Cooperation based on the division of labour takes its classical shape in manufacture. As the characteristic form of the capitalist production process, it prevails during the manufacturing period proper — roughly, from the mid-16th century to the last third of the 18th.
Manufacture springs up in two different ways.
In the first way, workers from different independent crafts — through whose hands a product must pass before it reaches its finished state — are brought together in one workshop under the command of a single capitalist.
A carriage, for instance, was once the product of a large number of independent craftsmen: wheelwrights, saddlers, tailors, locksmiths, belt-makers, turners, lacemakers, glaziers, painters, lacquerers, gilders, and so on. Carriage manufacture unites all these different craftsmen in one workhouse, where they work into each other's hands at the same time. A carriage cannot be gilded before it is built. But if many carriages are being built at once, one part can be continuously gilded while another part passes through an earlier phase of the production process.
Up to this point, we stand on the ground of simple cooperation, which finds its material ready at hand in people and things. But very soon a crucial change enters. The tailor, the locksmith, the belt-maker, and so on, who are now employed only in making carriages, gradually lose — along with the habit — the ability to practise their old craft in its full breadth. On the other hand, their one-sided activity now acquires the form best suited to the narrowed sphere of action.
At first, carriage manufacture seems like a combination of independent crafts. Gradually, it turns into a division of carriage production into its different partial operations, each one hardened into the exclusive function of a single worker, while the whole is performed by the association of these fragment workers. The cloth manufacture arose in the same way, and a whole series of other manufactures, out of the combination of different crafts under the command of the same capital.
But manufacture also springs up in the opposite way. Many craftsmen doing the same or similar work — making paper, type, or needles — are employed by the same capitalist at the same time in the same workshop. This is cooperation in its simplest form.
Each of these craftsmen, perhaps with an apprentice or two, makes the entire commodity and therefore performs the different operations needed to produce it one after another. He keeps working in his old craft-like way. But soon, external circumstances push the concentration of workers in the same space and the simultaneity of their work to be used differently. For instance, a larger quantity of finished goods must be delivered within a fixed time. The work is therefore distributed.
Instead of letting the different operations be performed by the same craftsman one after another, they are separated, isolated, and set side by side in space. Each one is assigned to a different craftsman, and all together are executed simultaneously by the cooperating workers. This accidental distribution repeats itself, shows its particular advantages, and gradually ossifies into a systematic division of labour. The commodity, from being the individual product of an independent craftsman who does many things, turns into the social product of an association of craftsmen, each of whom continuously performs only one and the same partial operation.
The same operations that flowed into one another as successive tasks of the German guild papermaker became independent, side-by-side partial operations of many cooperating workers in the Dutch paper manufacture. The guild needlemaker of Nuremberg forms the basic element of the English needle manufacture. But while there, one needlemaker ran through perhaps 20 operations in a row, here soon 20 needlemakers sat side by side, each doing only one of the 20 operations. These were then split even further through experience, isolated, and made into the exclusive functions of individual workers.
The way manufacture arises — its emergence from handicraft — is therefore twofold. On the one hand, it starts from the combination of different independent crafts, which are stripped of their independence and narrowed until they form merely complementary partial operations in the production of one and the same commodity. On the other hand, it starts from the cooperation of similar craftsmen; it dissolves that individual craft into its different special operations, and isolates and makes them independent, up to the point where each becomes the exclusive function of a particular worker.
On the one hand, manufacture introduces the division of labour into a production process, or develops it further; on the other hand, it combines crafts that were previously separate. But whatever its starting point, its final shape is the same — a production mechanism whose organs are human beings.
To correctly understand the division of labour in manufacture, it is essential to hold on to the following points.
First, the analysis of the production process into its particular phases here falls completely together with the breaking-down of a handicraft activity into its different partial operations. Whether complex or simple, the task remains craft-like, and therefore depends on the strength, skill, speed, and sureness of the individual worker in handling his tool.
The craft remains the basis. This narrow technical basis excludes any genuinely scientific analysis of the production process, because each partial process the product goes through must be executable as a craft-like piece of work. It is precisely because craft skill remains the basis of the production process that each worker is exclusively appropriated to a partial function, and his labour-power is turned into the life-long organ of that partial function.
Finally, this division of labour is a particular kind of cooperation, and some of its advantages spring from the general nature of cooperation, not from this particular form of it.
If we look closer at the details, it is first clear that a worker who performs one and the same simple operation his whole life long turns his whole body into the automatic, one-sided organ of that operation, and therefore spends less time on it than the craftsman who performs a whole series of operations in alternation.
But the combined collective worker — who forms the living mechanism of manufacture — consists entirely of such one-sided fragment workers. Compared to the independent handicraft, more is therefore produced in less time, or the productive power of labour is increased.
The method of the partial work is also perfected once it is established as the exclusive function of one person. The constant repetition of the same limited action, and the concentration of attention on this limited field, teach through experience how to reach the desired result with the least expenditure of effort. And since different generations of workers always live and work together at the same time in the same manufactories, the technical tricks thus gained are soon secured, accumulated, and passed on.
Manufacture indeed produces the virtuosity of the fragment worker by reproducing, inside the workshop, the naturally developed separation of trades it found in society, and by driving it systematically to an extreme.
On the other hand, its transformation of partial work into a person's lifelong profession corresponds to the drive of earlier societies to make trades hereditary — to petrify them into castes, or ossify them into guilds, unless specific historical conditions produce a variability in individuals that contradicts the caste system.
Castes and guilds spring from the same natural law that regulates the separation of plants and animals into species and subspecies — except that at a certain stage of development, the heredity of castes or the exclusiveness of guilds is decreed as social law.
"The muslins of Dakka in fineness, the calicoes and other fabrics of Coromandel in brilliance and durability of colour, have never been surpassed. And yet they are produced without capital, without machinery, without division of labour, or any of the other means that offer so many advantages to fabrication in Europe. The weaver is a detached individual, who makes the fabric to the order of a customer, using a loom of the simplest construction — sometimes consisting merely of wooden poles roughly lashed together. He does not even possess an apparatus for winding the warp; the loom must therefore remain stretched out to its full length, and becomes so unwieldy and wide that it finds no room in the hut of the producer, who consequently performs his work in the open air, where it is interrupted by every change in the weather."
It is only the special skill accumulated from generation to generation and inherited from father to son that gives this virtuosity to the Hindu just as it does to the spider. And yet such an Indian weaver performs highly complex work compared with the majority of manufacture workers.
A craftsman who performs the various partial processes in the production of a finished piece, one after another, must keep changing his place and his tools. The transition from one operation to the next interrupts the flow of his work and forms, so to speak, pores in his workday.
These pores close up as soon as he performs one and the same operation continuously all day, or they disappear to the extent that the switching of operations decreases. The increased productive power is due here either to the increased expenditure of labour-power in a given period — that is, to greater intensity of labour — or to a decrease in the unproductive consumption of labour-power. The surplus of effort that every transition from rest to motion requires is compensated for once the normal speed has been reached and maintained for a longer time. On the other hand, the continuity of uniform work destroys the tension and momentum of the spirits, which find their recreation and their very stimulus in the change of activity itself.
The productiveness of labour depends not only on the worker's virtuosity, but also on the perfection of his tools. Tools of the same kind — cutting, boring, pushing, and striking instruments — are used in different labour processes, and within the same labour process the same instrument serves different purposes.
But as soon as the different operations of a labour process are separated from one another, and each partial operation gains the most suitable and therefore exclusive form in the hands of the fragment worker, changes to the previously multipurpose tools become necessary. The direction of this change in form arises from experience with the specific difficulties that the unchanged form puts in the way.
The differentiation of working instruments — whereby instruments of the same kind receive special fixed forms for each particular application — and their specialization — whereby each such special instrument achieves its full effect only in the hands of specific fragment workers — characterize manufacture. In Birmingham alone, about 500 varieties of hammers are produced; not only is each adapted for a particular production process, but a number of varieties often serve only for different operations within one and the same process.
The manufacturing period simplifies, improves, and multiplies the tools of labour by adapting them to the exclusive special functions of the fragment workers. It thereby creates at the same time one of the material conditions for machinery, which consists of a combination of simple instruments.
The fragment worker and his instrument form the simple elements of manufacture. Let us now turn to its total shape.
The organization of manufacture has two fundamental forms. Though they sometimes blend, they are essentially different kinds — and they play very different parts later, when manufacture turns into large-scale machine industry. This double character comes from the nature of the product itself. The product is either built by mechanically assembling independent partial products, or it reaches its finished shape through a connected sequence of processes and handlings.
A locomotive, for instance, has more than 5,000 independent parts. But it cannot serve as an example of the first kind of genuine manufacture, because it is a creation of large-scale industry. A watch, however, can. William Petty used it to illustrate the division of labour in manufacture. Once the individual work of a Nuremberg craftsman, the watch became the social product of a vast number of detail workers — makers of mainsprings, dials, spiral springs, jewelled holes, ruby levers, hands, cases, screws, gilders, alongside numerous sub-divisions like wheel-makers (brass and steel separate), pin-makers, movement-makers, and specialists carrying names like acheveur de pignon or planteur de finissage, down to the final repasseur who assembles the whole watch and delivers it working.
Only a few parts of the watch pass through several hands; all these scattered limbs come together for the first time in the hand that binds them into one mechanical whole. Because the finished product stands in this purely external relation to its diverse elements, the combination of detail workers in the same workshop is, here and with similar products, accidental. The detail operations can equally be carried on as independent crafts, as they are in the cantons of Vaud and Neuchâtel, while in Geneva large watch manufactories exist — direct cooperation of detail workers under the command of one capital. Even in the latter case, dials, springs, and cases are seldom made in the manufactory itself. The combined manufacturing operation is profitable here only under exceptional circumstances, because the competition among workers who want to work at home is greatest, the splintering of production into a mass of heterogeneous processes allows little shared use of instruments of labour, and the capitalist saves the outlay for workshop buildings by scattering the work. Yet the position of these detail workers, who work at home but for a capitalist, is wholly different from that of the independent craftsman working for his own customers.
