III.3. [Need, Production and Division of Labour]

[XIV] (7) We have seen what significance the wealth of human needs has on the presupposition of socialism, and so what significance both a new mode of production and a new object of production have: a new confirmation of human essential power and a new enrichment of the human essence. Within private property, the inverse significance. Every man speculates on creating a new need in another, so as to force him into a new sacrifice, to place him in a new dependence and to lure him into a new mode of enjoyment, and so of economic ruin. Each tries to establish over the other an alien essential power, so as to find in it the satisfaction of his own selfish need. With the mass of objects, therefore, grows the realm of alien beings to which man is subjected, and every new product is a new potentiality of mutual deception and mutual plundering. Man becomes ever poorer as man; he needs ever more money to take possession of the hostile being; and the power of his money falls in exact inverse proportion to the mass of production, that is, his neediness grows as the power of money increases. The need for money is therefore the true need produced by political economy, and the only need it produces. The quantity of money becomes more and more its sole powerful property; just as it reduces every being to its abstraction, so in its own movement it reduces itself to a quantitative being. Excess and immoderation become its true measure. Subjectively this appears partly in the fact that the extension of products and needs becomes the inventive and ever calculating slave of inhuman, refined, unnatural and imaginary appetites. (Private property does not know how to turn crude need into human need; its idealism is fancy, caprice, whim; and no eunuch flatters his despot more basely or uses more infamous means to stimulate his jaded capacity for pleasure, so as to sneak a favour for himself, than the industrial eunuch, the producer, does in order to sneak himself some silver pennies and coax the golden birds out of the pocket of his neighbour, beloved in Christ. Every product is a bait with which one hopes to lure to oneself the other’s essence, his money; every real or possible need is a weakness that will lead the fly to the lime-twig; universal exploitation of the communal human essence, just as every imperfection of man is a bond with heaven, a side from which his heart is accessible to the priest; every want is an occasion to approach one’s neighbour in the most amiable guise and say to him: Dear friend, I will give you what you need; but you know the conditio sine qua non; you know with what ink you must sign yourself over to me; I am cheating you while I provide you with a pleasure.) This slave submits to the other’s most depraved fancies, plays the pander between him and his need, excites morbid appetites in him, lies in wait for every weakness, so as then to demand the fee for this labour of love. Partly this estrangement shows itself in the fact that the refinement of needs and of their means produces on the other side a bestial savagery, a complete, crude, abstract simplicity of need; or rather that it only reproduces itself in its opposite meaning. Even the need for fresh air ceases to be a need for the worker. Man returns to the cave dwelling, but it is now poisoned by the mephitic, pestilential breath of civilisation, and he lives in it only precariously, as in an alien power that can be withdrawn from him any day, from which he can be thrown out any day if he does [XV] not pay. He has to pay for this house of the dead. The dwelling in the light, which Prometheus in Aeschylus names as one of the great gifts by which he made the savage into a man, ceases to exist for the worker. Light, air, etc., the simplest animal cleanliness, cease to be a need for man. Filth, this stagnation and putrefaction of man, the sewage of civilisation (this is to be taken literally), becomes an element of life for him. Utter, unnatural neglect, putrefied nature, becomes his element of life. None of his senses exists any longer, not only not in its human way, but in an inhuman way, and so not even in an animal way. The crudest modes (and instruments) of human labour come back: the treadmill of the Roman slaves, for instance, has become the mode of production and the mode of existence of many English workers. It is not only that man has no human needs; even his animal needs cease. The Irishman knows only the need to eat, and to eat only potatoes, and only lumper potatoes, the worst kind of potato. But England and France already have a little Ireland in every industrial town. The savage, the animal, at least has the need to hunt, to roam, etc., the need for company. The simplification of the machine and of labour is used to make a worker out of the human being who is still only growing, the wholly unformed human being, the child, just as the worker has become a neglected child. The machine accommodates itself to the weakness of man in order to turn the weak man into a machine.

