“Discuss the nature of social organisation of work in capitalist society with reference to the ‘Limits of the working day’.” (2018)
“The Limits of the Working-Day” opens chapter 10 of Karl Marx‘s Capital, Vol. I (1867). There Marx shows that under capitalism time itself becomes the object of class struggle. The length of the working day is not fixed by nature or technology but by the contest between capital’s hunger for surplus labour and the worker’s need to live. Capitalist work is organised around the clock.
The working day as a social magnitude
- The day has two parts: necessary labour, which reproduces the value of the wage, and surplus labour, which yields surplus value.
- Its minimum is necessary labour time; its maximum is set by physical limits (sleep, food, rest) and moral limits (family, education, social life). Between them it is elastic.
- Buyer and seller both invoke the law of exchange, so, in Marx’s dictum, “between equal rights force decides.”
Capital’s drive to stretch the day
- “Capital is dead labour, that, vampire-like, only lives by sucking living labour.” Absolute surplus value grows by lengthening the day.
- Marx contrasts the Wallachian boyar’s corvée, where surplus labour was openly counted, with the English factory, where it hides inside the wage.
- Factory inspectors recorded “nibbling” at meal times, relay systems and night work; “moments are the elements of profit.” Unregulated trades such as bakeries and millinery wore workers out, as in the death of the young milliner Mary Anne Walkley in 1863.
Struggle and the “normal working day”
- The normal day was “the product of a protracted civil war” between classes. Early statutes had compelled longer hours; the Factory Act of 1833 and the Ten Hours Act of 1847 began limiting them.
- Marx read these laws as class outcomes and as capital’s interest in preserving labour power. The later global demand for eight hours crystallised in ILO Convention No. 1 (1919).
How limits reshape the organisation of work
- Relative surplus value: once the day is capped, capital raises productivity and intensity through machinery, speed-up and, later, Frederick Winslow Taylor‘s time-and-motion study.
- Time-discipline: E. P. Thompson (1967) showed clocks, shifts and fines replacing task-oriented rhythms.
- Gendered time: Arlie Hochschild (The Second Shift, 1989) showed that the wage day is followed by unpaid domestic work.
The contest in India today
- The Occupational Safety, Health and Working Conditions Code, 2020, in force from 21 November 2025, caps work at 8 hours a day and 48 a week, but permits 12-hour days in a four-day week and lets states set overtime limits.
- Karnataka (2023) allowed 12-hour factory days and raised quarterly overtime from 75 to 145 hours; Maharashtra (September 2025) and Uttar Pradesh (November 2025) followed with longer days and higher overtime caps.
- N. R. Narayana Murthy‘s call for a 70-hour week (2023) and S. N. Subrahmanyan‘s 90-hour remark (2025) revived the debate; the Economic Survey 2024-25 warned of health risks beyond 60 hours a week.
- PLFS quarterly data put salaried workers at about 48–50 hours a week in 2023-24. Women spend 289 minutes a day on unpaid domestic work against men’s 88 (Time Use Survey 2024).
- Platform workers paid per task face a day with no legal end: effort is limited only by the algorithm and fatigue.
Other readings
Liberal and functionalist scholars note that hours fell over the twentieth century as welfare capitalism absorbed the struggle. Juliet Schor (The Overworked American, 1991), however, found hours rising again, supporting Marx’s claim that the limit is never settled.
Conclusion
The working day shows capitalist work as a negotiated order of time: capital stretches and intensifies it, and labour and law push back. India’s rising overtime caps, hustle-culture rhetoric and borderless gig work show Marx’s “civil war” over the working day is still under way.