5—
The Disjoint Recognition of Markets in Britain

The example of "labor" strikingly shows how even the most abstract categories  . . . are a product of historical conditions and retain their validity only for and within the framework of these conditions.
Karl Marx, Zur Kritik der Politischen Oekonomie

What method of inquiry will allow us to account for the historical emergence of contrasting specifications of labor as a commodity in Germany and in Britain? Pairing German with late-developing British textile mills offered a synchronic comparison for the sake of highlighting the operation of an intelligible cultural logic. The riddle of beginnings remains: how did the contrasting concepts of labor as a ware originate? Formulating a response to this question requires a shift away from the local industrial setting. Looking at the whole spectrum of textile factories within each country, we can see that the distinctive British and German assumptions about labor prevailed in mills that developed under somewhat different regional circumstances. For example, in Britain similar definitions of labor organized practices in early-developing Lancashire and in late-developing Yorkshire. The German specification of labor appeared both in Silesian towns of the east and in the Wupper Valley of the west. The broad distribution of similar ideas about the commodity form of labor in each country suggests that concepts of labor were decisively influenced by the national historical context, not just by local conditions of production.

At the level of the countries as wholes, however, development took such different paths in Germany and Britain that a comparison of these two cases alone is ill suited for discovering and singling out the motivating conditions for divergent impressions of labor. I will proceed by examining these primary cases on their own grounds in order to identify the unique combinations of commercial liberty, feudal authority, and urban corporate institutions that guided their passage to a formal market in wage labor. Then, to confirm the consistent influence of these conditions upon the form of labor as a commodity, I will consider how the same elements interlocked

in France and, in a more summary presentation, northern Italy. These cases illustrate differing timings of similar changes entailed by the European path of capitalist development.

Since the concept of labor as an economic resource appears to have a manifest referent—the performance of work—one might suppose that it arises spontaneously in every society, as a natural reflection of activity in the shop, mine, or farmstead. Yet societies have developed sophisticated networks of trade and techniques for managing the use of labor without generating the idea of labor as a general source of economic value.^[1] The ancient Greeks, for example, in their philosophical speculations and political treatises recognized only diverse kinds of concrete work, which they did not compare to uncover labor as a separate, unifying element. Jean-Pierre Vernant demonstrated that the Greeks did not believe the various kinds of artisanal trades shared anything by virtue of carrying out the function of production.^[2] Neither Greek nor Latin evolved terms to express "the general notion of 'labor'" for the sake of an economic output.^[3] Is this cause for wonder? The ancient world also lacked an extensive, unified market in "formally free" wage labor.^[4] Could not the absence of such a market have deprived the ancients of an historical requisite for the concept of labor to emerge as an underlying source of value in popular and scholarly reflections?^[5]

[1] On the development of methods for the calculated exploitation of slave or serf labor, without the appearance of labor in the guise of a commodity, see Maurice Godelier, The Mental and the Material: Thought, Economy and Society (London: Verso, 1986), pp. 197–198.

[2] Jean-Pierre Vernant, Myth and Thought Among the Greeks (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1983), pp. 258, 262–263. In the Nicomachean Ethics Aristotle supposes that the goods artisans produce are comparable, not as the creations of labor, but as products for which there is a demand. See Book V, ch. 5, 1133, lines 15–20, in Aristotle, Ethica Nicomachea , trans. W. D. Ross (London: Humphrey Milford, 1925).

[3] M. I. Finley, The Ancient Economy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), p. 81. On the difficulties Roman jurists had in treating what we call labor, see Finley's notes to p. 66 and also Yvon Garlan, "Le Travail libre en Grèce ancienne," in Peter Garnsey, editor, Non-Slave Labour in the Greco-Roman World (Cambridge: Cambridge Philological Society, 1980), pp. 6–22. G. E. M. de Ste. Croix has tried to show that the concept of labor power was alive among the Greeks. The clearest reference to abstract labor de Ste. Croix unearths from ancient sources is a remark from The Republic. Plato comments that people not intelligent enough to be accepted as full partners in the Republic must "sell the use of their strength." The phrase does not establish a social equivalence between various kinds of work as productive actions. See de Ste. Croix's The Class Struggle in the Ancient World (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1981), p. 183.

[4] The phrase is Max Weber's, of course. The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1958), p. 21.

[5] Franz Petry, Der soziale Gehalt der Marxschen Werttheorie (Jena: Gustav Fischer, 1916), pp. 24–25.

The experience of Renaissance Italy reveals that the appearance of labor as a separate element of economic discourse coincided with a reliance on free artisanal labor to produce for a dynamic export trade. The Italian peninsula led Europe in dismantling feudal labor dues and in developing an extensive trade in the products of a growing population of urban free persons.^[6] As early as the 1470s, Italian administrators who wrote on government policy identified labor as the primary source of a state's wealth.^[7] A century later, the noted economist Giovanni Botero reaffirmed the centrality of labor when he said that neither the gold mines of the New World nor the landed estates of the Old produced so much wealth as "the industrie of men and the multitude of Artes."^[8] But these early Italian commentators still did not analyze labor as a commodity. They did not theorize its price either as it was transmitted from workers to employers or as it was exchanged among independent traders. This task was first conceived by British thinkers who experienced the consolidation of a liberal commercial order in the seventeenth century. They founded the school of classical political economy that blossomed with Adam Smith. Dare we claim that the formal essays of these economic thinkers, who gave clear expression to new perceptions of commercial development, also depict the process by which the concept of labor as a commodity assumed a central role in organizing manufacturing practice?

Among the enduring analysts of capitalist production, Marx alone considered it essential to uncover the genesis of the concepts he inherited and revised. His Theories of Surplus Value , although unpublished in his lifetime, offers a monumental survey of the development of economic theory in Britain, home to perhaps the most influential commercial ideas of his time. Yet in his account economic categories have an equivocal status: sometimes they represent popular forms of social consciousness, sometimes they are analytic devices that capture the true movement of economic forces. By way of illustration, Marx asserts that the notion of labor as a general productive factor emerged when the free circulation of laborers between occupations made the worker's vocation incidental to the universal function of produc-

[6] Gino Luzzatto, An Economic History of Italy from the Fall of the Roman Empire to the Beginning of the Sixteenth Century (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1961), p. 62.

[7] Joseph Schumpeter, History of Economic Analysis (New York: Oxford University Press, 1954), p. 163.

[8] Botero made this observation in Della ragion di stato libri dieci , Venice, 1589. The translation is from A Treatise Concerning the Causes of the Magnificencie and Greatness of Cities (London: R. Ockould, H. Tomes, 1606), pp. 48–51.

ing something for exchange.^[9] This category of abstract labor represented a form of consciousness bound up with historically specific conditions of social life. Marx believed that he refashioned this popular category to arrive at his own concept of the commodity "labor power," his scientific appreciation of the unique form in which human labor was appropriated in capitalist society. In historicizing economic categories, or at least the ones he revised, Marx set up a realm of mechanical development and one of unprescribed invention: the economic ideas that prevail in everyday life are generated involuntarily by the immediate processes of production and exchange; the elaborations of science, or at least his theory of the valorization of Arbeitskraft , may represent original fabrications of the solitary intellect. The underdetermination of his own formal economic innovations and the over-determination, so to speak, of popular economic notions comprise flip sides of an unresolved problem, that of recovering the historical unity of discursive and manufacturing practice. Part Two of this work shows that by misconceiving this problem in his analyses, Marx cast himself as an actor in a history of ideas that was made behind his back. Not that his ideas were "wrong," as so many have prided themselves in complaining. Rather, Marx's discoveries in the field of economics are pivotal for the understanding of capitalist practices, but for reasons upon which he proved unable to reflect.

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-

[9] Karl Marx, Grundrisse der Kritik der politischen Ökonomie (Berlin: Dietz Verlag, 1974), p. 25.

[10] R. H. Tawney and Eileen Power, editors, Tudor Economic Documents (London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1924), Volume III, p. 127.

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

[11] Armstrong did not conceive of labor as an item with a cost. The advantage of the growth of trade and industry is that it sets "common people daily to worke in a right ordre of the common weale to kepe theym out of idelnes frome working syne and myschif." Ibid.

[12] M. Beer, Early British Economics (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1938), pp. 170, 172–174, 215.

[13] Harold Laski, The Rise of Liberalism: The Philosophy of a Business Civilization (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1936), p. 117. "Private enterprise," Hobsbawm reminds us, "was and is blind." E. J. Hobsbawm, "The Seventeenth Century in the Development of Capitalism," Science and Society Volume XXIV, Number 2 (Spring 1960), p. 101. Eric Roll, A History of Economic Thought (New York: Prentice-Hall, 1942), pp. 51–52.