The second kind of manufacture, its perfected form, produces articles that pass through connected phases of development — a sequence of step-by-step processes. In the needle manufactory, for example, the wire passes through the hands of 72, and even 92, specific detail workers.
Insofar as this kind of manufacture originally combines scattered crafts, it reduces the spatial separation between the particular phases of production. The time the product takes to pass from one stage into another is shortened, and so is the labour that mediates these transitions. Compared to craft work, productive power is gained — and this gain springs from the general cooperative character of manufacture. On the other hand, manufacture's own peculiar principle, the division of labour, requires the isolation of the various phases of production, making them independent of one another as so many craft-like detail operations. Establishing and maintaining the connection between these isolated functions demands a constant transport of the article from one hand to another, from one process to another. From the standpoint of large-scale industry, this appears as a characteristic and costly limitation inherent in the very principle of manufacture.
If we look at a given quantity of raw material — rags in paper manufacture, or wire in the needle manufactory — it passes through a temporal succession of phases in the hands of various detail workers until it reaches its final shape. But if we look at the workshop as a whole mechanism, the raw material is in all its phases of production at once. With one set of its many tool-armed hands, the collective worker — combined out of detail workers — draws the wire, while simultaneously with other hands and tools he straightens it, with others cuts it, points it, and so on. What was a temporal sequence of step-by-step processes has been transformed into a spatial side-by-side. The result: more finished commodity delivered in the same time.
This simultaneity does spring from the general cooperative form of the whole process. But manufacture not only finds the conditions of cooperation ready to hand; it partly creates them for the first time through the decomposition of craft activity. On the other hand, it achieves this social organization of the labour process only by riveting the worker to one and the same detail.
Since the partial product of each detail worker is only a particular stage of development of one and the same article, one worker or group supplies the raw material to another. The result of one's labour is the starting point for the next. One worker directly occupies another. The necessary labour-time to achieve the targeted result in each partial process is determined by experience, and the whole mechanism of manufacture rests on the assumption that a given result is achieved in a given time. Only on this assumption can the various, mutually complementary labour processes proceed uninterruptedly, simultaneously, and side by side in space.
It is clear that this direct dependence of the operations, and therefore of the workers, on one another, forces each to use only the necessary time for his function. It generates a completely different continuity, uniformity, regularity, order — and indeed intensity of labour — than in the independent craft or even in simple cooperation. In commodity production generally, the rule that only the socially necessary labour-time is spent on a commodity appears as an external compulsion of competition, because, superficially put, every producer must sell at the market price. In manufacture, by contrast, the delivery of a given quantity of product in a given time becomes a technical law of the production process itself.
Different operations, however, require unequal lengths of time and thus yield unequal quantities of partial product in the same period. So if the same worker is to perform the same operation day in and day out, different numerical ratios of workers must be employed for different operations. In a type-foundry, for instance: 4 casters and 2 breakers to 1 rubber — the caster casts 2,000 types an hour, the breaker breaks 4,000, and the rubber polishes 8,000.
Here the principle of cooperation returns in its simplest form: the simultaneous employment of many doing the same thing, but now as the expression of an organic relation. The division of labour in manufacture thus not only simplifies and multiplies the qualitatively distinct organs of the social collective worker; it also creates a mathematically fixed ratio for the quantitative extent of these organs — that is, for the relative number of workers or the relative size of the worker-groups in each distinct function. Alongside the qualitative articulation, it develops the quantitative rule and proportionality of the social labour process.
Once the most fitting ratio of the different groups of detail workers has been fixed by experience for a given scale of production, that scale can be expanded only by employing a multiple of each particular group. To this is added that the same individual can perform certain kinds of work just as well on a large as on a small scale — the labour of supervision, the transport of partial products from one phase to another, and so forth. The isolation of these functions, their assignment to particular workers, becomes advantageous only once the number of workers employed grows; but this growth must immediately seize all groups proportionally.
A single group — a number of workers performing the same detail function — consists of homogeneous elements and forms a particular organ of the whole mechanism. In various manufactures, however, the group itself is an articulated working body, while the total mechanism is formed by repeating or multiplying these elementary organisms.
Take glass-bottle manufacture. It falls into three essentially different phases. First, the preparatory phase: preparing the glass components, mixing sand, lime, and so on, and melting them into a fluid glass mass. In this first phase various detail workers are employed, as also in the final phase — removing bottles from the cooling furnaces, sorting, packing, and so forth. Between both phases stands the glass-making proper, the working of the fluid mass. At one mouth of the glass furnace works a group called in England "the hole," consisting of one bottle maker or finisher, one blower, one gatherer, one putter up or whetter off, and one taker in. These five detail workers form so many special organs of a single working body, which can act only as a unity — only through the direct cooperation of all five. If one limb of this five-part body is missing, it is paralysed.
But the same furnace has various openings — in England, say, 4 to 6 — each holding an earthen melting-pot with fluid glass, and each employing its own group of the same five-part form. The articulation of each group rests directly on the division of labour, while the bond between the different homogeneous groups is simple cooperation, which uses one of the means of production — here the furnace — more economically through shared use. Such a furnace with its 4–6 groups forms a glass house, and a glass manufactory comprises several such houses, together with the apparatus and workers for the initial and final production phases.
Finally, just as manufacture partly arises from combining different crafts, so too it can develop into a combination of different manufactures. The larger English glass houses, for example, make their own earthen melting-pots, because the success or failure of the product depends heavily on their quality. The manufacture of a means of production is here united with the manufacture of the product. Conversely, the manufacture of the product can be combined with manufactures in which it serves as raw material, or whose products are later assembled with it. Thus the manufacture of flint glass is combined with glass-cutting and brass-founding — the latter for the metal fittings of various glass articles.
The various combined manufactures then form more or less spatially separated departments of a total manufactory, simultaneously independent production processes, each with its own division of labour. Despite the advantages combined manufacture offers, it gains, on its own foundation, no genuinely technical unity. That arises only with its transformation into machine-based industry.
The manufacturing period, which soon pronounced the reduction of the labour-time necessary for commodity production a conscious principle, also sporadically developed the use of machines — especially for certain simple, initial processes that must be carried out massively and with great exertion of force. Thus, early in paper manufacture, the tearing up of rags was done by paper mills, and in metallurgy the crushing of ores by stamping mills. The elementary form of all machinery, the water mill, had been handed down by the Roman Empire. The craft period bequeathed the great inventions of the compass, gunpowder, printing, and the automatic clock. On the whole, however, machinery plays only that side role that Adam Smith assigns to it alongside the division of labour. The sporadic application of machinery in the 17th century was very important, because it gave the great mathematicians of that time practical points of support and stimuli for the creation of modern mechanics.
The specific machinery of the manufacturing period remains the collective worker itself, combined from many detail workers. The different operations that the producer of a commodity performs in turn, and which entwine in the whole of his labour process, make different demands on him: in one he must develop more strength, in another more dexterity, in a third more mental attention. The same individual does not possess these qualities in equal measure. Once the various operations have been separated, made independent, and isolated, the workers are divided, classified, and grouped according to their predominant qualities. If their natural peculiarities form the basis on which the division of labour grafts itself, manufacture — once introduced — develops labour-powers fit by nature only for a one-sided special function. The collective worker now possesses all productive qualities in an equally high degree of virtuosity and expends them most economically, by using all his organs — individualized in particular workers or groups — exclusively for their specific functions.
The one-sidedness, even the imperfection, of the detail worker becomes his perfection as a limb of the collective worker. The habit of a one-sided function turns him into its naturally sure-acting organ, while the connection of the total mechanism forces him to work with the regularity of a machine part.
Because the collective worker's various functions are simpler or more complex, lower or higher, his organs — the individual labour-powers — require very different degrees of training and therefore possess very different values. Manufacture thus develops a hierarchy of labour-powers, to which a scale of wages corresponds. If, on the one hand, the individual worker is appropriated and annexed for life to a one-sided function, the various operations are just as much adapted to that hierarchy of natural and acquired skills. Every production process, however, requires certain simple manipulations that every person is capable of just as he stands. These too are now detached from their fluid connection with the richer moments of activity and ossified into exclusive functions.
In every craft it seizes, manufacture generates a class of so-called unskilled workers, whom craft production strictly excluded. If manufacture develops an entirely one-sided speciality into a virtuosity at the expense of the whole capacity for work, it also begins to make a speciality out of the absence of all development. Alongside the hierarchical gradation appears the simple separation of workers into skilled and unskilled. For the latter, the training costs vanish entirely; for the former, they sink compared to the craftsman, because the function is simplified. In both cases the value of labour-power sinks. The exception holds only where the decomposition of the labour process creates new, comprehensive functions that did not exist at all, or not to that extent, in the craft.
The relative devaluation of labour-power, which springs from the elimination or reduction of training costs, immediately implies a higher valorization of capital: for everything that shortens the time necessary to reproduce labour-power extends the domain of surplus labour.
We first considered the origin of manufacture, then its simple elements — the detail worker and his tool — and finally its total mechanism. We now touch briefly on the relation between the division of labour in manufacture and the social division of labour, which forms the general foundation of all commodity production.
If we keep labour alone in view, we can call the separation of social production into its great genera — agriculture, industry, and so on — the division of labour in general; the differentiation of these genera into species and sub-species, the division of labour in particular; and the division of labour within a workshop, the division of labour in detail.
The division of labour within society, and the corresponding restriction of individuals to particular professional spheres, develops — like the division of labour in manufacture — from opposite starting points. Within a family, and further within a tribe, a spontaneous division of labour arises from differences of sex and age, thus on a purely physiological foundation, which expands its material as the community grows, the population increases, and above all as different tribes clash and one subjugates another. On the other hand, as noted earlier, the exchange of products arises at the points where different families, tribes, or communities come into contact — for at the dawn of culture it is not private individuals but families, tribes, and so forth that confront one another independently. Different communities find different means of production and different means of subsistence in their natural surroundings. Their mode of production, way of life, and products are therefore different. It is this naturally grown difference that, upon contact between communities, calls forth the exchange of their respective products and thus the gradual transformation of those products into commodities.
