PART 3—
THE STRUCTURE OF THE WORKERS' COUNTERSIGNS

8—
The Monetization of Time

Labor is only another name for a human activity which goes with life itself, which in its turn is not produced for sale.  . . . The commodity description of labor  . . . is entirely fictitious.
Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation

The rites of practice in which the commodity form was brought to life not only structured agents' everyday relations to each other, but these conventions also defined the forms of understanding by which people would criticize and attempt to transform their social relations. As for the construction of practices by which employers and workers effected the transmission of "labor," so for struggles to modify that transfer the commodity form established the symbolic coordinates of the most fundamental dimensions of experience at the site of production—those of time and space themselves. Let us consider in this chapter a single field of effects, those resulting from the contrasting means of demarcating, exchanging, and consuming time in Germany and Britain.^[1]

Inspired by E. P. Thompson's classic essay on "Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism," historians have accumulated an imposing body of evidence about the development of time consciousness in early industrial societies.^[2] Their inquiries have focused on the historical processes by which individuals came to value the methodical expenditure of time and by which collective undertakings, including the daily labor activity, came to follow the rigid and precise cycles of the mechanical clock.^[3] For the comparative in-

[1] In Chapter Ten, the end of Part Three of this work, we will examine the contrasting uses of space in workers' struggles, based on the disposition of "labor power" in Germany and of the transmission of "objectified labor" in Britain.

[2] E. P. Thompson, "Time, Work-Discipline and Industrial Capitalism," Past and Present Number 38 (December 1967).

[3] Thomas Smith, "Peasant Time and Factory Time in Japan," Past and Present Number 111 (May 1986); Mark Harrison, "The Ordering of the Urban Environment: Time, Work and the Occurrence of Crowds, 1790–1835," Past and Present Number 110 (February 1986); David S. Landes, Revolution in Time: Clocks and the Making of the Modern World (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Belknap Press, 1983); Christoph Deutschmann, Der Weg zum Normalarbeitstag (Frankfurt: Campus Verlag, 1985). On the development of time discipline in eighteenth-century agricultural communities, see David Sabean, "Intensivierung der Arbeit undAlltagserfahrung auf dem Lande—ein Beispiel aus Württemberg," Sozialwissenschaftliche Informationen für Unterricht und Studium Volume 6, Number 4 (1977), pp. 149 ff.

quiry at hand, we know already that most producers in nineteenth-century Germany and Britain had sensitized themselves to this time economy. The question before us is more precise: how did the cultural definition of labor as a commodity influence workers' perception of the significance of time for remuneration in the labor process? The landmark studies conducted by Thompson and others correlated the differing appreciations of time with the necessities of work. Thompson, for example, associated the imposition of an unremitting time-discipline among the English common people with the transition from independent manufacture at home to supervised, regulated labor at the factory. More recently, in an investigation of the time regime of Tokugawa Japan, Thomas Smith underscored the functional requirements of social relations in agriculture.^[4] These studies treat the perception of time as a response to immediate instrumental requirements.

This chapter investigates instead the independent effect of the cultural encoding of practice upon producers' demarcation and manipulation of time. German workers and employers handled labor time itself as a commodity in the employment relation, whereas British workers and employers treated time only as a means for producing commodities. This difference shaped workers' understanding of the source of their income, their rationales for demanding payment from their employers, and, ultimately, the emergence and goals of their strike campaigns.

Units of Payment and Production

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

[4] Thompson, "Time, Work-Discipline and Industrial Capitalism," op. cit. In Smith's view, the assumption in Japan that time comprised a collective rather than an individual resource reflected the demands of a farm system that relied upon tight cooperation within the family and community. "Peasant Time and Factory Time in Japan," op. cit.

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

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

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

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

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

[5] For examples of German workers paying for their lodging and budgeting other household expenses by the week, see Der Textil-Arbeiter , October 1, 1909, "Ein Jammerleben," and Der Christliche Textilarbeiter , Düren, January 27, 1900. For British parallels, see Royal Commission on Labour, PP 1892 XXXV, Nov. 11, 1891, hearing, pp. 210, 229, 235.

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

[6] Der Textil-Arbeiter , Gera, Oct. 4, 1901; Hauptstaatsarchiv Düsseldorf, Regierung Aachen 1634, February, 1900, Düren. See also the discussion of the effort needed to earn an adequate "daily wage" in home weaving, in Der Rheinische Weber , September 1, 1899. German weavers who complained about the hard work that defective warps caused them could convert their piece rates to earnings per day. Der Christliche Textilarbeiter , Düren, January 27, 1900. Likewise, the German textile unions calculated the exploitation of the worker's expenditure of labor power in terms of the employer's daily profit per worker or per machine. Der Textil-Arbeiter , August 8, 1902, Chemnitz.

[7] Staatsarchiv Detmold, I.U. 429, March 21, 1905. See also Die Westdeutsche Arbeiter-Zeitung , September 17, 1904, Krefeld; Der Christliche Textilarbeiter , June 8, 1899, Kempen; Stadtarchiv Velbert VIe 7, Bestand Langenburg, March 25, 1889, strike report.

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

[8] Der Textil-Arbeiter , March 14, 1902, Gera.

[9] Vorwärts , May 8, 1908, jute spinning mill.

[10] In February, 1900, when weavers in Düren issued an exhortation for strike support, their leaflets averaged out their piece-rate earnings and expressed them as wages per day. HSTAD, Regierung Aachen 1634, Düren. Similarly, the dispute at the town of Emsdetten in 1906 turned on the question of whether weavers' earnings averaged 3.2 marks per day. Stadtarchiv Emsdetten, "Industrialisierung am Beispiel Emsdettens: Ein Rückblick aus dem Jahre 1924." For an example of employers and weavers on piece rates negotiating over wage increases in terms of daily averages, see Deutscher Textilarbeiterverband, Jahrbuch des deutschen Textilarbeiterverbandes, 1913 (Berlin: Karl Hübsch, 1914), Aachen, p. 113. Even when German piece-rate workers formulated their ideal earnings, without reference to particular employers, they thought in terms of earnings per day. Der Christliche Textilarbeiter , July 13, 1901, Krefeld. When the Christian textile union in the area of Krefeld took a survey of members' piece-rate earnings in stuff weaving during 1904, they formulated the results in terms of the average wage per day. Die Westdeutsche Arbeiter-Zeitung , September 17, 1904, Krefeld. For a parallel example, see Staatsarchiv Münster, Kreis Steinfurt 1116, December 11, 1910, Neunkirchen.

[11] Gauvorstand des Textilarbeiterverbands, Arbeitszeit und Löhne in der Textilindustrie der Niederlausitz (Berlin: Franz Kotzke, 1909), pp. 25–27; Deutscher Textilarbeiterverband, Soziale Gegensätze oder die Lage der Textilarbeiter in Augsburg (Berlin: Carl Hübsch, 1907), p. 8.

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

[12] In the area of Aachen, to be sure, some weaving mills paid workers immediately upon completion of the warp on which they were working. Artur Peltzer, "Die Arbeiterbewegung in der Aachener Textilindustrie von der Mitte des 19. Jahrhunderts bis zum Ausbruch des Weltkrieges," Ph.D. diss., Universität Marburg, 1924, p. 50. A practice such as this might be expected to have made it more difficult for German workers to adopt the week as their periodic unit for payment of wages. The rich evidence available about payment customs elsewhere, however, indicates that Aachen comprised an exception in this respect. See Germany, Reichskanzler-Amt, Ergebnisse der über die Verhältnisse der Lehrlinge, Gesellen und Fabrikarbeiter auf Beschluss des Bundesrathes angestellten Erhebungen (Berlin: Carl Heymann, 1877), p. 235; Karl Emsbach, Die soziale Betriebsverfassung der rheinischen Baumwollindustrie im 19. Jahrhundert (Bonn: Röhrscheid, 1982), p. 486 and the sources cited there. And, even in Aachen, some firms paid on a weekly basis: Jahres-Berichte der Königlich preussischen Regierungs- und Gewerberäthe, 1899 (Berlin: W. T. Bruer, 1900), p. 599.

[13] Der Textil-Arbeiter , April 8, 1904.

[14] For example, the weavers in Greiz in 1857 calculated the number of shots of the loom completed to justify a certain daily wage. Staatsarchiv Weimar, Landesregierung Greiz, a Rep. A, Kap. XXI/2c, Nr. 400, Petition of the Leinen-und Zeugweber-Innung of Greiz, May 20, 1857. For an example of weavers lodging pay demands based upon their calculation of the inserted weft thread per day, see Staatsarchiv Dresden, Amthauptmannschaft Zwickau Nr. 1547, August 18, 1903. The view in Germany that workers alienated their labor through sale of the timed disposition of their activity structured the workers' understanding of employers' attempts to increase work loads. In the three decades before the First World War, German manufacturers in many kinds of wool and silk weaving ordered weavers to tend two looms instead of one. The weavers equated the intensification of effort with an increase in the work time equivalent. Verband Deutscher Textilarbeiter, Die Tuch-Konferenz in Crimmitschau 26. und 27. Februar 1910: Unterhandlungs-Bericht (Berlin: Carl Hübsch, 1910), p. 51. German weavers analyzed their cloth as an index of shuttle motions. Then they counted the shuttle motions they could execute each day to estimate daily returns to effort. See, for example, Der Textil-Arbeiter , December 10, 1909, p. 397, and July 14, 1911, pp. 219–220. For other references to the expenditure of labor power per day, see Der Rheinische Weber , September 1, 1899; HSTAD, Regierung Aachen 1634, February 1900, Düren. For a later example of a worker referring to pay in terms of the daily quota of motions of the loom completed to receive it, seeDeutscher Textilarbeiterverband, Hauptvorstand/Arbeiterinnensekretariat, Mein Arbeitstag—mein Wochenende (Berlin: Textilpraxis, 1931), p. 24.

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

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

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

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

[15] Märkische Volksstimme , October 10, 1906.

[16] For spinning and twisting, see Leipziger Monatschrift für Textil-Industrie , 1913, Nr. 10, p. 286; for mangling, see Leipziger Monatschrift für Textil-Industrie , 1911, Nr. 8, "Arbeitslöhne für Mangeln."

[17] HSTAD, Regierung Düsseldorf 24692, J. Hellendall memo, October 14, 1899; Wirtschaftsarchiv Baden-Württemberg, Stuttgart, B25-319, 1895–1896.

[18] Leipziger Monatschrift für Textil-Industrie , 1902, Nr. 9, p. 605; 1902, Nr. 10, p. 683; 1910, Nr. 11, p. 321; Zeitschrift für die gesamte Textil-Industrie , 1912, Nr. 37, p. 768; Centralblatt für die Textil-Industrie , 1893, Nr. 10, p. 147. German employers who felt compelled to defend the piece-rate scales they had constructed for weavers informed the public about the weavers' earnings in the form of daily averages. See Viersener Zeitung , Nr. 102, May 5, 1908; HSTAD, Regierung Düsseldorf 24700, 1904 pamphlet, Deuss & Oetker, p. 288; Der Christliche Textilarbeiter , July 18, 1903, front page.

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

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

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

[19] Cotton Factory Times , January 8, 1897. This newspaper also reported that the average in Nelson is "9d per loom" higher than in Burnley: Cotton Factory Times , February 19, 1897, p. 6. Unions calculated their members' welfare by earnings per loom: Nelson Weavers' Committee Minutes, LRO, July 2, 1891. For Yorkshire, see Yorkshire Factory Times , Feb. 21, 1908, p. 4; February 14, 1890, Bingley.

[20] Even when German reports took note of variations in the number of looms per worker, they calculated only the aggregate wage per day given a particular loom assignment, not the pay per loom. Stadtarchiv Mönchengladbach, 5/660, August 29, 1910; Stadtarchiv Mönchengladbach, 1c 913, July 2, 1912.

[21] Yorkshire Factory Times , November 1, 1889, Leeds, p. 7, December 26, 1902, April 17, 1908, Burnley; interview tape with H. Jennings, by Bob Turner, at Centre for English Cultural Traditions and Language, University of Sheffield. It may be significant that the British textile workers did not use the expressions "piece rates" or "piece-rate system" to describe their wages but used the entrepreneurial phrase that they "kept what they could make." See Joanna Bornat's interview with Miss V., born 1901, p. 21; Yorkshire Factory Times , June 12, 1890, p. 4; January 2, 1891.

[22] When a report from Rochdale complained about a firm's custom of paying out only full pennies for completed pieces, keeping any halfpennies for itself, the correspondent's way of summarizing the aggregate effect of this measly withholding revealed a significant habit of mind. "This may not look [like] a large matter in itself," the writer reasoned, "but when it comes to be applied to hundreds of looms it multiplies quickly as time goes on." Cotton Factory Times , February 26, 1897, Rochdale. Here the correspondent adopted as the basic multiplier not the number of individual employees but the tools they used. Some employers punished weavers for leaving their job without giving notice. Rather than fining each weaver equally for the lost labor power, they levied a fine of sixpence for each loom the weaver should have attended. See United Kingdom, PP 1899 XCII, Strikes and Lock-outs in 1898 , Burnley and Oldham.

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

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

[23] Archive of General Union of Dyers, Bleachers, and Textile Workers, Yeadon and Guiseley Factory Workers' Union, Minutes, January 19, 1891, and March 10, 1891, Royal Commission on Labour, PP 1892 XXXV, p. 209; Yorkshire Factory Times , February 26, 1892, Yeadon & Guisely; LRO, DDX 1274/1/3, October 14, 1873; LRO, DDX 1274/1/1, March 5, 1872.

[24] United Kingdom, Earnings and Hours of Labour of the Workpeople of the United Kingdom , PP LXXX, pp. 86 ff.

[25] Textile Mercury , August 2, 1902, p. 83; United Kingdom, Royal Commission on Labour, PP 1892 XXXV, p. 199; B. Riley, Handbook, Sixteenth Independent Labour Party Conference (Huddersfield: Town Hall, 1908), p. 18.

[26] Yorkshire Factory Times , August 12, 1892, p. 4, Huddersfield.

[27] Cotton Factory Times , January 29, 1897, Brierfeld, and February 12, 1897, p. 7.

[28] Der Textil-Arbeiter , March 12, 1909.

[29] J. L. Hammond and Barbara Hammond, The Skilled Labourer (London: Longman, 1979), p. 169. See, for the mid-nineteenth century, H. Dutton and J. E. King, "Ten Percent and No Surrender": The Preston Strike, 1853–54 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), p. 34.

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

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

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

[30] Die Textilarbeiter-Zeitung , February 15, 1908, Bocholt. For statistics on the occupations of union members in the Christian textile workers union showing that weavers were a majority of the members, see Archiv der Gewerkschaft Textil-Bekleidung, Zentralverband Christlicher Textilarbeiter Deutschlands, "Geschäftsbericht," 1908–1910, p. 43; 1912–1914, pp. 94–95. For comments from the free textile workers' union about the predominance of weavers and the need to expand the membership beyond this occupational group, see HSTAD, Regierung Düsseldorf, 24691, May 1, 1899, report on meeting in Viersen.

[31] To cite a handful of illustrations: HSTAD, Präsidialbüro, 1272, report on meeting of January 8, 1899, p. 42, and January 22, 1899, p. 46; HSTAD, Landratsamt Mönchengladbach, 99, August 25, 1901, p. 180; HSTAD, Regierung Düsseldorf, 24691, March 20, 1899, Neuwerk. Weavers took the leadership posts in the textile unions over other skilled male textile workers. Staatsarchiv Dresden, Amthauptmannschaft Glauchau, Nr. 327, membership list 1891, Hohenstein, pp. 6 ff. Textile employers surveyed by the police reported that the weavers dominated elections to factory committees. Hauptstaatsarchiv Düsseldorf, Regierung Aachen, 13886, October 10, 1895. Dyers in Germany complained that the weavers took the lead over other textile workers. Stadtarchiv Gera, Gemeinde Zwötzen 133, November 19, 1904.

[32] Archive of General Union of Dyers, Bleachers, and Textile Workers, Yeadon and Guisely Factory Workers' Union, Minutes Book, March 2, 1892. The evolution of union terminology in the Huddersfield district followed the same path, indicating that the weavers served as the core of the organization there as well. Joanna Bornat, "An Examination of the General Union of Textile Workers 1883–1922," Ph.D. diss., University of Essex, 1981, p. 75. Spinners, the largest occupational group after weavers, accounted for only one-fifth of thisunion's members. Compare the figure of five hundred spinners listed by Keith Laybourn, "The Attitude of the Yorkshire Trade Unions to the Economic and Social Problems of the Great Depression, 1873–1896," Ph.D. diss., Lancaster University, 1973, p. 145, with membership figures published in PP 1900 LXXXIII, p. 731.

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

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

The Influence of Concepts of Time on Strike Demands

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

[33] Leslie Marshall, The Practical Flax Spinner (London: Emmott & Co., 1885), pp. 198, 234: Cotton Factory Times , April 9, 1897, p. 1.

[34] Germany, Jahresberichte der königlich preussischen Regierungs- und Gewerberäthe, 1896 (Berlin: W. T. Bruer, 1897), p. 439; HSTAD, Regierung Düsseldorf, Jahresbericht des Fabrikinspektors, Mönchengladbach, 1902; Hans Botzet, "Die Geschichte der sozialen Verhält-nisse in Krefeld und ihre wirtschaftlichen Zusammenhänge," Ph.D. diss., Köln, 1954, pp. 65 ff. For Britain, see Royal Commission on Labour, PP 1892 XXXV, p. 295.

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

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

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

[35] During these years, the union received over nine thousand reports of unemployment due to this cause. The workers who waited for materials lost on average more than ten days of work per year. Archiv der Gewerkschaft Textil-Bekleidung, Zentralverband Christlicher Textilarbeiter Deutschlands, "Geschäftsbericht," op. cit., 1910–1912, p. 112 (b).

[36] Yorkshire Factory Times , August 5, 1892, p. 8. In its wage census of 1885–1886, the British Board of Trade estimated that "broken time" might reduce the estimated annual earnings of weavers by 13 percent in woolens and by 10 percent in the worsted trade. Laybourn, op. cit., p. 315.

[37] Royal Commission on Labour, PP 1892 XXXV, transcript of November 11, 1891, p. 200.

[38] In 76 percent of these cases, the British weavers blamed overlookers.

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

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

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

[39] German weavers complained about waiting for warp and weft twenty-five times; the British weavers, twenty times. General complaints about waiting for materials comprised 3.0 percent of the German sample and 2.2 percent of the British sample.

[40] For similar responsibility for distributing warps in Britain, see Textile Manufacturer , October 15, 1907, p. 353.

[41] Wirtschaftsarchiv Baden-Württemberg, Stuttgart, B25-319, May 11, 1906. Weavers said that the time lost waiting for materials "curtailed the weaver's natural entitlement to his wage." Der Christliche Textilarbeiter , July 7, 1900, Viersen.

[42] Stadtarchiv Forst, Kommission der Forster Textilarbeiterschaft, August 8, 1899.

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

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

[43] For examples of strike demands for hourly compensation for waiting, see Stadtarchiv Mönchengladbach, 1c 913, March 26, 1912; Staatsarchiv Detmold, I.U. 429, March 21, 1905, Schildesche; Hauptstaatsarchiv Düsseldorf, Regierung Düsseldorf, 24701, February 23, 1906, p. 223; Hauptstaatsarchiv Düsseldorf, Landratsamt Mönchengladbach, 70, February 22, 1906, p. 103; Hauptstaatsarchiv Düsseldorf, Regierung Düsseldorf, 24699, May 1, 1905, p. 286; Stadtarchiv Wuppertal, Verband von Arbeitgebern im bergischen Industriebezirk, "Bericht des Verbandes von Arbeitgebern im bergischen Industriebezirk., 01. Januar 1905 bis 31. März 1906," p. 15; Staatsarchiv Münster, Kreis Steinfurt, 1311, July 25, 1906; Der Textil-Arbeiter , January 24, 1902, Sonthofen, and February 12, 1909, Mönchengladbach, "Aus der Bewegung in der Textilindustrie"; Westdeutsche Landeszeitung , March 7, 1906; Die Textilarbeiter-Zeitung , June 27, 1908; for waiting for design cards, Die Textil-Zeitung , October 27, 1902, Gera, p. 989; Staatsarchiv Dresden, Amthauptmannschat Chemnitz, Nr. 10, p. 130, Oct. 10, 1889. Another complaint indicates the precision with which German weavers gauged their time: at some mills weavers objected that the waiting time for which they were compensated extended only to the moment when the warp was delivered to the loom, not to the point at which the installers had actually completed putting in the warp. Der Textil-Arbeiter , January 4, 1907.

[44] In the language of the German workers, the payment for waiting time represented, not an allowance, but an indemnity (Entschädigung ). Der Textil-Arbeiter , February 12, 1904, Elsterberg. It is conceivable that British workers who could not easily demand money for a tangible output (such as railway personnel, perhaps) or those for whom interruptions occurred too irregularly to comprise a normal portion of a product's time of manufacture would resort to demands for waiting time for the sake of minimum take-home pay.

[45] Der Textil-Arbeiter , February 12, 1909, Neugersdorf. Weavers filed cases to recover small portions of unremunerated time through much of the Wupper Valley as well. HSTAD, Gewerbegericht Elberfeld, 80/47, 1888, case 39; 80/50, 1891, case 225; 80/50, 1891, case 282. Der Christliche Textilarbeiter , June 6, 1903, "Wie Fabrikordnungen entstehen."

[46] Der Textil-Arbeiter , November 26, 1920, p. 201; Landesarchiv Potsdam, Rep. 43, Gewerbeaufsicht Cottbus, Nr. 149, June 18, 1906, p. 8. See also HSTAD, Landratsamt Greven-broich, 271, pp. 94 ff., supplement to the "Arbeitsordnung" of J. A. Lindgens Erben, 1909, and p. 192, Erckens & Co; Günter Loose, Betriebs-Chronik VEB Baumwollspinnerei Zschopautal , Landesarchiv Potsdam, May, 1956, p. 108; Kölner Zeitung , November 18, 1900, Mönchengladbach; Der Textil-Arbeiter , Jan. 3, 1902, Saxony. Officials judged that the insertion of the disclaimer into the factory ordinance did not violate labor law. Staatsarchiv Dresden, Amtshauptmannschaft Zwickau, Nr. 2368, pp. 54–55. August 10, 1901. Stadtarchiv Cottbus, A II 4. 7 i, Nr. 11, April 5, 1905. A firm in Bremen that lacked such a disclaimer lost its case. Yet even here the court's reasoning reaffirms the supposition that labor's commodity form structured the debate. The court declared that a worker had a right to materials sufficient for him to "make full use of his labor power." Cited in Deutscher Textilarbeiterverband, Protokoll des 10. Generalversammlung für das Jahr 1910 (Berlin: Karl Hübsch, n.d.), pp. 286–287. The Berlin industrial court ruled, however, that piece-rate workers who were denied sufficient materials to put their labor power to use had the right to leave their employment but had no claim to restitution. Ludwig Bernhard, Die Akkordarbeit in Deutschland (Leipzig: Duncker & Humblot, 1903), p. 224.

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

[47] See the preceding two notes and Hauptstaatsarchiv Düsseldorf, Landratsamt Euskirchen, February 27, 1905, p. 355; Hauptstaatsarchiv Düsseldorf, Regierung Aachen, Birkesdorf, January, 1900; Hauptstaatsarchiv Düsseldorf, Regierung Düsseldorf, 24690, December 3, 1898, p. 148; Hauptstaatsarchiv Düsseldorf, Regierung Düsseldorf, 24692, August 3, 1899; Hauptstaatsarchiv Düsseldorf, Regierung Düsseldorf, 24692, August 16, 1899; Staatsarchiv Detmold, Reg. Minden I.U. Nr. 431, Buntweberei von Knemeyer & Co.; Zentrales Staatsarchiv Merseburg, 77 2524, Nr. 3, Volume 1, p. 13; Der Christliche Textilarbeiter , April 6, 1901, Viersen; Die Textilarbeiter-Zeitung , March 6, 1909, Münsterthal; March 13, 1909, Mülhausen i. Els.; Stadtarchiv Augsburg, No. 1670, May 16, 1912, p. 11; Staatsarchiv Dresden, Amthauptmannschaft Glauchau, pp. 71–72, July 12, 1910. For other complaints about waiting for warps, see Der Textil-Arbeiter , December 28, 1906, Sommerfeld and Mönchengladbach; August 12, 1910.

At the town of Rosenthal in Thüringen, workers went on strike in 1888 after their factory was closed for three days as a result of a breakdown. During the wait for completion of repairs, the factory owner promised one mark daily in restitution. The workers rejected the offer, since it did not equal their usual earnings, and they went on strike. Staatsarchiv Weimar, Reuss älterer Linie, Reuss Landratsamt Greiz, Nr. 2533, Sept. 18, 1888.

[48] See the preceding note, as well as Staatsarchiv Münster, Regierung Münster, 718, May 9, 1891, p. 140.

[49] Der Textil-Arbeiter , March 31, 1905, Mönchengladbach; May 29, 1914, Gronau. For spinners' informal requests for "waiting money," see Der Textil-Arbeiter , May 19, 1905, Zwötzen. For examples of spinners who received "waiting money," see Der Christliche Textilarbeiter , February 3, 1900, Düren; Der Textil-Arbeiter , May 21, 1909, Zwickau; Die Textilarbeiter-Zeitung , June 12, 1909. For spoolers and beamers requesting "waiting money," see Der Textil-Arbeiter , October 13, 1905.

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

[50] Stadtarchiv Velbert, VI e 7 Bestand Langenburg, December 15, 1893; Hauptstaatsarchiv Düsseldorf, Regierung Düsseldorf, 24692, August 16, 1899; Deutscher Textilarbeiterverband, Jahrbuch, 1913 , op. cit., p. 134; Archiv der Gewerkschaft Textil-Bekleidung, Zentralverband Christlicher Textilarbeiter Deutschlands, "Geschäftsbericht,' op. cit., 1906–1908, Gronau district, Firma Gaidoel, p. 72; Bocholter Volksblatt , October 1, 1901; Der Textil-Arbeiter , September 13, 1901, Pennig; May 30, 1902, Kettwig; January 24, 1902, Sonthofen (Allgäu); October 27, 1911, Krefeld; March 2, 1906, Rheydt; May 14, 1909, Neustadt a. d. Orla; August 6, 1909, Viersen; October 29, 1909, Bergisches Land; December 10, 1909, Wuppertal; January 27, 1911, Kunzendorf i. Schl.; May 19, 1911, Hof; August 4, 1911, Unterurbach (Württemberg); Die Textilarbeiter-Zeitung , December 9, 1899, Süchteln; February 1, 1902; May 16, 1908, Gronau; July 2, 1910, Grossschönau; September 10, 1910, Bocholt; May 20, 1911, Coesfeld; Hauptstaatsarchiv Düsseldorf, Gewerbegericht Elberfeld, 80/50, 1891, case 225 and cases on p. 2; Die Textil-Zeitung , September 11, 1899, p. 734; Stadtarchiv Greiz, B Nr. 5977, Kap. IV, Nr. 97, p. 67, 1909.

[51] Der Textil-Arbeiter , July 3, 1914, Barmen. An inquiry in Bocholt, taken in 1901 during a severe business downturn in which more than a quarter of the town's looms were taken out of operation, showed that the practice of paying "waiting money" could persist during periods when employers enjoyed an abundance of labor. During this extreme slump in the textile business, nine out of forty-two weaving mills in Bocholt paid workers for lost time. Der Christliche Textilarbeiter , August 10, 1901.

[52] An article in a German technical magazine took the practice of paying Wartegeld as an automatic assumption. In an article published in 1897, for example, a manager said, "It often occurs that looms sit still for two or three days and not only fail to produce anything, but the weavers who are waiting must receive indemnification." Die Textil-Zeitung , March 9, 1897, and March 16, 1897, "Krebsschaden." German employers also distinguished themselves from their British counterparts by guaranteeing that workers who were transferred to another job in the same mill would not suffer a reduction in their earnings while they were learning the new job. Having sold the disposition of their labor power, which had a known market value, workers were not to be disadvantaged if the employer put their labor potential into operation in an unanticipated fashion. Stadtarchiv Steinfurt-Borghorst, B379, September 20, 1913 ordinance, A. Wattendorf; HSTAD, Landratsamt Grevenbroich, 271, Anton Walraf Söhne, 1910, p. 243; Der Textil-Arbeiter , February 12, 1909, Chemnitz.

[53] HSTAD, Landratsamt Mönchengladbach 303, Viersen, 1909, p. 10.

[54] Der Textil-Arbeiter , April 3, 1914, Neugersdorf. On comparatively early experiments with paid vacation in German textiles, see Jürgen Reulecke, "Die Entstehung des Erholungs-urlaubs für Arbeiter in Deutschland vor dem Ersten Weltkrieg," in Dieter Langewiesche and Klaus Schönhoven, editors, Arbeiter in Deutschland: Studien zur Lebensweise der Arbeiterschaft im Zeitalter der Industrialisierung (Paderborn: Schöningh, 1981), p. 261.

By contrast with German practice, British textile employers did not offer their piece-rate workers waiting money. Nor did British textile workers ask for it in strike negotiations.^[55] In fact, the textile workers' press shows that British workers did not conceive of this as a possible issue of contention. A sampling of the Yorkshire Factory Times from 1890 to 1893 uncovered more than twenty complaints from weavers about reductions in earnings due to waiting for materials.^[56] Not one mentioned that the employer ought to compensate personnel for unused time. Nor did the complaints up to 1914 voice such a demand. Weavers argued, rather, that prices for fabrics delivered ought to take into consideration time lost waiting.^[57] For the intermittent time they spent installing the warp or waiting for a warp, they wished to receive payment via the selling price of the finished good in the market. A beneficent owner in Yorkshire proposed to pay workers for vacation time, but the mouthpiece for the textile union, the Yorkshire Factory Times , scorned the notion. For owners to offer money to workers for time not worked would be condescending, the paper claimed. "I should be glad if workers were sufficiently well paid to be independent even of these [payments]," its editorialist wrote on the front page of this journal in 1914.^[58] To avoid such "charity" at vacation time, workers had a right to earn enough for the work completed. True, the powerful unions for mule spinners in Lancashire saw to it that owners might pay workers something when the machines were stopped for repairs. But the employers owed such pay only if they needed the spinner's

[55] British miners who complained about idle time (as well as other problems) in the great strike of 1844 requested a minimum of five days' worth of labor out of a work week of six days. These miners were, however, engaged under a yearly "bondage" system that prevented them from switching employers when earnings declined below subsistence. The employers successfully resisted this effort to guarantee a minimum wage, one that would not even have been based upon the full number of workdays miners were expected to show up. Robert Galloway, Annals of Coal Mining and the Coal Trade , second series (London: The Colliery Guardian Company, 1904), pp. 167, 176–177.

[56] I sampled only every third issue of The Yorkshire Factory Times from this era; a full count of the number of complaints appearing about lost time would surely yield a larger number.

[57] As an example, see United Kingdom, Royal Commission on Labour, PP 1892 XXXV, pp. 208–210, Nov. 11, 1891. If a spinning mule became unreliable, the spinners negotiated for extra payment for the output. Sidney Webb and Beatrice Webb, Industrial Democracy (New York: Augustus Kelley, 1965 [1897]), p. 312. But on lack of compensation for waiting even eight hours in spinning, see Cotton Factory Times , Jan. 1, 1897, Stalybridge.

[58] Yorkshire Factory Times , March 12, 1914.

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

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

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

[59] British Association for the Advancement of Science, On the Regulation of Wages by Means of Lists in the Cotton Industry , Manchester Meeting of 1887 (Manchester: John Heywood [1887?]), Spinning, p. 7; Bolton Library Archives, Spinners of Bolton, "Annual Report," 1883, p. 63; Bolton Library Archives, ZGR/7, Taylor & Co. Rules, 1904. The same provision governed the Nottinghamshire lace trade. See W. A. Graham Clark, House of Representatives Committee on Interstate and Foreign Commerce, Lace Industry in England and France (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1909), p. 27. Analogously, in many British towns the masons and builders who were called to a site outside the locality received compensation for "walking time." The payment covered effort invested, not the commitment of a labor capacity. Webb and Webb, op. cit., p. 313.

[60] Wirtschaftsarchiv Baden-Württemberg, B25-319, Tuchfabrik Lörrach, June 18, 1906. Yet British employers shut employees inside at the mill even when, for lack of materials, the employees had no work. For examples of managers restraining workers from leaving even when there was no work to carry out, see Joanna Bornat's interview with Mr. B., born 1901, p. 55; Yorkshire Factory Times , January 15, 1892, Golcar. In Wigan, Lancashire, the owners kept the workers' remaining wages if they quit without notice during a period when the mill had no orders to work up and thus no pay for piece-rate workers: Cotton Factory Times , May 21, 1897, Wigan.

[61] Yorkshire Factory Times , November 1, 1889, p. 5.

[62] Yorkshire Factory Times , January 23, 1891. In Lancashire, too, workers proposed that the unions undertake the task of supporting members who had not been formally laid off but were waiting for materials. In the end the projected expense caused the textile unions to reject such plans. Cotton Factory Times , May 28, 1897, Rochdale; Archive of General Union of Dyers, Bleachers, and Textile Workers, Bradford, Yeadon General Union, minutes, Sept. 11, 1908. The unions granted out-of-work pay to weavers who were discriminated against in the distribution of materials. Wakefield Library Headquarters, Local Studies, C 99/585, January 27, 1903.

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

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

[63] For reports of textile labor shortages in Britain, see Yorkshire Factory Times , August 11, 1905, Bradford; Journal of the British Association of Managers of Textile Works (1912–1913) p. 93. On May 15, 1906, the Textile Manufacturer reported, "More or less through the whole wollen area of Yorkshire the shortage of labour is becoming a serious trouble" (p. 161).

[64] Royal Commission on Labour, PP 1892 XXXV, November 11, 1891, hearing, p. 222, and November 13, 1891, p. 282.

[65] HSTAD, Düsseldorf, Regierung Düsseldorf, 24652, October 24, 1878, p. 8; Hauptstaatsarchiv Düsseldorf, Grevenbroich, 319, October 28, 1899; Handelskammer Mönchengladbach, Jahresbericht, 1896 (Mönchengladbach: V. Hütter, n.d.), pp. 5–6; Handelskammer Mönchengladbach, Jahresbericht, 1897 (Mönchengladbach: V. Hütter, n.d.), p. 5; Hermann Hölters, "Die Arbeiterverhältnisse in der niederrheinischen Baumwollindustrie mit besonderer Berücksichtigung der männlichen Arbeiter," diss. Heidelberg, p. 21.

[66] Some managers used tallies of waiting money to monitor lost production time and to check the efficiency of production. The custom provides another indicator of German managers' formal approach to the use of labor time. Zeitschrift für die gesamte Textil-Industrie Volume 12, Number 68, p. 68.

[67] For the woolen industry of the lower Rhine, see Franz Decker, Die betriebliche Sozialordnung der Dürener Industrie im 19. Jahrhundert (Köln: Rheinisch-Westfälisches Wirtschaftsarchiv, 1965), p. 87. Elsewhere: Hauptstaatsarchiv Düsseldorf, Regierung Düsseldorf, 25015, p. 43, for 1893, and Regierung Düsseldorf, 25022, p. 42, for 1900; Hölters, op. cit., p. 23; Staatsarchiv Weimar, Landesregierung Greiz, n Rep. A, Kap. IX a, Nr. 148, reports of factoryinspectors, 1879–1886, p. 133; Die Textilarbeiter-Zeitung , November 26, 1910, Allersdorf; Germany, Enquete-Kommission, Reichs-Enquete für die Baumwollen- und Leinen-Industrie: Stenographische Protokolle über die mündliche Vernehmung der Sachverständigen (Berlin: Julius Sittenfeld, 1878), p. 397.

