth. The shape of practice in these instances, too, is unamenable to utilitarian explanation. Finally, the contrasting cultural definitions of labor as a commodity in Germany and Britain which found expression in the methods of defining overlookers' remuneration serve as the core principles for interpreting an entire constellation of factory customs. The scope of the instrumentalities elucidated by a cultural principle raises our confidence in the method of analysis and challenges the advocates of purely utilitarian reasoning to account for this range of differences between German and British textile mills. Let them bring their case before the court.

Concluding Reflections on Part One

Part One of this study has not attempted to decide which of two forces, culture or material circumstances, was the more powerful. Analysts who conceive of these forces as variables to be laid out side by side might suppose that their effects were conjoined, but their admixture is in fact more fundamental than that. Not only were both prerequisites for the composition of production, but the very operation of each remains inconceivable without the other. Material constraints assume their social effectivity only as they are encoded by culture; culture operates only as it is materialized in the concrete media at hand. The two forces are different moments in the same social process. Nonetheless, we can still isolate the effects of culture if we ask, not which had the most influence, but which comprised a social logic. The brute conditions of praxis in capitalist society, such as the need to compete in a market, did not provide the principles for organizing practices in forms that were stable and reproducible, for by themselves they did not supply a meaningful design for conduct. Rather, practices were given a consistent shape by the particular specifications of labor as a commodity that depended, to be sure, upon the general conditions of praxis for their materials, but granted them social consequences according to an intelligible logic of their own.

The discovery that factory production in Germany and Britain was orchestrated according to its signifying function bears important implications for sociological theories about the distinguishing character of human action in the capitalist order. Many in the tradition of Western Marxism have viewed the increasing salience of exclusively calculative, instrumental conduct as a characteristic developmental tendency of capitalist society.188 But looking at the sensuous realm of practice on the shop floor from a comparative perspective discloses a more complex process. One can, perhaps, refer to the "rationalization" of the labor process at the very end of the nineteenth century, when formal ideologies of management appeared and the legal system, at least in Germany, elaborated more explicitly the rules governing the transmission of labor in the factory. But the development of capitalism was not marked by the progressive reduction of the activity of labor to the logic of instrumental action alone, without respect for action's communicative function. Instrumental action, rationalized by progressive adjustments

to end-means logic, was still ordered by its conveyance of meaning and followed the cultural coordinates of a commodity form that varied apart from immediate economic conditions.189

If micro-procedures at the site of production were grouped in a meaningful pattern that incarnated different concepts of labor, how did this cultural logic tend to be incorporated consistently into practice? The concept of culture has drawn researchers' attention to the systematicity and global patterning of practices and signs, of strategies and life forms in society. Yet it is too easy to take this patterning as evidence for the influence or presence of something termed culture without asking how culture produces this configuration—or this configuration, culture. No social agent craftily designed the constellation of instrumentalities in the factory to embody, across the board, different specifications of labor as a commodity. By what processes did people create and reproduce not just an accidental assemblage of practices and concepts but an undivided cultural system based on concepts of labor?

To explain the survival of consistencies in the form of practice we need not invoke the notion of an overarching, harmonized normative order, internalized by the agents, that restrains deviant action. Once practices were installed as a consistent ensemble, their very execution could reproduce the concept of labor they embodied. Adherence to an ideal did not descend downward from contemplative knowledge of the general but percolated upward from practical knowledge of the concrete. It was the encounter with ideas residing in these humble instrumentalities that gave producers a practical knowledge of the ideal form by which labor was transferred as a commodity.190 The micro-practices contained within themselves the principle that structured the social whole; execution of specific practices could reproduce the structure of the whole from the ground up.

The question that remains unanswered is not how a patterned cultural system was maintained, but, simply, why and how do practices cohere to

begin with? The matched comparison of economic environments for British and German factories shows that, in each country, alternative conventions would have met the requirements of the firm in the realm of capitalist competition equally well. If a method for, say, the imposition of fines is installed under one form of labor as a commodity, the choice of form for other techniques is not entailed by practical necessity. What generated the tendency toward consistency of form?

Even if one admits that agents' cultural schemata are arranged into a systematic whole, it by no means follows that the institutions of the factory must themselves incorporate this coherence. Instead, culture could be used by the agents to formulate only a subjective response to practices shaped by external necessities.191 The built-in requirements of the mind for the production of meaning, which the cultural structuralists present as the ultimate cause of the coherence of culture, may well dictate a kind of formal patterning in language and in conceptual designs.192 If this holds true for the constitution of language and signification, however, the question—altogether separate—remains of how and why industrial practice in the newly emergent capitalist factory methodically embodied such adroit schemata.193

Max Weber's sociological perspective offers an advantage in responding to the riddle of systematicity in factory practices because it views cultural patterning as a contingent accomplishment open to historical investigation. As is well known, Weber identifies intellectual specialists as the historical actors who are responsible for the creation of doctrines that make possible the systematic patterning of culture and of conduct.194 Yet the details of the

cases at hand disqualify the Weberian approach to the development of a meaningful configuration of micro-practices in the factory. The principle of labor as a commodity did not form part of a formal management doctrine imparted to factory employers. To be sure, general precepts about the mutual responsibilities of the employing and the working classes had wide currency throughout the nineteenth century.195 But those sanctimonious philosophies about virtuous relations had nothing to say about the organization or execution of manufacturing techniques themselves. "So far as we know," Sidney Pollard concluded for the period of early industrialization in Britain, "the management pioneers were isolated and their ideas without great influence."196 Since so many factories were family-operated, the technical mysteries of the trade could be passed between generations through firsthand experience in the enterprise. In point of fact, there was as such no formal management doctrine to disseminate during the early development of the factory system. Professional administration of employees did not form an object for sustained reflection and study in either Germany or Britain until approximately the 1880s.197 Until then the managerial function on the shop floor was not differentiated from that of technical oversight. Accordingly, books on the management of textile mills most often referred to machinery, not people.198 At least until midcentury, the very term manager in Britain lacked a clear referent. The usual title for a supervisor of employees was clerk , a locution directed toward the older activity of book-

keeping.199 The crystallization of factory practices based on specifications of labor that varied between Germany and Britain occurred decades before the emergence of management science in either country.

The functioning of the networks of communication in the textile districts also excludes the possibility that similarities in practices across regions arose from the diffusion of formal doctrine about the efficient deployment of labor among machines. Although factory procedures in Yorkshire and Lancashire were based on similar principles, in the formative years of the factory system factory owners in these provinces did not remain in contact with each other to transmit information about those practices.200 The language of shop-floor life confirms the independence of development. In each of the neighborhoods of Lancashire and Yorkshire counties, managers used distinct vocabularies for parts of the loom and jobs in the mill.201 Information about technical innovation—a subject of great concern to mill managers—was slow to diffuse. For example, managers in Elland, just outside Bradford, did not acquire for two decades the attachments for automatically changing the weft color on multi-shuttle looms that were standard in the city of Bradford by the 1870s.202 How much less likely is it, therefore, that communication at length among factory managers about the interior social life of the mill led to the standardization of procedures within each country for managing the purchase of "labor" in the factory. The patterning of conduct according to the specification of labor as a commodity did not reflect a deliberate systematization of administrative rules.

If the patterning did not result from agents orienting themselves to environment with a certain schema and then creating a world in the image of this schema—the solution of idealists—neither was it the trace of the imperatives of the capitalist system imposing their image on people's consciousness. We cannot derive the cultural pattern from the functional requirements of the economy operating behind people's backs, for the

differing specifications of labor were both equally well suited for the reproduction of capitalism. Moreover, they could have been used together indiscriminately in one setting. The conditions of the capitalist system may have sustained a cultural outlook, but they did not by themselves inaugurate it; conversely, a cultural template lodged in concrete practice may have served as a moment in the reproduction of the capitalist system, but it did not create a capitalist economy.

The execution of practice incorporates a cultural schema, as Bourdieu always reminds us.203 Yet even in his studies of kin-based societies, Bourdieu did not consider seriously the next issue: whence, not just culture, but a cultural system? 204 If action requires conception, still there is no requirement emanating from the agents themselves that requires diverse practices to follow a single, generalizable idea. The record of anthropological research shows time and again that agents seem to have an inexhaustible capacity for synthesizing contradictory assumptions into a coherent, though perhaps imperfectly consistent, outlook.205 The systematicity of practices on the shop floor did not reflect some cognitive necessity lodged in the agents themselves that required them to "think" the structure of society or of the factory with a single principle. Such an explanation would reduce culture to a constraint of the contemplative mind, as if agents engaged in practice so as to gaze upon it from without as upon a work of art—and a simple one at that.

In each country, the operative concept of labor had two guises. Within the rude walls of the factory, the producers transmitted "labor" as an imaginative construct of their lifeworld to their employers through their tangible actions and face-to-face social ties; yet, beyond the realm of lived experience, abstract human labor formed the common denominator by which diverse kinds of products with incomparable use values could be brought into relation with each other and exchanged in the market, awakening to life an impersonal world of commodities in motion. The category

of labor did not function as a pivotal concept because it expressed the detached logic of the capitalist system, or, from the other side, because it revealed the supremacy of culture in the producers' negotiation of a meaningful order; instead, it bridged these two realms of a market-integrated social structure and the experienced world. If people monitor and organize their conduct in accordance with the commodity form of labor, they reproduce the networks of exchange and of objectified social relations that constitute capitalist society. Georg Lukács, who insisted on linking the dynamic of the capitalist system to the forms of understanding that people used to constitute their practice and experience, gave this insight a classic formulation long ago. "Objectively, in so far as the commodity form facilitates the equal exchange of qualitatively different objects, it can exist only if that formal equality is in fact recognized—at any rate, in this relation, which indeed confers upon them their commodity character," Lukács wrote. "Subjectively, this formal equality of human labor in the abstract is not only the common factor to which the various commodities are reduced; it also becomes the real principle governing the actual production of commodities."206

In capitalist society alone could a concept of labor serve as the organizing principle for a multiplicity of humble practices. Where labor has not been subsumed under the commodity form, it may be recognized as the source of material sustenance but it does not take on the social function of structuring the relation of person to person through the exchange of abstract labor time. Definitions of labor may not surface at all in kinbased or precapitalist societies as a principle for structuring social relations; should they arise, they remain subordinate to other categories coordinating social reproduction.207 Only in capitalist society is labor both a form of understanding and the integrative principle that regulates social relations in society as a whole; only there does it bridge lived experience and the invisible functioning of a system.

If these considerations render intelligible the patterning of practice by a specification of labor as a commodity, yet they do not explain why the concepts of labor differed between Germany and Britain. To answer this question requires us to uncover the historical genesis of the divergent concepts and the conditions governing their transmission in quotidian practice. That is the task in Part Two of this work.

The Codification of a Market in Products

As in the commercially advanced Italian cities, so in Britain the rise of trade in the products of wage labor coincided with the first reflections on labor as a source of wealth. Clement Armstrong, writing in 1535, concluded in the language of his day that "artificialites"—that is, products manufactured by artisans—provided the mainstay of Britain's foreign-exchange earnings. "Suerly the common weale of England muste rise out of the workes of the common people," he said; " . . . the workes of artificialite encressith plenty of money."10 Although human industry had emerged as a focus of attention for Armstrong, it did not appear to him as something conveyable as a com-

modity or as an ingredient that determined the relative prices of goods.11 When the revolution initiated in 1640 swept away restrictions on internal trade, labor time emerged as a national resource with a metric and as the standard of the value of transmittable goods.12

Britain drifted into the waters of a formally free market by default.13 In the course of the revolution, the executive government lost its arbitrary powers over local authorities.14 The dismantling of the prerogative courts made economic regulation a matter for Parliament.15 But Parliament, in contrast to the Privy Council, proved too unwieldy a body to pass significant bills of regulation for the country as a whole.16 The tortuous history of legislation after the Restoration shows that corporate regulation ended not because of a growing allegiance to laissez-faire but as a result of the deadlock between diverse commercial interests.17

Britain's unintended transition to a formally free commercial regime was fundamentally different from the more abrupt entry experienced on the Continent. There the passage to a new order could be debated in some measure and decreed. In France the revolutionary legislation of 1791, which abolished provincial and urban guild restrictions on trade, may not have transformed business mentality overnight; nonetheless, these laws marked

a dramatic break in the comprehension of commercial intercourse. In Prussia the bold edicts of 1810 serve as a signpost for the shift to a formal market society. The experience of discontinuity on the Continent versus a prolonged transition in Britain also points to a conjunctural difference in the institutional settings under which tradespeople came to envision the conveyance of labor as a commodity.

The Compass of the Commodity

The launching of the new market society in England was a work of blindness, an interpretation of the sale of labor that followed one of imagination. William Petty was perhaps the first British economist to combine a focus on labor as a creator of wealth with a systematic account of the determination of a commodity's exchange value.18 All too often his ideas appear as precursors to more refined theories of labor rather than as signals of abiding features of British commercial thinking. In A Treatise of Taxes and Contributions , published in 1662, Petty judged that both land and labor served as "natural denominations" of the value of all goods: "that is, we ought to say, a Ship or garment is worth such a measure of Land, with such another measure of Labour."19 The dual standards of land and labor remain a part of his thinking even when he focuses upon the more specific question of the principles that determine the relative prices of commodities:

Commentators unable to divest themselves of prior acquaintance with Marx are wont to assume that Petty anticipates Marx's premise that goods produced with equal amounts of labor have matching values.21 But Petty asserts only that the value of one commodity, corn, equals the value of another, silver, if the time spent producing them is equal, after deducting the expense, in labor and seed, of their production.22 He adds, "The neat proceed of the Silver is the price of the whole neat proceed of the Corn."23 There is no assurance that the prior expenses of the corn farm and the silver business are equal or that the labor expended by the producers for subsistence is on average equal. In fact, Petty's descriptions make this improbable, because the land makes an independent addition to the subsistence of the husbandman. Petty does not offer a theory in which the value of a product can be determined by adding up the costs of its components. He contends that the value of the product is determined by the surplus land and labor devoted to its production—a tracer for identifying original features of the British concept of labor as a commodity.24

Most wage earners and petty commodity producers in seventeenth-century Britain derived part of their subsistence from farming their own parcels, as did Petty's father, who combined agriculture with weaving.25 Analysts of early industrialization and the putting-out system have long observed that laborers in these situations do not receive equal returns on the time they spend on subsistence farming and that spent on manufacture for exchange. Depending on the sufficiency of their holdings, they can earn far more or far less per unit of time devoted to manufacture than to agriculture at home.26 Adam Smith commented upon one side of the anomaly: where cottagers derived their subsistence from their own agriculture, he said, their manufacture "comes frequently cheaper to market than would otherwise be suitable to its nature."27 The price of the product need not cover the labor invested in it, because it does not cover the workers' subsistence. Marx, too, observed that production was not governed by the laws of exchange value if independent workers directly produced their own means of subsistence.28 What seemed an incidental exception in Smith's century and Marx's was still a frequent occurrence in Petty's. Rather than formulate a "law" of value that was anything but, Petty's examples assume that laborers may have an independent means of subsistence outside the market.29

The manufacturer of silver in Petty's excerpted paragraph is not a wage earner but an independent producer who covers the expenses of his undertaking.30 He has the capital on hand for maintaining himself, lays out the capital needed for the production process, and manages the transport of the goods. By comparison, Petty banished the propertyless wage-earner from the liberal commercial order.

Petty dismissed wage labor as something inferior, which ought not be treated as a market commodity at all. He recommended instead that the government fix wage rates by law.32 "The Law that appoints such Wages," he concluded, "should allow the Labourer but just wherewithall to live."33 From Petty's standpoint, what an outsider might call labor power has no price set by the market.

In fine, Petty's text marks the emergence of a concept of labor as a commodity restricted to surplus labor traded freely in a market, embodied in a product, and vended by independent commodity producers.34 Petty was not alone among seventeenth-century writers in assuming that labor as a marketable commodity was traded between self-employed workers. Nicholas Barbon, a successful building contractor, is remembered for picturing trade

as "nothing else but an exchange of one mans labour for another."35 Barbon assumed that this trade took place between independent tradespeople, such as butchers, bakers, and drapers. In the confused succession of oppositional religious and political ideas of the seventeenth century, labor acquired diverse meanings. But the critics of the old order, from worldly critics of idle monks to the Puritan theorists, were united in one supposition: when they contrived explanations for the dignity of labor, they sanctified only the free craftspeople. Their formulations, which amounted to crude versions of a labor theory of value, rested upon the proprietorship of one's person and capacities that the dependent wage laborers, by contrast, had in the popular opinion forfeited once and for all.36

These writers may have occupied themselves with general principles, but they did not try to establish a systematic science. Most of the economic thinkers per se were entrepreneurs who wanted to enrich themselves by convincing others of the advantages of adopting certain policies.37 Petty may have written his most notable work, A Treatise of Taxes and Contributions , in the hope of advancing his fortune as surveyor general in Ireland.38 Petty and the clever marketers of the time drew upon premises that they expected others to understand easily. They did not create, but expressed, the assump-

tions of their age.39 Their ideas about labor corresponded to those held by many common people, as is confirmed in the popular sentiments that came to the surface following the crisis of 1640.

The Levellers, the most inventive publishers of democratic tracts during the revolutionary period, were united by aspirations for change rather than by a coherent program. Nonetheless, the statements of the Levellers about the franchise reveal that for the common people of Britain, the divide between the sale of wage labor and of products made with labor was fraught with significance. As C. B. Macpherson perceptively observed, the Levellers supposed that the capacity to labor was a form of property "not metaphorically but essentially."40 People who sold their labor power for a wage lost their birthright and claim to freedom, as if they had permanently alienated a piece of land.41 They no longer had the right to exclude others from the use and enjoyment of their labor power, and so they had forfeited their property in it altogether. Macpherson adduces evidence that prominent spokespersons for the Levellers used this reasoning to deny the franchise to wage earners.42 By the same logic, independent artisans, however penurious, sold only the products of their labor and thereby retained a claim to freedom and voice in government.43

The outlook of the Levellers, C. B. Macpherson has suggested, reflected their experience of freedom and competition in the market.44 Among their ranks were many small craftsmen who lacked freehold land or membership in a chartered trading corporation.45 They learned all too well that workers retained their liberty and self-direction only on condition that they protected their status as independent producers.46 The semi-servile position of wage earners influenced the vision of the most revolutionary segment of the Levellers' movement. Gerrard Winstanley, a leader of the Diggers, declared it iniquitous for people to work for wages.47 "We can as well live under a foreign enemy working for day wages," he said, "as under our own brethren." He recommended that the law forbid the institution of wage labor altogether.48

When political advisers, merchants, and poor artisans converged upon the view that the only kind of labor sold with a proper commercial value was that of the independent producer, all did so for the same reason: the institutions of work in Britain appeared to reveal labor as a commodity only under this guise. By 1690, according to Gregory King's appraisal, the total of la-

boring people and out-servants had reached one-quarter of the population. This group did not on average earn enough, he thought, to cover the price of their subsistence.49 Latter-day research confirms the dismal view that people who depended only on wages could not maintain themselves. How they survived remains as much a riddle for modern economists as it was for contemporaries.50 Roger North complained that the clothiers of their day kept dependent laborers "but just alive," so that the desperate employees resorted to theft or escaped starvation only by receiving poor relief.51 Wage earners were called, not "workers," but "the poor," those in need of benefactory employment or handouts.52

The low remuneration for wage earners could not help but shape the development of notions of labor as a commodity. People viewed wage labor not as a means of supporting themselves but as a supplement to a primary source of sustenance such as a smallholding.53 One retrospective calculation of the incomes of the common people found that a licensed beggar in the seventeenth century could expect higher proceeds than the average wage-

earner.54 Wage laborers as such could not survive as market actors.55 People in trade and industry who pictured the emerging commercial society saw labor as the wellspring of prosperity,56 but under these historical circumstances the sale of labor power was ill suited to serve as a model for the exchange of labor as a commodity in general.

The depressed level of wages in England represented a work of political art. The process of enclosing land, which continued through the seventeenth century, deprived people of their livelihood in the countryside faster than new possibilities opened up in urban or rural industry.57 Where a balance between the labor supply and need for labor did reappear, the employing class used the machinery of local government to restrain any wage increases.58 The Statute of Apprentices, dating from Elizabeth's reign, gave justices of the peace the responsibility for fixing wage rates for common occupations. These officials were supposed to set minimum levels of remuneration in times of need. In practice, during the seventeenth century they generally confined their efforts to setting maximum rates.59 Employers who violated the standards by paying a higher wage were subject to fines.60 The justices set wages at low levels with the expectation that wage earners would find additional support as agricultural tenants or as beneficiaries of poor

relief.61 In some instances, local officials did not simply block pay increases; they specified a new standard that fell below the previous average.62 Alice Clark, after comparing the cost of food with the legislated wages, concluded, "The Justices would like to have exterminated wage earners, who were an undesirable class in the community."63

Especially in the fledgling textile industries, employers used the statutory restrictions on wages to impede the development of a market in wage labor. In 1673 the justices of Lancashire supported the employers by republishing maximum legal wage rates in the textile trade "to the end that masters and mistresses of families shall not soe frequently tempte a good servante to leave his service by offering more or greater wages than the law permits."64 Magistrates responded to employers' reports of workers' dickering over wages by ordering strict enforcement of the maximum rates, which covered men and women regardless of the form of wage.65 In the textile regions justices issued and revised wage assessments most frequently, and in greatest detail, in areas such as Wiltshire, where the small independent clothier was fast disappearing and the divide between master and journeyman had grown widest.66 Exactly

in the regions where the first groups of people dependent on only their wages emerged, there statutory restrictions ensured that labor power was not treated or conceived of as a market commodity.67 The mass of rural laborers were "brutally repressed," in Walzer's words, but "they were not integrated into a modern economic system."68

The reflections of Rice Vaughan brilliantly illustrate how people of the era segregated labor power from market commodities. In one of the earliest analyses of monetary value, published in 1655, Vaughan sought to measure changes in the worth of money due to changes in its supply over more than a century. The prices of commodities—"Cloth, Linnen, Leather, and the like," he said—varied in response to the oscillations of fashion, the supply of raw materials, and improvements in manufacturing technology. On these grounds, fluctuations in the cost of buying these ordinary goods could not measure changes in the purchasing power of money. Vaughan reckoned that labor was unique because its real price was untouched by supply and demand. The "Wisdom of the Statute" fixed wages at the bare level needed for the necessaries of life. So "there is only one thing, from whence we may certainly track out prices," he concluded, "and that is the price of Labourers and Servants Wages, especially those of the meaner sort."69 Vaughan reversed the modern technique of consumer price indexing. Instead of recording changes in prices to calculate the real purchasing power of wages, he used adjustments in the money wages of labor over decades to chart the shifting value of money.70 Labor power served as the only orienting point,

because it comprised the only money good excluded from market fluctuations. Until the early eighteenth century, not only people of genius like Vaughan and Petty but almost everyone who speculated about the proper determination of wages endorsed stringent regulation.71

By the laws of preindustrial England, persons not lawfully retained, apprenticed, or claiming an agricultural holding were compelled to serve any farmer or tradesman needing labor.72 Especially if a temporary scarcity of labor arose, the local authorities forced unoccupied men and women into useful occupations.73 The economic compulsion of a market economy did not suffice for the procurement of labor; extra-economic sanctions made work a legal obligation.74 Accordingly, Sir William Blackstone, in his famous Commentaries on English law, published from 1765 through 1769, treated the relation between the employer and the laborer as one based not on contract but on status. The labor transaction, Blackstone averred, was "founded in convenience, whereby a man is directed to call in the assistance of others, where his own skill and labour will not be sufficient to answer the cares incumbent upon him."75 Here, as in the remainder of his discussion of the labor transaction, Blackstone fails to specify whether the subordinate satisfying this "call" for aid does so by consent. To the contrary, Blackstone's treatment of the matter, the definitive codification of mid-eighteenth-

century legal thought, created a category of "permanent" servants, a label which referred not to the length of their employment for a particular master but to an inherent condition in their person which compelled them to work for others. According to Blackstone, custom set some standard hours of work, but an employer could require his laborers to do his bidding at any moment, night or day, as if they were serfs with no time unconditionally their own.76 In practice as in the collective imagination, only independent producers could treat their labor as if it were freely alienable, individual property; otherwise, labor could be commanded.77

At least the group of workers coerced by the local justices to work for an employer had one protection denied those who fell into their jobs by other means. If the workers had been drafted into service by statute, local justices who fixed the wage rates had clear authority to issue orders forcing employers to disburse the wages owed to workers.78 Otherwise, legal remedies were uncertain and numerous masters fell weeks—even months—behind in paying their subordinates.79 Some masters forced their workpeople to take promissory notes in lieu of wages.80 Yet there was more to the legal subservience of labor. When an employer accused his workers of having neglected their duty, claiming that they had left their employment or performed unsatisfactorily, the alleged misdeed was classified not as a breach of a civil contract but as criminal misbehavior.81 If the obligation to serve arose from

workers' status rather than by agreement, it was only consistent to enforce the obligation to serve through the mechanism of criminal law. Offenders were incarcerated for weeks or months.82 The alternative of paying money damages to an employer allegedly injured by a worker's absence, as if the labor power withheld were a commodity like any other, was proscribed.83 The law denied labor power the status of a simple ware.

Meanwhile the sale of manufactures took place in a comparatively unrestricted market. To be sure, foreign commerce remained the monopoly of government-chartered companies until 1689.84 But competition in domestic trade, despite the ancient licensing of trading corporations, was opened to almost all challengers during the seventeenth century.85 During this period, the powerful London merchants succeeded in breaking down provincial barriers against traders from distant cities who wished to contract for work in the countryside.86 Thus the London merchants expanded to include the whole of the country in their commercial web.87 This provided the stuff for writers to envision society as a network of market exchanges. "The free circulation of trade among the common people," wrote T. Tryon in 1698, "hath made England exceed all here Neighboring Nations in Riches."88 Catchpenny reasoning was threaded into all layers of the social fabric. "Facts relating to Commerce," opined a commentator in 1680, "branch into almost

as many parts as there are humane Actions."89 The term market price no longer referred to the tangible location at which merchandise changed hands, but to the determination of value by abstract forces operating independently of the wills of individuals.90 In Britain (but not in Germany or France) the development of market thinking followed a separate chronology from the commercialization of labor power.91

The views of labor as a commodity invented concurrently with the rise of liberal commercialism in Britain retained their essential form during the eighteenth century. Until the monumental work of Adam Smith appeared, the economist most celebrated by intellectual and financial speculators was Sir James Steuart. Steuart divided the agents of production into two groups: slaves, under either feudal or colonial orders, and workmen. Workmen labored as independent commodity producers. "Those who want to consume," Steuart wrote in his treatise of 1767, "send the merchant, in a manner, to the workman for his labour, and do not go themselves; the workman sells to this interposed person and does not look for a consumer."92 In Steuart's analysis, the workman covers the entire production expense of the finished ware he sells to the merchant, including tools and materials. This autonomous artisan ordinarily turns a profit for his products above their "prime cost"—that is, beyond the labor and material invested.93 The laborer who is dependent upon a wage contract is conspicuously absent in this theory. Steuart's division of producers into feudal slaves and masterless workmen illustrates the prevailing assumption that labor entered the market as a free

commodity only when it was incorporated into a finished good and vended by independent manufacturers.

The Institutionalization of a Market in Labor

The restrictions on the level of wages which had proven so useful to British employers during the genesis of capitalist relations of production were thrown aside but a few generations later. To be sure, the statutory rates of wages could restrain pay increases. Under altered circumstances, however, they also limited wage reductions. Since the employment relation did not arise through free contract, masters could be required to support dependent laborers both when there was work to be done and when there was not.94 The employing class that had once welcomed legal intrusions to bind and discipline workers came to find the limitations on their purchase of labor power odious. "The Statutes for regulating wages and the price of labour," wrote Dean Tucker in 1757, "are another absurdity and a very great hurt to trade. Absurd and preposterous it must surely appear for a third person to attempt to fix the price between buyer and seller without their own consents. . . . How can any stated regulations be so contrived as to make due and reasonable allowance for plenty or scarcity of work, cheapness or dearness of provisions, difference of living in town or country?"95 By the time Tucker and others, including textile entrepreneurs, had formulated their criticisms, however, regulation was becoming superfluous.96 As the landholdings of wage earners shrank, they became increasingly dependent on wage labor for their subsistence and unable to withhold their labor from the marketplace. To curb wages, manufacturers could rely on the coercive power of the market alone.97

The statutory rating of wages had weakened in some trades when the eighteenth century commenced; by the middle of the century it was moribund in many branches, though not forgotten.98 The system, Sir John Clapham judged, "died harder than historians used to think—and the memory of it did not die."99 In the textile trade, as ever the leading department of manufacture, the assessment of wages by the justices became ever more difficult as the varieties of weaving proliferated in response to market enticements.100 The surviving records do not let investigators date the demise of wage assessments for cloth production with precision.101 In the West Riding of Yorkshire the steady enforcement of assessments faded after 1732.102 In Gloucestershire, the clothiers generally ignored the rating of wages issued in 1728.103 With the slow disappearance of assessments to guarantee minimum earnings, the judicial rationale for compel-

ling idle laborers to work for any farmer or tradesperson needing help also faded.104

The changes in the institutional framework for determining the price of labor established the background for a momentous change in the appreciation of labor as a marketable ware. During the first century of liberal commercialism in Britain, the belief persisted that workers delivered their labor only under the compulsions of law and hunger.105 Many enterprises in pottery, mining, and textiles bound their laborers by servile terms of indenture that held them to the same employer for terms of one to twenty years.106 After the middle of the eighteenth century, employers began to rely upon cash rather than coercive stipulations to secure labor. The opinion slowly and tentatively took hold that workers could be stimulated to work harder by the promise of higher earnings.107 It required several decades for this viewpoint to become general.108 By 1776 Adam Smith was able to draw upon it confidently. "Where wages are high," Smith observed, "accordingly, we shall always find the workmen more active, diligent, and expeditious, than where they are low."109 Indeed, some eighteenth-century employers came to worry that if laborers were remunerated according to the quantity of their output, they would overexert themselves and ruin their constitutions.110 By the time Smith set down his thoughts, the Statutes of Elizabeth that had mandated terms of apprenticeship as a requisite for legal exercise of ancient craft occupations were dead letters.111 Labor power was belatedly christened as a commodity.

But under what name? The employment of wage labor was assimilated to the prior notion of labor sold as it was embodied in the product of an independent artisan. Strange to say, this continuity is illustrated most vividly in what may otherwise appear to be an historical rupture: the issuance of Smith's Wealth of Nations. Smith's formulations about the efficiency of the market may have recast the field of high theory, but his portrayal of labor rested upon the appropriation of simple, long-standing ideas from social practice.

Adam Smith's Substance

Smith establishes a foundation for the relative prices of different commodities by extending to the contemporary setting the principles he finds effective in a simplified, archetypal kind of exchange. He seeks the determinants of the values of goods in a situation that "precedes both the appropriation of land and the accumulation of stock."112 In this original state, where capital investments do not enter into the cost of production, Smith adduces that

This hypothetical construction lets Smith introduce a set of paired suppositions: the labor the worker applies to the product equals and determines the product's exchange value; and people do not trade their living labor—or, to introduce an anachronism in this context, "labor power"—directly for goods, but instead receive their dues by exchanging the product of their labor for other products. Smith also refers at moments to such a society of independent producers as if it were a current reality. In an opulent, well-governed society, he claims, "Every workman has a great quantity of his own work to dispose of beyond what he himself has occasion for; and every other workman being in exactly the same situation, he is enabled to ex-

change a great quantity of his own goods for a great quantity, or, what comes to the same thing, for the price of a great quantity of theirs."114

Smith, however, recognized at other moments that not all those who sold their labor in the market did so as independent producers. He commented upon the decay in the statutory restrictions on wages and concluded that people had themselves become wares in the marketplace. "The demand for men, like that for any other commodity," he observed, "necessarily regulates the production of men, quickens it when it goes on too slowly, and stops it when it advances too fast."115 Whereas Petty and Steuart excluded wage labor from their theory of the market, Smith tries to explain the contribution of labor to the value of goods when the owner of stock invests capital in an enterprise and hires workers for a wage. "In this state of things," Smith reasons, "the whole produce of labor does not always belong to the labourer. He must in most cases share it with the owner of the stock which employs him."116 When he takes up the question of the source of the capitalist's profit, it seems that Smith alters his initial definition of the determinants of a product's value:

On the face of it, this passage contradicts Smith's ground premise that labor alone is the source of value. Now the amount of capital applied in the production of the good comprises an independent part of its price. Yet he also contends that the worth of the good can still be translated, by another means, into the universal equivalent, labor, because the finished product has the value of the labor for which it can be exchanged. He makes an unacknowledged shift here in the definition of the value of goods between the two cases, from the quantity of labor the goods contain to the quantity of labor that can be gotten in exchange for them.118

Smith's identification of labor with the delivery of a product permits him to elide this shift in his definition of value while moving from the principles that regulated transactions in the archetypal "nation of hunters" to the conditions when capital has accumulated. In fact, it provides the first occasion for this slippage between the determination of value by the amount of labor a product contains and the determination of value by the amount of labor for which it can be exchanged. A man's fortune is greater or less, Smith says, precisely in proportion to "the quantity either of other men's labour, or, what is the same thing , of the produce of other men's labour, which it enables him to purchase."119 Here Smith equates the employment of wage labor with the purchase of a product, an equation he repeats when he discusses the value of an article produced in capitalist society: "In exchanging the complete manufacture either for money, for labour, or for other goods , over and above what may be sufficient to pay the price of the materials, and the wages of the workmen, something must be given for the profits of the undertaker of work, who hazards his stock in this adventure."120 To lay out the circuit of reasoning here: Smith supposes that if the hiring of a person's labor is the same as buying that person's product, then the owners of goods end up receiving the same amount of labor whether they exchange it for labor in the employment relation or on the market for other products. In the second case, exchanges of merchandise, the value of the owners' goods equals the quantity of materialized labor they contain. In the first case, exchanges in the employment relation, the value of the owners' goods equals the quantity of living labor for which they will exchange. If labor as a commodity is exchanged only via its products, however, these two cases become equivalent.121

The import of these equations becomes apparent if we pose the question that Marx did: in capitalist society, do we know whether the quantity of labor in the goods that the worker gets back in the form of wages equals the quantity of labor the worker gives to the employer? To be sure, the restricted

conditions of the archetypal situation prior to the accumulation of capital permit a comparison between the value of the worker's living labor and the value of the "objectified labor" in the commodities for which it trades. In this restrictive situation, where the worker keeps the whole of his produce, the quantity of labor he invests in the product equals the labor he gets by exchanging it. In the actual situation, however, the wage laborer, as Smith says, cannot keep the whole of the produce. How do we decide what the worker ought to keep? In retrospect it appears that Smith's shift to the determination of value by the amount of labor for which a product will exchange makes it impossible to allocate shares to labor and capital based on the value of what they contribute to production. The value of the labor cannot be separated from the capital, because it has a value only when the mixture of the two is conveyed in the market. Smith satisfies himself with the observation that "the real value of all the different components of price  . . . is measured by the quantity of labor which they can, each of them, purchase or command."122 Yet viewing the employment relation as the delivery of labor in the form of a product allows him to assume that it falls under the ethical rules that governed the exchange of products in the archetypal situation. He sees the employer of labor as giving the worker a certain quantity of goods (in the form of wages) in exchange for another quantity of goods (the produce of labor).123 Even after the accumulation of stock, the product belongs initially only to the laborers who created it, even if they must in the end share portions of it with the owners of capital as a "deduction."124

Smith's Wealth of Nations reveals the intellectual reproduction of the assumptions about labor as a commodity that originated during the genesis of liberal commercialism in Britain. Abstract human labor was recognized as a transferable ware only as it was incorporated into a product that circulated in the sphere of exchange.125 This understanding of labor did not sur-

vive in the minds of armchair readers alone. It was sustained in social relations through everyday practice on the shop floor. When journeymen weavers of the eighteenth century worked in the shop of a master rather than on their own account, their payment was often reckoned as "the third part of the cloth"—that is, one-third of the price the material fetched when the master sold it to the merchant clothier.126 The labor was remunerated by its concretization in cloth brought to market. The concept of labor as a commodity that prevailed in British economic theory did not "reflect" material practices; it was born incarnate in their overall consistencies.

Other circumstances provided suitable material for sustaining the assumption that the commodity of labor resided in a substance. In many trades, artisans' remuneration followed customary piece rates fixed by custom that reached as far back as workers could recollect. A woolen weaver from the West Country testified in 1802 that the rate for a certain cloth had not changed in his lifetime, "nor yet in my father's memory."127 When stocking makers struck for higher wages in 1814, they asserted that their rates had changed only twice in two hundred years. The stability in quoted rates veiled the operation of the shifting market, for in times of labor scarcity employers supplemented the rates with perquisites such as a share of the produce or of the work materials. In all events, the compensation did not appear in the form of a simple wage for labor power. Rather, the major, identifiable part of the compensation was fixed in products that had been

assigned a certain value for decades, as though an established quantity of materialized labor had a self-evident value.128

The small instrumentalities of quotidian experience reproduced a specification of labor as a commodity that evolved from the broader context of market development in Britain. The commercialization of artisanal production in Britain since the seventeenth century led to the growth of extensive subcontracting networks and to the separation of master employers, who coordinated the collection of products, from the shops where the manual work was executed.129 "The employer's role was to initiate the process of production and market the finished goods. What came between," as Clive Behagg recently summed up, "was properly the province of labor."130 The carpet weavers of Kidderminster expressed this assumption during a long strike in 1828. They collectively sought a new "employer" by advertising in the local press for investors willing to put capital in a weaving undertaking with the strikers as both laborers and, effectively, organizers of the firm.131 Of course, the decentralized putting-out networks were not sufficient for the genesis of the cultural definition of labor as a commodity in Britain. Otherwise, the same understanding would have prevailed everywhere in Europe. The structure of the networks could only reproduce the specification of labor that originated in the broader market context, due to the staggered emergence of formally free markets in products and in labor power itself.

Autobiographies from hand workers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries shed additional light on workers' own perception of the wage relationship in these putting-out networks. They emphasize that the employer was rarely to be seen. The typical work group in the eighteenth

century consisted of adults of equal rank, with a young helper or two.132 The organization of production was left to the discretion of workers, who, with the commercialization of the trade, came to see that they were delivering not just tangible products but the commodity of labor materialized in a good. Recent studies of production in early nineteenth-century Britain show that even after industrialization began in earnest and the golden age of Smith's idealized artisans had passed, workers in small shops continued to claim the right to organize the labor process and to control the output until it was delivered to the employer. For example, the workers in a rule shop in Birmingham during the 1840s remained so confident of their control on the shop floor that when their employer tried to spy on them they scared him off by "shying at him rotten potatoes, stale bread, and  . . . on occasions, things of a worse description."133

Let no one suppose, however, that the permanence of small-scale units of production or the unbroken transmittal of artisanal culture accounts for the formation of the distinct British concept of labor as a commodity.134 Whereas a superficial continuity appears in the organizational form of production, the cultural code inscribed in work practices changed with the commodification of labor. Even in ancient societies workers sold their products; only in the unique epoch of liberal commercialism could the producers also come to see those products as vessels for the exchange of abstract labor time.135 Early mercantile businessmen had accepted the delivery of goods from subcontractors at erratic intervals; they had not set down schedules for

delivery that protected their claim to the workers' labor per se.136 In this blessed era, weavers could work for more than one trader at a time.137 When traders imposed delivery schedules on workers who depended upon a single contractor for their sustenance, the transaction acquired a new definition: workers delivered, not merely crafts work, but the timed life activity materialized in it, that is, embodied labor.138 Eighteenth-century legislation compelled male and female domestic workers to meet production deadlines or face prosecution.139 In parallel fashion, masters at artisanal shops who did not calibrate the hours of attendance still expected each worker to meet delivery quotas.140 Larger concerns in iron working and in the pottery trades in the eighteenth century also began to insist on the regular delivery of labor products. Long before the installation of powered machinery, they introduced codes that required workers who had once sauntered in and out of workplaces as they pleased to appear instead at fixed intervals on the shop floor.141

Labor's progressive envelopment in a commodity form can be traced with flawless clarity in discursive practices as well. Although Petty in the seventeenth century had made labor a standard of value, he had also viewed it as a kind of natural substance, not unlike the raw materials delivered from the land. He observed, for instance, that a calf could increase in value if it grazed unattended. What, he asked, is the general par between the value generated by the land and that created by labor? For him they appeared as equivalent, irreducible sources of wealth.142 Smith, by contrast, did not suppose that labor created value by making substances equivalent to nature. Human labor represented the sole, independent, and socially generated source of value.143 Smith made labor constitutive of social relations in high theory at the same time the form of labor as a commodity became a central, organizing principle of micro-practices on the shop floor.144

The Transmission of Labor in the Age of the Factory

On the clock of the artisanal world, Smith formulated his ideas at the eleventh hour, when the development of a market in labor itself had become inescapably obvious but the commencement of the industrial revolution was as yet perceived only dimly.145 With the founding of the Ricardian school of economics at the beginning of the nineteenth century, the most widespread form of considered reflection on the economy in Britain moved to an explicitly industrial view of society.146 Ricardo envisioned a social order with three classes: owners of capital, owners of land, and wage earners in the owners' employ. He saw all workers as dependent laborers, and he

took the mechanization of production for granted.147 If political economy moved smoothly in the wake of economic change, reflecting and generalizing upon it, would not British thinkers come to discard the notion that wage laborers sold materialized labor? Smith had already found it difficult to reduce the wage contract to the exchange of products. Would not the sale of labor in the form of a product appear increasingly anachronistic in the age of the factory? For social investigators coming after Marx, it may seem more "accurate" to encode labor in the form of "labor power." But this partiality reduces culture to a reflection of social organization. When Ricardo set out to clarify the role of labor in economic life, he did not reject but reinvigorated older suppositions about labor as a commodity.

