But, in spite of the numerous analogies and links connecting them, division of labour in the interior of a society, and that in the interior of a workshop, differ not only in degree, but also in kind. The analogy appears most indisputable where there is an invisible bond uniting the various branches of trade. For instance, the cattle breeder produces hides, the tanner makes the hides into leather, and the shoemaker, the leather into boots. Here the thing produced by each of them is but a step towards the final form, which is the product of all their labours combined. There are, besides, all the various industries that supply the cattle-breeder, the tanner, and the shoemaker with the means of production. Now it is quite possible to imagine, with Adam Smith, that the difference be- tween the above social division of labour, and the division in 1 "Whether the woollen manufacture of England is not diWded into several parts or branches appropriated to particular places, where they are only or principally manufactured; fine cloths in Somersetshire, coarse in Yorkshire, long ells at Exeter, soies at Sudbury, crapes at Norwich, linseys at Kendal, blankets at Whitney, and so forth." (Berkeley: "The Querist," 1750, p. 520.)
2 A. Ferguson: " History of Civil Society." Edinburgh, 1767; Part iv., sect, ii., 34^ Capitalist Production.
manufacture, is merely subjective, exists merely for the observer, who, in a manufacture, can see with one glance, all the numerous operations being performed on one spot, while in the instance given above, the spreading out of the work over great areas, and the gieat number of people employed in each branch of labour, obscure the connexion.^ But what is it that forms the bond between the independent labours of the cattle-breeder, the tanner, and the shoemaker? It is the fact that their respective products are commodities. What, on the other hand, characterises division of labour in manufactures? The fact that the detail labourer produces no commodities.^ It is only the common product of all the detail labourers that becomes a commodity.^ Division of labour in a society is brought about by the purchase and sale of the products of different branches of industry, while the connexion between 1 In manufacture proper, he says, the division of labour appears to be greater, because " those employed ih every different branch of the work can often be col- lected into the same workhouse, and jjlaced at once under the view of the spectator. In those great manufactures, (!) on the contrary, which are destined to supply the great wants of the great body of the people, every different branch of the work employs so great a number of workmen, that it is impossible to collect them all into the same workhouse...the division is not near so obvious." (A. Smith: "Wealth of Nations," bk. i. ch. i.) The celebrated passage in the same chapter that begins with the words, ' ' Observe the accommodation of the most common artificer or day labourer in a civilized and thriving country,"&c., and then proceeds to depict what an enormous number and variety of industries contribute to the satisfaction of the wants of an ordinary labourer, is copied almost word for word from B. de Mandeville's Kemarks to his "Fable of the Bees, or Private Vices, Publick Benefits." (First ed., without the remarks, 1706; with the remarks, 1714.)
2 " There is no longer anything which we can call the natural reward of individual labour. Each labourer produces only some part of a whole, and each part, having no value or utility in itself, there is nothing on which the labourer can seize, and say It is my product, this I will keep to myself." ( *' Labour Defended against the Claims of Capital." Lond., 1825, p. 25.) The author of this admirable work is the Th. Hodgskin I have already cited.
3 This distinction between division of labour in society and in manufacture, was practically illustrated to the Yankees. One of the new taxes devised at Washington during the civil war, was the duty of 6% " on all industrial products." Question: What is an industrial product? Answer of the legislature: A thing is produced " when it is made," and it is made when it is ready for sale. Now, for one example out of many. The New York and Philadelphia manufacturers had previously been in the habit of "making" umbrellas, with all their belongings. But since an umbrella is a mixtum compositum of very heterogeneous parts, by degrees these parts became the products of various separate industries, carried on independently in different places. They entered as separate commodities into the umbrella man- ufactory, where they were fitted together. The Yankees have given to articles thus l\ Division of Labour and Manufacture, 349 the detail operations in a workshop, are due to the sale of the labour-power of several workmen to one capitalist, who applies it as combined labour-power. The division of labour in the workshop implies concentration of the means of production in the hands of one capitalist; the division of labour in society implies their dispersion among many independent producers of commodities. While within the workshop, the iron law of proportionality subjects definite numbers of workmen to de- finite functions, in the society outside the workshop, chance and caprice have full play in distributing the producers and their means of production among the various branches of industry. The difierent spheres of production, it is true, constantly tend to an equilibrium: for, on the one hand, while each producer of a commodity is bound to produce a use-value, to satisfy a particular social want, and while the extent of these wants differs quantitatively, still there exists an inner relation which settles their proportions into a regular system, and that system one of spontaneous growth; and, on the other hand, the law of the value of commodities ultimately determines how much of its disposable working-time society can expend on each par ticular class of commodities. But this constant tendency to equilibrium, of the various spheres of production, is exercised only in the shape of a reaction against the constant upset ting of this equilibrium. The a priori system on which th division of labour, within the workshop, is regularly carrie out, becomes in the division of labour within the society, an i posteriori, nature-imposed necessity, controlling the lawless caprice of the producers, and perceptible in the barometric^ 1 fluctuations of the market prices, Division of labour withii the workshop implies the undisputed authority of the capita - ist over men, that are but parts of a mechani>ra that belong 3 to him. The division of labour within the society brings int ) contact independent commodity-producers, who acknowledg 3 no other authority but that of competition, of the coercioi exerted by the pressure of their mutual interests; just as in tUe fitted together, the name of "assembled articles," a name they deserve, for beipg an assemblage of taxes. Thus the umbrella "assembles," first, 6*^/0 on the price/ of each of its elements, and a further 67o on its own total price.