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

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

[68] Hermann Körner, Lebenskämpfe in der Alten und Neuen Welt , Volume I (New York: L. W. Schmidt, 1865), p. 391; Emsbach, op. cit., p. 322; Willi Brendgens, Die wirtschaftliche, soziale und communale Entwicklung von Viersen (Viersen: Gesellschaft für Druck und Verlag, 1929), p. 109. In the matter of labor supplies, as in many other respects, the Bielefeld region comprised an exception. Herbert Petzold, "Die Bielefelder Textilindustrie," diss., Rostock, 1926, p. 35.

[69] Körner, op. cit., p. 391; Emsbach, op. cit., p. 179. Weavers in France received payment for waiting time as early as the 1830s. L'Echo de la fabrique , March 3, 1833, p. 71, and December 29, 1833, p. 6.

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

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

[70] Die Ameise , April 7, 1834, p. 171. For an example of home weavers demanding and, in some instances, receiving compensation for the changing of the warp, see Kenneth N. Allen, "The Krefeld Silk Weavers in the Nineteenth Century," Ph.D. diss., Stanford University, 1988, p. 81.

[71] Stadtarchiv Chemnitz, Tarif of June 1, 1848; Zentrales Staatsarchiv Merseburg, Rep. 120 I 1, Vol. 2, Nr. 60, March 28, 1848, Berlin, pp. 310–316; Alphons Thun, Die Industrie am Niederrhein und ihre Arbeiter (Leipzig: Duncker & Humblot, 1879), Zweiter Theil, p. 195; Peter Kriedte, Eine Stadt am seidenen Faden (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1991), p. 320; Emsbach, op. cit., pp. 648–650.

[72] Die Verbrüderung , March 16, 1849, pp. 189–190.

[73] P. H. Noyes, Organization and Revolution: Working-Class Associations in the German Revolutions of 1848–1849 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1966), pp. 135–136.

[74] Kenneth Carpenter, editor, The Framework Knitters and Handloom Weavers: Their Attempts to Keep Up Wages (New York: Arno Press, 1972), pamphlets from 1820 to 1845; Duncan Bythell, The Handloom Weavers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969), p. 175; United Kingdom, Report from Select Committee on Hand-Loom Weavers' Petitions , 1834, PP 1834 X. The Northern Star reported in 1841 that two handweavers from Carlisle went to court for compensation "for payment for lost time, on account of their being disappointed of weft." Their complaint rested on the circumstance that the putter-out had them install new warps and then refused to let them take the warps out when the necessary weft did not arrive. The British weavers did not protest about waiting per se, and, unlike German weavers, they did not complain about having to pause between warps. Northern Star , September 4, 1841, p. 5.

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

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

[75] Frederick James Kaijage, "Labouring Barnsley, 1816–1856: A Social and Economic History." Ph.D. diss., University of Warwick, 1975, pp. 312 ff.

[76] Bythell, op. cit., p. 149. In contrast to many of their German counterparts, British handweavers did not seek or receive compensation for the time regularly spent changing the warp. United Kingdom, Report from Select Committee , op. cit., testimony of Hugh Mackenzie, p. 60, and of James Orr, p. 95. To the contrary, contractors reduced payments the handweavers received for a variety of cloths after the loom had been adjusted for that fabric pattern. The putters-out knew that the weavers would accept lower rates for additional pieces of cloth of the same type, rather than absorbing the set-up costs to prepare for a different variety. United Kingdom, Select Committee on Settling Disputes in the Cotton Manufacture , PP 1802–1803 VIII, testimony of Thomas Thorpe, April 25, 1803, p. 17. In parliamentary hearings British putters-out said they granted weavers an indeterminate bonus under one condition: if a weaver set up a different kind of warp and ended up receiving only one order on that kind of warp. If two or more orders were carried out, the effort invested in the installation was remunerated via the regular piece rate for the cloth. United Kingdom, Committee on Cotton Weavers and Petitions, Minutes of Evidence, Settling Disputes in the Cotton Manufacture , PP 1802–1803 VIII, pp. 97–98. Approximately one-eighth of the handloom weavers' time was lost changing from one piece to another. Kaijage, op. cit., p. 144.

[77] John Rule, The Experience of Labour in Eighteenth-Century Industry (London: Croom Helm, 1981), pp. 137–138.

[78] Charles Hall, The Effects of Civilization on the People in European States (London: T. Ostell, 1805), p. 118. Perhaps due to their belief that time was transferred as it was incarnated in finished products, English economists such as Hall struck Marx as the originators of a theory of value, but not of a theory of exploitation. Alexandre Chabert, "Aux Sources du socialisme anglais," Revue d'histoire économique et sociale No. 4 (1951), p. 382. Bray claimed that "theworkmen have given the capitalist the labour of a whole year, in exchange for the value of only half a year." John Bray, Labour's Wrongs and Labour's Remedy (Leeds: David Green, 1839), p. 48. The concept of labor as a commodity in Britain could of course include allocation of compensation for time invested in acquiring skills—cultivating one's "labor power"?—when the products of labor were sold. For an early example based on exchanges among independent commodity producers, see Adam Smith's Lectures on Justice, Police, Revenue and Arms , edited by Edwin Cannan (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1896), p. 174.

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

[79] Staatsarchiv Münster, Kreis Steinfurt, 1311, May 2, 1891, Neuenkirchen, and Regierung Münster, 718, May 14, 1891, p. 146.

[80] Karl Hüser, Mit Gott für unser Recht: Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte der Gewerk-schaftsbewegung im Münsterland (Paderborn: Gewerkschaft Textil-Bekleidung, 1978), pp. 28–29; Heinrich Camps, Geschichte und Entwicklung des Bezirks Westfalen des Zentralverbandes Christlicher Textilarbeiter Deutschlands (Münster: Bezirkssekretariat Christlicher Textilarbeiter, 1924), pp. 7–12. Indeed, the initial promoter of textile unions in this region, the Christian textile workers' association, had not yet been established in Germany. Michael Schneider, Die Christlichen Gewerkschaften 1894–1933 (Bonn: Neue Gesellschaft, 1982), pp. 74 ff.

[81] In Eschendorff, a town in the Münsterland, weavers went on strike without notice in 1899 and by all accounts spontaneously demanded an end to waiting without pay for materials or equipment. Staatsarchiv Münster, Kreis Steinfurt 1311, Eschendorff, March 29, 1899; Zentrales Staatsarchiv Merseburg, 77 2524, Nr. 3, Vol. 1, p. 13, April 1, 1899, Amt Rheine.

[82] Workers and employers in other branches of enterprise in Germany, including construction and metal work, also battled over compensation for idle time. A contract for Berlin journeymen carpenters and masons in 1870 tried to preclude demands for compensation of unused time. It specified that "the employer is obligated to keep the employee engaged withwork; if circumstances force the employer to lay the employee off against the employee's will, the latter cannot request a wage during the time in which he is inactive, but he can in this case request his immediate release." Der Volksstaat , February 5, 1870.

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

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

[83] Der Textil-Arbeiter , July 3, 1914, Barmen; Die Textilarbeiter-Zeitung , May 8, 1909, Mülhausen i. Els.; Die Textilarbeiter-Zeitung , August 20, 1910, Forst, Lausitz; Hölters, op. cit., p. 27; Stadtarchiv Augsburg, No. 1667, p. 1, June 15, 1903; Die Textilarbeiter-Zeitung , October 29, 1910, Augsburg. For other complaints about the owner's failure to provide compensation during engine breakdowns, see Der Textil-Arbeiter , July 4, 1902, Lörrach; April 23, 1909, Bautzen. The extent to which payment for factory shutdowns became the norm can be judged from the reaction of a mill owner in Mönchengladbach to a momentary break in production. He felt compelled to post an official notice in 1911 disavowing compensation to workers for disruptions resulting from the transfer of machinery to a new plant location in town. Die Textilarbeiter-Zeitung , March 18, 1911, Peter Brunen. See also HSTAD, Landratsamt Grevenbroich, 271, pp. 94 ff., 1909 factory ordinance.

[84] Cotton Factory Times , February 19, 1897, Preston; Yorkshire Factory Times , October 9, 1903, Dudley Hill. British textile workers who received piece rates as well as those who received time wages, such as dyers and mechanics, were denied compensation by employers for mill closures. Cotton Factory Times , February 5, 1897, Mossley.

[85] Die Textilarbeiter-Zeitung , August 26, 1911, Mönchengladbach. For an example of German weavers complaining about the time lost fetching cops, see Die Textilarbeiter-Zeitung , November 27, 1909.

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

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

[86] Seide , July 25, 1900, p. 466.

[87] Gladbacher Merkur , January 20, 1900. For another example of the same problem, see HSTAD, Regierung Düsseldorf, 24692, December 27, 1899, p. 160.

[88] HSTAD, Regierung Düsseldorf, 24699, May 1, 1905, p. 286.

[89] Die Textilarbeiter-Zeitung , March 13, 1909.

[90] Der Textil-Arbeiter , May 21, 1909, Gera. The handweavers in Chemnitz asserted that the time expended waiting at the office of the contractor should be reduced or separately remunerated. Stadtarchiv Chemnitz, Tarif of June, 1848.

[91] Landesarchiv Potsdam, Rep. 6B, Landratsamt Spremberg, Nr. 490, 1901, p. 34.

[92] Westdeutsche Landeszeitung , Rheydt, March 7, 1906. German workers also filed court challenges to recover the value of minutes they lost fetching their pay or waiting to exit the factory. Die Textilarbeiter-Zeitung , November 25, 1911.

[93] Yorkshire Factory Times , April 25, 1902, p. 4.

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

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

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

[94] LRO, DDX 1274/6/1, July 1, 1900.

[95] PP 1892 XXXV, p. 14; Yorkshire Factory Times , April 19, 1901, Spen Valley. On convictions for illegal overtime work, see Yorkshire Factory Times , April 24, 1908, p. 7. German commentators considered the British to be extremely sensitive to employers' attempts to run the engines a few minutes overtime. Der Textil-Arbeiter , March 15, 1907.

[96] HSTAD, Regierung Düsseldorf, 24684, May 26, 1894; HSTAD, Regierung Düsseldorf, 25027, printed story on employer from Neersen at Oberlandesgerichts Köln, published December 22, 1904; Germany, Jahres-Berichte der Königlich preussischen Regierungs- und Gewerberäte und Bergbehörden für 1895 (Berlin: W. T. Bruer, 1896), pp. 511–512; Germany, Jahresberichte  . . . 1904 (Berlin: R. v. Deckers Verlag, 1905), p. 433. For brief absences employers also confiscated the deposit workers paid upon beginning employment. Geraisches Tageblatt , April 12, 1890.

from one's workstation or for inattentiveness, in the category of damage compensation. In these cases as well, the employers had lost the full use of the labor time they needed for their machinery. But the company books showed that owners did not attempt to profit from these other kinds of disciplinary fines, as they would have been likely to have done if they had merely sought to enrich themselves. Second, the employers whom the factory inspectors accused of misappropriating fines for tardiness presented their reasoning to the courts. Rather than avoid the publicity of a trial—a matter about which employers generally showed acute sensitivity^[97] —they supported their practice in public.

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

[97] One owner specified in the factory's employment rules that workers had to notify the owner before going public with their complaints in the courts. HSTAD, Landratsamt Grevenbroich, 271, p. 184, circa 1910.

[98] The constellation of factory procedures also raises questions about the relation between culture and the actors' pragmatic, manipulative conduct. Did the agents cunningly support certain specifications of labor because they offered advantages lacking in alternative notions? The question has a meaning for social investigators only if they view ideas as an exclusive possession of individuals who appropriate them to act upon the outside world. If, instead, institutions are themselves constituted as symbolic forms, if ideas are materialized in forms of practice, then agents may reproduce these ideas without internalizing or consciously exploiting them. For example, the German weavers who labored under the system of pay per shot and the German employers who calculated weavers' efficiency as a fraction of possible shots executed did not have consciously to endorse and esteem the notion that the commercial transmission of labor depended on the process of converting it from a potential to a product. Their conduct reaffirmed and transmitted the assumption every day. Once the definition of labor was installed, agents employed it to advance their self-interested action, but that definition and the corresponding symbolic form of their action were not created by their private conception of self-interest. Nor did they passively internalize the specification of labor as anorm; rather, they actively embraced it. The execution of practices in the factory reproduced specifications of labor without agents either cynically choosing which concept of labor to use or helplessly internalizing the concept.

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

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

[99] The struggles conducted within the regime established by a particular commodity form also show that the shape of labor as a ware provided the signs and cultural definitions out of which those practices were forged through conflict, not a pattern decreed from on high. David M. Schneider, "Notes Toward a Theory of Culture," in Keith H. Basso and Henry A. Selby, editors, Meaning in Anthropology (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1976), p. 219.

[100] Verband Deutscher Textilarbeiter, op. cit., p. 51.

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

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

[101] HSTAD, Regierung Düsseldorf, 25025, August 8, 1892. Wirtschaftsarchiv Baden-Württemberg, Stuttgart, B25-319, June 15, 1906. When German workers began to voice demands for the ten-hour day, they characteristically attached this to a scheme specifying long breakfast and lunch breaks. For an example from the metal industry in 1872, see Lothar Machtan, "'Es war ein wundervolles Gefühl, dass man nicht allein war': Streik als Hoffnung und Erfahrung," in Wolfgang Ruppert, editor, Die Arbeiter (München: C. H. Beck, 1986), p. 264.

[102] Klaus Tidow, Neumünsters Textil-und Lederindustrie im 19. Jahrhundert (Neumünster: Karl Wachholtz, 1984), p. 32.

[103] Der Textil-Arbeiter , October 14, 1904, Luckenwalde. Analogously, for negotiations over a five-minute wash break, see Stadtarchiv Crimmitschau, Rep. III, Kap. IX, Lit. B, Nr. 23, Jan. 4, 1904, pp. 298–300. For other accounts of strikes over the timing of brief pauses, Zentrales Staatsarchiv Merseburg, 120 BB VII 1, Nr. 3, Volume 12, 1906, Sommerfeld; Der Christliche Textilarbeiter , April 1, 1905, Mönchengladbach. Textile workers in Thalheim struck in 1889 for ten-minute extensions of the lunch and late-afternoon breaks and for receipt of pay earlier on Saturday afternoons. Staatsarchiv Dresden, Amtshauptmannschaft Chemnitz, Nr. 10, June 29, 1889, pp. 4–5.

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

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

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

[104] In Werdau, the women workers succeeded in having wash-up time extended from five to ten minutes. Deutscher Textilarbeiterverband, op. cit., p. 41.

[105] Verband Deutscher Textilarbeiter, Gau Thüringen, Tariferläuterungen und Statistisches: Bearbeitet nach Aufzeichnungen der Tarif-Kommission im sächsisch-thüringischen Textilbezirk , p. 59. It appears that the only British equivalent to this fragmented scheduling was the partial shifts assigned to juveniles in Britain under pressure of the Factory Acts. In this instance, however, employers designed the partitioning of the workday on their own, sometimes with a view to evading the acts. United Kingdom, "Reports of the Inspectors of Factories," PP 1837–1838 XLV, quarter ending June 30, 1838, p. 7.

[106] Der Textil-Arbeiter , February 27, 1914, p. 66.

[107] Der Textil-Arbeiter , June 27, 1902, Elberfeld.

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

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

Real Abstractions

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

[108] "Strikes and Lockouts in 1894," PP 1895 XCII, Dundee.

[109] For a discussion of the distinction between analyses that treat culture as a set of norms and those, such as that of this study, that view culture as a set of assumptions that facilitate agents' pursuit of interests, see Paul DiMaggio, "Interest and Agency in Institutional Theory," in Lynne Zucker, editor, Institutional Patterns and Organizations: Culture and Environment (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Ballinger Publishing Co., 1988), p. 5.

[110] Tony Judt, Marxism and the French Left (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986), pp. 27, 102–103, 112.

[111] Sonenscher suggests that artisans' unprecedented complaints about competitive individualism in France during the early nineteenth century represented a new rhetorical strategyto justify allegiance to voluntary business associations. To his mind, the criticism of cut-throat self-aggrandizement after the revolution did not reflect the breakdown of intimate and customary paternal relations in the workshop, for these had corroded under the ancien régime. Michael Sonenscher, Work and Wages: Natural Law, Politics and the Eighteenth-Century French Trades (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), p. 371.

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

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

[112] Louis Althusser, Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1971), p. 168.

[113] Stadtarchiv Cottbus, A II 33 b, Nr. 34, February 8, 1903. Likewise, the linen weavers of Greiz in 1857 said that they were able to insert nine thousand units of yarn in the course of a year if they had no interruptions, but only eight thousand units if they had responsibility for supervising journeymen. Staatsarchiv Weimar, Landesregierung Greiz, a Rep. A, Kap. XXI/2c, Nr. 400, Petition of May 20, 1857.

[114] The conflict of interest between workers and employers was cast in an illusory form, as if the expenditure of labor power could be calibrated as a thing with a value imposed by an objective force. Karl Marx, Das Kapital (Berlin: Dietz Verlag, 1980), Volume One, pp. 91–92.

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

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

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

[115] Joan Wallach Scott insists that language does not reflect a reality external to it but is "constitutive of that reality." "On Language, Gender, and Working-Class History," in her Gender and the Politics of History (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), p. 57.

[116] Althusser, op. cit., p. 165.

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

[117] Marx, op. cit., Volume Three, p. 831.

[118] "As far as labor assumes the specifically social character of wage labor, it is not wertbildend. " Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Marx-Engels Werke , Volume 25 (Berlin: Dietz Verlag, 1964), p. 831.

[119] Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation (Boston: Beacon Press, 1957), p. 73.

9—
Theories of Exploitation in the Workers' Movements

All theory is grey unless it builds upon practical experience.
Fach-Zeitung: Organ des Niederrheinischen
Weber-Verbandes, July 16, 1899

If an analysis of the fabrication of labor as a commodity clarifies the installation of business practices—and thus people's engagement with culture as they come to terms with the commercial universe—it can also elucidate the other side of history: people's engagement with culture as they attempt to transcend that commercial universe. How did the fabrication of labor as a commodity influence workers' understanding of the fundamental sources of economic inequities? Did it guide their reception of formal political ideologies? Did the contrasting notions of labor as a ware that were lived in the humdrum routines of manufacture in Germany and Britain inspire contrasting dreams of the supercession of capitalism?

Historians of nineteenth-century labor and socialist movements have attributed an explanatory significance to culture in two fundamentally different ways. Following the example of E. P. Thompson, many investigators have assigned culture an enabling role as a creator of varying responses among workers. These inquirers associate culture with workers' creative agency. More recently, however, examiners such as Gareth Stedman Jones have assigned culture an explanatory role as a kind of restrictive structure, underscoring its function as an autonomous system of concepts that channel workers' insights and expression.^[1] Although both approaches have proven

[1] Culture , the set of collectively shared signs that both structure and create an experience of practice, has become an enigmatic term in social inquiry because it both constricts and broadens human conduct. The mystery stems not from conceptual incoherence but from the multiple effects of signs in social life. This study's examination of manufacturing institutions proceeded by showing that culture limited conduct by selecting the forms that practices on the factory shop floor assumed in economically similar environments. Yet the fictions of labor as a commodity also enlarged the scope of action, for they created multiple and equally viable principles for organizing the labor transaction in nations undergoing a generically similar, epochal process of commercialization. On the one hand, the intervention of culture gaveproducers and manufacturers principles for action apart from the exigencies of the immediate economic environment; on the other, it enmeshed these agents in a realm of meaningful practices that constrained their understanding of social relations.

their fertility, they are both demonstrably inadequate for the task of this chapter, that of explaining why workers in Britain and Germany developed contrasting ideologies of capitalist exploitation. Let us appraise the two prevailing views of culture to see how uncovering the cultural structure of the workplace offers a different means of explaining workers' adoption of specific political ideologies.

The Place of Culture in Labor Movements

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

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

[2] The Making of the English Working Class (New York: Vintage Books, 1963), p. 258.

[3] The extraordinary moral tone of The Making resonates with Thompson's analytic insistence that political culture had to transcend workers' social existence; the tenor is one of transcendence. The working class fights as a kind of heroic agent that suffers worldly trials, triumphs over ordinary experience, and finally surpasses the world by leaving an imperishable memory of its deeds. The Making is emplotted as a "Romance," to borrow the sense for thatterm that Hayden White chose in Metahistory (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973).

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

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

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

[4] See discussion of Thompson above, Chapter One, at footnotes 47–48.

[5] Thompson's view of the labor process is aptly described as "experiential" rather than "cultural." The distinction is made by William Sewell, Jr., "How Classes Are Made: Critical Reflections on E. P. Thompson's Theory of Working-Class Formation," in Harvey J. Kaye and Keith McClelland, editors, E. P. Thompson: Critical Perspectives (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1990), p. 67. Thompson equates culture with "consciousness" in "The Peculiarities of the English," in Ralph Miliband and John Saville, editors, The Socialist Register (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1965), p. 351. Although centered more often on the ignominious decline of the labor movement than on its heroic birth, "Alltagsgeschichte" shares this tendency to see culture either as something opposed to structure or as the subjective moment of structure but, in either case, as something that does not comprise a structure in its own right. See, illustratively, Alf Lüdtke, "Rekonstruktion von Alltagswirklichkeit—Entpolitisierung der Sozialgeschichte?" in Robert Berdahl et al., editors, Klassen und Kultur (Frankfurt am Main: Syndikat, 1982), pp. 330, 338–339.

[6] Op. cit., p. 185. Thompson also cites the Manchester historian Prentice: " 'A new instructor was busy amongst the masses—WANT' " (p. 142; cf. p. 184). Or, to cite another instance, the thinking of Thelwal, an interpreter of Jacobinism, appears bound by the artisan's economic interests (p. 160).

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

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

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

[7] Ibid., p. 592. Consider also Thompson's reference to the pace of capital accumulation and to the stages of technical change in his closing eulogy to a distinguished artisanal culture (pp. 830–831).

[8] Patrick Joyce, Work, Society and Politics (London: Methuen, 1982), p. 80.

[9] Op. cit., ibid., pp. 81–82; Patrick Joyce, Visions of the People: Industrial England and the Question of Class 1848–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), p. 88. Since the factory workers who occupied the same positions of dependency joined the burgeoning socialist movement in the quarter-century before the First World War, however, this structural explanation for political identities must be incomplete. No wonder another labor historian, Richard Price, adopted the same transition from the "formal" to the "real" subsumption of labor in the workplace to explain precisely the opposite outcome: the rise of labor militancy in the late 1880s. "The New Unionism and the Labour Process," in Wolfgang J. Mommsen and Hans-Gerhard Husung, editors, The Development of Trade Unionism in Great Britain and Germany, 1880–1914 (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1985), pp. 133–149.

[10] In Visions of the People , Joyce emphasizes in his methodological preface that the ability of language to constitute experience has dissolved "the old assurance of a formative link between social structure and culture." Yet in this recent work, too, the brute fact of mechanization is cited as a cause of workers' new feelings of insecurity and a constriction of their cultural horizons to the established capitalist order. Op. cit., pp. 9, 88. Analogously, see Joyce's inferences from the delegation of authority on the shop floor to populist accommodations to capitalism (p. 119).

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

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

[11] Perhaps I do Thompson and Joyce an injustice here. Thompson in his methodological reflections remains too wary of abstractions to suppose that the "productive process" comprises a merely economic relation. In The Poverty of Theory , for example, he insists that economic transactions can also be examined as cultural practices. But few researchers follow their own prescriptions. Even in this methodological essay, Thompson restricts his illustrations of culture in production to ancient customs of exchange in the "moral economy" which industrialization broke apart (op. cit., p. 292) or to the socialization of the actors outside of production (p. 294). These very examples rest on implicit contrasts with modern, instrumentally determined practices at the point of production; in The Making , those contrasts become explicit. When Thompson contests the formula that steam power plus cotton mills equals a new working class, the variable he wants to include for a more balanced equation, inherited tradition, refers primarily to a culture that is rooted in community relations, relations outside of production. The logic of both political resistance movements and Methodism is that they allow people to express, outside of production, that cultural animation which is suppressed, and in Thompson's account, temporarily deactivated, inside the industrial labor process itself. The Making , op. cit., p. 446. Likewise, Joyce coins the phrase the "culture of the factory," but this culture is lodged primarily in expressive activities such as social parties and teas or in loyalties that are in some way the offspring of the necessities of work but that do not define the labor process itself. Indeed, culture grows out of the factory when people are not at work, when instead they gossip during breaks or sing "as and when the tasks to hand permitted." Visions , op. cit., pp. 131–132.

[12] Languages of Class (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), p. 95. In the introduction to this set of essays, Jones expresses even more forcefully the assumption that identities are shaped in politics rather than through labor: "It is the discursive structure of political language which conceives and defines interest in the first place" (p. 22).

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

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

A Puzzle in the Workers' Reception of Ideas

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

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

[13] Membership in the Social Democratic unions rose from 300,000 in 1890 to 2.5 million in 1913. For an overview, consult Mary Nolan, "Economic Crisis, State Policy, and Working-Class Formation in Germany, 1870–1900," in Ira Katznelson and Aristide R. Zolber, editors, Working-Class Formation (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986), pp. 378–393.

[14] H. A. Clagg, Allan Fox, and A. F. Thompson, A History of British Trade Unions Since 1889 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1964), p. 468.

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

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

[15] Textile Mercury , August 30, 1890, p. 141.

[16] Textile Mercury , September 27, 1890, p. 210. The members of the Bradford Textile Society also captured the mood of change. In 1895, in an editorial about "Trades Unionism," they remarked, "Everything seems to point out that a great change is about to take place in our commercial and industrial system." Journal of the Bradford Textile Society Volume I, Number 5 (February 1895).

[17] Yorkshire Factory Times , May 13, 1892, Oakworth. The Burnley weavers' union rules in 1892 called for "socialisation of the means of production." Geoffrey Trodd, "Political Change and the Working Class in Blackburn and Burnley 1880–1914," Ph.D. diss., University of Lancaster, 1978, p. 341.

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

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

[18] Hans-Josef Steinberg, Sozialismus und deutsche Sozialdemokratie (Hannover: Verlag für Literatur und Zeitgeschehen, 1967), pp. 17–18. For background on Schramm's continued belief in working toward state aid for producer cooperatives, see Wolf-Ulrich Jorke, "Rezeptions- und Wirkungsgeschichte von Lassalles politischer Theorie in der deutschen Arbeiterbewegung," diss., Bochum, 1973, pp. 17–18.

[19] Carl Schorske, German Social Democracy 1905–1917 (New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1955), pp. 108 ff.

[20] Eduard Bernstein, Von der Sekte zur Partei (Jena: Eugen Diederichs, 1911), p. 23.

Economic Ideologies in the Workers' Movements of Britain

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

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

[21] The Co-operative Magazine and Monthly Herald Volume I, Number 2 (February 1826), p. 64.

[22] The Making , op. cit., p. 778; quotation on p. 807. Hodgskin edited the Mechanics' Magazine before writing Labour Defended. Karl-Josef Burkard, Thomas Hodgskins Kritik der Politischen Ökonomie (Hannover: SOAK Verlag, 1980), pp. 8, 219. The first clear point of contact between the working-class movement and the labor economists is publication of a review of Hodgskin's Labour Defended in Trades Newspaper in 1825. See the copious documentation of the popular appreciation of Hodgskin in Noel Thompson, The People's Science: The Popular Political Economy of Exploitation and Crisis 1816–1834 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), pp. 12–13. This exemplary study of the British economists' focus on the mechanisms of exchange provides the foundation for the following section.

[23] Jones, op. cit., pp. 114–115, 133–134 note. For other references to the importance of political economy for workers' formulations, see H. Dutton and J. E. King, "Ten Percent and No Surrender": The Preston Strike, 1853–54 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), pp. 55–56; T. W. Hutchison, On Revolutions and Progress in Economic Knowledge (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978), p. 59; Simon Dentith, "Political Economy, Fiction and the Language of Practical Ideology in Nineteenth-Century England," Social History Volume 8, Number 2 (May 1983), pp. 183–199; Max Goldstrom, "Popular Political Economy for the British Working Class Reader in the Nineteenth Century," in Terry Shinn and Richard Whitley, editors, Expository Science: Forms and Functions of Popularisation (Dordrecht: D. Reidel, 1985), p. 270.

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

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

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

[24] William Thompson, Labour Rewarded (London: Hunt & Clarke, 1827), p. 12. Emphasis added. Thomas Hodgskin described the capitalist as someone who has "power over the produce of labor." Thomas Hodgskin, Popular Political Economy (New York: Augustus Kelley, 1966 [1827]), p. 245.

[25] W. Thompson, op. cit., pp. 12, 36.

[26] The Poor Man's Advocate , January 21, 1832, p. 1. The Operative , which catered to the interests of factory workers, also emphasized the market as the site of exploitation. See discussion of economics on February 3, 1839. We cannot deduce workers' understanding of the exchange of labor for a wage from the brute fact that they are inserted into large-scale industry, as one analyst has unfortunately assumed. Craig Calhoun, The Question of Class Struggle (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), p. 117.

[27] An Inquiry into the Principles of the Distribution of Wealth (New York: Burt Franklin, 1968 [1824]), p. 88.

[28] John Bray briefly refers to the sale of labor and products of labor but says both amount to the sale of "labour for labour." Then the example immediately following illustrates only the exchange of finished products. Labour's Wrongs and Labour's Remedy (Leeds: David Green, 1839), p. 48.

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

Take away what labour has produced, or anticipate and seize on, as it were beforehand, what labor is about to produce: where is the difference in the operation? Where the difference in pernicious effects? If any, the difference would be in favor of seizing the products after production rather than anticipating them, because the relaxation of the producing industry is avoided where the products already exist, and the effect of discouragement would be only against future productions. But where the labour is compelled, the product itself to be seized upon is raised and completed with diminished energy.^[29]

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

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

[29] Emphasis in original. An Inquiry , op. cit., p. 89.

[30] On William Thompson's periodization of history by the transition from compelled labor to labor organized by individual competition, see J. E. King, "Utopian or Scientific? A Reconsideration of the Ricardian Socialists," History of Political Economy Volume 15, Number 3 (1983), p. 358.

[31] Thomas Hodgskin, Labour Defended Against the Claims of Capital (London: Labour Publishing Company, 1922 [1825]), p. 71. Likewise, the broadside "A Riddle" calls a capitalist a "rogue [who] steps in between to make the exchange" (Manchester Library Archives). The British workers moved beyond the ancient view that profit is simply the difference between purchase and sale prices, for in the liberal-capitalist order products appeared as the incarnation of quantified labor. Profit now emerged from labor appropriated from the worker. For a sophisticated commentary, see Burkard, op. cit., p. 58.

[32] 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 N. Thompson, op. cit., p. 61. Italics in original.

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

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

[33] N. Thompson, op. cit., p. 61. The Poor Man's Guardian referred in 1833 to the middle-class supporters of the Reform Bill as "middlemen." See Jones, op. cit., p. 105.

[34] Poor Man's Guardian , No. 80, December 15, 1832, p. 641. Emphasis in original. On the influence of this newspaper among workers, see Frederick James Kaijage, "Labouring Barnsley, 1816–1856: A Social and Economic History." Ph.D. diss., University of Warwick, 1975, p. 470, and Patricia Hollis, The Pauper Press (London: Oxford University Press, 1970), p. 293.

[35] The stress on the "defalcations of exchange" in the workers' press was overwhelming. As a writer for the Poor Man's Advocate expressed it, "The value of all commodities is the amount of human labour it has taken to procure them  . . . but the merchant or agent between buyer and seller, being able to conceal the real state of the transaction, contrives with scarcely any labour to charge  . . . one quarter above the value which he calls profit." January 21, 1832, p. 8. "Remember friends and brethren, that you and you alone produce all the real wealth of the country  . . . middlemen  . . . trick you out of the greater part of the wealth which you create." Poor Man's Guardian , No. 4 (1831), p. 25. Or, as John Bray said, it was "an inevitable condition of inequality of exchanges—of buying at one price and selling at another—that capitalists shall continue to be capitalists and working men be working men." Op. cit., pp. 48–49. The economy contained an "error," John Gray claimed, a "defective system of exchange." John Gray, The Social System (London: Longman, Rees, Orme, Brown & Green, 1831), p. 23. Emphasis in original. See also Stedman Jones, op. cit., p. 119.

Employers reciprocated the workers' emphasis on the sphere of circulation. The textile manufacturers were slow to theorize the difference between profitable exchange as a merchant and the generation of returns through investment in plant and equipment. Sidney Pollard shows that during the formation of factory practice in Britain, textile managers rarely distinguished between capital and revenue or between fixed and circulating capital. Their accounting followed the logic of commercial rather than of industrial capitalism. "The rise of modern cost accounting," Pollard concluded, "dates from the 1880's only." "Capital Accounting in the Industrial Revolution," Yorkshire Bulletin of Economic and Social Research Volume 15, Number 2 (November 1963), p. 79.

[36] The Operative , Nov. 4, 1838. "Aggregation of property into large masses" means "unjust preference given to the land-owner and money-monger that are the heaviest curses of the English Operative."

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

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

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

[37] The Operative , February 7, 1839.

[38] Bray, op. cit., p. 52. Bray also says that the infraction of the law of equal exchanges oppresses the working man more than accumulation of capital (p. 48).

[39] Ibid., p. 199. See his comments on p. 110 as well. Although Robert Owen lacked an economic theory to explain the exploitation of labor, he said that articles in his reformed communities would exchange "with reference to the amount of labour in each." Report to the County of Lanark of a Plan for Relieving Public Distress (Glasgow: Wardlaw & Cunninghame, 1821), p. 21.

[40] Op. cit., p. 127.

[41] Association for the Dissemination of the Knowledge of the Principles of an Equitable Labour Exchange, Production the Cause of Demand (Birmingham: Radcliffe & Co., 1832), p. 5.

[42] Employers without large quantities of capital were seen as victims of market exchange just as much as wage laborers were. Submission in market exchange, not the position of authority conferred by the employment of labor power, marked class boundaries. Jones, op. cit., pp. 131–132.

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

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

[43] John Gray, Lectures on the Nature and Use of Money (London: Longman, Brown, Green, and Longmans, 1848), p. 97.

[44] Ibid., p. 159. For Hodgskin's praise of a cleansed market, see N. Thompson, The Market and Its Critics , op. cit., pp. 71–73.

[45] An Inquiry , op. cit., p. 103. By "free" interchange Thompson did not necessarily mean market exchange.

Owen's doctrines are not analyzed in this chapter because they do not offer an economic theory of labor exploitation. Yet Owenite thinking, too, rested on the assumption that the inauguration of fair exchange and the subsequent prosperity of cooperative societies would be sufficient to eliminate disparities of wealth. See The Making , op. cit., p. 805, and N. Thompson, The People's Science , op. cit., p. 81.

[46] Bray, op. cit., p. 110.

[47] The Making , op. cit., p. 829. On the early influence of formal theories of labor's value in Bradford, see Jonathan Smith, "The Strike of 1825," in D. G. Wright and J. A. Jowitt, editors, Victorian Bradford (Bradford: Bradford Metropolitan Council, 1982), p. 75.

