The Fabrication of Labor: Germany and Britain, 1640-1914.

This study of labor history in Britain and Germany is intended as a contribution to modern cultural history. By discussing the concepts of culture in metatheories such as Habermas' as well as in recent discourse theory, Biernacki aims to show, "that differences in culture do not merely reflect economic constraints upon the development" but also "shape that development." (p. 16) Thus, he sets himself two tasks. First, he undertakes a concrete examination of the development of wage labor and how the workers perceived such a process. To achieve this he has conducted interviews with old-age textile-workers and has made detailed examinations of original sources in the archives of 19th-century textile factories, especially in the wool branch whose technical and economic structures were very similar in both countries. Second, he asks which theoretical concept of wage labor corresponds to daily practices at the workplace by reconstructing contemporary workers' and employers' perceptions of wage labor and analyzing the reflections of 19th-century political economists.

In Part 1, "The Cultural Structure of the Workplace," Biernacki introduces the structural differences between the German and the British concepts of labor as a commodity. In Germany he observes that workers assumed that they sold their labor power, i.e. their capacity to work, to their employers. In Britain, on the contrary, the commodity form of labor was embodied in the product. Thus, a British worker did not perceive that he was selling his labor power in an abstract manner, he rather perceived its concrete results. The employer in Germany was therefore seen as someone who brings together the various factors of production in order to make the finished product, whilst in Britain he was reduced to the function of a trader extracting the surplus value from selling the product. As Biernacki demonstrates in this first part of the study, this crucial difference in workers' and employers' perceptions of their roles extended even into the minutiae of factory life:

* In both countries, textile workers were paid for piece work. But while in Britain they were paid by length of cloth, i.e. by output, in Germany they were paid by "shots" of the shuttle, i.e. by input. Therefore, the concept of efficiency ratio gained currency only in Germany.

* In both countries workers were disciplined for sloppy work. But while in Germany fines were the responsibility of the overseer alone and given immediately inside the factory, in Britain they resulted as a reaction to responses from the market; therefore workers could be disciplined retroactively.

* Whereas in Britain latecomers were punished with lock-outs, in Germany they were simply fined. Unpunctual attendance was regarded as a denial of labor power whose loss could be measured and precisely counterbalanced.

* British employers relied upon the fiction that owners buy the labor embodied in completed products and therefore added the overseer's wage to the cost of the labor force. A German overseer's wage, on the contrary, was added to the overall production costs (i.e. machinery, insurance, property, taxes, energy). British overseers were thus regarded as a part of the workforce, and in conflicts were criticized as individuals, whereas their German counterparts were seen as representatives of capital and enjoyed a higher status.

How did these British-German differences develop? Biernacki gives a detailed answer in Part 2, entitled "Pathways to the Definition of Labor as a Commodity." First of all, he points to the particular British sequence of the rise of free markets and the rise of free labor. Given the advanced commercialization of the finished-goods sector, which was partly a consequence of the elimination of guild monopolies in the seventeenth century, a formal market in wage labor developed relatively late in Britain where legal and community controls did not come into force until a century later. In Germany, on the contrary, the lifting of statutes restricting the trade of finished products coincided with the shift to the formally free sale of labor power, i.e. from the time of the abolishment of corporate regulation of trade and occupations in Prussia from 1810/11 on. This central explanation is extended and enlarged by two others: the survival of feudal definitions of labor service in the German countryside, but not in the English, and the continued corporate organization of artisan work by the German guilds. In order to identify the unique interactions of the three factors Biernacki checks them against those in France and Northern Italy and works out the consequences of differing sequences in the respective countries.

This is perhaps the most original part of the study, because in his presentation Biernacki interweaves a comparative analysis of classical political economy in Britain and Germany. In a brillant chapter he demonstrates how much the theory of value by Karl Marx, despite his intensive study of British early-19th-century socialists, was influenced by his specifically German forms of perception. His main book, "Das Kapital," was according to Biernacki a result of the particular merging of feudal and machine-age culture in German economic thought.

Part 3, "The Structure of Workers' Countersigns," is by contrast something of a disappointment. Biernacki claims to trace the ways practice on the shop floor provided the templates for workers' understanding of exploitation and choice of tactics for resistance. But basically he deals with the different perception of labor time in the two wool industries. Whereas German workers who transferred the labor power embodied in their persons to the employer regarded labor time itself as a commodity and wanted to strike over the issue, their British colleagues treated time only as a means for producing commodities.

The descriptions of the consequences of the British and German roads into the age of wage labor are somewhat unsatisfactory because the comprehensive cultural concept outlined at the start leads the reader to expect the author to step outside the factory walls and extend his micro-analyses to macro-analyses in part 3 as well. If culture does not merely reflect economic constraints upon a development, but also shapes that development, as he assures us, then cultural history should also try to deal with the interaction of culture with society and economy. What did it mean, for example, to late-nineteenth-century textile unions, that in the one country they were regarded as representing the interests of the seller of products and in the other the seller of labor power? Did new technologies in Germany meet less resistance because they were seen by the workers who were selling their labor power as less of a problem? And - seen from the perspective of the whole industry - which perception of wage labor was more efficient and future-oriented?

This remark is not intended to criticize Biernacki for failure to conduct these examinations in his 569 page volume. I simply wish to point out that despite his reservations towards culturalist approaches in contemporary social sciences, he nevertheless follows the current trends of fashion by continually assuring the reader that what he writes is cultural history. Such a label is in my opinion quite superfluous and inappropriate. Biernacki's particular method is to compare by means of detailed source study as has been practiced for years in social history, particularly in labor history. From the reviewer's point of view what is rather notable is that the comprehensive source researches for this study (Biernacki visited 91 archives and libraries !!) have not been conducted by an historian but by a sociologist who was awarded the 1989 prize of the American Sociological Association for the dissertation on which this study is based. Therefore, rather than reading "The Fabrication of Labor" as a study in cultural history, we should better regard it as a prime example of the productive merger between Historical Sociology and Social History. One can only hope that this fine study soon finds a German publisher.

Christiane Eisenberg Universitat Hamburg