Exchange does not create the difference between spheres of production, but brings the already distinct spheres into relation, turning them into more or less mutually dependent branches of a social total production. Here the social division of labour arises through the exchange between originally distinct but mutually independent production spheres. There, where the physiological division forms the starting point, the separate organs of an immediately connected whole detach from one another, decompose — a process to which commodity exchange with foreign communities gives the main impulse — and make themselves independent, up to the point where the connection between the different kinds of labour is mediated only by the exchange of products as commodities. In the one case, it is the making dependent of what was previously independent; in the other, the making independent of what was previously dependent.
The foundation of every developed division of labour mediated by commodity exchange is the separation of town and country. One could say that the whole economic history of society is summed up in the movement of this antithesis — which, however, we shall not pursue further here.
Just as a certain number of simultaneously employed workers forms the material prerequisite for the division of labour in manufacture, so for the division of labour within society do the size and density of the population, which here take the place of agglomeration in one workshop. This density, however, is relative. A relatively sparsely populated country with developed means of communication possesses a denser population than a more populated country with undeveloped means of communication; in this sense the northern states of the American Union, for instance, are more densely populated than India.
Because commodity production and circulation are general prerequisites of the capitalist mode of production, the manufacturing division of labour requires a division of labour within society that has already matured to a certain degree. Conversely, the manufacturing division reacts back to develop and multiply that social division. As the instruments of labour differentiate, the trades producing those instruments differentiate ever further. When the manufacturing system seizes a trade that was previously connected to others as a main or side trade and carried out by the same producer, an immediate separation and mutual independence takes place. When it seizes a particular stage of production of a commodity, the different stages turn into different independent trades.
It was already noted that where the article is a mechanically assembled whole of partial products, the detail operations can re-establish themselves as their own crafts. To carry out the division of labour more perfectly within a manufactory, a single branch of production is split — according to the variety of its raw materials or the different forms the same raw material can take — into various, sometimes entirely new manufactures. Thus in France alone, in the first half of the 18th century, over 100 different kinds of silk stuffs were woven, and in Avignon, for example, it was law that "every apprentice should devote himself always to only one sort of fabrication and was not allowed to learn the production of several kinds of stuff at once." The territorial division of labour, which binds particular branches of production to particular districts of a country, receives new impetus from the manufacturing system, which exploits every local particularity.
The expansion of the world market and the colonial system, both of which belong to the general conditions of existence of the manufacturing period, supply rich material for the social division of labour. It is not the place here to show in detail how, alongside the economic sphere, it seizes every other sphere of society and everywhere lays the foundation for that cultivation of specialties, that parcelization of the human being, which already drove A. Ferguson — the teacher of Adam Smith — to exclaim: "We make a nation of Helots, and there are no free men among us."
Yet despite the numerous analogies and connections between the division of labour within society and the division within a workshop, the two differ not merely in degree but essentially, in kind.
The analogy seems most striking where an inner bond entwines different branches of trade. The cattle-breeder produces hides, the tanner turns the hides into leather, the shoemaker the leather into boots. Each produces a stage-product, and the last finished form is the combined product of their separate labours. Add to these the manifold branches that supply the cattle-breeder, tanner, and shoemaker with means of production. Now, one can imagine with Adam Smith that this social division of labour differs from the manufacturing division only subjectively — that is, for the observer, who here sees the manifold detail operations spatially combined at a glance, whereas there their dispersal over large areas and the great number employed in each branch obscure the connection. But what establishes the bond between the independent labours of cattle-breeder, tanner, and shoemaker? The existence of their respective products as commodities. What, by contrast, characterizes the manufacturing division of labour? That the detail worker produces no commodity. Only the combined product of the detail workers turns into a commodity. The social division is mediated by the purchase and sale of the products of different labour branches; the connection of detail operations in manufacture, by the sale of different labour-powers to one capitalist, who uses them as combined labour-power.
The manufacturing division presupposes concentration of the means of production in the hand of one capitalist; the social division presupposes the fragmentation of means of production among many independent commodity producers. While in manufacture the iron law of proportionality subsumes definite masses of workers under definite functions, in the distribution of commodity producers and their means of production among the various social branches of labour, chance and caprice play their colourful game. The different production spheres do constantly seek to balance themselves: on one hand, each producer of commodities must produce a use-value, must satisfy a particular social need, and while the extent of these needs differs quantitatively, an inner bond chains the various masses of need into a naturally grown system; on the other hand, the law of commodity value determines how much of its total disposable labour-time society can expend on producing each particular kind of commodity. But this constant tendency of the different production spheres to balance itself operates only as a reaction against the constant overturning of that equilibrium. The rule followed a priori and by plan in the division of labour within the workshop operates in the division of labour within society only a posteriori — as an inner, silent natural necessity, perceptible in the barometric fluctuations of market prices, which overpowers the lawless caprice of the commodity producers.
The manufacturing division of labour presupposes the unconditional authority of the capitalist over persons who form mere limbs of a total mechanism belonging to him; the social division of labour confronts independent commodity producers, who recognize no other authority than that of competition — the compulsion exerted by the pressure of their mutual interests, just as in the animal kingdom the war of all against all more or less preserves the conditions of existence of all species. The very same bourgeois consciousness that celebrates the manufacturing division of labour — the lifelong annexation of the worker to a detail operation and the unconditional subordination of detail workers under capital — as an organization of labour that increases its productive power, just as loudly denounces every conscious social control and regulation of the social production process as an intrusion upon the inviolable property rights, freedom, and self-determining "genius" of the individual capitalist. It is very characteristic that the enthusiastic apologists of the factory system can think of nothing worse to say against any general organization of social labour than that it would turn all society into a factory.
If the anarchy of the social division of labour and the despotism of the manufacturing division of labour mutually condition each other in the society of the capitalist mode of production, earlier forms of society — in which the separation of trades developed naturally, then crystallized, and was finally fixed by law — present, on one hand, the image of a planned and authoritative organization of social labour, while on the other they entirely exclude the division of labour within the workshop, or develop it only on a dwarf scale, or only sporadically and accidentally.
Those ancient, small Indian communities, some of which still exist today, are based on communal possession of the land, on the immediate connection of agriculture and handicraft, and on a fixed, planned division of labour that serves as a ready-made plan and blueprint whenever a new community is founded. They form self-sufficient productive wholes, whose territory varies from 100 to a few thousand acres. The bulk of the products is produced for the direct self-consumption of the community, not as commodities, and production is thus independent of that division of labour mediated by commodity exchange in Indian society at large. Only the surplus turns into a commodity — and partly only once it reaches the hands of the state, to which a certain quantity has flowed since time immemorial as rent in kind.
The forms of these communities vary across different parts of India. In the simplest form, the community tills the land communally and distributes its products among its members, while each family spins and weaves as a domestic side trade. Beside this homogeneously occupied mass, we find the "chief inhabitant," who is judge, police, and tax-collector in one; the bookkeeper, who keeps the accounts of agriculture and registers everything related to it; a third official, who pursues criminals, protects travelling strangers, and escorts them from village to village; the boundary man, who guards the community's borders against neighbouring communities; the water overseer, who distributes water for irrigation from the communal reservoirs; the Brahmin, who performs religious services; the schoolmaster, who teaches the children to write and read in the sand; the calendar-Brahmin, who as astrologer determines the times for sowing, harvesting, and the good and bad hours for all agricultural work; a smith and a carpenter, who make and repair all farming implements; the potter, who makes all the village vessels; the barber, the washerman for cleaning clothes, the silversmith, here and there the poet, who in some communities replaces the silversmith, in others the schoolmaster. This dozen persons is maintained at the expense of the whole community. If the population grows, a new community is settled on untilled soil after the pattern of the old.
The community mechanism displays a planned division of labour, but a manufacturing division is impossible here, because the market for the smith, carpenter, and so forth remains unchanged, and at most — depending on the size of the villages — two or three smiths or potters appear instead of one. The law regulating the division of labour in the community acts with the unbreakable authority of a law of nature, while each individual craftsman — the smith, and so on — carries out all the operations of his trade in his workshop in the traditional way, but independently, without recognizing any authority over him.
The simple productive organism of these self-sufficient communities, which constantly reproduce themselves in the same form and, when accidentally destroyed, rebuild in the same place and under the same name, supplies the key to the secret of the immutability of Asiatic societies — so strikingly in contrast with the constant dissolution and re-formation of Asiatic states and the ceaseless change of dynasties. The structure of the economic foundation of society remains untouched by the storms of the political clouds.
The guild laws, as noted earlier, purposely prevented the transformation of a single guild master into a capitalist, by strictly limiting the number of journeymen he was allowed to employ. Likewise, he could employ journeymen only in the exclusive craft in which he himself was a master. The guilds zealously fended off every encroachment by merchants' capital — the only free form of capital that confronted them. A merchant could buy all commodities, but not labour as a commodity. He was tolerated only as a putting-out dealer in craft products. If external circumstances called forth a progressive division of labour, existing guilds split into sub-species, or new guilds established themselves alongside the old — but always without combining different crafts in one workshop. The guild organization, however much its separation, isolation, and perfecting of crafts belonged among the material conditions of existence for the manufacturing period, thus excluded the manufacturing division of labour. On the whole, the worker and his means of production remained joined together like the snail with its shell, and so the first basis of manufacture — the separation of the means of production from the worker and their independence as capital — was missing.
While the division of labour in an entire society — whether mediated by commodity exchange or not — belongs to the most diverse economic formations of society, the manufacturing division of labour is a wholly specific creation of the capitalist mode of production.
Having many workers under one capitalist's command is the natural starting point for manufacture, just as it is for cooperation in general. But once the division of labor takes hold, it turns this need for more workers into a strict technical necessity. The division of labor itself now prescribes the absolute minimum number of workers a capitalist must hire.
Expanding the division of labor further requires adding even more workers, and they must be added in exact multiples. But as the variable part of capital (the wage bill) grows, so must its constant part. The shared facilities—like buildings and furnaces—must expand, and above all, the raw material must grow much faster than the workforce. The faster workers churn out products thanks to the division of labor, the more raw material they devour in the same amount of time.