[14] G. D. Ramsay, "Industrial Laisser-Faire and the Policy of Cromwell," The Economic History Review Volume XVI, Number 2 (1946), pp. 108–109.

[15] Christopher Hill, "A Bourgeois Revolution?" in J. G. A. Pocock, editor, Three British Revolutions: 1641, 1688, 1776 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980), pp. 117–118.

[16] B. E. Supple, Commercial Crisis and Change in England 1600–1642 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1959), p. 231.

[17] J. P. Cooper, "Economic Regulation and the Cloth Industry in Seventeenth-Century England," Transactions of the Royal Historical Society , Fifth series, Volume 20 (London: Printed for The Society by Butler & Tanner, 1970), pp. 93–99. Lawrence Stone emphasizes the unintended consequences of the revolution in "The Bourgeois Revolution of Seventeenth-Century England Revisited," in Geoff Eley and William Hunt, editors, Reviving the English Revolution (London: Verso, 1988), p. 287. Some legislation of local or restricted application continued to stray from the rules of formally free exchange. As late as 1773, Parliament passed an act regulating wages on behalf of the journeymen silk weavers of London and Middlesex. Ephraim Lipson, The Economic History of England , Volume III (London: Adam and Charles Black, 1948), p. 270.

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:

Suppose a man could with his own hands plant a certain scope of Land with Corn, that is, could Digg, or Plough, Harrow, Weed, Reap, Carry home, Thresh, and Winnow so much as the Husbandry of this Land requires; and had withal Seed wherewith to sowe the same. I say, that when this man hath subducted his seed out of the proceed of his Harvest, and also, what himself hath both eaten and given to others in exchange for Clothes, and other Natural necessaries; that the remainder of Corn is the natural and true Rent of Land for that year.  . . . But a further, though collateral question may be, how much English money this Corn or Rent is worth? I answer, so much as the money, which another single man can save, within the same time, over and above his expence, if he imployed himself wholly to produce and make it; viz. Let another man go travel into a Countrey where is Silver, there Dig it, Refine it, bring it to the

[18] Marx called Petty the founder of political economy. Theorien über den Mehrwert (Stuttgart: J. H. W. Dietz, 1919), Volume I, p. 1.

[19] Charles Henry Hull, editor, The Economic Writings of Sir William Petty (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1899), Volume I, pp. 44, 68.

same place where the other man planted his Corn; Coyne it &c the same person, all the while of his working for Silver, gathering also food for his necessary livelihood, and procuring himself covering, &c. I say, the Silver of the one, must be esteemed of equal value with the Corn of the other.^[20]

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]

[20] A Treatise of Taxes and Contributions , in ibid., p. 43.

[21] Marx himself misconstrued Petty so. Marx, Theorien über den Mehrwert , op. cit., Volume I, p. 1. Shichiro Matsukawa, "An Essay on the Historical Uniqueness of Petty's Labour Theory of Value," Hitotsubashi Journal of Economics Volume 5, Number 2 (January 1965), p. 3. Alessandro Roncaglia summarizes Petty's reception by economists familiar with the Marxist tradition in Petty: The Origins of Political Economy (Armonk, New York: M. E. Sharpe, 1985), pp. 79, 112. Marx found unresolvable contradictions in Petty's account: on the one hand, Petty seems to imply that the magnitude of a product's value is determined by labor time; on the other, land makes a contribution of its own to exchange value. Marx supposed that this inconsistency appeared because Petty appreciated labor only hazily. In his view, Petty merged two aspects of it which ought to remain separate: "Labour as a source of exchange value," Marx wrote, "is confused with labor as the source of use-value; in this case it presupposes material provided by nature (land)." Theorien op. cit., Volume 1, p. 11.

[22] Here I follow the noteworthy lead of David McNally in Political Economy and the Rise of Capitalism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), p. 51.

[23] Ibid., p. 43. My own emphasis.

[24] Petty attempts to equate the value of land and labor in several manuscripts. But in so doing he shifts from looking at labor as the determinant of the relative prices of commodities to looking at labor as the real standard of those prices. See Shichiro Matsukawa, "Sir William Petty: An Unpublished Manuscript," Hitotsubashi Journal of Economics Volume 17, Number 2 (February 1977), p. 48.

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]

[25] E. Strauss, Sir William Petty: Portrait of a Genius (London: Bodley Head, 1954), p. 20; David Seward, "The Devonshire Cloth Industry in the Early Seventeenth Century," in Roger Burt, editor, Industry and Society in the South-West (Essex: University of Essex, 1970), p. 42; John T. Swain, Industry Before the Industrial Revolution: North-East Lancashire c. 1500–1640 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1986), p. 121; Ian Blanchard, "Labour Productivity and Work Psychology in the English Mining Industry," The Economic History Review Second series, Volume XXXI, Number 1 (1978), pp. 11, 13.

[26] The weavers who set up the first trade union in Lancashire in 1756 complained that the labor of those who relied mostly on inherited farms "can never be reckoned upon an Average with those who have nothing but their Trade to subsist themselves and their family by." Alfred P. Wadsworth and Julia de Lacy Mann, The Cotton Trade and Industrial Lancashire 1600–1780 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1931), p. 317.

[27] An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1976 [1776]), pp. 130–131. Smith consigned the division between subsistence farming and manufacture for exchange to "ancient times" and "poor countries."

[28] Das Kapital (Berlin: Dietz Verlag, 1980), Volume I, p. 184.

[29] By far the most thorough and acute analysis of Petty's economic theories appears in Silva Kühnis's Die wert- und preistheoretischen Ideen William Pettys (Winterthur: P. G. Keller, 1960). Part of Kühnis's contribution consists in showing that the standard interpretations of Petty start from incorrect premises: Petty, she shows, does not try to establish labor as a measure of relative exchange values, nor does he consider the exchange value of labor equal to the costs of laborers' subsistence, nor does he aim at showing that the value of a product can be deduced by some formula from the cost of the land and labor employed upon it (pp. 161, 190, 81). Instead, in an exhaustive survey of his ideas, she shows that Petty takes on an impossible task, that of arriving at a universal measure of use value based on land, labor, and their products.

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.

It is observed by Clothiers, and others, who employ great numbers of poor people, that when corn is extremely plentiful, that the Labour of the poor is proportionably dear; And scarce to be had at all (so licentious are they who labour only to eat, or rather to drink). Wherefore when so many Acres sown with Corn, as do usually produce a sufficient store for the Nation, shall produce perhaps double to what is expected or necessary; it seems not unreasonable that this common blessing of God, should be applied to the common good of all people  . . . than the same should be abused, by the vile and brutish part of mankind.^[31]

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

[30] I owe this observation to M. Beer, Early British Economics (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1938), p. 168.

[31] "Political Arithmetick," originally published 1690, reprinted in Hull, editor, op. cit., Volume 1, pp. 274–275.

[32] A Treatise of Taxes , op. cit., p. 52.

[33] Ibid., p. 87. If the justices allow wages to rise to double the level needed for subsistence, Petty adds, the laborer "works but half so much as he could have done, and otherwise would; which is a loss to the Publick of the fruit of so much labour." Does not Petty exclude the laborer from the "public"?

[34] The emphasis upon the free exchange of labor when it is above that required for subsistence appears also in Dudley North's tract of 1690. Beer, Early British Economics , op. cit., p. 210.

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-

[35] In Nicholas Barbon, An Apology for the Builder (London: For Cave Pullen, 1685), p. 67.

[36] The preceding comment draws upon Christopher Hill's studies in Society and Puritanism in Pre-Revolutionary England (New York: Schocken Books, 1964), pp. 133–134, 143–144, and his comments in "Pottage for Freeborn Englishmen: Attitudes to Wage Labour in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries," in C. H. Feinstein, editor, Socialism, Capitalism and Economic Growth: Essays Presented to Maurice Dobb (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1967), p. 347. See also Beer, Early British Economics , op. cit., pp. 174–175. Several interpreters have concluded that John Locke could not admit the contractual sale of labor power, only the sale of the produce or completed service of labor. The servant who sold labor power itself had, like a slave, lost juridical autonomy. Locke also suggested that independent artisans who merchandized their own products were singularly productive for society. Some Considerations of the Consequences of the Lowering of Interest, and Raising the Value of Money , 1696, reprinted in Patrick Hyde Kelly, editor, Locke on Money (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), Volume One, pp. 241–242; James Tully, A Discourse on Property: John Locke and his Adversaries (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), pp. 138, 142; Keith Tribe, Land, Labour and Economic Discourse (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1978), pp. 48–51.