[48] N. Thompson, The People's Science , op. cit., p. 224. Sidney Pollard suggests that the theories of the early socialists were forgotten so completely because the process of industrialization made it increasingly unrealistic to imagine that workers could accumulate enough capital to replace the capitalists. But if this is granted, the question arises of why the socialists did not recast their economic solutions; once again, the answer may be found in their preoccupation with the market exchange of products. Sidney Pollard, "England: Der unrevolutionäre Pionier," in Jürgen Kocka, editor, Europäische Arbeiterbewegungen im 19. Jahrhundert (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1983), p. 26.

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

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

[49] H. M. Hyndman, The Historical Basis of Socialism in England (London: Garland Publishing, 1984 [1883]), p. 120. But the perception of a new start for socialism can be seen in Hyndman's claim that his book England for All "was the first Socialist work that appeared up to 1881 in English." Henry Mayers Hyndman, The Record of an Adventurous Life (London: Macmillan & Co., 1911), p. 248. Sidney Webb, Socialism in Great Britain (London: Swan Sonnenschein & Co., 1890), refers to Marx and Engels but not to the early British socialists (pp. 19, 85).

[50] See H. S. Foxwell's introduction to Anton Menger's The Right to the Whole Produce of Labour (New York: Augustus Kelley, 1962 [1899]), p. cii; Dona Torr, Tom Mann and His Times , Volume One (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1956), p. 183. The idea for this paragraph heavily relies upon the research of Noel Thompson in The People's Science , op. cit., p. 83.

[51] Menger, op. cit., p. cxv.

[52] Ibid., pp. 101–102.

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

[53] See the earliest known reference to "Ricardian socialists" in N. Thompson, The People's Science , op. cit., p. 84 note 5. See also Beatrice Webb, The Co-operative Movement in Great Britain (London: S. Sonnenschein, 1891), p. 47; Foxwell in Menger, op. cit., pp. iii–iv. Engels placed even the Owenite movement among the Ricardian school. Karl Marx, Das Kapital (Berlin: Dietz Verlag, 1980), p. 20.

[54] Foxwell in Menger, op. cit., pp. xl–xlii.

[55] N. Thompson, The People's Science , op. cit., p. 84.

[56] Joseph Schumpeter, History of Economic Analysis (New York: Oxford University Press, 1954), p. 583.

[57] I am indebted to Noel Thompson for this observation. See "Ricardian Socialists/Smithian Socialists: What's in a Name," in his The People's Science , op. cit., Chapter Four. Esther Lowenthal was among the first to remark upon the discrepancy between appellation and content in The Ricardian Socialists (Clifton, New Jersey: Augustus M. Kelley, 1972 [1911]), p. 103.

[58] King, op. cit., p. 346. Yet the British socialists could perhaps have found just as much support in Ricardo as in Smith for their view that exploitation occurred in the market. The notion that exploitation took place when exchanges did not properly balance the quantities of labor being traded rested on a comparison of the quantities of labor expended on the product—an analysis thoroughly consistent with Ricardo. Ricardo's theory also set up the exchange of equals for equals as a standard. That the early British socialists developed Smith's ideas more than Ricardo's has perhaps more to do with the possibilities of development opened up by these two founders' presentation than with their respective definitions of how labor determined values. Cf. Gregory Claeys, Machinery, Money and the Millennium: From Moral Economy to Socialism, 1815–60 (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1987), p. xxv.

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

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

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

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

[59] Ernest Mandel, The Formation of the Economic Thought of Karl Marx (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1971), p. 45.

[60] Stuart Macintyre, A Proletarian Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), p. 161.

[61] Cited in Richard Pankhurst, William Thompson (London: Watts & Co., 1954), p. 217.

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

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

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

[62] The immobility of theory in Britain rests upon the continuity, not of ideas, but of practices. Ideology has no history in its own right.

[63] Archive of the Huddersfield Polytechnic Labour Collection, "Jubilee Souvenir: History of the Colne Valley Labour Party," p. 5. Textile workers also dominated the executive committee elected at the meeting. David Clark, Colne Valley: Radicalism to Socialism (London: Longman, 1981), p. 19.

[64] Clark, op. cit., p. 33.

[65] See the transcript of the debate at the founding meeting of the Independent Labour Party reprinted in Henry Pelling, editor, The Challenge of Socialism (London: Adam & Charles Black, 1968), pp. 187–189; James Hinton, Labour and Socialism (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1983), pp. 58, 75; Stanley Pierson, British Socialists: The Journey from Fantasy to Politics (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1979), p. 37. Bradford's significance in the rise of this party can be gauged from its share of national membership dues. In 1895 Bradford provided one-sixth of the party's affiliation fees. J. Reynolds and K. Laybourn, "The Emergence of the Independent Labour Party in Bradford," International Review of Social History Volume 20, Part 3 (1975), p. 315. E. P. Thompson makes a strong case for the dynamic of local factors and for the contribution of Yorkshire to the development of the Independent Labour Party in "Homage to Tom Maguire," in Asa Briggs and John Saville, editors, Essays in Labour History (London: Macmillan & Co., 1960), p. 277.

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

The textile unions were linked to the socialist campaigns not by geographic coincidence but by personnel. The leaders of the principal textile union in Yorkshire, the West Riding Power Loom Weavers' Association, also worked for the new labor party. Ben Turner, Allen Gee, and J. W. Downing, for example, worked for the committee for labor representation in Slaithwaite as early as 1891.^[70] The textile workers in Yorkshire adopted socialist ideas as their own during the 1890s.^[71] In Yeadon, the Factory Workers' Union, a purely local association whose membership consisted of weavers, dyers, and spinners, adopted the songbooks and message of the independent labor movement. The union's goal, the secretary said, was to help workers find their "social salvation."^[72] A correspondent to the Yorkshire Factory Times in 1914 assumed that the textile unions were vehicles for social trans-

[66] Ben Turner, About Myself 1863–1930 (London: Cayme Press, 1930), p. 80.

[67] Hinton, op. cit., pp. 58, 60.

[68] Keith Laybourn, "The Attitude of the Yorkshire Trade Unions to the Economic and Social Problems of the Great Depression, 1873–1896," Ph.D. diss., Lancaster University, 1973, p. 451.

[69] Frank Bealey and Henry Pelling, Labour and Politics 1900–1906 (London: MacMillan & Co., 1958), p. 292; T. L. Jarman, Socialism in Britain: From the Industrial Revolution to the Present Day (London: Victor Gollancz, 1972), p. 89. On local representatives, see Turner, op. cit., p. 176, and Keith Laybourn, " 'The Defence of the Bottom Dog': The Independent Labour Party in Local Politics," in Wright and Jowitt, editors, Victorian Bradford , op. cit., p. 224. For George Garside's early election to the County Council in Slaithwaite in 1892, see Yorkshire Factory Times , February 26, 1904.

[70] Clark, op. cit., p. 23. Ben Turner also lists members of the early Socialist Club in Leeds who later became trade union leaders. Op. cit., p. 79. See also Robert Brian Perks, "The New Liberalism and the Challenge of Labour in the West Riding of Yorkshire 1885–1914," Ph.D. diss., Huddersfield Polytechnic, 1985, p. 53.

[71] Yorkshire Factory Times , May 13, 1892, Oakworth speech, p. 7; speech at Batley by Ben Turner, Yorkshire Factory Times , December 21, 1894, p. 8. In some towns of Lancashire, too, the organizers of the Independent Labour Party also worked for the local textile union. Elizabeth Roberts's interview with Mr. C1P, born 1894, Preston, p. 20.

[72] Archive of General Union of Dyers, Bleachers, and Textile Workers, Headquarters, Yeadon and Guiseley Factory Workers' Union, Minutes, January 25, 1899.

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

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

Blackburn represented another outpost of the socialist movement in Lancashire. Many weavers there were tied to the Social Democratic Federation, an avowedly Marxist league founded in 1881.^[77] If the best indicator of a movement's influence is the number of attempts to organize an

[73] Yorkshire Factory Times , January 1, 1914, p. 4. Similarly, see Yorkshire Factory Times , May 13, 1892, Oakworth.

[74] Bealey and Pelling, op. cit., p. 105.

[75] Town branches also elected socialist spokespersons: a member of the Social Democratic Federation served as vice-president of the Burnley Weavers' Association in 1895. Chushichi Tsuzuki, H. M. Hyndman and British Socialism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1961), p. 99.

[76] Alan Fowler and Lesley Fowler, The History of the Nelson Weavers Association (Nelson: Burnley, Nelson, Rossendale & District Textile Workers Union, 1989), p. 16. For the weavers' support of an independent labor party in the conservative Preston district, see Michael Savage, The Dynamics of Working-Class Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), p. 154.

[77] In 1895 the Social Democratic Federation claimed 10,500 members in the United Kingdom. Hinton, op. cit., pp. 41, 60.

opposition, then the socialists in the textile unions were becoming a power with which to reckon. Textile workers in Blackburn who wanted to distinguish themselves from the socialists, who allegedly controlled the main textile union in town, founded a separate city union in 1912.^[78] Before the First World War, the Lancashire and Yorkshire textile regions provided the major base of support—the votes, the financing, and the ideas—for the emerging socialist groups.^[79]

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

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

[78] Blackburn Times , June 15, 1912.

[79] Deian Hopkin, "The Membership of the Independent Labour Party, 1904–1910," International Review of Social History Volume 20, Part Two (1975), p. 182; Bealey and Pelling, op. cit.; Pierson, op. cit., p. 46. For statistics on the geographic concentration of Labour's vote in municipal elections, see M. G. Sheppard and John L. Halstead, "Labour's Municipal Election Performance in Provincial England and Wales 1901–13," Society for the Study of Labour History Bulletin Number 39 (Autumn 1979), p. 56. It may also be true, however, that among the textile labor force only a minority of workers supported socialist causes.

[80] Bradford Socialist Vanguard (December 1908).

[81] Yorkshire Factory Times , October 10, 1912; February 1, 1895, Bradford.

[82] Isaac Binns, From Village to Town (Batley: E. H. Purchas, n.d. [ca. 1882]). Sherwin Stephenson, "The Chronicles of a Shop Man," Bradford Library Archives, pp. 94, 197. For other references to popular beliefs about political economy, see R. V. Clements, "British Trade Unions and Popular Political Economy 1850–1875," Economic History Review Volume XIV, Number 1 (August 1961), p. 102.

[83] Blackburn Labour Journal (June 1900).

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

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

[84] See, for example, the discussion at a meeting of workers in 1894, where the capitalist was portrayed as a usurious lender who bargains thus: "I will allow you to use these tools on condition that you keep me without working." Keighley ILP Journal , February 4, 1894. The formulation is not essentially changed from that presented by Adam Smith, who thought that the workers "stand in need" of the capitalist to "advance them the materials of their work, and their wages and maintenance till it be compleated." An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976 [1776]), pp. 73–74.

[85] These British formulations contrast with those of the German literature, such as Kautsky's widely read popularization of Marx, which emphasized that "the means of production serve above all the goal of absorbing into themselves the labor power of the worker." Karl Marx' ökonomische Lehren (Berlin: J. H. W. Dietz, 1980), p. 121.

[86] The rich were those "who monopolise the land and capital, who thereby control labour and compel it to surrender to them its products, saving a bare pittance." The Labour Journal , October 14, 1892. Sometimes the analogy between the rent of the landowner and the interest paid to the capitalist allowed workers to conceive of the control of land as the original source of profit. The program of the Independent Labour Party in 1895 called for nationalization of land, not of industry.

[87] Blackburn Labour Journal (September 1898). Even the British Socialist Party judged that "agriculture is most important and most valuable of all industries." The Pioneer (February 1914), "Socialist Land Policy."

[88] Bradford Labour Echo , November 19, 1898.

[89] Philip Snowden, Socialism and Syndicalism (Baltimore: Warwick & York), p. 167.

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

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

[90] Allen Clarke's description of the operatives of Bolton in 1899 treated the source of profit as in "trade" rather than "manufacture." The workers, Clarke said, "think that the masters build factories and workshops not to make a living for themselves by trading but in order to find the people employment." Quoted in Joyce, Work, Society and Politics , op. cit., p. 90, emphasis added. Ben Turner said he did not condemn employers, only "the system under which employers in the district traded. " Yorkshire Factory Times , December 11, 1903, p. 6. Emphasis added.

[91] Burnley Gazette , August 5, 1893.

[92] Bradford Labour Echo , April 9, 1898. Sometimes the revived socialist movement supposed that the stabilization of wages at subsistence level represented, not the sale of labor (power) at the cost of its reproduction, but the remainder left to workers after miscellaneous middlemen completed their thievery. "Before getting his poor wages home, however, he [the worker] is systematically waylaid by robbers, each one taking various amounts till the last one, the leader, takes all he has left except just sufficient to keep him and his family at work." Bradford Labour Echo , May 9, 1896.

[93] Robert Blatchford, Merrie England: A Series of Letters to John Smith of Oldham—a Practical Working Man (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1966 [1894]), pp. 82–83, 84.

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

[94] Henry Collins, "The Marxism of the Social Democratic Federation," in Asa Briggs and John Saville, editors, Essays in Labour History 1886–1923 (Hamden, Conn.: Archon Books, 1971), p. 52.

[95] Hyndman, The Historical Basis of Socialism , op. cit., pp. 113, 114, 116.

[96] Ibid., pp. 119–122. "Everything else which is needed for the purposes of production—raw material, machinery, &c.—have been bought by the capitalist at their actual market value and paid for at their actual market price. It is from labour only, the labour-force of human beings compelled to compete against one another for a bare subsistence wage, that the actual employer derives his surplus value, and the merchant, &c., his profit" (pp. 119–120). The British Marxists, including Hyndman, retained a belief in the iron law of wages even when the writings by Marx available to them repudiated it. This follows from their interpretation of Marx as a theorist of market exploitation. In their understanding, the capitalist realizes a profit only if the competition among workers forces the price of labor down to subsistence, thus to below its real value. Their adherence to the iron law of wages results not from ignorance of Marx but from the internal logic of the market-based understanding of exploitation which they derived from Marx. For explicit reference to the "iron law of wages" and the logic behind its retention, see ibid., pp. 118–119. For evidence that the British Marxists retained a belief in this iron law after they most certainly must have known that Marx rejected it, see Collins, op. cit., pp. 52–53.

[97] In The Economics of Socialism , written a decade later, Hyndman renders Marx's theory more cogently. He emphasizes that the employer purchases labor power at its full exchange value. But again he fails to make a distinction between labor's value in use and in exchange. Instead, he reasons that unlimited competition among workers forces wages down to subsistence level, whereas workers produce more than they need for the reproduction of their labor power. Since the moment of the employer's exercise of authority to exploit the use value of labor at the point of production disappears from Hyndman's analysis, in his view the extraction of surplus depends upon the power of market forces to depress wages. The Economics of Socialism (London: The Twentieth Century Press, 1909), pp. 83, 97. In his memoirsHyndman again focuses on the market as the locus of exploitation: British workers would continue to live in poverty, he said, "as long as competition for mere subsistence ruled in the labour market.  . . . The dominant classes are no fools. They know perfectly well that if sweating were abolished and unemployment ceased to be, the whole capitalist system would be doomed." Henry Hyndman, Further Reminiscences (London: Macmillan & Co., 1912), p. 18.

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

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

[98] Bradford Labour Echo , November 26, 1898.

[99] The Bradford Labour Echo said that capitalists confiscate "the annual produce of the workers." Bradford Labour Echo , April 13, 1895. Correlatively, Ben Turner, an early convert to socialism and a leader of the Yorkshire textile unions, said that the profit was made on cloth, not labor. Turner, op. cit., p. 105.

[100] The Labour Journal , December 2, 1892, Bradford.

[101] The understanding of the labor transaction as the sale and resale of materialized labor, born in the British experience of commercialization, also informed the later elaborations of British academics. Richard H. Tawney exemplified it in his misinterpretation of Marx, imposing on him the British understanding of the exploitation of labor. Marx, he said, did not castigate the honest merchant. According to Tawney, Marx believed that "the unpardonable sin is that of the speculator or the middleman, who snatches private gain by the exploitationof public necessities." Religion and the Rise of Capitalism (New York: New American Library, 1954 [1926]), p. 38.

Economic Ideologies in the Workers' Movements of Germany

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

[102] Only upon the reestablishment of political movements in the 1860s did urban artisans begin to adopt the discourse of liberal political economy. Friedrich Lenger, Zwischen Kleinbürgertum und Proletariat (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1986), p. 195.

[103] P. H. Noyes, Organization and Revolution: Working-Class Associations in the German Revolutions of 1848–1849 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1966), pp. 240–241.

[104] Arbeiter-Blatt , from the textile district of Lennep, edited by members of the local workers' association, portrayed the market as a medium that reflected circumstances disadvantageous to workers, not as the cause of unequal exchange. The newspaper cited wage-depressing factors in Germany, including the abundance of landless, dependent laborers and the stiffening competition that hand workers faced from domestic and foreign machine production. December 3, 1848. In these dire circumstances, the newspaper believed, society needed to protect workers' only property, their labor, from exploitation in the workplace. It did not focus on the moment of exchange itself. Das Arbeiter-Blatt , October 29, 1848.

[105] The wealthy controlled the "valorization" of "talent and labor power." "Materielle Noth," in Freiheit, Arbeit , February 11, 1849, pp. 36–37. For a discussion of workers' contributions to the content of this journal, see Michael Vester et al., editors, Gibt es einen "Wissenschaftlichen Sozialismus"? (Hannover: SOAK Verlag, 1979), p. 64.

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

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

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

[106] Die Verbrüderung , December 5, 1850, p. 74.

[107] Die Verbrüderung , April 13, 1850, p. 114.

[108] "Grundzüge eines Systems, um Kapital zu sammeln," Arbeiter-Zeitung , February 22, 1863.

[109] The Operative , February 3, 1839.

[110] Bray, op. cit., pp. 140–141. John Gray said that the difference between money and capital is between the currency and physical items, including consumer goods. Gray, Lectures , op. cit., pp. 196–197.

[111] Deutscher Handwerker- und Gewerbe-Congress, Entwurf einer allgemeinen Handwerker- und Gewerbe-Ordnung für Deutschland: Berathen und beschlossen von dem Handwerker- und Gewerbe-Congress zu Frankfurt am Main im Juli und August 1848 (Hamburg, 1848), p. 5.

[112] Bray, op. cit., p. 153. In the 1830s leaflet "The Workings of Money Capital," an anonymous author explains that capital yields a profit because it "buys goods dishonestly obtained." Manchester Library Archives.

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

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

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

[113] The outlook of the labor exchange movement can be gleaned from the very title of William King's pamphlet: The Circulating Medium and the Present Mode of Exchange the Cause of Increasing Distress Amongst the Productive Classes: and an Effective Measure for Their Immediate and Permanent Relief Pointed Out in the Universal Establishment of Labour Banks, in Which All the Business of Life May Be Transacted Without Money (London: William Dent, 1832). For the statutes governing the exchange of labor time certificates at such an organization, see Equitable Labour Exchange, Rules and Regulations of the Equitable Labour Exchange, Gray's Inn Road, London: for the Purpose of Relieving the Productive Classes from Poverty, by Their Own Industry and for the Mutual Exchange of Labour for Equal Value of Labour (London: Equitable Labour Exchange, 1832).

[114] Jorke, op. cit., p. 10, 18; Roger Morgan, The German Social Democrats and the First International 1864–1872 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1965), p. 124.

[115] August Bebel, Aus meinem Leben , Part One (Stuttgart: J. H. W. Dietz Nachf., 1910), p. 131.

[116] Tatiana Grigorovici, Die Wertlehre bei Marx und Lassalle (Wien: Ignaz Brand & Co., 1910), pp. 63–64.

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

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

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

[117] Lassalles Reden und Schriften , ed. Eduard Bernstein (Berlin: Verlag des 'Vorwärts,' 1893), Volume 3, p. 180 and, correlatively, p. 798.

[118] On the imprecision of the term Ertrag , see Karl Marx, Kritik des Gothaer Programms (Moskau: Verlag für fremdsprachige Literatur, 1941), p. 20.

[119] Lassalle assumed that the production cooperatives he advocated would develop with the support of a socialist state, not simply through workers' frugality and the retention of labor's produce. Ulrich Engelhardt, "Nur vereinigt sind wir stark": Die Anfänge der deutschen Gewerkschaftsbewegung 1862/63 bis 1869/70 , Volume One (Stuttgart: Ernst Klett, 1977), p. 329.

[120] Hannes Skambraks, "Das Kapital" von Marx—Waffe im Klassenkampf (Berlin: Dietz Verlag, 1977), p. 104; Social-Demokrat , February 23, 1868, reprinted in Rolf Dlubek and Hannes Skambraks, editors, "Das Kapital" von Karl Marx in der deutschen Arbeiterbewegung: 1867 bis 1878 (Berlin: Dietz Verlag, 1967), p. 180. Von Schweitzer deduced from Marx's analysis that even a "just" employer, who paid labor power its full value in the market, nonetheless appropriated surplus value from the worker. Therefore demands for market "justice" would not protect workers. Cora Stephan, "Genossen, wir dürfen uns nicht von der Geduld hinreissen lassen!" (Frankfurt am Main: Syndikat, 1977), p. 212. German analysts adopted Marx's appreciation of the sale of labor power even when they did not accept other portions of Marx's political agenda and diagnosis. Skambraks, op. cit., pp. 104, 106, 126–127, 142–143.

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

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

[121] Social-Demokrat , February 23, 1868, in Dlubek and Skambraks, editors, op. cit., p. 180. Emphasis in original. Schweitzer's long reviews of Kapital in the Social-Demokrat pivoted on the difference between the exchange value and the use value of labor power. Johann Baptist von Schweitzer, "Das Werk von Karl Marx," Social-Demokrat , no. 25, February 26, 1868, reprinted in Dlubek and Skambraks, editors, op. cit., p. 181.

[122] Social-Demokrat , May 25, 1871, cited in Dlubek and Skambraks, editors, op. cit., p. 80.

[123] Neuer Social-Demokrat (Berlin), July 10, 1874. Dlubek and Skambraks, editors, op. cit., p. 80.

[124] Wilhelm Bracke, once a follower of Lassalle, keenly propagated Marx's concept of the sale and use of labor power. See Der Lassallesche Vorschlag , 1873, reprinted in Dlubek and Skambraks, editors, op. cit., p. 241.

[125] Morgan, op. cit., pp. 132–133; Stephan, op. cit., p. 202. But Stephan catalogues a lengthy roster of Social Democrats who did read Kapital soon after its appearance.

[126] Steinberg, op. cit., p. 17.

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

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

[127] Ibid., pp. 17, 130. For a discussion of other influential popularizations of Kapital , see Rolf Dlubek, "Die Rolle des 'Kapitals' bei der Durchsetzung des Marxismus in der deutschen Arbeiterbewegung," in Beiträge zur Marx-Engels Forschung , Institut für Marxismus-Leninismus (Berlin: Dietz Verlag, 1968), p. 47. Members of the Allgemeiner Deutscher Arbeiter-Verein, Lassalle's organization, wrote extensive reviews of Das Kapital for popular newspapers. Heinrich Leonard, Wilhelm Bracke: Leben und Wirken (Braunschweig: H. Rieke & Co., 1930), p. 16. The secondhand discussions of Kapital saved the book from the oblivion into which the low sales of the original would have cast it. On the original's marketing, see Steinberg, op. cit., p. 21 note.

[128] August Geib's pamphlet on the Normalarbeitstag also uses the term Arbeitskraft to distinguish between the use value and the exchange value of the workers' only commodity. Dlubek and Skambraks, editors, op. cit., p. 211. See also the 1873 edition of Johann Most's Kapital und Arbeit: "Das Kapital" in einer handlichen Zusammenfassung (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1972), p. 27, reprinted in Dlubek and Skambraks, editors, op. cit., pp. 276–279. Although the 1873 edition captured the distinction between use and exchange values of labor, it contained other misrepresentations, which Marx corrected in the edition of 1876. Dlubek, op. cit., p. 27.

[129] Steinberg, op. cit., pp. 130–139. On the influence of Kautsky's popularization of the first volume of Kapital , see Erich Matthias, "Kautsky und der Kautskyanismus," Marxismus-Studien , second series (Berlin: Institut für Marxismus-Leninismus, 1957), p. 156, and Hans-Josef Steinberg's introduction to Karl Kautsky, Karl Marx' ökonomische Lehren (Berlin: J. H. W. Dietz, 1980), p. xiv.

[130] Adolf Levenstein, Die Arbeiterfrage (München: Ernst Reinhardt, 1912), pp. 393–403.

[131] Steinberg, op. cit., pp. 130–137.

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

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

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

[132] Ottilie Baader, Ein steiniger Weg: Lebenserinnerungen einer Sozialistin (Berlin: J. H. W. Dietz, 1979 [1921]), pp. 23, 25, 36.

[133] Workers' letters to Marx upon reading Kapital are listed in Eike Kopf, "Die Ideen des 'Kapitals' von Karl Marx werden zur materiellen Gewalt: Zur Wirkungsgeschichte des 'Kapitals' in Deutschland bis 1872," Wissenschaftliche Zeitschrift der Friedrich-Schiller-Universität Jena , Gesellschafts- und Sprachwissenschaftliche Reihe, Volume 17, Number 2 (1968), p. 150.

[134] Hans Bursian, "Über den Einfluss des 'Kapitals' von Karl Marx auf die Magdeburger Arbeiterbewegung, 1869–1871—Forschungsprobleme und Ergebnisse," Beiträge zur Geschichte der deutschen Arbeiterbewegung , Volume 10 (Berlin: Institut für Marxismus-Leninismus, 1968), pp. 115, 117–118. In 1868 at the general conference of the ADAV the representatives heard a presentation of Marx's theory of surplus value and passed a resolution praising Marx's analysis of "the capitalist production process." Jutta Seidel, Wilhelm Bracke: Vom Lassalleaner zum Marxisten (Berlin: Dietz Verlag, 1966), pp. 40–42.

[135] Der Textil-Arbeiter , August 1, 1902, Adorf. For references to other unions' discussion of terms such as "the commodity of labor power," see Dlubek, op. cit., p. 41.

[136] Der Textil-Arbeiter , November 4, 1904, "Produktion." The "free" unions' newspapers referred to the extraction of unpaid labor time and described the profits of companies as "surplus value." Fach-Zeitung , July 16, 1899, Krefeld; Der Textil-Arbeiter , October 8, 1909, Bautzen.

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

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

The Practical Foundations for the Reception of Ideology

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

[137] Der Textil-Arbeiter , April 26, 1901, p. 1.

[138] Der Textil-Arbeiter , April 5, 1901. A representative to the textile workers' national conference in 1891 reported that some workers were shying away from the textile labor market but conveyed this by saying that workers were "witholding their commodity of labor power from the market." Deutscher Textilarbeiterverband, Protokoll des ersten deutschen Textilarbeiter-Kongresses (Berlin: Deutscher Textilarbeiterverband, n.d.), p. 46. For parallel expressions, see Der Textil-Arbeiter , April 23, 1909, Aachen. In their discussion of women's labor, the papers likewise objectified the "labor power" as a thing apart from its owner. The organ of the union of German workers' associations reduced female workers to "bearers of purchased labor power." Demokratisches Wochenblatt , January 2, 1869, p. 6. "Capital," said the Textil-Arbeiter , "has in the labor power of the woman found a choice object of exploitation [Ausbeutungsobjekt ]." Sept. 6, 1901.

[139] Verband Deutscher Textilarbeiter, "Die Sklaven des Jute-Kapitals, Protokoll," Jutearbeiter-Konferenz Braunschweig, Oct. 7, 1906, pp. 8–9, Archiv des Freien Deutschen Gewerkschaftsbundes, Berlin.

[140] For an example of a metal worker referring specifically to the appropriation of "labor power," see Levenstein, op. cit., p. 108.

a difference in the supply and dissemination of ideas? Marx's initial volume of Kapital appeared in Germany in 1867, but did not appear in English until the journal To-day , under Hyndman's editorship, began to serialize it in 1885. Kapital lacked an English translation in one volume until the publication of Engels's edition in 1887.^[141] As is well known, Marx remained in contact with key intellectuals of the German labor movement during his long exile in Britain.^[142] Perhaps his ideas triumphed in Germany due to their more vigorous propagation by this intellectual elite, which was in place before the trade union movement took off in Germany. Is it possible that the difference in outcomes had little to do with the cultural horizon of the workers but resulted from differences in the trade union elites and publishing organizations responsible for diffusing ideas?

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

[141] Tsuzuki, op. cit., p. 60. Apart from stray copies of pamphlets issued by the First International, none of Marx's works were available in English in full until James L. Joynes's edition of Wage-Labour and Capital (London: The Modern Press, 1886) appeared. On the introduction of translations of Marx's works, see also Torr, op. cit., p. 326; Collins, op. cit., p. 59.

[142] Georg Adler, Die Geschichte der ersten sozialpolitischen Arbeiterbewegung in Deutschland (Frankfurt am Main: Sauer & Auvermann, 1966 [1885]), pp. 299–300. Yet Marx also had an extensive network of contacts with British trade unionists. See Henry Collins and Chimen Abramsky, Karl Marx and the British Labour Movement (London: Macmillan & Co., 1965), especially pp. 93 ff.

[143] As Eric Hobsbawm has put it, "Marxism—or at all events some sort of simplified version of marxism—was the first kind of socialism to reach Britain during the revival of the 1880s, the one most persistently propagated by devoted pioneers at a thousand street corners, and the one most persistently and ubiquitously taught at a thousand classes run by socialist organizations, labour colleges or freelance lectures." E. J. Hobsbawm, "Karl Marx and the British Labour Movement," in his Revolutionaries: Contemporary Essays (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1973), p. 105. For an extensive list of sources of testimony by British socialists about their engagement with Marxian economic literature, consult Duncan Tanner, "Ideological Debate in Edwardian Labour Politics: Radicalism, Revisionism and Socialism," in Eugenio F. Biagini and Alastair J. Reid, editors, Currents of Radicalism: Popular Radicalism, Organised Labour and Party Politics in Britain, 1850–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), p. 280. On the influence of professed Marxists in Yorkshire, see Tom Mann, Tom Mann's Memoirs (London: Labour Publishing Company, 1923), pp. 39 ff., 129; for the role of other Marxists in Yorkshire see Bernard Barker, "Anatomy of Reformism: The Social and Political Ideas of the Labour Leadership in Yorkshire," International Review of Social History Volume 18, Part 1 (1973), p. 8, and Laybourn, op. cit., p. 234. For the availability ofMarxist economic theory in Britain generally, see Pierson, op. cit., pp. 28, 255; Eric Hobsbawm, editor, Labour's Turning Point 1880–1900 (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1948), pp. 23, 41; Hinton, op. cit., p. 94; E. P. Thompson, William Morris: Romantic to Revolutionary (New York: Pantheon Books, 1976), pp. 332–333.

speech in Burnley in 1893, William Morris rebutted this attack upon the introduction of ideas from abroad, asserting, "It was said that Socialism was a German import. It was nothing the worse for that. And Socialism is English now."^[144] If, as Morris insisted, British workers gave socialist theory a native hue, much of the materials they used came from Germany. Some members of the Social Democratic Federation and founders of the Labour Party, such as the trade unionist Jem Macdonald, said they received the ideas of Kapital from European acquaintances, including German artisans. "When Das Kapital appeared in English," Macdonald later wrote," it was to me as a book that I had read over and over again."^[145] Tom Maguire, who said he had studied Marx intensively, organized for the Socialist League in Leeds after 1884. Many of the leaders of the Independent Labour Party in the textile districts of the north, including Margaret McMillan, an elected member of the Bradford school board, boasted that they had studied Kapital.^[146] Tom Mann used Wage Labour and Capital as his basic text for the socialist economics course he gave in Bolton in 1888.^[147] In Burnley, Lancashire, which had a long tradition of open-minded debate in workers' clubs, skeptical liberals pressed the socialists to demonstrate the feasibility of their blueprints for the future. The local socialists responded in 1894 that they believed, not in the discredited Owen, but in Marx.^[148] The letters from many Burnley workers published in the Burnley Gazette during the 1890s cite the descriptive portions of Marx's Kapital , though not segments defining the transmission of labor in the form of a commodity.^[149] In sum, Marxist economic analysis was both well-represented in Britain and, in predictable ways, misunderstood.^[150]

[144] Socialist and N. E. Lancashire Labour News , December 15, 1893, p. 5. For a similar comment from Tom Mann, see Trodd, op. cit., pp. 328–329.

[145] Torr, op. cit., p. 183. See also Collins and Abramsky, op. cit., p. 303; Hinton, op. cit., p. 53.

[146] Keighley ILP Journal , December 30, 1894. On McMillan's election and tenure, see Laybourn, op. cit., p. 226.

[147] Torr, op. cit., p. 253. But compare his understanding of workers' retention of "the full fruits of their labor" in Chushichi Tsuzuki, Tom Mann, 1856–1941 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), p. 146 Eleanor Marx also spoke at socialist meetings in Bolton. Neil Duffield, "Bolton Socialist Club," Bolton People's History Volume 1 (March 1984), p. 3.

[148] Burnley Express and Advertiser , January 24, 1894.

[149] Burnley Gazette , e.g., August 5, 1893, and April 11, 1894.

[150] The work that faithfully presented Marx's theory of exploitation in Britain was written by Edward Aveling, translator of Kapital. See Edward Aveling, The Students' Marx: An Introduction to the Study of Karl Marx' "Capital" (London: Swan Sonnenschein & Co., 1907), p. 46.

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

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

[151] Frolinde Balser, Sozial-Demokratie 1848/49–1863 , Volume One (Stuttgart: Ernst Klett Verlag, 1962), pp. 211, 233.

[152] Adler, op. cit., p. 299. The founding congress of the General German Workers' Association took place in 1863 in Leipzig.

[153] Bebel, op. cit., pp. 49–50. For Bebel's assessment of the lack of continuity in socialist ideas between the 1848 revolution and the 1860s in the German labor movement at large, see August Bebel, Gewerkschafts-Bewegung und politische Parteien (Stuttgart: J. H. W. Dietz, 1900), p. 8.

[154] Stephan, op. cit., p. 199; Dlubek and Skambraks, op. cit., p. 34.

[155] The works of Marx, according to Bebel, were not known in the Social Democratic Party until the end of the 1860s. August Bebel, Aus meinem Leben , op. cit., pp. 131 ff.

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

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

[156] Quoted in Clements, op. cit., pp. 93–104.

[157] H. A. Turner, Trade Union Growth Structure and Policy (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1962), pp. 175–178. Local textile unions for factory workers founded earlier in the century disbanded shortly after the conclusion of the strike movements to which they owed their birth. E. E. Dodd, Bingley: A Yorkshire Town Through Nine Centuries (Bingley: T. Harrison & Sons, 1958), p. 164; Sheila Lewenhak, Women and Trade Unions (London: Ernest Benn, 1977), pp. 86, 92. See also Chapter One, footnote 26.

[158] Even contemporaries noticed the parallels in the timing and political sponsorship of unionization between Yorkshire and Germany. Joyce, Work, Society and Politics , op. cit., pp. 76, 226.

[159] The Weavers' and Textile Workers' Association sponsored meetings for willeyers, fettlers, rag grinders, and packers. Yorkshire Factory Times , March 17, 1993, p. 5. In some towns, workers in dyeing, combing, and finishing shops maintained their own craft unions, however. Joanna Bornat, "An Examination of the General Union of Textile Workers 1883–1922," Ph.D. diss., University of Essex, 1981, p. 8. These small societies did not form regional craft associations, but survived as local clubs. Laybourn, "The Attitude," op. cit., p. 140.

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

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

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

[160] In Germany only a few local societies, such as the relatively short-lived Weavers' Association of the Lower Rhine, centered in Krefeld, limited membership by textile occupation. On the exclusion of auxiliary cloth workers from that union, see Kreisarchiv Kempen, Stadt Lobberich, 1444, August 22, 1899. See also Chapter One, note 27.