So a growing minimum size of capital in each capitalist's hand is a strict law, springing directly from the technical nature of manufacture.
In manufacture, just as in simple cooperation, the working body functions as a form of existence of capital. The entire productive mechanism—made up of many individual detail workers—belongs to the capitalist. Therefore, the productive power generated by combining all these workers appears as capital's own productive power.
Manufacture does not just place the previously independent worker under capital's command and discipline; it creates a hierarchy among the workers themselves. While simple cooperation leaves an individual's way of working mostly unchanged, manufacture completely revolutionizes it. It seizes labour-power at its very root.
It cripples the worker into an abnormality. It forces their one-sided dexterity to grow unnaturally fast, like in a hothouse, by suppressing a whole world of productive drives and talents. It is like butchering a whole animal in the La Plata states just to get its hide or its tallow. The work is not just divided among different individuals; the individual worker is divided. The person is transformed into an automatic gear-wheel of one partial operation, making the absurd fable of Menenius Agrippa—which treats a human being as a mere fragment of a body—come true.
Originally, a worker sells their labour-power to capital because they lack the material means to produce a commodity on their own. But now, their individual labour-power refuses to function at all unless it is sold to capital. It works only inside a setup that only exists after the sale, inside the capitalist's workshop. Rendered naturally incapable of producing anything independently, the manufacturing worker carries out productive activity only as an appendage of the capitalist's workshop.
Just as the chosen people supposedly bore a sign on their foreheads marking them as the property of Jehovah, the division of labor stamps the manufacturing worker, branding them as the property of capital.
The independent peasant or handicraftsman develops practical knowledge, judgment, and will—even if on a small scale—just as a person in the wild uses all the arts of war as their own personal cunning. In manufacture, these mental faculties are needed only for the workshop as a whole.
Intellectual power in production expands on one side only because it vanishes on many others. What the detail workers lose, concentrates over against them, in capital. The division of labor in manufacture produces a specific result: it confronts the workers with the intellectual powers of the material production process as an alien property, a ruling power over them.
This process of separation begins in simple cooperation, where the capitalist represents the unity and will of the social laboring body to the individual workers. It develops further in manufacture, which mutilates the worker into a detail worker. It completes itself later in modern industry, which separates science as an independent productive force from labor and presses it into capital's service.
In manufacture, the enrichment of the collective worker—and therefore of capital—in social productive power is conditioned by the impoverishment of the worker in individual productive powers.
"Ignorance is the mother of industry as well as of superstition. Reflection and imagination are prone to error; but a habit of moving the hand or the foot depends on neither one nor the other. Manufactures, therefore, prosper most where the mind is least consulted, and where the workshop may be considered as an engine, the parts of which are men."
In fact, in the middle of the 18th century, some manufactures deliberately preferred to hire half-idiots for certain simple operations that were considered trade secrets.
"The understanding of the greater part of men," says A. Smith, "is necessarily formed by their everyday occupations. A man who spends his whole life performing a few simple operations ... has no occasion to exert his understanding ... He generally becomes as stupid and ignorant as it is possible for a human creature to become."
After describing the stupidity of the detail worker, Smith continues:
"The uniformity of his stationary life naturally corrupts the courage of his mind ... It even corrupts the activity of his body and renders him incapable of exerting his strength vigorously and steadily in any employment other than the one he was trained for. His dexterity at his own particular trade seems to be acquired at the expense of his intellectual, social, and martial virtues. But in every improved and civilized society, this is the state into which the labouring poor, that is, the great mass of the people, must necessarily fall."
To prevent the complete stultification of the masses caused by the division of labor, A. Smith recommends state-funded public education, though only in cautious, homeopathic doses. His French translator and commentator, G. Garnier, who naturally turned into a senator under the first French Empire, attacks this idea just as naturally. Public education, he argues, violates the primary laws of the division of labor, and by attempting it, "our whole social system would be proscribed."
"Like all other divisions of labor," he says, "the division between manual labor and intellectual labor becomes more pronounced and decided as society"—he correctly uses this word to mean capital, landed property, and their state—"becomes richer. Like every other division of labor, this one is an effect of past progress and a cause of future progress ... Ought the government then to work against this division of labor and hinder its natural course? Ought it to spend a portion of public funds trying to confound and mix together two classes of labor that are striving to divide and separate?"
A certain crippling of body and mind is inseparable even from the division of labor across society as a whole. But because the manufacturing period pushes this social splitting of labor branches much further, and because it uniquely strikes the individual at the very root of their life, it produces the first material and the first impulse for industrial pathology.
"To subdivide a man is to execute him if he deserves the death sentence, and to assassinate him if he does not. The subdivision of labor is the assassination of a people."
Cooperation based on the division of labor—in other words, manufacture—starts out as a natural, spontaneous formation. But as soon as it gains some consistency and extends its reach, it becomes a conscious, planned, and systematic form of capitalist production.
The history of manufacture shows how its specific division of labor first found the right forms through experience, almost behind the backs of the people acting it out. Once found, it tried to hold onto those forms traditionally, much like the guild handicrafts did, and in some cases it held onto them for centuries. Whenever this form changed—aside from minor details—it was solely because of a revolution in the tools of labor.
Modern manufacture—I am not speaking here about the large-scale industry based on machinery—either finds its scattered parts ready-made, as in the clothing manufacture in large cities, and just gathers them together; or the principle of division is self-evident, simply assigning the various tasks of a handicraft, like bookbinding, to specific workers. In these cases, it takes barely a week of experience to figure out the exact ratio of hands needed for each task.
By breaking down handicraft activity, specializing the tools of labor, forming detail workers, and grouping and combining them into a single overall mechanism, the division of labor in manufacture creates a qualitative gradation and a quantitative proportion in social production. It creates a specific organization of social labor, and in doing so, it develops a new, social productive power of labor.
As a specifically capitalist form of social production—and on the foundations it found, it could not have developed any other way than the capitalist form—manufacture is only a specific method for producing relative surplus value. It is a way to increase capital's own expansion—what is called social wealth, the "Wealth of Nations," and so on—at the expense of the workers.
It develops the social productive power of labor not only for the capitalist instead of the worker, but by crippling the individual worker. It creates new conditions for capital's domination over labor. Therefore, if on the one hand it appears as a historical progress and a necessary stage in the economic formation of society, on the other hand, it appears as a means of civilized and refined exploitation.
Political economy, which emerged as an independent science only during the manufacturing period, views the social division of labor entirely from the standpoint of manufacture. It sees it simply as a means to produce more commodities with the same amount of labor, thereby making commodities cheaper and accelerating the accumulation of capital.
In sharpest contrast to this emphasis on quantity and exchange-value, the writers of classical antiquity held strictly to quality and use-value. In their view, the separation of social production branches means commodities are made better, and people's different talents and tendencies find their proper fields; without specialization, nothing great can be achieved anywhere. For them, division of labor improves both the product and the producer. If they mentioned the growth in the mass of products, it was only with regard to a greater abundance of use-values—they never breathed a word about exchange-value or the cheapening of commodities.
This use-value standpoint dominates both Plato and Xenophon. Plato treats the division of labor as the foundation for the division of classes in society, while Xenophon, with his characteristic bourgeois instinct, moves a bit closer to the division of labor within a single workshop. Plato's Republic, insofar as it develops the division of labor as the shaping principle of the state, is just an Athenian idealization of the Egyptian caste system. Egypt served as a model industrial country for other contemporaries of his as well, such as Isocrates, and it retained this significance even for the Greeks of the Roman imperial era.
During the actual manufacturing period—the time when manufacture was the dominant form of capitalist production—many obstacles blocked the full realization of its own tendencies.
Although manufacture created a simple division between skilled and unskilled workers alongside its hierarchy, the number of unskilled workers remained very limited because of the overwhelming influence of the skilled ones. Although it adapted specific operations to the different degrees of maturity, strength, and development of its living human tools—driving toward the productive exploitation of women and children—this tendency largely wrecked itself on the habits and resistance of the male workers. And although breaking down handicrafts lowered the training costs and therefore the value of the worker, longer training was still required for the more difficult detail work. Even where such training was superfluous, workers jealously insisted on it. In England, for instance, the apprenticeship laws with their seven-year training periods remained in full force right down to the end of the manufacturing period, and they were only swept aside by large-scale industry.
Because handicraft skill remained the foundation of manufacture, and because the overall mechanism lacked a material framework independent of the workers themselves, capital was in a constant struggle with the insubordination of the workers.
"By the infirmity of human nature," exclaims friend Ure, "it happens that the more skilful the workman, the more self-willed and intractable he is apt to become, and of course the less fit a component of a mechanical system in which ... he may do great damage to the whole."
Throughout the entire manufacturing period, complaints run about the workers' lack of discipline. Even if we did not have the testimony of contemporary writers, the simple facts would speak volumes: from the 16th century right up to the era of large-scale industry, capital failed to master all the available working time of the manufacturing workers. Manufactures were short-lived, and when workers emigrated, the manufactures packed up and moved from one country to another.
"Order must in one way or another be established," exclaims the often-cited author of the "Essay on Trade and Commerce" in 1770. "Order," echoes Dr. Andrew Ure 66 years later; "Order" was missing in manufacture, which was based on "the scholastic dogma of division of labor," and "Arkwright created order."
At the same time, manufacture was unable to seize social production in its full extent or to revolutionize it down to its depths. It peaked as an economic work of art resting on the broad foundation of town handicrafts and rural domestic industry. At a certain stage of development, its own narrow technical basis came into contradiction with the very needs of production that manufacture itself had created.
One of manufacture's most perfect creations was the workshop that produced the tools of labor themselves, and especially the more complicated mechanical devices already in use.
"Such a workshop," says Ure, "displayed the division of labor in its manifold gradations—the file, the drill, the lathe, each having its own workers, hierarchically arranged according to their degree of skill."
This product of the division of labor in manufacture in turn produced—machines.
Machines sweep away handicraft activity as the regulating principle of social production. In doing so, on the one hand, the technical reason for annexing a worker to a single detail function for life is removed. But on the other hand, the fetters that this same principle had previously imposed on the rule of capital also fall away.
