Nature never brought one class into being for the purpose of working all their lives just for the comfort and enrichment of another class. Enclosure is a word used by historians to describe how over the centuries the rich and powerful forced the poor from their land and commons, in order to gain control and privatise it, usually in the name of the greater good of increased productivity. They called it a part of the enlightenment - an agricultural revolution - but never ever what it really was - thievery. The very subject of the enclosures remains almost forgotten and deliberately buried.
The way to turn workers into wage slaves was to dispossess them. The land was forcibly taken from them by aristocrats and governments. A person deprived of the right to use the commons would be much more dependent on an employer than one who had retained a right of free use. The poor, who had no land, the wage labourers and artisans depended on common land to survive, as indeed did the smaller farmers. For a dubious economic benefit, a great number of people have been reduced from a comfortable state of relative independence to the precarious condition of mere hirelings. Before enclosure, a "cottager" was described as a laborer with land; after enclosure, he was a laborer without land. Possessing no means of producing their own livelihood, workers were therefore condemned to working for others. The working class had been born and with it the spectre of socialism. This process is still going on in Africa, where governments are stealing land from traditional villagers and selling it to foreign companies that convert the land into commercial plantations to grow food for export.
During the movement of enclosure thousands of landlords drove off their tenants using the weapons of violence, intimidation, fraud, and corruption. Class war seethed between gentry and toiler. The landed oligarchy having studied law had obtained control of the legal, legislative system were in a position to be judge, jury and excutioner in ensuring all disputes about property was in their favour. Control of the courts and parliament made it possible for this ruling group to over-ride the rights of the peasants in land, to eject them, to enclose the open fields of the medieval system, to deprive cultivators of their manorial rights and reduce them to the condition of landless rural laborers or at best tenants:
"The law locks up both man and woman
Who steals the goose from off the common
But lets the greater felon loose
Who steals the common from the goose."
The revolutionary years of the 1640s and 1650s and the English Civil War swapped parliament for king but the liberty achieved and won was the freedom for the rich merchants and landlords to acquire and concentrate ownership of private property, to accumulate capital, into their own hands. They had gained the "democratic right" to elect a parliament which represented the propertied ("free") classes and legislated for their own enrichment and wealth against the poor. This had been a bourgeois revolution, after all. The propertyless, who fought and died for the revolution to win what they hoped would be their own freedom, a commonwealth in the literal sense of that word, were robbed of the spoils. Feudalism, king and court were toppled but landlords, big farmers and the newly victorious mercantile and industrial capitalist class having first used their peasant allies, now turned against them. A man of wealth himself, Cromwell purged the army and suppressed the more radical revolutionaries. The dispossessed rural poor became subject to wage-slavery with only one "freedom" left, the "freedom" to sell their labour power to an employer. Or else starve. That was their freedom. Farming became a large scale cash business with peasants paid in wages to work the land of the estate holders. The enclosure movement made possible Agricultural Revolution, greatly de-populated the rural areas and provided a surplus population for the cities to now make possible the Industrial Revolution.
Driven off the land into towns and cities and into those "those dark satanic mills", with no escape from the daily drudgery, and criminalised for trying, this was the fate of the rural worker.
Workers talk of "good wages" but there really is no such thing. Wages of any sort imply exploitation, which is a polite name for robbery, and all exploitation, from a worker’s point of view, is bad so it follows that all wages are bad. The early working class didn’t need socialists to tell them what this meant. They realised that they too were slaves robbed of the product of their labour. It was they who coined the term “wage-slavery”, not to describe the fact that they were paid low wages but that they had to work for wages at all. Workers, are now educated to expect to work for someone else, to feel themselves fortunate in finding work and often see the provision of employment as a form of generosity, a gift bestowed upon them. "Jobs" appear to be one of the sacred words today. Anything can be justified by “creating jobs”. No one likes being in a condition of slavery. It's understandable that slaves either identify with their master or deny that they are slaves. Who really takes pleasure in working eight hours a day, five days a week, having those hours and days decided for you by someone else, having to follow orders from a boss or another authority figure, receiving just a few weeks in the year as vacation time? This is the situation for those of us who are workers.