In his Principles of Political Economy , composed more than forty years after Smith's Wealth of Nations , Ricardo identified some of the major confusions in his predecessor's work. Ricardo uncovered the surreptitious moves Smith made between two specifications of how labor determines the value of commodities: as Ricardo summarized the difference, sometimes by "the quantity of labour bestowed on the production" of the commodity, sometimes by "the quantity of labour which that commodity would purchase."148 To set the matter straight, Ricardo declared that only with the first definition could an invariant measure of value be obtained.149 He reached this conclusion by observing that the value of labor in exchange varied—that is, the quantity of labor in the goods that the worker could buy in return for selling his own labor fluctuated with market conditions.150 By comparison, Ricardo believed that the quantity of labor the worker bestowed on a product provided a fixed standard for comparing the value of goods in the face of apparent shifts in exchange values. Ricardo reasoned that if a commodity suddenly required a lesser quantity of labor for its production due to technological improvement, that commodity would be exchanged for a lesser quantity of embodied labor.151

Given the initial trajectory of his thinking, Ricardo might well have arrived at the view that the owner purchased labor as if it were a potential rather than as if it were already materialized in a product. After all, the very first line of his book, by which he definitely announced his entry onto the front stage of the British intellectual drama, sent him on a straightforward path: "The value of a commodity  . . . depends on the relative quantity of labour which is necessary for its production, and not on the greater or lesser compensation which is paid for that labor."152 He could not have chosen a more auspicious starting point for considering discrepancies between labor costs and labor quantities. His emphasis on the quantity of labor might have led him to consider how employers derive varying quantities of labor from their workers' potential. Yet he retained the idea that labor was delivered in the form of a product even under penalty of introducing inconsistency into his system.153

Whereas Smith resorted to his second definition of value in exchange when he observed that with the advent of reliance upon accumulated stock in production the wage of the worker is no longer equal to the entire value of the products created, Ricardo's approach assumes that the transition to capitalist conditions of production in no way compromises Smith's first definition of value, based on the labor materialized in a product. If the relative prices of commodities are determined by the quantities of labor they contain, this remains true no matter how much of this quantity of labor is reimbursed to the workers as a wage. So Ricardo thinks only Smith's

first formulation of value, based on the labor bestowed on a commodity, is accurate: "If the reward of the labourer were always in proportion to what he produced, the quantity of labour bestowed on a commodity, and the quantity of labour which that commodity would purchase, would be equal, and either might accurately measure the variations of other things: but they are not equal." If we impose on this formulation a set of categories alien to Ricardo, we can say that the two quantities represent forms of the same thing, labor, but materialized versus living labor. If the difference between them is only a matter of form, why should they not be equals in exchange? With the help of Marx's tradition, we can pose the question.154 Ricardo could not. For him they were equal because they were the same. When he observed the inequality he saw, not two different forms of labor, but labor products delivered with the help of capital versus labor traded against labor.

Although Ricardo professes to make a theoretical choice in favor of the quantity of labor bestowed on a good as the measure of value, his analysis actually uses the cost of labor as that measure. The most obvious evidence for this slippage lies in his arithmetical examples throughout the Principles. Ricardo expects the reader to understand that if two owners pay the same amount in wages, they receive the same quantity of labor.155 If Ricardo identifies the cost of labor with the quantity received, he omits the employer's utilization of the labor as a step that decides how much labor the employer actually receives.156 Did he ignore this process as a simplifying assumption? Could he not have thought that the variations among employers in the quantity of labor actually extracted from the worker for a certain wage averages out for the economy as a whole? And then, in the aggregate, why could he not equate quantity received with cost? Ricardo's use of the famous "wages fund" theory rules out this interpretation. This doctrine starts from the assumption that capitalists in a society "advance" wages to the workers out of their total

stock of capital. The capitalists decide in advance what amount of this stock to allocate for the maintenance of productive labor and what part to consume themselves, that is, their budgeting determines the amount of capital "destined" for the payment of wages.157 Ricardo assumes that if the amount of capital allocated for the payment of wages in a society declines, then, all else being equal, the quantity of labor purchased by employers declines in the same proportion.158 They cannot use the falling demand for labor to get the real unit cost of labor to decline. (As Marx pointed out, by treating the length of the workday as fixed and irrelevant, Ricardo ignored the process of using labor power itself.)159 Therefore the reduction of the quantity of labor to its cost does not just represent an averaging out of the use that capitalists can make of labor at the same point in time. It means that even in different circumstances the capitalists cannot make better "use" of or extract more work out of the labor they buy—they purchase it as if it were already embodied.160

The second implication of Ricardo's reduction of the quantity of labor to its cost is that it can make his argument appear circular. Samuel Bailey, an early and vociferous critic of Ricardo, called attention to this in 1825:

Even if Bailey misrepresents Ricardo's argument, he insistently identifies labor with its product at moments when he might well have considered labor power itself as a ware.162 Read literally, Bailey appears correct in saying that "the value of labour depends on the quantity of labour employed in producing it" is nonsensical. As a declaration in which "labor" actually refers to "labor power," however, the words follow perfect logic and anticipate Marx's conceptual shift. A habitual process of interpretation in Britain reduced "labor" to its exchangeable product and rendered a potentially insightful formulation "evidently absurd."163

As is well known, Ricardo's formulation of the labor theory of value became the dominant form of economic reasoning both among specialized theorists and among popularizers of political economy.164 One of Ricardo's earliest followers, James Mill, imagined the factory worker as the owner of the finished product who negotiated with his employers over how much of his realized output he would yield. Mill classified the wage as a form of payment in advance because the worker received it before the product had actually been disposed of in the market. In Elements of Political Economy , Mill wrote that:

Here the capitalist cannot even be said to have purchased any labor until he buys a completed product. Mill transformed the transaction between the capitalist and the worker into an ordinary exchange between commodity owners, both of whom trade labor already embodied in products—materialized labor.166

The postulate that employers purchased only materialized labor became a standard assumption in British political economy. Peter Gaskell, in his celebrated book on The Manufacturing Population of England , suggested that labor had no exchange value until it entered the sphere of circulation as a finished product. "Of itself it [labor] is nothing  . . .," he said,"—it must be stamped or moulded to bring it into a state fit for useful exchange."167 John Stuart Mill, perhaps the most famous purveyor of the nineteenth century's common sense, supposed that wage laborers received loans from their employers, for they were paid before the finished products which they gave their employer had been disposed of in the market.168 Were employees

to wait for payment of a wage until their labor products were resold on the market, they would become capitalists like their employers: investment in products for resale, not authority over labor power, defines the capitalist's role in the employment relation.169

The conception of the transmission of labor presented in high theory coincided with that presented in the journals of the factory workers' insurgency during the 1830s. When the factory workers' press theorized the employment relation as a kind of economic exchange, it described the purchase of labor as concretized in a ware. For example, The Poor Man's Advocate said in 1832 that the mill owner who purchased a "stipulated quantity of labor" from workers was comparable to a customer who bought finished cloth in a store.170

The course of development of British political economy poses a genuine riddle when one recalls how the accepted definition of value, the quantity of labor embodied, might have caused economists to consider the actual determinants of the quantity of labor delivered. If Adam Smith confused the hiring of labor with the purchase of its product, this might be attributed to the ambiguities that often accompany the founding of a new science.171 But if Ricardo and his followers, conscious of the need for revision, confused labor with its product, their failure identifies the restricted ways in which the British could imagine abstract labor as an economic factor at all. Of course, British commentators were perfectly capable of describing labor not as a product but as a force. The class of workers supplies "a given quantity of power for the production of commodities," E. S. Cayley wrote in 1830.172 But remarks such as this define labor as a resource at large. They do not retain this formulation when they analyze the mechanisms by which labor is conveyed in a commercial transaction.

In the analysis of the social mechanisms of capitalism, the signifier labor served two functions in classical British political economy. First, it establishes the medium for expressing prices, the framework within which prices can mean something. In its second function, labor generates the particular messages that the general medium transmits: it specifies the particular values and the movement of values among commodities. In The Principles Ricardo moves back and forth without distinction between these two symbolic functions. Thus, when he says that labor "determines" prices, this can mean either that it fixes prices or, at other places, that it lets one ascertain prices. Ricardo conflates these two functions by using the words regulate and measure interchangeably.173 In the end, abstract labor came into sight for the British only in the process of exchange. They could not compare labor as a capacity in production or as an activity, only via the finished goods that were traded against each other. The generalizing of labor occurred at the completion of the production process. Nassau Senior, for example, excluded economically productive actions from the category of "labour" unless people performed them for the purpose of exchange.174

An emblematic contradiction between form and content runs through the Wealth of Nations: the argument makes labor the fount of value, preparatory to sale, whereas the language of analysis treats the labor activity—production—as itself a vending transaction. Smith declares, "Labour was the first price, the original purchase money that was paid for all things. It was not by gold or silver, but by labour, that all the wealth of the world was originally purchased."175 As the German commentator Theodor Bernhardi remarked in 1847, Smith here equates the original process of production—the creation of a good through the labor activity—with the socially organized way of acquiring goods through monetary exchange.176 When Smith discusses the determination of the level of wages, he transforms the labor of the isolated worker into a system of trade. "The produce of labour," he

asserts, "constitutes the natural recompence or wages of labour."177 He frequently uses phrases such as the "labour commonly employed in acquiring or producing any commodity," another expression which makes production analogous to acquisition by exchange.178 Every person who sells his labor, Smith says, "becomes in some measure a merchant," a turn of speech that places the laborer and the tradesman (who merely deals with finished goods) in similar roles.179

No wonder Smith's usage makes no distinction between commerce and industry. He assimilated the process of production to that of exchange. Spokespersons for the common people of Britain in the nineteenth century expressed the same point of view. When they criticized the capitalists' abuse of their power, they defined the capitalists not by their position in production but by their position as manipulative peddlers in the market. The holders of capital, William Heighton explained to trade union members in 1827, "effect exchanges by proxy, without working at all themselves and accumulate the wealth which other people's labour has created through the medium of profit."180

The British identification of the commodity of labor in the sphere of circulation left its impression upon the English language. The British, but not the Germans, felt the need to emphasize a single word as the signifier of production undertaken for the sake of exchange. History kindly provided an Anglo-German mediator who noticed this long ago. Friedrich Engels called it to the attention of both German and British readers in translations and annotated editions of Kapital. As Engels discovered, the English language in the course of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries came to rely upon work to refer to the qualitative activity of making use values; whereas labor , the only word that indicated diverse activities as serving a general productive function, became the marker for the activity considered as an abstract creator and quantitative measure of exchange value.181 Certainly

Smith testified to this usage when he argued that "there may be more labour in an hours hard work than in two hours easy business."182

The difference in meanings between work and labor in economic discourse did not lie in them as a potential waiting to come to life with the historical development of wage labor; people strove to create the distinction in the course of the eighteenth century. Sir James Steuart, for example, had put forward the same conceptual distinction before Smith but had marked it with another arbitrary pairing of terms, that of simple labor , production for use, versus industry , production for exchange.183 Steuart's writings show that the need to mark the difference in perspectives on the work activity—the need the terms work and labor happened later to fulfill—preceded the actual semantic differentiation.184 Therefore we cannot attribute this differentiation to the stock of words that English, as opposed to German, fortuitously had at its disposal. The Germans had equivalent lexical options available to them.185 The English term work derives from the same source as the German verbs werken and wirken and, before the rise of liberal commercialism, had a parallel range of meanings.186 Likewise, the Germans had at their disposal the verb arbeiten to correspond to labor , inasmuch as the German term, too, was originally associated with the Latin concept of

painful exertion or molestia. 187 The Germans did not consecrate the words available to them to differentiate between production for use and production for exchange, although werken survived into the first half of the nineteenth century as a verb referring to productive activity.188 We can conclude that the divergence reflects a difference in the concepts with which people apprehended economic activity, given the original similarity in lexical resources but the final difference between German and British usage. As components of popular languages, these terms and the conceptual operations to which they corresponded were the property in common of economic agents in each country, not the preserve of speculative intellectuals.

The Insincerity of the Historical Process

Social theorists of capitalist development have long characterized Britain as the pioneer society of a liberal market order. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries it certainly led Europe in building a nationally penetrating network of trade.189 In addition, historical analysts of diverse allegiances, from Barrington Moore to Jürgen Kuczynski, have highlighted Britain's early reliance upon market mechanisms rather than upon seigneurial coercion for the extraction of surplus from the agricultural work force.190 In manufacturing, the separate processes of developing markets in goods and of relaxing administrative controls for the compulsory delivery of labor

occurred very early in Britain in world-historical time, but they were staggered far apart in the country's own developmental time. The elimination of guild monopolies on the exchange of wares and of internal barriers to trade, as well as the attachment of the countryside to merchant enterprise in London, were nearing completion by the mid-seventeenth century. The cessation of the requisitioning of labor and of community controls on wages required in some important regions of the country up to a century more.

In terms of its own developmental sequence, then, Britain is distinguished by the relatively late emergence of a formal market in wage labor, given the advanced commercialization of the finished-goods sector.191 To appreciate this lag one need only compare Sir William Blackstone's definition of the employment relation with that of the Code Napoleon in France. In France the creation of a unified national market in goods occurred later than in Britain, but its definitive recognition coincided with the annihilation of the guilds and, during 1790 and 1791, the formal abolition of corporate controls on the marketing of labor. The Civil Code of Napoleon, promulgated just after the dawning of a liberal market regime in France, recognized "services for rent"—labor power—as a commodity freely exchangeable on the basis of individual contract alone.192 By contrast, Blackstone, we have seen, treated the engagement of labor power as a transaction founded on the ascribed inferiority of the worker—on status rather than compact. Until 1867, British law treated the worker either as an inferior, subject to imprisonment merely for failure to deliver labor, or as an independent contractor who delivered products.193 This archaic disjuncture in British law betrayed

the legacy of the country's early focus upon the enforced delivery of labor power or the contractual delivery of labor as it was embodied in products.

German commentators found it anomalous that even in the twentieth century the British continued to model the contractual elements of the employment relation upon the delivery of goods. In 1904 Otto von Zwiedineck-Südenhorst compared the German and the British legal classifications:

The British terms for the conveyance of labor might seem less demanding of the worker, but they scarcely derived from the "liberal" British past.

Historical development in Britain cunningly disguised the origins of the commodity form assumed by labor. The concept of labor as a commodity in Britain resembled the exchange of materialized labor between independent petty-commodity producers, or, in more ennobling terms, between freeborn tradespeople. This ideal was sustained in production but did not truthfully reflect its circumstances. Only a fraction of artisans were truly autonomous producers, as Adam Smith himself acknowledged. The toilsome research of modern historians has revealed that even in London, the hub of the artisanal trades, by 1800 only 5 or 6 percent of workers were genuinely self-employed.195 The understanding of the labor transaction in Britain as the transfer of materialized labor emerged, not from a preponderance of free

artisans, but from the protracted subjection of labor power itself to social regulation that denied its sellers the contractual and political rights of free, market agents during the economic and cultural formation of a commercial society. Only as it was objectified in products did labor at this critical step of development receive its commodity form. History succeeded in perpetrating a ruse, because coercion itself gave rise to an apparition of freedom: the repressive yoking of wage labor in this era of transition shifted the commercial model to the independent producer as the celebrated, mythologized seller of labor products, the only free vendor of labor in a precociously founded market regime.

Corporate Regulation

Was the transition to a liberal commercial order truly less complete in Germany than in Britain, as Marx and Engels claimed? The story of the shift to a juridically free market society in Britain depends upon imperceptible trends; in Germany, where change in the economic constitution was consciously orchestrated from above, it pivots to a greater degree on discrete events. The westernmost regions of Germany entered the era of free commercialism between 1798 and 1810, when the French invaders abolished the guilds and issued the decrees needed to remake economic life in the occupied provinces and towns in their own image of liberty.3 Official change in the framework of commerce took place very dramatically in Prussia, too, where the government's decrees in 1810 and 1811 attempted to abolish the corporate regulation of trade and occupations almost overnight.4 Other German states moved more slowly than Prussia. But during the first half of the nineteenth century each of them in a series of grand steps removed legal barriers to trade and to the unhampered exercise of occupations.

It is easy to exaggerate the suffocation of intercourse prior to these reforms for the sake of creating more vivid contrasts in business life before versus after their promulgation. The most recent historical research has more realistically emphasized the gradual de facto weakening of guild and merchant privileges over many decades. From a cross-national perspective, however, a crucial finding remains: throughout the eighteenth century, enough of the industry and exchange of Germany transpired within corporate institutions to prevent the market from appearing as a force with laws of its own. Although exceptions abounded, guild regulations in the towns assigned specific lines of products to each type of craftsman. Such rules were effective enough that they prevented small masters from switching to new lines of handiwork in response to consumer demands.5 Of course the statutes controlled not just the manufacture of goods but their conveyance.6 Before 1787, guild artisans in Prussia were generally prevented from marketing their wares outside their home towns;7 and even after this date, the protective laws enacted for many localities excluded import of craft goods from neighboring towns and regions.8 Putting-out merchants in Prussia and Saxony were required to get special approval to sell their goods to the public, rather than to authorized guild merchants who attempted to arrogate the important distribution outlets.9 A blanket of regulation enveloped the pro-

curement of raw materials as well. In Prussia, Saxony, and other regions, guild masters had either a monopoly on the purchase of wool or the legal right to purchase it before other traders.10

Restrictions on the sale of labor prior to the reforms appeared no less comprehensive. In Prussia, Frederick the Great fixed wages for craft and common labor.11 In several of the German states, authorities ensured that the use of labor did not fluctuate: they forbade both the sudden firing of home workers and severe cutbacks in piece rates.12 Home workers could not always vend the products of their industry as they wished, as if they were entrepreneurs. Instead, workers such as spinners, whose product represented an input for weavers, were required to sell their goods to the local weavers' guild.13 In turn weavers in many regions were required to sell their finished cloth to an authorized entrepreneur or to a local merchant guild, which often had a monopoly on the distribution of the product.14 In Württemberg the master weavers who had to sell their goods at fixed prices to a

chartered merchant company protested in 1753 about their dependence. In a petition to the ducal authorities, they complained that officialdom's regulations deprived the small master "of what he could otherwise realize from the ware, so that he stands in severe personal servitude  . . . in which he can earn nothing for his own account and for his family."15 By comparison with Britain, state controls in Germany established an adverse setting during the eighteenth century for idealizing small manufacturers as independent producers whose products were exchanged in accordance with the labor they contained.16

The guild and mercantile constraints proved least effective in the countryside, where competition from unauthorized producers, above all in the textile branch, had by the end of the eighteenth century eroded the guild members' monopolies on manufacture in many parts of Germany.17 Yet

the independent producers in the countryside were not automatically freed of requirements to sell to chartered traders; moreover, in some instances they were officially forbidden to compete with urban producers.18 In Silesia, new legislation in 1788 required country weavers to bring their products to authorized traders for inspection and pricing.19 Until the introduction of freedom of trade in the countryside at the close of the eighteenth century, officials in many regions viewed the putting-out system as ancillary to the essential enterprise of agriculture.20 Entrepreneurs organized their networks according to the privileges granted by mercantilist officials rather than by considerations of transport and resources.21 Only the Napoleonic invasions and the Prussian response initiated the reforms that cleared away such thickets of official control and gave clear institutional form to the strengthening current of market development in the rural outlands.22

The reception of the Wealth of Nations in Germany serves as a barometer for the country's economic climate. German was the first foreign language in which Smith's opus was published. The initial volume of its

translation appeared in Leipzig in 1776, the year of the English publication in London.23 At this early juncture, however, German critics overlooked its substantive innovations and emphasized instead its incidental similarities to the doctrines of French physiocrats, such as the assumption that agricultural rents rise with prosperity.24 Smith's ideas were not rejected—they were uncomprehended.25 For us, the categories Smith used may seem commonsensical and "life-like." But German translators and scholarly reviewers of Smith's work found the main arguments perplexing. "The original is extremely difficult," an early reviewer said, "and the language, by reason of the technical and juridical expressions, difficult and obscure."26 A translator confessed that he had had to read the book several times over to make sense of it.27 The German interpreters' attempts to rephrase Smith's expressions illustrates one source of difficulty.28 The first German translations showed some reluctance to conceive of labor as an abstract category. Where Smith referred to "the demand for labor," his interpreters rendered it as "demand for laboring

hands" or "demand for workers."29 Smith endowed the category itself with life, whereas German expositors resisted the detachment of the category from concrete persons. These early exegetes, unaccustomed to the reified form of labor as a commodity, thought of labor only as visible work.30

The German publishers of the Wealth of Nations could not find a significant audience for their intellectual merchandise until the revolutionary market perspective entailed by commercial liberty was introduced.31 They had not long to wait. The Prussian edict of 1810 made the purchase of a license the only requirement for conducting any form of enterprise anywhere in the state. In 1811 authorities abolished the regulation of wages and lifted requirements that craft entrepreneurs join a guild.32 These expedients, and the similar ones that followed in the other German states, abruptly revised the conditions for conceiving of transfers of goods and services.33

The Recognition of Labor as a Commodity

In Germany, reflection on market society included from the outset production based on the purchase of labor through the wage contract. It began not just with liberty of trade in manufactures, as in Britain, but with the full regime of capitalism, in keeping with the simultaneous creation of formal markets in wares and in labor power.34 German economists who interpreted the emergence of industrial liberalism in the first decades of the nineteenth century appropriated many of Smith's insights but resold them by casting the role of labor to conform with the genesis of wage labor in Germany.35 Long before the extensive development of the factory system in their coun-

try, German observers of the market were occupied with a distinctive apparition of labor as a commodity which eventually emerged on the factory shop floor itself.

A survey of market theories in Britain can sight the pinnacles of Smith and Ricardo, but the terrain in Germany shows few towering peaks. If German economists of the period did not cast a long shadow, they still serve as indicators of the rise of contrasting economic assumptions. One of the first notable German treatises that presented an alternative to the British appreciation of labor came from the pen of Ludwig Jakob, a professor of philosophy at the University of Halle.36 In a work published in 1805, Jakob adopted Smith's formulation of the labor theory of value, but already with modification. Smith, he noted perceptively, mistakenly identified the wage for labor with the quantity of labor delivered.37 "It is not what the worker receives for his labor that forms the measure of exchange value," he wrote in the 1825 edition, "but what it has cost him in the expenditure of power."38 Jakob was ready to consider the value of a good as determined by the expenditure of labor upon it, apart from the cost of the labor or from its embodiment in the product. In his view, labor did not identify the real values which inhere in the goods; it approximated the outcomes of trading between individuals due to individuals' strategizing.39

Jakob's work reveals the transcription of British terms for labor and work into the German field of meanings. When the Germans first transmitted Smith's wondrous ideas into their own language, their translators had had to improvise in two ways: they resorted to the adoption of several words not ordinarily used in German, and they attached more restricted meanings to current words.40 The word work , however, they did not transcribe. It was not that they merged it with their word for labor (Arbeit ) or that they tried out

a simple surrogate. They wrote around it. When Smith said, "There may be more labour in an hours hard work than in two hours easy business," the German translator rendered it something like this: "There may be more labor [Arbeit ] in one hour's difficult manifestation of power [angestrengten Kraftäusserung einer Stunde ] than in two hours' easy business."41 Jakob adopted this mode of expression for the work activity as part of his system. In British thinking, work could appear in a system of political economy because it became abstract labor only when examined from the perspective of the later moment of exchange. In Jakob's picture, however, the work activity itself, from the beginning of the process, is seen as abstract labor because it is the expression of a general power. This point of origin, rather than the exchange process, makes heterogeneous kinds of work comparable as abstract labor. Jakob referred to labor as the activation of a latent capacity, defining it as "the activation of human power" and measuring its quantity by "the sacrifice of power."42

The difference in Jakob's approach was not only a matter of vocabulary. In his discussion of the employment relation Jakob says that the worker does not merely sell his labor—as Smith, looking at the output, would have expressed it—but "hires out his diligence [Fleiss ]" to the capitalist or landowner.43 Jakob's refusal to identify "labor" with a material product showed up as well in the contrast he drew between the functions of factory owners and of landowners. "The whole difference [between them]," he said, "comes down to the simple fact that the landowner is master of external nature, the factory owner master of internal nature."44 Whereas the landowner made his profit through his control of the goods of the earth, the factory owner made his profit through his control of indispensable human labor. If Jakob had thematized the difference between these economic agents by drawing the conventional distinction between land and capital, as happened in British economics, this would have directed attention to differences in the material resources under their command. He emphasized instead the factory owner's disposal over human powers, which he saw as a "nonmaterial" good of an entirely different dimension.

Before long, others used this alternative concept of labor as a commodity to articulate a real theoretic break. Johann Lotz, a contemporary of Jakob's, rejected labor as a measure of the values of goods in the market. In 1811 he emphasized that "the products of labor are always different from the labor itself.  . . . Labor," he declared, "is something purely immaterial." The distinction between use value and exchange value, a pairing the British could imagine applying only to finished commodities, he extended to the labor potential hired by the employer. "Viewed as a productive power," Lotz concluded, "it [labor] is always a capacity, a good of high value, but only of use value, not of exchange value."45 He reasoned that labor could not be used to compare products because the worker's personal expenditure of effort was an immeasurable subjective experience.46 Lotz's inference, though crudely psychological, betrays the assumption that the value of labor had to be compared at its moment of origin in the production process or not at all. Wilhelm Roscher, in his classic history of German economic theory, completed in 1874, ranked Lotz's rejection of "real" values standing behind prices as an important contribution to the evolution of the country's "national economic grammar."47 For emphasis on the concrete moment of using labor power led German scholars in the first half of the nineteenth century to abandon Smith's faith that labor establishes a metric for product values.

The insight that labor was conveyed to the employer in the form of a capacity became commonplace in the writings of later German economists. Hans Mangoldt, an economist who after midcentury became particularly well known for his analysis of entrepreneurs' organization of the production process, said that "the wage is the compensation for the use of one's personal labor power that has been entrusted to another person."48 He referred to hiring labor as "acquiring the disposition over another person's labor power," a phrase which, in keeping with Mangoldt's approach, highlighted the entrepreneur's consumption of a potential.49 Friedrich Hermann,

a major expounder of German business economics, distinguished between labor power, the commodity of "the highest-use value," and labor, "the main component of most goods."50 The Germans' separation of labor from its product was a prerequisite for talking about the "use value" of labor at all. The British could not have theorized about the use value of labor purchased by an employer, because this would have required them to treat the power behind the activity as the actual thing that could be bought and "used" by the employer.

The distinction between labor and labor power which emerged in the Germans' lofty treatises paralleled the development of popular economic thinking in their country. Workers' descriptions of employment highlighted the renting of their labor capacity. For example, Die Verbrüderung , the newspaper of the workers' associations during the revolutions of 1848, complained that workers "chained to the power of capital have to hire out their physical or mental powers."51 In a petition submitted to authorities in 1850, the weavers from a town near Potsdam called employers of wage labor "renters of labor power."52 The language of formal remonstrance was no different from that of everyday expression, for a textile worker interviewed by the police in 1858 for having left his job described wage labor as "renting yourself out."53 The assumption that workers put their person in the hands of their employer formed part of the popular understanding of the vending of labor as a commodity.54

The evolution of everyday concepts in economic life can be traced through the introduction of new terms into the German language. The translations of Adam Smith for popular consumption at the beginning of the century lacked the term Arbeitskraft ("labor power") to translate the employer's purchase of labor, as well as the plural, Arbeitskräfte , to refer to the work force at large.55 These terms did not appear in dictionaries of the time.56 Yet by 1854, when the Brothers Grimm released their German dictionary, they included an entry for Arbeitskraft. They did not define it, but they illustrated its usage: "One views a person with his labor power as a commodity, whose price rises and falls with the level of supply and demand."57 The Grimms' example emphasizes that the term is linked to the commodification of labor and did not represent a locution, inherited from the precapitalist era, that highlighted merely a person's natural potential or concrete ability to work.58 What is more, their explanation specified that the commodity inheres in the person of the seller: the producers themselves, not simply their wares, are inserted into the marketplace. The Grimms' compilation, written to codify the national language, scarcely represents a source that can be faulted for its inclusion of arcane vocabulary. To the contrary, scholars have criticized the work for its admission only of commonplace words.59

The public's adoption of the term labor power in the first decades of the nineteenth century indicates that the Germans, in contrast to the British, felt a need to mark the workers' contribution in the employment relation by a term more precise than the existing terms for labor available

in their language.60 May we say that thought impressed itself on language, not language on thought? No lexical or semantic obstacles blocked a similar course of development in Britain. Indeed, the British already applied market terms to human qualities by referring to such intangibles as popular "favor" and "opinion" as commodities, since they represented assets that could bring monetary gain.61 By the nineteenth century the Germans had forgotten lexical resources which they might have employed to designate the contrast between materialized labor and the execution of work. In the period of Middle High German some writers had used the terms Werk and Arbeit to distinguish between the product of labor and the activity.62 But in modern German this distinction was no longer sharp enough to enable people to take over the simple word Arbeit to signify the disposal of a person's labor power in the market.63 The economic agents had to start anew.

The German invention of a fresh term rather than rearranging the connotations of an old one was in keeping, perhaps, with the more thoroughgoing break that the simultaneous transition to formal markets in finished articles and in labor power in Germany entailed. Workers themselves used the term Arbeitskraft for the commodification of labor. A workers' newspaper published in Chemnitz in the revolutionary days of 1848 said that if property relations were not governed by the market, the workers' "property, labor power" could not be assigned a value.64 Wurm's German dictionary, published in 1858, emphasized the context of market relations when it asserted that the term Arbeitskraft refers "especially to the strength of the commercial worker himself." Wurm also offered a forceful example of usage: "The rich factory masters, who exploit the material labor power of the

people."65 German society did not wait for Marx to use labor power to describe the extraction of profit; it surfaced in the vernacular beforehand and became commonplace during the revolution of 1848.66

The coining of the new term Arbeitskraft , its conscious linkage with the new market regime, and the timing of its appearance show that the difference in British and German expressions was not just a matter of linguistic form, of superficial words used to refer to the execution of work in any economic context. It represented a genuine difference in concepts of employment viewed under a capitalist regime. Where labor was not discussed in the context of commercial relations, other terms could be called to service. In Germany, an alternative locution, Menschenkraft , referred to the contribution of labor that was not necessarily exchanged as a commodity in the market. For example, a Saxony business journal said that good soil, fine weather, and "human power" (Menschenkräfte ) went into growing raw materials.67 The German labor movement during the revolution of 1848 used the general term labor to refer to the workers' contribution to society, but the term Arbeitskraft to describe the use of labor in production.68

The innovative nomenclature for labor as a commodity appeared in the writings of factory directors and other capitalist entrepreneurs concurrently with its appearance in the popular media. On the eve of the revolution of 1848, employers defined the jobless in terms that specified exactly what the subordinates were trying to sell: they were people who "cannot valorize their labor power."69 Similarly, in 1861 a Saxony newspaper described unemployed wage workers as persons who "let their labor power lie fallow."70 In the German textile trade the expression labor power appeared in the 1860s in the earliest technical guides to the establishment of a mill.71 Employers and workers moved toward the locution at the same juncture in history, neither ahead of the other.72 Despite all the differences between them, both groups responded to a shared societal condition, the regulation of social relations through formally free commerce in human work activity.

The basic difference in the way German and British economic agents conceived of the transmission of labor influenced their views of labor's contribution to national wealth and to employers' profits. Adam Smith created a divide between manufacturing labor, which he designated productive because it was fixed in a product, and services, which he called unfruitful because they did not terminate in a durable good.73 Ricardo excluded serv-

ices from his model altogether. But in the early German reviews of the Wealth of Nations , including the very first, in 1777, German commentators took issue with Smith's separation of productive labor from the delivery of a service.74 Friedrich Hermann, the theorist who built a new renown for German political economy, illustrated in 1832 the German method for equating the two: whether hiring workers or servants, an employer offers money in return for disposition over labor capacity. "The pay of the master [Brodherr ] goes to the worker, of course; but in return," Hermann reasoned, "the activity [Tätigkeit ] of the worker comes under the authority [Gewalt ] of the employer."75 In the second edition of this book, Hermann said, "We will no longer distinguish rigorously between service and labor."76 Hermann could carry out this merger of the two categories because he thought that in both instances the worker sold control over the execution of the activity rather than transferring materialized labor.77

British economists defined the efficiency of labor in terms of the employer's ability to obtain produce from his workers at a certain price.78 German economists, by contrast, defined it in terms of the difference between the use value of labor and its exchange value, that is, in terms of the distinct process of converting labor power to an output. The distinction allowed them to see that the production carried out by "labor" could be worth more than the price the employer [Lohnherr ] had paid for the right to use the "labor." For example, Karl Heinrich Rau, the eminent synthesizer of economic ideas during the 1820s, thought that although labor was not a "material good," it was something from which the employer could acquire unequal amounts of value depending on how he used it.79 In the case of personal services, Rau said, labor "usually is to be had for a price which stands far under its value."80 Rau contended here that labor's price in the market could stand below what the employer could get out of the use value of the labor. Such a proposition the British economists could not have entertained, since they did not look at the use made of labor but only at labor's exchange via finished commodities. Rau's own way of interposing a separate

moment for labor's utilization also entailed a theoretical loss, however. In contrast to the British, Rau declined to put forward any important propositions about the relation between wages and the exchange value of the goods produced.81

The Germans' conception of the work activity opened up wider possibilities for envisioning the source of the employer's profit. British economists saw labor as a kind of intervening variable that allowed the capitalist to expand his capital. It operated as a requisite that allowed the investment to yield profit, not as an independent source of that profit. The German economists, by contrast, saw the purchase of labor as potentially realizing a profit quite apart from the earnings on the capital invested. Hans Mangoldt, for instance, argued that the employer made a profit not only by putting his capital to work and not only by acquiring part of the worker's produce in return for the use of the capital stock; he also made a profit by renting labor. The employer engages labor, Mangoldt said, only if he "is in a position to turn the hired labor into a value greater than he has to pay for it himself."82 Roscher believed that workers got less pay for the same output if they sold their labor to an employer rather than directly to consumers in the form of either a product or a service.83 In the German tradition, the use of labor in the production process, leaving aside the return on capital invested, generated surplus value.

The German economists not only developed their ideas with reference to the British, but they also offered penetrating textual comparisons between the British concept of labor and their own. Theodor Bernhardi, writing in 1847, thought that part of the difference grew out of the infelicities of the English language. The word production , he said, had a "double sense" in classical English political economy. It referred to the mathematical function of adding units together to yield a result. This described the process of adding together the market prices of inputs to raise the exchange value of a good. The term could also refer, however, to the physical process of creating a good. By using the word production in both these senses, he said, Smith and Ricardo avoided considering labor from the distinct vantage points of commercial exchange value and concrete use

value and overlooked divergences between them.84 Smith, Bernhardi said, theorized labor only from its appearance in the realm of exchange, so that "labor is immediately conceived as a product."85 He cited instances from the Wealth of Nations where Smith collapsed the process of production into that of exchange by equating the price of labor with the quantity of labor delivered. He objected in particular to Smith's argument that "labour was the first price, the original purchase-money, that was paid for all things."86 To Bernhardi, this formulation inappropriately turned every producer into a merchant: the employment of natural materials was equated with a commercial exchange. Bernhardi found it incredible that British political economy neither anticipated German innovations nor incorporated them after the fact. "How could reflection on the matter not lead to the distinction between the price of labor and its value?" he concluded. "It seems almost inconceivable that, based on this point, an entire revolution of the whole doctrine did not come about."87

Readers in the twentieth century can nod their heads in assent, for they know that Bernhardi foretold the precise route by which classical political economy would finally be subverted. As the inheritors of this historical process, we believe that the perpetrator was another scholar of German origin—Karl Marx. How does the prior evolution of German economic doctrines in the first half of the nineteenth century illuminate the emergence of Marx's seditious theory? Marx did not arrive at his insights purely by applying the force of logic upon British sources. Nor did he knowingly draw upon the traditions of German economic doctrine. History transpires in a more complex and surprising fashion. The answer not only demonstrates how Marx's analysis of labor and profit emerged but helps us recover the historical processes by which the popular concept of labor as a commodity appeared in Germany.

Marx's Replication of Economic Theory in Germany

In Kapital Marx offered an original permutation of economic ideas which had been laid out in advance on both sides of the channel. He combined the

British view of circulation with the German view of production. To lay out the terms of the merger, Marx's analysis in Kapital of the transactions capitalists made in the sphere of circulation, those by which they purchased inputs (including labor power) and disposed of outputs, proceeded according to the hallowed laws of the exchange of equal values and equal quantities of labor. In his account of the generation of profit Marx reaffirms that on the market "equivalent has been exchanged for equivalent."88 This is the British view of circulation. Yet Marx argued that, looking at the production process as a concrete activity, the laws that govern the trade of exchange values no longer applied. "The seller of labour power, like the seller of any other commodity," Marx wrote, "indeed realizes its exchange value and parts with its use value.  . . . The circumstance that  . . . the very same labor power can work during a whole day, that consequently the value which its use during one day creates, is double what he pays for that use—this circumstance is, without doubt, a piece of good luck for the buyer, but by no means an injury to the seller."89 This insight represents the longstanding German view of the use of labor as a commodity in production. Up to this point Marx followed a trail laid by forgotten predecessors.

Marx completed a narrower innovation. He made a contribution by identifying the double character of labor in its role as a commodity—its determinate exchange value—and in its concrete use as the means for generating a surplus for employers. The purchaser of labor manages to turn a profit only by taking advantage of the use value of the labor in the production process. If the owner at this moment properly uses this labor power, it can yield goods with more exchange value than the exchange value of the labor. (The exchange value of labor power Marx defined as the substantial cost, or amount of labor, needed to maintain the employee's ability to work.) The commodity of labor power is unique because it represents "a source not only of value but of more value than it has itself. This is the specific service that the capitalist expects from it."90 To sum up, the two critical insights which led Marx to this analysis of the source of surplus value in the production process and which appear in earlier German texts were the following: that the owner purchased only

"labor power," and that the concepts of "use value" and of "exchange value" can be extended from inert wares to this peculiar human commodity.

Marx's interlacing of German ideas of production with British suppositions of circulation was original but not singular. It represented an intellectual outcome that may have already been in the cards. Karl Roesler published a parallel solution in 1861, six years before the first edition of Kapital appeared in the bookstores. He highlighted the dual character of what he termed "labor power" by entitling one chapter of his work "The Use Value of Labor" and the next "The Exchange Value of Labor." He declared that workers' wages depended upon the expense they incurred to develop and reproduce their work capacity:91

Roesler retained the classical principle governing equal exchange in the market while acknowledging that the employer could thereby receive a bonus in unpaid use value of the labor power. This acute insight anticipated Marx's analysis of the double character of labor as a commodity in the market and in the production process. Roesler diverged from Marx principally in supposing that capital could make an independent contribution to the exchange value of goods. For this reason, he did not arrive at the conclusion that all profit derived ultimately from the employment of labor. In its explanation of the extraction of surplus value, as in other ways, Marx's contribution remained unique.

Historians of economic theory have often envisioned their task as one of tracing a lineage or sequence of ideas among the known "greats," from

Smith to Ricardo to Marx. Within this overall plan of succession, they have, to be sure, identified the discontinuities that Marx introduced into the British line of development. But they have treated this change in the analysis of the valorization of labor as the fortuitous consequence of Marx's genius.93 To those unfamiliar with German economics Marx's pair of insights into labor might well seem to have come to him in an inspired dream. His voluminous notes and citations reinforce this view, and rightly so. Marx wrote exegetically as a matter of principle. From his perspective, the economic ideas of previous thinkers did not just offer examples of the play of logic, they expressed, sometimes indirectly, the essential social forces and forms of consciousness at work in prior stages of history. By developing his ideas through reflection upon earlier economists, he could join his thought to the central processes of social development.94 Accordingly, when Marx set out to write Kapital —subtitled, of course, a critique of reigning views of political economy—he conceived a history of theories of surplus value as an integral part of the project.95 Most of the theorems he presents in publications or drafts comment upon spirited formulations by other philosophers or pen-pushers. Yet the analysis of the double character of labor power—the undertaking he considered to be his single greatest contribution to the analysis of capitalist production96 —surfaces in his notebooks and drafts, not to mention in Kapital itself, as an invention without precedent, an intellectual creation de novo. 97 And so it seemed to him.

Marx, the well-read man of letters, steeped in both the high and vulgar analyses of his day, was in all likelihood unacquainted with formulations of

labor as a commodity among elite German economists. The value theorems of bourgeois political economy became his central preoccupation only after he fled to Britain. From there he innocently claimed in 1868 that "The economists without exception have missed the simple point that, if the commodity is a duality of use-value and exchange value, the labor represented in the commodity must also possess a double-character."98 In his rough draft, Grundrisse , where he presents a full-scale version of the theory of exploitation at the point of production that later surfaced in Kapital itself, Marx cites more than one hundred and fifty economic commentators or economic historians. Of these, only fifteen were of German origin, whereas more than ninety came from Britain.99 Where Marx makes reference to German economic thinkers in this draft and in earlier notebooks, he restricts himself almost entirely to monetary and currency theory or to the surface history of trade and industry.100

The neglect was deliberate. In Marx's view, the economically most progressive country could not fail to invent the most advanced economic thought. Conversely, Germany's deficient economic development "ruled out any original contribution to 'bourgeois' political economy." In the Preface to the second German edition of Kapital , he said, "Just as in the classical age of bourgeois political economy, so in the age of its decline, the Germans remained mere schoolboys, parroters, and hangers-on—petty retailers for the foreign-owned wholesale business."101 Marx arrived at this judgment by axiomatic deduction well before he launched his intensive study of economics. As early as 1845—that is, before he had begun his formal-analytic essays on economic theory—he had decided that the late appearance of the German bourgeoisie made it "impossible" for representatives of this class to better

the political economy expounded in more advanced countries.102 Marx's subsequent disregard of German sources may seem inexplicable. Only adherence to a powerful theory—in this case, about the social generation of meritable ideas—could have so narrowed his sight.