[37] For Josiah Child, Nicholas Barbon, and Dudley North, see William Letwin, The Origins of Scientific Economics (London: Methuen and Co., 1963), pp. 37, 54–55, 184–189.

[38] Letwin, op. cit., p. 141; Strauss, op. cit., pp. 123, 176. Petty reflected upon a general denominator of values of goods not as a theorist but as an advocate with a practical goal before him. To rebut claims that England's economy was in decline, he sought a measure of value apart from the fluctuating worth of currency.

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]

[39] No wonder some of the most notable economic treatises of the seventeenth century have remained anonymous. J. R. McCulloch, editor, Early English Tracts on Commerce (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1954 [1856]), p. xiii.

[40] C. B. Macpherson, The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1962), p. 153.

[41] Christopher Hill, "The Poor and the People," in The Collected Essays of Christopher Hill (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1986), p. 250. Hill, "Pottage for Freeborn Englishmen," op. cit., pp. 342–346. Through the end of the seventeenth century, the term to employ applied to the recruitment of an abject servant rather than to the wage-labor relation in general. E. J. Hundert, "Market Society and Meaning in Locke's Political Philosophy," Journal of the History of Philosophy Volume XV, Number 1 (January 1977), p. 41.

[42] See also Keith Thomas, "The Levellers and the Franchise," in G. E. Aylmer, editor, The Interregnum: The Quest for Settlement 1646–1660 (London: Macmillan & Co., 1972), p. 68. Christopher Hill has endorsed Macpherson's interpretation, but others contend that the evidence can be read several ways. See the literature cited in ibid., p. 208. Macpherson's interpretation of the franchise proposals supposes that the locution servants referred to all wage laborers. He defends his position in "Servants and Labourers in Seventeenth-Century England," in his Democratic Theory: Essays in Retrieval (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973), pp. 207–223, and in The Rise and Fall of Economic Justice and Other Papers (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), p. 153. Christopher Hill unearths evidence in support of Macpherson in "Pottage for Freeborn Englishmen," op. cit., pp. 341–342.

[43] The political theorist James Harrington also excluded wage laborers from the franchise on the grounds that they were not "freemen." C. B. Macpherson, "Harrington's 'Opportunity State,'" in Charles Webster, editor, The Intellectual Revolution of the Seventeenth Century (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1974), p. 42. J. G. A. Pocock sketches the intellectual setting for reasoning about the franchise in Eugene Kamenka and R. S. Neale, editors, "Early ModernCapitalism—The Augustan Perception, "in his Feudalism, Capitalism and Beyond (Canberra: Australian National University Press, 1975), p. 65.

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-

[44] Macpherson, The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism , op. cit., pp. 121, 150.

[45] Thomas N. Corns, Uncloistered Virtue: English Political Literature, 1640–1660 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), pp. 130–131; Christopher Hill, The World Turned Upside Down (New York: Viking Press, 1972), pp. 91–94. Fenner Brockway, Britain's First Socialists: The Levellers, Agitators and Diggers of the English Revolution (London: Quartet Books, 1980), p. 116; G. E. Aylmer, "Gentlemen Levellers?" Past & Present Number 49 (November 1970), pp. 121, 124.

[46] George Unwin, Industrial Organization in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1904), pp. 200–201. Pamphleteers of many sorts commented that people who did not have the working capital needed to maintain their independence could not exchange their labor at its true commercial value. The economist Andrew Yarranton, for example, advanced a plan in 1677 to protect from this abuse laborers who lacked funds. He proposed that a national bank be established from which common people could receive loans. Yarranton told workers that after receipt of some capital, "thy fingers and hands are thy own, and now they are employed for thy benefit and advantage, and not for others." The handicraft makers who lacked sufficient capital could not command the full value of their labor in the market: the "poor Man is forced many times to buy his Materials he makes his Commodity with, with some his own Trade, and is thereby forced to buy dear, and sell cheap.  . . . The poor Handicraft Man is forced to let part of that which is gained in the Commodity, go to one of his own Trade." Andrew Yarranton, England's Improvement by Sea and Land (London: R. Everingham, 1677), pp. 169, 172. Without sufficient working capital, workers sacrificed the labor they invested in the product.

[47] Hill, World Turned Upside Down , op. cit., p. 103.

[48] Quoted by Christopher Hill in "Discussion," of "Conference Paper" by Keith Thomas, "Work and Leisure in Pre-Industrial Society," Past & Present Number 29 (December 1964), p. 63.

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-

[49] See chart in Peter Laslett, The World We Have Lost (London: Methuen and Co., 1971), p. 36.

[50] Alice Clark, Working Life of Women in the Seventeenth Century (New York: Augustus Kelley, 1968 [1919]), pp. 69–90. Historians have corroborated King's estimates of the proportions of the laboring poor among the total population. D. C. Coleman, "Labour in the English Economy of the Seventeenth Century," The Economic History Review Second series, Volume VIII, Number 3 (April 1956), p. 283.

[51] Cooper, "Economic Regulation," op. cit., p. 94. "Many poor," said Matthew Hale in 1683, "must take such wages as they are not able to live upon." Matthew Hale, A Discourse Touching Provision for the poor (London: H. Hills, 1683), p. 18.

[52] David Ogg, England in the Reigns of James II and William III (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1955), p. 34; Gustaf F. Steffen, Studien zur Geschichte der englischen Lohnarbeiter (Stuttgart: Hobbing & Büchle, 1901), Volume One, p. 483; J. Haynes, Great Britain's Glory; Or, an Account of the Great Numbers of Poor Employ'd in the Woollen and Silk Manufactories (London: J. Marshall, 1715), p. 85. As wage labor and poor relief were fused in public perception, taxpayers feared the introduction of new industries. Roger North, A Discourse of the Poor Shewing the Pernicious Tendency of the Laws Now in Force (London: M. Cooper, 1753), p. 62. Christopher Hill, The Century of Revolution 1603–1714 (Edinburgh: Thomas Nelson and Sons, 1961), pp. 26–27. In Wiltshire, large clothiers had to grant a security deposit for permission to settle employees in a parish. G. D. Ramsay, The Wiltshire Woollen Industry in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (London: Frank Cass & Co., 1965), p. 129. "Those places, where there are the most Poor," Matthew Hale wrote, "consist for the most part of Trades-men." Op. cit., p. 7. The "Trades-men" themselves were distinguished from their employees by the circumstance that they did not have to depend upon their labor for subsistence.

[53] A. L. Beier, Masterless Men: The Vagrancy Problem in England 1560–1640 (New York: Methuen, 1985), p. 26; Donald Woodward, " Wage Rates and Living Standards in Pre-Industrial England," Past & Present Number 91 (May 1981), p. 43; Smith, Wealth of Nations , op. cit., p. 130.

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

[54] Beier, op. cit., p. 27.

[55] James E. Thorold Rogers, Six Centuries of Work and Wages: The History of English Labour (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1884), p. 353. So closely did writers associate poverty with manufacture that they oscillated between asserting that the poor were needed to work up tradespeople's materials and that the materials were important for giving the poor something to do. "Manufacture seems a kind of debt to the laborious part of the people," wrote William Petyt in 1680. William Petyt, Britannia Languens; Or, A Discourse of Trade (London: For T. Dring and S. Couch, 1680), pp. 26–27. See also Haynes, op. cit., pp. 83, 85. Robert Reyce said of Suffolk in 1618, "Where the clothiers do dwell or have dwelt, there are found the greatest number of the poor." Quoted by Hill, The Century of Revolution , op. cit., p. 25.

[56] John Bellers, Essays About the Poor, Manufactures, Trade, Plantations, and Immorality (London: T. Sowle, 1699), p. 10; North, op. cit., p. 66.

[57] E. C. K. Gonner, "The Progress of Inclosure During the Seventeenth Century," The English Historical Review Volume XXIII (July 1908), p. 495.

[58] Michael Walzer emphasizes that this legislation was composed in response to the growth of a class of wage laborers who were perceived as "masterless men." The Revolution of the Saints: A Study in the Origins of Radical Politics (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1965), p. 200. Dobb shows that diverse legislative measures to lower wages were invoked whenever the supply of labor became inadequate. Maurice Dobb, Studies in the Development of Capitalism (London: George Routledge & Sons, 1946), p. 234.

[59] Herbert Heaton, The Yorkshire Woollen and Worsted Industries (2d ed. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965), p. 112.