Capitalist society is structured such that most people are either unemployed or wage slaves. Marx wrote that while superficially labour appears to be voluntary, in reality it is forced. He was right. It appears that a worker chooses to work for a particular company. But in economic reality, he cannot choose to leave, and so he becomes a slave to the company, vulnerable to being exploited by a debilitating controlling work environment. When the market conditions changes the needs of capital, workers are completely expendable and get laid off. Left without the means of supporting themselves, workers are then at the mercy of employers who then use unemployment to drive down wage rates. The weaker the workers are collectively, the less they get over-all. Conversely, the more organised the owners become, the richer they become. And being far fewer, that collusion proves far easier for employers.
Wage slavery describes the extraction of unpaid-for surplus from the working class by a class that owns the means of production. We are not by law bound to a single individual, but, in fact, to the capitalist class as a whole. That's a fact we all need to recognise today, and although veiled and disguised we should recognise it as every bit the same as the human bondage seen on plantations of the slavery of the American southern states
The development of early industrial capitalism and its transition to mature industrial society entailed a severe restructuring of working habits - and introduced the tyranny of the clock. Rural work was accustomed to sun-rise and sun-set and to the seasons and the length and shortness of the day, the vagaries of weather, and, of course, the needs of the crop and animals. The working-day lengthened or contracte according to the task and its intensity varied accordingly. Men and women worked in relationship to Nature. Social life and labour were intermingled, people were free to indulge in "passing the time of day" with one another. It was an irregular and frequently informal cycle of the working day and week and indeed of the working year.
A rhyme printed in 1639 gives a satirical version of the working week:
"You know that Munday is Sundayes brother;
Tuesday is such another;
Wednesday you must go to Church and pray;
Thursday is half-holiday;
On Friday it is too late to begin to spin;
The Saturday is half-holiday agen."
Members of the early working class honoured "St. Monday". Many a Tuesday was also observed as a "Saints" day, or, at least, worked with less intensity. Absenteeism is not the product of the mid-20th century but of the early 17th.
In medieval England there were over a hundred holy days a year on which no work could be done and, in conjunction, were important social and trading events such as fairs. In capitalism holidays have to coincide with the demands of industry - whereas May Day traditionally fell on May 1, today it has been relegated to the first Monday in May. As the merchant/capitalist class grew in strength and power it could see that the medieval system of holidays was incompatible with its need for an ideology that fostered regular and easier regulated working habits required by the new manufacturing processes. The cry went up from moralistic preachers that England's allegedly weak competitive trading position was due to idleness and pleasure. With the triumph of capitalism over feudalism, Protestant work-ethic over Catholicism, the holy days were steadily eliminated until by the 1830s they had almost vanished. Holidays for much of the new-born working class, apart from Sundays, now meant only Christmas Day. The same trend affected office workers too. The Bank of England closed for 47 holidays in 1761, 40 in 1825, 18 in 1830, and 4 in 1834.
It was the factory, the mill and the work-shop which brought in time-sheets and clocking in and clocking out, along with the recording of productivity and out-put by the hour and the minute. But workers had to be broken and disciplined into wage-slavery. New labour habits were eventually formed even if it took a while but it didn't always go uncontested. Over the decades, the working class have managed to achieve a 40 hour week, a Saturday and Sunday weekend, and accrue 8 public holidays (Scotland has an extra one). But now with "flexible" working practices, shift work, more retail Sunday opening and obligatory overtime, even those concessions are being challenged by a more demanding capitalist system. We also read that the Centre for Economics and Business Research claims Britain is losing its competitive edge and scrapping the holidays might help save £19 billion annually.
See also:
workers-weekend
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