The retarded evolution of Marx's vocabulary corroborates the supposition that he developed his distinction between labor and labor power independently of the German economists. In the Grundrisse Marx makes use of the concept but not the term labor power. For example, in some passages he focuses his attention upon the "use value" of what he indifferently terms labor. He writes, "The worker exchanges his commodity, labor, the use value, which like all other commodities, also has a price [an exchange value]."103 In sentences such as this one, for example, Marx could not refer to the use value of labor without implicitly meaning labor power. In a few sections of this draft where the explanation of the generation of surplus value at the point of production is formally identical to that in the renowned final version, Kapital , Marx contrives to use instead an unfamiliar scholastic compound, Arbeitsvermögen ("labor capacity"), to define labor's commodity form.104 We have here an extraordinary manifestation of intellectual ignorance: the term Arbeitskraft ("labor power"), the indispensable talisman of conventional Marxist economics, is wholly absent from the Grundrisse even when Marx makes technical use of the concept,105 whereas we know that this very locution had already gained currency among German economists as an expression highlighting the difference between the use and exchange values of labor in the capitalist labor process. Engels used Arbeitskraft as early as 1843, though without analytic significance or consis-

tency, in the first essay either he or Marx wrote on economic method.106 Marx himself later attached great importance to the proper use of terminology about labor to mark what he saw as a momentous revolution, of his making, inaugurated by understanding the purchase and use of Arbeitskraft. 107 In hindsight Engels realized that Marx's published analyses of the production process before Kapital were absolutely misleading because they used the ambiguous term labor. 108 If Marx had borrowed the conceptual distinction between labor and labor power from German economists, he would have used Arbeitskraft in the Grundrisse. 109

In the historical unfolding of economic theory, Marx enters the story as a German not because he imparts the legacy of traditional German political economy; rather, his texts reproduce German social experience.110 How else could he have conceived by separate and independent reflection the same definition of labor as that of the liberal German economists?111 In his Foreword to the English edition of Kapital , Marx introduced himself as a German. "We," the Germans, he told the English readers, "suffer not only from the development of capitalist production but also from the incompleteness of its development. Alongside of modern evils, a whole series of inherited evils oppress us, arising from the passive survival of anachronistic modes of production."112 Marx's analysis of the commodity of labor came to him as an inspired vision, but the apparition was historically determined: it con-

jured in basic outline the peculiarities of German economic development. We have only to follow its lead.

The Guilds' Residual Control Over the Supply of Labor

If the simultaneous emergence of free trade in goods and in labor power in Germany represented a necessary step for the commodification of labor in the cultural form of "labor power," it did not comprise a sufficient condition. After all, judged by this sole criterion, French producers entered the modern world of liberal commercialism by the same door. Yet, as we will see, they reached a different concept of labor as a commodity from that of the Germans. A single contingency is inadequate even for the German case alone. It must be remembered that when freedom of occupation was introduced in Germany, the urban work force consisted primarily of artisanal manufacturers and included many small masters working on their own account. Did they not stand in the same position as the independent tradesmen who typified the sale of materialized labor in Britain? Could they not have evolved the same assumptions about the exchange of labor as a commodity as the British? To stipulate the historical forces that were sufficient to guide the cultural construction of "labor power" in Germany requires a more discriminating analysis of the ensemble of urban and rural institutions of work during the initial decades of liberal commercialism.

Let us turn to the cities. Among thinkers as diverse as Adam Smith and Paul Sweezy, the towns in Europe have been viewed as the nodal points from which capitalist development emanated. In Germany the urban centers with concentrations of artisanal enterprise had once acted as a force for change by sponsoring the growth of mercantile trade. But during the nineteenth century they shrank from the construction of a laissez-faire regime and resigned from a leading role in the development of labor as a commodity.

The introduction of freedom of occupation in Prussia may have destroyed the town guilds' legal monopolies, but it did not obliterate the guilds themselves. They retained many functions in Prussia: they continued to supervise the recruitment and training of apprentices; they retained the right to certify trainees;113 they still required that masters pass qualifying examinations in

order to become accepted as full members in the corporation;114 and they continued to administer workers' insurance funds.115 Saxony and the southern German states obtained a similar result, for they refused to enforce the guilds' legal monopolies but also declined to abolish the guilds' claims to the allocation of labor.116 In some German towns craft guilds were to reassert control over workers by controlling their placement in jobs. The guilds issued employment books to workers which documented the holders' training and conduct.117 Outside Prussia, the guilds generally had more widespread controls: they could regulate access to craft work by imposing residence requirements for licensing and by subjecting new practitioners to severe examination.118 To be sure, the guilds no longer had clear statutory power to shut down the businesses of interlopers. But, as corporate associations, to the end of the nineteenth century they maintained regulations for the protection and advancement of their trades and for the supervision of labor.119

Guild influence was probably weakest in the Rhineland. During the French occupation, the left bank of the Rhine, incorporated into France, had its corporations abolished altogether. After the ejection of the French, however, this zone rejoined the main path of business development as it was being followed in other parts of Germany. In many trades, the artisans in the Rhineland conjured the guild affiliations back from the dead. The Diet of the Rhine province even appealed to the Prussian king in 1826 and 1833 for a partial lifting of freedom of trade and occupation.120 The craftspeople

failed in their attempts to restore the old constitution of business with production monopolies, but they succeeded in reinstating the condition that only members of the craft associations could hire apprentices.121

Guild membership in Germany remained a sign of social status which complicated the terms by which producers conceived the employment relation for craft production. Christiane Eisenberg's inquiries into the legacy of the guilds in Germany have disclosed that corporate designations of status blunted the adoption of terms descriptive of capitalist relations of production. The locutions employer (Arbeitgeber , literally, "giver of work") and employee (Arbeitnehmer ) were slow to replace the guild terms master (Meister ) and journeyman (Geselle ). Where the new words appeared to prevail, their usage was sometimes confused with the old: independent producers with guild certification as masters but with no assistants were classified inconsistently as "employers."122 In contrast to experience in Britain, "no uniform expression developed for the group of independent producers working on their own account."123 Economic agents in Britain called the producers in this group "free tradesmen" or "undertakers."124 But in Germany, the public and the craftsmen themselves imposed linguistic distinctions from the guild system upon producers who shared the same market positions. For example, in the mid-nineteenth century they described these independent producers as journeymen working on their own (selbständige Gesellen ) or as masters working without assistants (Alleinmeister ).125 Rather than adopting a terminology based on the exchange of products by independent market actors, as in Britain, the Germans used guild designations that drew upon the prior status distinction between masters and jour-

neymen.126 Social forms inherited from the guild system were not modified to conform with the capitalist employment relation, but cross-cut capitalist definitions.127

During the revolution of 1848–1849, petitions for the recall of commercial liberty came from small textile masters in all portions of Germany. In Leipzig the craft masters wrote an appeal denouncing free trade as a pernicious "French" principle.128 "Unrestricted commercial freedom," the artisans of Korschenbroich in the lower Rhineland told the government in 1849, "is the origin of all evil."129 Every craft worker had a different home remedy for the exotic illness. Some guild petitioners wanted to prohibit merchants from buying goods manufactured by artisanal producers. They would have allowed peddlers to sell machine-made products but not hand-made ones—an eloquent indicator of the way craftspeople divided the world of production in two.130 Craft masters in the textile trade also attempted to prevent the rise of nonguild undertakings by allowing only guild masters to oversee the work of journeymen.131 Opposition to free trade came not just

from producers in the cities. The operators of rural putting-out systems wanted to restrict entry into the trade as a way of ensuring high-quality workmanship.132

The opposition to free trade did not disappear after the revolution was finally suppressed. To the end of their days, members of some of the urban crafts in Germany remained antagonistic to the emergence of liberal commercialism.133 During the 1850s the weaving guilds continued to send petitions asking the Saxon ministry of the interior to prohibit liberty of trade in their products.134 For artisans, the development of an unbridled market did not represent a natural progression in contrast to which regulation appeared as an exceptional constraint: as late as 1860, some craft workers saw free business as an artificial invention dreamed up by essayists. "Freedom of trade is a child of the press," the Magistrat of Conitz wrote in 1860, "supported by people and judgments that have little insight into the essence of craft work."135

In Britain, the cultural commodification of labor took place when artisanal work still enjoyed a vigorous youth. In the eyes of seventeenth-century British observers, small manufacture represented one of the most dynamic sectors of the economy.136 Given the prolonged suppression of market institutions for wage work in Britain, the exchange of merchandise by independent producers in this branch could provide the context for the commodification of labor as it was objectified in a ware. In Germany, by comparison, the introduction of a formal market in labor power and of

market discourse coincided with the middle age and deteriorating health of craft enterprise.137 It accompanied a secular debasement in the conditions of craft labor and a decline in its remuneration. Urban craft work tended to define itself as an opponent of free intercourse in labor rather than, as in Britain, a promoter of its growth within trade-union limits.138

The diverging usage of the term artisan in German and English illustrates the role of craft work in the cultural commodification of labor in the two countries. In the course of the nineteenth century the German term for artisan, Handwerker , came increasingly to refer to self-employed persons outside of large enterprises. It implicitly excluded wage laborers.139 In Britain, by comparison, the term artisan was increasingly used to refer to skilled workers who earned wages in the employ of others. It was applied to the aristocracy of wage laborers, including those in the factory. Unlike the German word, the English term was not shunted to the periphery of capitalist relations of employment but was central to the definition of wage labor. The fates of the terms worker and Werker also illustrate a divergence in the application of words that derived originally from the world of craft work but were extended to the industrial-capitalist economy. In both languages the term originally applied to those in craft and shop work.140 In English the term came to refer to the entirety of wage earners, marking the centrality of small manufacture for the definition of commercial labor. In German

usage, the term Werker remained confined to the original context of handicraft production, marking the failure of craft work to provide the template for conceiving of capitalist wage labor. The generic term for worker that prevailed in Germany, Arbeiter , came from another domain, that of the serfs on feudal estates.141

The urban crafts in Germany did not provide the context for the development of market thinking; instead, the crucible for the cultural specification of labor's commodity form was large enterprise relying upon supervised labor, that is, the manufactory.142 The employment regulations of Prussia and the other German states had long placed the manufactory and the artisanal workshop in separate worlds. During the eighteenth century, the Prussian state exempted manufactories on a case-by-case basis from the requirement that production of a line of goods rely only upon workers belonging to the guild responsible for that branch of industry. In 1794 Prussia finally arrived at a general rule: manufactories could hire whomever they pleased, including nonguild members and women.143 In Saxony as well, by the eighteenth century chartered factories were exempt from guild regulations on the use of labor.144 The German states recognized that the guilds restrained economic development, yet they remained unwilling to abolish them outright, for under the supervision of the masters they provided ready-made organizations for assisting authorities' surveillance and tutelage over workers.145 Once segmented by state regulation, the two worlds of work, manufactories with unregulated labor and guild craft shops, were never reunited.146

Prussia and the other German states continued their dual-track policy during the first decades of the nineteenth century. While they allowed guilds to maintain de facto control over labor in traditional workshops, official labor codes all but disappeared from the new and promising sector of large enterprise.147 Of course, the owners of the prosperous new factories considered their workers to be servants and supposed that the labor laws pertaining to the employment of house servants extended by implication to factory employees. But in Prussia, as elsewhere, these owners found that officials refused to extend the provisions of the laws for servants to factory workers.148 In the initial decades after the Prussian commercial reforms of 1810–1811, the police also declined to forcibly return workers who had abandoned their employment without notice.149 To collect compensation from miscreant workers, Prussian factory owners had to take the tedious step of filing claim for damages in court.150 Prussia, supposedly the land of heavy-handed state supervision, had a consistently laissez-faire policy toward labor contracts during the introduction of liberal commercialism.151 Enforcing a web of labor regulations in the factories, Prussian officials declared in 1817, "would reduce the natural freedom of people to dispose over their time and talents in the manner that seems most advantageous."152

Prussia set a standard for regulation elsewhere. In Saxony, where industrial growth enjoyed an early start, the industrial association reported in 1835 that "a condition of virtual lawlessness" had developed in labor relations.153 The Saxon state did not issue rules for labor contracts for nonguild factory workers until the 1850s.154 More remarkable are the steps that authorities there took to prevent town administrators from supplementing those general guidelines with additional disciplinary procedures for workers who left without notice or who damaged machinery. In Saxony provincial officials repeatedly intervened to prevent town administrators from officially sanctioning the employment codes drawn up by factory owners and their Chambers of Commerce.155 Employers in other regions, too, complained of lack of legal enforcement of employment rules in their mills and shops. "Whereas in other countries the law already regulates labor time, factory ordinances, and rules," the Magdeburg newspaper observed in 1850, "nothing similar occurs with us."156

The laissez-faire regime under which factory workers and employers in Germany were left to specify the labor transaction offers a powerful contrast with the fettering of wage labor at the dawn of liberal commercialism in Britain. There, we know, the law in force during the shift to a formal market made labor an exceptional good that employers could requisition by fiat. The law treated the laborer as the holder of an ascribed status rather than as the occupant of a role created through personal contract. In Germany, wage labor outside the guild system was founded on a more thoroughgoing break with the restrictions of the past than was true in Britain.157

In this respect the Germans proved themselves more liberal than the British at similar stages in the institutionalization of free exchange and commercialization of social life. Yet the maintenance of corporate organization of work in artisanal undertakings in Germany excluded this sector from a pioneering role in cultural change. The result was a profound division between large, innovative enterprise and small, traditional concerns.158 As Wolfram Fischer has observed, industrial policy in Germany "discouraged the transformation of the group of conservative artisans into a stratum of modernizing entrepreneurs and helped bifurcate the face of the economy into a static adherence to old forms and a dynamic, unlimited advance."159

The historical divide between traditional craft work and the commercialized manufactories in Germany found its theoretical expression in Marx's reflections. Marx excluded urban craft production from his interpretation of the genesis of capitalist relations of production. To be sure, it represented an early island of free labor within feudal society. Despite a propitious start, however, it remained unsuited for the eventual development of capitalist wage labor. "Although urban artisanal production rests essentially upon trade and the creation of exchange values," he acknowledged, "the direct, main purpose of this production is the subsistence of the artisan and of the craft master."160 Marx assumed that the urban artisans, under the aegis of the guilds, fought successfully against the attempts of merchant capitalists to govern the production process.161 In Kapital he emphasized the limits the guilds placed on the size of work-

shops and division of labor in the production process: "The merchant could buy every kind of commodity, with the exception of labor as a commodity. He was tolerated only as a distributor of the artisanal products."162 The appropriation of materialized labor did not, in Marx's opinion, constitute the purchase of labor as a commodity.163

To turn labor into a commodity, from Marx's point of view the capitalist had to take command of the production process in order to control the conditions under which labor power was converted into a product. The creation of a market in manufactures does not suffice to commodify labor; legal restrictions on both trade and the use of labor in production had to disappear. This theoretical supposition recapitulated the invention of the market in German history, where the commercialization of exchange in manufactures and the lifting of legal constraints on the use of labor in production were fused. Britain provided the historical laboratory for a model of capitalist development in Kapital , but the perspective imposed on Britain came from Germany. By the time internal monopolies on trade in manufactures had decayed in Britain, so had the power of the British guilds.164 By 1689 only a quarter of the towns in England had guilds with a semblance of organization, let alone ones capable of enforcing business prerogatives.165 They had lost the ability to impose statutory limits on the size of workshops and the division of labor. Marx's supposition that the urban crafts never allowed labor to crystallize as a commodity badly mis-

judges British experience but fits Germany closely.166 What appears here in Kapital as "theory" represents in fact the displaced historical experience of Germany.

Since Marx excluded urban crafts work from the development of capitalist relations of production, his attention was drawn to centralized manufacture in the countryside: "The original historical form in which capital appeared, first sporadically and locally, next to the old ways of production but gradually undermining them everywhere, was not yet the factory, but Manufacture proper."167 Historians in our day have emphasized that rural domestic industry based on the putting-out system occupied a larger portion of the work force than did centralized manufacture. David Landes has surmised that Marx's exaggerated estimation of the manufactory's importance stemmed from its role on the Continent as a state-subsidized disseminator of technical knowledge.168 Marx's accentuation of the manufactory's significance may also have derived from his theorization of social relations at the point of production. Workers in these large undertakings, in contrast to those in the guild-controlled shops, were separated from the tools of manufacture, and the conversion of their labor into a product was subordinated to management decree. To Marx's eye, these workers were the first to sell labor power per se in the emerging capitalist order. The prominence Marx gave to the manufactories was intended to accord, not with their quantitative share of employment, but with their importance as a site of the inception of the social categories of wage labor and capital.

The insight that labor itself became a commodity only when workers were supervised by the owners of large enterprises had become a common-place observation in bourgeois German economics before it surfaced in Kapital. J. C. Glaser, a philistine commentator from Berlin, had adduced such an argument in 1858. He claimed that

Glaser, in contrast to most economists in Britain, made an explicit contrast in his theory between the selling of mere articles and the offering of labor as a commodity in centralized factories with a division of responsibility. Like Marx, he called labor itself a commodity and applied the term labor power only when certain historically specific social relations obtained at the point of production. In addition, however, Glaser took care to say that workers did not sell but merely "rented" their labor power. This marks an understanding of labor power as something lodged in the person of the worker and reveals an understanding of an essential similarity between wage labor and serfdom or slavery. No wonder Glaser chose his words so carefully at this point to demarcate wage labor.170

In Britain, economic agents in the nineteenth century supposed that capitalist relations of labor were exemplified in the small craft shop as well as in the factory; in Germany, by contrast, both employers and workers usually focused upon employment in a centralized factory as the exemplary form of wage labor. During the early phases of mechanization in the German textile industry, the very term Lohnarbeiter , "wage worker," connoted those who worked in a factory.171 Remuneration in the factory also acquired a name different from that used in the craft shop. During the 1840s, workers of all sorts in the factories, as opposed to those in outside artisanal shops, were paid what were called "day wages" (Tagelohn ), as if they were day laborers. This emphasized the diurnal sale of labor power per se, even if the exact amount of the compensation was based on piece rates.172 In the textile trade, handweavers in trade associations gave their colleagues who entered the factories the contemptuous label of Tagelöhner , "day laborer."173 Employers adopted the same lan-

guage, singling out the factory operative as the true wage laborer. "The so-called day laborers," declared an industry journal in 1861, represented "the worker in the narrowest sense of the term."174 Conversely, journeymen weavers contended that merely by virtue of the fact that they worked outside the factory system, they were not wage laborers.175 In Britain, the commodification of labor appeared as a process separate from its impoundment in centralized, mechanized production under the supervision of the owner; in Germany, language testified to the conjunction of the two concepts.

The German view of employment as the purchase of "labor power" made the exercise of authority over the execution of work—that is, the purchase of labor's "use value"—an integral part of the process of securing a surplus from workers. This perspective unified the relations of appropriation and domination. When capitalists purchased "labor power," their receipt of profit depended on how successfully they converted labor capacity into labor. Without control of the production process, the employer did not appropriate a surplus. Profit may have been realized through exchange in the market, but it was generated and appropriated in production. There the buyers and sellers of labor as a commodity necessarily entered into relations of domination and subordination. Accordingly, Marx's theory ruled out the possibility of a social formation based on the exchange by independent commodity producers of labor as a commodity.176

The unique survival in Germany of corporate labor associations in craft work thus represents the second decisive condition for the development of the German specification of labor as a commodity. The resistance of German guilds to the introduction of liberal commercialism confined them to the margins of cultural development in the commercial economy. Their contribution to the cultural construction of labor was primarily negative. The restriction of the unbridled training and employment of labor to manufacture outside the guild system during the first decades of liberal commercialism in Germany meant that new branches of manufacture and the factory could play a pioneering role in the cultural construction of labor's commodity form. The factory provided a suitable setting for highlighting the supervision of labor and the appropriation of the "use value" of labor in the production process. If the immediate circumstances of production offer material for interpretation, however, they cannot impress themselves automatically upon the social imagination to produce a "corresponding" image of themselves. There is no single concept of labor that conforms most naturally to factory conditions. Instead, German producers drew upon cultural precedents to construct their definition of "labor power."

The Feudal Contribution

In Britain feudal tenures had been abolished and agrarian producers separated from the land before the government ceased regulating wages and before labor was formally founded upon contract rather than compulsion. In Germany, by contrast, feudal tenures and compulsory labor dues persisted in the countryside while the state created liberty of occupation and the formally free negotiation of wages for the factories and putting-out shops. This conjunction allowed feudal agricultural labor in Germany to supply a vivid template for the appropriation of labor in the factory during the transition to liberal commercialism.177 Whereas the contribution of the guilds was negative, that of feudal relations of work in agriculture was positive: they offered a model for the employment of labor on which economic agents could draw to define the labor transaction under the emerging capitalist relations of production.

The original feudalism of the Middle Ages had been founded on the coercive extraction of dues in labor. By the eighteenth century, of course, much of the tribute in labor services in Germany had been commuted to rents in kind or to money rents. This process followed separate tempos in localities from eastern to western Germany. Landowners who had converted most of the obligatory labor services to rents prior to 1810 did not as a rule manage estates of their own where they engaged wage labor.178 In a word, they did not support the rise of an alternative definition of the labor transaction based on commercial agriculture. Although the offering of labor tribute to seignors had a diminished economic significance in many regions of the country by the early nineteenth century, it remained the principal model for the employment of agricultural labor to accumulate surplus.179 In comparison to development in Britain, in Germany the introduction of freedom of occupation and of formally unconstrained market determination of wages in shops and factories began before—or in a few areas, barely coincided with—the complete abolition of dues in agricultural labor. We must examine the course of agrarian reform in each of Germany's key regions to show that despite enormous variation within Germany, this represented a general cross-national difference.

For historical analyses of the transformation of feudal relations in Germany, the Prussian heartlands have long served as the locus classicus. Until the reforms of the nineteenth century, most agricultural production here, east of the Elbe, was carried out on large estates with serf labor. Even the minority of peasants who were already legally free were required to give a labor tithe to the lord of their land in return for the use of a holding. Only in 1807, on the very eve of the introduction of freedom of trade, were the serfs themselves freed by law. Even then, many peasants did not satisfy the

provisions that in principle would have allowed them to redeem their dues in labor. Indeed, when the German cities experienced the heady days of revolution in 1848, the bulk of the Prussian peasantry still were compelled to deliver a quota of labor tribute.180 No wonder the entry for Arbeit in the German dictionary published in Berlin in 1860 included a feudal illustration of the term's meaning. This compendium, edited by a member of the Society for the Study of Modern Languages in Berlin, listed "going to do compulsory labor at the estate" as an illustration of the word's typical use.181 At the start of the industrial age, agricultural workers in the east were still bound in feudal relations of work that emphasized the lord's authority over their labor service.182

In Saxony, destined to become one of Germany's most heavily industrialized regions, the seignors prior to the era of reform managed only part of their holdings as personal estates.183 The remaining land had already come into possession of small peasant cultivators who owed the lords money rents as well as labor services. When the value of the money payments depreciated after 1815, however, the lords succeeded in intensifying their subordinates' labor obligations.184 Not until 1832 did the Saxony government establish a framework for cultivators to release themselves from labor tribute by indemnifying their lords. The peasants who met the eligibility requirements could redeem their obligations by making payments in installments over a span of twenty-five years. When textile mills had become an accepted sight in the Saxony countryside and the mechanized factory an important matter in economic discussions, most of the peasants had not yet paid off their

feudal obligation to labor.185 The outposts of factory development were surrounded by a sea of agricultural workers bound by compulsory labor from another era.

As a mechanism for extracting surplus from the agricultural producers, labor dues had less importance in western and southern Germany than in the east. But there were many exceptions to this rule. In some western and central regions, including Paderborn, Hannover, Brunswick, and Magdeburg, feudal rent in the form of labor services absorbed a large portion of the peasantry's workdays.186 In the districts of Duisburg and Essen, near the centers of industrial expansion, some peasants were still attempting to release themselves from labor dues in the revolution of 1848.187 In southern Germany the governments of Baden and Württemberg did not earn their liberal reputations for the agricultural reforms they introduced. Only in 1831 did Baden make labor obligations convertible to money payments.188 In Württemberg small cultivators continued to deliver labor services until the revolution of 1848. The compensation they paid their lords to abolish labor dues was much greater than they paid for release from other fees and rents.189 Even outside the Prussian heartlands, labor tribute played a role in defining the use of labor in the early nineteenth century

Prior to the French invasion, tithes in labor no doubt had less significance in the Rhineland than in other regions of the country. In this area above all, peasants could not be evicted from their holdings.190 Most of the services the peasants had once rendered in return for use of the soil had been converted to money rents or to levies on the harvest.191 The producers came close to enjoying a system of pure land rental.192

How, then, could historians conclude that in the Rhineland's system of agriculture prior to the French invasions "medieval survivals certainly still had a wide scope"?193 One answer is that as a modest supplement to agricultural rents, some days of compulsory labor were still rendered in much of the Rhineland.194 In rare instances, the obligatory service was rendered in the landowners' small manufactories.195 Even if the landholders did not rely upon tribute in labor for their economic sustenance, the required services still played an important role in defining farmers' subservience to land-owners, as the seignors' reactions to proposed reforms demonstrated. After the French invasion, landholders in western Germany opposed the elimination of labor dues, because they believed they would suffer a "decline of prestige through the future loss of subordinate persons."196

Seignors believed that the procurement of labor through dues served as a model of authority relations. Even after some of them began to fathom the inefficiency that accompanied unpaid, coerced labor, they contended that its disciplinary effect was indispensable.197 Johann Georg Fleischer had put this relation of domination into words in 1775, when he wrote that the dues were "service or labor for the lord" and were "owed as the obligation of a subordinate."198 For another reason, too, tribute in labor had a significance apart from the bare number of days of work delivered: it could be demanded during the critical harvest period, when the dependent farmer's time was most valuable to himself as well as to the seignor.

The survival of feudal labor services in German agriculture supports the assumption that the labor transaction was based on the offering of a labor potential rather than on the delivery of a product. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, when employers and state administrators first tried to imagine the conversion of dues in labor to a market equivalent, they rejected the view that the dues could be equated with an article of labor. As one adviser, Karl Dietrich Hüllmann, expressed it in 1803, the value of the product delivered could vary, whereas "labor is to be compared only with labor."199 Hüllmann recommended that landowners replace labor dues with variable money rents indexed by the current price of common day labor. With the funds thereby collected, lords could command the same amount of labor power in the market as they had received by feudal claim. Like others, Hüllmann equated labor dues with the command of living service. Economic theorists put this in a more explicit and commercial form. For example, Fleischer argued in 1775 that the compulsory labor services delivered to the lords represented "active capital,"200 a living potential that could be used in a way that inert capital could not.

The slow reshaping of the social relations of work in German agriculture in accord with a liberal market regime highlighted the difference between the use value of labor and its price. Commentators observed that the lords extracted far less labor in a day from a vassal than from a free worker.

Fleischer, for example, estimated that the use value of day labor obtained from an unfree subordinate was only half that of a common wage earner; but if both were free laborers in the market, he said, their labor time would have the same exchange value.201 The conversion of feudal to capitalist institutions of work encouraged German thinkers to determine the distinct moment of converting a labor potential into labor.

Feudal relations of work offered a model for capitalist relations in the eyes of the workers themselves. The recollections of Adam Heuss illustrate their reactions during the critical period of transition. Heuss, born in 1780, worked for a small hand smith in Nürnberg who suffered from a decline in business. He published his observations on this matter in 1845, in a text that was autobiographical in tone and not intentionally political:

In Heuss's account, the appearance of wage labor is conjoined with the rise of mechanized factory production, a typical appreciation based on the German path to a market regime.203 For him, the transition from compulsory labor dues to officially free labor served as a model for the transition from small craft shops to the factory. Heuss's text, focused on private affairs, was not composed for the sake of public dialogue or condemnation. The change from feudalism to capitalism was in his eyes purely formal: it did not alter the substance of employment. He testified to the transfer of feudal models of employment to the factory.

From the early days of factory labor in Germany during the 1830s, popular journals described the unwilling entry of workers into the factory as a

continuation of forced labor under the feudal system.204 During the revolutions of 1848 and 1849, the workers' newspaper Die Verbrüderung restated this judgment. It declared that there was no essential difference between feudal labor dues and "the labor that is demanded from the manual worker today." In both situations, it explained, the worker is compelled to work for his subsistence.205 Colloquial language also testified to the comparison of industrial and feudal relations of work: during the 1830s, the term Fröhnerlohn , the subsistence of the forced laborer, was transferred from agriculture to industry.206

The comparison of feudal with capitalist employment relations remained a standard theme into the late nineteenth century. At an assembly of factory laborers and cloth makers in Bautzen in 1873, a speaker for the union movement said that "the serf of the Middle Ages was in a better position than the modern free worker, for the free worker has no means for acquiring the tools for work and thus becomes a vassal of the employer [Brotherr ]."207 Joseph Dietzgen, a tanner and early interpreter of Marx's investigation of the capitalist labor process, used the dependent servant's obligation to deliver labor to the lord of the property as a model for the wage laborer's delivery of labor to the capitalist. "Those who are working must do compulsory labor to create a product for the owners," he wrote in 1873, "which in twenty years equals the full value of the invested capital."208

The long survival of feudal relations of work in Germany influenced the development of an understanding of the capitalist employment relation among elite economists as well. Many German economists saw the offering of feudal labor services as a forerunner to the sale of services by means of the wage contract.209 Ludwig Jakob was among those who expressed in clear form the carryover of feudal assumptions about labor to the wage contract. In a prize essay on free and servile labor, published in 1814, Jakob said that with wage labor, "the master does not have anything to do with forcing serfs into his service; rather, he selects among persons who seek to rent themselves [sich vermieten ]."210 The formulation that free workers compete to "rent themselves" establishes an analogy, suggesting that as serfs confer their person permanently, so wage laborers offer their person to the employer temporarily. Textile workers adopted the same expression. When they looked for work, they said they wanted to "rent themselves."211

German economists may have taken liberal commercialism as the foundation for their codifications of economic thought, but they composed their works with many a backward glance at feudal relations of work. Economists such as Jakob, Rau, and Hermann emphasized that labor could be employed most productively if workers received compensation for extra effort and if they remained "free" to bargain for wages that compensated them for their accomplishments.212 This looks liberal enough, but the writers were not so inured to capitalist relations as to take the officially free labor contract for granted. For the German economists, to say that workers sold their "labor" did not adequately distinguish between feudal and market relations, because

selling one's "labor," in their eyes, could also mean that one bound one's whole person with a feudal obligation to labor.213 The concept of "labor power," by contrast, identified clearly the commodity the worker sold as something that inhered in the individual but could be separated analytically from the worker's person. At the same time, it maintained the idea that workers sold their labor as if it were a service and a resource rather than as if it were materialized in finished articles, as in Britain.214 The German thinkers did not contrast the person of the worker and the delivered product, as their British counterparts did, to distinguish the commitment of the whole person to labor from the sale of labor as a commodity; rather, the Germans made a distinction between the disposition over the whole person of the worker and the temporary command over the individual's labor capacity.215 It is telling that even people of business in Germany emphasized that the wage was "the equivalent for rented human labor power."216 Unlike the British, the Germans did not interpose a product between workers and employers but instead established an immediate relation between the two parties by retaining the concept of employment as the offering of a capacity.

Marx called attention in Kapital to the continuity between the concepts that ruled the delivery of labor under feudalism and those that operated, in disguised form, in the capitalist factory. In the Middle Ages, Marx claimed, "Every serf knows that what he expends in the service of his master is a definite quantity of his own personal labor power."217 In the feudal period, "the social relations between individuals in the performance of their labour appear at all events as their own mutual personal relations and are not disguised under the shape of social relations between things, the labor products. "218 Under the feudal system, the relations of appropriation and domination were fused in experience. When Marx applied feudal common sense

about the delivery of labor to unmask capitalist nonsense, theory recapitulated history.219 For Marx's acquaintance with feudal relations in Germany gave him the historical vantage point needed to use the notion of labor power in a critique of the view of materialized labor that governed British economic thought. Marx, like his contemporaries, emphasized the unusual coincidence in Germany of capitalist relations in the factory with feudal relations in agriculture.220 The musty German past thereby divulged underlying truths about the fresh British future.

The distinctive content of the German specification of labor as a commodity drew in several ways upon the procurement of labor in feudal relations of agriculture. As in the delivery of labor tithes, so in the selling of labor power in a market the German definition of the transaction emphasized the delivery of labor as a service potential, the employer's authority over the use of the labor, and the challenge of converting the use value of labor into a result. Adelung's dictionary of 1793 highlighted the offering of the worker's own person as a tool to another in its definition of an Arbeitsmann ("workman") as someone who "in everyday life lets himself be used for manual labor."221 The feudal emphasis on the transfer of labor as a potential at the disposal of a superior was to echo inside the walls of the mechanized factory: at the beginning of the twentieth century, the employment contract was not yet termed a "labor relation" in the German business code but a "service relation."222

Even after the ancient system of extracting dues in labor was put to rest, other components of feudalism in agricultural work refused a timely burial. Their spirit animated labor law in the German countryside until the revolution of 1918. Up to that year, more than three dozen special ordinances, many dating back to the eighteenth century, condemned the agricultural wage laborer to harsh servitude. For violation of contract, these laborers were still liable to gross physical punishment, imprisonment, and forcible transport by the police.223 The bondage of agricultural workers to regulations outside those of a free mutual contract differs sharply from German

officials' deliberate protection of uncoercive agreements in factories at the dawn of the liberal commercial era. This extreme disjuncture in the pace of liberalization between the factory yard and the landed estate gave German producers an unusual vantage point. They could define the commodity of labor in terms of the underlying similarities between feudal and capitalist work regimes, systems whose principles appeared discordant to countries that had not experienced this coincidence of regimes of labor.

Three Conditions for the Cultural Outcome

This chapter has uncovered three major conditions guiding the construction of labor's commodity form in Germany: the simultaneous creation of juridically free markets in merchandise and wage labor in manufacturing, the prolonged supervision of labor in the urban crafts by guilds, and the compressed transition (amounting in a few regions to a genuine overlap) between the rendering of feudal dues in labor and the offering of labor for a wage in factory manufacture. The presentation has not treated these elements as additive factors; it has assigned them separate locations in an explanatory framework that shows how each established negative limits on the result or positively selected it. The conjoint introduction of formally free trade in manufactures and labor power gave German producers the opportunity of inventing labor's commodity form during the initial period in which market thinking emerged. In Britain the suppression of wage labor during the equivalent phase of the institutionalization of free commercial exchange blocked the discovery of labor as a commodity in the guise of "labor power." The two remaining conditions were still necessary to turn the possible into the actual in Germany. They enabled economic agents to transfer the assumptions surrounding the procurement of labor under feudalism to the labor transaction in the capitalist factory. It is only fitting that the word Arbeit , which in capitalist Germany came to designate labor in general, originally referred exclusively to agricultural services rendered by serfs.

To outline the historical origins of the contrasting commodity forms assumed by labor in Germany and Britain, this chapter has unraveled the lost connections between European economic practices lodged in the past and the Marxist analysis of the capitalist labor process debated in the present. We have seen how the categories Marx used to capture the generic logic of capitalist exploitation were unwittingly drawn from the culturally

specific concepts used in nineteenth-century German industrial life. The German producers had the pivotal concept of labor power ready to hand. But the parallels are more ample than that. The logical structure of Marx's theory of capitalist production—its exclusion, on analytic grounds, of independent artisanal producers from capitalist relations, its fundamental exemplification of supervised labor in large manufactories—telescopes and freezes the historically unique development of industrial capitalism in Germany.

As is well known, Marx was acutely aware that the concept of labor as a general factor of production arose only with the unhampered circulation of workers among occupations in a capitalist order. He described the historical development of the appreciation of labor as a commodity in his methodological reflections upon his critique of political economy:

Marx uses the concept of labor as a commodity not only as an economic but as a social category; it delineates both the systemic laws of capitalism and the culturally specific lifeworld of the producers in bourgeois society. But if Marx brilliantly historicized and humanized a concept that other economists had taken as a gift from on high, at the same time he continued to postulate a single commodity form for labor in all developed capitalist regimes. When he conducted his own interpretive analysis of the causal laws of commodity exchange enunciated by bourgeois economists before him, he still treated capitalism as a general system that stood outside of himself. He failed to reflect upon his own national location within the movement of history and the process by which his experience came to incorporate na-

tional specificities of development. He investigated what was hidden from his life experience, not what was hidden in it.

The delineation of the three forks in German development led us to the commodification of labor in the form of "labor power," but it left several questions unresolved. What destination does a country reach if it experiences the creation of officially free markets in merchandise and labor simultaneously but lacks the other conditions that prevailed in Germany? Are there other forms in which labor can be molded as a commodity apart from those cast in Germany and Britain? We address these questions in the next chapter.

Northern Italy: A Preparatory Application of the Model

The course of development in northern and central Italy, the pioneering regions of the peninsula in the transition to liberal commercialism, shares an essential similarity with development in Britain. Northern Italy, like Britain, began its transition to liberal commercialism cleansed of the legacy of feudal relations in the countryside.5 As early as the tenth century the

Figure 10.
Hierarchy of Motivating Conditions for Specifications
of Labor as a Commodity

nobles of northern and central Italy began to abandon manorial agriculture. They converted the obligatory labor services of their subordinates into rents.6 In the fourteenth century, as the economic influence of the buoyant urban communes encompassed much of the countryside, ownership of the land passed from the ancient nobles to new bourgeois owners.7 Despite the great variety in the size of holdings in different localities, most agriculture was dominated by small peasant farmers paying rents in money or as a share of the crops.8 The region was perhaps unique in its prolonged experience with a new rural civilization based on commercial exchange rather than formal legal privilege over persons.9 Peasants were, to be sure, dependent upon the landowners, but their relation was based originally on contract and did not include a model for the delivery of unpaid labor services.

As the Italian economy in the sixteenth century entered its secular decline, the countryside experienced what some observers have vaguely termed refeudalization. The peninsula's many small states, in their quest for revenue, sold rights and functions normally exercised by the central authorities, such as the levying of taxes and administration of justice. The buyers were thereby invested with a "fief." Despite the splintering of authority and the growth of byzantine networks of privilege, this process did not recreate the fusion of property and authority over labor that characterized land ownership in Germany and France. The feudatories received no estate holdings, no right to meddle in the property rights of the people in the fief, and, most important for the development of concepts of labor, no claim to exact dues in work.10 They acquired the license to levy taxes specified at the time of investiture, to collect fees from public facilities such as grain mills and inns, and to administer justice—although many subjects were exempted from the feudatories' courts or could appeal to central

authority.11 On the whole the peasants remained indifferent to this readjustment of administration, so inconsequential did these changes "on high" seem to them.12 In the centuries of Italy's economic regression the devolution of responsibility for collecting revenue and for staffing the courts created an interminable maze of privilege but did not alter the reliance in agriculture on contracts for labor rather than on obligatory services.

In the seventeenth century Italy diverged from Britain in its failure to develop a liberal market policy. The weakening of the Italian economy made it increasingly difficult to provision the towns with foodstuffs. Most states controlled prices of grain and imposed tariffs on grain shipments.13 In textiles, cultivators of raw silk had to dispose of their output to registered merchant guilds.14 In contrast to Britain's precocious development of an integrated national market, the Italian states regulated trade in such a way as to prevent the formation of interregional markets.15 The guilds continued to control the training and merchandising of labor power until the mid-eighteenth century.

As in Germany, so in Italy a period of rapid reform orchestrated by the state led to the simultaneous recognition of markets in labor and in other commodities. Venice began the gradual abolition of guild privilege in 1719. In Tuscany the government promulgated freedom of occupation in 1770 and abolished the guilds' exams, courts, and statutes.16 The administration in Lombardy removed the guilds through a series of bold decrees between 1773 and 1787.17 This period coincided with the removal of legal restrictions on the free marketing and pricing of goods.

Northern Italy's conjoint development of formal markets in labor and in finished products and its lack of a feudal legacy therefore combined aspects of the German and the British experiences. The effect upon the construction of labor as a commodity was perhaps foreseeable. First, the absence of a feudal legacy in Italy eliminated the cultural template for imagining that the employer lays claim to a service capacity and has the right of disposal over the person of the subordinate worker. Accordingly, the specification of labor that dominated Italian economic literature during the classical period of political economy bears a generic resemblance to the prevailing concept in Britain: labor was seen as being transferred from worker to employer as it was materialized in a product. Cesare Beccaria's reflections upon the division of labor, perhaps the most celebrated economic discussions from Italy's eighteenth-century bourgeois Enlightenment, are restricted to the example of independent producers exchanging their articles with each other.18 Yet the conjoint appearance of markets in labor and in finished products created a difference in development between Italy and Britain: when the concept of labor as a commodity appeared in Italy, it was not subsumed under a preexisting concept of material goods exchanged in a market, as happened in Britain. There the antecedent development of formally free intercourse in finished goods that were believed to be exchanged in terms of the value of the materialized labor they contained lent people of commerce the notion that if labor, too, was a commodity it must acquire its calculable value when it entered the market embodied in a ware. In Italy, by comparison, the transfer of labor occurred via the materialized product, but the value of the product was determined by the labor power people were willing to dispense for its acquisition.19 The simultaneous development of formally free intercourse in both finished products and labor power encouraged economic agents to see the expenditure of labor power and the amount spent on products as determined by the same utilitarian calculus. Since the amount of labor an individual was willing to disburse for a product could differ from the amount of materialized labor received in it, however, labor seemed to be a source of a product's value, but not its determinant.20 Yet a key similarity

between the Italian and British classical economists confirms that the Italians conceived of the conveyance of abstract labor via products: the Italians, like the British, were weak in analyzing the entrepreneurial function. The classical Italian economists, like the British, treated the employer as a capitalist investor rather than as a supervisor of the execution of work.21

The development of Italian theories of labor's contribution to the prices of goods may have crested in the work of Francesco Ferrara, who received a chair in political economy at Turin in 1848. Ferrara supposed that labor is transferred between persons in the market via the transfer of articles.22 He proposed that "labor be considered as a product capable of being sold, the price of which is the wage."23 To be sure, Ferrara acknowledged that the expenditure of labor entered into the calculation of the value of a product, for value is measured by the sacrifice in effort that consumers are willing to make to obtain the product, whether by making it themselves or by working to make an exchange for it.24 Every person equates the price of something with their "individual appreciation" of the amount of their own "effort" that would be required to obtain that merchandise.25 Ferrara treated the fact that people hire services as analytically similar to their purchase of a finished ware in an equalitarian exchange:

As in theories of value, so in theories of practice. Industrial advisers who discussed the use of piece-rate scales in Italy focused on the employer's measurement of the materialized labor. In contrast to German commentators upon industrial relations who saw the piece-rate scale as a surrogate index of the labor activity, the Italian experts saw it as a measure of embodied labor pure and simple.27 Research in the future must examine the incarnation of labor's commodity form within the instrumentalities of life on the shop floor in Italy.28 This preliminary sketch suggests, however, that discourse in Italy about labor was cast in a distinctive mold that followed the logic of the region's route to liberal commercialism.