[Crossed through in the manuscript: The political economist (and the capitalist: in general we are always speaking of the empirical businessmen when we address ourselves to the political economists, who are their scientific confession and existence) proves how the multiplication of needs and of their means breeds the absence of needs and of means. (1) He reduces the worker’s need to the most necessary and wretched maintenance of physical life, and his activity to the most abstract mechanical movement; so he says: man has no other need, either of activity or of enjoyment; for he declares even this life to be human life and existence. (2) He calculates the most meagre possible life (existence) as the standard, and indeed as the universal standard: universal because it holds for the mass of men. He turns the worker into a being without senses and without needs, just as he turns his activity into a pure abstraction from all activity. Every luxury of the worker therefore seems to him reprehensible, and everything that goes beyond the most abstract need (whether as passive enjoyment or as expression of activity) seems to him luxury. Political economy, this science of wealth, is therefore at the same time the science of renunciation, of want, of saving, and it really does go so far as to save man even the need for clean air or physical exercise. This science of marvellous industry is at the same time the science of asceticism, and its true ideal is the ascetic but usurious miser and the ascetic but productive slave. Its moral ideal is the worker who takes part of his wages to the savings bank, and for this pet notion of its own it has even found a servile art ready to hand: it has been put on the stage, sentimentally. For all its worldly and voluptuous appearance, it is therefore a truly moral science, the most moral science of all. Self-renunciation, the renunciation of life and of all human needs, is its chief doctrine. The less you eat, drink, buy books, go to the theatre, the dance, the tavern, the less you think, love, theorise, sing, paint, fence, etc., the more you save, the greater becomes your treasure, which neither moths nor thieves devour, your capital. The less you are, the less you express your life, the more you have, the greater is your alienated life, the more you store up of your estranged being. Everything [XVI] the political economist takes from you in life and in humanity he gives back to you in money and wealth; and everything you cannot do, your money can do. It can eat, drink, go to the dance and the theatre; it knows its way about art, learning, historical curiosities, political power; it can travel; it can appropriate all of this for you; it can buy all of this; it is the true Vermögen, at once wealth and capacity. But for all that it is all this, it likes to do nothing but create itself, buy itself; for everything else is after all its servant, and when I have the master I have the servant, and I have no need of his servant. All passions and all activity must therefore be submerged in greed. The worker may have only enough for him to want to live, and may want to live only in order to have.]

A controversy does, to be sure, now arise on the ground of political economy. One side (Lauderdale, Malthus, etc.) recommends luxury and curses thrift; the other (Say, Ricardo, etc.) recommends thrift and curses luxury. But the former admits that it wants luxury in order to produce labour, that is, absolute thrift; the other side admits that it recommends thrift in order to produce wealth, that is, luxury. The former side has the romantic notion that greed alone ought not to determine the consumption of the rich, and it contradicts its own laws when it passes off extravagance as a direct means of enrichment; and so the other side proves to it very earnestly and at great length that by extravagance I diminish my possessions and do not increase them. The other side is guilty of the hypocrisy of not admitting that it is precisely whim and caprice that determine production; it forgets the “refined needs”; it forgets that without consumption there would be no production; it forgets that through competition production can only become more many-sided and more luxurious; it forgets that on its own showing use determines the value of a thing, and that fashion determines use; it wants to see only “useful” things produced, but it forgets that the production of too many useful things produces too many useless people. Both sides forget that extravagance and saving, luxury and privation, wealth and poverty are equal.

And it is not only your immediate senses, such as eating, etc., that you must stint. Sharing in general interests, compassion, trust, etc.: you must save yourself all of this if you want to be economical, if you do not want to be ruined by illusions.

[Crossed through in the manuscript: You must make everything that is yours venal, that is, useful. If I ask the political economist: Am I obeying economic laws if I get money by giving up my body, by offering it for sale to another’s lust (the factory workers in France call the prostitution of their wives and daughters the nth working hour, which is literally true), or am I not acting in keeping with political economy if I sell my friend to the Moroccans (and the direct sale of human beings, as the trade in conscripts, etc., goes on in all civilised countries)? the political economist answers me: You are not acting against my laws; but look round and see what Cousin Morality and Cousin Religion have to say; my economic morality and religion have nothing against you, but… But whom am I now to believe, political economy or morality? The morality of political economy is gain, labour and thrift, sobriety; but political economy promises to satisfy my needs. The political economy of morality is wealth in a good conscience, in virtue, etc.; but how can I be virtuous if I do not exist, how can I have a good conscience if I know nothing? It is grounded in the essence of estrangement that each sphere applies a different and opposite standard to me, morality one and political economy another, because each is a particular estrangement of man and each] [XVII] fixes a particular circle of estranged essential activity; each relates in an estranged way to the other estrangement… Thus Monsieur Michel Chevalier reproaches Ricardo with leaving morality out of account. But Ricardo lets political economy speak its own language. If that language does not speak morally, it is not Ricardo’s fault. M. Chevalier abstracts from political economy in so far as he moralises, but he necessarily and really abstracts from morality in so far as he practises political economy. The relation of political economy to morality, if it is not arbitrary, accidental and therefore unfounded and unscientific, if it is not put on for show but meant as essential, can after all only be the relation of economic laws to morality; if this does not hold, or rather the opposite holds, what can Ricardo do about it? Besides, the opposition between political economy and morality is itself only a semblance, and, as it is an opposition, it is again no opposition. Political economy merely expresses moral laws in its own way.