Cooperation based on the division of labour takes its classical shape in manufacture. As the characteristic form of the capitalist production process, it prevails during the manufacturing period proper — roughly, from the mid-16th century to the last third of the 18th.
Manufacture springs up in two different ways.
In the first way, workers from different independent crafts — through whose hands a product must pass before it reaches its finished state — are brought together in one workshop under the command of a single capitalist.
A carriage, for instance, was once the product of a large number of independent craftsmen: wheelwrights, saddlers, tailors, locksmiths, belt-makers, turners, lacemakers, glaziers, painters, lacquerers, gilders, and so on. Carriage manufacture unites all these different craftsmen in one workhouse, where they work into each other's hands at the same time. A carriage cannot be gilded before it is built. But if many carriages are being built at once, one part can be continuously gilded while another part passes through an earlier phase of the production process.
Up to this point, we stand on the ground of simple cooperation, which finds its material ready at hand in people and things. But very soon a crucial change enters. The tailor, the locksmith, the belt-maker, and so on, who are now employed only in making carriages, gradually lose — along with the habit — the ability to practise their old craft in its full breadth. On the other hand, their one-sided activity now acquires the form best suited to the narrowed sphere of action.
At first, carriage manufacture seems like a combination of independent crafts. Gradually, it turns into a division of carriage production into its different partial operations, each one hardened into the exclusive function of a single worker, while the whole is performed by the association of these fragment workers. The cloth manufacture arose in the same way, and a whole series of other manufactures, out of the combination of different crafts under the command of the same capital.
But manufacture also springs up in the opposite way. Many craftsmen doing the same or similar work — making paper, type, or needles — are employed by the same capitalist at the same time in the same workshop. This is cooperation in its simplest form.
Each of these craftsmen, perhaps with an apprentice or two, makes the entire commodity and therefore performs the different operations needed to produce it one after another. He keeps working in his old craft-like way. But soon, external circumstances push the concentration of workers in the same space and the simultaneity of their work to be used differently. For instance, a larger quantity of finished goods must be delivered within a fixed time. The work is therefore distributed.
Instead of letting the different operations be performed by the same craftsman one after another, they are separated, isolated, and set side by side in space. Each one is assigned to a different craftsman, and all together are executed simultaneously by the cooperating workers. This accidental distribution repeats itself, shows its particular advantages, and gradually ossifies into a systematic division of labour. The commodity, from being the individual product of an independent craftsman who does many things, turns into the social product of an association of craftsmen, each of whom continuously performs only one and the same partial operation.
The same operations that flowed into one another as successive tasks of the German guild papermaker became independent, side-by-side partial operations of many cooperating workers in the Dutch paper manufacture. The guild needlemaker of Nuremberg forms the basic element of the English needle manufacture. But while there, one needlemaker ran through perhaps 20 operations in a row, here soon 20 needlemakers sat side by side, each doing only one of the 20 operations. These were then split even further through experience, isolated, and made into the exclusive functions of individual workers.
The way manufacture arises — its emergence from handicraft — is therefore twofold. On the one hand, it starts from the combination of different independent crafts, which are stripped of their independence and narrowed until they form merely complementary partial operations in the production of one and the same commodity. On the other hand, it starts from the cooperation of similar craftsmen; it dissolves that individual craft into its different special operations, and isolates and makes them independent, up to the point where each becomes the exclusive function of a particular worker.
On the one hand, manufacture introduces the division of labour into a production process, or develops it further; on the other hand, it combines crafts that were previously separate. But whatever its starting point, its final shape is the same — a production mechanism whose organs are human beings.
To correctly understand the division of labour in manufacture, it is essential to hold on to the following points.
First, the analysis of the production process into its particular phases here falls completely together with the breaking-down of a handicraft activity into its different partial operations. Whether complex or simple, the task remains craft-like, and therefore depends on the strength, skill, speed, and sureness of the individual worker in handling his tool.
The craft remains the basis. This narrow technical basis excludes any genuinely scientific analysis of the production process, because each partial process the product goes through must be executable as a craft-like piece of work. It is precisely because craft skill remains the basis of the production process that each worker is exclusively appropriated to a partial function, and his labour-power is turned into the life-long organ of that partial function.
Finally, this division of labour is a particular kind of cooperation, and some of its advantages spring from the general nature of cooperation, not from this particular form of it.
If we look closer at the details, it is first clear that a worker who performs one and the same simple operation his whole life long turns his whole body into the automatic, one-sided organ of that operation, and therefore spends less time on it than the craftsman who performs a whole series of operations in alternation.
But the combined collective worker — who forms the living mechanism of manufacture — consists entirely of such one-sided fragment workers. Compared to the independent handicraft, more is therefore produced in less time, or the productive power of labour is increased.
The method of the partial work is also perfected once it is established as the exclusive function of one person. The constant repetition of the same limited action, and the concentration of attention on this limited field, teach through experience how to reach the desired result with the least expenditure of effort. And since different generations of workers always live and work together at the same time in the same manufactories, the technical tricks thus gained are soon secured, accumulated, and passed on.
Manufacture indeed produces the virtuosity of the fragment worker by reproducing, inside the workshop, the naturally developed separation of trades it found in society, and by driving it systematically to an extreme.
On the other hand, its transformation of partial work into a person's lifelong profession corresponds to the drive of earlier societies to make trades hereditary — to petrify them into castes, or ossify them into guilds, unless specific historical conditions produce a variability in individuals that contradicts the caste system.
Castes and guilds spring from the same natural law that regulates the separation of plants and animals into species and subspecies — except that at a certain stage of development, the heredity of castes or the exclusiveness of guilds is decreed as social law.
"The muslins of Dakka in fineness, the calicoes and other fabrics of Coromandel in brilliance and durability of colour, have never been surpassed. And yet they are produced without capital, without machinery, without division of labour, or any of the other means that offer so many advantages to fabrication in Europe. The weaver is a detached individual, who makes the fabric to the order of a customer, using a loom of the simplest construction — sometimes consisting merely of wooden poles roughly lashed together. He does not even possess an apparatus for winding the warp; the loom must therefore remain stretched out to its full length, and becomes so unwieldy and wide that it finds no room in the hut of the producer, who consequently performs his work in the open air, where it is interrupted by every change in the weather."
It is only the special skill accumulated from generation to generation and inherited from father to son that gives this virtuosity to the Hindu just as it does to the spider. And yet such an Indian weaver performs highly complex work compared with the majority of manufacture workers.
A craftsman who performs the various partial processes in the production of a finished piece, one after another, must keep changing his place and his tools. The transition from one operation to the next interrupts the flow of his work and forms, so to speak, pores in his workday.
These pores close up as soon as he performs one and the same operation continuously all day, or they disappear to the extent that the switching of operations decreases. The increased productive power is due here either to the increased expenditure of labour-power in a given period — that is, to greater intensity of labour — or to a decrease in the unproductive consumption of labour-power. The surplus of effort that every transition from rest to motion requires is compensated for once the normal speed has been reached and maintained for a longer time. On the other hand, the continuity of uniform work destroys the tension and momentum of the spirits, which find their recreation and their very stimulus in the change of activity itself.
The productiveness of labour depends not only on the worker's virtuosity, but also on the perfection of his tools. Tools of the same kind — cutting, boring, pushing, and striking instruments — are used in different labour processes, and within the same labour process the same instrument serves different purposes.
But as soon as the different operations of a labour process are separated from one another, and each partial operation gains the most suitable and therefore exclusive form in the hands of the fragment worker, changes to the previously multipurpose tools become necessary. The direction of this change in form arises from experience with the specific difficulties that the unchanged form puts in the way.
The differentiation of working instruments — whereby instruments of the same kind receive special fixed forms for each particular application — and their specialization — whereby each such special instrument achieves its full effect only in the hands of specific fragment workers — characterize manufacture. In Birmingham alone, about 500 varieties of hammers are produced; not only is each adapted for a particular production process, but a number of varieties often serve only for different operations within one and the same process.
The manufacturing period simplifies, improves, and multiplies the tools of labour by adapting them to the exclusive special functions of the fragment workers. It thereby creates at the same time one of the material conditions for machinery, which consists of a combination of simple instruments.
The fragment worker and his instrument form the simple elements of manufacture. Let us now turn to its total shape.
The organization of manufacture has two fundamental forms. Though they sometimes blend, they are essentially different kinds — and they play very different parts later, when manufacture turns into large-scale machine industry. This double character comes from the nature of the product itself. The product is either built by mechanically assembling independent partial products, or it reaches its finished shape through a connected sequence of processes and handlings.
A locomotive, for instance, has more than 5,000 independent parts. But it cannot serve as an example of the first kind of genuine manufacture, because it is a creation of large-scale industry. A watch, however, can. William Petty used it to illustrate the division of labour in manufacture. Once the individual work of a Nuremberg craftsman, the watch became the social product of a vast number of detail workers — makers of mainsprings, dials, spiral springs, jewelled holes, ruby levers, hands, cases, screws, gilders, alongside numerous sub-divisions like wheel-makers (brass and steel separate), pin-makers, movement-makers, and specialists carrying names like acheveur de pignon or planteur de finissage, down to the final repasseur who assembles the whole watch and delivers it working.
Only a few parts of the watch pass through several hands; all these scattered limbs come together for the first time in the hand that binds them into one mechanical whole. Because the finished product stands in this purely external relation to its diverse elements, the combination of detail workers in the same workshop is, here and with similar products, accidental. The detail operations can equally be carried on as independent crafts, as they are in the cantons of Vaud and Neuchâtel, while in Geneva large watch manufactories exist — direct cooperation of detail workers under the command of one capital. Even in the latter case, dials, springs, and cases are seldom made in the manufactory itself. The combined manufacturing operation is profitable here only under exceptional circumstances, because the competition among workers who want to work at home is greatest, the splintering of production into a mass of heterogeneous processes allows little shared use of instruments of labour, and the capitalist saves the outlay for workshop buildings by scattering the work. Yet the position of these detail workers, who work at home but for a capitalist, is wholly different from that of the independent craftsman working for his own customers.
