“What is a working-day? What is the length of time
 during which capital may consume the labour-power whose daily value it
 buys? How far may the working-day be extended beyond the working-time necessary
 for the reproduction of labour-power itself?” It has been seen that to
 these questions capital replies: the working-day contains the full 24 hours,
 with the deduction of the few hours of repose without which labour-power
 absolutely refuses its services again. Hence it is self-evident that the
 labourer is nothing else, his whole life through, than labour-power, that
 therefore all his disposable time is by nature and law labour-time, to
 be devoted to the self-expansion of capital. Time for education, for intellectual
 development, for the fulfilling of social functions and for social intercourse,
 for the free-play of his bodily and mental activity, even the rest time
 of Sunday (and that in a country of Sabbatarians!) [72]
 — moonshine! But in its blind unrestrainable passion, its were-wolf hunger
 for surplus-labour, capital oversteps not only the moral, but even the
 merely physical maximum bounds of the working-day. It usurps the time for
 growth, development, and healthy maintenance of the body. It steals the
 time required for the consumption of fresh air and sunlight. It higgles
 over a meal-time, incorporating it where possible with the process of production
 itself, so that food is given to the labourer as to a mere means of production,
 as coal is supplied to the boiler, grease and oil to the machinery. It
 reduces the sound sleep needed for the restoration, reparation, rep253freshment
 of the bodily powers to just so many hours of torpor as the revival of
 an organism, absolutely exhausted, renders essential. It is not the normal
 maintenance of the labour-power which is to determine the limits of the
 working-day; it is the greatest possible daily expenditure of labour-power,
 no matter how diseased, compulsory, and painful it may be, which is to
 determine the limits of the labourers’ period of repose. Capital cares
 nothing for the length of life of labour-power. All that concerns it is
 simply and solely the maximum of labour-power, that can be rendered fluent
 in a working-day. It attains this end by shortening the extent of the labourer’s
 life, as a greedy farmer snatches increased produce from the soil by robbing
 it of its fertility.