[161] Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Marx-Engels Werke , Volume 6 (Berlin: Dietz Verlag, 1961), p. 594 The article by Engels is entitled "Einleitung zu Karl Marx Lohnarbeit und Kapital , Ausgabe 1891."

[162] Yorkshire Factory Times , January 3, 1908; Yorkshire Textile Workers' Deputation, Official Report of the Yorkshire Textile Workers' Deputation: An Enquiry into the Conditions of the German Woollen Cloth Operatives (Batley: News Office, 1908).

[163] In 1910, the Christian textile workers' union counted more than 32,000 members and the "free" German textile workers' union more than 113,000 members. Deutscher Textilarbeiterverband, Jahrbuch des deutschen Textilarbeiterverbandes, 1910 (Berlin: Karl Hübsch, 1911), and Zentralverband Christlicher Textilarbeiter Deutschlands, "Geschäftsbericht," 1908–1910, Archiv der Gewerkschaft Textil-Bekleidung, Düsseldorf.

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

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

[164] The flavor of the Christian movement can be appreciated from a speech a secretary, Johann Giesberts, gave before a meeting of nine hundred textile workers in Mönchengladbach in 1898. "The Christian workers demand only an adequate existence, and if one grants them this, then their will to labor and conscientiousness, of which the employer will have the use, will grow." HSTAD, Präsidialbüro 1272, p. 40.

[165] Der Christliche Textilarbeiter , February 24, 1900.

[166] Workers, Der Christliche Textilarbeiter stated, "own just a single commodity, namely their labor power." December 16, 1899, Mörs. Of course, some Christian commentators insisted that labor could never truly become a commodity, but when they discussed its treatment as such, they defined it as the sale of labor power. See the discussion of this doctrine in Die Textilarbeiter-Zeitung , January 11, 1908. Even if Christian organizers accepted the labor contract as a worthy mechanism for regulating social relations, they threw a worried glance back at the feudal commitment of the whole individual, just as German economists had. For example, in its delineation of the sale of labor, the Christlicher Arbeiterfreund showed that it could take nothing for granted: "The personage [of the worker] with all its intellectual and physical capabilities," it concluded, "is the inviolable property of the worker." Christlicher Arbeiterfreund , May 27, 1898.

[167] Der Christliche Textilarbeiter , June 30, 1900, emphasis added.

[168] Ibid. Emphasis added.

[169] Die Textilarbeiter-Zeitung , July 28, 1900, Borken. The Christians' emphasis on the creative power of human labor nonetheless led them to radical critiques of the profit accruing to owners of capital. "The Christian unions are an enemy of the false economy based oncapital," said one leader at a textile union meeting in Rheine in 1904. Speech by Herr Pesch of Krefeld, cited in Staatsarchiv Münster, Kreis Steinfurt, 1116, February 1, 1904.

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

In part, of course, the Catholic movement consciously distanced itself from the prevailing discourse of political economy in Germany, for both the established bourgeois economists and those of the Social Democratic movement accepted the commodification of everyday life and of labor as accomplished facts. Catholic intellectuals, by contrast, remained uncomfortable with these premises and developed an alternative discursive tradition based on the contributions to the social whole of organically related "estates." Yet when elite speakers for the Catholic labor unions reflected upon the essentials of the capitalist labor transaction, they, too, adopted the view that labor was sold in the form of labor power.^[171] Even when they rejected the world view of socialist and bourgeois economics, their social experience lent them much the same specification of labor as a commodity as circulated among their ideological opponents.

Practical Analyses of Exploitation

The contrasting forms of signifying practice in the workplace did not only support contrasts in the formal ideologies of exploitation; they correlated as

[170] Eric Dorn Brose, Christian Labor and the Politics of Frustration in Imperial Germany (Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 1985), Chapter One and pp. 146, 148; Jonathan Sperber, Popular Catholicism in Nineteenth-Century Germany (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), pp. 296–297.

[171] "Through the labor contract the entrepreneur receives likewise a certain sway over the person of the worker . .. over the expenditure of his physical and intellectual powers." Heinrich Brauns, "Die Notwendigkeit der Gewerkschaften," in his Katholische Sozialpolitik im 20. Jahrhundert: Ausgewählte Aufsätze und Reden von Heinrich Brauns , edited by Hubert Mockenhaupt (Mainz: Matthias-Grünewald-Verlag, 1976), p. 12.

well with differences in workers' impromptu articulation of complaints about exploitation on the shop floor. Contrasts in the workers' immediate apperception of exploitation appeared in weavers' responses to fines imposed for fabric that the employers alleged to be defective, one of the problems about which workers complained most frequently. The British workers analyzed the amounts of the fines assessed in terms of the market cost of repairing the defect in the finished product. "3d per yard is deducted for ends down," the Yorkshire Factory Times reported of one mill. By the newspaper's reckoning, this totaled "three times more than it costs to sew them in."^[172] In its account of a fine imposed on a woman weaver from Batley, the newspaper claimed that the cloth checker "had fined her 4s 6d for a damage that could be mended in three hours, and that would not cause the piece to be sold for any less in the market."^[173]

The British weavers viewed fining as a violation of the rules of fair exchange of finished products in the market. "I think it is a burning shame," wrote a correspondent for the Yorkshire Factory Times , "that employers cannot be satisfied with the profit they make at market out of the goods they manufacture without taking a portion of an employee's hard-earned money from him to further swell their coffers."^[174] Comments such as this rested on the idea that exchanges in the market, not labor alone, generated ordinary profits. The fine constituted a separate, unusual means of making a profit from labor. The Yorkshire Factory Times expressed a female weaver's view that fining comprised a kind of additional profit for the employer this way: "The masters smoke a tremendous lot of four-penny cigars, and the two piece wages [fines] last week were for cigars."^[175]

Given the British weavers' treatment of fining as a deviation from the rules of fair market exchange, the solutions they proposed ought not to occasion surprise. First, they insisted that textile workers on piece rates be treated as contractors who delivered a product. "They are piece workers," the Yorkshire Factory Times claimed, and therefore "by law" could not be

[172] Yorkshire Factory Times , October 31, 1890, Shipley.

[173] Yorkshire Factory Times , January 2, 1891, Batley. For other examples of such comparisons, see January 17, 1890, Halifax, and July 10, 1891.

[174] This writer contended that fining was "nothing better than second-hand pocket picking." Yorkshire Factory Times , April 29, 1892, Bingley. This reliance on reasoning about the sale of finished products in the market became evident in other contexts as well. British workers articulated the right of women workers to equal pay with men on the ground that the finished products were indistinguishable: "When a manufacturer sells a piece he does not tell the merchant that it has been woven by a woman." Yorkshire Factory Times , September 25, 1891, p. 4.

[175] Yorkshire Factory Times , April 4, 1890, Bingley.

fined simply for violating the mill's standards for cloth.^[176] By the workers' reasoning, if the employer wanted to fine them for bad cloth he had to prosecute them as he would a contractor who delivered a defective product. The British weavers' opposition to any form of fining for spoiled work led them to resist institutions that would regulate the fining system. For example, Parliament in 1896 passed a factory act that required employers to post a notice about all forms of fines to which employees at the site were subject. This legislation would have protected weavers by requiring employers to standardize the penalties imposed for each kind of defect. Yet the weavers' unions lobbied to have Parliament exempt textiles from the act's provisions—they preferred to suffer fining without safeguards than to recognize the legitimacy of the practice.^[177]

In contrast to the British weavers, who held up an ideal of the exchange of products in the market as a way of assessing the injustice of fines, German weavers included fines for purportedly flawed cloth in a list of more general abuses. They saw the imposition of fines as another expression of the owners' disposition over their labor. "Fines are always the order of the day," declared a union speaker at a shop meeting in Württemberg. "The workers at this firm are fined twice, for actually it is already a punishment if someone has to work at a plant with this kind of poor ventilation."^[178] This complainant drew a parallel between two grievances: just as submission to unhealthy air represented a kind of exploitation that resulted from the employers' domination of the production process, so did the payment of a fine. That is, German workers treated fines as just another strategy by which the owner could use his authority over the workplace to extract unpaid labor. They called the fines "pay deductions" (Lohnabzüge) , the phrase that referred to any lowering in the pay scale or in the amount workers actually earned.^[179]

[176] Yorkshire Factory Times , January 13, 1893.

[177] Cotton Factory Times , April 8, 1904, "'Reasonable' Fines." The M. P. from Darwen, speaking in 1896 for the textile workers, said, "The operatives wished to do away with fines altogether; and they objected to this Bill which recognises and regulated fines." See speech by John Rutherford in United Kingdom, Parliamentary Debates , Series Four, Volume 43, 1896, July 17—August 6, pp. 767–770.

[178] This is the union's report of the address. Der Textil-Arbeiter , August 4, 1911.

[179] See almost any issue of Der Textil-Arbeiter —for example, May 2, 1902, Ostritz; May 9, 1902, Rendsburg; May 16, 1902, Elsterberg. The widespread practice of offering workers a bonus for cloth of perfect quality, which could be withheld in its entirety for any faults, also discouraged German workers from adopting market-based criticisms like those of their British counterparts. Under the German bonus system, whether the piece had one fault or many, the worker suffered the same loss. The withholding of the gratuity, which represented a substan-tial loss, departed from the idea that the cloth had a determinant "market value" from which the fine constituted a deduction. Der Textil-Arbeiter , April 30, 1909, Bocholt; July 6, 1909, Oelsnitz; March 6, 1914, p. 79.

In contrast to the British workers' refusal to bargain over fines for allegedly spoiled work, German workers at some mills formed committees to negotiate with the owners on this issue.^[180] They also composed lists specifying how much weavers ought to be fined for each defect and included such charts among their strike demands. This difference between German and British reactions to fining cannot be dismissed by assuming that German textile workers were invariably more cooperative than their British counterparts. As we have seen, the German workers pressed ambitious demands concerning many facets of mill life.^[181] The example of fining shows that the contrasting "theories" of the labor transaction hidden in the disciplinary regime of German and British factories generated their counterpoints in

[180] Der Textil-Arbeiter , March 31, 1911, Peilau-Eulengebirges; February 27, 1914, Langenbielau.

[181] British workers' attention to the sale of their labor as product in a market exchange showed up in another complaint as well. Table 2, above, Chapter 4, which compares the distribution of complaints from weavers, shows that British weavers distinguished themselves from their German counterparts by focusing on mispayments for delivered pieces. Nearly 5 percent of complaints (42) from the British sample for weavers concerned the deceptive measuring of fabric, making it the fourth most frequent complaint. This grievance arose under two conditions: when company clerks paid the weaver for a shorter length of cloth than the weaver actually manufactured, and when the weaver received credit for fewer picks per inch than he or she had executed. Under 2 percent of complaints (16) from the German sample concerned the mismeasurement of pieces, making it only the eleventh most frequent complaint. Yet the deception in those cases that came to light in Germany was egregious (Staatsarchiv Münster, Kreis Steinfurt, 1116, January 19, 1904, Rheine; HSTAD, Regierung Düsseldorf, 25029, p. 2, for 1906; Der Textil-Arbeiter , May 30, 1902, Elsterberg). Academic writers described the mismeasurement of cloth as a fact of life in Germany; they arrived at averages for the rate at which owners shortchanged weavers in whole districts. Karl Schmid, Die Entwicklung der Hofer Baumwoll-Industrie 1432–1913 (Leipzig: A. Deichertsche Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1923), p. 76.

Whether this difference in the salience of mismeasuring resulted purely from workers' interpretations of similar settings or whether it was determined partly by the honesty of German employers, I am unable to say. The outcome, however, was consistent with the difference in the ways workers defined the commodity of labor in the two countries. Complaints about the false measurement of pieces originated in the era when handloom weavers sold their goods to putters-out. This grievance centered on whether the employer, as a kind of merchant, was obeying the rules of fair market exchange for finished goods. The Yorkshire Factory Times , in its appeals for workers to change factory conditions, placed a fair market at the center of its vision. It declared in 1891, "The textile industry in Yorkshire can be raised from commercial depravity, as at present, to commercial honesty." Yorkshire Factory Times , March 27, 1891, Pudsey. As with the theme of fining, so with measuring: the British textile workers formulated their responses by focusing on deviations from the ideal of equitable trades of products in the market.

workers' formulation of grievances: in each country, workers relied upon a corresponding theory of exploitation to criticize capitalist practice. When the concrete procedures of everyday manufacture "directly possess the naked and abstract form of the commodity," then workers are in immediate possession of economic theory.^[182]

The pervasive effect of the contrasting theories of the hiring of labor also emerged when German and British textile workers attempted to reach industrial bargains with their employers. In Lancashire representatives of the spinners' unions proposed that workers be paid according to piece-rate scales that would fluctuate to allow employers a stipulated percentage of return on their invested capital. For example, at a meeting in 1900 with the Federation of Master Cotton Spinners' Associations, the operatives said they preferred that "wages be adjusted on a net margin allowing for the fluctuations in the prices of cotton, coal, etc."^[183] The workers suggested that negotiators agree on the average capital invested in a spinning factory per spindle, figure the cost of depreciation, grant the owners a shifting allowance for working capital, and then assign a rate of return. The "net margin" between all these sums and the proceeds from disposing of the finished product in the market would provide workers with their wages fund. The representatives of the employers acceded to the workers' idea, provided that owners receive at least a 5 percent rate of return. According to the workers' research, for yarn of standard fineness mill owners needed a profit on average of one farthing per pound of cotton spun in order to realize an annual return of over 5 percent on investment.^[184]

More important than the figures, perhaps, are the principles they illustrate. The conduct of the negotiations shows that both the workers and the employers conceived of the factory proprietor as an investor in the marketplace rather than as a manager of labor power.^[185] For if the selling prices of the finished product were far above the cost of production, the owners were not entitled to reap the benefit of efficiently converting the raw materials

[182] Georg Lukács, "Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat," in his History and Class Consciousness (Cambridge, Massachusetts: The M.I.T. Press, 1971), p. 172.

[183] Goldsmiths' Library, University of London, Federation of Master Cotton Spinners' Associations, Report of Negotiations 1899–1900 , p. 16.

[184] The Leader , March 22, 1901, "Textile Tattle."

[185] Language itself could betray the understanding of profit as the reward of trade: "The manufacturer feels that if he lays out capital on improved machinery, or supplies extra good material, and thus enables his workpeople to produce more in a given time, he ought to get a trading profit." John Watts, "Essay on Strikes," British Association for the Advancement of Science: The Workman's Bane and Antidote (Manchester: A. Ireland, 1861), p. 7.

and labor power into a completed ware. Like bankers, they received only interest on investment. The workers, conversely, were not selling a resource, labor power, which had a fixed market value prior to being converted to a product. Rather, the operatives handed their labor over as if they were traders in products, who paid a rent on the mill, purchased supplies, and then delivered yarn at its current market appraisal. In the event, workers and employers could not reach agreement on the average capital invested per spindle and on the grade of yarn to take as a standard, but they did not fail for lack of effort. The spinning employers and their operatives sought for more than a dozen years to reach an accord on the "net margin" principle.^[186] To certify actual expenditures, mill owners offered to open their accounting books to the workers' inspection.^[187] Weavers, too, negotiated for piece rates by "net margin."^[188] The complications of putting the workers' "net margin" proposal into effect were so daunting that only well-established assumptions about the nature of the labor transaction could have kept employers and spinning operatives engaged with the idea for so long.

Although the "net margin" proposal legitimated the mill owners' rates of return, British workers in many industries were ready to let their wages fluctuate according to the selling price of their product because this index seemed to eliminate the most odious form of profit-taking, that appropriated by the "middleman" in the market for finished wares.^[189] In the coal trade, the miners at Newcastle declared as early as 1831 that they wanted to peg their earnings to product markets. "The Men and Boys are willing to abide the Risk of Fluctuations of the Coal Trade," their handbill declared.^[190] The miners' response showed, of course, that they saw their labor as a commodity and imagined the organization of work as a market relation. But their reaction did not entirely accept the commercial system, for it resisted

[186] Textile Mercury , January 15, 1910, p. 43. Card room workers were included in the plans. Burnley Gazette , Nov. 14, 1908, p. 3.

[187] Federation of Master Cotton Spinners' Associations, op. cit., p. 18. The negotiations failed in part because the employers themselves still lacked an adequate method for determining the cost of depreciation. M. W. Kirby, "The Lancashire Cotton Industry in the Inter-War Years," Business History (July 1974), p. 153.

[188] Nelson Chronicle , March 29, 1901, p. 4; Burnley Gazette , Nov. 14, 1908, p. 3.

[189] Sometimes the operative spinners seemed to view speculators in the product markets, not the employers, as the real exploiters. Mawdsley, the Lancashire spinners' leader, attacked the "middlemen bloodsuckers" who took the profit out of the cotton industry. Joyce, Visions of the People , op. cit., p. 120. Likewise, weavers sometimes blamed merchants, not employers, for low wages. Bradford Observer , January 25, 1894, Shipley.

[190] James Jaffe, The Struggle for Market Power: Industrial Relations in the British Coal Industry, 1800–1840 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), p. 115. The miners believed that unmanipulated trade in products would break the power of their employers.

the middleman predator. Near the turn of the century, the president of the miners' federation in Leicester endorsed sliding scales with a similar line of reasoning: "The giving away of value to middlemen," he said, "should not determine the rate of wages."^[191] In Germany the initiative for pegging wages to the selling prices of products came only after the First World War, and then not from workers but from employers, who adopted it to cope with the country's runaway inflation.^[192]

The Labor Process as an Anchor for Culture

The flow of ideas between German and British analysts of the exploitation of labor confirms the persistence of fundamental differences in the nationally prevalent concepts of labor. Cross-cultural exchange did not soften the contrasts in definitions of labor as a commodity, but, rather, demonstrated their rigidity. If a correspondence emerged in each country between the labor movement's concept of labor as a commodity and the definition of labor incorporated into manufacturing procedures, how can we ascertain that the production process served as the original source of these concepts? Is it not possible that the political and union movements acted as a precursory cradle of ideas that in turn shaped the institutionalization of factory practices?

In the case of Germany we can confirm that the conceptions of labor were lodged in the production process before they circulated in a trade union movement or in workers' political parties. The inscription of concepts of labor on the piece-rate scales, on the rules of employment, and on the measurement of time for factories was in place by the 1860s, before substantial numbers of workers had enrolled in the labor or political movements and, more particularly, before the dissemination of Marxist economic theory. The movements of artisanal workers that flowered during the revolution of 1848–1849 in Germany were suppressed and disabled in the 1850s.^[193] When the labor movement began to take shape again in the 1860s, it engaged a tiny segment of workers incapable of changing the face of mechanization. The process of industrialization, considered in terms of quantity of output, was at this time far from complete. In qualitative terms, however, the transformation was well under way, for the installation in the factory of the cultural

[191] Bradford Labour Echo , Jan. 9, 1897.

[192] Der Textil-Arbeiter , April 23, 1920; March 10, 1922, p. 37.

[193] Adler, op. cit., pp. 297–298.

concept of labor that would govern production was in large measure accomplished.^[194]

In Britain the distinctive procedures by which textile factory employers received materialized labor—the accounting methods, techniques of remuneration, and factory layouts—coincided with the development of early socialism and the labor organizing of the 1820s and 1830s. In this instance we cannot exclude the possibility that the philosophies of commerce in the insurgent workers' movements contributed to consistencies in the shape of factory practice. But we have also seen that the stereotypical understanding of labor as a ware in Britain had been articulated by elite economists in the second half of the eighteenth century and had already been experienced in the practices of the handweavers.^[195] Theories of value and exchange in the original socialist movement of the first half of the nineteenth century replicated and sometimes actively drew upon this antecedent intellectual and industrial heritage. In the British case, then, the early labor movement may have served as a momentary transmitter of ideas put into practice on the factory shop floor, but not as their originator.

Even if the cultural formation of manufacture was established before the labor movements developed their own economic outlooks, another question remains. Once manufacturing procedures are in place, if workers inventively call upon the resources of their culture as a whole to construct their experience of production, there is no original source or ultimate center to that experience. By this reasoning, the discursive resources deployed in civic politics, religion, family networks, or other contexts may also intervene firsthand in workers' (and employers') understanding of life at the point of production. On these grounds, cultural analysts of labor who emphasize the role of discourse in constituting workers' experience of production have

[194] Similarly, the timing of the emergence of the German specification of labor as a commodity makes it implausible to view the state as its critical shaper. Even in Germany, where government supervision of the workplace became strongest, the state did not assume an active role in overseeing industrial relations for adult workers until after the crystallization of the distinctive German forms of work practice and of the correlative understanding of labor as a commodity in the German labor movement. For example, Prussia did not mandate inspections of factory sites until 1878. Günther Schulz effectively discloses the state's nonintervention on the shop floor in "Die betriebliche Lage der Arbeiter im Rheinland vom 19. bis zum beginnenden 20. Jahrhundert," Rheinische Vierteljahrsblätter Jahrgang 50 (1986), p. 175.

[195] To the extent that the workers' movements of the 1820s drew upon a preceding ideology of British protest movements, it was that of a political radicalism which had much to say about the construction of political relations among citizens but very little to say about the construction of production relations between workers and employers. The practices of the factory system were structured by concepts of production more precise than those to be found in the political discourse of the eighteenth-century British radicals and republicans.

effected a decisive shift in the agenda that guides research in social history. Not only have they removed the institutions of the workplace from their pride of place as the original generator of workers' experience; they have discounted as tunnel vision the attempt to trace determinate connections between the structure of work and the development of workers' economic or political outlook.^[196] In so doing, they take two steps backward. By treating the dissection of the structure of political ideas as a self-sufficient enterprise, they return to old-fashioned intellectual history. But if we drop the supposition that the economic base dictates an ideological superstructure—resorting for the sake of exposition to this anachronistic vocabulary—the workplace can still play a central role in the generation of experience and in the reception of ideologies.^[197] We may grant to the signifying practices of the labor process (rather than to the economic and technological conditions of production) an unwavering influence upon the development of collective movements and political organizations.^[198]

Further, the uncanny stability in the understanding of the transmission of labor despite profound shifts in other aspects of public discourse indicates that this understanding was rooted in an immediate and unchanging experience, that is, in the exposure to labor's conveyance at the work site. The course of development in nineteenth-century German and British industry suggests that ideas which are incorporated into and reproduced through forms of manufacturing practice have greater permanence than those that float in the realm of civic politics. In Britain in particular the idioms of politics, religion, education, and domestic culture underwent significant change between the start of industrialization and 1914.^[199] Yet in cross-

[196] Tony Judt, Marxism and the French Left (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986), p. 27 note. "Marxists and anti-marxists alike are going to have to abandon their anachronistic obsession with the workplace and the shop-floor," Tony Judt has written, "with everything described in terms of its effect upon or as the result of work relations or work-related attitudes" (p. 114). Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, who emphasize the constitutive power of discourse, have put the conclusion in simple form: "There is no logical connection whatsoever between positions in the relations of production and the mentality of the producers." Hegemony and Socialist Strategy (London: Verso, 1985), pp. 84–85.

[197] My approach differs from that of labor historians of Britain who emphasize that radical political economy "revealed the fractured reality of social relations in production." The cultural shape of practice, not the structural features of the social organization of production, provided the template for workers' formulations of exploitation by "middlemen." Richard Price, "Structures of Subordination in Nineteenth-Century British Industry," in Pat Thane et al., editors, The Power of the Past (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), p. 123.

[198] Laclau and Mouffe, op. cit., p. 77.

[199] For a sketch of religious fluidity, see Hugh McLeod, Class and Religion in the Late Victorian City (London: Croom Helm, 1974), p. 283. Gareth Stedman Jones discusses changesin domestic and neighborhood culture, op. cit., pp. 217–218. The immobility of labor's specification as a commodity poses a challenge to alternative explanations of its foundation that would appeal to household or community structures subject to dramatic change.

national perspective the definition of labor as a commodity remained relatively fixed. It provided a stable point of reference that informed the diagnoses and prescriptions of the labor movement from the commencement of the nineteenth century and at its end. Upon the break-up of the early workers' movements in each country the distinctive appreciation of labor faded from the public sphere, only to resurface there, unchanged, because it had been preserved in the practices of production.

Ideas incarnated in a constellation of manufacturing techniques can be reproduced with less variance than ideas whose transmission depends principally upon discursive formulations. The definition of labor as a commodity was recreated day in, day out by a cluster of micro-procedures that did not require the producers to lend their attention to the meaning of labor in order to preserve its shape. The concept was received through experience rather than instruction; it was lived before it was turned to account. The specification of labor escaped those vagaries of constant reinterpretation and reappropriation to which verbal formulations are subject. Verbal formulations draw upon language's modulation of register, its interminable ability to inflect and ironize statements. These communicative resources discourage the stable transmission of concepts.^[200] Although the concepts of labor could be put into words for political and theoretic excursus, there was no need of words for their social reproduction. They survived through the arrangement of industrial practices and through the relative univocality of their material operation.^[201] Unlike the leading myths and narratives deployed in the realms of civic politics and religion, the manufacturing practices did not derive their power from their ability to act as a reservoir of multiple and potentially inconsistent meanings.

This chapter has not sought to explain workers' choices of conservative versus socialist parties. It does not account for marginal variation in rates of participation in the socialist movement by occupation or geographic region. Rather, with a cross-national perspective, it shows why ideologies of exploi-

[200] This comment draws upon Paul Connerton, How Societies Remember (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), p. 59.

[201] A new generation of cognitive scientists have begun to show that concepts are reproduced through their employment in limited and concrete settings. The experimental evidence disqualifies the alternative view that culture is transmitted through the agents' deliberate, formal acquisition of a set of general principles that can be applied across contexts. Jean Lave, Cognition in Practice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), p. 43.

tation were apt to take a certain shape among those workers who affiliated themselves with a socialist movement. In none of the domains outside work could practice have so vividly incarnated differing forms of labor as a commodity. As a cultural apparatus the workplace seemed to uphold, without perturbation, a specification of labor as a commodity despite tremendous change in workers' educational, religious, and electoral experiences.

10—
The Guiding Forms of Collective Action

Meaning is not decreed: if it is not everywhere, it is nowhere.
Claude Lévi-Strauss, Totemism

Strikes have entered sociologists' imagination as if they were events prefabricated for numerical analysis. They seem to present themselves with ready-made dimensions such as number of participants, duration, and frequency. Yet before strikes can be enumerated, they must be identified, and doing so requires that one define the cessation of the transfer of labor. In every society labor and its exchange are conceived before they are perceived. Accordingly, the occurrence of labor stoppage, like the transmission of the social force called labor , takes place in the imagination of the agents themselves.

In The Rise of Market Culture , William Reddy compellingly demonstrated the symbolic constitution of strikes in early nineteenth-century France. The operative principles of culture become visible only by descending to the particulars of practice. Consider one of Reddy's examples. In 1839 the employer at a spinning mill near Rouen asked his workers to pay for illuminating oil so he could extend the hours of manufacture into the evening. The operatives consigned themselves to the prolongation of work but rejected the surcharge for lighting. They made no concerted effort to abstain from labor, but at starting time each morning they mounted a demonstration against the new exaction for oil, causing the insulted owner to shut them out day by day afresh. "They were ready to work, they wanted to work; 28 centimes per kilogram of yarn was acceptable to them," Reddy concludes. "This was not a strike, so much as a state of refusal to pay for oil that resulted each morning in a new closing of the mill."^[1] Attaching the term strike to the event may suit a blind statistical vision of such events, since the result , to be sure, was a labor stoppage of quantifiable dimensions. But the workers did not intend to withhold their

[1] William Reddy, The Rise of Market Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), p. 190.

labor in order to bring the employer to terms. French industrial workers of this era had not yet adopted the concept of the strike or coined a locution for it.^[2] For the investigator to label it as such results in an anachronistic generalization; it effaces the character of the event and falsely abstracts the human agency that created it.

The agents' cultural schema determines not only whether a strike is a conceivable course of action but the forms the strike could imaginably take. The meaning and constitution of strikes assumed their contrasting forms in late-nineteenth-century Germany and Britain in accordance with those of the commodity of labor. What were hallmarks of a strike in one country were extraneous in the next. The workers' understanding of the labor transaction shaped the goals of strikes, the means by which strikes were executed, and, indeed, whether workers' collective action could be classified as a strike at all.

Scripts on Stage and on Paper

The workers used their definition of labor as a commodity to orchestrate the unfolding of a work stoppage in space. When British workers had a grievance they wanted corrected, they typically filed out of their workrooms into the central mill yard, which served as a theater for their demonstration. The tactic was habitual, as the documentary sources as well as oral history collections in Britain show. Textile workers from both Yorkshire and Lancashire, asked in interviews what they did to correct a workplace problem, responded, "We went out to the mill yard."^[3] The workers in some instances transformed this action into a raucous assembly, singing and shouting slogans in the yard.^[4] For example, at Glossop, just southeast of Lancashire, the

[2] Ibid., p. 129. French urban journeymen of the time attached multiple meanings to the term faire grève , which eventually came to signal "strike" but as yet could include looking for new employment in general, apart from a campaign against a master employer. William Reddy, "Skeins, Scales, Discounts, Steam, and Other Objects of Crowd Justice in Early French Textile Mills," Comparative Studies in Society and History Volume 21, Number 1 (January 1979), pp. 205–206.

[3] Bradford Heritage Recording Unit; Dermot Healey's interview tape 667, pp. 11–12, Lancashire. Yorkshire Factory Times , November 22, 1889, Birstall; May 2, 1902, Dewsbury, p. 5; June 27, 1902, Broadfield mill; Sept. 25, 1903, Birstall, p. 5; February 8, 1912, M. Oldroyd & Sons; February 8, 1912, Dewsbury district, p. 4. Even youngsters knew the tactic: Yorkshire Factory Times , April 29, 1898, Dudley Hill. Blackburn Library Archives, M31, Nr. 5403, Blackburn Weavers' Minutes, August 16, 1865. An employer narrating the course of a strike told the Royal Commission on Labour that he had received no prior notice: "The first I was aware of was seeing all the workpeople out in the yard." PP 1892 XXXV, p. 93.

[4] Yorkshire Factory Times , January 10, 1902, Marsden.

weavers at one mill who filed into their yard delivered a message that merged rebellion and patriotic conformity when they commenced singing "Rule Britannia" as loudly as possible.^[5]

The British textile workers also imported community traditions of demonstration into the factory. At the end of the nineteenth century, textile workers in urban areas, especially women, still subjected miscreant supervisors to the proverbial ceremony of "rough music." At a mill in Bradford, for example, the female workers in 1893 condemned the advances of their overlooker by preparing an effigy of him. They banged on cans and shouted.^[6] In 1891 at Great Horton, near Bradford, weavers who were "members of the weaker sex" jeered and hissed on the shop floor at a team of new overlookers with whom they were supposed to work. When the overlookers informed the employer of the rude distractions, he locked the women out and closed the mill.^[7] To put an unpopular overlooker in his place, workers at another mill in Bradford in 1890 formed a procession on the factory grounds, playing on tin kettles and a ram's horn.^[8] In these instances, workers drew upon repertoires of protest that had traditionally been used to censure those who transgressed community norms.

Textile strikes had long drawn upon community repertoires of mockery. In the Preston strikes of the 1850s, strikers who had turned out called upon itinerant musicians to stand opposite the mill and accompany their dances, which employers interpreted as a form of "ridicule and defiance."^[9] Even after the turn of the century, work boycotts could become an occasion for carnival merrymaking. At a village near Burnley, strikers in 1908 lent their

[5] Cotton Factory Times , December 3, 1886, Glossop. The very concept of a strike was imparted, not given automatically: one worker, after spending time in the mill, naively asked colleagues to explain what a strike was. Maggie Newberry, Reminiscences of a Bradford Mill Girl (Bradford: Local Studies Department, 1980), p. 49.

[6] Yorkshire Factory Times , December 15, 1893, p. 5. During the weavers' strike of 1912 in Blackburn, the female workers taunted strike breakers by carrying fireplace blowers on which they beat with pokers. Geoffrey Trodd, "Political Change and the Working Class in Blackburn and Burnley 1880–1914," Ph.D. diss., University of Lancaster, 1978, pp. 306–307.

[7] Yorkshire Factory Times , May 15, 1891, Great Horton, p. 8.

[8] Yorkshire Factory Times , June 27, 1890. At a mill in Halifax, the workers formed a circle around an unpopular overlooker at the mill gate and "hooted and hustled him." Yorkshire Factory Times , September 30, 1892, Halifax, p. 7. For an instance of rough music at an overlooker's house in Saltaire, see the Bradford Observer , June 29, 1894, Saltaire.

[9] Henry Ashworth, The Preston Strike: An Enquiry into Its Causes and Consequences (Manchester: George Simms, 1854), p. 13. For an example of a handloom weavers' strike during 1823 that drew upon the repertoire of festival wagons, see Frederick James Kaijage, "Labouring Barnsley, 1816–1856: A Social and Economic History," Ph.D. diss., University of Warwick, 1975, p. 320.

stoppage a festival atmosphere when a female participant "masqueraded in man's attire."^[10] In mockery of their owner, these revelers also paraded a pig in a cart through the town streets. With such opportunities for entertainment, an incident such as occurred at a Bradford mill in 1893 could only have been expected: officials of the textile workers' union, called to investigate the cause of the stoppage, claimed that many of the merrymakers demonstrating at the mill gate could not cite a grievance. The workers said they had "come out to have 'a little fun.'" The union officials said that "upon inquiry it turned out that few of the women really understood why they were on strike, many of them coming out as sympathizers with the first malcontents."^[11]

The British workers thought of their assemblies as a means of signaling their insistence upon bargaining, not just as a means of withdrawing labor. A newspaper account of a stoppage in the Colne Valley during 1891 makes plain the importance workers attached to turning the cessation of work into a visible gesture of disobedience. "The workmen were seen to be making their way to an open space close by their mill," the report stated," and when anything of this kind takes place all eyes are upon them in wonderment."^[12] At a mill in Apperley Bridge in 1893, the weavers were delighted to see that the head of the company "stood stock still when he saw all the weavers outside the mill gates."^[13]

The physical arrangement of the British mills often created a stage for workers' demonstrations. The central location of the yard in many mills ensured that a congregation there would be visible to workers and supervisors in every department of the factory. When not used as a site for protest, the mill yard was used by employers and public figures as a platform for addresses. In the Colne Valley, for example, politicians campaigning for

[10] Yorkshire Factory Times , February 21, 1908.

[11] Yorkshire Factory Times , June 9, 1893, p. 5. A winder from Bradford who began work during the First World War said of her first experience of a strike, "We had a nice bit of fun." Bradford Heritage Recording Unit, A0067, born 1904.

[12] Yorkshire Factory Times , July 10, 1891, Milnsbridge and Longwood. Then too, for workers who lacked the courage or know-how to initiate negotiations, assembling in the mill yard at the end of a morning or lunch break forced the owner or manager to inquire into the workers' complaints. At the town of Keighley in 1889, the spinners and doffers at one firm stayed out in the courtyard until the owner, not knowing what the matter was, went out to ask: "None of the older hands daring to say what they wanted, the least girl (a half-timer) spoke as follows: 'We want more wage.' 'Oh, that is it.' 'Aye, it is.' 'But tha' gets enough, doesn't ta.' 'I don't know, but mi' mother doesn't think so.'" Yorkshire Factory Times , September 20, 1889.