The second kind of manufacture, its perfected form, produces articles that pass through connected phases of development — a sequence of step-by-step processes. In the needle manufactory, for example, the wire passes through the hands of 72, and even 92, specific detail workers.
Insofar as this kind of manufacture originally combines scattered crafts, it reduces the spatial separation between the particular phases of production. The time the product takes to pass from one stage into another is shortened, and so is the labour that mediates these transitions. Compared to craft work, productive power is gained — and this gain springs from the general cooperative character of manufacture. On the other hand, manufacture's own peculiar principle, the division of labour, requires the isolation of the various phases of production, making them independent of one another as so many craft-like detail operations. Establishing and maintaining the connection between these isolated functions demands a constant transport of the article from one hand to another, from one process to another. From the standpoint of large-scale industry, this appears as a characteristic and costly limitation inherent in the very principle of manufacture.
If we look at a given quantity of raw material — rags in paper manufacture, or wire in the needle manufactory — it passes through a temporal succession of phases in the hands of various detail workers until it reaches its final shape. But if we look at the workshop as a whole mechanism, the raw material is in all its phases of production at once. With one set of its many tool-armed hands, the collective worker — combined out of detail workers — draws the wire, while simultaneously with other hands and tools he straightens it, with others cuts it, points it, and so on. What was a temporal sequence of step-by-step processes has been transformed into a spatial side-by-side. The result: more finished commodity delivered in the same time.
This simultaneity does spring from the general cooperative form of the whole process. But manufacture not only finds the conditions of cooperation ready to hand; it partly creates them for the first time through the decomposition of craft activity. On the other hand, it achieves this social organization of the labour process only by riveting the worker to one and the same detail.
Since the partial product of each detail worker is only a particular stage of development of one and the same article, one worker or group supplies the raw material to another. The result of one's labour is the starting point for the next. One worker directly occupies another. The necessary labour-time to achieve the targeted result in each partial process is determined by experience, and the whole mechanism of manufacture rests on the assumption that a given result is achieved in a given time. Only on this assumption can the various, mutually complementary labour processes proceed uninterruptedly, simultaneously, and side by side in space.
It is clear that this direct dependence of the operations, and therefore of the workers, on one another, forces each to use only the necessary time for his function. It generates a completely different continuity, uniformity, regularity, order — and indeed intensity of labour — than in the independent craft or even in simple cooperation. In commodity production generally, the rule that only the socially necessary labour-time is spent on a commodity appears as an external compulsion of competition, because, superficially put, every producer must sell at the market price. In manufacture, by contrast, the delivery of a given quantity of product in a given time becomes a technical law of the production process itself.
Different operations, however, require unequal lengths of time and thus yield unequal quantities of partial product in the same period. So if the same worker is to perform the same operation day in and day out, different numerical ratios of workers must be employed for different operations. In a type-foundry, for instance: 4 casters and 2 breakers to 1 rubber — the caster casts 2,000 types an hour, the breaker breaks 4,000, and the rubber polishes 8,000.
Here the principle of cooperation returns in its simplest form: the simultaneous employment of many doing the same thing, but now as the expression of an organic relation. The division of labour in manufacture thus not only simplifies and multiplies the qualitatively distinct organs of the social collective worker; it also creates a mathematically fixed ratio for the quantitative extent of these organs — that is, for the relative number of workers or the relative size of the worker-groups in each distinct function. Alongside the qualitative articulation, it develops the quantitative rule and proportionality of the social labour process.
Once the most fitting ratio of the different groups of detail workers has been fixed by experience for a given scale of production, that scale can be expanded only by employing a multiple of each particular group. To this is added that the same individual can perform certain kinds of work just as well on a large as on a small scale — the labour of supervision, the transport of partial products from one phase to another, and so forth. The isolation of these functions, their assignment to particular workers, becomes advantageous only once the number of workers employed grows; but this growth must immediately seize all groups proportionally.
A single group — a number of workers performing the same detail function — consists of homogeneous elements and forms a particular organ of the whole mechanism. In various manufactures, however, the group itself is an articulated working body, while the total mechanism is formed by repeating or multiplying these elementary organisms.
Take glass-bottle manufacture. It falls into three essentially different phases. First, the preparatory phase: preparing the glass components, mixing sand, lime, and so on, and melting them into a fluid glass mass. In this first phase various detail workers are employed, as also in the final phase — removing bottles from the cooling furnaces, sorting, packing, and so forth. Between both phases stands the glass-making proper, the working of the fluid mass. At one mouth of the glass furnace works a group called in England "the hole," consisting of one bottle maker or finisher, one blower, one gatherer, one putter up or whetter off, and one taker in. These five detail workers form so many special organs of a single working body, which can act only as a unity — only through the direct cooperation of all five. If one limb of this five-part body is missing, it is paralysed.
But the same furnace has various openings — in England, say, 4 to 6 — each holding an earthen melting-pot with fluid glass, and each employing its own group of the same five-part form. The articulation of each group rests directly on the division of labour, while the bond between the different homogeneous groups is simple cooperation, which uses one of the means of production — here the furnace — more economically through shared use. Such a furnace with its 4–6 groups forms a glass house, and a glass manufactory comprises several such houses, together with the apparatus and workers for the initial and final production phases.
Finally, just as manufacture partly arises from combining different crafts, so too it can develop into a combination of different manufactures. The larger English glass houses, for example, make their own earthen melting-pots, because the success or failure of the product depends heavily on their quality. The manufacture of a means of production is here united with the manufacture of the product. Conversely, the manufacture of the product can be combined with manufactures in which it serves as raw material, or whose products are later assembled with it. Thus the manufacture of flint glass is combined with glass-cutting and brass-founding — the latter for the metal fittings of various glass articles.
The various combined manufactures then form more or less spatially separated departments of a total manufactory, simultaneously independent production processes, each with its own division of labour. Despite the advantages combined manufacture offers, it gains, on its own foundation, no genuinely technical unity. That arises only with its transformation into machine-based industry.
The manufacturing period, which soon pronounced the reduction of the labour-time necessary for commodity production a conscious principle, also sporadically developed the use of machines — especially for certain simple, initial processes that must be carried out massively and with great exertion of force. Thus, early in paper manufacture, the tearing up of rags was done by paper mills, and in metallurgy the crushing of ores by stamping mills. The elementary form of all machinery, the water mill, had been handed down by the Roman Empire. The craft period bequeathed the great inventions of the compass, gunpowder, printing, and the automatic clock. On the whole, however, machinery plays only that side role that Adam Smith assigns to it alongside the division of labour. The sporadic application of machinery in the 17th century was very important, because it gave the great mathematicians of that time practical points of support and stimuli for the creation of modern mechanics.
The specific machinery of the manufacturing period remains the collective worker itself, combined from many detail workers. The different operations that the producer of a commodity performs in turn, and which entwine in the whole of his labour process, make different demands on him: in one he must develop more strength, in another more dexterity, in a third more mental attention. The same individual does not possess these qualities in equal measure. Once the various operations have been separated, made independent, and isolated, the workers are divided, classified, and grouped according to their predominant qualities. If their natural peculiarities form the basis on which the division of labour grafts itself, manufacture — once introduced — develops labour-powers fit by nature only for a one-sided special function. The collective worker now possesses all productive qualities in an equally high degree of virtuosity and expends them most economically, by using all his organs — individualized in particular workers or groups — exclusively for their specific functions.
The one-sidedness, even the imperfection, of the detail worker becomes his perfection as a limb of the collective worker. The habit of a one-sided function turns him into its naturally sure-acting organ, while the connection of the total mechanism forces him to work with the regularity of a machine part.
Because the collective worker's various functions are simpler or more complex, lower or higher, his organs — the individual labour-powers — require very different degrees of training and therefore possess very different values. Manufacture thus develops a hierarchy of labour-powers, to which a scale of wages corresponds. If, on the one hand, the individual worker is appropriated and annexed for life to a one-sided function, the various operations are just as much adapted to that hierarchy of natural and acquired skills. Every production process, however, requires certain simple manipulations that every person is capable of just as he stands. These too are now detached from their fluid connection with the richer moments of activity and ossified into exclusive functions.
In every craft it seizes, manufacture generates a class of so-called unskilled workers, whom craft production strictly excluded. If manufacture develops an entirely one-sided speciality into a virtuosity at the expense of the whole capacity for work, it also begins to make a speciality out of the absence of all development. Alongside the hierarchical gradation appears the simple separation of workers into skilled and unskilled. For the latter, the training costs vanish entirely; for the former, they sink compared to the craftsman, because the function is simplified. In both cases the value of labour-power sinks. The exception holds only where the decomposition of the labour process creates new, comprehensive functions that did not exist at all, or not to that extent, in the craft.
The relative devaluation of labour-power, which springs from the elimination or reduction of training costs, immediately implies a higher valorization of capital: for everything that shortens the time necessary to reproduce labour-power extends the domain of surplus labour.
We first considered the origin of manufacture, then its simple elements — the detail worker and his tool — and finally its total mechanism. We now touch briefly on the relation between the division of labour in manufacture and the social division of labour, which forms the general foundation of all commodity production.
If we keep labour alone in view, we can call the separation of social production into its great genera — agriculture, industry, and so on — the division of labour in general; the differentiation of these genera into species and sub-species, the division of labour in particular; and the division of labour within a workshop, the division of labour in detail.
The division of labour within society, and the corresponding restriction of individuals to particular professional spheres, develops — like the division of labour in manufacture — from opposite starting points. Within a family, and further within a tribe, a spontaneous division of labour arises from differences of sex and age, thus on a purely physiological foundation, which expands its material as the community grows, the population increases, and above all as different tribes clash and one subjugates another. On the other hand, as noted earlier, the exchange of products arises at the points where different families, tribes, or communities come into contact — for at the dawn of culture it is not private individuals but families, tribes, and so forth that confront one another independently. Different communities find different means of production and different means of subsistence in their natural surroundings. Their mode of production, way of life, and products are therefore different. It is this naturally grown difference that, upon contact between communities, calls forth the exchange of their respective products and thus the gradual transformation of those products into commodities.