[60] Even during the dislocations of the Interregnum, the machinery of government enforced official maximum wage rates. Margaret James, Social Problems and Policy During the Puritan Revolution 1640–1660 (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1966), p. 175.

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

[61] North, op. cit., p. 43; Rogers, op. cit., p. 422.

[62] Unwin, op. cit., pp. 119–120., W. G. Hoskins, Industry, Trade and People in Exeter 1688–1800 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1968), p. 22.

[63] Clark, op. cit., p. 90. See also James E. Thorold Rogers's comparison of living costs with mandated wages in A History of Agriculture and Prices in England , Volume V: 1583–1702 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1887), pp. 830, 832. Yet some economic theorists cautioned that wage lists should not make laborers destitute. Joyce Oldham Appleby, Economic Thought and Ideology in Seventeenth-Century England (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978), pp. 147–148.

[64] Wadsworth and de Lacy Mann, op. cit., p. 50. The word industry remained synonymous with textile manufacture in the seventeenth century. C. H. Wilson, "Trade, Society and the State," in The Cambridge Economic History of Europe , Volume IV (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1967), p. 491.

[65] The magistrates at the Doncaster sessions received complaints in the 1640s that "servants refuse to worke for reasonable wages, and cannot be hired for competent allowance as formerlye, makeing advantage of the much business of the times." Heaton, op. cit., pp. 111, 114. Herbert Heaton, "The Assessment of Wages in the West Riding of Yorkshire in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries," The Economic Journal Volume XXIV, No. 94 (June 1914), p. 219. In the textile trade, the wages approved by the justices often applied to men and women alike. In agricultural work, women's wages were established below men's. For an example of women spinners appealing for a new official wage, see Buchanan Sharp, In Contempt of All Authority: Rural Artisans and Riot in the West of England, 1586–1660 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980), p. 78. For women's wage assessments in other endeavors, see Clark, op. cit., pp. 66, 72.

[66] In Wiltshire wage rates were proclaimed each year and the small, independent textile entrepreneurs comprised a dying class. Ramsay, The Wiltshire Woollen Industry , op. cit., pp. 125, 129. On the early demise of the small producer in the West of England, see Wadsworth and de Lacy Mann, op. cit., p. 386.

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,

[67] Compare C. G. A. Clay, Economic Expansion and Social Change: England 1500–1700 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), Volume II, pp. 12, 93 with Heaton, The Yorkshire Woollen and Worsted Industries , op. cit., p. 114; Rogers, op. cit., p. 428.

[68] Walzer's interpretation emphasizes the exclusion of wage laborers from the new regime of disciplined work. Op. cit., p. 230. Macpherson, The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism , op. cit., pp. 215–220, presents John Locke as a kind of bourgeois theorist who takes for granted the free marketing of both products and of labor power. E. J. Hundert has convincingly shown that, to the contrary, the concept of a free market in labor power is absent from Locke's writings. Locke assumed that laborers could not conduct themselves as reasonable market actors; coercion and imprisonment were necessary to improve productivity. E. J. Hundert, "The Making of Homo Faber: John Locke Between Ideology and History," Journal of the History of Ideas Volume XXXIII, Number 1 (January–March 1972), pp. 5, 17; Hundert, "Market Society and Meaning," op. cit., pp. 33–34, 40–44. Perhaps due to the fact of wage regulation, Locke referred to agricultural workers who bargained over the harvest they would accept in lieu of a money wage but not over the money amount of the wage. Locke, op. cit., pp. 237–238.

[69] Rice Vaughan, A Discourse of Coin and Coinage , 1675, reprinted in J. R. McCulloch, editor, A Select Collection of Scarce and Valuable Tracts on Money (London: Political Economy Club, 1856), pp. 58–59.

[70] This thought comes from Marian Bowley's article "Some Seventeenth Century Contributions to the Theory of Value," Economica Volume XXX, Number 118 (May 1963), p. 137.

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-

[71] Edgar S. Furniss, The Position of the Laborer in a System of Nationalism. A Study in the Labor Theories of the Later English Mercantilists (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1920), pp. 168–169; Roll, op. cit., p. 97. William Sheppard, Englands Balme (London: J. Cottrel, 1657), p. 165. Jürgen Kuczynski cites a revealing body of primary sources: Die Geschichte der Lage der Arbeiter in England von 1640 bis in die Gegenwart (2d ed. Berlin: Tribüne, 1954), Volume IV, Part One, pp. 226–230.

[72] W. S. Holdsworth, A History of English Law , Volume IV (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1924), pp. 380–381; W. S. Holdsworth, A History of English Law , Volume XI (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1938), p. 475. The law applied to both men and women. George Howell, Labour Legislation, Labour Movements, and Labour Leaders (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1902), pp. 39 ff.

[73] For examples from the second half of the seventeenth century, see Keith Kelsall, Wage Regulation Under the Statute of Artificers (London: Methuen & Co., 1938), p. 30. Daniel Defoe thought it advisable that persons be compelled to work in the particular occupations where they were most needed, even if they were not on public relief. See The Great Law of Subordination Consider'd , 1724, reprinted in Stephen Copley, editor, Literature and the Social Order in Eighteenth-Century England (London: Croom Helm, 1984), p. 147. Dobb supplies examples of coerced labor. Op. cit., pp. 234–235.

[74] For evidence of an ordinance in Wiltshire from 1655 requiring young "men and maids" to leave home and "with all convenient speed betake themselves to service for the wages aforesaid, which if they refuse to do the justices shall proceed against them," see James, op. cit., p. 178.

[75] Quoted by Otto Kahn-Freund, "Blackstone's Neglected Child: The Contract of Employment," Law Quarterly Review Volume 93 (October 1977), p. 511.

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

[76] Kahn-Freund, op. cit., p. 521. See Charles Peard, The Woollen Labourer's Advocate (London: Printed by the author and sold by J. Dormer, 1733), p. 4. Naturally contemporaries referred to the sale of "time and labor," but within a relation created by ascribed status. Hundert, "Market Society and Meaning," op. cit., p. 41.

[77] The reduction of idle persons to the semi-servile status of a wage earner became not just a legal but a moral injunction. Bishop Berkeley, for example, reasoned in the mid-eighteenth century that public law should sentence lazy persons to a term of "temporary servitude." Quoted by T. W. Hutchison, "Berkeley's Querist and Its Place in the Economic Thought of the Eighteenth Century," British Journal for the Philosophy of Science Volume IV, Number 13 (May 1953), p. 61. The term did not denote a prison sentence, simply wage labor. Ordinary wage workers in the textile industry who labored on the employer's premises were said to be in "servitude." Anonymous, The Linnen and Woollen Manufactory Discoursed (London: G. Huddleston, 1698), p. 11. The term servitude was well chosen. Peard complained that some masters in the wool trade compelled dependent employees to "make their Hay, without recompense" Op. cit., p. 4.

[78] Holdsworth, op. cit., Volume XI, p. 467.

[79] Hill, "Pottage," op. cit., pp. 339–340; Kelsall, op. cit., pp. 47, 52; Julia de Lacy Mann, The Cloth Industry in the West of England from 1640 to 1880 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971), p. 108; John Rule, The Labouring Classes in Early Industrial England, 1750–1850 (London: Longman, 1986), p. 117.

[80] Lipson, op. cit., p. 278.

[81] Daphine Simon, "Master and Servant," in John Saville, editor, Democracy and the Labour Movement (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1954), p. 160.

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

[82] Kelsall, op. cit., p. 37.

[83] Sidney Webb and Beatrice Webb, The History of Trade Unionism (London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1894), p. 233.

[84] Hill, The Century of Revolution , op. cit., p. 213; Dobb, op. cit., p. 176.

[85] Unwin says that in London as early as the time of Elizabeth, "As a general rule it was impossible to prevent a citizen who was free of any company from carrying on the trade of any other company, if it seemed in his interest to do so." Op. cit., p. 105. Hill, "A Bourgeois Revolution?" op. cit., p. 118. For the eighteenth century, see Ray Bert Westerfield, Middlemen in English Business Particularly Between 1660 and 1760 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1915), p. 347. On the absence of restrictions in Lancashire, see Wadsworth and Mann, op. cit., p. 55. For a contemporary description of free domestic trade, see Joan Thirsk and J. P. Cooper, Seventeenth-Century Economic Documents (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972), p. 59. The grain trade, on which E. P. Thompson focused his model of the "moral economy," remained a limited exception. Roy Porter, English Society in the Eighteenth Century (London: Penguin Books, 1982), p. 207.

