8 marxs conceptualization of this anecdote leads to

8
Marx’s conceptualization of
this anecdote leads to an analysis of what he termed in his chapter 10, ‘The
Working Day’. In this chapter Marx discusses ‘value and labor’. He argues
that the ‘economic value of a commodity or service is determined by the total
amount of socially necessary labor required to produce it’.
9
He further
argues that because the workload in production relations does not necessarily
equal the length of the working day, capitalists endeavor to create surplus-
value and make the industry exploit as much surplus labor as possible.
10
Marx
therefore advocated for the reduction of the working hours. Marx’s
conceptualization of value, labor and the working time has however been
criticized for some hypothetical weaknesses. For instance, the revisionist
school of thought argues that Marx’s analysis fails to integrate the
exploitation of capitalists with prices dependent upon subjective wants in
exchange relations.
11
Other studies have also argued that Marx's so-
called immiseration of the proletariat is relative to labor’s share of output
4
Ibid, p.142
5
Karl Marx, Das Capital . Vol. 1. 9
th
ed. (London: Lawrence & Wishart, [1887] 1977), p.162
6
Ibid, p.112
7
Ibid, p.114
8
Ibid, p.164
9
Ibid, p.164
10
Ibid, p. 167
11
See also Brown, Morgan (2017). A Rationalist Critique of Deconstruction: Demystifying Poststructuralism and Derrida's
Science of the "Non" . The Culture & Anarchy Press. p. 119.

3
since wages are not fixed. Hence to them the proletariat is not completely
immiserated
12
.
Paul Stewart examines the centrality of the working day, the struggles of
organized white labor over working time, African labor’s failed attempts to
reduce industrial working hours and the dominant working time arrangements
in the South African mining industry since 1880’s mineral revolution.
13
Stewart’s argues that the mining industry’s prolonged struggle to
simultaneously maintain relatively long working hours and increasingly
maximize the length of the migrant labor contract reveals a deeper and
sustained underlying workings capitalist labor exploitation.
14
He notes that
in the wake of colonialism and apartheid, despite the substance in imperial
white labor activism and decades of long struggle for shorter working hours,
the industry successfully rebuffed their temporal demands as this would also
entail the reduction of the working time and productivity of African labor
that the industry depended on so much.
15
Stewarts’s argument complements
Marx’s conceptualization of the ‘capitalist character of manufacture’. In a
chapter entitled the ‘ Division of Labor and Manufacture ’, Marx argues that
the workers are transformed by manufacturing developments and the division
of labor is specifically capitalist form of special production of creation
surplus value at the expense of the worker.