France: A Suggestive Extension

The French case illustrates the construction of labor as a commodity under circumstances that display two initial contrasts to those prevailing in Britain. First, the institutional frameworks for the formally free exchange of manufactures and of labor power were created simultaneously in France during the Great Revolution, not disjointly as in Britain. Second, France began the transition to a capitalist labor market with a legacy of feudal relations of work in agriculture. Both these conditions approximately paralleled the conditions obtaining in Germany during the same process of transition. But development in France diverged from that in Germany: during the initial transition to a formally free labor market, the guilds in France were not just stripped of their lawful monopolies over the marketing of

goods; they were eliminated altogether. In contrast to development in Germany, urban craftwork in France adapted to commercial liberalism without significant protection and could therefore serve as an institutional locus for the cultural definition of labor as a commodity. The major currents of economic thinking in France in the early nineteenth century gave expression to a distinctive specification of labor as a commodity which was eventually installed on the factory shop floor.

In the decades before the revolution of 1789, the constraints on trade and on the exercise of an occupation eroded in France, but they were not replaced by a formally free market regime in products or labor power. Louis XV's government declared in 1762 that manufacture in the countryside could proceed independently of the guilds, which were centered in the cities.29 Despite this newly confirmed liberty, exchange in the rural outlands developed under a hodgepodge of shifting local ordinances. At least until 1779, many intendants in the provinces enforced requirements that rural textile makers produce only approved varieties of cloth.30 In the north of France, by order of the intendant , inspectors from the textile guilds of Lille tramped through the backwoods districts to seize fabrics that deviated from approved patterns.31 The surveillance of rural output and the fines levied on aberrant weavers did not halt the rise of outland manufacture, but they helped to attach a portion of that production to the regulated trade of the cities.32 Urban brokers sometimes retained a statutory monopoly on the marketing of certain lines of fabrics created in nearby villages.33 In some regions, rural

spinners and weavers were still required to sell their goods in an approved marketplace, to prevent unlicensed dealers from poaching on the business of the guild brokers.34 Amid this forest of regulation, the abolition of guild jurisdiction over labor in the countryside represented only a partial clearing.35

Within the walls of the municipalities, officials upheld their right to control manufacture. In principle, magistrates in the textile towns remained the "natural judges" of economic activity. They could allocate yarn to various branches of weaving, authorize brokers to serve as intermediaries between producers and merchants, set up appropriate prices to be paid to both male and female workers for products, and decide whether new branches of enterprise should be established.36 Finally, of course, the urban corporations used their royal charters and judicial rights to buttress their manufacturing privileges and to control the circulation of labor. Guild masters were officially forbidden to compete with colleagues to at-

tract journeymen by offering better terms of work.37 The corporations' fetters on the exercise of an occupation came under increasing criticism from the reform-minded philosophes in the last decades of the old monarchy. Indeed, Turgot suspended the corporations for several months in 1776 after he began his brief tenure as controler-general. But his edict was never enforced.38 The guilds were swiftly restored and consolidated between 1776 and 1780.39 As a well-ordered hierarchy of associations subordinate to the monarch, they seemed indispensable to uphold the organization of society.40 Even when, in the eighteenth century, the de jure monopolies of the guilds became less effective, the model of constitutory corporations remained dominant in popular conceptions of the social order.41

The revolution of course swiftly initiated the transition to liberal commercialism. Internal customs and tolls on the transport of goods disappeared in 1790.42 The Constituent Assembly moved almost immediately to create a formally free market in labor power as well. In the period of the revolution from February to September, 1791, the assembly passed three decrees that demolished the old framework of corporate production. It first eliminated the guild associations of masters and workers. By contrast with the path of reform in Prussia, in France the guilds lost their function as official corporate sponsors of the employment of artisans. They were suppressed as associations for the training of workers, certification of masters, and cultivation of the trade. Then, in June, the Le Chapelier law put an end to all trade associations, including workers' collective organizations. The law provided instead for the establishment of wages by "freely contracted agreements between individual and individual."43 Finally, in September of that year the

assembly set aside the regulations that had prescribed the execution of labor: it dismantled all offices for inspecting the quality and specifications of manufactures.44 Of course, no perfectly liberated bazaar in articles of commerce or in labor power appeared in France (or elsewhere) that would satisfy the economist's shining ideal of an unbridled play of market forces.45 But there is a world of difference between community-supported, culturally prominent, foundational restrictions on trade and narrow exemptions from competition or implicit market imperfections such as de facto labor immobility. The revolution brought France across this divide. At one stroke, the outlines of an integrated national market in both products and labor came into view.

The dramatic change in governing economic principle did not allow the concept of labor as a commodity to spring ready-made out of the market stalls and workshops. The current of ideas that surfaced among the sans-culottes during the ensuing months of popular organization and insurrection verify that labor's commodity form had not yet taken shape. The sans-culottes founded their outlook upon the social contribution of concrete labor itself. As William Sewell's study of the language of labor reminds us, the common people of Paris sanctified those who worked with their hands.46 In their eyes, manual effort provided the moral foundation of the new French republic. When the radical sans-culottes articulated their demands for bread on the morrow or their hopes for greater social equality in times to come, they did not reason from the commercial value of their labor. The dependent artisans and journeymen, Albert Soboul noticed, "did not go so far as to establish a relation between the amount of work and the amount of the wage."47 They asserted only that their labor made them deserving members of the community and gave them title to a share of its wealth. When they advanced their claims, "wages were not

in the least conceived as representative of labor."48 Technically labor power might be acquired by contract, but it had not yet been culturally defined as a commodity.49

The fashioning of labor's commodity form in France during the first half of the nineteenth century relied upon the understanding of labor services that was inherited from the old regime. Feudal legacies in the countryside and corporate traditions in the towns encouraged French employers and workers to envision the employer's purchase of labor as his requisitioning of the worker's labor activity. The urban corporations of the ancien régime not only ordered French business and industry, but they formed the constituent units of society and were to serve as a model of social relations in France's early commercial society. Their charters and internal organization were similar to those for the universities and learned professions, grouping trade guilds with other associations as upholders of the arts rather than as organizations defined as providers of productive or manual labor per se.50 "Labor" was recognized as a contributor to social welfare if it was governed by artistic and intellectual discipline.51 Urban producers supposed that well-ordered activity, not the exchange of materialized labor, bonded society together.

Present-day historians can no longer romanticize the self-consciously corporate organization of the French urban trades by supposing that it ensured stable, communal relations in the workshops. The arduous research of Michael Sonenscher has demonstrated that artisanal manufacture in eighteenth-century France was characterized by rapid turnover in the work force and by reliance on far-flung chains of subcontractors.52 In these flexible and dynamic networks, however, relations between outworkers and merchants were officially governed by an extensive code that

prescribed the legitimate exercise of the craft.5 The British model of independent, self-determining small producers exchanging their wares had little resonance against the background of corporate organization in eighteenth-century France.54 Instead, the rhetoric of the corporate order portrayed production as the execution of an art which was certified, controlled, and protected by the monarch. Despite their revolutionary sentiments, the sans-culottes carried some elements of this outlook forward. They focused on labor executed for the welfare of the community, not on the exchange of contributions produced by autonomous commodity producers. Even as the laws of the corporate order inherited from the ancien régime disappeared, the sans-culottes emphasized mutual devotion to the labor activity rather than the exchange among independent manufacturers of products as vessels of materialized labor.

The ancien régime's definition of feudal work relations in the countryside, where by far the greater part of the population toiled, supplemented the emphasis on the delivery of labor services that prevailed in the towns. The feudal legacy in the countryside could play an important role in defining the labor transaction because the urban crafts under the old regime did not define the transfer of labor from dependent worker to employer. In the cities, no term for employer , such as patron , had yet become current.55 Most craft masters employed only one or two assistants—or, very often, none.56 Agriculture offered an important model for large-scale requisitioning of laborers.

Feudal agriculture in eighteenth-century France sustained a view of the transfer of labor as the obligatory delivery of a service. To be sure, the landed elite in France, compared to privileged landowners in German territory east of the Elbe, put scant economic reliance on the receipt of obligatory dues in labor. In the last days of the old regime, dependent peasants by and large tendered no more than twelve days annually of unpaid corvée labor to their landowners.57 Yet, as in German territory west of the Elbe, these labor serv-

ices were nonetheless essential in France in defining the relation of the laboring peasantry to persons of rural property. The tribute showed that title to the land conferred a claim not only to rents but to service and to authority over the activity of subordinates.58 This connotation became explicit in an incident narrated by the abbé Clerget: he claimed that a seigneur at the Parlement of Franche-Comté asserted the right to impose a new corvée on the peasantry in exchange for relinquishing ancient rights over vassals to receive oblations and "lead them in the hunt."59 Not that the corvée had become purely symbolic: peasants from the village of Haute-Marche in the district of Creuse complained in 1790 that they still sacrificed at least one day weekly to discharge their labor obligations.60 In the last years of the old regime a few seigneurs tried to reimpose labor tributes that rivaled those of prior centuries.61 Small wonder that the peasants included the corvées among their humiliating burdens when they compiled lists of grievances on the eve of the revolution.62

Memory of the corvées survived well into the nineteenth century. When the reins of power passed again to the Bourbons, the peasants associated the restoration of old political principles with the return of ancient relations in economic life. They feared the resuscitation of the unpaid days of labor.63 As

late as 1840 the procurator-general in Bordeaux attributed to the influence of "socialists" the widespread apprehension on the Dordogne about reimposition of the tithes and corvées.64 The autobiography of the Parisian turner Jacques-Etienne Bédé shows that urban workers, too, used the corvée as a point of comparison. Bédé and his fellow workers on piece rates went on strike in 1819 to protest the unremunerated time they were obliged to spend waiting at the workshop. Their goal, they said, was to abolish "corvées," the supply of unpaid labor.65

As employers and workers developed an understanding of the capitalist employment relation in the nineteenth century, they viewed the labor transaction as the offering of a service capacity, paralleling the model of days of service delivered in agriculture. In keeping with the late abolition of feudal relations of work in their respective countries, French workers frequently used corvée and German workers applied Frondienst to characterize the capitalist employment relation.66 The English and Italian languages, by comparison, did not retain catchwords referring to the delivery of unpaid dues in labor. Language testified to the fundamental forces at work on the route to the creation of a capitalist labor market.

The vernacular discloses how the specifications of labor as a commodity that prevailed in nineteenth-century France and Germany shared important similarities due to their legacies of feudal relations of work; yet there were also important differences between the countries, which were attributable to the annihilation of the guilds in France. The works of political economists reflect both the parallels and the contrasts in cultural outcomes.67 Elite economists in France believed that labor was sold as a resource. For example, Jean-Baptiste Say, a former textile manager and one of the earliest economists to draw on French sources to counter some of Adam Smith's proposi-

tions, grouped the "industrial services" of workers alongside land and capital in a list of the productive capacities of a nation.68 He added, "When I hire a laborer by the day, he does not sell me his fund of productive skills; he sells me only the services his capacity can give in the course of a day."69 Say thereby intended to indicate that renting out any "productive fund," be it capital or labor, equaled the vending of a service.

Say's comment implied that workers were contributing a resource to the production process that had the same status as the contributions of landowners and capitalists. The French concept of labor as a commodity resembled that of the British insofar as both treated the exchange as one that occurred among market equals without necessarily referring to relations of supervision in production itself. But Say's analysis and those of the French economists who followed him differed from those of the British in making a distinction between labor sold as a service and the product of that labor.70

The French classical economists highlighted the entrepreneurial function of combining diverse resources to create a product that had a value greater than the sum of its parts. From this perspective, of course, the worker could sell, not a product, but only a resource to be complemented by the employer.71 To combine the factors of production employers needed only to put tools at the disposal of the workers; they did not require control over the immediate process of production.72 Pellegrino Rossi, who succeeded Say to the most prestigious chair of economics in France, said that people who put cloth out to tailors to be finished by the tailors' labor bought not a product but a potential. "What do they buy?" he asked in his economics course of 1836–1837. "They buy a force, a means that will produce results whatever

the risks and hazards."73 Workers sold their potential, but its use was not necessarily under the immediate command of employers and did not form part of the understanding of how the exchange of labor was effected.74

Still, the French concept of labor resembled the German concept insofar as it made a contrast between labor and labor power. As in Germany, vocabulary offers a suggestive, if preliminary, indicator of the concepts in operation. In the first half of the nineteenth century, French economists used labor power (puissance de travail) as well as industrial services to refer to labor as a commodity.75 Rossi recognized that what the worker sold was the capacity to work, but he felt uneasy about this monetization of the laborers' life process. In his course on political economy, published in 1842, he said, "To conceive of labor power while abstracting it from the means of subsistence of the laborers during the process of production is to conceive of a phantom. Whoever says labor, whoever says labor power, means simultaneously workers and the means of subsistence, the laborer and the salary."76 In this passage Rossi attempted to shift the emphasis from the sale of living labor to the provision of necessities of life. His discomfort resulted from the perception that workers in a capitalist regime seemed to be selling themselves, an unpleasantry that British economists avoided by focusing on the sale of labor materialized in a product.

If treating the workers themselves as commodities repelled the French economists, why did they not instead take up the British view of labor as a commodity? Where authors can gain a tactical advantage from altering their concept of labor but let the opportunity pass, the constraint laid by

an underlying assumption comes to the surface. A significant example appears in Pierre-Joseph Proudhon's System of Economic Contradictions , published in 1846. In the middle of this work's chapter on value, Proudhon wrote as if he were caught between two goals: he wanted to insist, against the prevailing skepticism in France, that embodied labor served as a measure of value; and he wanted to take the moral high ground by refusing to treat the workers themselves as marketable wares. He did not adopt the convenient escape of imagining that the commodity of labor was sold as materialized in a product. Instead, he presented a weak alternative:

With this maneuver Proudhon sacrificed a chance to offer a coherent explanation of how labor determined prices in the contemporary marketplace. He could not compare the value of one person's labor power to another's.78 Yet he retained the assumption that labor was sold as a potential even as he avoided setting a price tag on the workers themselves.79

The French concept of labor as a commodity was embodied not only in words but in legal and economic practice. How to define an employment contract was a difficult question for nineteenth-century French courts. Should home weavers who sold their products to middlemen be considered employees covered by labor law, or were they artisans in charge of an enterprise? Did it make a difference if they supplied their own materials and owned their own tools? The rulings of the French authorities emphasized the character of the market relation rather than the employer's immediate authority over the use of the labor.

The employment relation in France received legal clarification when the courts ruled as early as 1836 that wage earners remunerated by piece rates were employees, not entrepreneurial contractors.80 The courts found that the criterion for identifying an employee was the worker's "state of dependence and subordination," not the mode of payment.81 Was the laborer who worked at home in such a "state of dependence"? The response that crystallized in France in the nineteenth century was distinctive. French officials defined domestic artisans as employees if they sold their products to one buyer at a time rather than offering them to the general public.82 Home workers who sold products to a single buyer had the legal status of employees because they entered into an ongoing relation in which they cooperated to deliver labor on a regular basis, rather than formulating a separate contract for each piece of work.83 When German officials in the nineteenth century were asked to decide the question, they did not see domestic artisans who sold products to a single buyer as dependent employees under the general business code, because they emphasized that these workers labored without supervision, off the premises.84 True, the Prussian

ministry of trade allowed home textile workers as early as 1856 to enroll as "factory workers" in the municipal funds for insurance against sickness that were administered for mill employees. Despite this administrative ruling to provide social welfare, however, officials noted that home workers, including those who worked for a single contractor without tools or materials of their own, did not stand in a "dependent relation of employment" since they labored "outside the workshop."85

In France, by contrast, whether the laborer worked at home rather than under the employer's eye made no difference "from the moment that a certain continuity in the relationship between the parties exists."86 What defined the exchange of labor in business employment was not the employer's immediate exploitation of the use value of the labor, as in Germany, but the dedication, via the market, of the worker's labor potential to a single person. The definition of business employment in France focused on the offering of a potential but imagined that the employer consumed this potential through market exchanges rather than through immediate relations of domination, as in Germany.

This difference between the commodity form of labor in France and that in Germany derived in large measure from the isolation of German artisanal work from the development of commercial liberalism. As we have seen, even after the revolution of 1848 many German guilds continued their efforts to reacquire trade monopolies, and they blocked the intrusion of liberal commercial thought into the urban artisanal economy.87 By the wiles of historical process, the very survival of the guilds in Germany placed their

ideas at the periphery of the cultural development of capitalism.88 In France, by contrast, the annihilation of the guilds meant that some of their collective premises were passed on in new guises, for the urban specialty trades were centrally involved in the development of liberal commercialism and helped shape its course.

Unlike some of their German contemporaries, the small producers in early nineteenth-century France rarely supposed that a refurbished guild system could be reinstated.89 The corporate idiom inherited from the old regime nonetheless contributed to workers' early visions of an economy founded on association rather than proprietary individualism.90 As might be expected on the basis of their corporate legacy, French workers in the first half of the nineteenth century sometimes viewed labor as a collective resource rather than as something alienated at a calculable loss or profit to the individual. The journal La Fraternité gave expression to this outlook in 1846. "Labor," it philosophized, "is a social act that gives value to the thing processed." This extrapolation from the cooperation of people of diverse talents for the manufacture of a single product bore implications for the claims to compensation that could be pressed by the laborers: "The true claim issuing from labor is the collective force.  . . . None of the [individual] men employed on this piece of work can claim proprietorship of this piece, considering that it was made only by uniting his effort with those of others and that it issues only from the union and combination of heads and arms."91 This emphasis on labor as a collective power could

counter the conclusions offered by those who treated labor as a commodity like any other.92 Yet the collective assumptions were retained when workers went on to describe, as they had to, the reality of their employment as individuals. They maintained that if the social resource of labor was alienated in practice by the individual, no natural price could be attached to it.93

The commodity form of labor in France supported the development of industrial practices that differed from those of both Germany and Britain. To be sure, French textile factory organization in the early nineteenth century superficially resembled that of Britain in several respects. For example, some French employers who made the transition from hand-powered spinning equipment to steam-driven machinery imposed weekly steam fees upon the workers in charge of the new, more productive equipment.94 The weekly fee held workers responsible for covering the greater capital and operating costs of the powered machines in return for enjoying swifter output and correlatively greater returns from piece rates. This practice lent support to the notion that workers—sometimes called entrepreneurs d'ouvrage by the employers—were autonomous renters of the machines, who organized use of the apparatus and delivered finished products to the factory owner.95 If the French workers were seen as deliverers of products, however, this superficial similarity enables us to ask more precisely what it means to say that labor has taken on a "commodity form."

To place the new form of labor in definitive perspective, let us not forget that even in ancient Mediterranean society, free laborers received payment

for their products from regular buyers. But they did not thereby imagine that they were conveying abstract labor time.96 Likewise, the rich evidence of William Reddy suggests that French textile workers at the start of the nineteenth century believed that they transferred items pure and simple, not that their products were the vessels for abstract labor. (As Reddy hints, the very term product may be ill-chosen for this period, since the word designates an article as the "produce" of labor rather than as a mere object suitable for exchange.)97 This represents a major difference from Britain, where textile workers who saw themselves in part as renters of machinery rather than as employees per se also viewed the products they furnished as signs for abstract labor. French textile workers of the 1830s seem not to have referred to their earnings as wages or to have described themselves as deliverers of "labor." The employers at a spinning mill near Colmar showed that as late as 1842 they could take nothing for granted. They had to remind spinners that workers could not make products of their own choosing in the mill, reiterating in their factory ordinance that the decision as to what type of yarn to spin belonged to the employer.98 Until labor practices in France embodied labor's commodity form, French factory workers presumed that they should receive the same piece rate for yarn whether it came from an old, short spinning mule or a newer, longer, and more productive one. They overlooked the difference in embodied labor times.99 After all, from the standpoint of a trader, the goods from the old machine did not differ from the product of the new. The commodity form of labor in France was embodied in factory practice only when workers were conceived of as the sellers of labor services.100

With the benefit of a cross-national outlook we can ascertain the unique cultural mode by which labor power was sold in France. As in Britain and Germany, so in France the construction of the piece-rate scales for weavers exemplifies the specification of labor as a commodity. In France, as in Germany and parts of Britain, the mechanization of weaving was undertaken in

earnest only in the mid-nineteenth century.101 In the north, which became by far the most important center for mechanized textile production, the weavers in the earliest factories were paid flat day wages.102 By 1870, however, piece-rate scales applicable to several towns had emerged.103 Early examples of district piece-rate scales for handweavers set workers' remuneration for a fixed length of cloth. But the schedules, unlike those in Britain during the same period, fail to reveal a linear relation between the increases in the density of the fabric and increases in remuneration.104

With the completion of mechanization in weaving during the second half of the nineteenth century, the French made equal use of scales that paid workers per thousand shots inserted in the cloth and of scales that remunerated workers for a fixed length of cloth.105 But when they used pay per shot, too, they failed to find a linear relation between the density produced and payment for movement of the shuttle, as did German producers.106 Through the pre–World War One period, the great majority of French lists display irregular rather than linear increases in pay as the density of the fabric increases.107 Figure 11 plots onto a graph a schedule for merinos from the north of France. The slopes of the French scales, which indicate the rate at which remuneration rises as the density of the cloth increases, change erratically in woolens as in cottons, in moistened linen as in dry.

Figure 11.
Tarif of Seydoux, Sieber & Cie., Bousies, 1886
Source: ADN M 625/55

French piece-rate scales based on length of cloth delivered lacked the linear increases of the British scales because French producers did not view the product as the vessel of abstract labor incorporated in the material. Of course, by the second half of the nineteenth century, the fabric delivered may have represented "labor" effort in the eyes of the French producers. But that labor was not conceived of as a social substance, materialized in the product in standard fashion, capable of providing a detectable metric for the value of the good. Without the notion of an underlying substance corresponding to the physical dimensions of the cloth, the different sectors of the piece-rate scales were not unified in a linear system. Nor were those French

piece-rate scales that were founded on the unit of one thousand shots unified by linear relations between density and pay, as in Germany.108 For the French view of labor as a commodity did not include the employers' appropriation of labor's use value, the supervised use of a concrete activity, which allows one to valorize each motion delivered to the employer. Instead, piece-rates for varying densities of cloth in France followed the vagaries of pricing for each traditional fabric "type" in well-established markets, the nonlinear tensile strengths of the manipulated yarn, and the readiness of heads of households to exploit the labor of family members as assistants in producing certain ranges of better-remunerated cloth densities.109 If the French

producers had managed perfectly well without resorting to linear gradations, the design of their scales might seem insignificant, attributable to simple lack of challenges requiring greater regularity.110 But in fact linearity was not invoked as a natural principle even when it could have helped employers and workers in their efforts to agree upon schedules.111

The piece-rate scales held only a nominal status in the eyes of nineteenth-century French textile employers and their workers. Weavers and spinners saw them as an initial element in determining their remuneration, not as a critical measure of labor delivered and an essential yardstick for payment. Handweavers in the first half of the nineteenth century attempted to renegotiate the piece rate when they turned in the completed fabric, based on unforeseen difficulties encountered in the weaving process.112 Even in the mature factory system it was not unheard-of for weavers to receive a fixed time wage provided they met a production minimum.113 In some instances workers and employers saw the piece-rate scales as temporary conventions, to be adjusted as necessary to yield a target daily wage.114 When strikers demanded higher earnings, on occasion they presented employers with alternatives: either the owners could dispense with fines on damaged fabric, or they could revise the piece-rate scales upward.115 This open-ended request shows that workers looked at the scales as perfunctory contrivances influencing their earnings, not as definitive mechanisms designed to gauge the appropriation of a real substance, labor.

Workers' appreciation of labor as a commodity in France guided the formulation of strike demands. In contrast to their counterparts in Germany and Britain, French weavers on strike for higher piece rates focused their demands on particular densities of cloth, not on the overall construc-

tion of the schedules. Even when they lodged complaints about particular densities of many different types of cloth, they concentrated on isolated positions in the overall table.116 In a strike at Avesnes in 1886, weavers asked for minute adjustments in ten different kinds of cloth rather than calling for an across-the-board revision.117

The French specification of labor as a commodity may have influenced not only the conduct of strikes on the ground but the economic theory propounded in the intellectual circles attached to the workers' movement. The chief economists who wrote for the French Workers' Party, a Marxist group supported by Engels, consistently misread Marx's economic theory. For example, Paul Lafargue, the country's most influential expert in Marxist analysis,118 penned a defense of Marx's theory of surplus value in 1884. Lafargue assumed that production for exchange, including that of domestic workers, gave birth to capital and exploited labor. In his eyes, anyone producing goods for profit in a market (and not only a middleman) became a capitalist. Engels rebuked Lafargue for failing to realize that capitalism was distinguished by the social relations of production, in which ownership of the means of production allowed a proprietor to purchase and supervise another person's labor power. Yet Lafargue's analysis reflected perfectly well the French understanding of labor as a commodity, in which the immediate relations of domination were absent from the concept of purchasing another person's labor activity.119 Marx's analysis of the extraction of surplus under capitalism resonated with the presumption

in France that employers purchased a labor activity, but the French assumed that the exploitation of this activity was effected in the market.

The Hierarchy of Motivating Conditions

This suggestive application of theory to the commercial development of France and, more briefly, to that of northern Italy advances a general model of the development of labor's commodity form while it confirms the individuality of each national case. In France and Italy, as in Germany and Britain, the breakthrough to liberal commercialism was critical for establishing a concept of labor which became an enduring part of national culture. Britain's passage was effected in the second half of the seventeenth century, although its legacy was applied to the free sale of what an outside observer is able to term "labor power" only in the mid-eighteenth century.120 In France the revolution inaugurated a liberal commercial order that definitively cast labor as a commodity during the bourgeois regime of Louis Philippe.121 In northern Italy the progression began in the last quarter of the eighteenth century and thereafter followed the rhythm set by France. In Germany the movement extended from approximately 1810 to industrial take-off in the 1850s. During these formative periods, economic agents conceived of and implemented the specifications of the sale of labor that eventually gave shape to the instrumentalities of production in the factory.

These divergent specifications of labor as a commodity developed not from elemental but from conjunctural differences: the four countries in our purview had parallel feudal starting points but contrasting disjunctures and overlaps between major institutional changes in their transition to capitalism. In particular, each country offers its own chronology of change in the demolition of guild constraints on the use of labor, of feudal labor dues, and of local trading privileges in finished articles. The timetable established by the dating of each of these changes in relation to the others in a given country represents the decisive context for the emergence of cultural differences. As delineated in Figure 10, there is a hierarchy in the causal influence of these temporal contrasts. For example, what would have happened in Britain if feudal labor dues had persisted in the countryside after an unfet-

tered national market in finished wares had been introduced? The timing of the dismantling of feudal labor dues in agriculture is irrelevant for the British case. The prior triumph of a commercial discourse centered on products alone ensured that whenever constraints on the unfettered purchase of labor power (which might include feudal dues in labor or guild regulation of laborers) were abolished, the exchange of labor in the resulting market would be assimilated to the established model for the vending of finished articles. The traditional restrictions on the sale of labor power proved irrelevant as a positive model for the shape eventually taken by labor as a commodity in Britain. Their contribution was purely negative, that of allowing a market discourse to identify labor as a substance residing in products. We can infer, therefore, that for Britain the precise form of constraint on the vending of labor power, whether by feudal dues in agriculture, by statutory controls on wages, or by other means, was of no consequence for the final shape of labor as a commodity. When viewed in the European context the disjoint recognition of the free exchange of articles and of labor power is sufficient to explain the British outcome.122

A concentration on the development of labor's specification as a commodity in Britain and in Germany offers more than a series of rich historical contrasts. A focus on these primary cases offers a theoretic key, because they represent two extremes among the routes of development: the case with the fewest motivating circumstances versus the case with the most complicated and extreme combination of conditions. Once these cases are laid out, we can see that circumstances in France and northern Italy fill in the alternative permutations between the poles of Britain and Germany. The French-German contrast reveals the difference between conceiving of the labor transaction as the receipt of labor activity through the market and thinking of labor as a service over which the employer exercises immediate command. In France, the annihilation of the guilds meant that the urban trades, with their extensive networks of unsupervised subcontractors and home workers, were included as a setting for economic agents to conceive of the sale of labor to employers. Therefore the emphasis on the employer's direct supervision of the worker, which encouraged a distinction between the use and the exchange

values of labor and on the employer's exploitation of the use value of the labor, was relatively weak. The Italian-British opposition discloses the difference between conceiving of labor as valorized in a product and thinking of labor as a medium for equating the difficulty of procuring products. Yet the outcomes in Italy and Britain share a generic similarity, because feudal dues in agriculture were absent in Italy and irrelevant in Britain.

The investigation of economic thought in Italy suggests that in the European context the disjoint establishment of formally free markets in products and in labor power represents a sufficient but not a necessary cause for the development of the view that labor is acquired only as it is materialized in an article. In Italy the conjoint recognition of markets in products and in labor power meant that the understanding of labor as a commodity was not assimilated to an antecedent market discourse focused upon intercourse in finished articles alone. But the absence of a feudal template for the receipt of labor as a service ensured that the Italians would nonetheless adopt the view that labor is purchased only as it is materialized in a product. Whether the Italians maintained a residual guild system that controlled the labor market for urban craft workers and blocked the operation of capitalist categories was inconsequential for the eventual cultural outcome. Without the feudal constitution of society as the delivery of services, Italians lacked a prerequisite for thinking of the purchase of labor as the appropriation of a labor service. The circulation of products among urban craft specialists located in dense networks of trade does not in itself highlight the appropriation of labor power. The Italian case indicates, however, that the staggered recognition of markets in products versus labor power is necessary for assuming, as the British economic agents did, that labor becomes a calibrated, monetized substance once it is embodied in a ware. For the simultaneous appearance of formally free markets in products and in labor power submits the labor activity and the acquisition of wares to a commercial calculus at the same time, as is illustrated in Italian economic theory. Because the two appear for consideration together, it does not happen, as it does in classical British commercial discourse, that the material articles alone are subjected to such a calculus.

This chapter brings a chain of thought full circle. Part One of the study set out in pursuit of the systematic logic that culture contributed to the organization of capitalist practices in the workplace. Part Two examined the broader commercial framework on which the fabrication of that culture depended. Does this work as a whole thereby follow the bipartite explanatory method that Weber presented in The Protestant Ethic , emphasizing culture's causal independence once it was ushered into the world, but its dependence upon the

economy for its birth? Do studies of culture's effect and of its historical genesis represent separate, fragmentable inquiries? The response to this question closes Part Two.

Concluding Reflections on Part Two

Of late it has become fashionable among historical investigators to assert that the social explanation of economic ideologies is inappropriately reductionist because it necessarily treats intellectual ideas as a reflection of underlying social conditions. The new cultural history has emphasized instead that changes in the social environment make themselves felt—indeed, come into being—only through the medium of language, which operates with the power and within the constraints of its own logic and own history.123 Michael Agnatieff formulated this issue for the history of economics some time ago by contesting the assumption that agents spontaneously adopt the language of economics by participating in capitalist development. "Our reflexive, unthinking tendency to assume that the past speaks the same language as our own," he reminded us, "has led us, quite wrongly, to assume that as 'commercial society' takes shape, in their daily experience and in their reading, a language of 'markets', 'classes', and 'social relations' is there at hand to guide them cognitively."124 Agnatieff and others have suggested that we examine the development of the categories of capitalist thought as an autonomous process, guided as much by the discursive resources and constraints of language as by the imputed economic facts of life. By this line of reasoning, when the economic surroundings change the process of "generating language adequate to one's conception of social reality" poses a challenge whose accomplishment is unpredictable.125

In raising culture to the status of an independent object of study, however, this variety of cultural history may inadvertently divide language from the economy. It assumes that the categories of economic analysis belong to the realm of the discursive, outside of which lies "commercial society" proper, whose transactions language tries to grasp. The present study, by contrast, emphasizes above all that commercial practice was itself struc-

tured by categories that communicated the form of the labor transaction. Language did not establish discursive rules for conduct which agents then attempted to follow as a norm: such a viewpoint makes the symbolic order external to practice, insofar as each of the customs of the factory derives its meaning by conforming to "ideal" rules articulated by intellectuals, literate workers, or managers. Instead, practice itself embodied symbolic principles, and the constellation of material instrumentalities on the shop floor served as the elements that conveyed messages independently of verbal analyses. The capitalist economy is a realm of symbolic practice that already contains a language of political economy appropriate for the analysis of social life. The concepts of labor as a commodity did not "reflect" or "express" economic conditions in the two countries—they were part and parcel of those conditions. The political economists' reflections on labor as a commodity, which were debated and discussed outside the shop floor, developed in tandem with the emergence of labor's commodity form as the principle that organized the humblest details of everyday life. In the lived experience of their individual transfers of labor, workers and marketeers sustained the principle of the exchange of abstract labor which, behind their backs, united their society into a functioning whole.

Units of Payment and Production

A conceptual scheme begins with division and distinction. The segments into which workers partitioned time to gauge their earnings reveals time's meaning for them in the employment relation. Unlike their British counterparts, German weavers calculated their earnings in a temporal framework based on the delivery of abstract work time at the site of production. In both countries, the piece-rate earnings of the weavers fluctuated severely from week to week even when business remained steady. Employers generally paid workers the earnings due at the end of each week, but the workers received credit for work performed only upon completion of an entire piece.

It required at least several days' effort to come to the end of a piece. If a weaver had not quite finished a piece at the end of a pay period, he or she would take home nothing for it that week. In the following week, however, the weaver might be paid for twice as much work as in the preceding week. The procedure for disbursing wages due was the same in both countries, yet German and British weavers arrived at different interpretations of the relation between remuneration and the passage of time.

Weavers could count their earnings in either of two basic ways: they could quote the wage they received per piece of cloth handed in, or they could convert their pay to a wage received over an interval of time. The reports about wages and working conditions submitted to the textile workers' newspapers in Germany and Britain provide an index of workers' choice of expression. I analyzed weavers' descriptions of their wages from the earliest surviving issues of the textile union newspapers, those from 1890 in Britain and from 1899 to 1902 in Germany. In both countries, the reports, which often quoted verbatim the negotiations over piece rates and the scales for remuneration, often cited wages in terms of earnings per piece without reference to time (see Table 6). This is hardly surprising, since the choice depended on the purpose for which the pay was cited. For example, comparing past and future earnings per piece (without reference to the time required for completion) sufficed to convey the magnitude of a pay hike or decline. The real question of interest, however, is how German and British weavers converted the bare amounts received

for cloth into a temporal framework to judge their well-being or the returns they received for their effort.

Sharp differences emerge if one considers the specific intervals selected by British and German weavers when they did allude to time. When British weavers put their earnings into a temporal framework, in virtually all cases they chose the week as their unit (see Table 7). They simply followed the cycle of paydays. German weavers were less likely to choose the period of a week, and when they did so they had a specific purpose in mind. They chose the week when they were complaining that the pay was inadequate for the survival of their household, as Table 8 shows. The week was the most meaningful unit for making a comparison between the family's receipts and its expenditures.5 Workers cited this fraction of time when they wanted to complain that their earnings granted only a beggarly existence or, as they often put it, amounted to "starvation wages."

In contrast to British practice, German weavers who converted their piece-rate earnings to a time equivalent expressed this in the majority of instances in periods other than the week. In more than a quarter of cases, they chose the interval of a day, whereas the British weavers never did so.

When German workers used the unit of a day to express their piece-rate earnings, they were demonstrating their orientation to the daily expenditure of labor power in the production process. If German weavers referred to specific daily earnings, they could relate the pay to the disposition over their activity during this time interval in the production process.6 For example, in the textile town of Schildesche the weavers who threatened a strike in 1905 informed the owner of their expectation that "a middling worker [should] earn with normal exertion at least two and a half marks a day."7 In only two out of twenty-six instances in which German weavers converted their piece-rate earnings to a daily average did they also make a reference to the adequacy of this wage for supporting themselves or their families. This indicates that the Germans did not associate the period of a day with the cycle of household expenditure or consumption.

In adopting diurnal or even hourly intervals to measure their earnings, German weavers applied an abstract time frame to their employment relation, one that was removed both from the tangible cycle of paydays and from the rhythm of finishing a piece of cloth. The vagaries of the weaving process, with unpredictable changes in the speed at which difficult warps could be turned into cloth and fluctuations in earnings over time, did not intrinsically suggest the day or the hour as a convenient measure of earnings, for no piece of fabric could be completed so quickly. German weavers distanced themselves from the delivery of cloth credited per week and from the weekly disbursal of wages, in order to analyze the wage they received as a return for the disposition of hypothetical intervals of time in the production process. For instance, weavers in Gera who required many days to complete a piece of fabric converted the piece-rate earning to a quotidian wage based on what they called the "daily expenditure of time."8 Even workers who were paid a fixed weekly wage converted their earnings into a remuneration for each day's work.9 German workers often negotiated with employers for wages measured by a daily calculus, even if the exact amount of remuneration depended on piece rates.10 German piece-rate workers were so accustomed to looking at the daily cycle of production that they determined average weekly earnings by first considering average daily earnings and then multiplying by the days of the work week. Regardless of the final time frame in which they were interested, they began their reckoning with the unit of a day.11

An explanation for the difference in the units of time German and British piece-rate workers used to calculate their earnings is not to be found in the circumstances under which they spent their payments. In both countries, workers on piece-rate systems generally received their wages either weekly or biweekly.12 German workers did not differ from their British counterparts in the frequency with which they actually paid their rents or in the timeframe, that of the week, that they used for budgeting household expenses.13 When German workers expressed their earnings per day, therefore, they diverged from a consumption-based framework to orient themselves to the daily cycle of the production process. This assumption shows up in the way German workers expressed their grievances over low rates of pay: when they complained that this remuneration was not commensurate with their skills, experience, or effort, they spoke in terms of daily rates.14 "As a result of bad warp and

poor materials," the Märkische Volksstimme said in 1906, "a worker can with extremely hard effort earn at the most only 1.5 marks daily."15

The preference for the interval of the day as the unit to calculate use of labor power was shared by German employers. When German managers considered the construction of their piece-rate scales, they often began by setting a proposed average daily wage.16 The in-house memos generated by company clerks on weavers' actual earnings also cited daily averages,17 and managers founded their calculations of production efficiency upon the unit of a day.18

For the British weavers, time was a quantifiable resource but the use of time per se was not what they sold their employer. As would be expected, therefore, when British weavers looked at their earnings over time, they did so only with regard to the cycle of actual paydays. They did not invent an independent framework based on the delivery of abstract labor time; they merely reported what they received in the same units as it came to hand. Does this mean the German weavers (and German employers) were more adept at rational calculation? Did only the German weavers theorize receipt of the wage?

The abstractions of a conceptual system can of course take radically different forms. British weavers also calculated their earnings based on abstract theory, but what they considered the object of theory the Germans hardly noted. Rather than figuring the average pay per day, the British weavers calculated the average per loom per week, emphasizing that the total was nothing but the sum of the looms operated. For example, to summarize for its readers the level of earnings for weavers in the town of Hindley in Lancashire, the Cotton Factory Times in 1897 said that weavers "are not

averaging more than three shillings six pence per loom."19 For weavers assigned several looms at once, as most were, the pay per loom naturally oscillated more than the total take-home pay. Estimating a weekly loom average represented no less a feat of abstraction than the German calculation of daily total averages.20

The direction of thought pursued by the British weavers was guided by their understanding of labor's commodity form. The language of the British weavers, as we have seen, revealed the assumption that they took charge of a loom to manage it for a profit, as if they were petty commodity producers. When they sought employment they inquired whether employers "had any looms to let."21 Once engaged, they were holders of a machine and its output rather than peddlers of labor power.

The British weavers carried into their trade union activities their picture of themselves as entrepreneurs who ought to net so much per loom.22 Whenever weavers in Yorkshire and Lancashire took up a special collection to provide strike support, to compensate their fellow workers for attending meetings, or to gather the initial funds necessary to support a

union, they imposed a levy on each weaver of so much per loom. 23 An analyst might suppose that establishing a contribution on this basis served as a shorthand way of graduating donations to the earnings of weavers. In all likelihood the custom did originate with this purpose. Yet by the late nineteenth century weavers in the West Riding earned less on two looms than on one, because they tended two if they manufactured simpler fabrics.24 Weavers also charged a levy on each loom when they took up collections in districts or in factories where every weaver served the same quota of looms. In the Huddersfield district, for example, each worker served a single loom.25 Despite the uniform rate per person , weavers there still spoke of levying a fixed sum on each loom.26 This habit was not confined to fund-raising for the trade unions. Weavers adopted the same unit of calculation when they undertook voluntary subscriptions to charities such as "Indian Famine Relief."27 In Germany, by contrast, weavers who made special collections simply assessed themselves a certain sum per person.28

The British custom of seeking donations per loom originated in the era of home manufacture, when weavers operated as independent commodity producers. It began at least as early as the mid-eighteenth century and, despite the changed technical environment, survived into the early twentieth century.29 In Germany, by contrast, the loom-based view of contributions did not surface in factories which an analyst might suppose would closely parallel the British case. It did not arise in Krefeld or the cities of Thüringen, for example, where handweavers had strong organizational traditions and legacies of collective struggle under the aegis of craft associa-

tions. The differences in how weavers in the two countries expressed their earnings and dues shows that their understanding of the transfer of "labor" gave weavers different conceptions of the source and denominators of their income over time.

For the purpose of comparing the development of textile labor movements in the two countries, the workers on piece rates represent the key group for investigation. In Germany weavers provided the leadership and the majority of members for the textile unions. The predominance of piece-rate workers in the unions was so great that the Christian newspaper reported in 1908, "For some time now the day-wage workers have planned to found their own organization, because in their opinion the Christian Textile Workers' Union is only for weavers or other piece-rate workers."30 Where the surveillance records of the police report the job category of a speaker at a textile meeting, it was almost invariably that of weaver.31

In Yorkshire, too—that part of Britain which gave birth to the Labor Party and which most resembled Germany in the timing of formal unionization—the textile unions were led by weavers. In Yeadon and Guiseley, for example, the Factory Workers' Union began as the Powerloom Weavers' Association. Not until 1892, when it sought to organize the spinners, did it adopt a more inclusive name.32 In Lancashire, of course, mule spinners

played a key role in the development of unions, but this group, too, was one that depended upon remuneration by piece rates.