Exchange does not create the difference between spheres of production, but brings the already distinct spheres into relation, turning them into more or less mutually dependent branches of a social total production. Here the social division of labour arises through the exchange between originally distinct but mutually independent production spheres. There, where the physiological division forms the starting point, the separate organs of an immediately connected whole detach from one another, decompose — a process to which commodity exchange with foreign communities gives the main impulse — and make themselves independent, up to the point where the connection between the different kinds of labour is mediated only by the exchange of products as commodities. In the one case, it is the making dependent of what was previously independent; in the other, the making independent of what was previously dependent.
The foundation of every developed division of labour mediated by commodity exchange is the separation of town and country. One could say that the whole economic history of society is summed up in the movement of this antithesis — which, however, we shall not pursue further here.
Just as a certain number of simultaneously employed workers forms the material prerequisite for the division of labour in manufacture, so for the division of labour within society do the size and density of the population, which here take the place of agglomeration in one workshop. This density, however, is relative. A relatively sparsely populated country with developed means of communication possesses a denser population than a more populated country with undeveloped means of communication; in this sense the northern states of the American Union, for instance, are more densely populated than India.
Because commodity production and circulation are general prerequisites of the capitalist mode of production, the manufacturing division of labour requires a division of labour within society that has already matured to a certain degree. Conversely, the manufacturing division reacts back to develop and multiply that social division. As the instruments of labour differentiate, the trades producing those instruments differentiate ever further. When the manufacturing system seizes a trade that was previously connected to others as a main or side trade and carried out by the same producer, an immediate separation and mutual independence takes place. When it seizes a particular stage of production of a commodity, the different stages turn into different independent trades.
It was already noted that where the article is a mechanically assembled whole of partial products, the detail operations can re-establish themselves as their own crafts. To carry out the division of labour more perfectly within a manufactory, a single branch of production is split — according to the variety of its raw materials or the different forms the same raw material can take — into various, sometimes entirely new manufactures. Thus in France alone, in the first half of the 18th century, over 100 different kinds of silk stuffs were woven, and in Avignon, for example, it was law that "every apprentice should devote himself always to only one sort of fabrication and was not allowed to learn the production of several kinds of stuff at once." The territorial division of labour, which binds particular branches of production to particular districts of a country, receives new impetus from the manufacturing system, which exploits every local particularity.
The expansion of the world market and the colonial system, both of which belong to the general conditions of existence of the manufacturing period, supply rich material for the social division of labour. It is not the place here to show in detail how, alongside the economic sphere, it seizes every other sphere of society and everywhere lays the foundation for that cultivation of specialties, that parcelization of the human being, which already drove A. Ferguson — the teacher of Adam Smith — to exclaim: "We make a nation of Helots, and there are no free men among us."
Yet despite the numerous analogies and connections between the division of labour within society and the division within a workshop, the two differ not merely in degree but essentially, in kind.
The analogy seems most striking where an inner bond entwines different branches of trade. The cattle-breeder produces hides, the tanner turns the hides into leather, the shoemaker the leather into boots. Each produces a stage-product, and the last finished form is the combined product of their separate labours. Add to these the manifold branches that supply the cattle-breeder, tanner, and shoemaker with means of production. Now, one can imagine with Adam Smith that this social division of labour differs from the manufacturing division only subjectively — that is, for the observer, who here sees the manifold detail operations spatially combined at a glance, whereas there their dispersal over large areas and the great number employed in each branch obscure the connection. But what establishes the bond between the independent labours of cattle-breeder, tanner, and shoemaker? The existence of their respective products as commodities. What, by contrast, characterizes the manufacturing division of labour? That the detail worker produces no commodity. Only the combined product of the detail workers turns into a commodity. The social division is mediated by the purchase and sale of the products of different labour branches; the connection of detail operations in manufacture, by the sale of different labour-powers to one capitalist, who uses them as combined labour-power.
The manufacturing division presupposes concentration of the means of production in the hand of one capitalist; the social division presupposes the fragmentation of means of production among many independent commodity producers. While in manufacture the iron law of proportionality subsumes definite masses of workers under definite functions, in the distribution of commodity producers and their means of production among the various social branches of labour, chance and caprice play their colourful game. The different production spheres do constantly seek to balance themselves: on one hand, each producer of commodities must produce a use-value, must satisfy a particular social need, and while the extent of these needs differs quantitatively, an inner bond chains the various masses of need into a naturally grown system; on the other hand, the law of commodity value determines how much of its total disposable labour-time society can expend on producing each particular kind of commodity. But this constant tendency of the different production spheres to balance itself operates only as a reaction against the constant overturning of that equilibrium. The rule followed a priori and by plan in the division of labour within the workshop operates in the division of labour within society only a posteriori — as an inner, silent natural necessity, perceptible in the barometric fluctuations of market prices, which overpowers the lawless caprice of the commodity producers.
The manufacturing division of labour presupposes the unconditional authority of the capitalist over persons who form mere limbs of a total mechanism belonging to him; the social division of labour confronts independent commodity producers, who recognize no other authority than that of competition — the compulsion exerted by the pressure of their mutual interests, just as in the animal kingdom the war of all against all more or less preserves the conditions of existence of all species. The very same bourgeois consciousness that celebrates the manufacturing division of labour — the lifelong annexation of the worker to a detail operation and the unconditional subordination of detail workers under capital — as an organization of labour that increases its productive power, just as loudly denounces every conscious social control and regulation of the social production process as an intrusion upon the inviolable property rights, freedom, and self-determining "genius" of the individual capitalist. It is very characteristic that the enthusiastic apologists of the factory system can think of nothing worse to say against any general organization of social labour than that it would turn all society into a factory.
If the anarchy of the social division of labour and the despotism of the manufacturing division of labour mutually condition each other in the society of the capitalist mode of production, earlier forms of society — in which the separation of trades developed naturally, then crystallized, and was finally fixed by law — present, on one hand, the image of a planned and authoritative organization of social labour, while on the other they entirely exclude the division of labour within the workshop, or develop it only on a dwarf scale, or only sporadically and accidentally.
Those ancient, small Indian communities, some of which still exist today, are based on communal possession of the land, on the immediate connection of agriculture and handicraft, and on a fixed, planned division of labour that serves as a ready-made plan and blueprint whenever a new community is founded. They form self-sufficient productive wholes, whose territory varies from 100 to a few thousand acres. The bulk of the products is produced for the direct self-consumption of the community, not as commodities, and production is thus independent of that division of labour mediated by commodity exchange in Indian society at large. Only the surplus turns into a commodity — and partly only once it reaches the hands of the state, to which a certain quantity has flowed since time immemorial as rent in kind.
The forms of these communities vary across different parts of India. In the simplest form, the community tills the land communally and distributes its products among its members, while each family spins and weaves as a domestic side trade. Beside this homogeneously occupied mass, we find the "chief inhabitant," who is judge, police, and tax-collector in one; the bookkeeper, who keeps the accounts of agriculture and registers everything related to it; a third official, who pursues criminals, protects travelling strangers, and escorts them from village to village; the boundary man, who guards the community's borders against neighbouring communities; the water overseer, who distributes water for irrigation from the communal reservoirs; the Brahmin, who performs religious services; the schoolmaster, who teaches the children to write and read in the sand; the calendar-Brahmin, who as astrologer determines the times for sowing, harvesting, and the good and bad hours for all agricultural work; a smith and a carpenter, who make and repair all farming implements; the potter, who makes all the village vessels; the barber, the washerman for cleaning clothes, the silversmith, here and there the poet, who in some communities replaces the silversmith, in others the schoolmaster. This dozen persons is maintained at the expense of the whole community. If the population grows, a new community is settled on untilled soil after the pattern of the old.
The community mechanism displays a planned division of labour, but a manufacturing division is impossible here, because the market for the smith, carpenter, and so forth remains unchanged, and at most — depending on the size of the villages — two or three smiths or potters appear instead of one. The law regulating the division of labour in the community acts with the unbreakable authority of a law of nature, while each individual craftsman — the smith, and so on — carries out all the operations of his trade in his workshop in the traditional way, but independently, without recognizing any authority over him.
The simple productive organism of these self-sufficient communities, which constantly reproduce themselves in the same form and, when accidentally destroyed, rebuild in the same place and under the same name, supplies the key to the secret of the immutability of Asiatic societies — so strikingly in contrast with the constant dissolution and re-formation of Asiatic states and the ceaseless change of dynasties. The structure of the economic foundation of society remains untouched by the storms of the political clouds.
The guild laws, as noted earlier, purposely prevented the transformation of a single guild master into a capitalist, by strictly limiting the number of journeymen he was allowed to employ. Likewise, he could employ journeymen only in the exclusive craft in which he himself was a master. The guilds zealously fended off every encroachment by merchants' capital — the only free form of capital that confronted them. A merchant could buy all commodities, but not labour as a commodity. He was tolerated only as a putting-out dealer in craft products. If external circumstances called forth a progressive division of labour, existing guilds split into sub-species, or new guilds established themselves alongside the old — but always without combining different crafts in one workshop. The guild organization, however much its separation, isolation, and perfecting of crafts belonged among the material conditions of existence for the manufacturing period, thus excluded the manufacturing division of labour. On the whole, the worker and his means of production remained joined together like the snail with its shell, and so the first basis of manufacture — the separation of the means of production from the worker and their independence as capital — was missing.
While the division of labour in an entire society — whether mediated by commodity exchange or not — belongs to the most diverse economic formations of society, the manufacturing division of labour is a wholly specific creation of the capitalist mode of production.
Having many workers under one capitalist's command is the natural starting point for manufacture, just as it is for cooperation in general. But once the division of labor takes hold, it turns this need for more workers into a strict technical necessity. The division of labor itself now prescribes the absolute minimum number of workers a capitalist must hire.
Expanding the division of labor further requires adding even more workers, and they must be added in exact multiples. But as the variable part of capital (the wage bill) grows, so must its constant part. The shared facilities—like buildings and furnaces—must expand, and above all, the raw material must grow much faster than the workforce. The faster workers churn out products thanks to the division of labor, the more raw material they devour in the same amount of time.