[Crossed through in the manuscript: Needlessness as the principle of political economy shows itself most brilliantly in its theory of population. There are too many people. Even the existence of men is a pure luxury, and if the worker is “moral” (Mill proposes public praise for those who show themselves abstinent in sexual matters, and public rebuke for those who sin against this barrenness of marriage… is that not morality, the doctrine of asceticism?), he will be sparing in procreation. The production of human beings appears as public misery.]

The meaning that production has in relation to the rich is shown openly in the meaning it has for the poor; upwards its expression is always refined, veiled, ambiguous, semblance; downwards it is coarse, straightforward, frank, essence. The worker’s crude need is a far greater source of gain than the refined need of the rich. The cellar dwellings in London bring in more to their landlords than the palaces; that is, in relation to the landlord they are a greater wealth, and so, to speak the language of political economy, a greater social wealth. And just as industry speculates on the refinement of needs, it speculates just as much on their crudeness, but on their artificially produced crudeness, whose true enjoyment is therefore self-stupefaction: this seeming satisfaction of need, this civilisation within the crude barbarism of need. The English gin shops are therefore symbolic representations of private property. Their luxury shows the true relation of industrial luxury and wealth to man. They are therefore rightly also the only Sunday pleasures of the people that the English police treat at least mildly. [XVII]

[XVIII] We have already seen how the political economist posits the unity of labour and capital in a variety of ways. (1) Capital is accumulated labour. (2) The function of capital within production (partly the reproduction of capital with profit, partly capital as raw material, the material of labour, partly as itself a working instrument: the machine is capital posited as directly identical with labour) is productive labour. (3) The worker is a capital. (4) Wages belong to the costs of capital. (5) In relation to the worker, labour is the reproduction of his life-capital. (6) In relation to the capitalist, it is a moment of the activity of his capital.

Finally, (7) the political economist presupposes the original unity of the two as the unity of capitalist and worker; this is the paradisal primal state. How these two moments [XIX] leap apart as two persons is for the political economist an accidental event, and so one to be explained only externally. (See Mill.) The nations still dazzled by the sensuous glitter of the precious metals, and so still fetish-worshippers of metal money, are not yet complete money nations. Contrast between France and England. How far the solution of theoretical riddles is a task of practice and is practically mediated, how far true practice is the condition of a real and positive theory, is shown for instance by fetishism. The sensuous consciousness of the fetish-worshipper is different from that of the Greek, because his sensuous existence is still different. The abstract enmity between sense and spirit is necessary so long as the human sense for nature, the human sense of nature, and so also the natural sense of man, has not yet been produced by man’s own labour. Equality is nothing but the German I = I translated into French, that is, political, form. Equality as the ground of communism is its political justification, and is the same as when the German justifies it to himself by conceiving man as universal self-consciousness. It goes without saying that the supersession of estrangement always proceeds from the form of estrangement that is the dominant power: in Germany self-consciousness; in France equality, because politics; in England real, material, practical need that measures itself only by itself. It is from this point that Proudhon is to be criticised and recognised. If we still designate communism itself (because it is the negation of the negation, the appropriation of the human essence that mediates itself with itself through the negation of private property, and so not yet the true position, beginning from itself, but rather one beginning from private property) [part of this page of the manuscript is torn away] […] in the old German manner (after the manner of Hegel’s Phenomenology) so to [take it] up […] as an overcome moment were now done with, and one […] could, and could be content with having superseded it in one’s consciousness […] of the human essence only through the real […] supersession of its thought, as before […] since, then, with it the real estrangement of human life remains, and remains all the greater the more one is conscious of it as such, can be accomplished, then it can be accomplished only by communism put into action. To supersede the idea of private property, the idea of communism is quite enough. To supersede real private property takes real communist action. History will bring it, and the movement that we already know in thought to be a self-superseding one will in reality go through a very rough and protracted process. But we must regard it as a real advance that we have from the outset gained a consciousness both of the limited character and of the goal of the historical movement, and a consciousness that reaches beyond it.