3 so Capitalist Production, animal kingdom, the helluTn omnium contra omnes more or less preserves the conditions of existence of every species. The same bourgeois mind which praises division of labour in the workshop, life-long annexation of the labourer to a partial operation, and his complete subjection to capital, as being an organisation of labour that increases its productiveness — that same bourgeois mind denounces with equal vigour every con- scious attempt to socially control and regulate the process of production, as an inroad upon such sacred things as the rights of property, freedom and unrestricted play for the bent of the individual capitalist. It is very characteristic that the enthusiastic apologists of the factory system have nothing more damning to urge against a general organization of the labour of society, than that it would turn all society into one immense factory.
If, in a society with capitalist production, anarchy in the social division of labour and despotism in that of the workshop are mutual conditions the one of the other, we find, on the con- trary, in those earlier forms of society in which the separation of trades has been spontaneously developed, then crystallized, and finally made permanent by law, on the one hand, a speci- men of the organisation of the labour of society, in accordance with an approved and authoritative plan, and on the other, the entire exclusion of division of labour in the workshop, or at all events a mere dwarf-like or sporadic and accidental development of the same.^ Those small and extremely ancient Indian communities, some of which have continued down to this day, are based on posses- sion in common of the land, on the blending of agriculture and handicrafts, and on an unalterable division of labour, which serves, whenever a new community is started, as a plan and scheme ready cut and dried. Occupying areas of from 100 up to several thousand acres, each forms a compact whole pro- ducing all it requires. The chief part of the products is 1 " On peut.. etablir en regie ginferale, que moins I'autoritd preside a la division du travail dans I'interieur de la societe, plus la division du travail se developpe dans I'interieur de I'atelier, et plus elle y est soumise k I'autorite d'un seul. Ainsi l'atitorit6 dans I'atelier et celle dans la societe, par rapport a la division du travail, sont en raison inverse I'une de I'autre." (Karl Marx, " Misere," &c., pp. 130-131.)
Division of Labour and Manufacture. 3 5 1 destined for direct use by the community itself, and does not take the form of a commodity. Hence, production here is independent of that division of labour brought about, in Indian societjT- as a whole, by means of the exchange of commodities. It is the surplus alone that becomes a commodity, and a portion of even that, not until it has reached the hands of the State, into whose hands from time immemorial a certain quantity of these products has found its way in the shape of rent in kind. The constitution of these communities varies in different parts of India. In those of the simplest form, the land is tilled in common, and the produce divided among the members. At the same time, spinning and weaving are carried on in each family as subsidiary industries. Side by side with the masses thus occupied with one and the same work, we find the " chief inhabitant," who is judge, police, and tax-gatherer in one; the book-keeper who keeps the accounts of the tillage and registers everything relating thereto; another official, who prosecutes criminals, protects strangers travelling through, and escorts them to the next village; the boundary man, who guards the boundaries against neighbouring communities; the water- overseer, who distributes the water from the common tanks for irrigation; the Brahmin, who conducts the religious services; the schoolmaster, who on the sand teaches the children reading and writing; the calendar-Brahmin, or astro- loger, who makes known the lucky or unlucky days for seed- time and harvest, and for every other kind of agricultural work; a smith and a carpenter, who make and repair all the agricultural implements; the potter, who makes all the pottery of the village; the barber, the washerman, who washes clothes, the silversmith, here and there the poet, who in some com- munities replaces the silversmith, in others the schoolmaster. Tliis dozen of individuals is maintained at the expense of the whole community. If the population increases, a new com- munity is founded, on the pattern of the old one, on unoccupied land. The whole mechanism discloses a systematic division of labour; but a division like that in manufactures is impossible, since the smith and the carpenter, &;c., find an unchanging market, and at the most there occur, according to the sizes of 352 Capitalist Production, the villages, two or three of each, instead of one/ The law that regulates the division of labour in the community acts with the irresistible authority of a law of Nature, at the same time that each individual artificer, the smith, the carpenter, and so on, conducts in his workshop all the operations of his handicraft in the traditional way, but independently, and without recognizing any authority over him. The simplicit}^ of the organisation for production in these self-sufficing com- munities that constantly reproduce themselves in the same form, and when accidentally destroyed, spring up again on the spot and with the same name^ — this simplicity supplies the key to the secret of the unchangeableness of Asiatic societies, an unchangeableness in such striking contrast with the con- stant dissolution and refounding of Asiatic States, and the never-ceasing changes of dynasty. The structure of the economical elements of society remains untouched by the storm-clouds of the political sky.