So a growing minimum size of capital in each capitalist's hand is a strict law, springing directly from the technical nature of manufacture.
In manufacture, just as in simple cooperation, the working body functions as a form of existence of capital. The entire productive mechanism—made up of many individual detail workers—belongs to the capitalist. Therefore, the productive power generated by combining all these workers appears as capital's own productive power.
Manufacture does not just place the previously independent worker under capital's command and discipline; it creates a hierarchy among the workers themselves. While simple cooperation leaves an individual's way of working mostly unchanged, manufacture completely revolutionizes it. It seizes labour-power at its very root.
It cripples the worker into an abnormality. It forces their one-sided dexterity to grow unnaturally fast, like in a hothouse, by suppressing a whole world of productive drives and talents. It is like butchering a whole animal in the La Plata states just to get its hide or its tallow. The work is not just divided among different individuals; the individual worker is divided. The person is transformed into an automatic gear-wheel of one partial operation, making the absurd fable of Menenius Agrippa—which treats a human being as a mere fragment of a body—come true.
Originally, a worker sells their labour-power to capital because they lack the material means to produce a commodity on their own. But now, their individual labour-power refuses to function at all unless it is sold to capital. It works only inside a setup that only exists after the sale, inside the capitalist's workshop. Rendered naturally incapable of producing anything independently, the manufacturing worker carries out productive activity only as an appendage of the capitalist's workshop.
Just as the chosen people supposedly bore a sign on their foreheads marking them as the property of Jehovah, the division of labor stamps the manufacturing worker, branding them as the property of capital.
The independent peasant or handicraftsman develops practical knowledge, judgment, and will—even if on a small scale—just as a person in the wild uses all the arts of war as their own personal cunning. In manufacture, these mental faculties are needed only for the workshop as a whole.
Intellectual power in production expands on one side only because it vanishes on many others. What the detail workers lose, concentrates over against them, in capital. The division of labor in manufacture produces a specific result: it confronts the workers with the intellectual powers of the material production process as an alien property, a ruling power over them.
This process of separation begins in simple cooperation, where the capitalist represents the unity and will of the social laboring body to the individual workers. It develops further in manufacture, which mutilates the worker into a detail worker. It completes itself later in modern industry, which separates science as an independent productive force from labor and presses it into capital's service.
In manufacture, the enrichment of the collective worker—and therefore of capital—in social productive power is conditioned by the impoverishment of the worker in individual productive powers.
"Ignorance is the mother of industry as well as of superstition. Reflection and imagination are prone to error; but a habit of moving the hand or the foot depends on neither one nor the other. Manufactures, therefore, prosper most where the mind is least consulted, and where the workshop may be considered as an engine, the parts of which are men."
In fact, in the middle of the 18th century, some manufactures deliberately preferred to hire half-idiots for certain simple operations that were considered trade secrets.
"The understanding of the greater part of men," says A. Smith, "is necessarily formed by their everyday occupations. A man who spends his whole life performing a few simple operations ... has no occasion to exert his understanding ... He generally becomes as stupid and ignorant as it is possible for a human creature to become."
After describing the stupidity of the detail worker, Smith continues:
"The uniformity of his stationary life naturally corrupts the courage of his mind ... It even corrupts the activity of his body and renders him incapable of exerting his strength vigorously and steadily in any employment other than the one he was trained for. His dexterity at his own particular trade seems to be acquired at the expense of his intellectual, social, and martial virtues. But in every improved and civilized society, this is the state into which the labouring poor, that is, the great mass of the people, must necessarily fall."
To prevent the complete stultification of the masses caused by the division of labor, A. Smith recommends state-funded public education, though only in cautious, homeopathic doses. His French translator and commentator, G. Garnier, who naturally turned into a senator under the first French Empire, attacks this idea just as naturally. Public education, he argues, violates the primary laws of the division of labor, and by attempting it, "our whole social system would be proscribed."
"Like all other divisions of labor," he says, "the division between manual labor and intellectual labor becomes more pronounced and decided as society"—he correctly uses this word to mean capital, landed property, and their state—"becomes richer. Like every other division of labor, this one is an effect of past progress and a cause of future progress ... Ought the government then to work against this division of labor and hinder its natural course? Ought it to spend a portion of public funds trying to confound and mix together two classes of labor that are striving to divide and separate?"
A certain crippling of body and mind is inseparable even from the division of labor across society as a whole. But because the manufacturing period pushes this social splitting of labor branches much further, and because it uniquely strikes the individual at the very root of their life, it produces the first material and the first impulse for industrial pathology.
"To subdivide a man is to execute him if he deserves the death sentence, and to assassinate him if he does not. The subdivision of labor is the assassination of a people."
Cooperation based on the division of labor—in other words, manufacture—starts out as a natural, spontaneous formation. But as soon as it gains some consistency and extends its reach, it becomes a conscious, planned, and systematic form of capitalist production.
The history of manufacture shows how its specific division of labor first found the right forms through experience, almost behind the backs of the people acting it out. Once found, it tried to hold onto those forms traditionally, much like the guild handicrafts did, and in some cases it held onto them for centuries. Whenever this form changed—aside from minor details—it was solely because of a revolution in the tools of labor.
Modern manufacture—I am not speaking here about the large-scale industry based on machinery—either finds its scattered parts ready-made, as in the clothing manufacture in large cities, and just gathers them together; or the principle of division is self-evident, simply assigning the various tasks of a handicraft, like bookbinding, to specific workers. In these cases, it takes barely a week of experience to figure out the exact ratio of hands needed for each task.
By breaking down handicraft activity, specializing the tools of labor, forming detail workers, and grouping and combining them into a single overall mechanism, the division of labor in manufacture creates a qualitative gradation and a quantitative proportion in social production. It creates a specific organization of social labor, and in doing so, it develops a new, social productive power of labor.
As a specifically capitalist form of social production—and on the foundations it found, it could not have developed any other way than the capitalist form—manufacture is only a specific method for producing relative surplus value. It is a way to increase capital's own expansion—what is called social wealth, the "Wealth of Nations," and so on—at the expense of the workers.
It develops the social productive power of labor not only for the capitalist instead of the worker, but by crippling the individual worker. It creates new conditions for capital's domination over labor. Therefore, if on the one hand it appears as a historical progress and a necessary stage in the economic formation of society, on the other hand, it appears as a means of civilized and refined exploitation.
Political economy, which emerged as an independent science only during the manufacturing period, views the social division of labor entirely from the standpoint of manufacture. It sees it simply as a means to produce more commodities with the same amount of labor, thereby making commodities cheaper and accelerating the accumulation of capital.
In sharpest contrast to this emphasis on quantity and exchange-value, the writers of classical antiquity held strictly to quality and use-value. In their view, the separation of social production branches means commodities are made better, and people's different talents and tendencies find their proper fields; without specialization, nothing great can be achieved anywhere. For them, division of labor improves both the product and the producer. If they mentioned the growth in the mass of products, it was only with regard to a greater abundance of use-values—they never breathed a word about exchange-value or the cheapening of commodities.
This use-value standpoint dominates both Plato and Xenophon. Plato treats the division of labor as the foundation for the division of classes in society, while Xenophon, with his characteristic bourgeois instinct, moves a bit closer to the division of labor within a single workshop. Plato's Republic, insofar as it develops the division of labor as the shaping principle of the state, is just an Athenian idealization of the Egyptian caste system. Egypt served as a model industrial country for other contemporaries of his as well, such as Isocrates, and it retained this significance even for the Greeks of the Roman imperial era.
During the actual manufacturing period—the time when manufacture was the dominant form of capitalist production—many obstacles blocked the full realization of its own tendencies.
Although manufacture created a simple division between skilled and unskilled workers alongside its hierarchy, the number of unskilled workers remained very limited because of the overwhelming influence of the skilled ones. Although it adapted specific operations to the different degrees of maturity, strength, and development of its living human tools—driving toward the productive exploitation of women and children—this tendency largely wrecked itself on the habits and resistance of the male workers. And although breaking down handicrafts lowered the training costs and therefore the value of the worker, longer training was still required for the more difficult detail work. Even where such training was superfluous, workers jealously insisted on it. In England, for instance, the apprenticeship laws with their seven-year training periods remained in full force right down to the end of the manufacturing period, and they were only swept aside by large-scale industry.
Because handicraft skill remained the foundation of manufacture, and because the overall mechanism lacked a material framework independent of the workers themselves, capital was in a constant struggle with the insubordination of the workers.
"By the infirmity of human nature," exclaims friend Ure, "it happens that the more skilful the workman, the more self-willed and intractable he is apt to become, and of course the less fit a component of a mechanical system in which ... he may do great damage to the whole."
Throughout the entire manufacturing period, complaints run about the workers' lack of discipline. Even if we did not have the testimony of contemporary writers, the simple facts would speak volumes: from the 16th century right up to the era of large-scale industry, capital failed to master all the available working time of the manufacturing workers. Manufactures were short-lived, and when workers emigrated, the manufactures packed up and moved from one country to another.
"Order must in one way or another be established," exclaims the often-cited author of the "Essay on Trade and Commerce" in 1770. "Order," echoes Dr. Andrew Ure 66 years later; "Order" was missing in manufacture, which was based on "the scholastic dogma of division of labor," and "Arkwright created order."
At the same time, manufacture was unable to seize social production in its full extent or to revolutionize it down to its depths. It peaked as an economic work of art resting on the broad foundation of town handicrafts and rural domestic industry. At a certain stage of development, its own narrow technical basis came into contradiction with the very needs of production that manufacture itself had created.
One of manufacture's most perfect creations was the workshop that produced the tools of labor themselves, and especially the more complicated mechanical devices already in use.
"Such a workshop," says Ure, "displayed the division of labor in its manifold gradations—the file, the drill, the lathe, each having its own workers, hierarchically arranged according to their degree of skill."
This product of the division of labor in manufacture in turn produced—machines.
Machines sweep away handicraft activity as the regulating principle of social production. In doing so, on the one hand, the technical reason for annexing a worker to a single detail function for life is removed. But on the other hand, the fetters that this same principle had previously imposed on the rule of capital also fall away.