When communist artisans associate with one another, theory, propaganda, etc., is at first their aim. But at the same time they acquire through it a new need, the need for society, and what appears as a means has become an end. One can see this practical movement in its most splendid results when one sees French socialist workers (ouvriers) together. Smoking, drinking, eating, etc., are no longer there as a means of contact, as means that bring them together. Company, association, conversation, which in turn has company as its end, are enough for them; the brotherhood of man is no empty phrase with them but a truth, and the nobility of man shines upon us from their work-hardened figures.

[XX] [Crossed through in the manuscript: When political economy claims that demand and supply always cover each other, it at once forgets that by its own claim the supply of men (theory of population) always exceeds the demand, and that in the essential result of the whole of production, the existence of man, the disproportion between demand and supply therefore finds its most decisive expression.

How far money, which appears as a means, is the true power and the sole end; how far in general the means that makes me a being, that appropriates the alien objective being for me, is an end in itself…: this can be seen from the fact that landed property, where the soil is the source of life, and the horse and the sword, where they are the true means of life, are also recognised as the true political powers of life. In the Middle Ages an estate is emancipated as soon as it is allowed to bear the sword. Among nomadic peoples it is the horse that makes me a free man, a member of the community.

We said above that man returns to the cave dwelling, etc., but returns to it in an estranged, hostile form. The savage in his cave (this element of nature that offers itself freely for his enjoyment and shelter) does not feel himself a stranger; or rather he feels as much at home as a fish in water. But the cellar dwelling of the poor man is a hostile dwelling, “an alien power that holds itself back and gives itself to him only in so far as he gives it his blood and sweat”, a dwelling he may not regard as his home, where he might at last say: here I am at home. Here he finds himself rather in another person’s house, in an alien house, whose owner lies in wait for him every day and throws him out if he does not pay the rent. He knows, too, the quality of his dwelling, in contrast to the human dwelling that resides in the other world, in the heaven of wealth.

Estrangement appears both in the fact that my means of life belong to another, that what is my desire is the inaccessible possession of another, and in the fact that each thing is itself something other than itself, that my activity is something other, and finally (and this holds for the capitalist too) that an inhuman power rules over all.