While keeping in mind the predominance of piece-rate workers in the union movements, a restriction on the applicability of my comparison to the British and German textile work forces should be noted. For unskilled workers who received a flat day-wage, British employers and workers found it convenient and probably unavoidable to carry over on occasion the same unit, the day, to measure earnings and production.33 This sometimes happened in ring-frame spinning, for example. In such an environment, however, the calculations of the owners and workers for output and earnings merely copied the temporal unit used for remuneration, a unit owners adopted for an entirely pragmatic reason: by paying a flat wage for each day worked, in place of a flat sum per week, owners could avoid paying workers a full wage during those weeks that included holidays. The position of these day laborers contrasts with that of weavers, who received irregular piece rates and had to rely upon implicit assumptions about the labor activity to choose a conventional unit of time over which to average them. However, as we have seen, it was the piece-rate workers who organized and led the labor movements among textile workers. They selected the ideas and planned the programs of the unions. It is they who are of most significance in any comparative analysis of the effect of workplace culture on the development of workers' responses.

The Influence of Concepts of Time on Strike Demands

The workers' understandings of the sale of time guided their efforts to protect their interests. Weaving mills in both nations suffered from frequent interruptions in production. Factories usually waited for a merchant house to submit orders for a particular run of fabric before they began its manufacture.34 If the orders arrived sporadically, weavers found themselves wait-

ing for overlookers to install warps in their looms. Or, if a mill had a full line of orders, it could mishandle the winding of warps and procurement of weft yarn. In this case, too, weavers were left waiting for materials for their work.

The days textile workers lost waiting for materials amounted to a significant portion of work time in both Britain and Germany. In Germany, the union for Christian textile workers kept statistics on the matter, and its reports show that days lost waiting accounted for most of the time that its members spent "unemployed." The union calculated that from 1910 to 1912, for example, 64 percent of the workdays members lost resulted from waiting for materials.35 In Britain, overlookers' estimates and the report of the secretary of the weavers' union in Yorkshire indicate that Yorkshire weavers normally lost about one-quarter of their work time for lack of warps or weft.36 Allen Gee, secretary of the union, testified to the Royal Commission on Labour, "A man never expects to be fully employed as a weaver."37

British and German weavers developed contrasting responses to this shared predicament. The samples of complaints from the German and British newspapers near the turn of the century (see Tables 1–5, above, Chapter 4) provide one source of evidence of their divergence. In thirty-one cases cited by British weavers from 1890 to 1893, workers complained about higher-ups who distributed work materials unfairly.38 This grievance thus ranks among the dozen most frequently voiced. In my German sample, by contrast, weavers complained only five times about favoritism in the distribution of materials. This represented about 0.5 percent of the German sample. The relative absence of complaints about favoritism in distributing materials in Germany cannot be dismissed as an artifact of the circumstance that the German weavers minded less about waiting for warp and weft. After all, the list of major complaints shows that they

complained about waiting for materials slightly more frequently than did their British counterparts.39

Does the lower incidence of complaints about unfair allocation of materials in Germany indicate that German overlookers dispensed the warps and weft more equitably? The possibility cannot be excluded. It seems significant, however, that many of the complaints about waiting for materials that did not blame the overlooker came from districts where mills concentrated on short runs of specialized patterns. Mills in these regions, such as Barmen and Aachen, gave the overlookers responsibility for allocating warps among the weavers so that overlookers could match the skills of individual weavers to specific fabric orders.40 The lack of blame assigned to the overlooker might indicate that, in reaction to favoritism exercised by overlookers, German weavers who waited for materials simply focused on the more basic issue of losing their time, whereas British weavers particularized the problem and interpreted it as a product of their overlooker's character. What remains certain is the outcome in workers' consciousness: the German workers' relative emphasis on the underlying issue of losing time is in keeping with their view of the employment relation as the sale of the disposition of a labor capacity. The German workers did not attribute lost time to the prejudices of overlookers but addressed it as a basic problem in the employment relation.

Drawing upon their view of employment as the commitment of the use of labor over time, German weavers argued that they had a right to payment for the period they spent waiting without working (Wartegeld ). "During the period of the labor contract we must place all our labor power [Arbeitskraft ] at disposal," the workers in Lörrach complained in 1906. "In return the firm is contractually obligated to take care of the prompt delivery of work tools and materials."41 In Forst, the textile workers issued a statement in 1899 that called the worker's time a kind of capital for which workers had to be paid even while waiting for materials.42 German workers attached a value to the commitment of time with such precision that when they formulated strike demands for

waiting money, they often requested that managers graduate the pay not only for lost days but for fractions of lost hours.43 From a cross-national perspective, the issue is not simply the lodging of the demand but its design and rationale: the indemnification did not just ensure workers' minimum take-home pay but was finely graduated to lost minutes and was justified as payment for the timed disposal of labor power.44

The contestation of uncompensated time was so important to German workers that as individuals they initiated legal complaints against their employers. A weaver from Neugersdorf took the trouble to file a claim in court during 1909 to recover the value of two hours spent waiting. He demanded restitution for the lull caused when a company official had to check the fabric pattern installed on his loom.45 The difference between the German and the British responses to wasted time cannot be explained by the statutory environment. When textile employers in Germany wanted to be certain that they could escape from threatened litigation over lost time, they merely inserted a disclaimer in their factory rules against providing payment for "canceled time," a tactic which persisted into the 1920s.46

Strike demands for reimbursement of waiting time originated in each of Germany's major textile regions, including the Wupper Valley, the lower Rhine, the Münsterland, Saxony, and Silesia.47 The demands arose both in urban centers and in remote areas where workers supplemented their factory employment with agricultural work.48 Not only weavers but spinners, beamers, and spoolers demanded "waiting money."49 The workers enjoyed a measure of success: reports from the textile workers' newspapers and factory rule books show that the custom of paying "waiting

money" was geographically widespread.50 In the Wupper Valley, a survey of thirty-nine ribbon-weaving firms near Barmen conducted on the eve of the First World War found that almost half paid weavers for waiting for materials, including sixteen companies that offered restitution calculated to the hour.51 The payments became a permanent and taken-for-granted procedure.52 They offered a first step toward demands for payment for vacation time in Germany. The female winders at a firm in Viersen included among their strike demands in 1909 the proposal that they receive their regular pay for labor on days before holidays, when the firm operated only part-time.53 Workers at a textile mill at Neugersdorf went a step further in 1914 when they asked for compensation for the complete days off for holiday observances.54

By contrast with German practice, British textile employers did not offer their piece-rate workers waiting money. Nor did British textile workers ask for it in strike negotiations.55 In fact, the textile workers' press shows that British workers did not conceive of this as a possible issue of contention. A sampling of the Yorkshire Factory Times from 1890 to 1893 uncovered more than twenty complaints from weavers about reductions in earnings due to waiting for materials.56 Not one mentioned that the employer ought to compensate personnel for unused time. Nor did the complaints up to 1914 voice such a demand. Weavers argued, rather, that prices for fabrics delivered ought to take into consideration time lost waiting.57 For the intermittent time they spent installing the warp or waiting for a warp, they wished to receive payment via the selling price of the finished good in the market. A beneficent owner in Yorkshire proposed to pay workers for vacation time, but the mouthpiece for the textile union, the Yorkshire Factory Times , scorned the notion. For owners to offer money to workers for time not worked would be condescending, the paper claimed. "I should be glad if workers were sufficiently well paid to be independent even of these [payments]," its editorialist wrote on the front page of this journal in 1914.58 To avoid such "charity" at vacation time, workers had a right to earn enough for the work completed. True, the powerful unions for mule spinners in Lancashire saw to it that owners might pay workers something when the machines were stopped for repairs. But the employers owed such pay only if they needed the spinner's

assistance in carrying out the overhaul.59 The money served as compensation for extra labor, not, as in Germany, for the commitment of time when weavers were not used for any purpose in the mill.60

British textile workers' failure to demand reimbursement for waiting time certainly cannot be attributed to a lack of "time thrift" or to a disregard for time as a resource. Even in Elland, a sleepy village outside Bradford, weavers complained in 1889 that their employer forced them to wait for weft at their shop rather than giving them the chance of "profitably utilising" their time at home.61 The textile workers' union in Yorkshire reported that some of its members were so concerned about waiting for a warp that they unrealistically expected to qualify for out-of-work benefits from the union.62 British textile workers sought remedies for the loss of income but did not articulate a demand for compensation from the employer.

Why did the German employers, but not the British, provide "waiting money"? From a comparative perspective, the economic environment does not offer promising ground for generating this variation. A market analyst would be apt to assume that owners paid "waiting money" to discourage the unoccupied workers from seeking employment at another firm. German

managers might have had a greater incentive for holding on to their workers under either of two circumstances: if labor resources were scarcer in Germany than in Britain, or if the skills the owners required were so specialized that they could not easily be purchased in the general labor market. The evidence does not support either hypothesis. Factories in Britain that suffered from severe labor shortages paid no waiting money,63 nor did British companies who relied on unique skills from their workers, such as the isolated silk firms in Bradford and Halifax.64 In Germany, the incidence of compensation for lost time also contradicts economic logic. The highly paid weaving branch, which offered "waiting money" more often than other textile departments, was the sector least likely to suffer from labor shortages, for spinners, who had lower status and wages, transferred to weaving when they had the opportunity.65

The terms under which German firms dispensed waiting money also indicate that the practice was not crafted for the purpose of retaining labor. Companies began crediting the money to workers before the workers had lost enough time to consider changing employers. The payments could begin after as little as two hours of waiting, and almost always began within one workday after the commencement of idleness.66 If companies wanted to retain labor, moreover, they had other means at their disposal. They could, for example, offer bonuses to workers who stayed in their employ for a long period, a plan implemented by several German textile firms.67

If the German employers did not introduce waiting money for their own benefit, then the workers' understanding of labor's commodity form must have comprised the critical force in its introduction. How did the demands for compensation of time originate? Could differences between Germany and Britain in the lodging of time revendications have reflected nothing more than textile union officials' decisions as to which among many grievances to support and articulate? This would be to say that formal organizations for the propagation of ideology intervened to decide whether workers would focus upon and engage the issue. Alternatively, did the claims that attached to time arise as an expression of assumptions about the workday that workers acquired in the labor process? If the specifications of labor as a commodity were imparted to workers by the daily enactment of cultural practices rather than by discursive instruction, then the ideology workers carried into their collective actions could have originated, almost naturally, from the very construction of the labor process. The initiation and distribution of the demands for waiting money allows us to adjudicate between these possibilities.

Weavers in Germany had laid claim to waiting money prior to their incorporation into the factory system. In that era, textile employers had shamelessly enjoyed a gross oversupply of skilled and common labor.68 They certainly did not institute the payment of waiting money as a response to labor scarcity. In the Wuppertal, for instance, where a surplus of workers in the 1840s led to a disastrous decline in their earnings, handweavers in that decade began to receive money for the time lost between contracts or for the time expended setting up the warps for their next job.69 Indeed, as early as the 1830s, the entrepreneurs who ran putting-out networks included the weavers' "loss of time" during the changing of the

loom's fabric patterns as part of the expenses to be covered.70 In 1848 weavers in the putting-out networks in the Wuppertal, on the left side of the Rhine, in Brandenburg, and in Saxony advanced demands for officially guaranteed compensation for waiting for materials.71 Cotton printers in manufactories also pressed for waiting money during those revolutionary days.72 But weavers in particular advanced such claims in the first days of the 1848 revolution, before organizations of workers had extended across trade lines and before standing, citywide assemblies of artisans and factory workers had convened.73 The articulation of claims for waiting time before weavers had come into contact with organizational leaders suggests that the demand emerged as part and parcel of the everyday experience of the employment relation rather than out of a formal discourse imported by intellectual elites.

The demands raised by the British handloom weavers in response to similar predicaments reveal the influence of a different view of the exchange of labor as a commodity. The handloom weavers in Britain proposed all manner of remedies during the early nineteenth century to arrest the decline of their earnings, including a legislated minimum wage. Yet they never arrived at the notion that the employer owed them compensation for the simple commitment of time.74 Their proposals set forth minimum piece

rates for cloth actually delivered.75 In keeping with the principle of the exchange of labor via its products, they thought that they ought to earn enough for products delivered during the busy weeks to tide them over slow periods.76

We should not suppose that the handweavers in Britain believed they sold their products instead of time; they sold time, but as it was embodied in products. When the putting-out system for home weavers was in its prime, the distributors sometimes assigned a standard piece of fabric a time equivalent, which they used to establish the weaver's payment. If the clothiers in this system altered the remuneration for completion of that cloth, they expressed this as a change in the time investment expected for the work. For example, the clothiers of Wiltshire in 1801 reduced the time allocation for a standard piece of cloth from twenty-three to twenty hours.77 From the earliest days of radical political economy in Britain, critics of the market system asserted that workers did not get back from their employers all the time they had delivered. In 1805, Charles Hall asserted that the poor enjoyed only "about one-eighth part, or the produce of one-eighth part of their time."78 But the British workers considered the unfair transfer of time only as it was embodied in products.

Not only the original appearance of claims for waiting money in Germany but its geographical incidence after the establishment of mature factory regimes demonstrates that the demand rested on a popular conviction about the nature of the labor transaction. Weavers demanded restitution for the commitment of time in backwater areas where neither union organizations nor union spokesmen had appeared. A strike in a rural area of the Münsterland offers a telling emblem of German textile workers' belief that they ought to be compensated for the loss of their time. When workers in the village of Neuenkirchen left work to counter a proposed wage reduction in May, 1891, they not only succeeded in maintaining the previous piece rates, but they also drew compensation (Entschädigung ) from the company for the time out of work due to the strike!79 The demand for the reimbursement could hardly have been recommended by union leaders, for organizers did not target this rural area until almost a decade later.80 German textile workers raised the demand for waiting money in other remote areas where union representatives had not campaigned.81 Requests for the restitution of time commitments rested on established assumptions that were generated and sustained by the arrangement of workaday practices.82

The expectation in Germany that employers would provide compensation for the commitment of time also surfaced in the norms for disbursing wages in the event of the temporary closure of a factory. German textile workers successfully demanded that they receive compensation when their mill was shut due to breakdowns or alterations of machinery.83 British owners failed to offer compensation for disruptions in employment even when they required workers to wait in the vicinity for the mill to reopen.84 The columns of the textile workers' newspapers in Britain in the decades before the First World War frequently referred to engine breakdowns and stoppages due to the transfer of looms. They never suggested, however, that workers ought to receive compensation from employers during these intervals.

The German workers' readiness to battle for waiting money formed part of a larger struggle over the control and valorization of inappreciable segments of time, a contest in which British workers did not so readily engage. German workers not only complained about the petty ways in which employers controlled their time without compensating them for it, but they went ahead and seized upon that complaint as a cause for launching strikes. Weavers in Mönchengladbach struck with the sole demand of compensation for minutes that some of them lost waiting in line to punch out on the time clock.85 When the weavers at a mill in the same town went on strike in early 1900, they combined their request for higher wages with a demand related

to the expenditure of time. They proposed that the owner cease making the weavers wait to have their spools of yarn weighed (a means of calculating yarn wastage upon completion of a piece),86 or, alternatively, that the owner "compensate the worker for the resulting time loss."87 The German workers' enumeration of tasks for which they ought to receive compensation extended to the personal maintenance of their bodies. When the workers at a large silk firm outside of Krefeld in 1905 requested pay for auxiliary chores that consumed their time, they included the task of carrying the coffee water.88 In Mülhausen, textile workers told their owner in 1909 that for changing their clothing they wanted an extra five minutes' wage credit.89 If the workers transferred to the employer the labor power lodged in their person, they could expect compensation for sustaining it at the work site.

Even the ritual of handing workers the coins and currency of their pay absorbed time and as such became a contested interval in Germany. As early as 1848, home weavers in Chemnitz asserted that an excessive wait for the processing of their finished warps at the receiving office constituted a violation of the employment contract. When German textile workers negotiated with their employers over wages, they sometimes specified that clerks were to hand the pay out to them during work hours, not during a break or upon the conclusion of the regular workday.90 In Spremberg, police surveilling workers' meetings at the turn of the century reported that a major complaint of workers concerned the receipt of the pay packet after the close of the workday.91 In the course of strike negotiations at a mill in Mönchengladbach, the workers requested that their pay be brought to them at their machine.92 Reports from the Yorkshire Factory Times leave no doubt that British workers considered it offensive when employers detained them after normal working hours to dole out pay.93 Some employers made it a

policy to do so.94 Yet British workers never introduced these lost minutes into strike negotiations; they did not conceive of a small period of waiting as an unauthorized appropriation of their property—their time. British workers were no less vigilant than their German counterparts to protect themselves against the illegal prolongation of work for even a minute or two.95 In comparative perspective, the issue is not workers' concern about the length of the work shift—or, for employees on time wages, the performance of work without pay. The question is workers' sensitivity to payment for small increments of time in which the labor capacity is unused.

If German workers treated time itself as a kind of currency, so did their employers. They demonstrated this through their handling of the monies withheld from workers for coming to their jobs late. After 1891, German law prohibited factory employers from putting into their general till the funds they collected from disciplinary punishments. They had permission to pocket fines collected from workers for property damage, however. Employers could keep as compensation deductions made for broken windows or for the misuse of equipment, for example. Therefore employers kept two sets of books for the fines they imposed: one for the disciplinary fines, which they transferred to workers' welfare committees, and one for destruction of property. The important point here is that some German owners believed that the fines they levied on workers for tardiness belonged in the category of compensation for property losses.96

It would be easy to dismiss the employers' conduct in this instance as underhanded, unprincipled attempts to appropriate funds. But the evidence conflicts with this interpretation for two reasons. The books in which employers recorded their fines, the very records the factory inspectors and the courts used to arraign the avaricious employers, did not group other disciplinary fines, such as those inflicted for socializing away

from one's workstation or for inattentiveness, in the category of damage compensation. In these cases as well, the employers had lost the full use of the labor time they needed for their machinery. But the company books showed that owners did not attempt to profit from these other kinds of disciplinary fines, as they would have been likely to have done if they had merely sought to enrich themselves. Second, the employers whom the factory inspectors accused of misappropriating fines for tardiness presented their reasoning to the courts. Rather than avoid the publicity of a trial—a matter about which employers generally showed acute sensitivity97 —they supported their practice in public.

In each country, the conflicting expectations of the employers and workers arose from a foundation of cultural agreement, a shared understanding of labor as a commodity. In Germany the transmission of labor via the disposition over workers' time monetized time itself, whereas in Britain the transfer of labor as it was materialized in products meant that time was a resource whose gain or loss was measured in merchandise. In Germany the scales on which employers graduated per minute the amount of the fine they would assess for lateness treated time itself as a form of property—and so workers reciprocated. In Britain employers who locked tardy workers out of the mill enforced their expectation that anyone working for them deliver products at a regular pace, but as a rule employers did not treat the workers' time itself as property for whose loss they claimed a metrically graduated restitution. And, in parallel fashion, neither did British workers. The form of labor as a commodity laid out a distinctive playing field.98

In this culturally mediated struggle, the selection of labor's commodity form never conferred a univocal advantage upon a contestant. For example, the specification of labor in Germany may have enabled employers to justify shifting employees between jobs in the firm, since employers had purchased the disposition over the subordinates' labor power. But for employers it also had an unwanted effect. It immediately led German workers to press far-reaching demands based on the treatment of time as transferable property. Similarly, the specification of labor as a commodity that appeared in Britain may have discouraged textile workers from seeking pay for idle moments; at the same time, however, it encouraged workers to demand the full product of their labor. Even in the first decade of the century, Adam Smith's elaboration of labor's commodity form in The Wealth of Nations served as a handbook for working-class radicals who objected to sharing the product of labor with employers. The complex network of response and counterresponse engendered by a particular commodity form shows that the adoption of that form did not offer either side a straightforward instrumental benefit.99

The German workers' treatment of time as a form of property guided their articulation of grievances about workloads. In both Germany and Britain, weavers opposed their employers' efforts to have each weaver tend more looms, a contest that reemerged in different periods during the nineteenth century for each kind of fabric manufactured. But in Germany, weavers saw the introduction of more looms per worker not just as an intensification of effort but as a prolongation of work time. For instance, a speaker at the weaving conference in Crimmitschau in 1910 said that if weavers operate an additional loom, it "is indirectly an extension of work time. We must try to combat this with all the strength at our disposal."100 German weavers converted an issue of concrete effort into a matter of the employer effectively controlling more time.

The contest that developed in Germany over the allocation of time did not just concern the total remuneration to which workers could lay claim. It revolved around the point at which the employer converted labor power into a product. Accordingly, strike demands about the use of time followed a different pattern in Germany than in Britain. German workers agitated for adjustments in the partitioning of the workday, not just for changes in its length. A recurring issue for German strikers was how the hours of the day, which as a rule in the late nineteenth century totaled at least ten, would be divided between morning and afternoon. For 1899 through 1906, the years in which official enumerations of the separate demands lodged by German workers in strikes have survived, the textile industry experienced thirty-five outbreaks in which workers lodged requests for changes in the periods for rest pauses, extensions in the lunch break (although this meant workers would labor until later in the evening), or other demands related to the apportionment of the work hours. Workers contested the allotment of time, which sometimes comprised the sole ground for strikes, under many different structures of workdays. Where the lunch pauses lasted an hour, they wanted one and a half; where one and half, they wanted two.101

German workers bargained down to the requisitioning of small time fragments. Consider the long strike of weavers in Neumünster in 1888. Over one hundred workers there sustained a labor stoppage for two and a half months because employers refused to extend the lunch hour an extra fifteen minutes.102 In Luckenwalde the female workers in a weaving room launched a strike in 1904 to gain the right to a ten-minute wash-up break each day.103 Every fraction of time conceded to workers by, say, extending a

cleaning break from five to ten minutes comprised in their eyes a significant victory.104 Not surprisingly, when the textile union in Saxony surveyed the arrangement of workdays in its district, it found some byzantine schedules. The conflict over the apportionment of tiny intervals led to some markedly irregular lunch periods, such as one hour and twenty-five minutes, or to rotating fifteen-and twenty-minute early and afternoon breaks.105

Apart from disputing the allocation of work time over the day, textile workers in Germany distinguished themselves by contesting the days of the week when they would deliver their labor power, given a fixed number of hours. For instance, textile workers struck at a mill in Augsburg in 1914 when the employer responded to a downturn by eliminating work on Mondays. The workers demanded that Saturday be free instead. In this instance the struggle was in no way confused with commercial issues of profit and loss, but related solely to authority over time: the employer denied workers their long-held dream of enjoying Saturday off even when the low volume of production could have fulfilled it.106 When German workers contested the regulation of working hours, they emphasized the delivery of time as an abstract potential that employers consumed. For example, when German workers complained about having to work so many days, they said they "had to put their meager day of rest at the disposal of their employer."107

German workers and employers who saw time itself as a kind of property fought at innumerable points, not just over the total amount of time whose ownership would change hands, but when it would do so. In Britain, by contrast, the partitioning of the workday, given a fixed duration, almost never became the touchstone for workers' collective action. The Board of Trade provided a complete enumeration of the strike demands lodged in textiles for the years from 1889 to 1900. In only a single instance did British textile workers request a change in the distribution, given a fixed sum of hours. And even the circumstances surrounding this case seem deviant. It

occurred at a mill in Dundee whose weavers had been placed on a shortened work week in 1894 due to a business slowdown. They insisted on reducing the number of days they worked each week rather than continuing on brief shifts six days a week.108 British workers were ready, of course, to protest long workdays. But as a rule, the time sense of British workers paralleled that of the employers: the passage of the workday was not divided into minute increments, with the appropriation of singular moments being contested. Rather, the workday was a block of time during which workers created the products that were to be transferred to employers.

Would it have been more advantageous for British textile workers to have pursued the same demands as did their German counterparts? This question is unanswerable, for the focus among British workers on improving piece rates for cloth delivered may well have given them a higher return for their labor than they would otherwise have enjoyed. Culture guided but in no way blocked workers' struggles for improvements.109

Real Abstractions

This chapter calls attention to a new method for attaching workers' articulation of discontent to the structure of the production process and, ultimately, offers a way of linking the domains of social experience and discourse. Cultural historians of labor have recently emphasized that the development of workers' grievances does not parallel the evolution of the conditions of work. These critics have contended that workers' grievances, instead of reflecting the material circumstances or institutional structure of production, depend principally upon discursive resources and the organization of the public sphere in which complaints can be lodged and debated.110 For instance, in Work and Wages , his exemplary study of prerevolutionary artisanal conflicts in France, Michael Sonenscher detaches (changing) discursive practices from the (unvarying) organization of work itself.111

The present chapter shows instead that the signifying processes incorporated into the concrete procedures of work configured the concepts to which workers would have ready access for verbal analyses of the employment relation. Through their experience of the symbolic instrumentalities of production, such as the piece-rate scales, workers acquired their understanding of labor as a commodity and their expectations for its use in the same way that Pascal allegedly would have advised them to acquire religious conviction: "Kneel down, move your lips in prayer, and you will believe."112 They derived the categories of the discourse of complaint from their lived experience at the point of production, as is confirmed by the very manner in which weavers conceptualized their output. For example, German weavers who worked with piece-rate scales that centered the categories of payment on the execution of the labor activity could judge changes in output by the number of shots inserted in the course of a time interval rather than by the length of cloth delivered. At a meeting of textile workers in Cottbus in 1903, a discussant described in this manner the exploitation of weavers' labor: "Whereas a loom used to give forty-five shots per minute, the new looms have raised this to 105 shots per minute and now three hundred thousand shots are demanded each week from a worker on a new loom."113 This speaker expressed the additional work extracted in terms of the movements executed in a day—that is, in terms of the metered expenditure of labor power rather than the dimensions of requisitioned fabric.114 Verbal analysis followed the culturally variable ideas embedded in the execution of work for a wage.

To affirm the symbolic constitution of experience, historians influenced by post-structuralist philosophy, including Joan Scott, have emphasized the

linguistic mediation of social experience. In so doing they have come perilously close to severing the nondiscursive from the domain of experience.115 A focus upon the cultural construction of material practices allows us to reconnect language and social experience without reducing one to the other. Practice is not composed of arbitrary signifiers and does not follow a scripted logic to advance its propositions. This comparative inquiry suggests, however, that as the fixtures of production are employed as signs, they create a shared conceptual experience of the ongoing execution of material practice and thereby supply the constituents—although not the syntax—of formal discourse. Important national differences in workers' experience developed from the immediate execution of practice, apart from the intervention of language—that is, from a symbolically constituted order of reality that is distinct from the mere representation of the world via the divisions of language.

If workers brought into the realm of collective action and trade union struggle that specification of labor as a commodity which is embodied in the material performance of production, this reinforces the importance of the labor process for the formation of workers' discourse about labor, but it does not compel a return to the older view that this discourse reflects the material conditions of production. For if symbolic instrumentalities at the point of production—such as the operation of the piece-rate systems—guided the formation of discourse about exploitation, these instrumentalities are not the outgrowth of adaptation to the actual conditions of the environment. Production is not another order of reality more veracious than discursive practice. If I dare cite the words of Althusser, who has more to contribute to cultural history than most would nowadays admit, what workers' complaints express is not "the real conditions which govern the existence of individuals, but the imaginary relation of those individuals to the real relations in which they live."116

In both Britain and Germany, the cultural specification of labor's commodity form rested on preposterous assumptions. British employers and workers supposed that labor could literally be embodied in a product that served as a vessel to transfer it—as if human activity could become a substance. As a matter of principle, the textile workers' labor no more resides

in the output than do the other elements that contribute to the creation of the fabric, such as the factory's land.117 The labor said to be incorporated in the ware reflects a social relation between producers, namely, the relative expenditures of labor time socially necessary for them to create the product—not something materialized in a discrete product. The German specification of labor's commodity form supposed that the employer could purchase time itself and that the expenditure of concrete labor power actually created value. In truth, of course, the use of labor as a factor of production does not create value: the value is conferred by the social relations structuring the activity, not by, say, the observable motions of the shuttle. Likewise, it is absurd to suppose that one can purchase the disposition over workers' time as a thing; time is the medium through which the disposition over human relations is expressed, not an item with a price.118 Karl Polanyi perspicaciously referred to labor power as an "alleged commodity."119 But what could only be claimed metaphorically in theory was in the practice of production affirmed as a fact in reality.

The Place of Culture in Labor Movements

As a pioneer investigator of workers' embrace of oppositional ideas, E. P. Thompson's writings express in pure form the tensions inherent in cultural analyses of workers' movements that underspecify culture's constitutive role in the labor process itself. In The Making of the English Working Class , skilled craftspeople, domestic weavers, field laborers, and the new textile operatives are described as having contrasting social experiences but making common cause by drawing upon the inherited discourses of the "free-born Englishman" and of radical republicanism to interpret their predicaments and to imagine alternatives. Their receptivity to political beliefs comes from their individual experiences of a more ruthless use of labor.2 But, given this exposure, what match between workers' social being and the political ideologies of the day permitted workers to take up as their own the ideals of cooperative manufacture and political reform that were initially formulated by prosperous artisans and middle-class radicals?

To cast the issue more concretely, does Thompson mean to tell us that given a different political legacy among the middle classes in England, workers in the early nineteenth century would not have acquired a shared class identity? Or, if some variety of class consciousness inevitably follows capitalist development (a vexing question for Thompson's argument), how did workers' experience of labor establish the range of ideas they could receive favorably? Thompson, as a man of letters, believed that incertitude suited his humanist goals.3 The commemoration of indeterminacy fulfills an hon-

orable commitment to human self-making, but it scarcely offers a foundation for a program of research into the forces shaping the adoption of ideologies in workers' collective movements.

Thompson's inexactitude makes a virtue of necessity. It follows unavoidably from his perspective on the labor process. In conceptualizing the generation of work experience, he "humanizes" the point of production in a peculiar fashion. He views the workplace as a site of personal experience, not as a set of practices patterned by culture;4 he highlights the subjective side of productive relations, not their cultural structure. 5 Given this foundation, either the development and endorsement of particular complexes of political ideas appears capricious, an historical miracle in which the common people transcend the limitations of their social existence; or, alternatively, if the historical process is explained by the circumstances of workers' productive life, it is reduced to a mechanical reflection of crude material distress and economic compulsion.

This latter choice, irreconcilable as it seems with the tenor of Thompson's work as a whole, commands the argument of many passages in The Making. For example, artisans' sympathetic reception of Paine's The Rights of Man fluctuated with their standard of living. "Jacobin ideas driven into weaving villages, the shops of the Nottingham framework-knitters and the Yorkshire croppers, the Lancashire cotton-mills," he says, "were propagated in every phase of rising prices and of hardship."6 In his account of the Luddite movement's vision of political upheaval and insurrectionary objectives,

Thompson claims, "People were so hungry that they were willing to risk their lives upsetting a barrow of potatoes. In these conditions, it might appear more surprising if men had not plotted revolutionary uprisings than if they had. "7 Contrary to his own intentions, Thompson resorts to these pictures of mechanical response when he seeks not only to describe but to explain workers' reception of new ideas.

In similar fashion, Patrick Joyce adopts reductionist explanations in spite of himself in his sensitive analyses of Victorian factories. He draws correspondences between workers' political visions and the objective features of work. For example, in Work, Society and Politics Joyce explains the decline of political radicalism in the textile districts after midcentury as the result of "the power of mechanisation to re-cast the social experience of the worker."8 The decline of workers' independent political movements, he asserts, mirrored the erosion of their autonomy in the labor process.9 The supposition that the formulation and acceptance of political ideologies reflects the conditions of production, rejected in his theory, is embraced in his history.10

The institutions and manufacturing procedures of the workplace, for Joyce as for Thompson, become technological and economic givens, not because these investigators would assert that work obeys only economic and technical determinations, but insofar as these elements are the only ones they treat as systemic forces in the construction of workplace procedures.

Joyce's unwitting reductionism issues from the same source as Thompson's: it results from leaving in place an unreconstructed, implicitly economic view of the development of the factory labor process, which makes possible the explication of determinant connections between the labor process and the acceptance of ideas only by forcing ideas to reflect the economic aspects of work.11

Gareth Stedman Jones arrived at an alternative understanding of culture and work by following Thompson's problematic to a different terminus. In the acclaimed essay "Rethinking Chartism," he argued that workers in early industrial Britain discovered their interests through the political language of Chartism, and thus historians ought not to envision social classes with prior economic interests turning to a political medium. Rather, workers' primary experiences in work were constituted from the start by an inherited political language.12 Yet this linguistic model inhibits explanation of the vitality and acceptance of insurgent ideas. What kept the framework of radical ideas intact in the first half of the nineteenth century despite the proliferation of diverse protest movements and despite great change in the organization of the labor movement? Why did British workers not evolve an alternative discourse of resistance shortly after 1842, if, as Stedman Jones says, the radicals' emphasis on Parliament's responsibility for economic

oppression rang increasingly false after that date? Were laborers and their spokespersons incapable of articulating more resonant interpretations of their social predicaments? To address these questions of change and persistence, Stedman Jones would have to consider the connections between political ideas and the workers' lived experience—a divide which brings one back to Thompson's starting point.

By deciphering the signifying processes embedded in the labor process, the present study offers an alternative perspective which bridges workers' experience of production and their reception of public discourse without resorting to economic reductionism. Workers' experience of production did not develop as the subjective side of economic and technological conditions, but emerged through an engagement with the cluster of cultural signs that defined material practices. The definitions of labor that were communicated in the execution of work offered a foundation for the receipt of economic philosophies and radical programs of change.

A Puzzle in the Workers' Reception of Ideas

During the last decade of the nineteenth century, workers and employers in both Britain and Germany believed they were witnessing a revolution in the labor movement. In Germany this decade was marked by a surge in union membership and by the widespread adoption of a Marxist discourse.13 In Britain many trade unions during this same period adopted the goal of developing a socialist society. Membership in all trade unions of the United Kingdom rose from 750,000 in 1888 to over two million in 1901. In the country's textile industry, union membership doubled.14 The endorsement of socialism, though confined to a minority of unions, and rise in membership represented a significant departure from the previous history of British labor.

The textile employers in Britain believed that the new ideology of the unions represented a momentous pullback from their previous support for the settled customs of industrial relations. The businessmen's newspaper

the Textile Mercury took note of the changed atmosphere as early as 1890. This journal said, "The introduction of socialistic principles into English trades-unionism has completely transformed the character of the latter.  . . . It is now unrecognizable in its objects, aims, and the means it is using to attain them compared with the trades-unionism of only ten or fifteen years ago."15 In a column entitled "The Apotheosis of Labour," the journal's editors concluded in the fall of 1890 that "almost everything is being turned topsy-turvy."16

During these "topsy-turvy" years of change, continuing up to the First World War, Marxist economic discourse found a ready audience among literate workers in Germany, whereas among workers in Britain it fell on unprepared and partially closed ears. Is it reasonable to conclude that the German workers and their avowed spokespersons, in contrast to their counterparts in Britain, were frustrated by their confrontations with the autocratic German state and found Marxism congenial because they preferred an uncompromising program of change? Professed approval of Marx's analysis of the capitalist production process was neither sufficient nor necessary for support of a strong agenda for social transformation. Although articulate members of the trade unions in Britain proved resistant to Marx's analysis of the extraction of surplus value from labor power, they nonetheless endorsed programs for a dramatic reordering that included the seizure of state power and collectivization of the means of production.17 Conversely, in Germany some members of workers' organizations who endorsed Marx's economic analyses shrank from attacks upon the state or from calls for the expropriation of capitalist enterprise. The Social Democrat Carl August Schramm offers a well-known example of the divergent political uses to which Marx's economic analysis could be put. Schramm, an early, accomplished initiate into Marx's analysis of the generation of surplus value, combated party members' strengthening endorsement during the 1880s of

the necessity of political revolution.18 Likewise, in the 1890s the free trade unions helped disseminate Marx's economic doctrines but at the same time tried to moderate the influence of radicals in the Social Democratic party who were advocating forceful challenges to the political institutions of the old regime.19 These considerations remind us that Marx's economic analysis could be accepted or repudiated apart from any belief in the need for political revolution.20 Instead of serving as an index of radicalization, Marx's examination of the capitalist employment relation must be approached for what it is, a system of ideas that can be endorsed or discarded by workers or their avowed spokespersons for its perceived logic and plausibility.

In Marx's analysis of workers' exploitation in the capitalist system of production, as finally presented in Kapital , employers adhered to the principles of equitable market transactions. As with the purchase of any commodity, they paid living labor its full exchange value when they appropriated its use value. The degradation of labor did not occur because capitalists added interest and profit to the value of the labor embodied in the finished commodity before they disposed of the commodity in the market, or because capitalists used their power over dependent workers to subvert the operation of a market in labor power. Instead, employers used unpaid labor time at the point of production. If workers did not imagine they sold their labor in the form of "labor power," they could envision that the labor time they put into products for the employer was more than the labor time embodied in the products that they received in return, via their wage. But they could not conceive that employers exploited the difference between the exchange value and use value of labor time at the work site. The cultural constitution of factory practices encouraged members of the labor movement in Britain to focus on the unfair exchange of products in the market, as the histories both of the early socialist movement in Britain and of the reappearance of socialism in the last quarter of the nineteenth century demonstrate. In Germany, by contrast, Marx's dissection of the extraction of surplus at the site of production enjoyed a magnified resonance.

Economic Ideologies in the Workers' Movements of Britain

The recreation of a socialist labor movement in Britain during the last two decades of the nineteenth century invented for a second time the explanation for the exploitation of labor that had developed in the heroic decades of the 1820s and 1830s. In the earlier era, radical political economy supported the rise of a popular conviction that workers could collectively shape their destinies. As a letter writer to the Co-operative Magazine in 1826 proclaimed, "Labourers are beginning to think for themselves. And turning their attention to that science, which treats of the production and distribution of wealth."21 Middle-class educators such as the temperate Francis Place grew alarmed at workers' independent reshaping of this science. Place included Thomas Hodgskin, whose essay Labour Defended Against the Claims of Capital grew out of personal experience in the London trades, among those who had caused "incalculable" mischief.22 During this period political economy became a staple of the labor movement's discourse instead of an esoteric body of theorems.23

The view of the labor transaction that prevailed among these early working-class representatives was that of labor being exchanged as it had already taken shape in an object. William Thompson emphasized this mode of conveyance when he wrote in Labour Rewarded in 1827, "It is not the differ-

ences of production in different laborers, but the complicated system of exchanges of those productions when made , that gives rise to  . . . frightful inequality of wealth."24 The "higgling of the market," not the subordination of labor in production, denied workers the full produce of their labor.25

This view of the exchange of materialized labor did not arise from observers whose horizons were limited by the world of small craftshops. The press of the common people, which regularly surveyed and elaborated upon the ideas of Thompson, Hodgskin, and other economists, was perfectly cognizant of the new regimens and tactics of control deployed in the large textile mills. Popular writers in the industrial North formulated economic principles based on the conveyance of materialized labor as they studied the centralization of production under the eye of the mill owner. The Poor Man's Advocate , which covered problems in textile mills, drew an analogy between the consumer who bought finished cloth in a store and the mill owner who bought a quantity of labor from his workers.26

The popular economists were capable of describing a difference between labor and its product when they discussed the manufacture of goods, but they did not theorize about the meaning of this difference for the wage contract. William Thompson, in An Inquiry into the Principles of the Distribution of Wealth , drew a pregnant distinction between the products of labor and labor itself, defined as "that productive energy which called wealth into being."27 Seldom did British authors distinguish so carefully between the two as Thompson did.28 But in this work, printed in 1824, Thompson's very identification of the difference showed that in the end he did not imagine that under the regime of commercial liberalism surplus was appro-

priated from the labor activity itself, only from labor's products. For example, in his chapter entitled "Labour Must Receive Its Full Equivalent," Thompson pondered the seizure of "labor itself":

Thompson equated the appropriation of the workers' labor capacity with reliance upon "compelled," slave labor, not the incentives of marketed wage labor.30 From his standpoint, employers under the new regime of capitalism sequestered, not labor itself, but its products.

With this appreciation of labor as a commodity in mind, the early British socialists formulated a coherent set of propositions that placed the capitalist in the role of a middleman. "Betwixt him who produces food and him who produces clothing, betwixt him who makes instruments and him who uses them," wrote Thomas Hodgskin, "in steps the capitalist, who neither makes nor uses them, and appropriates to himself the produce of both."31 William Heighton defined the holders of capital in 1827 as those who "effect exchanges by proxy."32 The nomenclature middleman that denoted the capitalist also embraced such disparate groupings as small retailers, peddlers,

merchants, and master manufacturers. The odious term drew boundaries between laborers and their exploiters based not on the ownership of capital per se but on a market position as an intermediary.33 "[Middlemen] get their living by buying your labour at one price and selling it at another ," the Poor Man's Guardian warned its readers. "This trade of 'buying cheap and selling dear,' is of all human pursuits the most anti-social."34 Producers equated the capitalist with the trader and imagined his metier not as the control of production but as the manipulation of exchange.35

In the periodicals aimed at the new factory operatives, the workers' exploiters were reduced to the "landowner and money-monger," a pairing that ignored the use of capital at the point of production.36 The Operative said in 1839 that "all the tyranny and misery in this world are the work of landlords and profit-mongers  . . . that is to say, the man who lives by lending the use of land, which ought never to be individual property, and the man who

lives by the use of money, which ought never to be any thing more than a mere symbol of value."37 The journal's correspondent viewed money as a fraudulent token, for instead of allowing goods to exchange at their value in labor, it itself becomes the measure of value. The control of money leads to exploitation not because the owners invest in and control the production process but because it facilitates deceitful exchange.

