Key Arguments

• Marx contrasts previously examined industries 'where capital’s monstrous outrages… caused it at last to be bound by the chains of legal regulations' with sectors where exploitation remains 'either still unfettered even now, or was so yesterday.'
• He introduces a series of examples (lace manufacture, potteries, matches, wallpaper printing, baking) in which children work 12–16 or more hours, often at night, in highly unhealthy conditions, with no statutory limits.
• By explicitly selecting these 'branches of production' that have escaped the Factory Acts, he shows that capital’s 'werewolf-like hunger for surplus labour' continues unabated wherever law does not intervene.

Source Quotes

3. BRANCHES OF ENGLISH INDUSTRY WITHOUT LEGAL LIMITS TO EXPLOITATION So far, we have observed the drive towards the extension of the working day, and the werewolf-like hunger for surplus labour, in an area where capital’s monstrous outrages, unsurpassed, according to an English bourgeois economist, by the cruelties of the Spaniards to the American red-skins, caused it at last to be bound by the chains of legal regulations. Now let us cast a glance at certain branches of production in which the exploitation of labour is either still unfettered even now, or was so yesterday.

BRANCHES OF ENGLISH INDUSTRY WITHOUT LEGAL LIMITS TO EXPLOITATION So far, we have observed the drive towards the extension of the working day, and the werewolf-like hunger for surplus labour, in an area where capital’s monstrous outrages, unsurpassed, according to an English bourgeois economist, by the cruelties of the Spaniards to the American red-skins, caused it at last to be bound by the chains of legal regulations. Now let us cast a glance at certain branches of production in which the exploitation of labour is either still unfettered even now, or was so yesterday. ‘Mr Broughton Charlton, county magistrate, declared, as chairman of a meeting held at the Assembly Rooms, Nottingham, on 14 January 1860, that there was an amount of privation and suffering among that portion of the population connected with the lace trade, unknown in other parts of the kingdom, indeed, in the civilized world…Children of nine or ten years are dragged from their squalid beds at two, three, or four o’clock in the morning and compelled to work for a bare subsistence until ten, eleven, or twelve at night, their limbs wearing away, their frames dwindling, their faces whitening, and their humanity absolutely sinking into a stone-like torpor, utterly horrible to contemplate…We are not surprised, he went on, that Mr Mallett, or any other manufacturer, should stand forward and protest against discussion…The system, as the Rev.

Key Concepts

• So far, we have observed the drive towards the extension of the working day, and the werewolf-like hunger for surplus labour, in an area where capital’s monstrous outrages, unsurpassed, according to an English bourgeois economist, by the cruelties of the Spaniards to the American red-skins, caused it at last to be bound by the chains of legal regulations.
• Now let us cast a glance at certain branches of production in which the exploitation of labour is either still unfettered even now, or was so yesterday.

Context

Opening sentences of Section 3, 'BRANCHES OF ENGLISH INDUSTRY WITHOUT LEGAL LIMITS TO EXPLOITATION', where Marx shifts from legally regulated factory industries to unregulated sectors in order to further illustrate capital’s drive to extend the working day.