The character of wealth that gives itself up only to enjoyment, inactive and extravagant (in which the one who enjoys, on the one hand, acts only as an ephemeral individual raging himself out to no purpose, and knows other people’s slave labour, human blood and sweat, as the prey of his appetite, and so knows man himself, and so himself too, as a sacrificed and worthless being; whereby contempt for man appears partly as arrogance, as the squandering of what could sustain a hundred human lives, partly as the infamous illusion that his unbridled extravagance and endless unproductive consumption is the condition of the other’s labour and so of his subsistence; who knows the realisation of human essential powers only as the realisation of his own non-essence, his whims and capricious, bizarre notions): this wealth, which on the other hand knows wealth as a mere means and a thing worthy only of destruction, and so is at once its slave and its master, at once magnanimous and base, capricious, conceited, presumptuous, refined, cultivated, witty, this wealth has not yet experienced wealth as an utterly alien power over itself; rather, it sees in it only its own power, and [not] wealth but enjoyment [is its final] aim. This […] [about three lines torn away] [XXI] and the glittering illusion about the essence of wealth, blinded by sensuous appearance, is confronted by the working, sober, prosaic, economical industrialist, enlightened about the essence of wealth; and while he provides the other’s love of enjoyment with a wider scope and pays it fine flatteries in his products (his products are so many base compliments to the appetites of the spendthrift), he knows how to appropriate to himself, in the only useful way, the power that is slipping away from the other. If, then, industrial wealth at first appears as the result of extravagant, fantastic wealth, the movement of the former also actively supplants the latter by a movement of its own. For the fall in the rate of interest is a necessary consequence and result of the industrial movement. The means of the extravagant rentier therefore diminish daily, in exact inverse proportion to the growth of the means and snares of enjoyment. He must therefore either consume his capital, and so be ruined, or become an industrial capitalist himself… On the other hand, ground-rent does indeed rise directly and constantly with the course of the industrial movement; but, as we have already seen, a time necessarily comes when landed property, like every other property, must fall into the category of capital reproducing itself with profit; and this, too, is the result of the same industrial movement. So the extravagant landlord too must either consume his capital, and so be ruined, or become the tenant of his own estate, an agricultural industrialist. The fall in the rate of interest, which Proudhon regards as the abolition of capital and as a tendency towards the socialisation of capital, is therefore rather, directly, only a symptom of the complete victory of working capital over extravagant wealth, that is, of the transformation of all private property into industrial capital: the complete victory of private property over all those of its qualities that still seem human, and the complete subjection of the private owner to the essence of private property, labour. To be sure, the industrial capitalist also enjoys himself. He by no means returns to the unnatural simplicity of need; but his enjoyment is only a side issue, recreation, subordinated to production, and at the same time calculated, and so itself an economic enjoyment; for he charges his enjoyment to the costs of capital, and his enjoyment may therefore cost him only so much that what is squandered on it is made good again by the reproduction of capital with profit. Enjoyment is therefore subsumed under capital, the enjoying individual under the capitalising individual, whereas formerly the opposite was the case. The fall in interest is therefore a symptom of the abolition of capital only in so far as it is a symptom of its rule being completed, of estrangement being completed and so hastening towards its abolition. This is in general the only way in which what exists affirms its opposite.] The quarrel among political economists about luxury and saving is therefore only the quarrel of the political economy that has become clear about the essence of wealth with the political economy still burdened with romantic, anti-industrial memories. But neither side knows how to reduce the object of the dispute to its simple expression, and so they cannot settle accounts with each other. [XXI]

[XXXIV] Ground-rent was further overthrown as ground-rent, in that modern political economy, against the Physiocrats’ argument that the landowner is the only true producer, proved rather that the landowner as such is the only wholly unproductive rentier. Agriculture, it held, is the business of the capitalist, who gives his capital this employment when he can expect the ordinary profit from it. The Physiocrats’ claim that landed property, as the only productive property, should alone pay the taxes of the state, and so should alone vote them and take part in the affairs of state, is therefore turned into the opposite position: that the tax on ground-rent is the only tax on an unproductive income, and so the only tax that does no harm to national production. It goes without saying that, conceived in this way, the political privilege of the landowners no longer follows from their being the chief taxpayers either.

Everything Proudhon conceives as the movement of labour against capital is only the movement of labour in the character of capital, of industrial capital, against capital that is not consumed as capital, that is, industrially. And this movement goes its victorious way, that is, the way of the victory of industrial capital. We see, then, that only when labour is grasped as the essence of private property can the economic movement as such be seen through in its real determinateness.

Society, as it appears to the political economist, is civil society, in which each individual is a whole of needs and exists only [XXXV] for the other, as the other exists only for him, in so far as they become means for each other. The political economist (just like politics in its rights of man) reduces everything to man, that is, to the individual, whom he strips of all determinateness in order to fix him as capitalist or worker. The division of labour is the economic expression of the social character of labour within estrangement. Or, since labour is only an expression of human activity within alienation, of the expression of life as alienation of life, the division of labour too is nothing but the estranged, alienated positing of human activity as a real species-activity, or as activity of man as a species-being.

About the essence of the division of labour (which naturally had to be conceived as one of the chief motors of the production of wealth as soon as labour was recognised as the essence of private property), that is, about this estranged and alienated form of human activity as species-activity, the political economists are very unclear and contradict themselves.