The rules of the guilds, as I have said before, by limiting most strictly the number of apprentices and journeymen that a single master could employ, prevented him from becoming a capitalist. Moreover, he could not employ his journeymen in any other handicraft than the one in which he was a master. The guilds zealously repelled every encroachment by the capital of merchants, the only form of free capital with which they came in contact. A merchant could buy every kind of com- modity, but labour as a commodity he could not buy. Ho existed only on sufferance, as a dealer in the products of the handicrafts. If circumstances called for a further division of labour, the existing guilds split themselves up into varieties, or 1 Lieut. -Col. Mark Wilks: "Historical Sketches of the South of India." Lond., 1810-17, V. I., pp. 118-20. A good description of the various forms of the Indian communities is to be found in George Campbell's "Modern India." Lond., 1852.
3 "Under this simple form...the inhabitants of the country have lived from time immemorial. The boundaries of the villages have been but seldom altered; and though the villages themselves have been sometimes injured, and even desolated by war, famine, and disease, the same name, the same limits, the same interests, and even the same families, have continued for ages. The inhabitants give themselves no trouble about the breaking up and division of kingdoms; while the village remains entire, they care not to what power it is transferred, or to what sovereign it devolves; its internal economy remains unchanged." (Th. Stamford Raffles, late Lieut. Gov. of Java: "The History of Java." Lond., 1817, Vol. I., p. 285.)
Division of Labour and Manufacture, 353 founded new guilds by tlie side of the old ones; all this, how- ever, without concentrating various handicrafts in a single workshop. Hence, the guild organization, however much it may have contributed by separating, isolating, and perfecting the handicrafts, to create the material conditions for the exist- ence of manufacture, excluded division of labour in the workshop. On the whole, the labourer and his means of pro- duction remained closely united, like the snail with its shell, and thus there was wanting the principal basis of manufacture, the separation of the labourer from his means of production, and the conversion of these means into capital.
While division of labour in society at large, whether such division be brought about or not by exchange of commodities, is common to economical formations of society the most diverse, division of labour in the workshop, as practised by manufacture, is a special creation of the capitalist mode of production alone.
SECTION O. — THE CAPITALISTIC CHARACTER OF MANUFACTURE, An increased number of labourers under the control of one capitalist is the natural starting-point, as well of co-operation generally, as of manufacture in particular. But the division of labour in manufacture makes this increase in the number of workmen a technical necessity. The minimum number that any given capitalist is bound to employ is here prescribed by the previously established division of labour. On the other hand, the advantages of further division are obtainable only by adding to the number of workmen, and this can be done only by adding multiples of the various detail groups. But an increase in the variable component of the capital employed necessitates an increase in its constant component, too, in the workshops, implements, &c., and, in particular, in the raw ma;terial, the call for which grows quicker than the number of workmen. The quantity of it consumed in a given time, by a given amount of labour, increases in the same ratio as does the productive power of that labour in consequence of its division. Hence, it is a law, based on the very nature of manufacture, 354 Capitalist Production.