[13] Yorkshire Factory Times , June 9, 1893.

office used yards inside the mills as sites for public addresses to workers.^[14] A weaver from Yeadon, born in 1861, chose the mill yard as the setting in his autobiography in which to portray the turning point of his spiritual development. There he rejected a job offer from a shady music agent from London and threatened to heave a rock at the man.^[15] Well could the central yard, encircled by buildings as if by grandstands, serve as a stage for dramatic confrontation.

The surviving record of evidence in Germany does not easily yield instances before 1914 in which workers turned the mill yard into a theatrical arena for their protests.^[16] Yet many examples of conduct come forth that draw on an alternative symbolism: German workers stopped work at their looms and refused to continue until their grievances were corrected. At a weaving mill in Rheydt, for example, weavers stopped work for two days in 1909, but stayed in their shop rooms, to protest against what they viewed as a reduction in piece rates.^[17] The workers employed this tactic in Saxony, Bavaria, the Vogtland, the Rhineland, the Münsterland, and the Osnabrück district.^[18] Since the workers left whenever owners requested it, this conduct cannot be taken to represent an attempt to occupy the factory by means of a sit-down strike. A police report from the district of Burgsteinfurt said the

[14] Robert Brian Perks, "The New Liberalism and the Challenge of Labour in the West Riding of Yorkshire 1885–1914," Ph.D. diss., Huddersfield Polytechnic, 1985, p. 46.

[15] Raymond Preston, Life Story and Personal Reminiscences (London: Epworth Press, 1930), p. 27.

[16] One instance appears in which the workers moved to the mill yard to negotiate for a more liberal interpretation of the piece-rate categories after having stopped work in the workrooms the previous day. Staatsarchiv Osnabrück, Rep. 610, Lingen, Nr. 124, August 20, 1902, report on Neuenhaus, Lingen district. Similarly, an employer's journal complained about a congregation of strikers at a weaving yard in Zittau. Die Deutsche Arbeitgeber-Zeitung , Dec. 11, 1910. Such gatherings were not only uncommon in Germany but unrecognized among textile workers as a strategy of significance.

[17] HSTAD, Regierung Düsseldorf, 24702, October 10, 1909, p. 40. At one mill in Jöllenbeck, at the beginning of a strike in 1907 the female workers spent a day in the mill without working. They entered the workroom on the second day and sat at their machines until managers finally ordered them to leave. Staatsarchiv Detmold, I.U. Nr. 430, May 22, 1907.

[18] Der deutsche Leinenindustrielle , March 28, 1896, pp. 643–44; Stadtarchiv Steinfurt-Borghorst, B378, July 14, 1892 report; Staatsarchiv Osnabrück, Rep. 610, Lingen, Nr. 125, August 20, 1902; Staatsarchiv Münster, Kreis Steinfurt 1311, February 7, 1891, Werner & Cie; Staatsarchiv Detmold, I.U. Nr. 430, May 3, 1907; Gladbacher Merkur , March 21, 1899, Gebrüder Peltzer; Der Textil-Arbeiter , April 5, 1901, Chemnitz, workers called trespassers; April 25, 1902, Crimmitschau; January 29, 1909, Mittweida; Die Textilarbeiter-Zeitung , June 6, 1908, Lampertsmühle; February 3, 1900, Düren. Leipziger Volkszeitung , May 28, 1909, Plauen; Augsburger Abendzeitung , July 24, 1912; Der Christliche Textilarbeiter , March 10, 1900, Bocholt. For a temporary work stoppage of the same kind, see HSTAD, Regierung Aachen, 1633, p. 302.

inoperative workers had even left "obligingly."^[19] Workers sometimes used the sit-down technique after telling the owner that they did not intend to work. Therefore it was not a silent way of striking without verbal communication, nor a way of denying to authorities that a strike was in fact underway.^[20] Like their colleagues in Britain, many German workers remained skeptical of employers' claim to authority and were ready to mock it by pranks on the shop floor, such as falsely pulling emergency alarms.^[21] Starting a strike by sitting at the machine was not a sign of greater subordination to managerial directives. It simply exemplified the German workers' conception in this period of the stoppage of work.

The tactic of merely sitting at the machine did not represent a less active response than demonstrating in the yard, or one that required less coordination than marching in a body out of the factory. German workers who adopted the tactic of the "passive strike" showed a high degree of discipline. According to police records from Emsdetten, for example, the weavers who initiated a passive strike in 1904 stopped work at their looms "suddenly, according to an arranged signal."^[22] These protesters then sat in the workroom all day. A decade later, at another mill in the same town, the weavers repeated this tactic during the morning shift to protest against weft yarn of substandard quality. The owner eventually shut off the steam power and asked the weavers to leave the premises. When the weavers complied, they did not scatter. Having made their point, they had the discipline to return "punctually" to work in a body at the beginning of the afternoon shift.^[23] Details such as these indicate that German workers conducted well-orchestrated stoppages. But they hardly drew upon established techniques such as rough music, nor did they regularly mount protests that depended upon a visual display of disobedience in the yard. The German strikes emphasized the precise, timed withdrawal of labor. At some citywide work stoppages, all

[19] Staatsarchiv Münster, Kreis Steinfurt, 1311, February 7, 1891.

[20] Leipziger Volkszeitung , May 28, 1909, Plauen.

[21] Staatsarchiv Weimar, Landesregierung Greiz, n Rep. A, Kap. IX a, Nr. 207, 1885–1895, factory inspector reports, p. 108. Female workers ridiculed elections to the employer-organized factory committees by writing in votes for fictitious or mentally handicapped persons. Christliche Arbeiterin , June 16, 1906, Mönchengladbach. See Alf Lüdtke, "Cash, Coffee Breaks, Horseplay: Eigensinn and Politics Among Factory Workers in Germany Circa 1900," in Michael Hanagan and Charles Stephenson, editors, Confrontation, Class Consciousness, and the Labor Process (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1986).

[22] Stadtarchiv Emsdetten, Nr. 737, February 6, 1904. In some instances the initiators of such a strike agreed among themselves before they entered the workroom that they would file in but not work. HSTAD, Regierung Düsseldorf, 24691, January 20, 1899.

[23] Staatsarchiv Münster, Kreis Steinfurt, 1452, January 2, 1914, Emsdetten.

workers in town stopped their work at the same instant. "On May 10th, at nine o'clock in the morning," a factory inspector from Greiz reported, "the strike broke out as if on command in all mechanical weaving mills and in the dyeing and finishing branches."^[24] Since workers often began work in the morning with the intention of stopping shortly thereafter, their conduct seemed to affirm the symbolic importance of the act of collectively ceasing the motion of production, rather than merely preventing that motion from starting at all.

The absence of visible workplace demonstrations in the enactment of German strikes made it awkward for some to distinguish between a strike and the contractual withdrawal of labor. Legal-minded German bureaucrats of the time found it so. In the Rhineland, local officials thought that if a large group of workers canceled their employment contract by giving prior notice, they were legally withdrawing their labor and therefore not launching a strike. The Imperial Bureau of Statistics in Berlin had to keep the provincial authorities informed that a mass labor dispute which transpired according to orderly procedures of terminating a labor contract still constituted an event that the officials should report as a strike.^[25] The district record keepers in Thüringen may have reflected the prevailing uncertainty about the sighting of a strike in the title of a volume of handwritten enumerations for the period 1882–1906: they called their compilation "Supposed Strikes."^[26] In contrast with the British stoppages at the workplace, German protests in the quarter-century before the First World War seem elementary and austere.

[24] Staatsarchiv Weimar, Landesregierung Greiz, n Rep. A, Kap. IXa, Nr. 207, factory inspector reports 1885–1895, p. 150. The Reussische Volkszeitung reported on a strike in Kirchberg in 1907: "At exactly ten o'clock the Knacken of the looms and the Gebrumm of the other machines was silenced." But the workers did not leave the premises. March 20, 1907.

[25] HSTAD, Regierung Düsseldorf, 24692, July 7, 1899. For a parallel case from eastern Germany, see Stadtarchiv Werdau, Rep. II, 2, Nr. 90, Nov.7, 1899. In reponse to inquiries from authorities in the district of Düsseldorf, the Imperial Bureau of Statistics informed the local authorities that" the workers must have decided in the moment they lay down their work that if their requests are rejected, they will refrain from any further activity for their current employer.  . . . Violation of the labor contract and damages suffered by the employer or workers is of course often an accompanying event, but in no way a conceptual prerequisite for a labor dispute to be treated as a 'strike.'" HSTAD, Regierung Düsseldorf, 24692, October 12, 1899. For an example of a work stoppage that local authorities did not consider a "veritable strike," see HSTAD, Landratsamt Mönchengladbach, 99, March 6, 1899, Rheydt.

[26] Staatsarchiv Weimar, Landesregierung Greiz, n Rep. A, Kap. IXa, Nr. 165, "Angebliche Arbeitseinstellungen," 1882–1906. When a larger than usual number of workers happened to give notice to quit at a textile firm in Rheydt, the employer inferred—mistakenly—that a strike was underway. Der Textil-Arbeiter , April 12, 1907.

How are we to explain the difference between the German and the British forms of protest? Certainly the German workers did not adopt this particular style of action because they lacked acquaintance with forms of crowd action. In the early days of factory development at midcentury, workers also employed rough music (Katzenmusik ) against their employers, though not in the workplace.^[27] A minister reported in this era that the workers in the Wuppertal district treated their employers to this ceremony whenever "it became known that a moral lapse had occurred in an eminent family."^[28] The tradition of rough music still enjoyed a rich life in industrial towns of imperial Germany. At a village in the Lausitz in 1886, weavers suffering from a wage reduction subjected the mayor's house to these raucous sounds.^[29] Protesters used this repertoire for issues unrelated to the workplace. At a textile town near Mönchengladbach, one hundred people, including workers from the local mills, joined a rough music demonstration in 1902. They banged pot tops and clanged bells for several nights around the home of a carpenter whom they accused of carrying on an indecent sexual liaison.^[30] German textile strikers also organized street processions after the cessation of work.^[31] Striking weavers at a firm in the Löbau district in 1886 paraded through the streets with their colorful fabrics mounted on poles.^[32] German workers had the repertoires for collective demonstrations at hand in the community, but seldom imported them into the workplace.^[33]

[27] Der unbefangene Beobachter , Crimmitschau, August 11, 1848, p. 22.

[28] "People especially liked to use this tactic if the sinner belonged to a family who paid its workers poorly and exploited their time and labor capacity, and who were called 'sweaters.' " August Witteborg, Geschichte der evang.-lutherischen Gemeinde Barmen-Wupperfeld von 1777 bis 1927 (Barmen: Selbstverlag der evang.-lutherischen Gemeinde, 1927), p. 237.

[29] Das deutsche Wollen-Gewerbe , May 5, 1886, p. 588.

[30] The participants called it a Klatschet-Tierjagen. HSTAD, Landgericht Mönchengladbach, 10/8. For evidence of the number of residents in Giesenkirchen who worked in textile mills, see the employment listings at Stadtarchiv Mönchengladbach, 1c 3550.

[31] One of the earliest references to "factory workers" organizing street demonstrations for higher pay comes from Elberfeld: Zentrales Staatsarchiv Merseburg, Rep. 51E, Nr. 62, Rheinprovinz, Sept. 3, 1830, pp. 47 ff. Also, Staatsarchiv Weimar, Landesregierung Greiz, n Rep. A, Kap. IXa, Nr. 207, factory inspector reports 1885–1895, p. 151; Stadtarchiv Greiz, B 5972, May 22, 1873, report on strike processions, pp. 5–8; Staatsarchiv Detmold, M2 Bielefeld, Nr. 291, pp. 563–564; Klaus Tidow, Neumünsters Textil- und Lederindustrie im 19. Jahrhundert (Neumünster: Karl Wachholtz, 1984), p. 68, regarding 1888 strike; for Borghorst, Zentrales Staatsarchiv Merseburg, Rep. 120 BB, VII 1, Nr. 3, Band 3, pp. 134 ff., Dec. 31, 1875, and pp. 137 ff., report of January 4, 1876.

[32] Staatsarchiv Dresden, Amthauptmannschaft Löbau, Nr. 3055, May 14, 1886, p. 16. For a demonstration of weavers with flags and chimes, see Landesarchiv Potsdam, Rep. 3B, Regierung Frankfurt I Präs. 327, Guben, 1851.

[33] For a commemorative parade organized by textile workers, see Die Textilarbeiter-Zeitung , August 20, 1910, Emsdetten.

Nor did the divergence in British and German repertoires of action originate in the legal statutes that applied to protest. To be sure, the laws regarding public assembly in Prussia, and in most other German states, required workers to give local police forty-eight hours' notice of a meeting. Yet the courts ruled that the laws that prevented public meetings of associations without prior announcement did not apply to gatherings of employees at work. The courts reasoned that the participants at meetings on shop property discussed workplace matters, not "public affairs." Therefore the law did not require German workers to give police notice of meetings or assemblies on the mill grounds.^[34] On this score the laws governing assembly at work in Germany were no different from those in Britain.

If the difference in the repertoires of action at the workplace cannot be explained by the legal environment, where can we turn to discover their significance? One of the terms workers used to describe their actions provides an initial clue, though not a monolithic response. British textile workers who went on strike often said they had "turned out," a figure of speech which highlighted the crossing of a boundary between inside and outside the mill rather than focusing on the stoppage of labor per se.^[35]

A confrontation between workers and employers at a Blackburn weaving mill in 1865 implemented this principle. The insurgent weavers assembled in the mill yard before leaving, but they defined the start of the strike as the moment at which they passed through the main gate and left the premises.^[36]

[34] Stadtarchiv Emsdetten, Nr. 734, Kammergericht judgments of September 5, 1903, and July 26, 1904. Provincial authorities unsuccessfully sought to override this ruling. Das deutsche Wollen-Gewerbe , January 17, 1904, p. 68. For an example of a meeting held in a German factory without the owner's permission, see Der Textil-Arbeiter , January 3, 1902, Crimmitschau. Workers sometimes did not register their meetings at public locales if employers from only one firm were admitted. Stadtarchiv Werdau, Rep. II, Kap. 4, Nr. 7, Bd. 2, March 14, 1904, pp. 139 ff. On workplace meetings, see also Wilhelm Gewehr, Praktischer Rathgeber für Vereins- und Versammlungsleiter sowie Versammlungsbesucher (Elberfeld, 1897), p. 34, and Deutscher Textilarbeiterverband, Leitfaden bei Führung der Geschäfte, in der Agitaton, bei Streiks und Lohnbewegungen (Berlin: Maurer & Dimmick, 1908), p. 65. For a discussion of the evolution of German laws regarding assembly and association, see Vernon Lidtke, The Alternative Culture: Socialist Labor in Imperial Germany (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), pp. 30–31.

[35] Yorkshire Factory Times , November 15, 1889, Manningham and Shipley; September 13, 1889, Kirkstall. Striking could also be called "going out." Leeds District Archives, T & M Bairstow, 72, negotiations of July 26, 1913. The term strike was not associated only with the defiant stoppage of work, but with individual absence from work for any reason. See Bradford Heritage Recording Unit, A0087, born 1903.

[36] Blackburn Library Archives, M31, Nr. 5403, Blackburn Weavers' Minutes, August 16, 1865.

Managers, too, framed the cessation and resumption of work in spatial terms. The director of a factory in Bradford described the readiness of strikers to begin work again with the expression "They were glad to come in."^[37] To "come out" became synonymous with going on strike. In their own accounts of work stoppages, workers described the start of a strike with the standard phrase that they "came out" together or "in a body."^[38] The phrase "in a body" connoted a highly patterned form of group conduct. Both the middle-class and the working-class press took care to distinguish between actions committed by a "crowd" and those that workers committed "in a body." A crowd, The Dewsbury Reporter noted in 1875, moved "without arrangement," even when it seemed a peaceable assemblage, whereas workers organized and coordinated their movements when they acted "in a body."^[39] In a word, the spatial form assumed by many strikes was purposeful and methodical.

German workers who struck said they had "ceased their labor" (die Arbeit eingestellt ). A similar phrase appeared in German dialect speech. The memoirs of Friedrich Storck, a German poet from the Wuppertal who worked in textile mills as a teenager, document the evolution of workers' language. Storck said that in the Wuppertal, a region known as a pioneer in the development of factory workers' movements, the word strike (Streik) did not acquire currency until after the 1860s.^[40] The popular expression of that era was de Brocken hennschmieten ("throw down the work"), a colloquialism which survived into the early twentieth century.^[41] Modern histori-

[37] Cited by Elizabeth Jennings, Sir Isaac Holden (Bradford: University of Bradford, 1982), pp. 159 ff.

[38] Centre for English Cultural Traditions and Language, University of Sheffield, interview tape A72 with Benny Laughlin, describing his participation in the 1912 warpers' strike; B. Riley, Handbook , Town Hall, Huddersfield, 1908, p. 18; Archive of General Union of Dyers, Bleachers, and Textile Workers, Yeadon and Guiseley Factory Workers' Union, Minutes, January 19, 1891; Yorkshire Factory Times , May 30, 1902, Lockwood, p. 5. For stereotyped use of the term come out as a synonym for strikes, see the company records of T & M Bairstow Limited, Leeds District Archives, book 72, workers' speech recorded July 26, 1913; Operative Spinners' Provincial Association, Fourth Annual Report, 1883 (Bolton: Thomas Abbatt), p. 45; Cotton Factory Times , January 22, 1897, Darwen; Yorkshire Factory Times , November 22, 1889, Birstall and Oxenthorpe.

[39] The Dewsbury Reporter , March 13, 1875. The phrase "in a body" reflects a refinement of terms indicating nonriotous groupings. For the earlier distinction between "crowds" and "mobs," see Mark Harrison, Crowds and History: Mass Phenomena in English Towns, 1790–1835 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), p. 170.

[40] Storck said "The word 'strike' was not known in our valley." Friedrich Storck, Aus der Schule des Lebens (Elberfeld: G. Lucas, 1910), Part One, p. 178.

[41] Ibid., pp. 178–179. This was the same phrase striking weavers used in 1899 in Mönchengladbach when they sat at their looms inside the mill. HSTAD, Regierung Düssel-dorf, 24691, January, 1899. No doubt British workers, too, could refer to the beginning of a strike as "downing tools," but in addition they deployed the customary metaphor of "turning out," absent in Germany.

cal research confirms that in other regions of Germany, the phrase "cessation of labor" (Arbeitsniederlegung ) was employed before use of the word strike became commonplace.^[42]

The German workers' tactic of sitting at the machine indicates that the withdrawal of the owners' command of the conversion of labor power comprised a symbolic statement of its own. The only "language" the employer knew how to interpret, the Social Democratic textile union said, was "the language of the work stoppage."^[43] In Britain, by comparison, the exchange of labor as it was embodied in finished products meant that the withdrawal of the conversion of labor power per se at the point of production did not constitute a symbolic end to the employment relation. Instead, workers supplemented this with the crossing of the boundary of the workroom, combined with a visible demonstration of protest in the mill yard, to express their flouting of the owners' authority. British textile workers enacted their protests by responding to the employers' own emphasis on the surveillance of traffic at border zones rather than on the control of the transformation of labor power into labor. They took hold of the employers' use of space as a handle by which they could turn the employers' authority upside down in the theater of the central mill yard.

In both Germany and Britain, the workers' tactics of collective action represented the appropriate counter-symbols to use against the employers' own ways of asserting their authority over the factory. British textile workers did not as a rule sign contracts or other documents when they entered into an employment relation.^[44] Custom and implicit agreement, to which the courts referred if called upon, governed workers' association with their employers.^[45] Only a few mills posted notices in the workroom about the

[42] Dieter Schneider et al., Zur Theorie und Praxis des Streiks (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1971), p. 7.

[43] Der Textil-Arbeiter , January 27, 1905, Mönchengladbach.

[44] Yorkshire Factory Times , March 28, 1902, p. 4; May 30, 1902, Huddersfield; September 18, 1903, Marsden, p. 5; June 3, 1892, p. 5. The Yorkshire Factory Times treated the introduction of written agreements as a news event in itself. According to the written contracts in Britain, the owner or the worker had to provide fourteen days' notice if either wanted to end the employment relation. The Yorkshire weavers considered the contracts pointless, however, because the firm might officially keep the weaver on while placing no warp in the loom. Yorkshire Factory Times , July 3, 1891, p. 4; May 6, 1898, Ravensthorpe.

[45] Yorkshire Factory Times , July 26, 1889. The reliance on custom could in some instances provide workers with greater protection. For example, I found instances in which female textile workers left their jobs without notice. Formally they had broken their employ-ment agreement. Yet the courts let them off when the women quoted the obscene language of their overlookers that had provoked their departure—a safeguard difficult to insert into contracts or legislation. See Textile Mercury , March 8, 1913, p. 192.

terms of employment or about the conduct of the hired hands on the shop floor itself.^[46] No wonder, then, that British textile workers did not break the employment relation merely by withdrawing the use of their labor power, for there was no official code giving the owner control on the shop floor over the workers' labor time. Instead, workers reacted by crossing the factories' physical boundaries.^[47]

Unlike their British counterparts, German workers signed written contracts when they began employment. As early as midcentury, most German mills had printed rules posted in the shop.^[48] After 1891 such posting became obligatory. Workers usually received a personal copy of the factory rules.^[49] These ordinances typically told workers how to carry out their work effectively, banned political or religious conversations on the shop floor, and specified the fines that would be levied for misbehavior. According to the provisions of the factory ordinances posted in the mills, stopping work at the loom indicated that workers had "deliberately disobeyed" the factory

[46] United Kingdom, Royal Commission on Labour, PP 1892 XXXV, pp. 250, 265, 270; Yorkshire Factory Times , October 18, 1889, Keigley; March 18, 1892, Deighton & Dalton, p. 7; February 5, 1897, Elland; December 20, 1889, J. Skelsey & Sons. Even after 1897, when revisions in the factory acts required owners to provide written warning of the fines to which workers were subject, many mills failed to post notices. Yorkshire Factory Times , May 6, 1898, p. 1. For Lancashire, see LRO, Skipton Power-Loom Weavers' Association, DDX 1407, August 5, 1908. Mills lacked such notices in part because workers rejected them. In Bingley, Lockwood, and Leeds, for example, workers objected to the owners posting notices in their workroom. In Bingley, the workpeople struck for the removal of a sign that listed fines for spoiled work—but not against the fines per se. Once the owner removed the notice, they agreed to the fines and returned to work. "Strikes and Lockouts in 1899," PP 1900 LXXXIII, p. 529, strike number 88. For other examples of British workers objecting to the posting of written rules, see Yorkshire Factory Times , May 30, 1902, Lockwood.

[47] PP 1892 XXXV, p. 160. No doubt instances could be found in which British textile workers stopped their labor and created a disturbance inside their workroom, but this did not comprise a widely enacted, recognized model for strikes.

[48] Edward Beyer, Die Fabrik-Industrie des Regierungsbezirkes Düsseldorf vom Standpunkt der Gesundheitpflege , p. 134; Germany, Amtliche Mitteilungen aus den Jahres-Berichten der mit Beaufsichtigung der Fabriken betrauten Beamten (Berlin: Kortkampf, 1884), p. 381; Karl Emsbach, Die soziale Betriebsverfassung der rheinischen Baumwollindustrie im 19. Jahrhundert (Bonn: Röhrscheid, 1982), p. 303.

[49] Workers paid a fine of ten pfennigs if they failed to return their copy of the ordinance when they quit. HSTAD, Landratsamt Mönchengladbach, 703, Kloeters & Lamerz, 1897. For other factories that gave workers a copy of the ordinance, see Kreisarchiv Kempen, Gemeinde-archiv Breyell, F. Beckmann, 1892, and Esters & Co., 1905; Stadtarchiv Mönchengladbach, Gemeinde-archiv Neersen, 814, Rheinische Velvetfabrik, 1912; HSTAD, Landratsamt Grevenbroich, 271, Peter Sieben, pp. 76 ff., 184.

managers.^[50] Such defiance provided grounds for immediate dismissal, according to the provisions of the state industrial labor code.^[51] The importance German employers attached to the posting of written rules as a means of enforcing their authority over the labor process can be judged from the composition of the rules. Before 1891, factory owners frequently entitled the factory regulations "laws" (Gesetze ). On their own initiative, employers had the local police stamp the rules before posting them.^[52] In some instances, they entitled their rules "police regulations."^[53] Through these tactics German employers could give the impression that conduct on the shop floor was subject to legal scrutiny and punishment.

It seems clear that German workers took a more legalistic view of the employment relation than did their British counterparts—when it was to their immediate advantage. In both Germany and Britain, the workers' newspapers reported that managers typically responded to workers' grievances with the comment, "If you don't like it, you can leave."^[54] But workers responded to these taunts in a different way in each country. German workers took such casual challenges as grounds for departing, for they had, literally, been told they could go home if they wanted to do so. In each of the principal textile districts of Germany, the work force left without notice on the grounds that by saying anyone could return home if things did not suit them, factory officials had terminated the employment relation.^[55] Individual workers used the same reasoning before the business courts. A bobbin winder told the court in Elberfeld in 1899 that she had left without offering notice because a supervisor had told her, "If you don't want to work

[50] The factory rules that owners posted in their mills forbade workers from congregating in the entryways or in the yard of the factory. For example, Westfälisches Wirtschaftsarchiv Dortmund, S 8/41, Arbeitsordnung, 1892, and HSTAD, Landratsamt Grevenbroich, 271, Weberei Carl Rente, 1892, pp. 53 ff.

[51] Germany, Gewerbeordnung für das Deutsche Reich (München: C. H. Beck, 1909), section 123, Nr. 3.

[52] Emsbach, op. cit., p. 303. Before 1891 the employers were not obligated to get police approval of the provisions of their rules.

[53] Das Handels-Museum , May 12, 1892, p. 245.

[54] Cotton Factory Times , March 19, 1897; Yorkshire Factory Times , June 3, 1892, p. 5; Der Textil-Arbeiter , March 19, 1909, Lunzenau.

[55] Staatsarchiv Detmold, I.U. 430, May 3, 1907; HSTAD, Regierung Aachen, 1635, May 30, 1900, Düren (Mariaweiler); Stadtarchiv Mönchengladbach, 1c 913, March 7, 1913; Staatsarchiv Münster, Kreis Steinfurt, 1311, August 3, 1892; Augsburger Neueste Nachrichten , July 25, 1912; Stadtarchiv Chemnitz, Kap. XI, Sect. I, Nr. 16, April 23, 1866; Staatsarchiv Dresden, Amtshauptmannschaft Chemnitz, Nr. 10, 1889, p. 9; Arbeiter-Sekretariat Luckenwalde, 5. Geschäftsbericht für die Zeit vom 1. Januar bis zum 31. Dezember 1908 (Luckenwalde: Selbstverlag, 1909), p. 11.

for the pay, you should get out of here."^[56] In response, she left her machine, never to return.

The legal savvy of German workers can be detected in their treatment of written contracts as well. A spinning mill owner in Rheine complained to a district official in 1908 that workers were acutely aware of their legal situation in the factory during the first hour of their hire, before they had been handed their personal copy of the factory ordinance. During these few minutes, the owner said, the workers believed they were "justified" in committing "the worst kinds of mischief" because they knew they did not yet stand under the legal provisions of a labor contract.^[57] Not surprisingly, the "people's bureau" (Volksbüro ) in that town, set up by Catholic organizations to inform workers of their legal rights in housing and employment, reported frequent inquiries from workers about the terms for concluding labor contracts.^[58] In Rheine, weavers in 1891 stopped work instantly when a clerk took down the sign that listed their piece rates. The workers did not ask why the sign had been removed, but they refused to continue until the clerk replaced it—in the absence of a posted agreement about rates, the workers believed that they had no contract.^[59]

The German strikers treated a halt to the process of converting labor power into labor as an essential and dramatic challenge to the owner's authority. They oriented their action to the technical violation of the printed factory rules, which specified the employer's authority over conduct on the shop floor. British textile workers, by contrast, considered a visual demonstration of defiance, "coming out" of the mill into an open theater, to be one of the hallmarks of a strike. In each country the workers' actions represented the appropriate counterstatement to daily practices on the shop floor. In German mills, where the rituals for entering the mill and the timing of workers' entry focused on the appropriation of workers' labor power, strikers acted out the withdrawal of labor power as such. In British mills, where owners focused on the appropriation of products and the assertion of control over border spaces, strikers, too, thought in terms of "coming out" and staging visible protests in the mill yard.

For many Germans who reflected on their economy in the middle of the nineteenth century, the treatment of labor as a commodity still appeared

[56] HSTAD, Gewerbegericht Elberfeld, Nr. 80/48, March 22, 1899.

[57] Stadtarchiv Rheine, 183, January 20, 1908, letter to Regierungspräsident.

[58] Bistumsarchiv Münster, A38, report for 1913, Rheine.

[59] Staatsarchiv Münster, Regierung Münster, 718, February 10, 1891.

monstrous and perverse.^[60] Ferdinand Lassalle pointed to industrial conflict in Britain as evidence that the complete objectification of human labor was unrealizable. The melancholy course of strikes in Britain, Lassalle claimed, represented the vain attempt of human beings "to disguise themselves as commodities."^[61] In the closing decades of the nineteenth century, however, the specification of labor as a commodity was taken so thoroughly for granted that it guided not only the humdrum enactment of production but the small insurrections workers improvised on the shop floor against the system's indignities. In all likelihood, only a minority of workers could have offered a detailed verbal exposition of their understanding of labor's commodity form. But the eloquent patterning of work stoppages shows, as philosophers and social historians alike have remarked, that although people may not be able to put their knowledge into words, they can put it into action.

The Formulation of Strike Demands

In both the German and the British textile industry, the decade of the 1890s began an upsurge in labor disputes that was sustained until the First World War. Karl Emsbach, in his sample of reports from the textile industry in the Rheinland, found a threefold increase in strikes during the decade 1890–1899 over the averages for the three preceding decades. The trend accelerated in the decade after the turn of the century.^[62] In Britain the years from 1888 to 1892, the critical years of development for the New Unionism, also initiated an extended increase in textile strikes.^[63] Despite this shared trajectory, however, strike demands at the textile factories of each country reached toward different ends, based on the workers' definition of labor as a commodity. In Germany, textile strikers transcended requests concerning wages and hiring to propose changes of their own in the conditions under which workers carried out the labor activity.

[60] "Economically you are a commodity, not a human." Allgemeine deutsche Arbeiter-Zeitung , Coburg, Nr. 22, May 31, 1863, p. 130.

[61] Dieter Schneider et al., op. cit., p. 26.

[62] Emsbach, op. cit., pp. 562–565. Due to the lack of summaries for the decades before the 1890s, however, investigators cannot offer a pithy national measure of the extent to which textile strikes became more frequent. The broad lines of development, however, as laid out in local police reports, are unmistakable.

[63] Joseph White, "Lancashire Cotton Textiles," in Chris Wrigley, editor, A History of British Industrial Relations 1874–1914 (Brighton: Harvester Press, 1982), p. 220.

The German workers went beyond their British counterparts in requesting changes to protect the labor power they entrusted to the employer. They lodged strike demands for technical improvements to prevent accidents at work. In Borghorst, for example, striking weavers requested the introduction of "arrangements for the transport of warps according to the accident prevention regulations" of their company.^[64] German strikers also requested the installation of shuttle guards to prevent shuttles from flying off the loom and injuring nearby workers. According to the Imperial Bureau of Statistics in Berlin, demands for safer or healthier working conditions contributed to the outbreak of eleven strikes in textiles from 1901 through 1906 (these are the years for which the official figures can be disaggregated into precise demands).^[65]

Unfortunately, the average frequency with which German strikers presented such demands for changes in the organization of work will never be ascertained. Local authorities who submitted strike reports to the Imperial Bureau of Statistics often omitted reference to the demands workers submitted that did not relate to wages or the length of the workday. The officials forwarded only those demands that seemed palpably understandable and that fit into their conventional view of industrial conflict, but the researcher who sifts through police notes or newspaper accounts will find a veritable underground of grievances which the workers themselves incorporated into strike negotiations. Historians who rely on the published government statistics in Germany to enumerate the instigating causes of work stoppages merely recirculate the crass assumptions of German officialdom. In Gummersbach, for example, textile workers in 1900 submitted demands for more light and air in the workplace, for a better canteen, and for cleaner toilets. City officials submitted reports to higher-ups only about the wage demands, however, so only the wage demands entered the published tabulations. Similar misreporting occurred for textile strikes in Saxony, in Luckenwalde, and in the district of Lingen.^[66] "The official overview of the results of the

[64] Stadtarchiv Steinfurt-Borghorst, Akt. B 378.

[65] The towns in which these demands originated included Leitelshain, Reichenbach, Krefeld, Crimmitschau, Schwaig, Mesum, Lörrach, Bramsche, and Barmen. They embraced the linen, wool, and cotton industries. Germany, Statistik des Deutschen Reichs , Volume 157 (Berlin: Kaiserliches Statistisches Amt, various years), pp. II 103 ff.; Volume 164, pp. II 127 ff.; Volume 188, pp. I 58 ff.

[66] Stadtarchiv Gummersbach, 4479, report of May 17, 1900. Compare Germany, Statistik des Deutschen Reichs , Volume 141, pp. 62–63; Der Textil-Arbeiter , June 20, 1902, Wittgensdorf, with Germany, Statistik des Deutschen Reichs , Volume 157, Streiks und Aussperrungen im Jahre 1902, p. II 58; Der Textil-Arbeiter , October 14, 1904, Luckenwalde, with Germany, Statistik des Deutschen Reichs , Volume 188, Streiks und Aussperrungen imJahre 1904; and Staatsarchiv Osnabrück, Rep. 610, Lingen, Nr. 125, September 16, 1902, with Germany, Statistik des Deutschen Reichs , Vol. 157, pp. II 104–105.

strike statistics," the Social Democratic Volkszeitung concluded in 1892, "is absolutely worthless."^[67]

The significant point from a comparative perspective is that German textile workers often formulated such demands in strikes, whereas British workers rarely did. No evidence that British textile workers voiced strike demands for protection against accidents appears in British workers' textile newspapers or in the parliamentary listings.^[68] Does the inclusion of demands for workplace safety in German strikes, but their absence in Britain, mean that this issue was of concern only to workers in Germany?

The comments of British workers in the Yorkshire Factory Times indicate that they certainly harbored dissatisfaction with unsafe machinery. In my sample of stories from this journal for the years from 1890 through 1893, twenty-seven complaints about unhealthy or dangerous working conditions appeared. Most frequently the workers mentioned the lack of guards to prevent the shuttles from flying out of the loom;^[69] they also cited the lack of mesh fencing around some equipment.^[70] Yet proposals to correct these problems, in particular the installation of loom guards, were not apt to enter into strike negotiations as they did in Germany. This seems even more curious in view of the British textile workers' legendary obstinacy and readiness to strike over minor arrangements in the workplace that concerned pay.

German textile workers, again unlike British workers, included among their strike demands the building of factory canteens and the cleaning of toilet facilities.^[71] At Düren in the Rhineland, for example, the workers at a

[67] Volkszeitung , May 2, 1892, p. 1.

[68] The format of British government reports during the 1890s would have suited the listing of idiosyncratic demands, for officials published concrete descriptions of the points at issue and not merely standardized causes. The lack of appropriate shuttle guards in Britain led weavers in Bradford to improvise: they draped sheets around their looms to deflect the injurious projectiles. Yorkshire Factory Times , December 29, 1893, p. 4.

[69] Yorkshire Factory Times , April 17, 1891, Yeadon; October 2, 1891, Horsforth; November 13, Horsforth; March 17, 1893; April 28, 1893, Bradford; May 19, 1893, Bradford; June 9, 1893, Queensbury.

[70] Yorkshire Factory Times , October 14, 1892, Bradford; February 24, 1893.

