This is exactly what happened when capitalists in Europe opened the first factories. And they take breaks they’re not supposed to, or they stop for important prayers, or they leave in the middle of work to care for a family member or sit all day talking to their friends. And all but maybe one or two of them do the work as they think the work should be done, rather than how the owner told them to do it. Half of those who do show up don’t stay the entire day. So, the first day, half of the workers the owner hired don’t show up. However, let’s then say the villagers in this village have never worked for a capitalist before, are accustomed to just working for themselves, don’t have watches or clocks, and are also quite used to being somewhere or doing something when they feel like it, rather than when they are told to.
Of course, he’ll need workers for his factory, and he needs them to show up on time, to have certain skills and knowledge, and most of all to have a certain work ethic. To understand this process, consider what happens when an American or English businessman decides he wants to set up a factory in an “undeveloped” village in Africa.
As a class, however, they functioned not just as an economic force but also a social force, changing society and the way we see ourselves and each other. The word itself means “city dweller,” but it refers to the capitalist class: those who own the means of production and exploit the labor of others in order to profit.
To understand this chapter well, remember that one of the core beliefs of Marxism is that a new class of people - the bourgeoisie - birthed capitalism into the world. “To pose the body as mechanical matter, void of any intrinsic teleology - the "occult virtues" attributed to it by both Natural Magic and the popular superstitions of the time - was to make intelligible the possibility of subordinating it to a work process that increasingly relied on uniform and predictable forms of behavior.” “We can see, in other words, that the human body and not the steam engine, and not even the clock, was the first machine developed by capitalism.”
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