Adam Smith: “The division of labour does not owe its origin to human wisdom. It is the necessary, slow and gradual consequence of the propensity to exchange and to barter products with one another. This propensity to trade is probably a necessary consequence of the use of reason and of speech. It is common to all men and is found in no animal. The animal, once grown up, lives by its own strength. Man constantly needs the support of others, and he would expect it from their benevolence alone in vain. It will be much surer to appeal to their personal interest and persuade them that their own advantage requires them to do what he wishes of them. We address ourselves, not to other men’s humanity, but to their egoism; we never speak to them of our needs, but always of their advantage. Since, then, we obtain the greater part of the good offices we need from one another by exchange, trade and barter, it is this disposition to barter that gave rise to the division of labour. For example, in a tribe of hunters or shepherds a private person makes bows and strings with more speed and skill than another. He often exchanges these kinds of work with his companions for cattle and game; he soon notices that he can obtain the latter more easily by this means than if he went hunting himself. Out of self-interested calculation, therefore, he makes the making of bows, etc., his chief occupation. The difference of natural talents among individuals is not so much the cause as the effect of the division of labour… Without man’s disposition to trade and exchange, each would have been obliged to procure all the necessities and conveniences of life for himself. Each would have had to perform the same daily work, and that great difference of occupations which alone can produce a great difference of talents would not have existed. Just as this propensity to exchange produces the diversity of talents among men, so it is the same propensity that makes this diversity useful. Many breeds of animals, although of the same species, have received from nature characters that differ more markedly in their aptitudes than one could observe among uneducated men. By nature a philosopher is not half so different in talent and intelligence from a porter as a house-dog is from a greyhound, a greyhound from a spaniel, and the latter from a sheepdog. Yet these different breeds of animals, although of the same species, are of almost no use to one another. The mastiff cannot add to the advantages of its strength [XXXVI] by making use, say, of the greyhound’s swiftness, etc. The effects of these different talents or grades of intelligence cannot, for want of the capacity or the propensity to trade and exchange, be thrown together into a common stock, and can contribute nothing at all to the advantage or the common convenience of the species… Each animal must maintain and protect itself, independently of the others; it cannot draw the slightest benefit from the variety of talents that nature has distributed among its kind. Among men, on the contrary, the most dissimilar talents are of use to one another, because the different products of each of their respective branches of industry are, by means of this general propensity to trade and exchange, thrown, as it were, into a common stock, where each man can go and buy, according to his needs, any part of the product of the other’s industry. Because this propensity to exchange gives rise to the division of labour, the growth of this division is consequently always limited by the extent of the capacity to exchange, or in other words by the extent of the market. If the market is very small, no one will be encouraged to devote himself entirely to a single occupation, for want of being able to exchange the surplus of the product of his labour, beyond his own consumption, for an equal surplus of the product of another’s labour that he would like to obtain…” In the advanced state: “Every man lives by exchanges (échanges) and becomes a kind of merchant, and society itself is properly a trading society.” (See Destutt de Tracy: “Society is a series of mutual exchanges; in commerce lies the whole essence of society.”) “… The accumulation of capitals rises with the division of labour, and conversely.”

So far Adam Smith. [The emphasis in these quotations is Marx’s.]

“If each family produced the totality of the objects of its consumption, society could keep going even though no exchange of any kind took place. Without being fundamental, exchange is indispensable in the advanced state of our society. The division of labour is a skilful employment of man’s powers; it therefore increases the products of society, its power and its enjoyments, but it robs, it diminishes the capacity of each man taken individually. Production cannot take place without exchange.”

Thus J. B. Say.

“The powers inherent in man are his intelligence and his physical aptitude for labour; those that derive their origin from the social condition consist in the capacity to divide labour and to distribute the different kinds of labour among different men… and in the power to exchange mutual services and the products that constitute these means… The motive for which one man devotes his services to another is self-interest: man demands a recompense for the services rendered to another. The right of exclusive private property is indispensable for exchange to become established among men.” “Exchange and division of labour mutually condition each other.”

Thus Skarbek.

Mill presents developed exchange, trade, as a consequence of the division of labour.

“Man’s activity can be reduced to very simple elements. He can in truth do nothing more than produce motion; he can move things so as to separate [XXXVII] them from one another or bring them closer together; the properties of matter do the rest. In the employment of labour and machinery one often finds that the effects can be increased by skilful distribution, by separating operations that hinder one another and by combining all those that can in some way assist one another. Since men in general cannot perform many different operations with equal speed and skill, as habit gives them this ability in the practice of a smaller number, it is always advantageous to restrict as far as possible the number of operations entrusted to each individual. For the division of labour and the distribution of the powers of men and machines in the most advantageous way, it is necessary in a great many cases to operate on a large scale, or, in other words, to produce wealth in large masses. This advantage is what gives rise to the great manufactories, a small number of which, set up under favourable conditions, sometimes supply not merely one but several countries with the quantity required of the objects they produce.”