that the minimum amount of capital, which is bound to be in the hands of each capitalist, must keep increasing; in other words, that the transformation into capital of the social means of production and subsistence must keep extending.^ In manufacture, as well as in simple co-operation, the collec- tive working organism is a form of existence of capital. The mechanism that is made up of numerous individual detail labourers belongs to the capitalist. Hence, the productive power resulting from a combination of labours appears to be the productive power of capital. Manufacture proper not only subjects the previously independent workman to the discipline and command of capital, but, in addition, creates a hierarchic gradation of the workmen themselves. While simple co-opera- tion leaves the mode of working by the individual for the most part unchanged, manufacture thoroughly revolutionises it, and seizes labour-power by its very roots. It converts the labourer into a crippled monstrosity, by forcing his detail dexterity at the expense of a world of productive capabilities and in- stincts; just as in the States of La Plata they butcher a whole beast for the sake of his hide or his tallow. Not only is the detail work distributed to the different individuals, but the in- dividual himself is made the automatic motor of a fractional operation,^ and the absurd fable of Menenius Agrippa, which makes man a mere fragment of his own body, becomes realised.^ If, at first, the workman sells his labour-power to capital, because the material means of producing a commodity 1 " It is not sufficient that the capital " (the writer should have said the necessary- means of subsistence and of production) "required for the sub-division of handi- crafts should be in readiness in the society: it must also be accumulated in the hands of the employers in sufficiently large quantities to enable them to conduct their operations on a large scale...The more the division increases, the more does the constant employment of a given number of labourers require a greater outlay of capital in tools, raw material, &c." (Storch: Cours d'Econ. Polit. Paris Ed., t. I., pp. 250, 251.) " La concentration des instruments de production et la division du travail sont aussi inseparables I'une de I'autre que le sont, dans le regime politique, la concentra- tion des pouvoirs publics et la division des inter^ts prives." (Karl Marx. 1. c, 2 Dugald Stewart calls manufacturing labourers "living automatons...employed in the details of the work." (1. c, p. 318.)
3 In corals, each individual is, in fact, the stomach of the whole group; but it sup- plies the group with nourishment, instead of, like the Roman patrician, withdraw- ing it.
Division of Labour and Mamtfacture, 355 fail him, now his very labour-power refuses its services unlesc it has been sold to capital. Its functions can be exercised only in an environment that exists in the workshop of the capitalist after the sale. By nature unfitted to make anything independently, the manufacturing labourer developes produc- tive activity as a mere appendage of the capitalist's workshop.^ As the chosen people bore in their features the sign manual of Jehovah, so division of labour brands the manufacturing work- man as the property of capital.
The knowledge, the judgment, and the will, which, though in ever so small a degree, are practised by the independent peasant or handicraftsman, in the same way as the savage makes the whole art of war consist in the exercise of his per- sonal cunning — these faculties are now required only for the workshop as a whole. Intelligence in production expands in one direction, because it vanishes in many others. What is lost by the detail labourers, is concentrated in the capital that employs them.^ It is a result of the division of labour in manufactures, that the labourer is brought face to face with the intellectual potencies of the material process of production, as the property of another, and as a ruling power. This sepa- ration begins in simple co-operation, where the capitalist re- presents to the single workman, the oneness and the will of the associated labour. It is developed in manufacture which cuts down the labourer into a detail labourer. It is com- pleted in modern industry, which makes science a productive force distinct from labour and presses it into the service of capital.^ 1 ' ' L'ouvrier qui porte dans ses bras tout un metier, peut aller partout exercer son industrie et trouver des raoyens de subsister: I'autre (the manufacturing labourer) n'est qu'un accessoire qui, separd de ses confreres, n'a plus ni capacity, ni independ- ance, et qui se trouve force d'accepter la loi qu'on juge h. propos de lui imposer." (Storch. 1. c. Petersb. edit., 1815, t. I., p. 204.)
2 A. Ferguson, 1. c, p. 281: " The former may have gained what the other has lost."
3 «' The man of knowledge and the productive labourer come to be widely divided from each other, and knowledge, instead of remaining the handmaid of labour in the hand of the labourer to increase his productive powers...has almost everywhere arrayed itself against labour...systematically deluding and leading them (the labourers) astray in order to render their muscular powers entirely mechanical and obedient." (W. Thompson: "An Inquiry into the Principles of the Distribution of 35^ Capitalist Production.