[71] Stadtarchiv Gummersbach, 4479, report of May 17, 1900; HSTAD, Regierung Aachen, 1634, February 6, 1899, Düren; Der Textil-Arbeiter , June 20, 1902, Wittgensdorf; Der Christliche Textilarbeiter , February 24, 1900, Dülken; Historisches Archiv des Erzbistums Köln, 23.2, 2 (2), report from Mönchengladbach, 1900, p. 47. For other instances of demands for canteens, dressing rooms, and bathrooms, see Christlicher Textilarbeiter Deutschlands, Geschäftsbericht, July 1910 to July 1912 , p. 155, Düren. For an example of extensive negotiations over the condition of toilets, see Wirtschaftsarchiv Baden-Württemberg, Stuttgart, B25-319, June 15, 1906. For a demand for better washing facilities submitted along with wage requests, see Der Textil-Arbeiter , October 11, 1901. Factory inspectors reported frequent complaints about toilet facilities. HSTAD, Regierung Düsseldorf, 25022, report for 1900, pp. 15 ff. At Gera, the workers had a provision incorporated into the piece-rate agreement of 1905 that guaranteed that the workrooms themselves would be cleaned daily. Stadtarchiv Gera, "Vereinbarungen zu den Akkordlohn-Tarifen," October, 1905.

mill for weaving metal sheets bargained in 1899 for better eating facilities as part of the strike settlement.^[72] The male dyers who went on strike in 1899 around the district of Krefeld included among their demands a request that the owner provide dressing rooms in which they could change clothes.^[73] In Thüringen, workers pressed for free soap and towels from employers.^[74] In Mönchengladbach, striking textile workers in 1900 bargained not only for higher wages but for unsoiled toilets.^[75] German workers treated the condition of water closets as a topic meriting separate discussion at their union meetings. At Coesfeld, for example, thirty-seven weavers at a meeting in 1910 signed a petition whose sole object was cleaner toilets.^[76]

The circumstance that in strikes only German workers advanced demands for better factory facilities does not imply that only German workers concerned themselves with these amenities. The great majority of British textile workers felt the lack of cloakrooms, cafeterias, and undefiled restrooms, but they did not make this an issue of contestation with employers.^[77] Instead, they submitted letters to their newspapers express-

[72] HSTAD, Regierung Aachen, 1634, February 16, 1899.

[73] Gladbacher Merkur , September 18, 1899.

[74] Over eighty firms in the district of the German Textile Workers' Union in Thüringen provided the soap and towels. Verband Deutscher Textilarbeiter, Gau Thüringen, Tariferläuterungen und Statistisches: Bearbeitet nach Aufzeichnungen der Tarif-Kommission im sächsisch-thüringischen Textilbezirk (Gera: Alban Bretschneider, 1909), p. 32.

[75] Historisches Archiv des Erzbistums Köln, 23.2, 2 (2), July, 1900, report, p. 47.

[76] Die Textilarbeiter-Zeitung , January 14, 1911, Coesfeld. For other examples of discussions of toilets at union meetings, see Forster Tageblatt , August 13, 1899; Die Textilarbeiter-Zeitung , July 23, 1910, Bocholt; Der Textil-Arbeiter , February 21, 1902, Meerane. The German workers' press adopted a writing style that was all too vivid when it came to the toilets. See, for example, Der Textil-Arbeiter , March 18, 1904; April 14, 1905, Dölau. The "free" textile workers' union in Germany developed rating systems of toilet cleanliness and executed statistical surveys of toilet conditions at various mills. See Der Textil-Arbeiter , January 15, 1904, Gera, and April 22, 1904, Chemnitz. In Saxony, workers extracted an agreement that employers would clean toilets weekly. Verband Deutscher Textilarbeiter, Gau Thüringen, Lohnbewegungen der Weber und Weberinnen 1902–1909 (Gera: Alban Bretschneider, 1909), p. 29. But then workers struggled to ensure that the toilets were not merely swept but also scrubbed. Vorwärts , Sept. 4, 1909.

[77] For an example of a worker's discontent with the lack of a cloakroom but absence of any expectation that the owner should provide one, see Elizabeth Roberts's interview with Mr. C1P, born 1894, Preston, p. 42. An overlooker testified in 1892 that the workpeople grumbled to him, but not to the employer, about dirty, primitive toilets. Royal Commission on Labour, PP 1892 XXXVI, Part II, p. 10.

ing their discontent about toilet and eating facilities. In my Yorkshire Factory Times sample for 1890 through 1893, for example, ten complaints about sanitation and two about the absence of canteens appeared.^[78] (Remarks about canteens appeared only under unusual circumstances, however: in one case the air in the workroom itself was so noxious people felt they could not safely eat there; in another, the owner punished someone for eating near their loom and spilling crumbs on the cloth.) Thus, the British workers complained informally about toilets, but they did not introduce the state of these facilities into strike negotiations as the Germans did. Nor did the discussion of toilets become a topic for public meetings in Britain, as it was in Germany.

The German strikes and complaints concerning toilet facilities, canteens, and safety all took for granted the owner's responsibility for providing for workers' needs on the shop floor. These strikes assumed that the small rituals of life in the factory—eating, cleaning oneself, going to the toilet—could be treated as confrontations with the owner's authority over the production process.^[79] When seen in those terms, apparent details grew into suitable issues to introduce into strike negotiations. Speakers at German union meetings turned them into symbols of the owners' command over the worker.^[80] The union secretary in Gera declared it "scandalous" in 1906 that female workers at a mill could clean themselves only by putting water in their mouths and spraying it over their bodies.^[81] British workers, by contrast, lacking the notion of the owner's embrace of the expenditure of their labor power, did not dramatize those parts of their vie intime that

[78] Cf. Bradford Library Archives, Mary Brown Barrett, "In Her Clogs and Her Shawl:. A Working Class Childhood, 1902–1914," p. 56: "We hated having to go to the toilet and were glad to get out again." At a Bradford weaving shed, workers brought camphor with them to avoid nausea from the toilet odors. Yorkshire Factory Times , September 20, 1889.

[79] Factory inspectors reported that German workers rarely used any facilities, such as bath facilities, that were not required for the labor process, even when the services were free. Jahresberichte der königlich preussischen Regierungs- und Gewerberäthe, 1898 (Berlin: R. v. Decker, 1899), p. 257. In Barmen the inspector reported that workers said outright that such facilities "served a policing function." Jahresberichte der königlich preussischen Regierungs- und Gewerberäthe, 1892 (Berlin: T. Burer, 1893), p. 354.

[80] Owners in Germany fined workers for dirtying the toilets and for dallying around them. At the C. A. Delius factory near Bielefeld, fines of workers for toilet behavior amounted to fifteen marks a year. Staatsarchiv Detmold, Regierung Minden, I.U. Nr. 425, pp. 106 ff. British textile employers, unlike those in Germany, did not establish fines for dirtying the toilet seats.

[81] Arbeiter-Sekretariat, Gera, Fünfter Geschäfts-Bericht des Arbeiter-Sekretariats Gera (Gera: Selbstverlag, 1906), p. 17.

transpired within the factory walls as points of contact with their employer.^[82]

German textile workers also displayed a tendency to broaden the issues in strike movements to cover many seemingly unrelated points of contention. They extended the conflict to consider the employers' authority over the manufacturing process in multiple ways. According to the reports of the Imperial Bureau of Statistics in Berlin, 44 percent of the strikes that German textile workers launched from 1899 through 1906 included multiple demands (these are the only years for which strikes with more than one ultimatum are distinguishable in published reports). The surviving copies of workers' original demands indicate that strikers sometimes compiled long lists. For example, workers at Schiefbahn in 1905 submitted eleven separate demands, including hourly pay for waiting time, restraints on abusive language, and regular consultation between representatives of management and workers.^[83] In Britain, by contrast, in a count of the Board of Trade's strike reports for textiles whose format permits a comparison (the years 1894 through 1900), only 5 percent of strikes included more than one demand.^[84]

[82] Indeed, at some British mills the owner relinquished responsibility for toilet conditions by letting overlookers collect fees from workpeople to hire persons to clean the stalls. Yorkshire Factory Times , January 29, 1892, p. 5. Of course, the "contact" with employers through the care of one's body in the factory could become all too literal. Workers at a mill in Thüringen complained that the water they received to wash themselves had already been used by people in the factory's supervisory office. Verband Deutscher Textilarbeiter, Gau Thüringen, op. cit., p. 32.

[83] HSTAD, Regierung Düsseldorf, 24699, May 1, 1905, p. 286. For examples of workers presenting nine or ten strike demands, see Wirtschaftsarchiv Baden-Württemberg, Stuttgart, B25-319 May 11, 1906; Staatsarchiv Dresden, Kreishauptmannschaft Zwickau, Nr. 1999, March 12, 1887, p. 134. For examples of five or more demands, see HSTAD, Regierung Düsseldorf, 24701, 1906, Rheydt, p. 223; HSTAD, Regierung Aachen, 1634, Jan. 27, 1900, Düren; HSTAD, Landratsamt Mönchengladbach, 70, April 4, 1906, p. 109; Staatsarchiv Münster, Kreis Steinfurt, 1311, Sept. 12, 1906, Mesum; Der Christliche Textilarbeiter , Nov. 4, 1899, Grefrath; Staatsarchiv Dresden, Amthauptmannschaft Glauchau, Nr. 341, July 12, 1910; Staatsarchiv Dresden, Amtshauptmannschaft Chemnitz, Nr. 10, October 27, 1889, p. 112; Staatsarchiv Dresden, Kreishauptmannschaft Zwickau, Nr. 1999, August 5, 1884, p. 121, and Oct. 20, 1889, p. 157; Stadtarchiv Greiz, B Nr. 5977, Kap. IV, Nr. 97, Sept. 13, 1905, pp. 39–42. Even in the course of districtwide strikes over wages, weavers submitted many supplementary demands on a firm-by-firm basis regarding coffee water, repair of cloth defects, payment for reeling, etc. Zentrales Staatsarchiv Merseburg, Rep. 120 BB VII 3, Nr. 32, Aachen, pp. 3–19, 1895.

[84] Cross-checks of official British reports with the accounts of strikes in the Yorkshire Factory Times reveal no instances in which the Board of Trade omitted subsidiary demands in strike movements.

It is possible, of course, that the greater incidence of multiple demands in Germany meant only that German workers planned their strikes more carefully or conducted them in a more organized fashion.^[85] Were this explanation accurate, strikes in Germany that were initiated with the two weeks' advance notice legally required to terminate the employment relation would revolve around multiple demands more frequently than would more spontaneous strikes begun without sufficient notice. Government statistics are not the last word on the matter, but they lend no support to this hypothesis. For the years 1899 through 1906, the period for which the official German data can be cross-tabulated, textile workers issued multiple demands in 43 percent of the abrupt, illegal strikes. There was no statistically significant difference in Germany between the rate at which textile workers in well-organized, lawful strikes presented multiple demands and the rate at which workers in illegal strikes lodged them.^[86]

The variation between Germany and Britain in number of demands lodged probably did not derive from the institutions that factories had in place for mediating workplace conflicts. In both countries, conflict usually broke out in individual mills without turning into district-wide confrontations between the unions and the employers' associations. In Germany, if negotiations at a mill preceded the launching of a strike, workers usually conducted them without assistance from trade union officials. The lack of close union guidance in German textile strikes can be gauged from the circumstance that most of them began without the legal notice necessary to end employment.^[87] The so-called worker committees some German mills formed to administer health insurance funds hardly became known for representing the workers' interests in disputes.^[88] And in Yorkshire most

[85] In her study of strikes in France from 1871 to 1890, Michelle Perrot found that more spontaneous strikers were more likely to lodge only a single demand. Les Ouvriers en grève (Paris: Mouton & Co., 1974), p. 344.

[86] Of the 313 strikes textile workers initiated in the years 1899 to 1906 with the two weeks' notice necessary to terminate the employment contract, 139 (44 percent) had multiple demands. Of the 362 strikes textile workers undertook in this period without proper notice, 155, or virtually the same portion (43 percent), had multiple demands. Germany, Statistik des Deutschen Reichs (Berlin: Kaiserliches Statistisches Amt, 1899–1906). For an autobiographical account of an impromptu strike in which workers articulated more than one demand, see Gewerkschaft Textil-Bekleidung, Dokumente zu 150 Jahren Frauenarbeit in der Textil- und Bekleidungsindustrie (Düsseldorf: Courier-Druck, 1981), p. 23: "What we should demand, no one of us knew better than any other, but we knew we wanted to strike!"

[87] Ibid. Of 675 strikes in the German textile industry between 1899 and 1906, 362 (54 percent) involved workers who had not legally terminated the employment contract.

[88] For the lower Rhine, see HSTAD, Regierung Düsseldorf, 25014, Mönchengladbach Fabrikinspektor, 1892; Christliche Arbeiterin , June 16, 1906, Mönchengladbach; GladbacherMerkur , August 1, 1899, Fabrik Von Kaubes. For the Wuppertal, see Elisabeth Gottheiner, Studien über die Wuppertaler Textilindustrie und ihre Arbeiter in den letzten zwanzig Jahren (Leipzig: Duncker & Humblot, 1903), p. 87; for the Bergisches Land, HSTAD, Landratsamt Gummersbach, 487, May 4, 1890, Bergneustadt. For the Münsterland, see Herbert Erdelen, "Die Textilindustrie in zwei Kreisen (Ahaus und Steinfurt) des Münsterlandes," diss., Freiburg i. Br., 1921, p. 152. Since the committees were often dominated by supervisors, social democratic organizers in some regions discouraged their formation. Staatsarchiv Weimar, Landesregierung Greiz, n Rep. A, Kap. IXa, Nr. 207, factory inspector reports, 1885–1895, p. 152, and Staatsarchiv Weimar, Landesregierung Greiz, n Rep. A, Kap. IXa, Nr. 303, 1896, p. 87, and 1897, p. 159.

strikes broke out before the unions had received word of the dispute.^[89] The Socialist Review reported in 1910 that in one woolen district, workers launched or threatened half a dozen strikes within three months "without a single Union member being concerned or official intervening."^[90]

Still another possible explanation for the greater incidence of multiple demands in Germany is that the German textile workers struck less frequently. By this hypothetical line of argument, fewer strikes would build up a backlog of demands that would then be expressed in a single strike. But in terms of the size of the textile work forces, strikes were actually slightly less frequent during the period from 1899 through 1913 in Britain than in Germany. The annual ratio of strikes to workers was about one to seven hundred in Britain and one to six hundred in Germany.^[91]

The tendency of textile workers in Germany to formulate an extensive list of demands rather than to strike over a single issue coincided with another trend: German textile workers included among their strike demands requests that employers reform their governance of the work activity. Strikers at a Chemnitz mill told their employer in 1889 he had to make a "better arrangement of the production techniques" and allow workers to monitor the run-

[89] Ben Turner said, "We seldom heard of the disputes until a day or two had elapsed." About Myself 1863–1930 (London: Cayme Press, 1930), pp. 116, 125. Turner said the weavers' union approved of only four strikes in more than eight years. Turner's Scrapbook, Kirklees Archives, Sept., 1894, Yorkshire Factory Times , September 13, 1889, Morley; June 20, 1890, Kirkheaton; August 15, 1890, Bradford; September 5, 1890, Bradford; September 26, 1890, Shipley; October 2, 1890, Keighley; June 2, 1893, Leeds, p. 1; June 9, 1893, Bradford; August 4, 1893, Luddenden.

If the institutional environment were responsible for differences in the lodging of multiple demands, an analyst might expect significant differences to have arisen in the frequency of multiple demands between Yorkshire and highly unionized Lancashire. Yet in both provinces fewer than 5 percent of strikes involved multiple demands.

[90] Henry Wilmott, "The 'Labour Unrest' and the Woollen Trades," Socialist Review (November 1910), p. 214.

[91] Textile workforces computed from Germany, Die Deutsche Volkswirtschaft am Schlusse des 19. Jahrhunderts (Berlin: Puttkammer und Mühlbrecht, 1900), p. 25 and United Kingdom, Census of England and Wales 1891 , PP 1893–1894 CVI, pp. vii ff.

ning of the engine.^[92] In Aachen the weavers demanded that the company create a new job, that of carrying warp beams, to relieve weavers of this burden.^[93] Challenges such as this were not simply defensive responses to employers' efforts to introduce new machinery or heavier workloads. At a spinning mill in Viersen, on the lower Rhine, for example, the striking spinners in 1899 listed several demands for the maintenance of machinery. They gave the manager a schedule that stipulated how often he was to carry out preventive maintenance and replace frayed parts on various types of spinning frames.^[94] In both Germany and Britain, weavers considered it proper that overlookers dispense warps among the looms in the order in which weavers had finished their previous jobs.^[95] At a mill in Eupen, Germany, the weavers even demanded that the overlooker himself, who tended a loom of his own in his spare moments, receive warps in the same order as the ordinary weavers. When the owner disapproved the request, the weavers went on strike.^[96] They wanted to override the overlookers' and employers' authority to determine the distribution of work on the shop floor.

How dissimilar are these demands from those of the British? British weavers, like those in Germany, resisted changes in the labor process, such as the change to the two-loom system. Like the German weavers, they struck over the poor quality of raw materials, especially in the cotton industry, because defective materials reduced their piece-rate earnings or caused them to work harder for the same wage. They also struck over the arbitrary sacking of co-workers and, in the spinning departments, over the owners' failure to promote workers in order of seniority from the apprenticeship position of a piecer to the full position of a mule minder. British workers were no less concerned with authority than their German counterparts, but they focused on defending against encroachment rather than challenging

[92] Staatsarchiv Dresden, Amthauptmannschaft Chemnitz, Nr. 10, October 30, 1889, pp. 116–117, and Protokoll of Nov. 15, 1889.

[93] Zentrales Staatsarchiv Merseburg, Rep. 120 BB VII, Fach. 3, Nr. 32, Feb. 2, 1895.

[94] Der Christliche Textilarbeiter , June 8, 1899. Textile strikers in the region of Greiz demanded not just fresh air at work but the installation of a new system of ventilation. Staatsarchiv Weimar, Landratsamt Greiz, Nr. 2550, 1895, p. 10. At Anrath striking weavers extracted a promise from the firm in 1902 that overlookers would be on hand to attend broken looms more promptly. Der Christliche Textilarbeiter , February 1, 1902, Anrath.

[95] For an example of a strike over this issue, see Zentrales Staatsarchiv Merseburg, Rep. 77 2525, Volume 1, Nr. 3, pp. 6 ff., January 1899.

[96] Der Christliche Textilarbeiter , June 2, 1900, Eupen. In the district of Löbau, weavers also demanded changes in the "arrangement and regulation" of production to reduce waiting time for materials. Staatsarchiv Dresden, Amthauptmannschaft Löbau, Nr. 3055, March 30, 1890.

the governance of production. British textile-factory workers did not propose changes to control the manager's methods of administering production, as did their German counterparts.^[97]

British contemporaries believed that some of the strikes over wages disguised textile workers' wishes to change aspects of the manufacturing process. For example, at the Alston wool combing works in Bradford, the director found in 1892 that men who had gone out on strike were glad to come in once he agreed to changes in the organization of work. He concluded that the wages had not been the overriding issue at all; rather, it was "a problem of work operations concerning the disposal of suds and potash."^[98] William Drew, an executive of the Yorkshire textile workers' union, testified in 1891 that many strikes over wages were an "excuse," a pretext. Wage demands concealed other concerns, he said, in particular, mismanagement of the looms.^[99] Even when British textile workers were both dissatisfied with the technical methods of production and willing to strike, they did not focus on the governance of work as a contestable issue.

Each of these differences between the goals of British and German strikers parallels the differences between their cultural definitions of the commodity of labor. The German concept of the delivery of labor in the form of labor power accentuated the employer's exercise of authority at the point of production to convert this labor capacity into labor.^[100] The distinguishing

[97] To be sure, British textile workers proposed changes related to the calculation or verification of pay. At a mill in Lockwood, for example, the female weavers in 1902 left the premises and refused to return until the owner agreed to place marks on the warps at ten-foot intervals. By these marks the weavers would be able to check whether the warp spanned a greater distance than the weavers had been told it would. But this demand related to the exchange of products for pay, not to the execution of the labor activity. Yorkshire Factory Times , May 30, 1902, p. 5, Lockwood. In the cotton branch, British cotton workers also protested when managers put excessive steam into the air. They suggested limits to the discomforts of work, not improvements in the technique of manufacture proper. See Joseph White, The Limits of Trade Union Militancy (Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1978), Appendix One, pp. 186–201; Royal Commission on Labour, PP 1890–1891 LXXVII, p. 483, Kirkham and Blackburn.

[98] Quoted in Jennings, op. cit., pp. 159 ff.

[99] Royal Commission on Labour, PP 1892 XXXV, p. 223. A striking weaver at Sunnyside Mills in Bolton said in 1905 that the wage complaint only cloaked "the real want," which was less specialization in the work process. Zoe Munby, "The Sunnyside Women's Strike," Bolton People's History , Volume 1 (March 1984), p. 8. Tom Mann's autobiography provides an interesting parallel case for the dock workers, with wage demands again disguising concern about the organization of the labor process. Tom Mann's Memoirs (London: Labour Publishing Company, 1923), p. 110.

[100] Thus employers defined a worker (Arbeiter ) as someone "whose activity is controlled by supervisors." Staatsarchiv Dresden, Amthauptmannschaft Löbau, Nr. 3375, factory ordinance, Weberei Gebrüder Hoffmann.

features of German textile workers' strike goals—the greater focus on safety conditions and on hygienic care of the worker's person, the multiplication of grievances in a single strike about the employer's administration of the mill, and the advancement of proposals for changes in the governance of production—all focused on the employer's domination of workers by the exercise of authority at the point of production. British textile strikers did not focus on the small rituals of daily life inside the mill as a point of contact with the employer's authority. Rather, they converted disputes that might have addressed the organization of production into an issue of receiving adequate compensation for products delivered.^[101]

German workers' understanding of the labor transaction did not always lead them to reject the owner's authority on the shop floor; sometimes they embraced it. The union of workers employed at home in the sewing industry demanded the erection of central workshops for themselves, though not to boost productivity. Instead, they sought to make employers responsible for providing better working conditions and wanted union and state inspectors to certify and monitor the wages and hours of labor, which would be possible only if workers labored under the employer's supervision.^[102] British sewers, by contrast, were far from preferring centralized work.^[103] As the example of the home sewers in Germany shows, the specification of labor as a commodity did not inevitably make workers in Germany more rebellious against the capitalist labor transaction or against authority on the shop floor. Factory workers contested employers' authority while home workers embraced it, yet the struggle in both situations started with the presumption that the renter of labor power, entrusted with the disposition over the person of the worker, also bore responsibility for the care of that labor power.^[104] Depending on the tactical advantages to be secured, German workers used the prevailing specification of the labor transaction in different ways, but always in a

[101] For a brief discussion of why workers in the nineteenth century based their demands upon their identities as producers, see Bernard Mottez, Systèmes de salaire et politiques patronales (Paris: Centre Nationale de la Recherche Scientifique, 1966), p. 232.

[102] Herbert Cohen, "Heimarbeit und Heimarbeiterbewegung in der deutschen Herrenkonfektion," Ph.D. diss., Erlangen, 1926, pp. 78–79.

[103] Royal Commission on Labour, PP 1892 XXXVI, Part II, p. 117.

[104] "Labor power is the only capital of the worker.  . . . It is therefore his first duty to prevent its premature deterioration or even destruction. This is no less the responsibility of the employer, who out of self-interest watches over the health of his subordinates." Walter Höttemann, Die Göttinger Tuchindustrie der Vergangenheit und Gegenwart (Göttingen: Göttinger Handelsdruckerei, 1931), p. 105.

manner that reveals consistent differences from the cultural paradigm for conflict in Britain.

Overlookers' Role in Strikes

The role of overlookers in Germany helped to sustain German workers' understanding of the labor process as the submission of the labor activity to the employer's domination. When German workers labored under overlookers, they understood themselves as having immediate contact with executants of the employer. In Britain, by contrast, the overlookers' relative independence from the factory owners lent support to the workers' understanding that they transferred their labor as it was embodied in products. The German overlookers' status as agents, not just servants, of the owners prevented them from mediating between workers and owners. By contrast, British overlookers, who boasted that they did not "fawn" on the owners, saw themselves as intermediaries between workers and owners.^[105] For example, the rules of the Huddersfield and Dewsbury Power Loom Tuners' Society, issued in 1882, set down as one of the association's goals the "regulating" of relations between workmen and owners.^[106] Weavers in Yorkshire and Lancashire could even consult with their overlookers about the chances of obtaining wage concessions or ask for advice about the best timing for a strike.^[107] Textile workers in Germany prevented even the lowest supervisors from getting word of a possible strike.^[108] The German courts ruled that if an overlooker heard of a planned strike and did not report it to the owner, he had betrayed his duty to the owner and given grounds for immediate dismissal.^[109]

The contrast between the roles of overlookers in Germany and in Britain left their marks upon the organization and course of strikes. Overlookers in Britain sometimes supported weavers' strike demands. At Manningham, for

[105] Yorkshire Factory Times , February 7, 1902, p. 8. A poem published in Werkmeister-Zeitung betrays a somewhat different attitude: "If the output is to be a credit to the foreman, then sweat must run from the burning brow. Yet only from above [the owner] can the yield indeed come." January 1, 1892.

[106] Kirklees Archives, Rules, Huddersfield and Dewsbury Power Loom Tuners' Society, 1882.

[107] For examples of tuners acting as intermediaries, see Yorkshire Factory Times , March 20, 1903, and December 6, 1889, p. 6, Huddersfield. For Lancashire, see Cotton Factory Times , September 10, 1886, Rochdale.

[108] Stadtarchiv Gera, Nr. 2799, pp. 40–41, April 27, 1890.

[109] Das deutsche Wollen-Gewerbe , December 31, 1905, Beilage zu Nr. 104–105, p. 1663. See the parallel decision for white-collar workers in Zeitschrift für Textil-Industrie , October 1, 1913, p. 264.

example, in one of Yorkshire's most famous labor disputes, in 1890 and 1891 the tuners refused to teach silk weaving to the new hires whom the higher management set on to break the weavers' strike. Instead, the tuners walked off the job in support of the striking weavers.^[110] Weavers cheered their supervisors' decision with the cry, "Good owd overlooker!"^[111] In the great weavers' strike of 1883 in the Colne Valley, too, tuners from the district voted against training learners and against filling in on the looms for the striking weavers.^[112]

British overlookers also supported weavers' opposition to increases in the number of looms per weaver. For example, the overlookers at a firm outside Bradford in 1891 accused the owner of plotting to shift from two to three looms per weaver. They refused to carry out what they called the owner's "dirty work" of "spotting" for dismissal the least favorite weavers in their sections. This, they charged, would only fit into the owner's plan to begin assigning three looms to each weaver. They ceased work even though the owner did not propose an increase in their own allotments of looms.^[113] In Lancashire, too, the overlookers struck in support of workers' demands. In a strike at Nelson in 1891, many of the weaving overlookers left work to force the dismissal of an overlooker who had made immoral propositions to a female subordinate.^[114] Overlookers in Lancashire also supported an end to the so-called slate system, in which overlookers posted their workers' earnings to shame the slower ones.^[115]

[110] Cyril Pearce, The Manningham Mills Strike, Bradford: December 1890–April 1891 (Hull: University of Hull, 1975), p. 20.

[111] Yorkshire Factory Times , January 9, 1891, p. 7.

[112] Northern Pioneer , April 14, 1883, p. 11. The employers' request during the strike that the tuners do weaving reflected a customary expectation: during slowdowns in production, tuners were wont to weave on a loom of their own. A few overlookers did carry out the weaving after the employer threatened them with dismissal. Yorkshire Factory Times , November 1, 1889, and December 6, 1889; Huddersfield Daily Examiner , April 12, 1883. In 1884 overlookers in Burnley, Lancashire, refused to fill places of weavers who went on strike. When these weaving overlookers went out on strike on their own in 1897 for a higher commission, they issued a leaflet which said, "The masters have set the tacklers and weavers one against the other quite long enough.  . . . It is plain to everyone that our interests are identical." Trodd, op. cit., p. 302.

[113] Bradford Daily Telegraph , May 11, 1891, Horton Bank. This pattern was repeated elsewhere in Yorkshire. When employers at the turn of the century put increasing pressure on weavers in the Colne Valley to take on two looms instead of one, the Huddersfield and Dewsbury Power Loom Tuners' Society censured the employers. Yorkshire Factory Times , February 7, 1902, p. 1; March 28, 1902. Tuners in Dewsbury encouraged weavers to join the Textile Workers' Association: Yorkshire Factory Times , July 14, 1905, p. 4.

[114] Jan Lambertz, "Sexual Harassment in the Nineteenth Century English Cotton Industry," History Workshop Issue 19 (Spring 1985), p. 35. The Nelson Society of Powerloom Overlookers dismissed one of its members who allowed his children to work at this shed during the strike. Ibid.

Can we find analogous episodes in Germany where overlookers supported their underlings? In Germany, the professional journal Der deutsche Meister reported sympathetically in 1904 on weavers' efforts in Mönchengladbach to resist a move in some branches to the two-loom system.^[116] But German overlookers did not make formal statements or take stronger action to support the weavers.^[117] In Germany, business journals, textile workers' newspapers, police reports, and factory inspectors' reports appear not to mention such acts of solidarity.

The most telling indicator that overlookers stood closer to the workers in Britain than in Germany lies in the workers' collective actions. In Yorkshire and Lancashire, strikes by subordinates to protest the firing of their overlooker occurred in each of the textile districts and in all branches of the trade, especially among women, but among male workers as well.^[118] When companies attempted to replace striking tuners, the Yorkshire Factory Times

[115] LRO, DDX 1151/19/3, Chorley Power-Loom Overlookers' Association, March 13, 1908. In Lancashire the overlookers' unions voted to strike with weavers against the use of inferior cotton. LRO, DDX 1151/1/3, January 7, 1907.

[116] Der deutsche Meister , September 7, 1904.

[117] Overlookers in Germany, as an arm of the employer, were forbidden to strike. As an appeals court in Dresden reasoned, "If the professional staff resorts to the threat of collectively giving notice, in order through the planned action to force the employer to be more forthcoming, then the staff has grossly violated their duty, inherent in the employment relation, to safeguard the interests of the owner and to refrain from anything that could run against those interests, and has thereby proven themselves guilty of disloyalty in service." The quotation comes from a case involving white-collar workers but applied to the category of professional technical workers as well. Zeitschrift für die gesamte Textil-Industrie , October 1, 1913, p. 264. For an analogous case outside of textiles in which an employer could immediately dismiss a technical professional for collaborating with workers, see Das Gewerbegericht , September 3, 1903, p. 294, Solingen. So long as they did not strike, however, German overlookers remained free to petition their employers for changes in working conditions. Jürgen Kocka, Die Angestellten in der deutschen Geschichte , 1850-1980 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1981), p. 123. But they exercised this option only when it concerned their own interests. Die Textilarbeiter-Zeitung , May 21, 1910, "Kommission der Webermeister," and September 25, 1909, Bocholt; Der Textil-Arbeiter , April 29, 1910, p. 134.

[118] "Strikes and Lockouts in 1893," PP 1894 LXXXI, strike 694, Halifax; "Strikes and Lockouts in 1894," PP 1895 XCII, strike 966, Leeds; United Kingdom, Royal Commission on Labour, 1891, re strike ca. 1870, op. cit., p. 92; Yorkshire Factory Times , Birstall, November 22, 1889; Elland, May 15, 1891; Ravensthorpe, April 29, 1892; Milnsbridge, February 12, 1892; Halifax, June 2, 1893; Luddenden, August 9, 1901; Dewsbury, May 2, 1902; Halifax, June 17, 1898; Bradford Daily Telegraph , May 8, 1891. For Lancashire, see J. White, The Limits , op. cit., p. 189, and J. White, "Lancashire Cotton Textiles," op. cit., p. 213; Cotton Factory Times , January 29, 1897, Colne; PP 1890 68, pp. 574, 580, Manchester; Royal Commission on Labour, PP 1890–1891 LXXVII, p. 483, Burnley; "Strikes and Lockouts in 1893," PP 1894 LXXXI, p. 77, Wigan, and p. 510, Bolton; "Strikes and Lockouts in 1894," PP 1895 XCII, p. 360, Whittlefield, and p. 481, Stockport; "Strikes and Lockouts in 1897," PP 1898 LXXXVIII, p. 589, Preston. For the early industrial era, see Ashworth, op. cit., p. 13.

reported, "the weight of the evidence is that women weavers will refuse to work with imported overlookers."^[119] This newspaper even believed that the ability to retain favorite supervisors in the spinning branch comprised an incentive for workers to join unions. "It's a great pity, to my mind," a correspondent wrote, "that even the spinners do not combine, if for no other reason than to keep a good overlooker."^[120] British weavers supported the demands of their tuners for higher commissions.^[121] German overlookers received comparatively little support from workers. In Britain, workers' strike support for overlookers was discussed as common knowledge, but in Germany it was considered an extraordinary event. A German supervisor said in 1912 that if an overlooker appealed to underlings for support, "they would laugh at him and declare him insane."^[122]

To complete this comparison of overlookers' positions, we must consider the form of union organization pursued by overlookers in the two countries. Although German overlookers could not legally strike, they could unite in collective associations and organize demonstrations.^[123] Two major organiza-

[119] Yorkshire Factory Times , December 6, 1912. For Nelson in Lancashire, see Yorkshire Factory Times , October 28, 1892. The tuners' society in Bradford resolved at an assembly in 1899 "that the best thanks of this meeting be given to the weavers at Briggella Mills for the gallant stand they have made on behalf of the overlookers." Bradford District Archives, 1/1/6 3D86, July 8, 1899.

[120] Yorkshire Factory Times , November 17, 1893.

[121] Cotton Factory Times , April 23, 1897, Oldham.

[122] Zeitschrift für die gesamte Textil-Industrie , October 31, 1912, p. 967. One example of German weavers striking in support of a fired overlooker did come to light: Zentrales Staatsarchiv Merseburg, Rep. 120, BB VI, No. 164, Band 4, 1899, Mönchengladbach, p. 109.