[86] J. R. Kellett, "The Breakdown of Gild and Corporation Control over the Handicraft and Retail Trade of London," The Economic History Review second series, Volume X, Number 3 (April 1958), p. 384.

[87] R. H. Tawney, editor, Studies in Economic History: The Collected Papers of George Unwin (London: Macmillan and Co., 1927), p. 281. John Lie, "Embedding Polanyi's Market Society," Sociological Perspectives Volume 34, Number 2 (Summer 1991), pp. 228–230.

[88] T. Tryon, Some General Considerations Offered, Relating to Our Present Trade. And Intended for Its Help and Improvement (London: J. Harris, 1698), p. 7.

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

[89] William Petyt, Britannia Languens , op. cit., Preface, p. iv. E. P. Thompson presents the claims of the common people in the eighteenth century to a "moral economy" as a paternalist ideal revived principally in times of severe food shortages. E. P. Thompson, "The Moral Economy of the English Crowd in the Eighteenth Century," Past & Present Number 50 (February 1971), p. 88.

[90] Mann, op. cit., p. 105; Ronald Meek, "Ideas, Events and Environment: The Case of the French Physiocrats," in Robert V. Eagly, editor, Events, Ideology and Economic Theory (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1968), pp. 48–49.

[91] Furniss, in his now classic study of seventeenth-century mercantile writers in England, was forcibly struck by their combination of liberalism in the product market and intrusive legislation in the labor market. Furniss, op. cit., p. 225. G. D. Ramsay remarks upon this combination of product laissez-faire and labor regulation in textiles. Ramsay, The Wiltshire Woollen Industry , op. cit., pp. 124–125. Joyce Appleby presents an analysis of the forces that delayed the acceptance of a market in labor power in "Ideology and Theory: The Tension Between Political and Economic Liberalism in Seventeenth-Century England," The American Historical Review Volume 81, Number 3 (June 1976), especially pp. 511–515

[92] Sir James Steuart, An Inquiry into the Principles of Political Oeconomy , edited by Andrew Skinner (Edinburgh: Oliver & Boyd, 1966), p. 150.

[93] Ibid., p. 192.

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]

[94] Kahn-Freund, op. cit., p. 519.

[95] Quoted by Laski, op. cit., p. 198. Although Tucker objected to the regulation of wages, he retained the older belief that low wages spurred productivity. George Shelton, Dean Tucker and Eighteenth-Century Economic and Political Thought (London: Macmillan, 1981), pp. 55–57.

[96] Textile employers in Gloucestershire applied the language of laissez-faire in 1757 to the purchase of labor. In response to a new rating of the weavers' wages, the employers said, "We think it repugnant to the liberties of a free people and the interest of trade that any law should supersede a private contract honourably made between a master and his workman." Quoted by Lipson, op. cit., p. 268.

[97] Kelsall, op. cit., p. 100; Joyce Oldham Appleby, Economic Thought and Ideology in Seventeenth-Century England (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978), p. 274; W. E. Minchinton, "Introduction," in his Wage Regulation in Pre-Industrial England (Newton Abbot: David & Charles, 1972), p. 27.

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-

[98] North, op. cit., p. 64. In agriculture, to be sure, wage assessments appear to have guided effective wage rates until 1812. "The wages of labour do conform, notwithstanding the continual increase in the price of the necessaries of life, to the assessments of the Quarter Sessions, and the system continued under legal sanction till 1812." Rogers, p. 353. Perkin shows that wage regulation in manufacture was not only unenforced but unthinkable at the end of the eighteenth century, despite the wool workers' brief campaign, initiated in 1802, to revive ancient employment laws. Harold Perkin, The Origins of Modern English Society 1780–1880 (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1969), pp. 185, 188.

[99] J. H. Clapham, A Concise Economic History of Britain from the Earliest Times to 1750 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1957), p. 215. For a contemporary reference revealing the survival of wage rating, see P. Colquhoun, A Treatise on Indigence, Exhibiting a General View of the National Resources for Productive Labour (London: J. Hatchard, 1806), p. 16. Marx emphasized the extraordinary longevity of wage regulation in Britain. Kapital , op. cit., p. 768. For evidence that agricultural workers as late as 1833 believed that Justices of the Peace could fix wage rates, see Howell, op. cit., p. 62.

[100] Many statutes were not applied to the new worsted trade, because wage law was considered valid only for occupations existing at the time of its promulgation. Heaton, The Yorkshire Woollen and Worsted Industries , op. cit., p. 310. In 1738 Parliament abolished the requirement that narrow cloth manufactured in the West Riding follow standard designs established by statute. Lipson, op. cit., p. 326.

[101] Ramsay, Wiltshire Woolen Industry , p. 125; for evidence of the survival of fixed customary wages in the textile industry into the mid-eighteenth century, see Robert Malcolmson, Life and Labour in England 1700–1780 (London: Hutchinson, 1981), pp. 125–126. Local authorities occasionally called regulation back to life when perturbations in the supply of labor threatened to push wages upwards. A. Holderness, Pre-Industrial England: Economy and Society 1500–1750 (London: J. M. Dent & Sons, 1976), p. 195.

[102] Heaton, "The Assessment of Wages," op. cit., p. 232.

[103] Lipson, op. cit., p. 266; Mann, op. cit., p. 110. In 1756 Parliament instructed justices in Gloucestershire to rate wages in the textile trade. Mann, op. cit., p. 110. On the Colchester weavers' attempt in the 1740s to preserve locally mandated wages, see A. F. J. Brown, Essex at Work 1700–1815 (Chelmsford: Tindal Press, 1969), p. 25. In 1757 Parliament repealed the legislation that had enabled justices to govern wool weavers' wages. Lipson, op. cit., pp. 269–271.

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.

[104] Holdsworth, op. cit., p. 475.

[105] N. J. Pauling, "The Employment Problem in Pre-Classical English Economic Thought," The Economic Record Volume XXVII, Number 52 (1951), p. 59; Peter Mathias, "Leisure and Wages in Theory and Practice," in his The Transformation of England (New York: Columbia University Press, 1979), pp. 150–151; Marx, Kapital op. cit., pp. 290–292.

[106] Pollard, op. cit., p. 191.

[107] A. W. Coats, "Changing Attitudes to Labour in the Mid-Eighteenth Century," The Economic History Review second series, Volume XI, Number 1 (August 1958), p. 46. Pollard, op. cit., p. 191.

[108] See William Temple, A Vindication of Commerce and the Arts , 1758, reprinted in Copley, editor, Literature and the Social Order in Eighteenth-Century England , op. cit., p. 154.

[109] Smith, Wealth of Nations , op. cit., p. 91.

[110] The Monthly Magazine , "On Taken-Work," by "A Farmer" (May 1799), pp. 273–275; Rule, op. cit., p. 124; L. J. Hume, "Jeremy Bentham on Industrial Management," Yorkshire Bulletin of Economic and Social Research Volume 22, Number 1 (May 1970), p. 6.

[111] For testimony about long-standing ignorance of the terms of the apprenticeship statutes and about their nonenforcement, see United Kingdom, Report from the Committee on Woollen Clothiers Petition , PP 1802–1803 VII, pp. 5–7, March 13, 1803; United Kingdom, Minutes of Evidence, Committee on Woollen Bill , PP 1802–1803 (95) VII, pp. 7, 357; United Kingdom, Minutes of the Committee on the Woollen Trade , PP 1806 III, pp. 135, 197, 198,231; Wadsworth and de Lacy Mann, op. cit., pp. 351–352. On the weakening of urban corporations after the revolution and their virtual extinction by the mid-eighteenth century, see ibid., pp. 63–67.

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

the proportion between the quantities of labor necessary for acquiring different objects seems to be the only circumstance which can afford any rule for exchanging them one for another. If among a nation of hunters, for example, it usually costs twice the labour to kill a beaver which it does to kill a deer, one beaver should naturally exchange for or be worth two deer.^[113]

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-

[112] Wealth of Nations , op. cit., p. 72.

[113] Ibid., p. 53.

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:

Neither is the quantity of labour commonly employed in acquiring or producing any commodity, the only circumstance which can regulate the quantity of which it ought commonly to purchase, command, or exchange for. An additional quantity, it is evident, must be due for the profits of the stock which advanced the wages and furnished the materials of that labour.^[117]

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]

[114] Ibid., p. 15.

[115] Ibid., p. 89.

[116] Ibid., p. 55.

[117] Ibid.

[118] David Ricardo was among the first to call attention to this displacement. On the Principles of Political Economy and Taxation (3d ed: London: John Murray, 1821), p. 5.