Given this diagnosis, the corrective, too, lay in the marketplace. In Labour's Wrongs and Labour's Remedy , published in 1839, Bray located the problem and its solution. "Inequality of exchanges, as being the cause of inequality of possessions, is the secret enemy that devours us," he wrote.38 The introduction of trading cooperatives would short-circuit the market, allowing goods to be exchanged according to the value of labor they contained. "The general equality of condition which would be induced by equal exchanges," Bray said, "is, to the capitalist and economist, the last and most dreaded of all remedies."39 Bray, like other authors, acknowledged that the ultimate goal was to secure workers' ownership of the means of production. "To free Labour from the dominion of Capital," he said, "it is necessary that the land and reproducible wealth of the country should be in possession of the working class."40 The establishment of equal exchanges represented a sufficient means for this end.41 Fair exchange would lead to an adequate reform of production, not the reform of production to the establishment of fair exchange.42

The focus of the socialist economists on the distribution of wealth insofar as this impinged upon equitable market exchange made it all too easy for the purification of exchange to become not only the means but the goal of reform. John Gray, for example, said that once the system of commerce was purified of distortion and the labor embodied in goods determined prices, it

was proper to sanction any inequalities of wealth that resulted.43 He endorsed "unrestricted competition between man and man," once prices had been cleansed of distortions.44 Likewise, William Thompson said that wherever the principle of "free interchange" of equivalents was respected, there property had been distributed in the most useful fashion.45 The socialist economists imagined that the concentration of the means of production in the hands of a few may have resulted from, but did not necessarily cause, inequitable exchange.46

The work of Thompson, Gray, and Hodgskin received considerable popular attention and endorsement as the labor movement matured in the 1830s. "When Marx was still in his teens," E. P. Thompson wrote in The Making , "the battle for the minds of English trade unionists, between a capitalist and a socialist political economy, had been (at least temporarily) won."47 With the decline of agitation after 1848, popular political economy lost its bite and its critical legacy was forgotten. The theories' internal logic may have accelerated and completed their eclipse. As Noel W. Thompson has remarked, a preoccupation with the mechanism of exchange, rather than with the power of capital to shape workers' productive lives, could easily give way to a limited, conservative focus on the proceeds of wage agreements negotiated in the labor market.48

The heritage of this critical political economy was never reappropriated by the labor movement as a native intellectual growth. The advocates for the socialist revival of the 1880s, including Beatrice Potter Webb, attempted to place the new movement in context by tracing the succession of prior socialist movements in the land. On the whole their surveys overlooked the early popular economists entirely; some, like H. M. Hyndman's The Historical Basis of Socialism in England , made passing reference to them in notes.49 Until nearly the end of the century, the labor organizers remained out of touch with early socialist economic theory from their own soil, regarding socialist economic conjectures as an alien import. Not until the issuance in 1899 of an English translation of Anton Menger's original German volume, The Right to the Whole Produce of Labour , with H. S. Foxwell's extended preface about British socialist works, were the popular British economists recognized again in their country of origin.50

The rescue occurred due to the combined and uneven development of theory across the European landscape. Among the leading economic theorists of the second half of the nineteenth century, Marx was almost alone in taking notice of the contributions of the early British economists. The prestige of Marx's ideas in Germany led economists there to reexamine the British philosophers of labor who had long been forgotten by the British themselves. When the Austrian scholar Anton Menger wrote his history of The Right to the Whole Produce of Labour , he set out to discredit Continental Marxists by showing that Marx had disguised the true magnitude of his debt to these early British predecessors.51 Menger asserted that many of Marx's consequential assertions, including those concerning the mechanisms by which surplus value was generated and appropriated, had been anticipated, sometimes in embryonic form, by earlier French and British socialists, and in particular by William Thompson.52

The English translation of Menger's work about Marx earned broad attention. In this circuitous manner the British became aware of their own early socialists. These pioneering socialists were brought back from the dead by the writings of the dead, through Menger's excavations of the deceased Marx.53 The roundabout rediscovery left its trace in language. When Foxwell highlighted the similarities between Ricardo's theory and those of the early British socialist economists,54 he helped establish the appellation "Ricardian socialists" for the popular British economists, following Marx's categorization of economic history.55 As everyone knows, Marx's commentary and elaborations on Ricardo lauded him as the most important advocate of the labor theory of value on which the early British socialists seemed to build. The label "Ricardian socialists" became a permanent, though deceptive, term of reference.56 It was misleading insofar as the British socialist economists rarely alluded to Ricardo, but made frequent reference to Adam Smith.57 Their preoccupation with the process of exchange resonated more strongly with Smith's rich descriptions of commercial transactions than with Ricardo's abstract models of the costs of production.58 By looking at their early writers as "Ricardian socialists," the British rediscoverers viewed their heritage from the standpoint of Marx, who, more than the early Brit-

ish socialists themselves had done, proceeded by developing the problematic suggested by Ricardo's theory.59

Whereas Marx overlooked what was distinctively German about his thinking by deriving his conclusions from English economic history, the later British socialists overlooked what was distinctively British about the thinking of the early socialists in their own land by looking at them through the legacy of Marx. In a sense, Marx was a more faithful successor to Ricardo than the early British socialists were, since only he rigorously pursued Ricardo's emphasis on the labor invested at the point of production as the ultimate determinant of value. It was by a process of cross-cultural development, in which thinkers in each country expressed their own life experience in how they appropriated concepts from another land, that the later British socialists came into contact with their native predecessors.

More specifically, by accepting Marx's view of himself as a successor to the heritage of British political economy, the British socialists at the end of the nineteenth century failed to appreciate how Marx's account of the extraction of surplus from labor power at the point of production diverged from the early British socialists' preoccupation with exchange in the marketplace. They therefore acted as though they were condemned to rebuild an edifice that had been erected by their forebears. They supposed that Marx, like themselves, believed that the market comprised the site of exploitation and that labor was transferred as if it were concretized in a ware.60 Foxwell said that after a half-century of neglect, the ideas of the original socialists survived because they "remained germinating in the minds of Marx and Engels."61

If the popular political economy of the newly emergent socialism in Britain at the end of the century and that created near its beginning contained parallel concepts of labor, how are we to explain this family resemblance? The similarity cannot be explained by a continuity of intellectual tradition or by the inertia of ideas among a literate elite. Instead, it points to similarities in the social environments. In particular, the specification of labor as a commodity, reproduced in everyday practice on the shop floor, came to the fore in both British movements' understanding of capitalist

exploitation. What the British labor movement had forgotten about its past it was bound to repeat.62

The rebirth of socialist movements in the textile towns of Yorkshire and Lancashire illustrates the popular footing of the movements and the distinguishing features of their understanding of wage labor. Yorkshire served as the home base of the Independent Labour Party, perhaps the most influential propagator of a renewed socialism. The organization was tied to the textile mills from the start, for the first group of workers in Yorkshire to propose the establishment of a union in order to run independent labor candidates in local and parliamentary elections was assembled during 1891 in the weaving town of Slaithwaite. The earliest meetings of this group, the predecessor of the Independent Labour Party, were attended largely by weavers.63 As its name suggested, the association began with the simple objective of breaking with the Liberal Party to secure autonomous representation for workers. Many of its elected committee members, however, were already convinced socialists, as were the speakers at the local labor clubs sponsored by the new organization.64 When the delegates from likeminded committees in other provinces assembled in Bradford in 1893 to found the Independent Labour Party as a national organization, they counted "socialism" and the communal ownership of production among their goals.65

The ideals of this labor party emerged through grass-roots debate, not through the speculations of a few intellectuals. The independent labor movement in Yorkshire inspired the growth of an extensive network of

neighborhood labor clubs, especially in textile towns.66 The clubs competed with taverns as places where workers could meet to talk after work. In them, workers were able to discuss socialist ideas. In 1892, twenty-three labor clubs, with about three thousand members, operated in Bradford alone. By 1895, the Independent Labour Party claimed thirty-five thousand members.67 Before the First World War, the Yorkshire textile districts provided the setting for some of the party's most significant electoral successes.68 By 1907 the party had managed to elect Labour M.P.'s from Bradford, Leeds, Halifax, and the Colne Valley, as well as representatives to municipal and county government in the region.69

The textile unions were linked to the socialist campaigns not by geographic coincidence but by personnel. The leaders of the principal textile union in Yorkshire, the West Riding Power Loom Weavers' Association, also worked for the new labor party. Ben Turner, Allen Gee, and J. W. Downing, for example, worked for the committee for labor representation in Slaithwaite as early as 1891.70 The textile workers in Yorkshire adopted socialist ideas as their own during the 1890s.71 In Yeadon, the Factory Workers' Union, a purely local association whose membership consisted of weavers, dyers, and spinners, adopted the songbooks and message of the independent labor movement. The union's goal, the secretary said, was to help workers find their "social salvation."72 A correspondent to the Yorkshire Factory Times in 1914 assumed that the textile unions were vehicles for social trans-

formation, not just effective negotiation. "Organized working men," he said, "wish to use Trade Unionism as a means for ending the present conditions of society."73

In Lancashire the admission of socialist ideas was more localized. They were perhaps received most enthusiastically in the Clitheroe district, which originally represented an outpost of liberalism in a large region captive to the Tory party. The district included the textile centers of Nelson, Burnley, and Colne. The quarterly report of the Nelson weavers for 1902 expressed the break that textile workers in this region had made with the bread-and-butter politics of conservative unions in other Lancashire districts. "Therefore, let us workers sink our little differences and go hand in hand and return representatives to Parliament and on all public bodies from our class," the Nelson union stated in the conclusion of its report, "and show the capitalist class that we are determined not to have them as our representatives any longer."74 To be sure, the textile workers in the unions of the Clitheroe district belonged to the United Textile Factory Workers' Association, one of Lancashire's ossified, conservative unions. At the same time, however, the local textile unions could affiliate themselves with a political party without receiving approval from the central office.75 The Nelson weavers attended the founding conference of the Labour Party in 1900. In 1902 the parliamentary constituency of Clitheroe elected the vice-president of the Weavers' Amalgamation as the first Labour M.P. in the north of England.76

Blackburn represented another outpost of the socialist movement in Lancashire. Many weavers there were tied to the Social Democratic Federation, an avowedly Marxist league founded in 1881.77 If the best indicator of a movement's influence is the number of attempts to organize an

opposition, then the socialists in the textile unions were becoming a power with which to reckon. Textile workers in Blackburn who wanted to distinguish themselves from the socialists, who allegedly controlled the main textile union in town, founded a separate city union in 1912.78 Before the First World War, the Lancashire and Yorkshire textile regions provided the major base of support—the votes, the financing, and the ideas—for the emerging socialist groups.79

The recreated socialist movement in Britain propagated what its members considered a novel, reinvigorated political economy. The socialist journals of the textile communities published regular columns, sometimes composed in simple language, that analyzed the origin of profit. The Bradford Socialist Vanguard even adopted the graces of dialect: in 1908 it told its readers, "Capital is nobbut stoored up labour."80 In the wool districts even the staple Yorkshire Factory Times recounted the lectures and debates over labor theories of value that were sponsored by the workers' clubs.81 The autobiographies of former textile workers describe workers' eager consumption of economic theory.82

In the populist newspapers' rejuvenated discussions of the exploitation of labor, the portrayal of the capitalist evolved but did not depart from the essential form it had assumed in early British socialism. The capitalist became a financier who received a profit by charging interest on industrial investment or by coercing the worker to pay a rent for the use of the tools of production. The cause of the exploitation, the Blackburn Labour Journal said in 1900, is that "the capitalists permit you to use the means of production on certain terms."83 The workers paid a surcharge to use the means of production, but in this theory the capitalist did not occupy a special role as

the director of production.84 Although workers in their concrete complaints criticized their subordination to the mill owners, in their discourse of economic reform the capitalist's organization of work and his exercise of authority at the point of production did not appear as essential conditions for the extraction of profit.85 Instead, the surplus extracted by the capitalist was secured like a kind of rent: the capitalist, like the landowner, secured profit at a remove as a deduction from the product of the worker.86 The "explanation" for exploitation, the Blackburn Labour Journal said, is simple: "We allow a certain class to own all the land in the country. These landowners do not allow the land to be used unless a large share of what is produced is given up to them in the form of rent. The same remark applies to machinery. Unless a big profit can be made for the capitalists who own the machinery, they refuse to allow it to be used."87 By this reasoning, laborers who had no need of tools owned by another person were fortunate indeed, for even if these laborers were subordinated to an employer they could escape exploitation.88

In the resuscitated socialist movement the capitalists were portrayed as usurious lenders, empowered by the unequal division of wealth to manipulate exchange relations in the market.89 In this respect, just as in the economic theories of early British socialism, so in those of the century's end the

capitalist could be likened to a middleman.90 The capitalist controlled the marketing of products by forcing laborers to use the means of production that he owned. The Burnley Gazette , in a column intended to explain why the attainment of higher wages represented an inadequate solution to workers' poverty, also exposed its understanding of exploitation. Socialism offers the only solution, it said, because a rise in wages does not "catch the profit-monger in the labour market."91 The Bradford Labour Echo , organ of the Bradford Independent Labour Party, told workers in 1898 that they were exploited because "all sorts of middle-men" cut workers out of the full value of the product.92 Robert Blatchford's Merrie England , published in 1894, one of the most widely distributed books that sought to revive the theoretic analysis of the exploitation of labor, succinctly identified the extraction of profit: "As a rule, profit is not made by the producer of an article, but by some other person commonly called 'the middleman' because he goes between the producer and the consumer; that is to say, he, the middleman, buys the article from the maker, and sells it to the user, at a profit." Blatchford went on to define all middlemen as capitalists.93

Even the Social Democratic Federation, an organization which saw itself as the most loyal disseminator of Marxist ideas, supposed that the market was the site of exploitation. James L. Joynes, who translated into English Marx's Lohnarbeit und Kapital ("Wage Labour and Capital" ), also wrote "The Socialist Catechism," a sixteen-page pamphlet that served as perhaps the most influential introduction to socialist economic theory in Britain during the 1880s. In it Joynes argued that capitalism was distinctive because

exploitation arose from market forces rather than custom.94 Even the leader of the Social Democratic Federation, Hyndman, who was attempting to follow Marx's account of the generation of surplus value, tellingly misrepresented it in The Historical Basis of Socialism in England , published in 1883. To clarify the word Arbeitskraft , Hyndman introduced the clumsy translation "force of labour," which of course never acquired currency.95 Hyndman did not present the difference between the use value and the exchange value of labor power or the fact that the capitalist paid the worker the full exchange value of his ware. Stripped of these ideas, the elaborate phrase "force of labour" served no function in his presentation. Instead, he emphasized that the capitalist was able to buy labor power, in contrast to machinery and raw materials, "on the cheap," due to the competition among workers for subsistence. As a result, the fact that the capitalist can earn a surplus from this "human merchandise" appears to result from overcompetition among workers, which prevents labor from fetching its fair "market price."96 Thus the leading British proponent of Marxist economics transformed the theory of exploitation into market cheating.97

The socialist press emphasized that the capitalist's purchase of labor was in essence like that of the home consumer's purchase of finished products. The only difference was that the capitalist used his ownership of the implements of production and his position in the market to devise an unfair exchange. "Every child who buys a pennyworth of nuts or toffee in a tuckshop is, in one and a true sense, an employer of labour," the Bradford Labour Echo claimed in 1898. "But, though every buyer, as such is, like this child, an employer of labor, he is not an interceptor of part of his employees' earnings, nor therefore an earner of 'employers' ' profits."98 The products the capitalists purchased at an unfairly depressed price they resold at an inflated one. The emphasis on the "seizure" of profits by controlling the price at which finished goods were sold in the market tallied with the view prevailing among British socialists that labor was transferred to the capitalist as it was concretized in a ware.99

As in the original socialist movement, so in the second a significant body of workers looked upon the assurance of fair exchanges not as the result of socialism but as socialism's very goal. The Labour Journal of Bradford imagined that variations in individuals' work effort would lead to variations in their income under socialism. But unequal income would no longer result from unequal exchange. "The sum of socialism," it claimed in 1892, "is equal economic opportunities for all, and then the reward proportioned to the use individually made of such equal opportunities."100 Many socialists' vision of the future rested on the presumption that both the injuries of capitalism and the justice of the coming order rested on equitable transfers in the sphere of exchange.101

Economic Ideologies in the Workers' Movements of Germany

Workers' debates about political economy in Germany during the revolution of 1848–1849 did not inspire the formation of a group of thinkers so renowned as the so-called Ricardian socialists in Britain. Due perhaps to the legacy of corporate regulation in the urban crafts trades in Germany, the artisans who spearheaded the workers' movement there never expressed the degree of interest in formal theories of capitalist exploitation that their counterparts in the early British socialist movement did.102 When the labor periodicals which blossomed in the revolution analyzed the sources of workers' impoverishment, however, their portrayal of the labor transaction varied from the start from that of the British. The revolutionary press in Germany generally viewed the concentration of capital not as the result of ruinous exchange in the market but as its cause. 103 It acknowledged that market forces reshaped the landscape, but market transactions themselves did not appear to it to comprise the site of exploitation.104 For example, the Cologne newspaper Freiheit, Arbeit declared in 1849 that the wealthy profited not just through trade but by "the administration of work" and by "guiding the manufacture" of products.105 It portrayed the subordination of labor in the workshop as a mechanism in its own right for extracting profit. In Die Verbrüderung the correspondent Oskar Stobek declared in 1850 that workers engaged in the workshops of superiors were exploited because they

were paid only for elapsed time on the premises, not for the value of the output.106

When the German workers' press referred to commercial investment, it revealed some fundamental differences from the British. German writers offered a prescient distinction between money and capital. In 1850 the national organ of the German workers' associations asked, "By what do the people live, who claim that they pay taxes for support of workers? Simply by the circumstance that they use the labor power [Arbeitskraft ] of the worker to get the greatest possible use from their money and to elevate the money to the status of capital."107 In a word, money became capital when it employed labor in the production process.108 In Britain, by contrast, some writers in the same era made no distinction between money and capital,109 whereas others supposed that capital referred to any material holding, such as a house, without necessarily entailing an intervention in production.110 The definition of capital that prevailed in the German workers' press during the revolution emphasized its engagement with labor at the point of production, a necessary step for conceiving of the appropriation of surplus at this site. The convention of masters and business persons that met in Frankfurt during July and August, 1848, defined a capitalist not as a shady dealer in the realm of exchange but as a "producer who profiteers with labor power."111

In Britain the emphasis on the realm of exchange as the locus of exploitation led spokespersons for workers to devote great attention to the use of money as a form of trickery. Reliance on the artificial symbols of pounds and pence, John Bray averred in Labour's Wrongs and Labour's Remedy , allowed people to avoid exchanging equal quantities of labor for labor.112

Workers believed they could eliminate exploitation by effecting their transactions in labor notes denoting time rather than resorting to currency, as their support for the ill-fated labor-exchange movement illustrated.113 German workers, by comparison, did not focus on the use of money per se as a contributor to exploitation, since they did not see the mechanism of exchange as the crucial arbiter of their fate.

The chronology of the development of socialist ideas in Germany nonetheless displays a basic parallelism with that of Britain: in both countries, an early socialist movement was extinguished in the first half of the nineteenth century and a new one born in the second half. During the repression of the 1850s the German states succeeded in dismantling most of the labor organizations, such as Stephan Born's German workers' association, which had introduced workers to socialist ideas during the revolutionary years of 1848–1849. When the German labor movement reemerged in the 1860s, the leaflets about the exploitation of labor with which workers were most likely to come into contact were those of Ferdinand Lassalle.114 In his autobiography August Bebel testified that, "Like almost all others who were socialists back then, I came to Marx by way of Lassalle. Lassalle's writings were in our hands long before we knew one writing of Marx and Engels."115

Lassalle emphasized that the use value of a good regulated its distribution in precommercial society, whereas its exchange value regulated its distribution in capitalist society.116 Consequently, he could not seize upon the difference between the use value and the exchange value of labor in the capitalist epoch to specify the extraction of surplus at the point of production, as Marx did. Unlike the early British socialists, Lassalle did not envision that the exploitation of labor occurred in the marketplace. He supposed

that the capitalist made a profit by controlling, like a feudal lord, "the will and acts" of workers under his authority.117 Lassalle and his followers, like British socialists, believed the capitalist employer made a profit by buying cheap and selling dear, but in addition they supposed that the employer's ability to do this depended upon his authority at the point of production.

In keeping with this outlook, Lassalle supposed that profit represented merely a deduction from the labor output. The Lassallians demanded that workers receive the full "return" of their labor, but they used the ambiguous term Ertrag , which did not refer clearly to either the product or the value of the work.118 In contrast to the early socialist movement in Britain, which had supposed that the workers' retention of the value of their labor through equal exchange would lead to the workers' acquisition of capital, the Lassallian movement made the acquisition of capital by the workers' cooperatives the necessary starting point for workers to receive the value of their labor.119 Lassalle's theory shows that even when the German labor movement lacked Marx's striking elucidation of the appropriation of surplus value in production, it did not focus upon unequal exchange in the product market as the locus of exploitation.

After the publication of Kapital , Lassalle's followers quickly adopted Marx's analysis of the capitalist employment relation, even though Marx had modified Lassalle's earlier presentation.120 The Social-Demokrat , organ of the Lassallians, succinctly identified Marx's innovation: the worker, this journal explained, "instead of being able to incarnate his labor into a ware,

must consequently sell his labor power itself. The value of this labor power itself is determined not by the value that it creates and can create , but by the value required to produce and maintain it." 121 The columns of the Social-Demokrat emphasized that the site of production, not the market, represented the locus of exploitation. In 1870 the journal said that "the exchange of commodities in proportion to the labor they contain does not at all rule out the exploitation of labor power by capital; rather, it provides the basis on which it [exploitation] can develop."122 After the appearance of Kapital , the Lassallian journal also highlighted the significance that could be attached to the locution Arbeitskraft even when the subject matter was not economic theory. For example, an article on commercial development said that labor had become a commodity, but then added a clarification: "To put it more exactly, labor power is a commodity."123 By comparison with British misperceptions of Marx, the ready absorption of Marx's analyses and swift revision of Lassalle's economic tenets in Germany suggests that Marx's theory resonated with German experience.124

Of course, only a small minority of the members of the free unions and of the Social Democratic party in Germany concerned themselves with matters of economic theory. Even some of the organizations' top officials, whose time was taken up by party business, paid no attention to Marx's analysis.125 In the first decade after the publication of Kapital , party members treated as savants those able to expound the theory at length.126 But the creed did not remain occult. In subsequent decades workers interested in Marx's examinations could find abbreviated summaries of his analysis of the production process in popular tracts published by Johann Most, Carl August Schramm, and, after 1887, Karl

Kautsky.127 Unlike the popularizations of Marx published in Britain, those in Germany remained true to his distinctive conception of labor as a commodity and to his theorization of exploitation at the site of production.128 The records of the libraries of workers' associations and of party libraries around the turn of the century show that Kautsky's popularization of the new theory of exploitation, Karl Marx' ökonomische Lehren ("Karl Marx's Economic Theories") , was frequently borrowed.129 Over 40 percent of the textile and metal workers who responded to the survey of workers' attitudes initiated by Adolf Levenstein in 1907 reported that they read socialist and trade union literature, including several who said they had read Das Kapital or other economic writings by Marx in the original edition.130

How well could workers comprehend Marx's prose? The libraries of the workers' associations and of the Social Democratic party lent many copies of Marx's Kapital , but clerks at the lending institutions claimed few readers succeeded in digesting the material.131 Not all workers were mystified by the thinker in the original, however. In her luminous autobiography, Ottilie Baader reports that Marx's Kapital was the first socialist book with which she came into contact as a sewing machine worker during the period of the anti-socialist laws. Baader said she studied it to great profit, first with family

members and later in reading groups of socialist women.132 Testimony such as hers, in conjunction with the pattern of library lendings, suggests that a significant minority of educated workers had a serious encounter with Marx's theory of exploitation in the capitalist labor process.133

Workers did not absorb Marx's ideas only in solitude, through texts. Members of workers' associations discussed Kapital soon after its publication. In Magdeburg, the cooper Julis Bremer announced a lecture to the workers' education club in Magdeburg on Marx's Kapital just five months after the book's appearance. In the next three years, programs of the Social Democratic workers' association there included the work frequently enough that the local liberal newspaper, the Magdeburgische Zeitung , took fright at the "propositions" of Karl Marx that "were interpreted and demonstrated."134

During the period of union expansion in the two decades before the First World War, the newspapers and conferences of the Social Democratic (or "free") textile unions faithfully adopted the Marxist theory of the extraction of surplus. Local branches held meetings for workers on such topics as "The Value of Labor Power."135 The journal of the German textile union, Der Textil-Arbeiter , used the general term labor to describe the factors necessary for production but referred to labor power in the context of the employment relation.136 Der Textil-Arbeiter also emphasized that workers were exploited separately as "producers" at work and as "consumers" in the

market who paid taxes and higher prices due to tariffs.137 By comparison, the press of the British labor movement did not distinguish so carefully between these two modes of exploitation, but, rather, combined them under the general rubric of unfair exchange in the market.

The assumption that the worker transferred labor to the employer in the form of labor power shaped literate workers' descriptions of their productive activity. Der Textil-Arbeiter treated "labor power" as a detached thing which the capitalist tried to seize. For example, the newspaper enjoined its readers in 1901, "Above all, [your] labor power and [your] very selves must be protected from exploitation."138 The phrasing treated labor power as an entity apart from the concrete person and identified its use as the cause of exploitation. At a conference of workers from the jute textile industry in 1906, a representative complained that "the piece rates are arranged so that to achieve the pay of 1.6 marks, the labor power is fully absorbed [by the capitalist]."139 Labor power was seen as comprising a real substance which the employer "consumed." The choice of expression shows that even when textile workers did not engage in abstract discussions of political economy, they assumed that their struggles pivoted around the calibrated use of "labor power" in the production process.140

The Practical Foundations for the Reception of Ideology

Where are we to turn for an explanation of the success of the dissemination and development of Marx's theory of exploitation in Germany, but its weakness in Britain? Could the difference in outcomes have resulted merely from

a difference in the supply and dissemination of ideas? Marx's initial volume of Kapital appeared in Germany in 1867, but did not appear in English until the journal To-day , under Hyndman's editorship, began to serialize it in 1885. Kapital lacked an English translation in one volume until the publication of Engels's edition in 1887.141 As is well known, Marx remained in contact with key intellectuals of the German labor movement during his long exile in Britain.142 Perhaps his ideas triumphed in Germany due to their more vigorous propagation by this intellectual elite, which was in place before the trade union movement took off in Germany. Is it possible that the difference in outcomes had little to do with the cultural horizon of the workers but resulted from differences in the trade union elites and publishing organizations responsible for diffusing ideas?

This line of reasoning does not match the circumstances of ideological development in either Britain or Germany. In Britain the failure of Marxist economic theory resulted, not from ignorance or rejection of Marx, but from misinterpretation. Marx was the single most important writer on economic theory for the revived socialist movement in Britain at the end of the nineteenth century, so much so that opponents of the labor movement in Britain criticized its members for inviting "German" theory into the land.143 At his

speech in Burnley in 1893, William Morris rebutted this attack upon the introduction of ideas from abroad, asserting, "It was said that Socialism was a German import. It was nothing the worse for that. And Socialism is English now."144 If, as Morris insisted, British workers gave socialist theory a native hue, much of the materials they used came from Germany. Some members of the Social Democratic Federation and founders of the Labour Party, such as the trade unionist Jem Macdonald, said they received the ideas of Kapital from European acquaintances, including German artisans. "When Das Kapital appeared in English," Macdonald later wrote," it was to me as a book that I had read over and over again."145 Tom Maguire, who said he had studied Marx intensively, organized for the Socialist League in Leeds after 1884. Many of the leaders of the Independent Labour Party in the textile districts of the north, including Margaret McMillan, an elected member of the Bradford school board, boasted that they had studied Kapital. 146 Tom Mann used Wage Labour and Capital as his basic text for the socialist economics course he gave in Bolton in 1888.147 In Burnley, Lancashire, which had a long tradition of open-minded debate in workers' clubs, skeptical liberals pressed the socialists to demonstrate the feasibility of their blueprints for the future. The local socialists responded in 1894 that they believed, not in the discredited Owen, but in Marx.148 The letters from many Burnley workers published in the Burnley Gazette during the 1890s cite the descriptive portions of Marx's Kapital , though not segments defining the transmission of labor in the form of a commodity.149 In sum, Marxist economic analysis was both well-represented in Britain and, in predictable ways, misunderstood.150

Whereas the reborn English movement misinterpreted its chosen step-father, the German labor movement grew up in its early years an orphan. There is no evidence of a network of communication between Marx and the largest workers' movement of the revolution born in 1848, the Arbeiterverbrüderung ("Workers' Brotherhood").151 The members of workers' clubs in the 1860s had little acquaintance with Marx's early writings. In his autobiography, Bebel stressed the disconnection during this period between Marxist ideas and the workers' associations, for which Leipzig served as a traditional center:152 "That there were workers who were familiar with the Communist Manifesto , for instance, or who knew something about Marx's and Engels's activity during the revolutionary years in the Rhineland, of this I saw absolutely no indication at this time in Leipzig." In sum, the German labor movement after the repression of the 1850s did not begin with an established Marxist heritage.153 Marx had been sorely disappointed by the lack of response to his early Critique of Political Economy. 154 His ideas did not gain an audience in the workers' movement until the publication of Kapital. 155 Although the British workers' movements were exposed to Marxist ideas more than a decade later than their German counterparts were, the involvement, once it began, was intense. How, then, are we to explain the long-lasting divergences in Britain and in Germany in the interpretation of Marx's theory of exploitation?

If Marx's analysis of the exploitation of labor was widely distributed in Britain but systematically misrepresented, and if this analysis was transmitted more successfully to the German labor movement despite the absence of a standing Marxist tradition leading back to 1848, then the supply of ideas among intellectuals does not represent the critical variable for differentiating between the German and British outcomes. The differentiating circumstance is not the depth of engagement with Marx but the variations in

response among those who came into contact with Marx's propositions. Intellectual elites may serve as the tentative formulators of an explicit system of ideology, but that ideology will be received sympathetically by workers and sustained from below only if it resonates with portions of the conduct of everyday practice. Lloyd Jones, a prominent member of the co-op movement, noted the limits on workers' readiness to take up economic theories. "The working man accepts such of these views as his experience in the world and workshops justify to him," Jones wrote in 1877. "Where his experience does not do so, he rejects them."156

A comparison of the textile industries of Yorkshire with those of early industrializing regions of Germany is well suited for comparing the reception of ideologies, because it proceeds from structural parallels in the environment in which the textile unions acquired their economic philosophies before the First World War. The characteristics sometimes used to label the British labor movement—early craft unionization based on occupational exclusivity, and delayed affiliation with a political party—do not fit Yorkshire textiles. In Yorkshire the first unions for factory weavers and spinners did not emerge until 1881 in Huddersfield and until the 1890s in other districts.157 The emergence of unions in Yorkshire well after the completion of mechanization matched experience in Germany, where textile union membership expanded rapidly after 1890. As in Germany, trade unions in Yorkshire developed in tandem with an independent workers' party with which union organizers were affiliated.158 Still another feature of the textile associations in Yorkshire makes it parallel to the German case. The major union for textile workers in Yorkshire admitted all workers in the trade, not just those in select occupations.159 This practice resembled the industrywide

recruitment practiced by German unions.160 The example of Yorkshire shows that the boundaries of unionization and the legacy of past organizational development do not account for the differential reception of analyses of the exploitation of labor.

The reception of ideas depended upon something more profound than the environment for union growth. Upon the publication of Kapital , attention in Germany focused on Marx's analysis of labor as a commodity, and the ready absorption of a Marxist vocabulary into the expression of ordinary problems shows that Marxism resonated with German producers' everyday experience of micro-practices on the shop floor. For the workers, cultural practice led theory: they lived out the Marxist specification of labor on the shop floor before intellectuals presented those categories to them as a formal body of propositions. Workers without advanced education could grasp the importance of the distinction between labor and labor power, Marx claimed, and could thereby prove themselves sharper economists than vulgar analysts were.161 But in Britain, despite the contacts between British trade unionists and their German counterparts,162 and despite the availability of Marxist-inspired discourse from British intellectuals, the trade unions resanctified a theory of exploitation based on the transfer of materialized labor.

The lived experience of the transfer of "labor power" represented a necessary but not a sufficient condition for the adoption of the belief that the owner's extraction of unpaid labor time was intrinsic to the employment relation. On the eve of the First World War, about one-quarter of the textile workers in Germany who joined unions chose the Christian textile workers' union.163 The Christian (predominantly Catholic) associations did not seek

to overthrow the capitalist system; they simply sought better treatment and higher earnings for workers.164

Despite the self-proclaimed limits of the Christian movement, however, their deliberations about economic affairs revealed the distinctive influence of German experience of labor as a commodity. The Christian unions did not simply vindicate the noble character of work or its social value. They advanced a crude labor theory of value and reasoned in terms of abstract labor time. "Money is the representation of human labor," the Christian textile newspaper concluded in an editorial on economic principles, "minted, tangible, metallicized human power."165 The Christian unions adopted the German notion of the sale of labor power to portray the workers' insertion into the capitalist economy.166 In an article entitled "Is Labor a Commodity?" their Textilarbeiter-Zeitung made explicit in 1900 the telling and characteristic German distinction: employers, it explained, "regard labor or, rather, labor power as a commodity."167 This journal also identified labor power as an entity "alienated" by the worker: "Conceiving of labor as merely a commodity, which the owner of the labor power sells," it explained, "makes the worker dependent on the purchase offer that the employer makes to him."168 Christians also referred to the owner's exploitation "of the [labor] power of the worker"—though not, of course, with Marx's conclusion that the exploitation of labor represented the ultimate source of profit.169

Similar worker demands emerged on the left bank of the Rhine, where Christian unions dominated most of the Catholic cities, as appeared in districts where Protestants and the socialist-affiliated "free" unions were ascendant: the same rationale for the payment of waiting time, the same contestation of the distribution of hours over the workday. In view of the pervasive differences between the experiences of Catholic and Protestant workers outside the workplace in the period before the First World War and between the intellectual roots of their leaders,170 the convergence in the underlying view of labor in the Christian and Social Democratic labor movements suggests the influence of something else their members shared in common: namely, the workers' everyday experience of the conveyance of "labor power" at the point of production.

In part, of course, the Catholic movement consciously distanced itself from the prevailing discourse of political economy in Germany, for both the established bourgeois economists and those of the Social Democratic movement accepted the commodification of everyday life and of labor as accomplished facts. Catholic intellectuals, by contrast, remained uncomfortable with these premises and developed an alternative discursive tradition based on the contributions to the social whole of organically related "estates." Yet when elite speakers for the Catholic labor unions reflected upon the essentials of the capitalist labor transaction, they, too, adopted the view that labor was sold in the form of labor power.171 Even when they rejected the world view of socialist and bourgeois economics, their social experience lent them much the same specification of labor as a commodity as circulated among their ideological opponents.

Practical Analyses of Exploitation

The contrasting forms of signifying practice in the workplace did not only support contrasts in the formal ideologies of exploitation; they correlated as

well with differences in workers' impromptu articulation of complaints about exploitation on the shop floor. Contrasts in the workers' immediate apperception of exploitation appeared in weavers' responses to fines imposed for fabric that the employers alleged to be defective, one of the problems about which workers complained most frequently. The British workers analyzed the amounts of the fines assessed in terms of the market cost of repairing the defect in the finished product. "3d per yard is deducted for ends down," the Yorkshire Factory Times reported of one mill. By the newspaper's reckoning, this totaled "three times more than it costs to sew them in."172 In its account of a fine imposed on a woman weaver from Batley, the newspaper claimed that the cloth checker "had fined her 4s 6d for a damage that could be mended in three hours, and that would not cause the piece to be sold for any less in the market."173

The British weavers viewed fining as a violation of the rules of fair exchange of finished products in the market. "I think it is a burning shame," wrote a correspondent for the Yorkshire Factory Times , "that employers cannot be satisfied with the profit they make at market out of the goods they manufacture without taking a portion of an employee's hard-earned money from him to further swell their coffers."174 Comments such as this rested on the idea that exchanges in the market, not labor alone, generated ordinary profits. The fine constituted a separate, unusual means of making a profit from labor. The Yorkshire Factory Times expressed a female weaver's view that fining comprised a kind of additional profit for the employer this way: "The masters smoke a tremendous lot of four-penny cigars, and the two piece wages [fines] last week were for cigars."175

Given the British weavers' treatment of fining as a deviation from the rules of fair market exchange, the solutions they proposed ought not to occasion surprise. First, they insisted that textile workers on piece rates be treated as contractors who delivered a product. "They are piece workers," the Yorkshire Factory Times claimed, and therefore "by law" could not be

fined simply for violating the mill's standards for cloth.176 By the workers' reasoning, if the employer wanted to fine them for bad cloth he had to prosecute them as he would a contractor who delivered a defective product. The British weavers' opposition to any form of fining for spoiled work led them to resist institutions that would regulate the fining system. For example, Parliament in 1896 passed a factory act that required employers to post a notice about all forms of fines to which employees at the site were subject. This legislation would have protected weavers by requiring employers to standardize the penalties imposed for each kind of defect. Yet the weavers' unions lobbied to have Parliament exempt textiles from the act's provisions—they preferred to suffer fining without safeguards than to recognize the legitimacy of the practice.177

In contrast to the British weavers, who held up an ideal of the exchange of products in the market as a way of assessing the injustice of fines, German weavers included fines for purportedly flawed cloth in a list of more general abuses. They saw the imposition of fines as another expression of the owners' disposition over their labor. "Fines are always the order of the day," declared a union speaker at a shop meeting in Württemberg. "The workers at this firm are fined twice, for actually it is already a punishment if someone has to work at a plant with this kind of poor ventilation."178 This complainant drew a parallel between two grievances: just as submission to unhealthy air represented a kind of exploitation that resulted from the employers' domination of the production process, so did the payment of a fine. That is, German workers treated fines as just another strategy by which the owner could use his authority over the workplace to extract unpaid labor. They called the fines "pay deductions" (Lohnabzüge) , the phrase that referred to any lowering in the pay scale or in the amount workers actually earned.179

In contrast to the British workers' refusal to bargain over fines for allegedly spoiled work, German workers at some mills formed committees to negotiate with the owners on this issue.180 They also composed lists specifying how much weavers ought to be fined for each defect and included such charts among their strike demands. This difference between German and British reactions to fining cannot be dismissed by assuming that German textile workers were invariably more cooperative than their British counterparts. As we have seen, the German workers pressed ambitious demands concerning many facets of mill life.181 The example of fining shows that the contrasting "theories" of the labor transaction hidden in the disciplinary regime of German and British factories generated their counterpoints in

workers' formulation of grievances: in each country, workers relied upon a corresponding theory of exploitation to criticize capitalist practice. When the concrete procedures of everyday manufacture "directly possess the naked and abstract form of the commodity," then workers are in immediate possession of economic theory.182

The pervasive effect of the contrasting theories of the hiring of labor also emerged when German and British textile workers attempted to reach industrial bargains with their employers. In Lancashire representatives of the spinners' unions proposed that workers be paid according to piece-rate scales that would fluctuate to allow employers a stipulated percentage of return on their invested capital. For example, at a meeting in 1900 with the Federation of Master Cotton Spinners' Associations, the operatives said they preferred that "wages be adjusted on a net margin allowing for the fluctuations in the prices of cotton, coal, etc."183 The workers suggested that negotiators agree on the average capital invested in a spinning factory per spindle, figure the cost of depreciation, grant the owners a shifting allowance for working capital, and then assign a rate of return. The "net margin" between all these sums and the proceeds from disposing of the finished product in the market would provide workers with their wages fund. The representatives of the employers acceded to the workers' idea, provided that owners receive at least a 5 percent rate of return. According to the workers' research, for yarn of standard fineness mill owners needed a profit on average of one farthing per pound of cotton spun in order to realize an annual return of over 5 percent on investment.184

More important than the figures, perhaps, are the principles they illustrate. The conduct of the negotiations shows that both the workers and the employers conceived of the factory proprietor as an investor in the marketplace rather than as a manager of labor power.185 For if the selling prices of the finished product were far above the cost of production, the owners were not entitled to reap the benefit of efficiently converting the raw materials

and labor power into a completed ware. Like bankers, they received only interest on investment. The workers, conversely, were not selling a resource, labor power, which had a fixed market value prior to being converted to a product. Rather, the operatives handed their labor over as if they were traders in products, who paid a rent on the mill, purchased supplies, and then delivered yarn at its current market appraisal. In the event, workers and employers could not reach agreement on the average capital invested per spindle and on the grade of yarn to take as a standard, but they did not fail for lack of effort. The spinning employers and their operatives sought for more than a dozen years to reach an accord on the "net margin" principle.186 To certify actual expenditures, mill owners offered to open their accounting books to the workers' inspection.187 Weavers, too, negotiated for piece rates by "net margin."188 The complications of putting the workers' "net margin" proposal into effect were so daunting that only well-established assumptions about the nature of the labor transaction could have kept employers and spinning operatives engaged with the idea for so long.

Although the "net margin" proposal legitimated the mill owners' rates of return, British workers in many industries were ready to let their wages fluctuate according to the selling price of their product because this index seemed to eliminate the most odious form of profit-taking, that appropriated by the "middleman" in the market for finished wares.189 In the coal trade, the miners at Newcastle declared as early as 1831 that they wanted to peg their earnings to product markets. "The Men and Boys are willing to abide the Risk of Fluctuations of the Coal Trade," their handbill declared.190 The miners' response showed, of course, that they saw their labor as a commodity and imagined the organization of work as a market relation. But their reaction did not entirely accept the commercial system, for it resisted

the middleman predator. Near the turn of the century, the president of the miners' federation in Leicester endorsed sliding scales with a similar line of reasoning: "The giving away of value to middlemen," he said, "should not determine the rate of wages."191 In Germany the initiative for pegging wages to the selling prices of products came only after the First World War, and then not from workers but from employers, who adopted it to cope with the country's runaway inflation.192

The Labor Process as an Anchor for Culture

The flow of ideas between German and British analysts of the exploitation of labor confirms the persistence of fundamental differences in the nationally prevalent concepts of labor. Cross-cultural exchange did not soften the contrasts in definitions of labor as a commodity, but, rather, demonstrated their rigidity. If a correspondence emerged in each country between the labor movement's concept of labor as a commodity and the definition of labor incorporated into manufacturing procedures, how can we ascertain that the production process served as the original source of these concepts? Is it not possible that the political and union movements acted as a precursory cradle of ideas that in turn shaped the institutionalization of factory practices?

