Marx sets out the increase in UK productivity between the start of the Industrial Revolution, in 1770, and 1840. In 1770, the total population was 15 million, and working population 3 million. For the 3 million to provide for 15 million assumes a “scientific power of production” equal to an additional working population of 12 million. That would give a total productive power to population of 1:1, and scientific power, relative to manual labour of 4:1. In 1840, the population was around 30 million, and productive population 6 million, but the volume of output had expanded massively.
On the above basis the scientific power amounted to the equivalent of 650 million workers, giving a proportion to total population of 21:1, and to actual workers of 108:1. Given the continued such huge increases in social productivity, it can be seen how ridiculous are the claims that workers have to accept later retirement, or worse pensions, because they are living a few additional years, and the number of actual workers to pensioners has fallen modestly!
“In English society the working day thus acquired in 70 years a surplus of 2,700 per cent productivity; that is, in 1840 it produced 27 times as much as in 1770. According to M. Proudhon, the following question should be raised: why was not the English worker of 1840 27 times as rich as the one of 1770?” (p 98)
But, it was clear that the English workers were not 27 times more wealthy in 1840 than they were in 1770, and for the same reason that, despite even more massive rises in social productivity, workers are, now, being told that they must work longer, and accept lower pensions and living standards. Indeed, as Marx sets out, in Capital I, drawing extensively from Engels' work in The Condition of the Working Class, in the intervening period, the conditions of labourers deteriorated considerably. The life expectancy of labourers declined massively, as they moved from the conditions of being rural peasants to urban proletarians, working longer, in poor conditions, crammed into unhealthy urban slums, and so on.
On the basis of the abstract, bourgeois-idealist concepts of “society”, “nation”, “people”, we might, indeed, have asked why it was that their condition worsened, rather than becoming 27 times better, just as today, we might ask why it is that, despite the massive rise in productivity and output from the 1980's onwards, and now being offered by artificial intelligence, workers are being told they must work longer, retire later, accept lower living standards and worse pensions. The answer is apparent, as soon as we move away from these abstract categories, and consider matters, concretely, from the perspective of class.
“In raising such a question one would naturally be supposing that the English could have produced this wealth without the historical conditions in which it was produced, such as: private accumulation of capital, modern division of labour, automatic workshops, anarchical competition, the wage system – in short, everything that is based upon class antagonism. Now, these were precisely the necessary conditions of existence for the development of productive forces and of surplus labour. Therefore, to obtain this development of productive forces and this surplus labour, there had to be classes which profited and classes which decayed.” (p 93)
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