[123] On the staging of demonstrations, see Der deutsche Meister , March 1, 1913, and March 15, 1913. Overlookers from the Wuppertal in Germany, during a collective protest in 1910, sought to establish thirty-six looms as their upper limit. Der Textil-Arbeiter , 1910, p. 142. German overlookers were not denied the right to bargain over the sale of their labor as a market commodity, only the ability to do so through the threat of collective action. In Yorkshire and Lancashire, strikes by an entire staff of overlookers at weaving mills did not represent a rare event. The tuners' typical grievance was the assignment of an excessive number of looms per tuner. In the twenty-five-year period before the First World War, overlooking disputes occurred in each of the major weaving towns of Yorkshire and in every branch of production, from the fancy woolen trade to cheap worsteds. The largest action by overlookers began during the spring of 1913 in the Bradford district. The overlookers' union in Bradford, which counted 90 percent of the areas' tuners as its members, carried out a general strike to demand a minimum wage of two pounds per week. For tacklers' strikes in Lancashire at Accrington, Church, and Oswaldtwistle, see Textile Mercury , July 8, 1899, p. 24, and for Nelson, see Yorkshire Factory Times , October 28, 1892. For Yorkshire, see the wagebooks for Taylor and Littlewood, Newsome Mills, August 1894, Kirklees Archives; Minutes of the Huddersfield Power Loom Tuners' Society, January 10, 1912, November 12, 1912, and October 24, 1913, Kirklees Archives; Textile Mercury , May 16, 1891, p. 344; Bradford Daily Telegraph , May 8, 1891; July 6, 1899. Yorkshire Factory Times , June 9, 1905, Dudley Hill.

tions represented the interests of German textile overlookers. The oldest, the German Foremen's Union, founded in 1884, included overlookers from all industries. Before the turn of the century, this group counted over twenty thousand members, including more than one hundred in each of several towns in northwest Germany where textiles predominated: Aachen, Mönchengladbach, Rheydt, Barmen, and Elberfeld.^[124] Another association, the German Supervisors' Union, admitted overlookers only from the textile branch. This group, founded by weaving overlookers in 1899 in Mönchengladbach, had over five hundred members in northwest Germany by 1903.^[125]

These German overlookers' unions varied in a crucial respect from those in Britain: the lowest loom fixers and the highest foremen united in a single organization.^[126] The lowest loom fixers and the highest supervisors in Germany shared the position of salaried servants, in contrast to those below them who received piece rates. German foremen used their organization to support the rights of the lesser overlookers. For example, the German Foremen's Union petitioned to ensure that state officials classified its loom fixers as technical professionals, eligible for the government's pension plan.^[127] In each of the major centers of weaving in Yorkshire—Bradford, Leeds, Halifax, Keighley, and Huddersfield—citywide overlookers' unions developed at the same pace as in Germany. But the British overlookers' unions severed the lower-level overlookers from higher-ups; foremen did not join.^[128] The titles of the Yorkshire unions reflected this exclusion: the local associations named themselves Power-Loom Tuners or Power-Loom Overlookers. In contrast to their German counterparts, the British overlookers had an organization in which the

[124] Deutscher Werkmeister-Verband, Statistics from 1892. Zentrales Staatsarchiv Merseburg, Rep. 120, BB VII 1, Nr. 25, Bd. 1, p. 19. Membership cannot be broken down by trade on either the city or the national level.

[125] Gladbacher Merkur , September 26, 1899. Archiv des Freien Deutschen Gewerkschaftbundes, Der Deutsche Meister-Verband, Membership Report, Third Quarter, 1903.

[126] Stadtarchiv Bocholt, K2/149, August 1900, statutes of Deutscher Webermeister-Verband. For evidence that not all members had so-called fixed terms (feste Bezüge ), see paragraph 133, Der Textil-Arbeiter , June 16, 1905. This confirms that loom fixers belonged to this union. See also Der Christliche Textilarbeiter , June 8, 1901, "Sonderorganisationen."

[127] Archiv des Deutschen Gewerkschaftsbundes, "Stenographischer Bericht über die Verhandlungen des Delegiertentages des Deutschen Werkmeister-Verbandes," 1913, p. 32.

[128] In its mill-by-mill survey of members and loom assignments in 1913, the Bradford loom tuners' union counted as members virtually all tuners but in each mill excluded one supervisor, the highest-level foreman. Bradford District Archives, Loom Tuners' Union survey of 1913.

highest foremen, who were tied most closely to the owner, could not put a brake on action directed against the owners. In Germany, by contrast, the overlookers' unions classified the loom fixers, who actually stood near to the status of ordinary workers, as occupants of the same basic position as the employers' closest assistants.

The absence of foremen from overlookers' organizations in Britain also enabled the overlookers to move closer to the position of the textile workers' unions.^[129] From their founding in the mid-nineteenth century, the overlookers' organizations endorsed the principle of providing strike support to weavers if weavers in turn supported the overlookers' cause.^[130] In the last quarter of the nineteenth century, affiliation became more explicit. The tuners' societies in the cities of Yorkshire relinquished their status as mere friendly societies and registered as trade unions.^[131] By the eve of the First World War, the overlookers' unions in Bradford, the Colne Valley, and the Heavy Woollen District had endorsed the Independent Labour Party. They donated funds and sent representatives to the Labour party's parliamentary council meetings.^[132] Even in Halifax, where the overlookers' club was slow to act, some overlookers identified themselves more as laborers than as supervisors. One member of the Halifax society, in a debate during 1909 on a resolution to affiliate with the General Union of Overlookers, a national organization, expressed this view with special clarity. According to the minutes of the union's meeting,

He said it was the same ol' thing over again, Capital versus Labour.

He said if the masters of Halifax wished to reduce overlookers'

[129] For an example in which even the mill manager's niece and chief overlooker's daughter volunteered for the weavers' union, see Elizabeth K. Blackburn's autobiography, "In and Out the Windows," Burnley Library Archives, p. 36.

[130] LRO, DDX 1128/1/1, Blackburn Overlookers' Society, 1858, 1862.

[131] Managers' and Overlookers' Society, Bradford, Managers' and Overlookers' Society, Centenary Spinning Celebrations, 1827–1927 (Bradford: R. Sewell, 1927), p. 20; Yorkshire Factory Times , March 22, 1901, p. 5, and March 17, 1893, p. 4.

[132] Managers' and Overlookers' Society, Bradford, op. cit., p. 26. Joanna Bornat, "An Examination of the General Union of Textile Workers 1883–1922," Ph.D. diss., University of Essex, 1981, p. 76; Minutes of the Huddersfield Power Loom Tuners' Society, May, 1905, and December, 1907, Kirklees Archives. The Huddersfield Power Loom Tuners' Society sent delegates to the Labour party parliamentary council meeting in 1905 to decide how many wards ought to be contested "in the interest of Labour." These overlookers' unions also supported the Yorkshire Textile Workers' Federation, which lobbied in Parliament for factory legislation. Yorkshire Factory Times , March 22, 1901, p. 5. The Yorkshire Factory Times reported in the spring of 1914 that the Yorkshire Tuners' Association planned to put forward Labour candidates for Parliament at Morley, Wakefield, and Holmfirth. March 26, 1914.

wages, this Society could not resist it. Therefore he would support Joining the General Union or he was prepared to go further and amalgamate with the workers of the world.^[133]

The collaboration between overlookers and workers extended to Lancashire as well. In 1907, when overlookers in Blackburn, Lancashire, joined the United Textile Workers' Association, a national confederation of textile unions, they justified their decision by citing the "spirit of mutual help and brotherhood that ought to exist among all unionists."^[134]

Whereas overlookers' unions in Britain supported their members' interests by fighting for improvements in the factory, their counterpart German unions focused their efforts on the political arena outside the factory. They persuaded the German government to admit them in 1911 to a government pension program similar to one enjoyed by white-collar workers.^[135] They advocated that technical professional workers be represented on the government's labor boards.^[136] Yet the German overseers' unions did not directly

[133] Calderdale Archives, TU102/3, June 19, 1909. In Burnley, the overlookers in 1892 urged the formation of a "distinct Labour Party in order to carry forward the full and complete emancipation of labour." Trodd, op. cit., p. 325. The General Association of Powerloom Overlookers supported the Labour Representation Committee, because, it said, other parties are "mixed up and interwoven with capital." General Union of Associations of Powerloom Overlookers, The Almanack and Guide for 1899 (Manchester: Ashton and Redfern, 1899). Yorkshire overlookers stood close enough to the weavers that they also applied for jobs as dues collectors for the regular textile workers' union, the Textile Workers' Association. Yorkshire Factory Times , October 14, 1892, p. 4, Bradford. Overlookers were also elected treasurers of workers' independent mill clubs. Yorkshire Factory Times , December 5, 1912. In Yeadon, the tuners never developed their own union, but enlisted with weavers in the Factory Workers' Union. My interview with Edward Mercer, Rawdon, Yorkshire. In the heavy woolen district, some heads of departments, probably outside of weaving, were members of the regular textile workers union. The union chief asked for a raise for them as part of a package of wage demands in 1913. Yorkshire Factory Times , May 8, 1913, p. 8. In Lancashire, the manager of an Oldham mill said, "Plenty of overlookers in the weaving trade who have been working weavers are still in the Weavers' Union." Journal of the British Association of Managers of Textile Works , Session 1913–1914, Volume 5, p. 17.

[134] Blackburn Times , March 2, 1907. The textile overlookers played an important role in the founding of the Labour Representation Committee in Lancashire. Trodd, op. cit., p. 303. For Lancashire, see also LRO, DDA 1151/19/3, Chorley Power-Loom Overlookers' Association Minutes, July 11, 1903, support for Labour Representation; LRO, DDX 1151/1/3, Preston Powerloom Overlookers, June 19, 1906, support for Labour Representation. The General Union of Associations of Power-Loom Overlookers endorsed the Labour Representation Committee. Cotton Factory Times , April 29, 1904. For the division in political outlooks among overlookers from 1908 to 1920 in Preston, however, see Michael Savage, The Dynamics of Working-Class Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), p. 155.

[135] Heinz Potthoff, Das Versicherungsgesetz für Angestellte: Vom 20. Dezember 1911. (Stuttgart: J. Hess, 1912).

[136] Franz Potthoff, Die soziale Frage der Werkmeister (Düsseldorf: Werkmeister-Buchhandlung, 1910).

confront the issue of raising overlookers' salaries. "In our social program the question of pay is almost completely forgotten," said a speaker at the overlookers' convention in 1911. The first requirement for raising the salaries of overlookers would have been to admit into the union only those who were already able to command a minimum salary, so that all in the union would have some bargaining leverage. Such an entrance requirement the union rejected.^[137] The overlookers' societies in Yorkshire and Lancashire, by contrast, imposed a rule that applicants prove they already earned a high wage.^[138] British overlookers took on the issue of pay directly, whereas their German counterparts moved to the political arena, a shift which, in the factory itself, upheld the role of German overlookers as servants of the owner.

The forms of association for overlookers in Germany and Britain reflected the basic difference between their perceptions of the overlooker's role in the factory. The German organizations detached the overlookers from the workers and linked them to the highest foremen; they defined their members' status by reference to the exercise of authority. From the German viewpoint, even the lowest loom fixer was unlike a worker, since the loom fixer had to exercise authority over others and made decisions for workers. The British associations for overlookers, by contrast, severed overlookers from the higher foremen close to the owner; they defined their members as workers who delivered a labor product.

The inability of workers in Germany to unite with their immediate supervisors against employers meant that workers' collective action was directed against the employers' domination of the labor process per se. In Britain, the affiliation of workers with their overlookers meant that workers were comparatively insulated on the shop floor itself from regular contact with the employers' authority. They oriented their collective action to a greater degree toward the price at which workers would deliver their materialized labor.

The theory of the capitalist labor process that Marx presented in Volume One of Kapital is critical for unraveling the differences between the German and British labor movements—but not for reasons that Marx would ever

[137] Archiv des Deutschen Gewerkschaftsbundes, "Stenographischer Bericht über die Verhandlungen des Delegiertentages des Deutschen Werkmeister-Verbandes," 1911, p. 94.

[138] LRO, DDX 1128/1/1, Blackburn Powerloom Overlookers' Society, February 5, 1862. Kirklees Archives, Minutes of the Huddersfield Power Loom Tuners' Society, September, 1912. For an example of someone rejected due to low salary, see ibid., May, 1907.

have dreamed of. The text reveals the cultural assumptions acquired by German workers in the labor process. Marx's emphasis upon the capitalist's exercise of authority in the factory as a means of extracting surplus forecasts the greater importance German textile workers would place, both in their complaints and in the enactment of strikes, upon aggressively contesting the capitalist's disposition over the labor activity itself.

Concluding Reflections on Part Three

The reified forms of consciousness that were manufactured at the point of production molded the shape of workers' resistance to the appropriation of their labor. Workers in each country advanced their interests vis-à-vis employers as straightforwardly as they could, but in so doing they confirmed their allegiance to a nationally prevailing concept of labor's commodity form, a concept that ironically united workers and employers in each locale. In The Rise of Market Culture William Reddy examined the essential terms of liberal capitalism, in particular the concept of labor as a commodity, as alien, intellectual imports with which nineteenth-century workers never authentically identified. He treated market categories as universalistic tools of scholarly analysis.^[139] By illuminating the inconspicuous differences between German and British workers' understanding and use of labor as a commodity, the present study instead suggests that the concept of labor as a commodity represented for workers not just an abstract doctrine but a set of popular repertoires that were linked to the course of industrialization and formed an essential component of popular culture. Rather than juxtapose an ethereal market model to real practices in one country, as Reddy did, we compared practices across countries to detect the impressive, but necessarily incomplete, materialization of market categories in everyday life and tactics of resistance.

The distinctive form of labor as a commodity in each country, as opposed to the alternative specifications operating in other capitalist societies, remained out of view of pointed critique.^[140] The cultural order was not immune to radical transformation before the First World War. But change could issue from below only through struggles guided by the definition of labor as a commodity that was, literally, "in place."

[139] Reddy, op. cit., pp. x–xi. In Reddy's view, workers' self-guided struggles are most accurately portrayed as movements of opposition to market categories, based in part on family and community solidarities. Op. cit., pp. 310–312, 324–325, 330–336; William Reddy, Money and Liberty in Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), Chapter Five. Workers may have been antagonistic toward commercial culture, but in each country they faithfully borrowed and exploited its terms.

[140] Cf. Yorkshire Textile Workers' Deputation, Official Report of the Yorkshire Textile Workers' Deputation: An Enquiry into the Conditions of the German Woollen Cloth Operatives (Batley: News Office, 1908).

11—
Conclusion:
Under the Aegis of Culture

History is just the history of the unceasing overthrow of the forms of objectivity that shape the life of humankind.
Georg Lukács, Geschichte und Klassenbewusstsein

It is the submission of this book that in the contrasting transitions to capitalist labor markets in Germany and Britain, a different understanding of the transmission of labor as a commodity emerged in each country, where it was shared by both its common people and its economic elites; that these divergent specifications of labor subsequently configured the daily use of time and space in the developing factories of nineteenth-century Germany and Britain independently of the immediate economic and technological circumstances in which manufacturing techniques arose; that once these nationally diverging models of the conveyance of labor were incarnated at the point of production, they were reproduced among managers and workers through the execution of work rather than through the reception of a discourse; and that, by this means, the stipulations of labor as a commodity acquired an uncanny stability in Germany and Britain throughout the nineteenth century. We have seen, further, that the contrasting German and British definitions of the exchange of labor provided the cultural schemata through which workers identified abuses in the workplace, articulated their demands, and invented tactics for resisting employers' power; that Marx arrived at the decisive revelations of Kapital by mediating between the opposing German and British experiences of the commodification of labor; and, finally, that reception of Marx's economic perspective among members of the labor movements of Germany and Britain depended on whether the symbolic structures of manufacturing techniques corresponded to Marx's specification of labor as a commodity. In this extended drama culture played a causal role first by configuring factory procedures and, once embodied and reproduced in such practices, by shaping the ideologies of labor movements and the conduct of struggles between workers and employers. The moment has arrived to sum up, on a formal level, the method employed in this study to isolate and specify culture's independent effects.

The Explanatory Method

Rather than make an appeal to culture as the sum of beliefs or implicit background assumptions that together comprised "Britishness" or "Germanness," I condensed the relevant differences between culture in Germany and in Britain into a single principle, the specification of the conveyance of labor as a commodity.^[1] I handled this feature in two ways: first as a key for identifying meaningful configurations of practices and, second, as a discrete variable whose causes and consequences could be specified. When I treated culture as an intelligible schema that came to life in a complex of practices, I reasoned from the viewpoint of synchrony; when I treated it as a variable, I reasoned from diachrony. These two approaches employed different comparative strategies.

On the synchronic level, I endeavored to show by judicious comparison that the differences between German and British wool mills in the symbolic patterning of manufacturing techniques could not be explained by the tangible conditions of the immediate business environment. In this part of the inquiry I excluded the economic environment as a source of variation between countries. True, factory practices served economic purposes, but the means employed to meet functional demands emerged from the cultural assumptions the agents applied. The German weaving managers' consecration of the "efficiency ratio," for example, served the purpose of measuring the level of production, but it hardly represented a natural or superior adaptation to the conditions of production. To review a second instance, the implementation of "waiting money" in German textiles before 1914 correlated with the workers' distinctive insistence upon payment for the commitment of labor power, rather than conforming to economic features of the German labor market that differed from those in Britain before 1914. The demonstration that culture had a pervasive, but specifiable, influence on industrial technique was complete after the initial, synchronic stage of comparison.

A different set of issues arises and a separate method of analysis must be called into service when one inquires into the historical origins of the German and British cultural systems. Culture does not descend from the clouds. Although the growth of the wool textile industries and the imme-

[1] Whereas this study considers only labor's particular commodity form, other investigators have considered the broader cultural resonance of work in general. Joan Campbell, Joy in Work, German Work: The National Debate, 1800–1945 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989).

diate circumstances of production in textiles were parallel in Britain and Germany, the national contexts of economic development in the countries as wholes contrast sharply. The conjunctural differences in the way Germany and Britain negotiated the transition from the feudal-corporate organization of work and exchange to factory manufacture in the era of capitalism enabled the agents to import contrasting definitions of labor's commodity form into the factory. On the diachronic level of analysis, therefore, I included economic institutions as a context for the emergence of cultural differences at the level of the countries as wholes. In identifying the autonomous causal contribution of culture, we are not required to treat culture as an unmoved mover.

But does this entire study then merely lead to the conclusion that the "economy" generated cultural impressions which subsequently assumed a stable life of their own? For the purpose of stipulating the causal contribution of culture, this is no different in its implications from the viewpoint that supposes that the economy is the active motor of change but that culture does not perfectly reflect economic circumstances, due either to cultural inertia or, if culture is treated as more plastic, due to the incomplete impression made by present economic conditions; nor is it different in its implications from the perspective that asserts that the differences in the national economies, the alleged foundation of social change, were naturally "reflected" in cultural conceptions which were then imported into diverse local undertakings, such as the regionally circumscribed wool industries. From each of these points of view, culture serves as a component, possibly a necessary one, in the creation of institutions, but it is the conduit, even if imperfect, of an original economic logic, not a systematically structuring force in its own right.

In order to override this reductionist interpretation of the findings of this study, wherein cultural differences only mirrored antecedent economic conditions, it is plausible but unsatisfactory to insist dogmatically, as a general rule of social theory, that what we designate the economy could not come into existence except through the medium of culture. Certainly the succession of economic structures cannot serve as the ultimate foundation of cultural change, for the economy has no history of its own apart from its realization in the culture, which gives shape to human practice. But this peremptory culturalist line of argument no longer makes appeal to an evidentiary demonstration; it no longer advances a research program by showing that the study of culture parsimoniously explains a wide range of phenomena that purely utilitarian or adaptive theories of practice do not

seem to cover. Not to waste words, the dogmatic culturalist interpretation of the results of the present inquiry into the origins of industrial differences is disenchanting because, if accepted, it means that the evidence marshalled in this study cannot be used to adjudicate between theoretic alternatives. It might well return us to the starting point of choosing an allegiance to a variety of theory based on a priori inclinations.

Perhaps we can apply the conventional method of distinguishing between cause and effect by temporal priority. A survey of the transition to liberal commercialism in each country shows that the definition of labor as a commodity emerged in speculative intellectual ruminations upon economic processes before it was embodied in micro-procedures on the factory shop floor. In their characteristic specifications of labor's commodity form, Adam Smith and Johann Lotz each uncannily foretold the shape of practice in his own country's industrial future. If this sequence of development shows that the definition of labor did not reflect established practice in the factory, does it also show that culture represented a force in its own right for institutional development? By itself, the chronological precedence of distinctive national differences in discourse about labor does not resolve this issue, for it might well be the case that the strategic goal of legitimating a profitable factory system was responsible for sustaining or resurrecting traditions of thought about labor which would not otherwise have been reproduced. Even if cultural definitions of labor display striking continuities, an advocate of utilitarian modes of explanation can still maintain that economic requirements decide which cultural features survive at the national level.

Because of its extensive reliance upon configurational analysis, however, this study enables us to make limited causal inferences from the temporal priority of the cultural template. For the outcome we are analyzing is not an isolated element or a single appurtenance of institutions, but a comprehensive constellation of practices. If the outcome to be explained were a simple trait, such as the affirmation of paternalism, then it might be treated as an accompaniment of factory systems which would have been legitimated in some other fashion in the absence of this feature; or it could be dismissed as a trait that was unsubstitutable, but had it not already been in place, would have been invented to meet the needs of the factory system; or, finally, it could be acknowledged as a resource that the economic agents could not have created, but which they put to the service of a structuring economic logic. But the outcome to be explained, as our synchronic comparison emphasized, was a complete cluster of practices. The tendency toward a pattern-

ing of these techniques shows that culture was not just an ingredient or a resource but a structuring principle. In this case, the appearance of the specification of labor in discourse prior to its embodiment in factory procedures is causally definitive; as a system of practice with an internal symbolic logic, culture stands revealed as a positive shaper rather than an accompaniment or passive resource for institutions.

The synchronic comparison of parallel segments of the British and German wool industries shows that practices were configured to form meaningful constellations, but it does not identify in positive fashion the historical genesis of these patterns. It contributes to explaining their initial emergence only by ruling out utilitarian accounts of their genesis. But excluding a competing mode of explanation for historical developments does not by default endorse one's own explanation if one's alternative represents not the simple negation of the rival but an entirely different approach. What is more, the differences in the economic environments may not account for the installation of differing factory practices, but they could still account for the invention of different specifications of labor before they took on a life of their own. Thus the question for delimiting culture's causal influence is not only whether culture "did" something, but from where that culture came. Even if a specification of labor as a commodity imposed a constitutive logic of its own once it was lodged in the factory, the argument might go, this fact offers slight reason for centering the comparative study of history on culture if national differences in cultural conceptions originated as a mere aspect of corresponding economic conditions.

Yet in Britain and Germany the features of the newly emergent discourse about labor that were uncovered in this inquiry debar attempts to see economic circumstances as the cause of the creation of distinctive concepts of labor as a commodity. In Britain the notion that wage workers transfer their labor as it is embodied in a product represented an idealized interpretation, not a mirror image, of the institutions of work in the transition to liberal commercialism. In seventeenth-century Britain, when wage laborers were prevented, at least in official opinion, from offering their labor as a freely marketable ware, and the independent artisan became the exemplary seller of labor, the bulk of the working population was excluded from the paradigm of commercial labor. When labor power became formally marketable in the course of the eighteenth century, Adam Smith, the prototypical philosopher of petty commodity production, recognized in The Wealth of Nations a continued divergence between fact and orienting model. Even while Smith employed the model of labor incarnated in a finished ware by a small

producer as his paradigm of the circulation of commodities, he acknowledged that nearly all worked in the service of a master, not as independent artificers.^[2] In Germany the exclusion of craft work as an imaginary locus for the emergence of labor as a commodity in the first half of the nineteenth century depended on the small urban producers' continued allegiance to a world of corporate production, seemingly in ignorance of the inescapable "reality" of a secular economic transition. Yet the response of the artificers in Germany did not appear out of thin air: unlike their British counterparts, they had in the main lost their guild monopolies only recently, and they confronted the institutionalization of liberal commercialism at a more threatening point on the clock of world development than British artificers did, a point at which it was evidently feasible for centralized factories to supersede craft production.^[3] But for this fact to be interpreted and thereby to bear consequences, the agents in Germany had to draw upon the outlying domains of their experience: the imagined past, the global and national economic context, and the projected future. When the manufactory and the textile mill comprised a statistically small portion of employment, they still served as the key site in Germany for the exemplification of capitalist wage labor. The forms of labor as a commodity to which the agents subscribed grew out of the conditions of economic development and exchange, but only as the agents conceived of their relation to them.

That the element of labor became the centerpiece of economic speculation during the transition to commercial liberalism underscores the symbolic process by which the agents established their relation to the commercial world. The young Karl Marx, upon making initial contact with classical political economy, understood that this received body of thought comprised a monumental break with prior reflections on commercial intercourse. Previously wealth had seemed to inhere in natural objects; now, under the sign of capital or, more fundamentally, accumulated labor, agents conceived of it as a form of human subjectivity. As is well known, Marx called Adam Smith "the Luther of political economy," for Smith reoriented belief by showing that development no longer issued from external forces

[2] For a compilation of Smith's views on independent manufacture, see Maxine Berg, "Political Economy and the Principles of Manufacture 1700–1800," in Maxine Berg et al., editors, Manufacture in Town and Country Before the Factory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), pp. 48–49.

[3] For a contemporary discussion of how guild members drew upon the example of mechanization in Britain to reinforce their commitment to corporate regulation in Germany, see Die Ameise , October 14, 1833, p. 588.

but arose from the labor of the human subject.^[4] The focus on human labor as both the generator and the regulator of value in Smith's eighteenth-century Britain coincided with the consecration of market categories as an effective ideology—that is, as the source of the operative schemata of everyday practice. The agents of commercial life incorporated the conditions of existence into their culture in such a way as to define themselves as the subjects of the economic process, but precisely in so doing they made it possible for themselves to become enmeshed in—and become subject to —these economic procedures.^[5] The discourse in which the specification of labor's commodity form can first be detected did not just record the landscape of commodities in motion, either straightforwardly or by a natural camera obscura; rather, it performed the symbolic work of constituting people as autonomous subjects even as it enveloped them in a sovereign economic system.^[6]

On some of the underlying uniformities identified between the German and British mills—their staffing, the distribution of tasks to overlookers, the general reliance on piece rates for weavers—cultural differences did not impinge. Culture is situated in every institution of society, but not everything is culturally determined. If we admit that the necessity of adapting to the economic environment accounts for certain uniformities between German and British mills—such as the general reliance on piece rates for weavers—do we then fall back on the position that culture was nonetheless determinative "in the last instance"? Such ultimate causes have no observable incarnation in history.^[7] But neither has this study retreated to the chicken-and-egg position in which culture and the economy are both necessary for each other's substantiation and the contribution of culture to the constitution of the labor process is limited to one category of prerequisite factors in an inextricable combination of causes. The manner in which culture is seen as making its separate contribution to the historical process differs fundamentally according to whether one is assessing the institution-

[4] Karl Marx, Marx/Engels Gesamtausgabe , Series One, Volume Three (Berlin: Marx-Engels Verlag, 1932), pp. 107–108.

[5] Michel Foucault, The Order of Things (New York: Vintage Books, 1973), p. 259.

[6] Ronald Meek cites evidence that a concern to preserve social relations between human subjects as the foundation of market phenomena gave rise to the eighteenth-century emphasis upon labor as a source of value. Ronald L. Meek, Economics and Ideology and Other Essays (London: Chapman and Hall, 1967), pp. 204–205.

[7] Raymond Aron, Introduction to the Philosophy of History (Boston: Beacon Press, 1962), pp. 252–254; Erik Olin Wright, Andrew Levine, and Elliot Sober, Reconstructing Marxism (London: Verso, 1992), "Causal Asymmetries."

alization of practice through contrasting specifications of labor or whether one is considering the origins of those conceptual assumptions. Culture operates in spite of economic similarities in the essentially synchronic comparisons between matched textile factories, so the typical differences in the symbolic orchestration of practice can be attributed to culture alone at this stage in the analysis. Only an argument based upon configurational reasoning can advance such a claim to causal exclusivity. Of course the material components of production were indispensable for the incorporation of culture into practice, but the systematic differences in the typical meaningful configuration of those resources obeyed nothing but an internal cultural logic. In the comparisons between Germany and Britain as wholes for the sake of identifying the origins of divergent conceptions of labor, culture is seen to operate in an environment of established contrasts in economic institutions. In each country, the agents moved in a cultural milieu that enabled them to isolate certain sectors in the country's economy as the prototypical site for the transmission of labor under liberal commercialism and to simplify and idealize features of the labor transaction.

To filter and interpret the record of evidence, historical investigators bring to bear a theoretical lens formed by their own vantage point in history. Since the researchers themselves stand inside history, the lens they use may comprise a product of the very course of change they are subjecting to examination. This principle offers an explanatory key for the present study. Marx's analysis of the difference between "labor power" and "embodied labor" and his influential emphasis on the ultimate genesis of profit in the conversion of "labor power" developed in response to the experience, shared by German employers and workers in the nineteenth century, of a rapid transition from feudal-corporate institutions of work to the capitalist factory system. As a scholar marked by the German developmental experience and steeped in German economic history, Marx unintentionally replicated in his texts the symbolic forms of everyday practice enacted by German workers and employers. My analysis of the history of economic thought suggests that Marx's position in the German milieu permitted him to recycle the cultural definition of labor as labor power which governed German practice and to present it in the form of a theory. If Marx can be used to analyze the development of German factories, so, too, can the development of German factories be used to analyze Marx.

This principle gives us new means both for theorizing history and for historicizing theory. The late-twentieth-century sociologist who uses Marx's concept of labor power as a tool to analyze the history of factory

relations has found a powerful lever, not because the concept necessarily penetrates the hidden essence of capitalism, but thanks to the concept's encapsulation of the particularities of the German experience of industrialization. To this extent, my method may carry subversive implications. In drawing upon the distinction between embodied labor and labor power I have changed the status of those terms. I converted them from analytic distinctions in the realm of high theory into cultural categories that people used in the inconspicuous procedures of everyday life. Making them a constituent part of sensuous human practice, rather than an outward description of action imposed by the analyst, makes them more "real" but, paradoxically, less objective—for, as realized categories of culture, they become genuine appurtenances of subjects rather than theoretic properties of economic objects.

Having established the cultural formation of the instrumentalities in the workplace, I considered the consequences of those practices for the articulation of grievances and for the adoption of ideologies of exploitation in workers' labor movements. The historical significance of the differences between the cultural construction of labor in German and in British textile factories does not lie in their effects upon economic efficiency, which in all likelihood remained exiguous. Rather, the cultural differences are notable for the differing ways in which they shaped workers' lived experience of the employment relation and thereby provided the underlying assumptions for their union movements. British textile workers focused on the acquisition of products at less than their true market value as the source of exploitation. Without the concept of labor power as a commodity, they did not move from theories about the creation of profit in the market to theories that focused on the extraction of surplus value at the point of production. Their textile unions, which in the 1890s sponsored the rebirth of socialist ideas, focused on the need to redistribute capital and access to the market rather than on the need to remove the subordination of living labor. In Germany, the textile workers' daily experience of the buying and selling of labor power on the shop floor gave them the cultural resources necessary for the positive reception of Marxist economic theory, or at least of a Marxist economic idiom, from the Social Democratic textile union.

In its appropriation of Marx's economic categories as cultural constructs, this inquiry may seem double-edged. In fact, it contains another paradox. Every act of rejection has a moment of reaffirmation. At the same time that this study shows how culture constituted the means of production, it lends qualified support to Marx's emphasis on the importance of the labor activity

for the formation of people's understanding of social relations. The respective cultural definitions of labor in Germany and in Britain did not survive through sheer inertia or through the might of intellectuals' discourse. They were sustained by a constellation of practices at the factory—from the small rituals of entering the mill to the fining systems for defective cloth—that gave them palpable form. Culture was enacted, not permanently absorbed. Even within the grey walls of the factory, the meanings that the activity of manufacturing sustains may bear ideological consequences as significant as are its instrumental outcomes. German workers were not duped by Marxist ideologues when they focused on the use of Arbeitskraft as the source of the owners' profit, nor did they thereby necessarily discover the essential workings of the capitalist system. Rather, the cultural categories that practices on the shop floor sustained provided German workers with a spontaneous theory of exploitation—a lived truth, if you will—that proved critical for their sympathetic reception of Marxist ideas.

Examining the independent influence of culture on the institutions of the factory solves two problems in labor history with one piece of evidence. It bridges the perplexing divide—established, if not discovered, by E. P. Thompson—between the structured relations of the economy and what Thompson celebrated as the fluid, creative, and heroic formation of political beliefs among workers. The present study identifies the determinate ways in which the symbolic apparatuses of production established the assumptions about labor that workers brought to the arena of politics, but it makes this causal linkage without resorting to economic reductionism. The ideologies of exploitation accepted in the labor movements were fixed, not by the workplace's economic structure, but by the cultural forms inscribed in the micro-practices of production, forms which varied independently of the material or socio-organizational conditions of the manufacturing process.

As a cross-national comparison conceived with a selective question, this investigation has of necessity focused upon a decisive contrast between countries rather than upon variation within them. But this expansive comparison nonetheless affords a perspective from which to study differences within each country in workers' experiences, above all those emerging from the divisions of gender. Consider the inflection of gender distinctions upon the factories' control of intervals of labor in the course of the workday. In Germany, many textile mills granted a special schedule to female workers in charge of households. For example, at lunch time or on the eve of holidays, for the sake of readying the family meal, these women could leave the

factory at least half an hour earlier than other workers.^[8] The arrangement was consistent with the procedure of partitioning the use of labor power into increments of time that were indefinitely divisible. It also tallied with other rotating or irregular schedules for adult workers in Germany, such as rest pauses whose length alternated according to the day of the week. In Britain, factory owners before the First World War often discussed ways of attracting more workers, especially women, to mill work.^[9] They considered giving the mill a more wholesome atmosphere and offering cleaner working conditions. But they did not grant women an extended lunch or single them out for early release on the eve of holidays. This would have fragmented the block of a complete day and slowed the delivery of products. Female textile workers in Britain could instead adjust workdays to their household schedule by sending substitute workers to take their place at the looms. Unlike their German counterparts, they had to offer prompt delivery of products, not necessarily access to their own labor power.^[10] These differences in the treatment of women's labor show that the form assumed by labor as a

[8] For instance, in the district of the Mönchengladbach factory inspectorate, women in charge of households had extended lunch breaks in forty-three factories. Twelve factories also allowed them to start work a half-hour or more after other workers. Germany, Jahres-Berichte der königlich preussischen Regierungs- und Gewerberäte und Bergbehörden für 1899 (Berlin: R. v. Decker, 1900), p. 515. After 1891, factory inspectors believed that women in charge of households had a right to a longer lunch break. But this provision, like the laws for donating fines, merely supported practices that had crystallized in the workplace long before. For examples, see HSTAD, Landratsamt Mönchengladbach, 710, 1870s, p. 105; Victor Böhmert, "Die Methode der Lohnstatistik," Der Arbeiterfreund: Zeitschrift des Central-Vereins in Preussen für das Wohl der arbeitenden Klassen (Berlin: Otto Ianke, 1877), p. 427; Franz Decker, Die betriebliche Sozialordnung der Dürener Industrie im 19. Jahrhundert (Köln: Rheinisch-West-fälisches Wirtschaftsarchiv, 1965), p. 71. At factories where the regular midday break amounted to an hour and a half, women with families had no legal claim to longer breaks but many received them. Compare Germany, Die Gewerbe-Ordnung (Berlin: Carl Heymanns Verlag, 1910), provision 137, p. 421, with Germany, Jahres-Berichte der königlich preussischen Regierungs- und Gewerberäte und Bergbehörden für 1894 (Berlin: W. T. Bruer, 1895), pp. 483 ff.; Germany, Jahres-Berichte der königlich preussischen Regierungs- und Gewerberäte und Bergbehörden für 1895 (Berlin: W. T. Bruer, 1896), pp. 60–61. Women bargained for the flexible schedules in return for working additional hours: Stadtarchiv Gera, Gemeinde Debschwitz, III D 11 0579, 1897, p. 33. The extended breaks were granted even in districts where inspectors reported a surplus of labor: Germany, Jahres-Berichte der königlich preussischen Regierungs- und Gewerberäte und Bergbehörden für 1900 (Berlin: W. T. Bruer, 1901), p. 12. For early release on the eve of celebrations, see Landesarchiv Potsdam, Rep. 6B, Kreisverwaltung Cottbus, Nr. 1253, 1902, p. 5.

[9] Yorkshire Factory Times , November 28, 1912, p. 8; Textile Mercury , January 11, 1914, p. 24. For a discussion of women and time schedules in the prewar period, see "The Scarcity of Labour and How to Solve the Difficulty," Journal of the British Association of Managers of Textile Works Volume 7 (1915–1916), pp. 61–62.