Thus Mill.

But the whole of modern political economy agrees that division of labour and wealth of production, division of labour and accumulation of capital, mutually condition each other, and that only private property set free, left to itself, can bring forth the most useful and most comprehensive division of labour.

Adam Smith’s argument can be summed up as follows. The division of labour gives labour an infinite productive capacity. It is grounded in the propensity to exchange and barter, a specifically human propensity that is probably not accidental but conditioned by the use of reason and language. The motive of the one who exchanges is not humanity but egoism. The diversity of human talents is more the effect than the cause of the division of labour, that is, of exchange. It is also only exchange that makes this diversity useful. The particular qualities of the different breeds of a species of animal are by nature more marked than the diversity of human aptitude and activity. But because animals are unable to exchange, no individual animal benefits from the different quality of an animal of the same species but of a different breed. Animals cannot pool the different qualities of their species; they can contribute nothing to the common advantage and convenience of their species. It is otherwise with man, where the most dissimilar talents and modes of activity are of use to one another, because they can throw their different products together into a common stock, from which each can buy. Just as the division of labour springs from the propensity to exchange, so it grows with, and is limited by, the extent of exchange, of the market. In the advanced state every man is a merchant, society a commercial society.

Say regards exchange as accidental and not fundamental. Society could exist without it. It becomes indispensable in the advanced state of society. Yet production cannot take place without it. The division of labour is a convenient, useful means, a skilful employment of human powers for social wealth, but it diminishes the capacity of each man taken individually. This last remark is an advance on Say’s part.

Skarbek distinguishes the individual powers inherent in man, intelligence and physical disposition to labour, from the powers derived from society, exchange and division of labour, which mutually condition each other. But the necessary presupposition of exchange is private property. Skarbek here expresses in objective form what Smith, Say, Ricardo, etc., say when they name egoism, private interest, as the ground of exchange, or barter as the essential and adequate form of exchange.

Mill presents trade as the consequence of the division of labour. For him human activity is reduced to mechanical motion. Division of labour and the use of machinery promote wealth of production. Each man must be entrusted with as small a sphere of operations as possible. Division of labour and the use of machinery, for their part, require the production of wealth in mass, and so the concentration of production. This is the reason for the great manufactories.

[XXXVIII] The consideration of division of labour and exchange is of the greatest interest, because they are the perceptibly alienated expressions of human activity and essential power as a species activity and essential power.

To say that division of labour and exchange rest on private property is nothing but the assertion that labour is the essence of private property, an assertion the political economist cannot prove and that we mean to prove for him. Precisely in the fact that division of labour and exchange are configurations of private property lies the double proof both that human life needed private property for its realisation and, on the other hand, that it now needs the supersession of private property.

Division of labour and exchange are the two phenomena on which the political economist prides himself for the social character of his science, while in the same breath he unconsciously expresses the contradiction of his science: the grounding of society through unsocial particular interest.

The moments we have to consider are these. First, the propensity to exchange, whose ground is found in egoism, is regarded as the ground of the division of labour, or as interacting with it. Say regards exchange as not fundamental to the essence of society. Wealth, production, is explained by division of labour and exchange. The impoverishment of individual activity, its loss of essence through the division of labour, is admitted. Exchange and division of labour are acknowledged as the producers of the great diversity of human talents, a diversity that in turn becomes useful through exchange. Skarbek divides man’s essential powers of production, or productive essential powers, into two parts: (1) the individual powers inherent in him, his intelligence and his special disposition or capacity for labour; (2) those derived from society (not from the real individual), division of labour and exchange. Further: the division of labour is limited by the market. Human labour is simple mechanical motion; the material properties of objects do the main work. As few operations as possible must be allotted to each individual. Splitting up of labour and concentration of capital; the nullity of individual production, and the production of wealth in mass. Meaning of free private property in the division of labour. [XXXVIII]