In manufacture, in order to make the collective labourer, and through him capital, rich in social productive power, each labourer must be made poor in individual productive powers. " Ignorance is the mother of industry as well as of superstition. Reflection and fancy are subject to err; but a habit of moving the hand or the foot is independent of either. Manufactures, accordingly, prosper most where the mind is least consulted, and where the workshop may...be considered as an engine, the parts of which are men." ^ As a matter of fact, some few manufacturers in the middle of the 18th century preferred, for certain operations that were trade secrets, to employ half- 'diotic persons.^ " The understandings of the greater part of men," says Adam Smith, " are necessarily formed by their ordinary employments. The man whose whole life is spent in performing a few simple operations...has no occasion to exert his understanding...He generally becomes as stupid and ignorant as it is possijDle for a human creature to become." After describing the stupidity of the detail labourer he goes on: " The uni- formity of his stationary life naturally corrupts the courage of his mind It corrupts even the activity of his body and renders him incapable of exerting his strength with vigour and perseverance in any other employments than that to which he has been bred. His dexterity at his own particular trade seems in this manner to be acquired at the expense of his in- tellectual, social, and martial virtues. But in every improved and civilised society, this is the state into which the labouring poor, that is, the great body of the people, must necessarily fall."^ For preventing the complete deterioration of the great 2 J. D. Tuckett: " A History of the Past and Present State of the Labouring Popu- lation." Lond., 1846.
3 A. Smith: Wealth of Nations, Bk. V., ch. I., art. II. Being a j)upil of A. Fer- guson who showed the disadvantageous effects of division of labour, Adam Smith was perfectly clear on this point. In the introduction to his work, where he ex pro- fesso praises division of labour, he indicates only in a cui'sory manner that it is the source of social inequalities. It is not till the 5th Book, on the Revenue of the State, that he reproduces Ferguson. In my " Misere de la Philosophie," I have sufficiently explained the historical connection between Ferguson, A. Smith, Lemontey, and Say, as regards their criticisms of Division of Labour, and have shown, for the first time, Division of Labour and Manufacture, 357 mass of the people by division of labour, A. Smith recommends education of the people by the State, but prudently, and in homoeopathic doses. G. Garnier, his French translator and commentator, who, under the first French Empire, quite natu- rally developed into a senator, quite as naturally opposes him on this point. Education of the masses, he urges, violates the first law of the division of labour, and with it " our whole social system would be proscribed." " Like all other divisions of labour," he says, " that between hand labour and head labour^ is more pronounced and decided in proportion as society (he rightly uses this word, for capital, landed property and their State) becomes richer. This division of labour, like every other, is an effect of past, and a cause of future progress...ought the government then to work in opposition to this division of labour, and to hinder its natural course? Ought it to expend a part of the public money in the attempt to con- found and blend together two classes of labour, which are striving after division and separation? " ^ Some crippling of body and mind is inseparable even from division of labour in society as a whole. Since, however, manu- facture carries this social separation of branches of labour much further, and also, by its peculiar division, attacks the individual at the very roots of his life, it is the first to afford the materials for, and to give a start to, industrial pathology.^ " To subdivide a man is to execute him, if he deserves the that Division of Labour as practised in manufactures, is a specific form of the capi- talist mode of production.
1 Ferguson had already said, 1. c. p. 281: "And thinking itself, in this age of separations, may become a peculiar craft."
2 G. Garnier, vol. V. of his translation of A. Smith, pp. 4-5.
8 Ramazzini, professor of practical medicine at Padua, published in 1713 his work " De morbis artificum," which was translated into French 1781, reprinted 1841 in the " Encyclopedie des Sciences Medicales. 7"^® Dis. Auteurs Classiques." The period of Modern Mechanical Industry has, of course, very much enlarged his catalogue of labour's diseases. See " Hygidne physique et morale de I'ouvrier dans les grandes villes en general et dans la ville de Lyon en particulier. Par le Dr. A. L. Fonterel, Paris, 1858," and " Die Krankheiten, welche verschiednen Standen, Altern und Geschlechtern eigenthiimlich sind. 6 Vols. Ulm, 1860," and others. la 1854 the Society of Arts appointed a Commission of Inquiry into industrial pathology. Th« list of documents collected by this commission is to be seen in the catalogue of the "Twickenham Economic Museum." Very important are the oflBcial " Eeports on Public Health." See also Eduard Beich, M.D. "Ueber die Entartung des Men- Bchen," Erlangen, 1868.
358 Capitalist Production,