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

[119] Wealth of Nations , op. cit., p. 35. Emphasis added. When Smith recognizes a difference between the state of nature and capitalism, he does so not because he recognizes a difference between the sale of living labor and of a labor product. His only problem in making the shift is that he has difficulty in establishing the contributions of labor and of capital to the value of the output in the capitalist order.

[120] Smith, Wealth of Nations , op. cit., p. 54.

[121] In order to make Smith's alternative definitions of value equivalent, Ricardo assumed that Smith believed labor was exchanged in the form of materialized labor. Op. cit., p. 5. Marx, who imagined the sale of labor in the employment relation only in the form of "labor power," could not understand why Ricardo interpreted Smith in this fashion. Theorien über den Mehrwert , op. cit., Volume Two, Part One, p. 114.

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-

[122] Wealth of Nations , op. cit., p. 56.

[123] "The value of any commodity, therefore, to the person who possesses it, and who means not to use or consume it himself, but to exchange it for other commodities, is equal to the quantity of labour which it enables him to purchase or command." Wealth of Nations , op. cit., p. 34. Or, again: "The quantity of labor commonly employed in acquiring or producing any commodity is the only circumstance which can regulate the quantity of labor which it ought commonly to purchase, command, or exchange for" (p. 54).

[124] On this point see the commentary by E. H. Phelps Brown, "The Labour Market," in Thomas Wilson and Andrew S. Skinner, editors, The Market and the State: Essays in Honour of Adam Smith (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976), pp. 254–256.

[125] Louis Dumont brilliantly captures Smith's inability to think of "value, or surplus value, as already present in the good produced, in anticipation of its future destiny on themarket." From Mandeville to Marx (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977), p. 94. Of course, even Smith remarked that workers who took longer to acquire their skills required higher compensation. Wealth of Nations , op. cit., pp. 113 ff. In the nineteenth century, the skilled labor aristocrats among British workers also saw their expertise as a kind of capital. Patrick Joyce, Visions of the People: Industrial England and the Question of Class 1848–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), pp. 116–117. The issue, however, is not whether economic agents conceive of investment in labor power but how they conceive of and concretely enact the transfer of the commodity of labor to the employer at the point of production.

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

[126] Lipson, op. cit., p. 36. The allocation of shares could vary: United Kingdom, Report from Select Committee on Handloom Weavers , PP 1834 (556) X, testimony of Richard Needham, p. 443. Female apprentices were paid by the same method: United Kingdom, Select Committee of the Petitions of Ribbon Weavers , PP 1818 (398) IX, testimony of John Carter, p. 5. In Germany, where, however, craft practices were not yet configured by labor's commodity form, payment of artisanal weaving apprentices by giving them a share of the product's selling price was not unheard of, but it was much more common to pay apprentices a time wage. Krefeld comprised an exception. See Peter Kriedte, Eine Stadt am seidenen Faden (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1991), p. 113.

[127] Cited by Rule, op. cit., p. 119. Rule provides evidence from other trades as well.

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

[128] John Styles, "Embezzlement, Industry and the Law in England, 1500–1800," in Maxine Berg, Pat Hudson, and Michael Sonnenscher, editors, Manufacture in Town and Country (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), p. 184.

[129] Christiane Eisenberg, Deutsche und englische Gewerkschaften (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1986), p. 73.

[130] Clive Behagg, "Controlling the Product: Work, Time, and the Early Industrial Workforce in Britain, 1800–1850," in Gary Cross, editor, Worktime and Industrialization: An International History (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1988), pp. 45–46. See also Clive Behagg, "Secrecy, Ritual and Folk Violence: The Opacity of the Workplace in the First Half of the Nineteenth Century," in Robert D. Storch, editor, Popular Culture and Custom in Nineteenth-Century England (London: Croom Helm, 1982).

[131] L. Smith, "The Carpet Weavers of Kidderminster 1800–1850," Ph.D. thesis, University of Birmingham, 1982, pp. 224–226. The definition of labor as a commodity did not "reflect" the decentralized organization of craft production, for, after all, such free workers had worked autonomously in mercantile societies of the ancient world. But the subcontracting system provided a site for the incarnation of a specific commodity form of labor in mundane practice.

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

[132] John Rule, The Experience of Labour in Eighteenth-Century Industry (London: Croom Helm, 1981), p. 194; Clive Behagg, "The Democracy of Work, 1820–1850," in John Rule, editor, British Trade Unionism 1750–1850 (London: Longman, 1988), p. 168.

[133] Dyke Wilkinson, Rough Roads: Reminiscences of a Wasted Life (London: Sampson Low, Marston & Co., 1912), p. 18; G. C. Allen, "Methods of Industrial Organization in the West Midlands," The Economic Journal (January 1929), pp. 546, 553.

[134] Alas, several analysts have overlooked the profound difference between the simple sale of products as products versus the sale of products as bearers of quantified labor time. These scholars indistinctly contrast the sale of products by independent crafts workers with the sale of labor for a wage by factory workers. Craig Calhoun, The Question of Class Struggle (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), pp. 117–118; William Reddy, The Rise of Market Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), pp. 124, 251.

[135] The employment of small tailors dramatically illustrates the treatment of the product as a container for the transmission of abstract labor time. Tailors in Britain received a piece rate computed by totaling the number of minutes allotted for each stitched component of the complete garment they handed in. The incorporated minutes were remunerated by an hourly standard that varied by city. The Master Tailors' Association attempted to secure a national log book of embodied times that would give "one time for the making of a garment throughout the whole of the kingdom." Royal Commission on Labour, PP 1892 XXXVI, Part II, pp. 115, 117, 160.

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]

[136] On the merchants' attention to delivery dates, see C. P. Kindleberger, "The Historical Background: Adam Smith and the Industrial Revolution," in Thomas Wilson and Andrew Skinner, editors, The Market and the State: Essays in Honour of Adam Smith (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976), p. 16.

[137] Julia de Lacy Mann, "Clothiers and Weavers in Wiltshire During the Eighteenth Century," in L. S. Pressnell, editor, Studies in the Industrial Revolution (London: Athlone Press, 1960), p. 89.

[138] Testimony of John Niblett, United Kingdom, Minutes of Evidence, Committee on Woollen Bill , op. cit., p. 38. For an example from the eighteenth-century metal file trade, see T. S. Ashton, An Eighteenth-Century Industrialist (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1939), p. 20. For an example from the textile industry of Essex, see D. C. Coleman, Courtaulds: An Economic and Social History (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969), Volume One, p. 103. When weavers depended on the market for their very subsistence, they contracted debts to putting-out entrepreneurs who then had exclusive claim to the weavers' output. Eric M. Sigsworth, Black Dyke Mills (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1958), p. 145. For eighteenth-century cloth traders' calculation of embodied labor times in types of fabric, see Adrian Randall, Before the Luddites (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), p. 52. In early nineteenth-century Germany, domestic weavers were not only subject to delivery schedules; additionally, some putting-out traders sent agents to the weavers' homes to monitor the execution of the work itself. Kriedte, op. cit., p. 107.

[139] Report from the Select Committee on Master and Servant , PP 1865 (370) VIII, pp. 3–4. For eighteenth-century reports of male and, especially, female textile domestic workers imprisoned for one month due to failure to complete orders, see Heaton, The Yorkshire Woollen and Worsted Industries , op. cit., p. 431. On the evolution of disciplinary codes for home workers, see Wadsworth and Mann, op. cit., p. 397.

[140] Rule, op. cit., p. 120. At Crowley's ironworks, one of the largest concerns of the eighteenth century, workers entrusted with orders for a week's worth of labor were paid less than full price for late deliveries. M. W. Flinn, editor, The Law Book of the Crowley Ironworks (London: Bernard Quaritch, 1957), p. 138.

[141] Llewellynn Jewitt, The Wedgwoods: Being a Life of Josiah Wedgwood (London: Virtue Brothers and Co., 1865), pp. 131–132. For supervisors, see Flinn, op. cit., p. 135. E. P.Thompson, "Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism," Past and Present Number 38 (December 1967), p. 82.

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

[142] Tribe, op. cit., p. 93.

[143] Of course, The Wealth of Nations also carried suggestions that labor devoted to cultivation of the land was especially productive. On the reception of this part of Smith, see Tribe, op. cit., pp. 110–112.

[144] What is distinctive in capitalist society is not that labor can be bought as a commodity but that labor appears in the first instance as a commodity. Marx, Kapital , op. cit., Volume II, p. 114.

[145] Hiram Canton, "The Preindustrial Economics of Adam Smith," The Journal of Economic History Volume 45 (December 1985), p. 384. On Smith's ignorance of the changes in techniques of production that would later be termed a "revolution," see Kindleberger, op. cit., pp. 6–7.

