ABSTRACT
Marx extended his theory of exploitation through examining the conflict over working hours, the organisation and intensity of labour. The theories of absolute and relative surplus-value are the extension of this theory, and the former serves as the starting point for the theoretical investigation in this chapter. In Volume II of Capital, Marx also identified the ‘preferences’ of workers for leisure as a source of conflict. In the early phases of the implementation of the factory system in England, for a given hourly wage rate, workers exhibited a preference for fewer hours with lower wages. Aside, therefore, from a distributional conflict over surplus and necessary labour time, there was also a conflict between capitalists and workers over hours for a given hourly wage. Thus class conflict can be theoretically divided between what we describe here as ‘class struggle’ (over the rate of exploitation) and ‘class preference’ (over the ‘normal’ hours of work, with a given hourly wage rate).
