I haven’t re-read chapter ten in its entirety and I am, as I mentioned, working under imperfect conditions, but so far from my most recent re-read and what I can recall from before, I think it’s striking that Marx doesn’t mention industrial accidents. His discussion of the working day is largely a discussion of occupational hazards, the health effects of work and of the lives workers lead due to work. (There’s also repeated mention in this chapter of child laborers and parents who bring their kids to work, I know I’ve commented on this before but I don’t have the time to look up the old post, either way – seems to me this is relevant to my comment in the last post as well, since child laborers – and at the time of Marx’s writing perhaps women workers as well [I’m not up on English legal history] – were not self-possessing sellers of their labor power, which means that if the presence of free waged labor is taken as a hard and fast requirement for calling something capitalist then Marx’s own examples of English capitalist industry are only partially capitalist, that seems to me like it would be a silly result.)
Given all the info Marx looked at, factory inspectors’ reports and press coverage and so on, I’m surprised that there’s only one mention of a workplace accident as far as I can tell. It comes in the middle of section 3 (it’s on p363 of the Penguin edition), and it’s about a railway accident which killed passengers. The accident happened because the railway workers were working too much and sleeping too little, and their fatigue led to an error. There’s no mention of whether or not any railway workers were hurt in the incident.
It seems to me there’s two basic possibilities for the ommission.
1) They weren’t mentioned in any of the sources Marx looked at.
2) They’re not part of Marx’s goal for the chapter so he didn’t look for sources which mention accidents or he didn’t use sources he found.
Possibility 1) seems improbable to me. If that is the case, I’d be interested to know what sources might have existed, if any, that Marx might have drawn on. Possibility 2) seems more likely to me. In brief, here’s what I think is going on.
I think Marx’s point in the chapter is in part to dramatize that labor power resides in the bodies of workers such that the consumption of labor power is the consumption of workers’ bodies. (Another point of his is that capitalists have a collective interest in the regulation of this consumption even if this or that individual capitalist may not know this or try to fight against the imposition of regulation.) The feeling reading the chapter – at least the sections on overwork and child labor – is one of machinery grinding away human life, relentlessly. The exclusion of accidents, then, might be because accidents are … well, accidental. Accidents may happen rather than being something which labor definitely does to workers. Of course, given high enough probabilities of accidents I think it would be fair to say that industrial accidents are also part of what labor does under capitalism, but perhaps the statistics weren’t collected or if they were it still may have seemed like a sort of gamble – a worker on a dangerous machine is playing a sort of Russian Roulette, which means more will escape. (The same claim could perhaps be made about Marx’s remarks on life expectancies as well, so maybe I’m off the mark here; those remarks, however, seem to me to be further evidence to the claim I’ve made repeatedly on here contra Negri, that capitalism does not become biopolitical in the present – the point about maximum hours law being in the capitalist interest seems to me to be an example of the management of the life of populations.)
crashcourse666 
A couple of quick points. Marx does here and there in other chapters mention industrial accidents and, in passing, health and safety regulations – but they do get short shrift relative to his analysis of struggles over time – perhaps because the social structuration of time is a theme that recurs on multiple levels in the text. So he’ll often make a point with reference to the working day, and then at some later point, and only in passing, happen to mention that similar structural dynamics come into play with reference to health and safety, environmental regulations, and other sorts of things for which one then regulates… I find the overwhelming focus on struggles over the working day a bit frustrating myself, as I think it can obscure a much more general argument about structural pressures (something similar happens very early on in his discussion of what gets to “count” as labour under capitalism, where he spends a great deal of time talking about the coercion to match socially average labour time, but only much more occasionally mentions that simple absence of adequate demand can have the same effect as failing to produce goods at socially normative levels of productivity). My rough read is that he does more “work” with the issue of time – which is fine, but it does, I think, risk creating some wrong impressions along the way…
On the issue of child labourers, though – and on their effective sale by their parents: here Marx will be more explicit and helpful to you, even if not in this chapter or in any unified space. He does speak fairly often in the later chapters in Capital, though not in a systematic way, about how children, who of course cannot contract themselves, are contracted out by their families. Again, he does this in passing, but he tends to like to point this out – more than he does industrial accidents, although reference to these crops up from time to time as well (I have a specific memory of him discussing accidents in one of the sections where he’s talking about pressure being placed on the working class to save, such that business doesn’t have to bear the cost of this sort of thing) – because it allows him to “invert” the self-understanding dominant in the sphere of circulation.
In terms of the goal for the chapter, I’ve tended to read it as another contribution to the overarching argument about the social structuration of time (and therefore, as I’ve said above, somewhat problematic, to the extent that it downplays how other sorts of struggle for working conditions of other sorts, should have similar “structural” effects), but also as an argument about why the state and the bourgeois public sphere aren’t actually alien impositions on capitalism, but are actually intrinsically required by it – and then as providing the nucleus of a theory about key characteristics of the regulatory state that emerges in tandem with capitalist production. He does, though, carry through on these wonderful images of capital subsisting, vampire-like, from living labour – and it’s important, as well, for his argument that the labourer sells something that they can’t actually divest themselves of, and which therefore must be renewed and replenished so that it can be sold again – and so he also emphasises this wherever he can…
(Sorry to keep metacommenting – I know you’re looking at the text with a different purpose – hopefully not being annoying š )
Marx notes that the shortening of the working day is the first step towards time for oneself, free of the necessity of producing for material needs. He is giving you a clue here.