[146] Ricardo influenced trade unionists as well, although his popularity never approached that of Adam Smith. Eugenio F. Biagini, "British Trade Unions and Popular Political Economy, 1860–1880," The Historical Journal Volume 30, Number 4 (1987), p. 831 note.

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]

[147] As Marx acutely observed. Theorien über den Mehrwert , op. cit., Volume 2, Part Two, p. 346.

[148] Op. cit., p. 5.

[149] He did not assert that embodied labor provided an absolute measure, only that it allowed for comparisons between commodities. Schumpeter, op. cit., p. 591.

[150] Ricardo, op. cit., p. 7.

[151] In this example Ricardo apparently believed that the cheapened product would hire or "command" the same amount of living labor. Op. cit., p. 8. In his first chapter, "On Value," Ricardo writes, "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; the first is under many circumstances aninvariable standard, indicating correctly the variations of other things; the latter is subject to as many fluctuations as the commodities compared with it" (p. 5). Notice that Ricardo confuses two issues here: finding an invariant measure of value, and explaining the difference between the quantity of "living labor" a commodity "commands" in the market and the quantity of "embodied labor" it purchases. See Schumpeter, op. cit., p. 591 note. Marx says Ricardo's failure to disentangle these issues shows how insensitive he remained to the difference between living and embodied labor even after he realized that Smith's philosophical equation of the two did not apply to the real world. Theorien über den Mehrwert , op. cit., Volume Two, Part One, pp. 113–115.

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

[152] This comprises the introductory heading of Chapter One of his Principles. In his notebooks Marx commented that, as far as he could tell, Ricardo asserted here, at the outset of his investigation, that commodities traded not in proportion to the paid labor they contained (the cost of the labor) but by the total labor, paid or unpaid. Theorien über den Mehrwert , op. cit., Volume Two, Part One, p. 113.

[153] Ricardo, unlike Smith, does not consider it his job to explain the origin of profit, only to show that profit's existence does not contradict his initial premises. If finished commodities normally sell in the market for a price higher than the cost of the labor they contain, this remains consistent with his model.  Provided that the commodities normally trade in proportion to the labor they contain, from his viewpoint nothing more need be said. Keith Tribe comments upon Ricardo's recognition of only embodied labor. Op. cit., pp. 135, 138.

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

[154] Marx himself formulated the question, but he supposed that Ricardo merely failed to inquire into the origins of surplus value. Theorien über den Mehrwert , op. cit., Volume 2, Part 2, pp. 116, 126.

[155] As he told Malthus, "If my commodity is of equal value with yours, its cost of production must be the same." Cited in Oswald St. Clair, A Key to Ricardo (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1957), p. 337. See also Ricardo, op. cit., pp. 46 note, 481. Notice that Ricardo does not say that the cost of production of a single good equals an absolute value. He argues only from comparisons between goods, an important consideration in understanding his treatment of profit.

[156] As Marx points out in Theorien über den Mehrwert , op. cit., p. 114. For a recent quantitative analysis that includes the process of utilizing labor power, see Samuel Bowles, "The Production Process in a Competitive Economy: Walrasian, Neo-Hobbesian, and Marxian Models," The American Economic Review Volume 75, Number 1 (March, 1985).

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:

Mr. Ricardo, ingeniously enough, avoids a difficulty, which on a first view, threatens to encumber his doctrine, that value depends on the quantity of labour employed in production. If this principle is rigidly adhered to, it follows, that the value of labour depends on the quantity of labour employed in producing it—which is evidently absurd. By a dextrous turn, therefore, Mr. Ricardo makes the value of labour depend on the quantity of labour required to produce wages, or, to give him the benefit of his own language, he maintains, that the value of labour is to be estimated by the quantity of labour required to produce wages, by which he means, the quantity of labour required to produce the money or commodities given to the labourer. This is similar to saying, that the value of cloth is to be estimated, not by the quantity of labour bestowed on its production, but by the quantity of labour bestowed on the production of the silver, for which the cloth is exchanged.^[161]

[157] Op. cit., p. 107.

[158] At least that is how Ricardo argues in op. cit., Chapter Thirty-One, "On Machinery."

[159] Theorien über den Mehrwert , op. cit., p. 134.

[160] This holds true in Ricardo's famous Chapter Thirty-One, where it is clear that his conclusion does not derive in any way from the notion that real wages, in the long run, tend toward subsistence.

[161] A Critical Dissertation on the Nature, Measures, and Causes of Value; Chiefly in Reference to the Writings of Mr. Ricardo and His Followers (London: R. Hunter, 1825), pp. 50–51.

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:

the commodity, when produced, belongs in certain proportions to both [capitalist and laborers]. It may happen, however, that one of these parties has purchased the share of the other, before production

[162] For a defense of Ricardo, see Pier Luigi Porta, editor, David Ricardo: Notes on Malthus's "Measure of Value," (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), p. xviii, and Mark Blaug, Ricardian Economics: A Historical Study (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1958), p. 54 note 56.

[163] In the last years of his life Ricardo cogitated furiously on the difficulties that had beset his theory of value. J. H. Hollander, "The Development of Ricardo's Theory of Value," in John Cunningham Wood, editor, David Ricardo: Critical Assessments (London: Croom Helm, 1985), Volume II, pp. 33–36. Yet his final writings confirm his earlier definition of labor as a commodity. In an essay on "Absolute Value and Exchangeable Value" he described a worker's wage as a portion of a concrete product in which the worker had materialized his labor. "That part of the value of a commodity which is required to compensate the labourer for the labour he has bestowed upon it is called wages," Ricardo opined; "the remaining part of its value is retained by the master and is called profit." The Works and Correspondence of David Ricardo , edited by Piero Sraffa (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1951), Volume IV, pp. 379–380.

[164] "Ricardo conquered England as completely as the Holy Inquisition conquered Spain." J. M. Keynes, The General Theory of Employment Interest and Money (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1936), p. 32. Donald Winch, "The Emergence of Economics as a Science 1750–1870," in Carlo Cipolla, editor, The Industrial Revolution 1700–1914: The Fontana Economic History of Europe (New York: Barnes & Noble, 1976), Volume 3, p. 541; Ronald L. Meek, Economics and Ideology and Other Essays (London: Chapman and Hall, 1967), p. 73.

is completed.  . . . In point of fact, it does happen, that the capitalist, as often as he employs labourers, by the payment of wages, purchases the share of the labourers. When the labourers receive wages for their labour, without waiting to be paid by a share of the commodity produced, it is evident that they sell their title to that share. The capitalist is then the owner, not of the capital only, but of the labour also.^[165]

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

[165] James Mill, Elements of Political Economy (3d ed. London: Henry Bohn, 1844), p. 94; see also pp. 40–41. Mill described this work as a "schoolbook," a codification of accepted principles.

[166] Here I call upon Marx's commentary. Theorien über den Mehrwert , op. cit., Volume Three, p. 101. Mill's theory follows the logic employed at the dawn of economic speculation about labor: "The Labourer's share of the Cloth is as much in proportion to the whole Cloth as the price of Labour is in proportion to the whole price." Anonymous, Considerations on the East-India Trade , 1701, in J. R. McCulloch, editor, Early English Tracts on Commerce (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1954 [1856]), p. 588.

[167] (London: Baldwin and Cradock, 1833), p. 291. Robert Torrens, who pondered the effect of mechanization on the wages of dependent factory workers, still imagined the transmission of labor as the exchange of output among autonomous producers. "When the divisions of labour, and private property, are established, then each individual lives by giving the surplus produce of his own, for the surplus produce of his neighbour's industry." An Essay on the Production of Wealth (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orne, and Brown, 1821), p. 15.

[168] John Stuart Mill, Principles of Political Economy (London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1920), pp. 417–418. In a footnote Mill argues that the labor invested in helping people acquire work abilities is productive, because these skills represent a kind of durable good. The worker can "transfer" the skills, in the sense that an employer can hire or purchase them. "If the skill itself cannot be parted with to a purchaser, the use of it may." This is the closest Mill comes to seeing labor as a potential the employer uses, but he does not connect this discussion with theanalysis of profit and exchange in the employment relation (p. 47). Mill also sees that, at the level of the national economy, the ability of labor to produce more than it is paid in a certain time period represents the source of profit, but, again, he does not apply this insight to the capitalist employment relation but says it holds true in societies without the exchange of labor in any form (p. 417).

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.