In the case of Germany we can confirm that the conceptions of labor were lodged in the production process before they circulated in a trade union movement or in workers' political parties. The inscription of concepts of labor on the piece-rate scales, on the rules of employment, and on the measurement of time for factories was in place by the 1860s, before substantial numbers of workers had enrolled in the labor or political movements and, more particularly, before the dissemination of Marxist economic theory. The movements of artisanal workers that flowered during the revolution of 1848–1849 in Germany were suppressed and disabled in the 1850s.193 When the labor movement began to take shape again in the 1860s, it engaged a tiny segment of workers incapable of changing the face of mechanization. The process of industrialization, considered in terms of quantity of output, was at this time far from complete. In qualitative terms, however, the transformation was well under way, for the installation in the factory of the cultural

concept of labor that would govern production was in large measure accomplished.194

In Britain the distinctive procedures by which textile factory employers received materialized labor—the accounting methods, techniques of remuneration, and factory layouts—coincided with the development of early socialism and the labor organizing of the 1820s and 1830s. In this instance we cannot exclude the possibility that the philosophies of commerce in the insurgent workers' movements contributed to consistencies in the shape of factory practice. But we have also seen that the stereotypical understanding of labor as a ware in Britain had been articulated by elite economists in the second half of the eighteenth century and had already been experienced in the practices of the handweavers.195 Theories of value and exchange in the original socialist movement of the first half of the nineteenth century replicated and sometimes actively drew upon this antecedent intellectual and industrial heritage. In the British case, then, the early labor movement may have served as a momentary transmitter of ideas put into practice on the factory shop floor, but not as their originator.

Even if the cultural formation of manufacture was established before the labor movements developed their own economic outlooks, another question remains. Once manufacturing procedures are in place, if workers inventively call upon the resources of their culture as a whole to construct their experience of production, there is no original source or ultimate center to that experience. By this reasoning, the discursive resources deployed in civic politics, religion, family networks, or other contexts may also intervene firsthand in workers' (and employers') understanding of life at the point of production. On these grounds, cultural analysts of labor who emphasize the role of discourse in constituting workers' experience of production have

effected a decisive shift in the agenda that guides research in social history. Not only have they removed the institutions of the workplace from their pride of place as the original generator of workers' experience; they have discounted as tunnel vision the attempt to trace determinate connections between the structure of work and the development of workers' economic or political outlook.196 In so doing, they take two steps backward. By treating the dissection of the structure of political ideas as a self-sufficient enterprise, they return to old-fashioned intellectual history. But if we drop the supposition that the economic base dictates an ideological superstructure—resorting for the sake of exposition to this anachronistic vocabulary—the workplace can still play a central role in the generation of experience and in the reception of ideologies.197 We may grant to the signifying practices of the labor process (rather than to the economic and technological conditions of production) an unwavering influence upon the development of collective movements and political organizations.198

Further, the uncanny stability in the understanding of the transmission of labor despite profound shifts in other aspects of public discourse indicates that this understanding was rooted in an immediate and unchanging experience, that is, in the exposure to labor's conveyance at the work site. The course of development in nineteenth-century German and British industry suggests that ideas which are incorporated into and reproduced through forms of manufacturing practice have greater permanence than those that float in the realm of civic politics. In Britain in particular the idioms of politics, religion, education, and domestic culture underwent significant change between the start of industrialization and 1914.199 Yet in cross-

national perspective the definition of labor as a commodity remained relatively fixed. It provided a stable point of reference that informed the diagnoses and prescriptions of the labor movement from the commencement of the nineteenth century and at its end. Upon the break-up of the early workers' movements in each country the distinctive appreciation of labor faded from the public sphere, only to resurface there, unchanged, because it had been preserved in the practices of production.

Ideas incarnated in a constellation of manufacturing techniques can be reproduced with less variance than ideas whose transmission depends principally upon discursive formulations. The definition of labor as a commodity was recreated day in, day out by a cluster of micro-procedures that did not require the producers to lend their attention to the meaning of labor in order to preserve its shape. The concept was received through experience rather than instruction; it was lived before it was turned to account. The specification of labor escaped those vagaries of constant reinterpretation and reappropriation to which verbal formulations are subject. Verbal formulations draw upon language's modulation of register, its interminable ability to inflect and ironize statements. These communicative resources discourage the stable transmission of concepts.200 Although the concepts of labor could be put into words for political and theoretic excursus, there was no need of words for their social reproduction. They survived through the arrangement of industrial practices and through the relative univocality of their material operation.201 Unlike the leading myths and narratives deployed in the realms of civic politics and religion, the manufacturing practices did not derive their power from their ability to act as a reservoir of multiple and potentially inconsistent meanings.

This chapter has not sought to explain workers' choices of conservative versus socialist parties. It does not account for marginal variation in rates of participation in the socialist movement by occupation or geographic region. Rather, with a cross-national perspective, it shows why ideologies of exploi-

tation were apt to take a certain shape among those workers who affiliated themselves with a socialist movement. In none of the domains outside work could practice have so vividly incarnated differing forms of labor as a commodity. As a cultural apparatus the workplace seemed to uphold, without perturbation, a specification of labor as a commodity despite tremendous change in workers' educational, religious, and electoral experiences.

Scripts on Stage and on Paper

The workers used their definition of labor as a commodity to orchestrate the unfolding of a work stoppage in space. When British workers had a grievance they wanted corrected, they typically filed out of their workrooms into the central mill yard, which served as a theater for their demonstration. The tactic was habitual, as the documentary sources as well as oral history collections in Britain show. Textile workers from both Yorkshire and Lancashire, asked in interviews what they did to correct a workplace problem, responded, "We went out to the mill yard."3 The workers in some instances transformed this action into a raucous assembly, singing and shouting slogans in the yard.4 For example, at Glossop, just southeast of Lancashire, the

weavers at one mill who filed into their yard delivered a message that merged rebellion and patriotic conformity when they commenced singing "Rule Britannia" as loudly as possible.5

The British textile workers also imported community traditions of demonstration into the factory. At the end of the nineteenth century, textile workers in urban areas, especially women, still subjected miscreant supervisors to the proverbial ceremony of "rough music." At a mill in Bradford, for example, the female workers in 1893 condemned the advances of their overlooker by preparing an effigy of him. They banged on cans and shouted.6 In 1891 at Great Horton, near Bradford, weavers who were "members of the weaker sex" jeered and hissed on the shop floor at a team of new overlookers with whom they were supposed to work. When the overlookers informed the employer of the rude distractions, he locked the women out and closed the mill.7 To put an unpopular overlooker in his place, workers at another mill in Bradford in 1890 formed a procession on the factory grounds, playing on tin kettles and a ram's horn.8 In these instances, workers drew upon repertoires of protest that had traditionally been used to censure those who transgressed community norms.

Textile strikes had long drawn upon community repertoires of mockery. In the Preston strikes of the 1850s, strikers who had turned out called upon itinerant musicians to stand opposite the mill and accompany their dances, which employers interpreted as a form of "ridicule and defiance."9 Even after the turn of the century, work boycotts could become an occasion for carnival merrymaking. At a village near Burnley, strikers in 1908 lent their

stoppage a festival atmosphere when a female participant "masqueraded in man's attire."10 In mockery of their owner, these revelers also paraded a pig in a cart through the town streets. With such opportunities for entertainment, an incident such as occurred at a Bradford mill in 1893 could only have been expected: officials of the textile workers' union, called to investigate the cause of the stoppage, claimed that many of the merrymakers demonstrating at the mill gate could not cite a grievance. The workers said they had "come out to have 'a little fun.'" The union officials said that "upon inquiry it turned out that few of the women really understood why they were on strike, many of them coming out as sympathizers with the first malcontents."11

The British workers thought of their assemblies as a means of signaling their insistence upon bargaining, not just as a means of withdrawing labor. A newspaper account of a stoppage in the Colne Valley during 1891 makes plain the importance workers attached to turning the cessation of work into a visible gesture of disobedience. "The workmen were seen to be making their way to an open space close by their mill," the report stated," and when anything of this kind takes place all eyes are upon them in wonderment."12 At a mill in Apperley Bridge in 1893, the weavers were delighted to see that the head of the company "stood stock still when he saw all the weavers outside the mill gates."13

The physical arrangement of the British mills often created a stage for workers' demonstrations. The central location of the yard in many mills ensured that a congregation there would be visible to workers and supervisors in every department of the factory. When not used as a site for protest, the mill yard was used by employers and public figures as a platform for addresses. In the Colne Valley, for example, politicians campaigning for

office used yards inside the mills as sites for public addresses to workers.14 A weaver from Yeadon, born in 1861, chose the mill yard as the setting in his autobiography in which to portray the turning point of his spiritual development. There he rejected a job offer from a shady music agent from London and threatened to heave a rock at the man.15 Well could the central yard, encircled by buildings as if by grandstands, serve as a stage for dramatic confrontation.

The surviving record of evidence in Germany does not easily yield instances before 1914 in which workers turned the mill yard into a theatrical arena for their protests.16 Yet many examples of conduct come forth that draw on an alternative symbolism: German workers stopped work at their looms and refused to continue until their grievances were corrected. At a weaving mill in Rheydt, for example, weavers stopped work for two days in 1909, but stayed in their shop rooms, to protest against what they viewed as a reduction in piece rates.17 The workers employed this tactic in Saxony, Bavaria, the Vogtland, the Rhineland, the Münsterland, and the Osnabrück district.18 Since the workers left whenever owners requested it, this conduct cannot be taken to represent an attempt to occupy the factory by means of a sit-down strike. A police report from the district of Burgsteinfurt said the

inoperative workers had even left "obligingly."19 Workers sometimes used the sit-down technique after telling the owner that they did not intend to work. Therefore it was not a silent way of striking without verbal communication, nor a way of denying to authorities that a strike was in fact underway.20 Like their colleagues in Britain, many German workers remained skeptical of employers' claim to authority and were ready to mock it by pranks on the shop floor, such as falsely pulling emergency alarms.21 Starting a strike by sitting at the machine was not a sign of greater subordination to managerial directives. It simply exemplified the German workers' conception in this period of the stoppage of work.

The tactic of merely sitting at the machine did not represent a less active response than demonstrating in the yard, or one that required less coordination than marching in a body out of the factory. German workers who adopted the tactic of the "passive strike" showed a high degree of discipline. According to police records from Emsdetten, for example, the weavers who initiated a passive strike in 1904 stopped work at their looms "suddenly, according to an arranged signal."22 These protesters then sat in the workroom all day. A decade later, at another mill in the same town, the weavers repeated this tactic during the morning shift to protest against weft yarn of substandard quality. The owner eventually shut off the steam power and asked the weavers to leave the premises. When the weavers complied, they did not scatter. Having made their point, they had the discipline to return "punctually" to work in a body at the beginning of the afternoon shift.23 Details such as these indicate that German workers conducted well-orchestrated stoppages. But they hardly drew upon established techniques such as rough music, nor did they regularly mount protests that depended upon a visual display of disobedience in the yard. The German strikes emphasized the precise, timed withdrawal of labor. At some citywide work stoppages, all

workers in town stopped their work at the same instant. "On May 10th, at nine o'clock in the morning," a factory inspector from Greiz reported, "the strike broke out as if on command in all mechanical weaving mills and in the dyeing and finishing branches."24 Since workers often began work in the morning with the intention of stopping shortly thereafter, their conduct seemed to affirm the symbolic importance of the act of collectively ceasing the motion of production, rather than merely preventing that motion from starting at all.

The absence of visible workplace demonstrations in the enactment of German strikes made it awkward for some to distinguish between a strike and the contractual withdrawal of labor. Legal-minded German bureaucrats of the time found it so. In the Rhineland, local officials thought that if a large group of workers canceled their employment contract by giving prior notice, they were legally withdrawing their labor and therefore not launching a strike. The Imperial Bureau of Statistics in Berlin had to keep the provincial authorities informed that a mass labor dispute which transpired according to orderly procedures of terminating a labor contract still constituted an event that the officials should report as a strike.25 The district record keepers in Thüringen may have reflected the prevailing uncertainty about the sighting of a strike in the title of a volume of handwritten enumerations for the period 1882–1906: they called their compilation "Supposed Strikes."26 In contrast with the British stoppages at the workplace, German protests in the quarter-century before the First World War seem elementary and austere.

How are we to explain the difference between the German and the British forms of protest? Certainly the German workers did not adopt this particular style of action because they lacked acquaintance with forms of crowd action. In the early days of factory development at midcentury, workers also employed rough music (Katzenmusik ) against their employers, though not in the workplace.27 A minister reported in this era that the workers in the Wuppertal district treated their employers to this ceremony whenever "it became known that a moral lapse had occurred in an eminent family."28 The tradition of rough music still enjoyed a rich life in industrial towns of imperial Germany. At a village in the Lausitz in 1886, weavers suffering from a wage reduction subjected the mayor's house to these raucous sounds.29 Protesters used this repertoire for issues unrelated to the workplace. At a textile town near Mönchengladbach, one hundred people, including workers from the local mills, joined a rough music demonstration in 1902. They banged pot tops and clanged bells for several nights around the home of a carpenter whom they accused of carrying on an indecent sexual liaison.30 German textile strikers also organized street processions after the cessation of work.31 Striking weavers at a firm in the Löbau district in 1886 paraded through the streets with their colorful fabrics mounted on poles.32 German workers had the repertoires for collective demonstrations at hand in the community, but seldom imported them into the workplace.33

Nor did the divergence in British and German repertoires of action originate in the legal statutes that applied to protest. To be sure, the laws regarding public assembly in Prussia, and in most other German states, required workers to give local police forty-eight hours' notice of a meeting. Yet the courts ruled that the laws that prevented public meetings of associations without prior announcement did not apply to gatherings of employees at work. The courts reasoned that the participants at meetings on shop property discussed workplace matters, not "public affairs." Therefore the law did not require German workers to give police notice of meetings or assemblies on the mill grounds.34 On this score the laws governing assembly at work in Germany were no different from those in Britain.

If the difference in the repertoires of action at the workplace cannot be explained by the legal environment, where can we turn to discover their significance? One of the terms workers used to describe their actions provides an initial clue, though not a monolithic response. British textile workers who went on strike often said they had "turned out," a figure of speech which highlighted the crossing of a boundary between inside and outside the mill rather than focusing on the stoppage of labor per se.35

A confrontation between workers and employers at a Blackburn weaving mill in 1865 implemented this principle. The insurgent weavers assembled in the mill yard before leaving, but they defined the start of the strike as the moment at which they passed through the main gate and left the premises.36

Managers, too, framed the cessation and resumption of work in spatial terms. The director of a factory in Bradford described the readiness of strikers to begin work again with the expression "They were glad to come in."37 To "come out" became synonymous with going on strike. In their own accounts of work stoppages, workers described the start of a strike with the standard phrase that they "came out" together or "in a body."38 The phrase "in a body" connoted a highly patterned form of group conduct. Both the middle-class and the working-class press took care to distinguish between actions committed by a "crowd" and those that workers committed "in a body." A crowd, The Dewsbury Reporter noted in 1875, moved "without arrangement," even when it seemed a peaceable assemblage, whereas workers organized and coordinated their movements when they acted "in a body."39 In a word, the spatial form assumed by many strikes was purposeful and methodical.

German workers who struck said they had "ceased their labor" (die Arbeit eingestellt ). A similar phrase appeared in German dialect speech. The memoirs of Friedrich Storck, a German poet from the Wuppertal who worked in textile mills as a teenager, document the evolution of workers' language. Storck said that in the Wuppertal, a region known as a pioneer in the development of factory workers' movements, the word strike (Streik) did not acquire currency until after the 1860s.40 The popular expression of that era was de Brocken hennschmieten ("throw down the work"), a colloquialism which survived into the early twentieth century.41 Modern histori-

cal research confirms that in other regions of Germany, the phrase "cessation of labor" (Arbeitsniederlegung ) was employed before use of the word strike became commonplace.42

The German workers' tactic of sitting at the machine indicates that the withdrawal of the owners' command of the conversion of labor power comprised a symbolic statement of its own. The only "language" the employer knew how to interpret, the Social Democratic textile union said, was "the language of the work stoppage."43 In Britain, by comparison, the exchange of labor as it was embodied in finished products meant that the withdrawal of the conversion of labor power per se at the point of production did not constitute a symbolic end to the employment relation. Instead, workers supplemented this with the crossing of the boundary of the workroom, combined with a visible demonstration of protest in the mill yard, to express their flouting of the owners' authority. British textile workers enacted their protests by responding to the employers' own emphasis on the surveillance of traffic at border zones rather than on the control of the transformation of labor power into labor. They took hold of the employers' use of space as a handle by which they could turn the employers' authority upside down in the theater of the central mill yard.

In both Germany and Britain, the workers' tactics of collective action represented the appropriate counter-symbols to use against the employers' own ways of asserting their authority over the factory. British textile workers did not as a rule sign contracts or other documents when they entered into an employment relation.44 Custom and implicit agreement, to which the courts referred if called upon, governed workers' association with their employers.45 Only a few mills posted notices in the workroom about the

terms of employment or about the conduct of the hired hands on the shop floor itself.46 No wonder, then, that British textile workers did not break the employment relation merely by withdrawing the use of their labor power, for there was no official code giving the owner control on the shop floor over the workers' labor time. Instead, workers reacted by crossing the factories' physical boundaries.47

Unlike their British counterparts, German workers signed written contracts when they began employment. As early as midcentury, most German mills had printed rules posted in the shop.48 After 1891 such posting became obligatory. Workers usually received a personal copy of the factory rules.49 These ordinances typically told workers how to carry out their work effectively, banned political or religious conversations on the shop floor, and specified the fines that would be levied for misbehavior. According to the provisions of the factory ordinances posted in the mills, stopping work at the loom indicated that workers had "deliberately disobeyed" the factory

managers.50 Such defiance provided grounds for immediate dismissal, according to the provisions of the state industrial labor code.51 The importance German employers attached to the posting of written rules as a means of enforcing their authority over the labor process can be judged from the composition of the rules. Before 1891, factory owners frequently entitled the factory regulations "laws" (Gesetze ). On their own initiative, employers had the local police stamp the rules before posting them.52 In some instances, they entitled their rules "police regulations."53 Through these tactics German employers could give the impression that conduct on the shop floor was subject to legal scrutiny and punishment.

It seems clear that German workers took a more legalistic view of the employment relation than did their British counterparts—when it was to their immediate advantage. In both Germany and Britain, the workers' newspapers reported that managers typically responded to workers' grievances with the comment, "If you don't like it, you can leave."54 But workers responded to these taunts in a different way in each country. German workers took such casual challenges as grounds for departing, for they had, literally, been told they could go home if they wanted to do so. In each of the principal textile districts of Germany, the work force left without notice on the grounds that by saying anyone could return home if things did not suit them, factory officials had terminated the employment relation.55 Individual workers used the same reasoning before the business courts. A bobbin winder told the court in Elberfeld in 1899 that she had left without offering notice because a supervisor had told her, "If you don't want to work

for the pay, you should get out of here."56 In response, she left her machine, never to return.

The legal savvy of German workers can be detected in their treatment of written contracts as well. A spinning mill owner in Rheine complained to a district official in 1908 that workers were acutely aware of their legal situation in the factory during the first hour of their hire, before they had been handed their personal copy of the factory ordinance. During these few minutes, the owner said, the workers believed they were "justified" in committing "the worst kinds of mischief" because they knew they did not yet stand under the legal provisions of a labor contract.57 Not surprisingly, the "people's bureau" (Volksbüro ) in that town, set up by Catholic organizations to inform workers of their legal rights in housing and employment, reported frequent inquiries from workers about the terms for concluding labor contracts.58 In Rheine, weavers in 1891 stopped work instantly when a clerk took down the sign that listed their piece rates. The workers did not ask why the sign had been removed, but they refused to continue until the clerk replaced it—in the absence of a posted agreement about rates, the workers believed that they had no contract.59

The German strikers treated a halt to the process of converting labor power into labor as an essential and dramatic challenge to the owner's authority. They oriented their action to the technical violation of the printed factory rules, which specified the employer's authority over conduct on the shop floor. British textile workers, by contrast, considered a visual demonstration of defiance, "coming out" of the mill into an open theater, to be one of the hallmarks of a strike. In each country the workers' actions represented the appropriate counterstatement to daily practices on the shop floor. In German mills, where the rituals for entering the mill and the timing of workers' entry focused on the appropriation of workers' labor power, strikers acted out the withdrawal of labor power as such. In British mills, where owners focused on the appropriation of products and the assertion of control over border spaces, strikers, too, thought in terms of "coming out" and staging visible protests in the mill yard.

For many Germans who reflected on their economy in the middle of the nineteenth century, the treatment of labor as a commodity still appeared

monstrous and perverse.60 Ferdinand Lassalle pointed to industrial conflict in Britain as evidence that the complete objectification of human labor was unrealizable. The melancholy course of strikes in Britain, Lassalle claimed, represented the vain attempt of human beings "to disguise themselves as commodities."61 In the closing decades of the nineteenth century, however, the specification of labor as a commodity was taken so thoroughly for granted that it guided not only the humdrum enactment of production but the small insurrections workers improvised on the shop floor against the system's indignities. In all likelihood, only a minority of workers could have offered a detailed verbal exposition of their understanding of labor's commodity form. But the eloquent patterning of work stoppages shows, as philosophers and social historians alike have remarked, that although people may not be able to put their knowledge into words, they can put it into action.

The Formulation of Strike Demands

In both the German and the British textile industry, the decade of the 1890s began an upsurge in labor disputes that was sustained until the First World War. Karl Emsbach, in his sample of reports from the textile industry in the Rheinland, found a threefold increase in strikes during the decade 1890–1899 over the averages for the three preceding decades. The trend accelerated in the decade after the turn of the century.62 In Britain the years from 1888 to 1892, the critical years of development for the New Unionism, also initiated an extended increase in textile strikes.63 Despite this shared trajectory, however, strike demands at the textile factories of each country reached toward different ends, based on the workers' definition of labor as a commodity. In Germany, textile strikers transcended requests concerning wages and hiring to propose changes of their own in the conditions under which workers carried out the labor activity.

The German workers went beyond their British counterparts in requesting changes to protect the labor power they entrusted to the employer. They lodged strike demands for technical improvements to prevent accidents at work. In Borghorst, for example, striking weavers requested the introduction of "arrangements for the transport of warps according to the accident prevention regulations" of their company.64 German strikers also requested the installation of shuttle guards to prevent shuttles from flying off the loom and injuring nearby workers. According to the Imperial Bureau of Statistics in Berlin, demands for safer or healthier working conditions contributed to the outbreak of eleven strikes in textiles from 1901 through 1906 (these are the years for which the official figures can be disaggregated into precise demands).65

Unfortunately, the average frequency with which German strikers presented such demands for changes in the organization of work will never be ascertained. Local authorities who submitted strike reports to the Imperial Bureau of Statistics often omitted reference to the demands workers submitted that did not relate to wages or the length of the workday. The officials forwarded only those demands that seemed palpably understandable and that fit into their conventional view of industrial conflict, but the researcher who sifts through police notes or newspaper accounts will find a veritable underground of grievances which the workers themselves incorporated into strike negotiations. Historians who rely on the published government statistics in Germany to enumerate the instigating causes of work stoppages merely recirculate the crass assumptions of German officialdom. In Gummersbach, for example, textile workers in 1900 submitted demands for more light and air in the workplace, for a better canteen, and for cleaner toilets. City officials submitted reports to higher-ups only about the wage demands, however, so only the wage demands entered the published tabulations. Similar misreporting occurred for textile strikes in Saxony, in Luckenwalde, and in the district of Lingen.66 "The official overview of the results of the

strike statistics," the Social Democratic Volkszeitung concluded in 1892, "is absolutely worthless."67

The significant point from a comparative perspective is that German textile workers often formulated such demands in strikes, whereas British workers rarely did. No evidence that British textile workers voiced strike demands for protection against accidents appears in British workers' textile newspapers or in the parliamentary listings.68 Does the inclusion of demands for workplace safety in German strikes, but their absence in Britain, mean that this issue was of concern only to workers in Germany?

The comments of British workers in the Yorkshire Factory Times indicate that they certainly harbored dissatisfaction with unsafe machinery. In my sample of stories from this journal for the years from 1890 through 1893, twenty-seven complaints about unhealthy or dangerous working conditions appeared. Most frequently the workers mentioned the lack of guards to prevent the shuttles from flying out of the loom;69 they also cited the lack of mesh fencing around some equipment.70 Yet proposals to correct these problems, in particular the installation of loom guards, were not apt to enter into strike negotiations as they did in Germany. This seems even more curious in view of the British textile workers' legendary obstinacy and readiness to strike over minor arrangements in the workplace that concerned pay.

German textile workers, again unlike British workers, included among their strike demands the building of factory canteens and the cleaning of toilet facilities.71 At Düren in the Rhineland, for example, the workers at a

mill for weaving metal sheets bargained in 1899 for better eating facilities as part of the strike settlement.72 The male dyers who went on strike in 1899 around the district of Krefeld included among their demands a request that the owner provide dressing rooms in which they could change clothes.73 In Thüringen, workers pressed for free soap and towels from employers.74 In Mönchengladbach, striking textile workers in 1900 bargained not only for higher wages but for unsoiled toilets.75 German workers treated the condition of water closets as a topic meriting separate discussion at their union meetings. At Coesfeld, for example, thirty-seven weavers at a meeting in 1910 signed a petition whose sole object was cleaner toilets.76

The circumstance that in strikes only German workers advanced demands for better factory facilities does not imply that only German workers concerned themselves with these amenities. The great majority of British textile workers felt the lack of cloakrooms, cafeterias, and undefiled restrooms, but they did not make this an issue of contestation with employers.77 Instead, they submitted letters to their newspapers express-

ing their discontent about toilet and eating facilities. In my Yorkshire Factory Times sample for 1890 through 1893, for example, ten complaints about sanitation and two about the absence of canteens appeared.78 (Remarks about canteens appeared only under unusual circumstances, however: in one case the air in the workroom itself was so noxious people felt they could not safely eat there; in another, the owner punished someone for eating near their loom and spilling crumbs on the cloth.) Thus, the British workers complained informally about toilets, but they did not introduce the state of these facilities into strike negotiations as the Germans did. Nor did the discussion of toilets become a topic for public meetings in Britain, as it was in Germany.

The German strikes and complaints concerning toilet facilities, canteens, and safety all took for granted the owner's responsibility for providing for workers' needs on the shop floor. These strikes assumed that the small rituals of life in the factory—eating, cleaning oneself, going to the toilet—could be treated as confrontations with the owner's authority over the production process.79 When seen in those terms, apparent details grew into suitable issues to introduce into strike negotiations. Speakers at German union meetings turned them into symbols of the owners' command over the worker.80 The union secretary in Gera declared it "scandalous" in 1906 that female workers at a mill could clean themselves only by putting water in their mouths and spraying it over their bodies.81 British workers, by contrast, lacking the notion of the owner's embrace of the expenditure of their labor power, did not dramatize those parts of their vie intime that

transpired within the factory walls as points of contact with their employer.82

German textile workers also displayed a tendency to broaden the issues in strike movements to cover many seemingly unrelated points of contention. They extended the conflict to consider the employers' authority over the manufacturing process in multiple ways. According to the reports of the Imperial Bureau of Statistics in Berlin, 44 percent of the strikes that German textile workers launched from 1899 through 1906 included multiple demands (these are the only years for which strikes with more than one ultimatum are distinguishable in published reports). The surviving copies of workers' original demands indicate that strikers sometimes compiled long lists. For example, workers at Schiefbahn in 1905 submitted eleven separate demands, including hourly pay for waiting time, restraints on abusive language, and regular consultation between representatives of management and workers.83 In Britain, by contrast, in a count of the Board of Trade's strike reports for textiles whose format permits a comparison (the years 1894 through 1900), only 5 percent of strikes included more than one demand.84

It is possible, of course, that the greater incidence of multiple demands in Germany meant only that German workers planned their strikes more carefully or conducted them in a more organized fashion.85 Were this explanation accurate, strikes in Germany that were initiated with the two weeks' advance notice legally required to terminate the employment relation would revolve around multiple demands more frequently than would more spontaneous strikes begun without sufficient notice. Government statistics are not the last word on the matter, but they lend no support to this hypothesis. For the years 1899 through 1906, the period for which the official German data can be cross-tabulated, textile workers issued multiple demands in 43 percent of the abrupt, illegal strikes. There was no statistically significant difference in Germany between the rate at which textile workers in well-organized, lawful strikes presented multiple demands and the rate at which workers in illegal strikes lodged them.86

The variation between Germany and Britain in number of demands lodged probably did not derive from the institutions that factories had in place for mediating workplace conflicts. In both countries, conflict usually broke out in individual mills without turning into district-wide confrontations between the unions and the employers' associations. In Germany, if negotiations at a mill preceded the launching of a strike, workers usually conducted them without assistance from trade union officials. The lack of close union guidance in German textile strikes can be gauged from the circumstance that most of them began without the legal notice necessary to end employment.87 The so-called worker committees some German mills formed to administer health insurance funds hardly became known for representing the workers' interests in disputes.88 And in Yorkshire most

strikes broke out before the unions had received word of the dispute.89 The Socialist Review reported in 1910 that in one woolen district, workers launched or threatened half a dozen strikes within three months "without a single Union member being concerned or official intervening."90

Still another possible explanation for the greater incidence of multiple demands in Germany is that the German textile workers struck less frequently. By this hypothetical line of argument, fewer strikes would build up a backlog of demands that would then be expressed in a single strike. But in terms of the size of the textile work forces, strikes were actually slightly less frequent during the period from 1899 through 1913 in Britain than in Germany. The annual ratio of strikes to workers was about one to seven hundred in Britain and one to six hundred in Germany.91

The tendency of textile workers in Germany to formulate an extensive list of demands rather than to strike over a single issue coincided with another trend: German textile workers included among their strike demands requests that employers reform their governance of the work activity. Strikers at a Chemnitz mill told their employer in 1889 he had to make a "better arrangement of the production techniques" and allow workers to monitor the run-

ning of the engine.92 In Aachen the weavers demanded that the company create a new job, that of carrying warp beams, to relieve weavers of this burden.93 Challenges such as this were not simply defensive responses to employers' efforts to introduce new machinery or heavier workloads. At a spinning mill in Viersen, on the lower Rhine, for example, the striking spinners in 1899 listed several demands for the maintenance of machinery. They gave the manager a schedule that stipulated how often he was to carry out preventive maintenance and replace frayed parts on various types of spinning frames.94 In both Germany and Britain, weavers considered it proper that overlookers dispense warps among the looms in the order in which weavers had finished their previous jobs.95 At a mill in Eupen, Germany, the weavers even demanded that the overlooker himself, who tended a loom of his own in his spare moments, receive warps in the same order as the ordinary weavers. When the owner disapproved the request, the weavers went on strike.96 They wanted to override the overlookers' and employers' authority to determine the distribution of work on the shop floor.

How dissimilar are these demands from those of the British? British weavers, like those in Germany, resisted changes in the labor process, such as the change to the two-loom system. Like the German weavers, they struck over the poor quality of raw materials, especially in the cotton industry, because defective materials reduced their piece-rate earnings or caused them to work harder for the same wage. They also struck over the arbitrary sacking of co-workers and, in the spinning departments, over the owners' failure to promote workers in order of seniority from the apprenticeship position of a piecer to the full position of a mule minder. British workers were no less concerned with authority than their German counterparts, but they focused on defending against encroachment rather than challenging

the governance of production. British textile-factory workers did not propose changes to control the manager's methods of administering production, as did their German counterparts.97

British contemporaries believed that some of the strikes over wages disguised textile workers' wishes to change aspects of the manufacturing process. For example, at the Alston wool combing works in Bradford, the director found in 1892 that men who had gone out on strike were glad to come in once he agreed to changes in the organization of work. He concluded that the wages had not been the overriding issue at all; rather, it was "a problem of work operations concerning the disposal of suds and potash."98 William Drew, an executive of the Yorkshire textile workers' union, testified in 1891 that many strikes over wages were an "excuse," a pretext. Wage demands concealed other concerns, he said, in particular, mismanagement of the looms.99 Even when British textile workers were both dissatisfied with the technical methods of production and willing to strike, they did not focus on the governance of work as a contestable issue.

Each of these differences between the goals of British and German strikers parallels the differences between their cultural definitions of the commodity of labor. The German concept of the delivery of labor in the form of labor power accentuated the employer's exercise of authority at the point of production to convert this labor capacity into labor.100 The distinguishing

features of German textile workers' strike goals—the greater focus on safety conditions and on hygienic care of the worker's person, the multiplication of grievances in a single strike about the employer's administration of the mill, and the advancement of proposals for changes in the governance of production—all focused on the employer's domination of workers by the exercise of authority at the point of production. British textile strikers did not focus on the small rituals of daily life inside the mill as a point of contact with the employer's authority. Rather, they converted disputes that might have addressed the organization of production into an issue of receiving adequate compensation for products delivered.101

German workers' understanding of the labor transaction did not always lead them to reject the owner's authority on the shop floor; sometimes they embraced it. The union of workers employed at home in the sewing industry demanded the erection of central workshops for themselves, though not to boost productivity. Instead, they sought to make employers responsible for providing better working conditions and wanted union and state inspectors to certify and monitor the wages and hours of labor, which would be possible only if workers labored under the employer's supervision.102 British sewers, by contrast, were far from preferring centralized work.103 As the example of the home sewers in Germany shows, the specification of labor as a commodity did not inevitably make workers in Germany more rebellious against the capitalist labor transaction or against authority on the shop floor. Factory workers contested employers' authority while home workers embraced it, yet the struggle in both situations started with the presumption that the renter of labor power, entrusted with the disposition over the person of the worker, also bore responsibility for the care of that labor power.104 Depending on the tactical advantages to be secured, German workers used the prevailing specification of the labor transaction in different ways, but always in a

manner that reveals consistent differences from the cultural paradigm for conflict in Britain.

Overlookers' Role in Strikes

The role of overlookers in Germany helped to sustain German workers' understanding of the labor process as the submission of the labor activity to the employer's domination. When German workers labored under overlookers, they understood themselves as having immediate contact with executants of the employer. In Britain, by contrast, the overlookers' relative independence from the factory owners lent support to the workers' understanding that they transferred their labor as it was embodied in products. The German overlookers' status as agents, not just servants, of the owners prevented them from mediating between workers and owners. By contrast, British overlookers, who boasted that they did not "fawn" on the owners, saw themselves as intermediaries between workers and owners.105 For example, the rules of the Huddersfield and Dewsbury Power Loom Tuners' Society, issued in 1882, set down as one of the association's goals the "regulating" of relations between workmen and owners.106 Weavers in Yorkshire and Lancashire could even consult with their overlookers about the chances of obtaining wage concessions or ask for advice about the best timing for a strike.107 Textile workers in Germany prevented even the lowest supervisors from getting word of a possible strike.108 The German courts ruled that if an overlooker heard of a planned strike and did not report it to the owner, he had betrayed his duty to the owner and given grounds for immediate dismissal.109

The contrast between the roles of overlookers in Germany and in Britain left their marks upon the organization and course of strikes. Overlookers in Britain sometimes supported weavers' strike demands. At Manningham, for

example, in one of Yorkshire's most famous labor disputes, in 1890 and 1891 the tuners refused to teach silk weaving to the new hires whom the higher management set on to break the weavers' strike. Instead, the tuners walked off the job in support of the striking weavers.110 Weavers cheered their supervisors' decision with the cry, "Good owd overlooker!"111 In the great weavers' strike of 1883 in the Colne Valley, too, tuners from the district voted against training learners and against filling in on the looms for the striking weavers.112

British overlookers also supported weavers' opposition to increases in the number of looms per weaver. For example, the overlookers at a firm outside Bradford in 1891 accused the owner of plotting to shift from two to three looms per weaver. They refused to carry out what they called the owner's "dirty work" of "spotting" for dismissal the least favorite weavers in their sections. This, they charged, would only fit into the owner's plan to begin assigning three looms to each weaver. They ceased work even though the owner did not propose an increase in their own allotments of looms.113 In Lancashire, too, the overlookers struck in support of workers' demands. In a strike at Nelson in 1891, many of the weaving overlookers left work to force the dismissal of an overlooker who had made immoral propositions to a female subordinate.114 Overlookers in Lancashire also supported an end to the so-called slate system, in which overlookers posted their workers' earnings to shame the slower ones.115

Can we find analogous episodes in Germany where overlookers supported their underlings? In Germany, the professional journal Der deutsche Meister reported sympathetically in 1904 on weavers' efforts in Mönchengladbach to resist a move in some branches to the two-loom system.116 But German overlookers did not make formal statements or take stronger action to support the weavers.117 In Germany, business journals, textile workers' newspapers, police reports, and factory inspectors' reports appear not to mention such acts of solidarity.

The most telling indicator that overlookers stood closer to the workers in Britain than in Germany lies in the workers' collective actions. In Yorkshire and Lancashire, strikes by subordinates to protest the firing of their overlooker occurred in each of the textile districts and in all branches of the trade, especially among women, but among male workers as well.118 When companies attempted to replace striking tuners, the Yorkshire Factory Times

reported, "the weight of the evidence is that women weavers will refuse to work with imported overlookers."119 This newspaper even believed that the ability to retain favorite supervisors in the spinning branch comprised an incentive for workers to join unions. "It's a great pity, to my mind," a correspondent wrote, "that even the spinners do not combine, if for no other reason than to keep a good overlooker."120 British weavers supported the demands of their tuners for higher commissions.121 German overlookers received comparatively little support from workers. In Britain, workers' strike support for overlookers was discussed as common knowledge, but in Germany it was considered an extraordinary event. A German supervisor said in 1912 that if an overlooker appealed to underlings for support, "they would laugh at him and declare him insane."122

To complete this comparison of overlookers' positions, we must consider the form of union organization pursued by overlookers in the two countries. Although German overlookers could not legally strike, they could unite in collective associations and organize demonstrations.123 Two major organiza-

tions represented the interests of German textile overlookers. The oldest, the German Foremen's Union, founded in 1884, included overlookers from all industries. Before the turn of the century, this group counted over twenty thousand members, including more than one hundred in each of several towns in northwest Germany where textiles predominated: Aachen, Mönchengladbach, Rheydt, Barmen, and Elberfeld.124 Another association, the German Supervisors' Union, admitted overlookers only from the textile branch. This group, founded by weaving overlookers in 1899 in Mönchengladbach, had over five hundred members in northwest Germany by 1903.125

These German overlookers' unions varied in a crucial respect from those in Britain: the lowest loom fixers and the highest foremen united in a single organization.126 The lowest loom fixers and the highest supervisors in Germany shared the position of salaried servants, in contrast to those below them who received piece rates. German foremen used their organization to support the rights of the lesser overlookers. For example, the German Foremen's Union petitioned to ensure that state officials classified its loom fixers as technical professionals, eligible for the government's pension plan.127 In each of the major centers of weaving in Yorkshire—Bradford, Leeds, Halifax, Keighley, and Huddersfield—citywide overlookers' unions developed at the same pace as in Germany. But the British overlookers' unions severed the lower-level overlookers from higher-ups; foremen did not join.128 The titles of the Yorkshire unions reflected this exclusion: the local associations named themselves Power-Loom Tuners or Power-Loom Overlookers. In contrast to their German counterparts, the British overlookers had an organization in which the

highest foremen, who were tied most closely to the owner, could not put a brake on action directed against the owners. In Germany, by contrast, the overlookers' unions classified the loom fixers, who actually stood near to the status of ordinary workers, as occupants of the same basic position as the employers' closest assistants.

The absence of foremen from overlookers' organizations in Britain also enabled the overlookers to move closer to the position of the textile workers' unions.129 From their founding in the mid-nineteenth century, the overlookers' organizations endorsed the principle of providing strike support to weavers if weavers in turn supported the overlookers' cause.130 In the last quarter of the nineteenth century, affiliation became more explicit. The tuners' societies in the cities of Yorkshire relinquished their status as mere friendly societies and registered as trade unions.131 By the eve of the First World War, the overlookers' unions in Bradford, the Colne Valley, and the Heavy Woollen District had endorsed the Independent Labour Party. They donated funds and sent representatives to the Labour party's parliamentary council meetings.132 Even in Halifax, where the overlookers' club was slow to act, some overlookers identified themselves more as laborers than as supervisors. One member of the Halifax society, in a debate during 1909 on a resolution to affiliate with the General Union of Overlookers, a national organization, expressed this view with special clarity. According to the minutes of the union's meeting,

The collaboration between overlookers and workers extended to Lancashire as well. In 1907, when overlookers in Blackburn, Lancashire, joined the United Textile Workers' Association, a national confederation of textile unions, they justified their decision by citing the "spirit of mutual help and brotherhood that ought to exist among all unionists."134

Whereas overlookers' unions in Britain supported their members' interests by fighting for improvements in the factory, their counterpart German unions focused their efforts on the political arena outside the factory. They persuaded the German government to admit them in 1911 to a government pension program similar to one enjoyed by white-collar workers.135 They advocated that technical professional workers be represented on the government's labor boards.136 Yet the German overseers' unions did not directly

confront the issue of raising overlookers' salaries. "In our social program the question of pay is almost completely forgotten," said a speaker at the overlookers' convention in 1911. The first requirement for raising the salaries of overlookers would have been to admit into the union only those who were already able to command a minimum salary, so that all in the union would have some bargaining leverage. Such an entrance requirement the union rejected.137 The overlookers' societies in Yorkshire and Lancashire, by contrast, imposed a rule that applicants prove they already earned a high wage.138 British overlookers took on the issue of pay directly, whereas their German counterparts moved to the political arena, a shift which, in the factory itself, upheld the role of German overlookers as servants of the owner.

The forms of association for overlookers in Germany and Britain reflected the basic difference between their perceptions of the overlooker's role in the factory. The German organizations detached the overlookers from the workers and linked them to the highest foremen; they defined their members' status by reference to the exercise of authority. From the German viewpoint, even the lowest loom fixer was unlike a worker, since the loom fixer had to exercise authority over others and made decisions for workers. The British associations for overlookers, by contrast, severed overlookers from the higher foremen close to the owner; they defined their members as workers who delivered a labor product.

The inability of workers in Germany to unite with their immediate supervisors against employers meant that workers' collective action was directed against the employers' domination of the labor process per se. In Britain, the affiliation of workers with their overlookers meant that workers were comparatively insulated on the shop floor itself from regular contact with the employers' authority. They oriented their collective action to a greater degree toward the price at which workers would deliver their materialized labor.