[10] See above, Chapter Two, p. 82. On cross-national differences in women's complaints about changing clothing, see Chapter Three, p. 127.

commodity did not exhaust the determinants of factory life, but operated as a pivotal category that mediated the influence of gender distinctions.^[11]

The Fetishism of Quantified Labor

The discovery that the apparatuses of production were organized as signifiers of labor's commodity form has important implications for our understanding of the constitution of liberal capitalist society by labor. In his legendary analysis of the fetishism of commodities, the founding charter for Western critical theory, Marx contends that commodity producers grasp their social dependency upon each other only through the moment of exchange.^[12] The agents' discovery of the social character of their labor through the trade of products causes human labor to appear under an absurd guise: as the comparative exchange value of products. In Marx's account, not only do the mutual relations of the producers take the misleading form of a social relation between things, but the category of social labor in general disappears from the producers' sight. In his view, liberal capitalism has the peculiarity that it structures social relations by abstract labor at the same time that it effaces abstract labor as a category of social consciousness. Even the classical political economists, by his reading, never identified abstract labor as such but contented themselves with comparing quantities of labor. These brilliant articulators of capitalist logic had "not the least idea, that the merely quantitative difference between kinds of labor presupposes their qualitative unity or equality, therefore their reduction to abstract human labor."^[13]

For Marx, the categories of recognition arise from the process of production and exchange depicted only in terms of its most fundamental mechanics. In his discussion of the fetishism of commodities, Marx temporarily suspends his prior characterization of the production process under capitalism and defines it only by the circumstance that articles are produced for the purpose of exchange. Indeed, at this point in his exposition Marx resorts to the counterfactual premise that the economic agents are independent commodity producers who handle the exchange of their own products: "Since the producers do not come into social contact with each other until they

[11] I have begun a comparative study of the ties between the family and the factory in German and British textile communities. Such a cross-national perspective highlights the articulation of capitalist and gender distinctions and, by contrasting their varying exemplifications in each country, historicizes the concept of gender as well.

[12] Das Kapital (Berlin: Dietz Verlag, 1980), Volume One, p. 88.

[13] Ibid., p. 94 note.

exchange their products, the specific social character of the producer's labor does not show itself except in the act of exchange."^[14] This simplification allows Marx to reason from the social horizon of the marketplace, in which officially free and equal owners are associated by exchanging their commodities in terms of values that appear imposed by an objective necessity from without. The experience of production itself, the use of concrete living labor, is not theorized as a process generating the agents' misrecognition of the governing categories of capitalism.

Marx's emphasis upon the generation of the forms of understanding out of the "deep structure" of the exchange of labor gives rise to several questions which the unveiling of the symbolic apparatuses of production on the shop floor can address. The economic agents, in point of fact, are not all independent producers separated except at the moment of exchange: capitalism from its inception required workers to dispose of their living labor by entering into social relations of subordination to employers. Why, then, are the agents' "mutual personal relations" in the performance of labor "disguised under the shape of social relations between products"?^[15] Can Marx's simplified model of independent commodity owners who labor in isolation be applied to explain the development of the categories of recognition among dependent wage laborers? The meaningful arrangement of micro-apparatuses on the shop floor suggests that workers acquired the categories of their culture, not from the deep structure of relations of exchange, but from the discernible shape of procedures on the surface of production. Not in the fleeting moment of concluding a wage contract but in the minute details of work itself, in the ongoing experience of systems of payment, accounting, and time discipline, did the dependent British workers learn that human practice revolves around the imagined exchange of labor materialized in a product. Workers in Germany learned to think of their concrete exertions as the expenditure and transmission of a quantity of labor power that appeared to them as a measurable thing with a commercial metric attached to it by the external force of the market. In both countries, the subordination of workers in the factory did not simply appear as the direct personal domination of the employer but came into view as an effect of the impersonal workings of the transmission and circulation of quantified labor. In each country, both workers and employers pursued their interests within shared forms of

[14] Ibid., p. 73.

[15] Ibid., pp. 91–92.

understanding of labor which neither group alone had created and which confronted both as a prior fact.

Marx's presentation of the fetishism of commodities gives rise to still another issue. In focusing on the fetishization that took place behind people's backs via the market, he depreciated the fetishization of labor as a commodity on the shop floor. In his view, once production is structured to become a mere means of exchanging commodities, the labor process appears to obey natural technical imperatives and relations between producers are structured as instrumental relations. Marx's descriptions of capitalist factories endow the machines themselves with the ability to dictate relations between producers on the shop floor.^[16] For Marx, of course, the emergence of technological determinism at the work site is only an effect of the historically unique institutions of capitalism and is in the end, therefore, socially structured. But the use of labor is socially determined at a remove, by the underlying commercial structure which makes of production a mere means for the exchange of commodities. In Marx's account, if the use of labor inside the capitalist factory appears determined by technical imperatives, this is not an illusion but a local reality.^[17]

In the realm of the factory itself, Marx mistook as a simple technical outcome or as a set of relations between things what was in truth a set of human relations structured by communication about labor's commodity form. The configuration of procedures on the shop floor in conformity with varying cultural assumptions about labor shows that the fetishism of commodities emerges not just in the marketplace but in the process of production, not just in the exchange of labor but in its use.^[18] The factory producers mistook the form of labor as a commodity as an objective force controlling the enactment of their life activity because they were enmeshed in minute procedures structured as signifiers of labor's commodity form. As they engaged in the order of practice, they treated themselves and their fellow agents as if they were things, bearers of objectified labor. This "objectivating attitude" was not a simple correlate of production for

[16] Ibid., pp. 445–446.

[17] Grundrisse der Kritik der politischen Ökonomie (Berlin: Dietz Verlag, 1974), p. 716.

[18] In effect, Marx's analysis of the fetishism of commodities marks a failure to complete the integration of the British view of exchange of materialized labor with the German view of the employment of labor power. It reverts to the British focus on the exchange of materialized labor among formal market equals as a social process susceptible to theorization, shaped through and through by the abstraction of labor.

exchange, but was sustained by the communicative function of unobtrusive procedures in the execution of work itself.^[19]

The disclosure of signifying practices on the shop floor helps to specify the historically unique mode by which culture shaped human activity in nineteenth-century capitalism. At the outset of this study, we saw that Marshall Sahlins aptly demonstrated how non-capitalist societies have used the instrumentalities of production to communicate a symbolic schema.^[20] They have incorporated kinship distinctions, which shape society into a functional whole, into the minute procedures of work. But these kinship principles for social relations are also supported by a transcendent cosmology. The principles, received from the gods, stand above production so that the preservation of the social relations based upon them appears as the very motive of production.^[21] In the liberal capitalist factory, by contrast, the structuring form of labor as a commodity was neither explicated nor solemnized through transcendent norms or through principles standing above the sensible processes of production and exchange. The reproduction of culture did not rely upon a sacred cosmology to make its preservation appear as an end in itself. The purpose of social life was nothing more than the production of commodities.^[22] In noncapitalist societies, the unspoken principles and assumptions of sacred tradition may comprise the undisputed foundation of social life;^[23] in the liberal capitalist order, it is not the unspoken parts of enunciated laws or acts of

[19] Jürgen Habermas uses the expression "objectivating attitude" to characterize agents' orientation to the exchange value of their labor. The Theory of Communicative Action (Boston: Beacon Press, 1987), vol. 2, p. 336. Historians have complained that the study of the texture of everyday life can inadvertently consign one to an atheoretical portrayal of facts. Geoff Eley and Keith Nield, "Why Does Social History Ignore Politics?" Social History Volume 5, Number 2 (May 1980), pp. 259–262. By contrast, the present study suggests that the best Alltagsgeschichte will become theoretical against its own intentions. The minutiae of everyday experience already contain the fundamental categories that make possible the reproduction of society as a whole.

[20] See Chapter One of this work, p. 26.

[21] In archaic societies, "the reproduction of traditional relations  . . . of the individual to his commune  . . . of his relations both to the conditions of labor and to his co-workers, fellow clansmen, etc.  . . . is the foundation of development." Marx, Grundrisse , op. cit., p. 386.

[22] "Thus the old horizon, where the human being always appears as the end of production, regardless of his narrow national, religious, political character, seems to be very lofty when contrasted to the modern world, where production appears as the aim of mankind and wealth as the aim of production." Marx, Grundrisse , op. cit., p. 387. Seyla Benhabib, on whom I draw for this interpretation of Marx, explains the implications of the shift from transcendent to immanent legitimation more fully in Critique, Norm, and Utopia: A Study of the Foundations of Critical Theory (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), pp. 110–111.

[23] Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), pp. 167–169.

religious ritual but the symbolic form of instrumental practice itself that represents the supreme domain of the culturally undisputed. Nineteenth-century economic theorists and demagogues could put concepts of labor into words for their own, fleeting purposes. But capitalist culture at work did not depend upon its verbal articulation, for the logic of practice did not have to refer to something greater than itself.

The nationally specific understandings of labor as a commodity appeared to the producers in Germany and Britain as natural appurtenances of the capitalist order. Even when spokespersons for the labor movement at the end of the nineteenth century called for the supersession of capitalism, they did not question the particular form in which labor was designated a commodity in their country; that form acted as a reference point for their nationally distinctive visions of socialist society. In noncapitalist societies, that which is unquestionable about social arrangements is merged with the structure of the natural universe. In the nineteenth-century factory, by contrast, the undoubtable fundament was merely the representation of human labor as an objectified and natural thing: the unquestionable procedures of conduct appeared to the agents as if they were attached, not to nature outside of humankind, but to the nature of humankind; not to objects outside of people, but to people as objects. The institutions of the factory are grasped as human creations, but human agency is misrecognized in the guise of quantified human labor. In noncapitalist society, utilitarian action is hidden under the guise of disinterested conduct that conforms to transcendent norms. In this setting the very haziness and incompleteness of the discursive tradition are part of its usefulness, because they make it pliable enough to legitimate unforeseen strategies.^[24] In noncapitalist society, practices that appear to serve nothing but noninstrumental goals actually disguise the pursuit of profit. In the nineteenth-century factory, the reverse occurs: the very practices that appear to serve nothing but the pursuit of profit actually conform to a communicative logic. Because the reproduction of the specification of labor as a commodity did not depend upon its legitimation as part of the sacred but could appear as a mode of strictly instrumental conduct, it was less vulnerable to the questioning that occurs with the disenchantment of the modern social world.

[24] Ibid., p. 49.

Forms of Passage

Comparison of the paths of cultural development in Germany and Britain teaches a paradoxical lesson about the possible advantages of relative underdevelopment for the articulation of economic thought. In Germany the conception of the commodity of labor which proved so suitable for analyzing the utilization of labor in the mechanized factory depended not only upon the commercial logic of a free market but upon the cultural model of feudalism. Many historical analyses emphasize the manner in which the exceptionally rapid economic growth in nineteenth-century Germany outpaced cultural change as a result of the relatively late dismantling of the corporate-feudal order there.^[25] The present study evaluates the unusually strong feudal template as a helpful resource for the construction of Germany's factory institutions in the image of fully realized capitalist categories. The compressed progression from feudalism to the market-industrial order in Germany, far from creating a lag or an imbalance in economic categories, was distilled in a pure capitalist form: it propelled the Germans to place special emphasis on the timed subordination of labor power per se. Thorstein Veblen wisely appreciated the advantages of initial backwardness; at the level of the economic infrastructure, as is well known, he highlighted the benefits of starting with only up-to-date technology, and at the level of cultural resources, he noted that the Germans' unusual combination of ideas from the medieval and mechanical ages created the potential for "an acceleration of change."^[26]

In Britain the precocious development of a unified national market with formally free exchange in finished products bestowed upon the country a pioneering role in economic reasoning. But the development of a set of commercial assumptions centered on labor before labor power itself became a freely marketable commodity led to the installation of practices in the workshops that revolved around the exchange of materialized labor. Nineteenth-century capitalists and political economists in Britain, who emphasized labor as the generator and regulator of value, did not develop

[25] Ralf Dahrendorf, Gesellschaft und Demokratie in Deutschland (München: R. Piper & Co., 1968); Shulamit Volkov, The Rise of Popular Antimodernism in Germany (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978); Georg Iggers, The German Conception of History: The National Tradition of Historical Thought from Herder to the Present (Middletown, Connecticut: Wesleyan University Press, 1983), p. 275; Hans-Ulrich Wehler, Das deutsche Kaiserreich 1871–1918 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1973).

[26] Thorstein Veblen, Imperial Germany and the Industrial Revolution (New York: Macmillan and Co., 1915), p. 231.

categories for assessing the significance of labor's systematic use in the classical age of the factory. Their commercial ideology of practice remained within the social perspective of exchange relations between juridically equal property owners. The introduction in Germany of officially free market transactions in products only when juridically free markets in labor power were created, and the survival of feudal templates of the appropriation of labor services, together allowed the Germans to incorporate asymmetric social relations at the point of production into the economic specification of the labor transaction. The precipitous introduction of free exchange relations into the feudal-corporate order afforded German political economists a position from which they could critique the social outlooks centered upon the equalitarian sphere of exchange. Marx's penetrating theory of the exploitation of labor power, intriguingly similar to that of other German economists of his time in its treatment of labor power in production, relied upon the peculiar experience of late and rapid development in his homeland as a reference point for the development of critical social theory. As Marx drew upon British assumptions about labor in the sphere of exchange and compounded them with German assumptions about labor at the point of production, he incorporated the combined and uneven development of capitalism across Europe into the very core of his economic theorems.

Britain's early development of an integrated national market and the country's subsequent weakening in the world economy of the twentieth century have prompted vigorous debate about the distinctive features of Britain's movement to a capitalist regime. Many analysts, from Perry Anderson and Tom Nairn to Martin Wiener, have attributed Britain's modern industrial descent to its early and "incomplete" development of a capitalist social order under the auspices of a commercially minded, yet aristocratic, landed elite.^[27] Ellen Meiksins Wood has departed from this view in her notable work The Pristine Culture of Capitalism. Wood suggests that Britain's industrial fate can be attributed to the consummation of capitalist culture in Britain rather than to the system's unfinished incarnation. In Britain, where free-market principles left entrepreneurs to their own devices, people of business focused upon short-term profit in the consumer

[27] These authors' recent contributions to the thesis of Britain's incomplete transition to industrial capitalism include Tom Nairn, The Enchanted Glass: Britain and Its Monarchy (London: Century Hutchinson, 1988), pp. 239–245; Perry Anderson, "The Figures of Descent," The New Left Review Number 161 (January–February 1987), pp. 31, 35; Martin Wiener, English Culture and the Decline of the Industrial Spirit, 1850–1980 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), pp. 7–10.

goods sectors rather than upon the transformation of technique in heavy industry. In Germany, fewer of the business and political elites converted to the culture of liberal "free enterprise." The Bismarkian state drew upon the authoritarian and military traditions of the precapitalist past to organize technological innovation and to coordinate longterm industrial investment for geopolitical advance. In Wood's opinion, it is not accidental but paradigmatic that state-guided industrialization in Germany proved economically superior to the "pristine culture of capitalism" in Britain.^[28]

Likewise, in the present study, the British factory system exemplified "pure" capitalist categories. In the British case the concept of the sale of labor as a commodity was shorn of traditional relations of subordination for its content. In this sense it depended less upon precapitalist forms of labor appropriation than its counterpart in Germany did. Yet, as we have seen, the focus upon the equalitarian realm of product exchange in Britain grew out of the protracted suppression of a market for the transmission of labor power itself after the recognition of a market in goods. The selection of the peculiarly commercial and liberal specification of labor as a commodity in Britain developed as a result of the long survival of the "archaic" corporate administration of wage labor in Britain, not because of a relatively early or clean supersession of the medieval-corporate order. In a word, the pristine cultural outcome emerged from a corrupted transition. In Germany, the protection of contractual relations in industrial wage labor occurred relatively early compared to a recognition of an integrated market in products. The conjuncturally early establishment of a formally free market in labor power in Germany permitted the carryover of feudal relations of domination into the understanding of capitalist wage labor. In my study, Germany's feudal past does not figure as an obstacle to the expression of a purely capitalist culture; rather, the strong legacy of feudal relations of labor defined the fundamental concept of wage labor itself.^[29]

[28] Ellen Meiksins Wood, The Pristine Culture of Capitalism (London: Verso, 1991), pp. 15, 103, 105. Wood's characterization of Germany resembles the classic formulation of Ralf Dahrendorf: "Imperial Germany developed into an industrial, but not into a capitalist society." Op. cit., p. 54.

[29] If the focus on the timed conversion of labor power into a product in Germany before 1914 helped to focus attention on the transformation of industrial technique and eventually contributed to German economic superiority, this alters the appreciation of the precapitalist legacy. In Wood's account, the survival of anti-liberal elites and the state-organized pursuit of traditional militaristic ambitions contribute to industrial development as a noncapitalist component of economic institutions. In my analysis, the feudal endowment molds capitalist categories themselves in the hidden abode of the production process. It thereby constructs apeculiar kind of capitalism in social practice from the ground up, not by the external administration of the state.

By returning Marx's well-known analysis of the capitalist labor process to its home in German practice, this study helps us to appreciate how the past shaped an economic theory that is alive in the present. Does the contextualization of Marxist categories as the representation of a particular cultural experience also differentiate between past and present by restricting the applicability of Marx's nineteenth-century theory of exploitation to the era in which it originated?

Recent developments in Marxist theory have removed from scholarly discourse that part of Marx's theory which initially derived from the German context, and, in fact, have jettisoned the concept of labor power in toto. In Kapital , Marx counted the employer's control over the execution of work as the first defining feature of the production process under capitalism.^[30] Like nineteenth-century German employers and workers, Marx unified the relations of domination and appropriation at the point of production. Contemporary Marxist theory has disengaged the exercise of authority in the workplace from the appropriation of surplus. John Roemer, among the most influential Marxist economists at present, has offered an intriguing reanalysis of the mechanisms by which surplus is transferred between workers and capitalists. In A General Theory of Exploitation and Class , Roemer concludes that surplus labor can be transferred from one class to another if productive assets are unequally distributed among classes, even if the classes with the lesser assets still own the means of production that they employ for their labor.^[31] Roemer's demonstration has even led theorists to remove wage labor from the necessary design of capitalism.^[32] Adam Przeworski has participated in this analytical shift by turning away from the analysis of the actors' locations in the production process and emphasizing the distribution of labor surplus.^[33] Erik Olin Wright has also contributed to this continuing realignment of theory. In a revision of his earliest parsing of class categories, Wright eliminated authority over the labor process as a criterion of class position in capitalist relations

[30] Das Kapital , op. cit., pp. 199–200. The capitalist's ownership of the product was for Marx the second defining feature of the capitalist labor process.

[31] John Roemer, A General Theory of Exploitation and Class (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1982), pp. 104–105.

[32] Cf. William H. Sewell, Jr., "A Theory of Structure: Duality, Agency, and Transformation," American Journal of Sociology Volume 98, Number 1 (July 1992), p. 25.

[33] Adam Przeworski, Capitalism and Social Democracy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), pp. 88 ff. and Chapter Four.

of production.^[34] The ongoing process by which capitalists rely upon their domination at the work site to extract surplus from living labor power is losing its centrality in the leading Marxist analyses of contemporary economic functions.

This sea-change is telling because it alters the way Marxist theory connects the functioning of the capitalist system to the understandings of the economic agents. In Marx's perspective, the sale of labor power comprises an encounter between the functional requirements of the valorization of labor for the capitalist system on the one side and the lived experience of the producers on the other. Labor power for him is both an analytic mold and a category in the producers' social consciousness. The shift of contemporary Marxist analysis away from the experienced moment of the use of labor power means that the operation of the economic system is theorized without reference to its constitutive and governing forms of understanding and experience. To be sure, Marx assumed that only one definition of labor power emerges in capitalist culture, in keeping with his premise that its apparent form is an inseparable expression of the essence of the capitalist system. Yet he believed that the lived experience of the monetization of labor is essential both for the system's reproduction and for struggles to change it. The appearance of abstract human labor as a category shaping the practices of production establishes at the outset the cultural foundation for the agents' pursuit of their interests. The present study reaffirmed the constraining effect of the form of abstract labor in the example of the Huddersfield weavers, who were unable to recognize and measure their own activity except under the guise of the objective properties of the fabric itself.^[35]

[34] Erik Olin Wright, Classes (London: Verso, 1987), p. 83. Since the publication of Classes , Wright has acknowledged shortcomings in his principles for demarcating class positions, without offering a new general strategy. He has also placed renewed emphasis on the accessory experiences of domination, although not as a basis for establishing class position or for elucidating the reproduction of capitalist economies. Erik Olin Wright et al., The Debate on Classes (London: Verso, 1989), pp. 289, 307, 323.

[35] If a social analyst attempts to extrapolate from the distribution of resources in the economic system to the agents' recognition and pursuit of class interest, the result is not only crudely reductionist, but, from Marx's viewpoint, the distinguishing feature of conflict in capitalist society is lost. In contrast to precapitalist economies, where struggle between laborers and appropriators can be pursued as direct conflicts over the concrete relations of personal dependence and political inferiority, struggle in bourgeois society is "objectivistically concealed and objectivated through the medium of exchange value." Jürgen Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action (Boston: Beacon Press, 1987), p. 334. In medieval society, Marx explains, "the social relations between individuals in the performance of their labor appear at all events as their own mutual personal relations and are not disguised under the shape of social relations between objects, the labor products.  . . . Here the natural form of labor, its particu-larity, and not, as in a society based on the production of commodities, its general form is the immediate social form of labor." Das Kapital , op. cit., pp. 91–92. My excerpt transposes the sentences in the original.

For this comparative study of culture I am interested only in ascertaining what the producers themselves believed was true and in identifying the origins and consequences of their beliefs. This is not a blind strategy of convenience. On the contrary, the truth value of Marxism depends on the interpretations of the producers. Their categories of understanding prompt the development of economic processes, shape the course of change, and continue to alter the relevance of theory. It is not up to theorists to decide with equations from afar whether Marx's definition of the commodity of labor as labor power remains valid at the end of the twentieth century. How the producers themselves interpret the labor process will resolve this fateful question. The history of practice on the shop floor suggests that the concept of labor as a commodity may have long ago lost its position as the center-point of a constellation of practices.

The two decades leading up to the First World War comprise the last days of the classical factory system that was established in the heyday of commercial liberalism. Until the onset of the war, there was little evidence that the cluster of practices based on labor's commodity form was losing its coherence. Yet German and British producers could not inhabit unconnected and uncompared conceptual worlds forever. As they came into tighter contact, they inadvertently reaffirmed their distinctive cultural starting points. In the weaving branch, the diffusion of the so-called pick clock, a technical contrivance mounted on looms in order to count the motions of the shuttle across the warp, caused British managers closely to examine German procedures for executing work. On the very eve of the war, managers in Britain became aware that the philosophy of remunerating weavers by shots in Germany marked the major difference between the two countries' pay systems.^[36] In Germany, the concept of pay by shots had preceded the technology of the pick clock, whereas in Britain it happened the other way around.^[37] The first batch of pick clocks to arrive in Yorkshire, purchased for inspection and experimentation in 1911 by the Huddersfield employers' association,

[36] Bradford Technical College, Quarterly Report of the Department of Textile Industries, City of Bradford Technical College (Bradford, August 1912), p. 11: "The system of paying for woollen and worsted weaving at so much 'per thousand picks' is general in Germany." For cotton, see Textile Mercury , March 16, 1912.

[37] See also Textile Mercury , March 16, 1912, p. 199. Tentative experiments with pick clocks in Yorkshire began during 1912. Bradford District Archives, Minutes of the Huddersfield and District Woollen Manufacturers' and Spinners' Association, 20 D 81/46.

came from Germany. Before that date, contemporaries claimed, not a single loom in Yorkshire had a pick clock.^[38]

Even after they began testing the pick clocks, the British were unsure whether they would restructure their pay scales or would use the clocks just to measure cloth length more precisely.^[39] A change in one element of the technical environment did not call into question the overall view of the labor process. The concept of pay by shot in Germany made the usefulness of the pick clock apparent from the start. The slow adoption of pick clocks in Britain resulted not from technical backwardness but from a particular outlook upon labor. The emphasis on measuring production by the length of the output made it difficult for the British to envisage how such clocks could be used until after German industry had provided a complete demonstration. Decades earlier, British technicians had discussed the feasibility and usefulness of assembling pick clocks for looms. A mechanic in Britain had inquired as early as 1879 in the Textile Manufacturer , the central forum for technical discussions for British textiles, whether a gadget existed for registering picks as they were inserted. The magazine dismissed the notion of building a pick clock. "We are almost certain that no instrument is in the market specifically intended for this purpose," its technical editors replied, "and if there were, it is a moot point whether there would be a great demand for it."^[40] Thoughts of a pick clock disappeared until foreigners reintroduced them.

In the Lancashire cotton district, the idea of remunerating weavers by the total shots inserted appears to have occurred only among managers who, after 1902, installed American-designed Northrop automatic looms with pick clocks.^[41] In 1914 only 1 percent of the looms in Britain were of this type.^[42] The Gregs of Styal, Cheshire, began to install these new looms in 1909. The surviving account books indicate that the machines alone did not bring about a revised appreciation of weaving. This company placed Northrop looms with pick clocks next to its older weaving equipment. Only weavers on the new machines were paid by thousands of shots, since pick clocks were measuring

[38] See also Yorkshire Factory Times , February 7, 1908, p. 4; Textile Mercury , March 16, 1912, p. 199.

[39] Yorkshire Factory Times , May 1, 1913, p. 5.

[40] Textile Manufacturer , February 15, 1879, p. 48.

[41] Journal of the British Association of Managers of Textile Works Volume IV (1912–1913), p. 46.

[42] Behnam Pourdeyhimi, "A Study of the Evolution of the Automatic Loom and Its Diffusion Within the British Cotton Industry," Ph.D. diss., University of Leeds, 1982, p. 173. D. M. Hollins, "The Northrop Loom for Woollens and Worsteds," Huddersfield Textile Society Journal (1918–1919), pp. 12–13.

their output.^[43] British weavers on the Northrops contested the number of looms each of them would operate as well as the total amount of their wage, but they did not resist the new principles on which their piece earnings were based, another indication that survival of the old piece-rate systems cannot be attributed to organizational inertia or rigidity in industrial relations. The bookkeepers at the Greg firm maintained the accounts for the old and the new machines in the same volume. They awkwardly divided the pages into different sets of columns for the two types, because they calculated the net efficiency only of the new looms. The categories used to measure output and efficiency with the alien technology on new looms were not generalized to the mill as a whole.^[44] Their introduction did not lead to revision in the symbolic apparatuses of production for old looms. When the British came into contact with imported technologies, they lost some of the techniques that reproduced their own construct of labor as a commodity. But given the stability in the other parts of the ensemble of practices, the established concept of labor was reproduced.

When the British adopted methods for calculating an efficiency ratio on new looms, their methods did not always conform to the cultural framework in place in Germany. At the firm of Benjamin Thornber and Sons in Burnley, records show that managers began calculating the efficiency of production no later than 1919. Unlike German managers, however, they did not begin with the maximum production possible in a given unit of time. They calculated the hours required to complete a piece of cloth of a fixed length with uninterrupted operation of the loom and then compared this with the actual number of hours used to produce cloth of that length.^[45] To be sure, the formula expressed efficiency as a percentage of the maximum possible, as in Germany. Yet fabric partitioned time, not time fabric; British practitioners

[43] Manchester Library Archives, C5/2/4. As British firms after the First World War slowly adopted pay per shot, they did not design their scales with a base unit of labor such as one thousand shots. Instead they chose miscellaneous sums (such as 14,551 shots!) whose execution qualified for payment of one penny. The execution of the shots still did not comprise an elementary foundation for the design of the scales. See, illustratively, LRO, DDX 1123/6/2/345, Bolton, 1931.

[44] Manchester Library Archives, C5/1/7/3, shows that the bookkeepers sometimes put the data for new and old looms on the same page, but they drew in different layouts of columns on the same page rather than adopt a single scheme applicable to both sets of looms.

[45] Burnley Library, Archives, Benjamin Thornber and Sons Ltd., M31, Acc. No. 11498, 1919–1920. I am grateful for the permission granted by the Thornber family to examine the company's books. For an example from the First World War in which a British manager cited an efficiency ratio for the Northrop looms using the German method but, properly, cautioned that the ratio was misleading, see Journal of the Association of British Managers of Textile Works Volume VIII (1916–1917), p. 87.

reasoned in this instance from hours per cloth, not, as the Germans did, from cloth per hour.^[46] Even when the British analyzed the use of labor in time, then, they sometimes began with the length of cloth, not the motions executed, as labor's denominator, a sign that change did not necessarily push them toward the German perspective of transmission of labor as a commodity.

Whether the systems of industrial practice in Germany and Britain contained endogenous forces for change that would have revealed themselves but for the intervention of the First World War, no one is in a position to determine. In the event, the force summoned to dislocate the systems was the organizational influence of the state, which broke the liberal-capitalist occultism of commodity production. In both Germany and Britain, during the war the state assumed greater responsibility for determining the rate at which workers were paid. In Germany, the workers' receipts from employers for piecework were adjusted to provide additional allowances, regardless of performance, to men for each dependent child.^[47] Government intervened to decide not just the social benefits workers received as citizens but the wages they received as wage laborers, which now diverged from the quantity of labor power expended. The state determined not just the amount of pay but the formula by which it was calculated. The purchase of labor as a commodity through the autonomous workings of the market was not circumscribed; rather, it was completely undermined.^[48]

[46] Likewise, the so-called speed clauses of the Oldham spinning scales, which in effect divided gains in productivity between workers and employers, did not measure length of yarn output per unit of time, but time per unit of length. The design of the scales did not measure the use of a potential, but the progressive cheapening of the product. As a result, industrial commentators did not realize how the division of gains changed as efficiency increased. See the inaccurate analysis in James Winterbottom, "A Criticism of the Oldham and Bolton Lists of Earnings for Mule Spinning," Journal of the British Association of Managers of Textile Works Volume VI (1914–1915), pp. 94–95. The history of payment systems suggests that the Oldham scales originated as an attempt to compensate workers assigned to old, slower machinery who delivered less output. H. A. Turner, Trade Union Growth Structure and Policy (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1962), p. 338 footnote 1. The indicator of motions on the mules was used as a proxy for measuring the product, for its readings were recalibrated and discounted for breakages to equal a hank of yarn. Royal Commission on Labour, PP 1892 XXXVI, Part 4, p. 896.

[47] Deutscher Textilarbeiter-Verband, 12. Bericht über die Lage der Textil-Industrie und ihrer Arbeiter in der Kriegszeit , (Berlin, 1917). On the breakdown of market incentives in German industry during the First World War, see also Rudi Schmiede and Edwin Schudlich, Die Entwicklung der Leistungsentlohnung in Deutschland (Frankfurt: Aspekte Verlag, 1976), p. 233.

[48] Family wage supplements independent of work performance and wage regulation were enforced in German textiles during the revolutionary crisis of the 1920s. Hauptstaatsarchiv Düsseldorf, 13072, 1920, p. 585; Karl Dörpinghaus, Nachlass in Deutscher Gewerk-schaftsbund, Bundesvorstand, Archiv, Düsseldorf, "Lebenserinnerungen," p. 11. An analysis of the bureaucratic determination of postwar textile wages by locality and age of the worker, rather than by performance, appears in Constantin Beck, "Die Lohnunterschiede in der württembergischen Metall- und Textil-Industrie," diss., Tübingen, 1927.

In Britain the breakdown of a market in raw materials and labor is illustrated by the policies of the Cotton Control Board, an association of textile manufacturers appointed in 1917 by the government Board of Trade. The Control Board allocated raw cotton at controlled prices to manufacturers, who were required to purchase a license to operate all their standing machinery. The more equipment the mill owners operated, the greater the levies they owed to the Cotton Control Board; the funds were used to provide unemployment relief for operatives in the industry.^[49] The board also controlled wage agreements. When the spinners, weavers, and card-room workers began negotiations in 1918 for large pay raises, the Cotton Control Board threatened (with great effect) to eliminate unemployment relief.^[50] Clearly, the bargaining no longer revolved around the sale of materialized labor, but centered on the collectively managed maintenance of labor power.^[51]

The war brought about a fundamental shift in the symbolic apparatuses of production in Britain. Perhaps because manufacturers had to purchase a license for each machine they wanted to run, they began to abandon the custom of locking tardy workers out; instead, they threatened to make latecomers put in a full day of labor by working past quitting time.^[52] Government-sponsored costing principles made it superfluous to reckon expenditures on overlookers' labor as an input embodied in the cloth; instead, overlookers received a guaranteed wage whether or not they or their underlings worked.^[53] In Germany, workers' struggles in the postwar period were no longer played out through the anonymous

[49] Alan Fowler, "War and Labour Unrest," in Alan Fowler and Terry Wyke, editors, The Barefoot Aristocrats (Littleborough: George Kelsall, 1987), p. 149.

[50] Ibid.

[51] Unemployment allowances were standardized by age and gender, not fixed to prior earnings. Edwin Hopwood, A History of the Lancashire Cotton Industry and the Amalgamated Weavers' Association: The Lancashire Weavers Story (Manchester: Amalgamated Weavers' Association, 1969), p. 82. Overlookers, however, successfully bargained for a percentage of their normal earnings paid directly by the firm whether they worked or not, thereby eroding the accounting methods that calculated their labor as part of the product. Michael Savage, Control at Work (Lancaster: University of Lancaster Regionalism Group, Working Paper 7, 1982), p. 31.

[52] Leeds District Archives, Bradford Business Science Club, address of November 11, 1915.

[53] Savage, Control at Work , op. cit., p. 31.

mechanisms of the market, but shifted to the political and state administrative sectors. The revolutionary conflicts over the state constitution and over employee management of factories upon the conclusion of the war allowed struggle between employers and workers to appear for an instant on the ground of their "own mutual personal relations."^[54]

The intensifying governmental responsibility for the constitution of the labor process since the First World War suggests that the principle of labor as a commodity has lost its salience as the primary mechanism that both integrates social exchange as a whole and organizes the lifeworld of the producers. Perhaps, then, the disappearance of labor power as a category of human experience in contemporary Marxist theory at the end of the twentieth century was only to have been expected. Perhaps, too, labor power could be rediscovered by scholars as a lived category of nineteenth-century production only through a retrospective inquiry: so long as capitalism appeared as a unitary system with an historical dynamic of its own, researchers would conceive of labor's specification, not as a culturally variable form, but as a universal form of understanding that emanated from the essence of the system. But to investigate the symbolic constitution of practices on the shop floor at the end of the twentieth century, the question may no longer be what form labor takes as a commodity on its own terms, but how that form is intertwined with categories that supplement the role once played by labor alone. As Habermas has emphasized, the commodity of labor has been supplanted by the juridical categories, increasingly salient for citizens and clients of state bureaucracies, that autonomously connect the parts of society apart from the mechanism of exchange value.^[55]

Although the effective forms of culture may have changed, the past still offers guidance for the exploration of the institutions of manufacture in the present. From the geometry of the factory portals to the denominators of fabric, labor's commodity form in the nineteenth century did not lie underneath practice but in it. Likewise, for researchers of the present, as for poets and theologians, divinity is contained within life's humblest details. To find the treasure in the concrete, investigators of factories in our own age require neither faith nor dogma, only theory, as Marx's fading categories continue to show us.

[54] The phrase of course appears in Das Kapital , op. cit., pp. 91–92.

[55] Habermas, op. cit., pp. 356–373.