“In fact, the realm of freedom actually begins only where labour which is determined by necessity and mundane considerations ceases; thus in the very nature of things it lies beyond the sphere of actual material production. Just as the savage must wrestle with Nature to satisfy his wants, to maintain and reproduce life, so must civilised man, and he must do so in all social formations and under all possible modes of production. With his development this realm of physical necessity expands as a result of his wants; but, at the same time, the forces of production which satisfy these wants also increase. Freedom in this field can only consist in socialised man, the associated producers, rationally regulating their interchange with Nature, bringing it under their common control, instead of being ruled by it as by the blind forces of Nature; and achieving this with the least expenditure of energy and under conditions most favourable to, and worthy of, their human nature. But it nonetheless still remains a realm of necessity. Beyond it begins that development of human energy which is an end in itself, the true realm of freedom, which, however, can blossom forth only with this realm of necessity as its basis. The shortening of the working-day is its basic prerequisite.”
The passage ends: ‘The shortening of the working-day is its basic prerequisite.’
P.S. I should also say that I absolutely agree with your point on Negri.
Commenting on the previous post and this one, and as I write now on the next one, has been on my list, but I just can’t squeeze out the time. Appropriately, because I do this at work and right now my employer claims too much of my time and work.
I would say that Marx does not talk about accidents here because accidents do not result directly from the extension (or reduction, if it mattered) of the working day.
As far as vol I is concerned, try chapter 15 on machinery, Section 4, The Factory, the concluding paragraph. Even here, he says only, “We shall merely allude” and most of the material is in a footnote. But the next footnote directs us to Vol. 3. there in Chapter V Economy in the
Employment of Constant Capital, we find Section II Savings in Labor conditions at the Expense of the Labourers … . It consists of ten pages on accidents. Accidents result from the combination of socialization, mechanization and economization. Until all three moments operate ‘accidents’ are not a systemic feature. So here you find the accidents caused by the increase of the working day, most interestingly, the unpaid time for mandatory machine cleaning and maintenance and the resultant haste that leads to injury.
To abstract from the content in order to clarify the perspective of method, the argument continually adds moments to the analysis of the process of production. It does not treat a particular outcome of that process until sufficient moments to explain that outcome have been added.
Back to vol I, Chapter XV, Section 3 again for a second point. Section 3 is further subdivided and after a brief introductory paragraph, the first subsection is a. Appropriation of Supplementary labour-Power by Capital. The Employment of Women and Children. Marx introduces the topic at this point, because machinery must reduce the physical effort needed before capital can sytematically employ women and children. Two generalization directly address your questions: “Machinery, by throwing every member of that family on to the labor market, spreads the value of the man’s labour-power over his whole family.” with the consequence that you were looking for, “Machinery also revolutionises out and out the contract between the labourer and the capitalist … ” with the outcome that, “Previously the workman sold his own labour-power, which he disposed of nominally as a free agent. Now he sells wife and child. He has become a slave-dealer.”
The discussion then continues with examples of specific egregious practices. But they are better cited in connection with the next post.
hi Chuckie, NP,
NP, I could have sworn I replied to your comments but damned if I can find that reply. Maybe I just replied in my head, or maybe the internet ate it. My connection is really terrible these days. I’ll have to get back to you.
Chuckie, sorry I haven’t replied to you on these yet. Normally the blog sends me an email when there’s a comment, for some reason I didn’t get an email like this for your most recent comments. Unfortunately I’m tired and have a ton of crap to get to so I don’t have time to give your comments the treatment they deserve. Briefly –
First off, these two sentences on how Marx proceeds are really succinct and helpful. Thanks much. “[T]he argument continually adds moments to the analysis of the process of production. It does not treat a particular outcome of that process until sufficient moments to explain that outcome have been added.” This is, I think, part of what I dislike about Marx’s method and why I think it’s best to read Capital v1 effectively backwards. As you put it in your comments on the more recent post, “Marx argues simultaneously about the historical and the logical constitution of capital.” I’m not sure I like that simultaneity at least as Marx does it.
Thanks a tone for the reference to the section of v3. I’ll look at that ASAP. I’ve not read v3 yet. As for the chapter on machinery you’ve anticipated my most recent post. I just started to reread that section tonite, read the first couple pages, stopped reading in order to collect my thoughts by composing a post, posted, then saw your comment. Funny coincidence, and thanks for the reference. Your comments on the other post – here: http://whatinthehell.blogsome.com/2008/02/13/is-the-spirit-of-capital/#comment-2440 – get at things I left out of my most recent post, I’ll have to come back to that. This is all helpful stuff and I appreciate.
take care,
Nate
Note to self to come back to this soon, and a link to the bit of v3 that Chuckie referenced –
http://marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1894-c3/ch05.htm