The theory of the capitalist labor process that Marx presented in Volume One of Kapital is critical for unraveling the differences between the German and British labor movements—but not for reasons that Marx would ever

have dreamed of. The text reveals the cultural assumptions acquired by German workers in the labor process. Marx's emphasis upon the capitalist's exercise of authority in the factory as a means of extracting surplus forecasts the greater importance German textile workers would place, both in their complaints and in the enactment of strikes, upon aggressively contesting the capitalist's disposition over the labor activity itself.

Concluding Reflections on Part Three

The reified forms of consciousness that were manufactured at the point of production molded the shape of workers' resistance to the appropriation of their labor. Workers in each country advanced their interests vis-à-vis employers as straightforwardly as they could, but in so doing they confirmed their allegiance to a nationally prevailing concept of labor's commodity form, a concept that ironically united workers and employers in each locale. In The Rise of Market Culture William Reddy examined the essential terms of liberal capitalism, in particular the concept of labor as a commodity, as alien, intellectual imports with which nineteenth-century workers never authentically identified. He treated market categories as universalistic tools of scholarly analysis.139 By illuminating the inconspicuous differences between German and British workers' understanding and use of labor as a commodity, the present study instead suggests that the concept of labor as a commodity represented for workers not just an abstract doctrine but a set of popular repertoires that were linked to the course of industrialization and formed an essential component of popular culture. Rather than juxtapose an ethereal market model to real practices in one country, as Reddy did, we compared practices across countries to detect the impressive, but necessarily incomplete, materialization of market categories in everyday life and tactics of resistance.

The distinctive form of labor as a commodity in each country, as opposed to the alternative specifications operating in other capitalist societies, remained out of view of pointed critique.140 The cultural order was not immune to radical transformation before the First World War. But change could issue from below only through struggles guided by the definition of labor as a commodity that was, literally, "in place."

The Explanatory Method

Rather than make an appeal to culture as the sum of beliefs or implicit background assumptions that together comprised "Britishness" or "Germanness," I condensed the relevant differences between culture in Germany and in Britain into a single principle, the specification of the conveyance of labor as a commodity.1 I handled this feature in two ways: first as a key for identifying meaningful configurations of practices and, second, as a discrete variable whose causes and consequences could be specified. When I treated culture as an intelligible schema that came to life in a complex of practices, I reasoned from the viewpoint of synchrony; when I treated it as a variable, I reasoned from diachrony. These two approaches employed different comparative strategies.

On the synchronic level, I endeavored to show by judicious comparison that the differences between German and British wool mills in the symbolic patterning of manufacturing techniques could not be explained by the tangible conditions of the immediate business environment. In this part of the inquiry I excluded the economic environment as a source of variation between countries. True, factory practices served economic purposes, but the means employed to meet functional demands emerged from the cultural assumptions the agents applied. The German weaving managers' consecration of the "efficiency ratio," for example, served the purpose of measuring the level of production, but it hardly represented a natural or superior adaptation to the conditions of production. To review a second instance, the implementation of "waiting money" in German textiles before 1914 correlated with the workers' distinctive insistence upon payment for the commitment of labor power, rather than conforming to economic features of the German labor market that differed from those in Britain before 1914. The demonstration that culture had a pervasive, but specifiable, influence on industrial technique was complete after the initial, synchronic stage of comparison.

A different set of issues arises and a separate method of analysis must be called into service when one inquires into the historical origins of the German and British cultural systems. Culture does not descend from the clouds. Although the growth of the wool textile industries and the imme-

diate circumstances of production in textiles were parallel in Britain and Germany, the national contexts of economic development in the countries as wholes contrast sharply. The conjunctural differences in the way Germany and Britain negotiated the transition from the feudal-corporate organization of work and exchange to factory manufacture in the era of capitalism enabled the agents to import contrasting definitions of labor's commodity form into the factory. On the diachronic level of analysis, therefore, I included economic institutions as a context for the emergence of cultural differences at the level of the countries as wholes. In identifying the autonomous causal contribution of culture, we are not required to treat culture as an unmoved mover.

But does this entire study then merely lead to the conclusion that the "economy" generated cultural impressions which subsequently assumed a stable life of their own? For the purpose of stipulating the causal contribution of culture, this is no different in its implications from the viewpoint that supposes that the economy is the active motor of change but that culture does not perfectly reflect economic circumstances, due either to cultural inertia or, if culture is treated as more plastic, due to the incomplete impression made by present economic conditions; nor is it different in its implications from the perspective that asserts that the differences in the national economies, the alleged foundation of social change, were naturally "reflected" in cultural conceptions which were then imported into diverse local undertakings, such as the regionally circumscribed wool industries. From each of these points of view, culture serves as a component, possibly a necessary one, in the creation of institutions, but it is the conduit, even if imperfect, of an original economic logic, not a systematically structuring force in its own right.

In order to override this reductionist interpretation of the findings of this study, wherein cultural differences only mirrored antecedent economic conditions, it is plausible but unsatisfactory to insist dogmatically, as a general rule of social theory, that what we designate the economy could not come into existence except through the medium of culture. Certainly the succession of economic structures cannot serve as the ultimate foundation of cultural change, for the economy has no history of its own apart from its realization in the culture, which gives shape to human practice. But this peremptory culturalist line of argument no longer makes appeal to an evidentiary demonstration; it no longer advances a research program by showing that the study of culture parsimoniously explains a wide range of phenomena that purely utilitarian or adaptive theories of practice do not

seem to cover. Not to waste words, the dogmatic culturalist interpretation of the results of the present inquiry into the origins of industrial differences is disenchanting because, if accepted, it means that the evidence marshalled in this study cannot be used to adjudicate between theoretic alternatives. It might well return us to the starting point of choosing an allegiance to a variety of theory based on a priori inclinations.

Perhaps we can apply the conventional method of distinguishing between cause and effect by temporal priority. A survey of the transition to liberal commercialism in each country shows that the definition of labor as a commodity emerged in speculative intellectual ruminations upon economic processes before it was embodied in micro-procedures on the factory shop floor. In their characteristic specifications of labor's commodity form, Adam Smith and Johann Lotz each uncannily foretold the shape of practice in his own country's industrial future. If this sequence of development shows that the definition of labor did not reflect established practice in the factory, does it also show that culture represented a force in its own right for institutional development? By itself, the chronological precedence of distinctive national differences in discourse about labor does not resolve this issue, for it might well be the case that the strategic goal of legitimating a profitable factory system was responsible for sustaining or resurrecting traditions of thought about labor which would not otherwise have been reproduced. Even if cultural definitions of labor display striking continuities, an advocate of utilitarian modes of explanation can still maintain that economic requirements decide which cultural features survive at the national level.

Because of its extensive reliance upon configurational analysis, however, this study enables us to make limited causal inferences from the temporal priority of the cultural template. For the outcome we are analyzing is not an isolated element or a single appurtenance of institutions, but a comprehensive constellation of practices. If the outcome to be explained were a simple trait, such as the affirmation of paternalism, then it might be treated as an accompaniment of factory systems which would have been legitimated in some other fashion in the absence of this feature; or it could be dismissed as a trait that was unsubstitutable, but had it not already been in place, would have been invented to meet the needs of the factory system; or, finally, it could be acknowledged as a resource that the economic agents could not have created, but which they put to the service of a structuring economic logic. But the outcome to be explained, as our synchronic comparison emphasized, was a complete cluster of practices. The tendency toward a pattern-

ing of these techniques shows that culture was not just an ingredient or a resource but a structuring principle. In this case, the appearance of the specification of labor in discourse prior to its embodiment in factory procedures is causally definitive; as a system of practice with an internal symbolic logic, culture stands revealed as a positive shaper rather than an accompaniment or passive resource for institutions.

The synchronic comparison of parallel segments of the British and German wool industries shows that practices were configured to form meaningful constellations, but it does not identify in positive fashion the historical genesis of these patterns. It contributes to explaining their initial emergence only by ruling out utilitarian accounts of their genesis. But excluding a competing mode of explanation for historical developments does not by default endorse one's own explanation if one's alternative represents not the simple negation of the rival but an entirely different approach. What is more, the differences in the economic environments may not account for the installation of differing factory practices, but they could still account for the invention of different specifications of labor before they took on a life of their own. Thus the question for delimiting culture's causal influence is not only whether culture "did" something, but from where that culture came. Even if a specification of labor as a commodity imposed a constitutive logic of its own once it was lodged in the factory, the argument might go, this fact offers slight reason for centering the comparative study of history on culture if national differences in cultural conceptions originated as a mere aspect of corresponding economic conditions.

Yet in Britain and Germany the features of the newly emergent discourse about labor that were uncovered in this inquiry debar attempts to see economic circumstances as the cause of the creation of distinctive concepts of labor as a commodity. In Britain the notion that wage workers transfer their labor as it is embodied in a product represented an idealized interpretation, not a mirror image, of the institutions of work in the transition to liberal commercialism. In seventeenth-century Britain, when wage laborers were prevented, at least in official opinion, from offering their labor as a freely marketable ware, and the independent artisan became the exemplary seller of labor, the bulk of the working population was excluded from the paradigm of commercial labor. When labor power became formally marketable in the course of the eighteenth century, Adam Smith, the prototypical philosopher of petty commodity production, recognized in The Wealth of Nations a continued divergence between fact and orienting model. Even while Smith employed the model of labor incarnated in a finished ware by a small

producer as his paradigm of the circulation of commodities, he acknowledged that nearly all worked in the service of a master, not as independent artificers.2 In Germany the exclusion of craft work as an imaginary locus for the emergence of labor as a commodity in the first half of the nineteenth century depended on the small urban producers' continued allegiance to a world of corporate production, seemingly in ignorance of the inescapable "reality" of a secular economic transition. Yet the response of the artificers in Germany did not appear out of thin air: unlike their British counterparts, they had in the main lost their guild monopolies only recently, and they confronted the institutionalization of liberal commercialism at a more threatening point on the clock of world development than British artificers did, a point at which it was evidently feasible for centralized factories to supersede craft production.3 But for this fact to be interpreted and thereby to bear consequences, the agents in Germany had to draw upon the outlying domains of their experience: the imagined past, the global and national economic context, and the projected future. When the manufactory and the textile mill comprised a statistically small portion of employment, they still served as the key site in Germany for the exemplification of capitalist wage labor. The forms of labor as a commodity to which the agents subscribed grew out of the conditions of economic development and exchange, but only as the agents conceived of their relation to them.

That the element of labor became the centerpiece of economic speculation during the transition to commercial liberalism underscores the symbolic process by which the agents established their relation to the commercial world. The young Karl Marx, upon making initial contact with classical political economy, understood that this received body of thought comprised a monumental break with prior reflections on commercial intercourse. Previously wealth had seemed to inhere in natural objects; now, under the sign of capital or, more fundamentally, accumulated labor, agents conceived of it as a form of human subjectivity. As is well known, Marx called Adam Smith "the Luther of political economy," for Smith reoriented belief by showing that development no longer issued from external forces

but arose from the labor of the human subject.4 The focus on human labor as both the generator and the regulator of value in Smith's eighteenth-century Britain coincided with the consecration of market categories as an effective ideology—that is, as the source of the operative schemata of everyday practice. The agents of commercial life incorporated the conditions of existence into their culture in such a way as to define themselves as the subjects of the economic process, but precisely in so doing they made it possible for themselves to become enmeshed in—and become subject to —these economic procedures.5 The discourse in which the specification of labor's commodity form can first be detected did not just record the landscape of commodities in motion, either straightforwardly or by a natural camera obscura; rather, it performed the symbolic work of constituting people as autonomous subjects even as it enveloped them in a sovereign economic system.6

On some of the underlying uniformities identified between the German and British mills—their staffing, the distribution of tasks to overlookers, the general reliance on piece rates for weavers—cultural differences did not impinge. Culture is situated in every institution of society, but not everything is culturally determined. If we admit that the necessity of adapting to the economic environment accounts for certain uniformities between German and British mills—such as the general reliance on piece rates for weavers—do we then fall back on the position that culture was nonetheless determinative "in the last instance"? Such ultimate causes have no observable incarnation in history.7 But neither has this study retreated to the chicken-and-egg position in which culture and the economy are both necessary for each other's substantiation and the contribution of culture to the constitution of the labor process is limited to one category of prerequisite factors in an inextricable combination of causes. The manner in which culture is seen as making its separate contribution to the historical process differs fundamentally according to whether one is assessing the institution-

alization of practice through contrasting specifications of labor or whether one is considering the origins of those conceptual assumptions. Culture operates in spite of economic similarities in the essentially synchronic comparisons between matched textile factories, so the typical differences in the symbolic orchestration of practice can be attributed to culture alone at this stage in the analysis. Only an argument based upon configurational reasoning can advance such a claim to causal exclusivity. Of course the material components of production were indispensable for the incorporation of culture into practice, but the systematic differences in the typical meaningful configuration of those resources obeyed nothing but an internal cultural logic. In the comparisons between Germany and Britain as wholes for the sake of identifying the origins of divergent conceptions of labor, culture is seen to operate in an environment of established contrasts in economic institutions. In each country, the agents moved in a cultural milieu that enabled them to isolate certain sectors in the country's economy as the prototypical site for the transmission of labor under liberal commercialism and to simplify and idealize features of the labor transaction.

To filter and interpret the record of evidence, historical investigators bring to bear a theoretical lens formed by their own vantage point in history. Since the researchers themselves stand inside history, the lens they use may comprise a product of the very course of change they are subjecting to examination. This principle offers an explanatory key for the present study. Marx's analysis of the difference between "labor power" and "embodied labor" and his influential emphasis on the ultimate genesis of profit in the conversion of "labor power" developed in response to the experience, shared by German employers and workers in the nineteenth century, of a rapid transition from feudal-corporate institutions of work to the capitalist factory system. As a scholar marked by the German developmental experience and steeped in German economic history, Marx unintentionally replicated in his texts the symbolic forms of everyday practice enacted by German workers and employers. My analysis of the history of economic thought suggests that Marx's position in the German milieu permitted him to recycle the cultural definition of labor as labor power which governed German practice and to present it in the form of a theory. If Marx can be used to analyze the development of German factories, so, too, can the development of German factories be used to analyze Marx.

This principle gives us new means both for theorizing history and for historicizing theory. The late-twentieth-century sociologist who uses Marx's concept of labor power as a tool to analyze the history of factory

relations has found a powerful lever, not because the concept necessarily penetrates the hidden essence of capitalism, but thanks to the concept's encapsulation of the particularities of the German experience of industrialization. To this extent, my method may carry subversive implications. In drawing upon the distinction between embodied labor and labor power I have changed the status of those terms. I converted them from analytic distinctions in the realm of high theory into cultural categories that people used in the inconspicuous procedures of everyday life. Making them a constituent part of sensuous human practice, rather than an outward description of action imposed by the analyst, makes them more "real" but, paradoxically, less objective—for, as realized categories of culture, they become genuine appurtenances of subjects rather than theoretic properties of economic objects.

Having established the cultural formation of the instrumentalities in the workplace, I considered the consequences of those practices for the articulation of grievances and for the adoption of ideologies of exploitation in workers' labor movements. The historical significance of the differences between the cultural construction of labor in German and in British textile factories does not lie in their effects upon economic efficiency, which in all likelihood remained exiguous. Rather, the cultural differences are notable for the differing ways in which they shaped workers' lived experience of the employment relation and thereby provided the underlying assumptions for their union movements. British textile workers focused on the acquisition of products at less than their true market value as the source of exploitation. Without the concept of labor power as a commodity, they did not move from theories about the creation of profit in the market to theories that focused on the extraction of surplus value at the point of production. Their textile unions, which in the 1890s sponsored the rebirth of socialist ideas, focused on the need to redistribute capital and access to the market rather than on the need to remove the subordination of living labor. In Germany, the textile workers' daily experience of the buying and selling of labor power on the shop floor gave them the cultural resources necessary for the positive reception of Marxist economic theory, or at least of a Marxist economic idiom, from the Social Democratic textile union.

In its appropriation of Marx's economic categories as cultural constructs, this inquiry may seem double-edged. In fact, it contains another paradox. Every act of rejection has a moment of reaffirmation. At the same time that this study shows how culture constituted the means of production, it lends qualified support to Marx's emphasis on the importance of the labor activity

for the formation of people's understanding of social relations. The respective cultural definitions of labor in Germany and in Britain did not survive through sheer inertia or through the might of intellectuals' discourse. They were sustained by a constellation of practices at the factory—from the small rituals of entering the mill to the fining systems for defective cloth—that gave them palpable form. Culture was enacted, not permanently absorbed. Even within the grey walls of the factory, the meanings that the activity of manufacturing sustains may bear ideological consequences as significant as are its instrumental outcomes. German workers were not duped by Marxist ideologues when they focused on the use of Arbeitskraft as the source of the owners' profit, nor did they thereby necessarily discover the essential workings of the capitalist system. Rather, the cultural categories that practices on the shop floor sustained provided German workers with a spontaneous theory of exploitation—a lived truth, if you will—that proved critical for their sympathetic reception of Marxist ideas.

Examining the independent influence of culture on the institutions of the factory solves two problems in labor history with one piece of evidence. It bridges the perplexing divide—established, if not discovered, by E. P. Thompson—between the structured relations of the economy and what Thompson celebrated as the fluid, creative, and heroic formation of political beliefs among workers. The present study identifies the determinate ways in which the symbolic apparatuses of production established the assumptions about labor that workers brought to the arena of politics, but it makes this causal linkage without resorting to economic reductionism. The ideologies of exploitation accepted in the labor movements were fixed, not by the workplace's economic structure, but by the cultural forms inscribed in the micro-practices of production, forms which varied independently of the material or socio-organizational conditions of the manufacturing process.

As a cross-national comparison conceived with a selective question, this investigation has of necessity focused upon a decisive contrast between countries rather than upon variation within them. But this expansive comparison nonetheless affords a perspective from which to study differences within each country in workers' experiences, above all those emerging from the divisions of gender. Consider the inflection of gender distinctions upon the factories' control of intervals of labor in the course of the workday. In Germany, many textile mills granted a special schedule to female workers in charge of households. For example, at lunch time or on the eve of holidays, for the sake of readying the family meal, these women could leave the

factory at least half an hour earlier than other workers.8 The arrangement was consistent with the procedure of partitioning the use of labor power into increments of time that were indefinitely divisible. It also tallied with other rotating or irregular schedules for adult workers in Germany, such as rest pauses whose length alternated according to the day of the week. In Britain, factory owners before the First World War often discussed ways of attracting more workers, especially women, to mill work.9 They considered giving the mill a more wholesome atmosphere and offering cleaner working conditions. But they did not grant women an extended lunch or single them out for early release on the eve of holidays. This would have fragmented the block of a complete day and slowed the delivery of products. Female textile workers in Britain could instead adjust workdays to their household schedule by sending substitute workers to take their place at the looms. Unlike their German counterparts, they had to offer prompt delivery of products, not necessarily access to their own labor power.10 These differences in the treatment of women's labor show that the form assumed by labor as a

commodity did not exhaust the determinants of factory life, but operated as a pivotal category that mediated the influence of gender distinctions.11

The Fetishism of Quantified Labor

The discovery that the apparatuses of production were organized as signifiers of labor's commodity form has important implications for our understanding of the constitution of liberal capitalist society by labor. In his legendary analysis of the fetishism of commodities, the founding charter for Western critical theory, Marx contends that commodity producers grasp their social dependency upon each other only through the moment of exchange.12 The agents' discovery of the social character of their labor through the trade of products causes human labor to appear under an absurd guise: as the comparative exchange value of products. In Marx's account, not only do the mutual relations of the producers take the misleading form of a social relation between things, but the category of social labor in general disappears from the producers' sight. In his view, liberal capitalism has the peculiarity that it structures social relations by abstract labor at the same time that it effaces abstract labor as a category of social consciousness. Even the classical political economists, by his reading, never identified abstract labor as such but contented themselves with comparing quantities of labor. These brilliant articulators of capitalist logic had "not the least idea, that the merely quantitative difference between kinds of labor presupposes their qualitative unity or equality, therefore their reduction to abstract human labor."13

For Marx, the categories of recognition arise from the process of production and exchange depicted only in terms of its most fundamental mechanics. In his discussion of the fetishism of commodities, Marx temporarily suspends his prior characterization of the production process under capitalism and defines it only by the circumstance that articles are produced for the purpose of exchange. Indeed, at this point in his exposition Marx resorts to the counterfactual premise that the economic agents are independent commodity producers who handle the exchange of their own products: "Since the producers do not come into social contact with each other until they

exchange their products, the specific social character of the producer's labor does not show itself except in the act of exchange."14 This simplification allows Marx to reason from the social horizon of the marketplace, in which officially free and equal owners are associated by exchanging their commodities in terms of values that appear imposed by an objective necessity from without. The experience of production itself, the use of concrete living labor, is not theorized as a process generating the agents' misrecognition of the governing categories of capitalism.

Marx's emphasis upon the generation of the forms of understanding out of the "deep structure" of the exchange of labor gives rise to several questions which the unveiling of the symbolic apparatuses of production on the shop floor can address. The economic agents, in point of fact, are not all independent producers separated except at the moment of exchange: capitalism from its inception required workers to dispose of their living labor by entering into social relations of subordination to employers. Why, then, are the agents' "mutual personal relations" in the performance of labor "disguised under the shape of social relations between products"?15 Can Marx's simplified model of independent commodity owners who labor in isolation be applied to explain the development of the categories of recognition among dependent wage laborers? The meaningful arrangement of micro-apparatuses on the shop floor suggests that workers acquired the categories of their culture, not from the deep structure of relations of exchange, but from the discernible shape of procedures on the surface of production. Not in the fleeting moment of concluding a wage contract but in the minute details of work itself, in the ongoing experience of systems of payment, accounting, and time discipline, did the dependent British workers learn that human practice revolves around the imagined exchange of labor materialized in a product. Workers in Germany learned to think of their concrete exertions as the expenditure and transmission of a quantity of labor power that appeared to them as a measurable thing with a commercial metric attached to it by the external force of the market. In both countries, the subordination of workers in the factory did not simply appear as the direct personal domination of the employer but came into view as an effect of the impersonal workings of the transmission and circulation of quantified labor. In each country, both workers and employers pursued their interests within shared forms of

understanding of labor which neither group alone had created and which confronted both as a prior fact.

Marx's presentation of the fetishism of commodities gives rise to still another issue. In focusing on the fetishization that took place behind people's backs via the market, he depreciated the fetishization of labor as a commodity on the shop floor. In his view, once production is structured to become a mere means of exchanging commodities, the labor process appears to obey natural technical imperatives and relations between producers are structured as instrumental relations. Marx's descriptions of capitalist factories endow the machines themselves with the ability to dictate relations between producers on the shop floor.16 For Marx, of course, the emergence of technological determinism at the work site is only an effect of the historically unique institutions of capitalism and is in the end, therefore, socially structured. But the use of labor is socially determined at a remove, by the underlying commercial structure which makes of production a mere means for the exchange of commodities. In Marx's account, if the use of labor inside the capitalist factory appears determined by technical imperatives, this is not an illusion but a local reality.17

In the realm of the factory itself, Marx mistook as a simple technical outcome or as a set of relations between things what was in truth a set of human relations structured by communication about labor's commodity form. The configuration of procedures on the shop floor in conformity with varying cultural assumptions about labor shows that the fetishism of commodities emerges not just in the marketplace but in the process of production, not just in the exchange of labor but in its use.18 The factory producers mistook the form of labor as a commodity as an objective force controlling the enactment of their life activity because they were enmeshed in minute procedures structured as signifiers of labor's commodity form. As they engaged in the order of practice, they treated themselves and their fellow agents as if they were things, bearers of objectified labor. This "objectivating attitude" was not a simple correlate of production for

exchange, but was sustained by the communicative function of unobtrusive procedures in the execution of work itself.19

The disclosure of signifying practices on the shop floor helps to specify the historically unique mode by which culture shaped human activity in nineteenth-century capitalism. At the outset of this study, we saw that Marshall Sahlins aptly demonstrated how non-capitalist societies have used the instrumentalities of production to communicate a symbolic schema.20 They have incorporated kinship distinctions, which shape society into a functional whole, into the minute procedures of work. But these kinship principles for social relations are also supported by a transcendent cosmology. The principles, received from the gods, stand above production so that the preservation of the social relations based upon them appears as the very motive of production.21 In the liberal capitalist factory, by contrast, the structuring form of labor as a commodity was neither explicated nor solemnized through transcendent norms or through principles standing above the sensible processes of production and exchange. The reproduction of culture did not rely upon a sacred cosmology to make its preservation appear as an end in itself. The purpose of social life was nothing more than the production of commodities.22 In noncapitalist societies, the unspoken principles and assumptions of sacred tradition may comprise the undisputed foundation of social life;23 in the liberal capitalist order, it is not the unspoken parts of enunciated laws or acts of

religious ritual but the symbolic form of instrumental practice itself that represents the supreme domain of the culturally undisputed. Nineteenth-century economic theorists and demagogues could put concepts of labor into words for their own, fleeting purposes. But capitalist culture at work did not depend upon its verbal articulation, for the logic of practice did not have to refer to something greater than itself.

The nationally specific understandings of labor as a commodity appeared to the producers in Germany and Britain as natural appurtenances of the capitalist order. Even when spokespersons for the labor movement at the end of the nineteenth century called for the supersession of capitalism, they did not question the particular form in which labor was designated a commodity in their country; that form acted as a reference point for their nationally distinctive visions of socialist society. In noncapitalist societies, that which is unquestionable about social arrangements is merged with the structure of the natural universe. In the nineteenth-century factory, by contrast, the undoubtable fundament was merely the representation of human labor as an objectified and natural thing: the unquestionable procedures of conduct appeared to the agents as if they were attached, not to nature outside of humankind, but to the nature of humankind; not to objects outside of people, but to people as objects. The institutions of the factory are grasped as human creations, but human agency is misrecognized in the guise of quantified human labor. In noncapitalist society, utilitarian action is hidden under the guise of disinterested conduct that conforms to transcendent norms. In this setting the very haziness and incompleteness of the discursive tradition are part of its usefulness, because they make it pliable enough to legitimate unforeseen strategies.24 In noncapitalist society, practices that appear to serve nothing but noninstrumental goals actually disguise the pursuit of profit. In the nineteenth-century factory, the reverse occurs: the very practices that appear to serve nothing but the pursuit of profit actually conform to a communicative logic. Because the reproduction of the specification of labor as a commodity did not depend upon its legitimation as part of the sacred but could appear as a mode of strictly instrumental conduct, it was less vulnerable to the questioning that occurs with the disenchantment of the modern social world.

Forms of Passage

Comparison of the paths of cultural development in Germany and Britain teaches a paradoxical lesson about the possible advantages of relative underdevelopment for the articulation of economic thought. In Germany the conception of the commodity of labor which proved so suitable for analyzing the utilization of labor in the mechanized factory depended not only upon the commercial logic of a free market but upon the cultural model of feudalism. Many historical analyses emphasize the manner in which the exceptionally rapid economic growth in nineteenth-century Germany outpaced cultural change as a result of the relatively late dismantling of the corporate-feudal order there.25 The present study evaluates the unusually strong feudal template as a helpful resource for the construction of Germany's factory institutions in the image of fully realized capitalist categories. The compressed progression from feudalism to the market-industrial order in Germany, far from creating a lag or an imbalance in economic categories, was distilled in a pure capitalist form: it propelled the Germans to place special emphasis on the timed subordination of labor power per se. Thorstein Veblen wisely appreciated the advantages of initial backwardness; at the level of the economic infrastructure, as is well known, he highlighted the benefits of starting with only up-to-date technology, and at the level of cultural resources, he noted that the Germans' unusual combination of ideas from the medieval and mechanical ages created the potential for "an acceleration of change."26

In Britain the precocious development of a unified national market with formally free exchange in finished products bestowed upon the country a pioneering role in economic reasoning. But the development of a set of commercial assumptions centered on labor before labor power itself became a freely marketable commodity led to the installation of practices in the workshops that revolved around the exchange of materialized labor. Nineteenth-century capitalists and political economists in Britain, who emphasized labor as the generator and regulator of value, did not develop

categories for assessing the significance of labor's systematic use in the classical age of the factory. Their commercial ideology of practice remained within the social perspective of exchange relations between juridically equal property owners. The introduction in Germany of officially free market transactions in products only when juridically free markets in labor power were created, and the survival of feudal templates of the appropriation of labor services, together allowed the Germans to incorporate asymmetric social relations at the point of production into the economic specification of the labor transaction. The precipitous introduction of free exchange relations into the feudal-corporate order afforded German political economists a position from which they could critique the social outlooks centered upon the equalitarian sphere of exchange. Marx's penetrating theory of the exploitation of labor power, intriguingly similar to that of other German economists of his time in its treatment of labor power in production, relied upon the peculiar experience of late and rapid development in his homeland as a reference point for the development of critical social theory. As Marx drew upon British assumptions about labor in the sphere of exchange and compounded them with German assumptions about labor at the point of production, he incorporated the combined and uneven development of capitalism across Europe into the very core of his economic theorems.

Britain's early development of an integrated national market and the country's subsequent weakening in the world economy of the twentieth century have prompted vigorous debate about the distinctive features of Britain's movement to a capitalist regime. Many analysts, from Perry Anderson and Tom Nairn to Martin Wiener, have attributed Britain's modern industrial descent to its early and "incomplete" development of a capitalist social order under the auspices of a commercially minded, yet aristocratic, landed elite.27 Ellen Meiksins Wood has departed from this view in her notable work The Pristine Culture of Capitalism. Wood suggests that Britain's industrial fate can be attributed to the consummation of capitalist culture in Britain rather than to the system's unfinished incarnation. In Britain, where free-market principles left entrepreneurs to their own devices, people of business focused upon short-term profit in the consumer

goods sectors rather than upon the transformation of technique in heavy industry. In Germany, fewer of the business and political elites converted to the culture of liberal "free enterprise." The Bismarkian state drew upon the authoritarian and military traditions of the precapitalist past to organize technological innovation and to coordinate longterm industrial investment for geopolitical advance. In Wood's opinion, it is not accidental but paradigmatic that state-guided industrialization in Germany proved economically superior to the "pristine culture of capitalism" in Britain.28

Likewise, in the present study, the British factory system exemplified "pure" capitalist categories. In the British case the concept of the sale of labor as a commodity was shorn of traditional relations of subordination for its content. In this sense it depended less upon precapitalist forms of labor appropriation than its counterpart in Germany did. Yet, as we have seen, the focus upon the equalitarian realm of product exchange in Britain grew out of the protracted suppression of a market for the transmission of labor power itself after the recognition of a market in goods. The selection of the peculiarly commercial and liberal specification of labor as a commodity in Britain developed as a result of the long survival of the "archaic" corporate administration of wage labor in Britain, not because of a relatively early or clean supersession of the medieval-corporate order. In a word, the pristine cultural outcome emerged from a corrupted transition. In Germany, the protection of contractual relations in industrial wage labor occurred relatively early compared to a recognition of an integrated market in products. The conjuncturally early establishment of a formally free market in labor power in Germany permitted the carryover of feudal relations of domination into the understanding of capitalist wage labor. In my study, Germany's feudal past does not figure as an obstacle to the expression of a purely capitalist culture; rather, the strong legacy of feudal relations of labor defined the fundamental concept of wage labor itself.29

By returning Marx's well-known analysis of the capitalist labor process to its home in German practice, this study helps us to appreciate how the past shaped an economic theory that is alive in the present. Does the contextualization of Marxist categories as the representation of a particular cultural experience also differentiate between past and present by restricting the applicability of Marx's nineteenth-century theory of exploitation to the era in which it originated?

Recent developments in Marxist theory have removed from scholarly discourse that part of Marx's theory which initially derived from the German context, and, in fact, have jettisoned the concept of labor power in toto. In Kapital , Marx counted the employer's control over the execution of work as the first defining feature of the production process under capitalism.30 Like nineteenth-century German employers and workers, Marx unified the relations of domination and appropriation at the point of production. Contemporary Marxist theory has disengaged the exercise of authority in the workplace from the appropriation of surplus. John Roemer, among the most influential Marxist economists at present, has offered an intriguing reanalysis of the mechanisms by which surplus is transferred between workers and capitalists. In A General Theory of Exploitation and Class , Roemer concludes that surplus labor can be transferred from one class to another if productive assets are unequally distributed among classes, even if the classes with the lesser assets still own the means of production that they employ for their labor.31 Roemer's demonstration has even led theorists to remove wage labor from the necessary design of capitalism.32 Adam Przeworski has participated in this analytical shift by turning away from the analysis of the actors' locations in the production process and emphasizing the distribution of labor surplus.33 Erik Olin Wright has also contributed to this continuing realignment of theory. In a revision of his earliest parsing of class categories, Wright eliminated authority over the labor process as a criterion of class position in capitalist relations

of production.34 The ongoing process by which capitalists rely upon their domination at the work site to extract surplus from living labor power is losing its centrality in the leading Marxist analyses of contemporary economic functions.

This sea-change is telling because it alters the way Marxist theory connects the functioning of the capitalist system to the understandings of the economic agents. In Marx's perspective, the sale of labor power comprises an encounter between the functional requirements of the valorization of labor for the capitalist system on the one side and the lived experience of the producers on the other. Labor power for him is both an analytic mold and a category in the producers' social consciousness. The shift of contemporary Marxist analysis away from the experienced moment of the use of labor power means that the operation of the economic system is theorized without reference to its constitutive and governing forms of understanding and experience. To be sure, Marx assumed that only one definition of labor power emerges in capitalist culture, in keeping with his premise that its apparent form is an inseparable expression of the essence of the capitalist system. Yet he believed that the lived experience of the monetization of labor is essential both for the system's reproduction and for struggles to change it. The appearance of abstract human labor as a category shaping the practices of production establishes at the outset the cultural foundation for the agents' pursuit of their interests. The present study reaffirmed the constraining effect of the form of abstract labor in the example of the Huddersfield weavers, who were unable to recognize and measure their own activity except under the guise of the objective properties of the fabric itself.35

For this comparative study of culture I am interested only in ascertaining what the producers themselves believed was true and in identifying the origins and consequences of their beliefs. This is not a blind strategy of convenience. On the contrary, the truth value of Marxism depends on the interpretations of the producers. Their categories of understanding prompt the development of economic processes, shape the course of change, and continue to alter the relevance of theory. It is not up to theorists to decide with equations from afar whether Marx's definition of the commodity of labor as labor power remains valid at the end of the twentieth century. How the producers themselves interpret the labor process will resolve this fateful question. The history of practice on the shop floor suggests that the concept of labor as a commodity may have long ago lost its position as the center-point of a constellation of practices.

The two decades leading up to the First World War comprise the last days of the classical factory system that was established in the heyday of commercial liberalism. Until the onset of the war, there was little evidence that the cluster of practices based on labor's commodity form was losing its coherence. Yet German and British producers could not inhabit unconnected and uncompared conceptual worlds forever. As they came into tighter contact, they inadvertently reaffirmed their distinctive cultural starting points. In the weaving branch, the diffusion of the so-called pick clock, a technical contrivance mounted on looms in order to count the motions of the shuttle across the warp, caused British managers closely to examine German procedures for executing work. On the very eve of the war, managers in Britain became aware that the philosophy of remunerating weavers by shots in Germany marked the major difference between the two countries' pay systems.36 In Germany, the concept of pay by shots had preceded the technology of the pick clock, whereas in Britain it happened the other way around.37 The first batch of pick clocks to arrive in Yorkshire, purchased for inspection and experimentation in 1911 by the Huddersfield employers' association,

came from Germany. Before that date, contemporaries claimed, not a single loom in Yorkshire had a pick clock.38

Even after they began testing the pick clocks, the British were unsure whether they would restructure their pay scales or would use the clocks just to measure cloth length more precisely.39 A change in one element of the technical environment did not call into question the overall view of the labor process. The concept of pay by shot in Germany made the usefulness of the pick clock apparent from the start. The slow adoption of pick clocks in Britain resulted not from technical backwardness but from a particular outlook upon labor. The emphasis on measuring production by the length of the output made it difficult for the British to envisage how such clocks could be used until after German industry had provided a complete demonstration. Decades earlier, British technicians had discussed the feasibility and usefulness of assembling pick clocks for looms. A mechanic in Britain had inquired as early as 1879 in the Textile Manufacturer , the central forum for technical discussions for British textiles, whether a gadget existed for registering picks as they were inserted. The magazine dismissed the notion of building a pick clock. "We are almost certain that no instrument is in the market specifically intended for this purpose," its technical editors replied, "and if there were, it is a moot point whether there would be a great demand for it."40 Thoughts of a pick clock disappeared until foreigners reintroduced them.

In the Lancashire cotton district, the idea of remunerating weavers by the total shots inserted appears to have occurred only among managers who, after 1902, installed American-designed Northrop automatic looms with pick clocks.41 In 1914 only 1 percent of the looms in Britain were of this type.42 The Gregs of Styal, Cheshire, began to install these new looms in 1909. The surviving account books indicate that the machines alone did not bring about a revised appreciation of weaving. This company placed Northrop looms with pick clocks next to its older weaving equipment. Only weavers on the new machines were paid by thousands of shots, since pick clocks were measuring

their output.43 British weavers on the Northrops contested the number of looms each of them would operate as well as the total amount of their wage, but they did not resist the new principles on which their piece earnings were based, another indication that survival of the old piece-rate systems cannot be attributed to organizational inertia or rigidity in industrial relations. The bookkeepers at the Greg firm maintained the accounts for the old and the new machines in the same volume. They awkwardly divided the pages into different sets of columns for the two types, because they calculated the net efficiency only of the new looms. The categories used to measure output and efficiency with the alien technology on new looms were not generalized to the mill as a whole.44 Their introduction did not lead to revision in the symbolic apparatuses of production for old looms. When the British came into contact with imported technologies, they lost some of the techniques that reproduced their own construct of labor as a commodity. But given the stability in the other parts of the ensemble of practices, the established concept of labor was reproduced.

When the British adopted methods for calculating an efficiency ratio on new looms, their methods did not always conform to the cultural framework in place in Germany. At the firm of Benjamin Thornber and Sons in Burnley, records show that managers began calculating the efficiency of production no later than 1919. Unlike German managers, however, they did not begin with the maximum production possible in a given unit of time. They calculated the hours required to complete a piece of cloth of a fixed length with uninterrupted operation of the loom and then compared this with the actual number of hours used to produce cloth of that length.45 To be sure, the formula expressed efficiency as a percentage of the maximum possible, as in Germany. Yet fabric partitioned time, not time fabric; British practitioners

reasoned in this instance from hours per cloth, not, as the Germans did, from cloth per hour.46 Even when the British analyzed the use of labor in time, then, they sometimes began with the length of cloth, not the motions executed, as labor's denominator, a sign that change did not necessarily push them toward the German perspective of transmission of labor as a commodity.

Whether the systems of industrial practice in Germany and Britain contained endogenous forces for change that would have revealed themselves but for the intervention of the First World War, no one is in a position to determine. In the event, the force summoned to dislocate the systems was the organizational influence of the state, which broke the liberal-capitalist occultism of commodity production. In both Germany and Britain, during the war the state assumed greater responsibility for determining the rate at which workers were paid. In Germany, the workers' receipts from employers for piecework were adjusted to provide additional allowances, regardless of performance, to men for each dependent child.47 Government intervened to decide not just the social benefits workers received as citizens but the wages they received as wage laborers, which now diverged from the quantity of labor power expended. The state determined not just the amount of pay but the formula by which it was calculated. The purchase of labor as a commodity through the autonomous workings of the market was not circumscribed; rather, it was completely undermined.48

In Britain the breakdown of a market in raw materials and labor is illustrated by the policies of the Cotton Control Board, an association of textile manufacturers appointed in 1917 by the government Board of Trade. The Control Board allocated raw cotton at controlled prices to manufacturers, who were required to purchase a license to operate all their standing machinery. The more equipment the mill owners operated, the greater the levies they owed to the Cotton Control Board; the funds were used to provide unemployment relief for operatives in the industry.49 The board also controlled wage agreements. When the spinners, weavers, and card-room workers began negotiations in 1918 for large pay raises, the Cotton Control Board threatened (with great effect) to eliminate unemployment relief.50 Clearly, the bargaining no longer revolved around the sale of materialized labor, but centered on the collectively managed maintenance of labor power.51

The war brought about a fundamental shift in the symbolic apparatuses of production in Britain. Perhaps because manufacturers had to purchase a license for each machine they wanted to run, they began to abandon the custom of locking tardy workers out; instead, they threatened to make latecomers put in a full day of labor by working past quitting time.52 Government-sponsored costing principles made it superfluous to reckon expenditures on overlookers' labor as an input embodied in the cloth; instead, overlookers received a guaranteed wage whether or not they or their underlings worked.53 In Germany, workers' struggles in the postwar period were no longer played out through the anonymous

mechanisms of the market, but shifted to the political and state administrative sectors. The revolutionary conflicts over the state constitution and over employee management of factories upon the conclusion of the war allowed struggle between employers and workers to appear for an instant on the ground of their "own mutual personal relations."54

The intensifying governmental responsibility for the constitution of the labor process since the First World War suggests that the principle of labor as a commodity has lost its salience as the primary mechanism that both integrates social exchange as a whole and organizes the lifeworld of the producers. Perhaps, then, the disappearance of labor power as a category of human experience in contemporary Marxist theory at the end of the twentieth century was only to have been expected. Perhaps, too, labor power could be rediscovered by scholars as a lived category of nineteenth-century production only through a retrospective inquiry: so long as capitalism appeared as a unitary system with an historical dynamic of its own, researchers would conceive of labor's specification, not as a culturally variable form, but as a universal form of understanding that emanated from the essence of the system. But to investigate the symbolic constitution of practices on the shop floor at the end of the twentieth century, the question may no longer be what form labor takes as a commodity on its own terms, but how that form is intertwined with categories that supplement the role once played by labor alone. As Habermas has emphasized, the commodity of labor has been supplanted by the juridical categories, increasingly salient for citizens and clients of state bureaucracies, that autonomously connect the parts of society apart from the mechanism of exchange value.55

Although the effective forms of culture may have changed, the past still offers guidance for the exploration of the institutions of manufacture in the present. From the geometry of the factory portals to the denominators of fabric, labor's commodity form in the nineteenth century did not lie underneath practice but in it. Likewise, for researchers of the present, as for poets and theologians, divinity is contained within life's humblest details. To find the treasure in the concrete, investigators of factories in our own age require neither faith nor dogma, only theory, as Marx's fading categories continue to show us.