[169] Ibid., p. 417; John Stuart Mill, Essays on Some Unsettled Questions of Political Economy (2d ed. London: Longmans, Green, Reader & Dyer, 1874), p. 104.

[170] The Poor Man's Advocate , January 21, 1832, p. 1. See below, Chapter Nine.

[171] Smith sensed his problems. When he sought to explain "wherein consists the real price of all commodities," he apologized that "some obscurity may remain upon a subject in its own nature extremely abstracted." Wealth of Nations , op. cit., p. 33.

[172] E. S. Cayley, On Commercial Economy (London: James Ridgway, 1830), p. 2.

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

[173] This is the insight of Oswald St. Clair, op. cit., pp. 333–335, who diligently traces Ricardo's usages of the terms regulate and measure in books and correspondence. For an analysis of John Stuart Mill's recognition of this slippage but failure to resolve it, see Blaug, op. cit., pp. 173–174.

[174] Nassau William Senior, An Outline of the Science of Political Economy (New York: Farrar & Rinehart, 1939 [1836]), p. 57.

[175] Wealth of Nations , op. cit., p. 35. I am indebted to the astute commentary of Louis Dumont, op. cit., p. 194.

[176] Theodor Bernhardi, Versuch einer Kritik der Gründe, die für grosses und kleines Grundeigentum angeführt werden (St. Petersburg: Kaiserliche Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1849), p. 101 (written in 1847).

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

[177] Wealth of Nations , op. cit., p. 72.

[178] Ibid., pp. 53–56.

[179] Ibid., p. 26. More than a century later, people with factory experience still echoed Smith's words. A spinner, Harold Catling averred, is a "tradesman selling the fruits of his labor." Harold Catling, The Spinning Mule (Newton Abbot: David & Charles, 1970), p. 149.

[180] William Heighton, An Address to the Members of Trade Societies and to the Working-Classes Generally (London: Co-Operative Society, 1827), p. 5, cited in Noel Thompson, The Market and Its Critics (London: Routledge, 1988), p. 61. See also footnotes 31 ff. in Chapter Nine, below.

[181] See Friedrich Engels's comment in the fourth edition of Kapital he edited, cited in Kapital , op. cit., pp. 61–62. For references to the same distinction appearing in later writing in English, see Hartmut Graach, "'Labour' und 'Work,'" in Sprachwissenschaftliches Collo-quium Bonn, editor, Europäische Schlüsselwörter: Wortvergleichende und wortgeschichtliche Studien (München: Max Hueber Verlag, 1964), pp. 293, 295. Edward Aveling relied on the distinction between labor and work in The Students' Marx: An Introduction to the Study of Karl Marx' "Capital" (London: Swan Sonnenschein & Co., 1907), p. 44.

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

[182] Wealth of Nations , op. cit., p. 35. My emphasis.

[183] "Labour which through its alienation creates a universal equivalent, I call industry. " Yet Steuart tried to further restrict industry to voluntary work in such a way that he overlaid the difference between the work activity as a creator of exchange value and as a creator of use value with other meanings. He left it to Smith to extract the difference in its pure form. Op. cit., Volume I, pp. 146 ff. See Volume II, p. 382, for a definition of labour.

[184] Authors of the seventeenth century did not treat work and labor as evident synonyms, but neither did they ascribe indubitable contrasts to them. Petty emphasized that labor was governed by the necessity of maximizing the goods available for exchange. In his table of words he defined labour as a person's devotion to the making of commodities "for so many houres as hee is naturally able to endure the same." Sir William Petty, The Petty Papers , Volume I (New York: Augustus Kelley, 1967), p. 211. Andrew Yarranton may have supposed that the terms work and labor had different connotations when he referred to those who "work or labour in Mechanik arts." Op. cit., p. 170.

[185] See Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958), pp. 79–80.

[186] Ortrud Reichel, "Zur Bedeutungswechsel der Worte 'Werk' und 'Wirken' in as, ahd, und mhd Zeit," diss., University of Tübingen, 1952, pp. 92–93; Klaus Grinda, "Arbeit" und "Mühe": Untersuchungen zur Bedeutungsgeschichte altenglischer Wörter (München: Wilhelm Fink, 1975), pp. 53 ff.

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

[187] Günther Drosdowski et al., editors, Duden Etymologie: Herkunftswörterbuch der deutschen Sprache (Mannheim: Bibliographisches Institut, 1963), p. 31. Konrad Wiedemann, Arbeit und Bürgertum: Die Entwicklung des Arbeitsbegriffs in der Literatur Deutschlands an der Wende zur Neuzeit (Heidelberg: Carl Winter, 1979), p. 255. The word Arbeit derives from arba , "servant." The verb therefore referred to the activity of a servant. Until the sixteenth century it indicated the activity of feudal workers in agriculture. Arbeit in Friedrich Ludwig Karl Weigand, Deutsches Wörterbuch , fifth ed., revised by Hermann Hirt et al. (Giessen: A. Topelmann, 1909–1910).

[188] The word werken still had currency in the countryside at least up to the First World War and had not become archaic even in the cities by 1854, when the Grimms compiled their dictionary. Jacob Grimm and Wilhelm Grimm, Deutsches Wörterbuch von Jacob Grimm und Wilhelm Grimm (Leipzig: S. Hirzel, 1854), Volume 14, p. 361.

[189] Ellen Meiksins Wood, The Pristine Culture of Capitalism (London: Verso, 1991), pp. 95–96. Adrian Randall shows that even the "moral community" of the eighteenth century, which E. P. Thompson so aptly portrayed, was founded upon market relations. Op. cit., pp. 88–89.

[190] Kuczynski, op. cit., Volume IV, Part One, p. 225; Barrington Moore, Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy (Boston: Beacon Press, 1966), pp. 419–420, 424; Robert Brenner, "The Agrarian Roots of European Capitalism," in T. H. Aston and C. H. E. Philpin, editors, The Brenner Debate: Agrarian Class Structure and Economic Development in Pre-Industrial Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), pp. 297–299.

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

[191] I do not claim that the actual exchanges in goods or labor in Britain ever approached the economists' ideal of a free market. But the institutional structures in place by the mid-eighteenth century recognized labor as a good that in principle was traded according to the unhampered play of the market. Here I adopt the empirical approach to the study of "markets" exemplified in Stuart Plattner's essay "Markets and Marketplaces" in Stuart Plattner, editor, Economic Anthropology (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1989).

[192] P. A. Fenet, Recueil complet des trauvaux préparatoires du Code civil (Osnabrück: Otto Zeller, 1968 [1827]), Volume 14, p. 339. On the liberality of French labor contracts at the dawn of the new commercial order, see Michael Sonenscher, Work and Wages: Natural Law, Politics and the Eighteenth-Century French Trades (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), pp. 366–367.

[193] The application of the Master and Servant Act, by whose terms failure to work was a criminal offense punishable by imprisonment, did not exclude application of the notion that labor was delivered in a product. The act punished domestic weavers or other home workers who delivered products more than seven days later than scheduled. Testimony of John Strahan, PP 1865 (370) VIII, pp. 3–4. In 1836 the court in Preston ruled that weavers who paid loom rent to a master could not be dismissed from their jobs for coming and going as they pleased, unless they absented themselves more than seven days. In that case, the Master and Servant Act could be invoked. Preston Pilot , December 3, 1836. Here, too, the employer was denied aclaim to the workers' labor power, but the act was still enforceable. The act represented a carryover from the enforced sequestering of labor, but after the mid-eighteenth century it was used only to specify the sanctions to be applied if the contractual terms for the transmission of labor were violated. United Kingdom, Second and Final Report of the Commissioners Appointed to Inquire into the Working of the Master and Servant Act, 1867 , PP 1875 XXX, p. 5.

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:

With the modern labor contract the full commitment of the labor power of an individual for a certain time through the employment relation ensues, even if the measurement of compensation proceeds according to labor output. The interpretation of this matter seems to differ in England, as emerges from the Labor Department's report on standard piece-rate wages and sliding scales of 1900 (page ten). There the viewpoint is expressed that only the completion of a certain work forms the content of the piece-rate agreement; in other words, that an agreement for a contractor's work, as understood in our civil law, is present.^[194]

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

[194] Otto von Zwiedineck-Südenhorst, Beiträge zur Lehre von den Lohnformen (Tübingen: H. Laupp, 1904), p. 18.

[195] L. D. Schwarz, "Income Distribution and Social Structure in London in the Late Eighteenth Century," Economic History Review Volume XXXII, Number 2 (May 1979), pp. 256–257; L. D. Schwarz, London in the Age of Industrialisation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), p. 167.

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.