II.2. The Division of Labor and Machinery

The division of labor opens, according to M. Proudhon, the series of economic evolutions.

The division of labor is, according to M. Proudhon, an eternal law, a simple and abstract category. It is necessary, then, that the abstraction, the idea, the word, should suffice him to explain the division of labor in the different epochs of history. Castes, corporations, the manufacturing regime, the great industry, must be explained by the single word division. First study well the meaning of division, and then you will not need to study the numerous influences which give to the division of labor a definite character in each epoch.

Certainly this would be to render things altogether too simple, by merely reducing them to the categories of M. Proudhon. History does not proceed so categorically. Three whole centuries have been necessary in Germany to establish the first great division of labor—that is, the separation of the town from the country. As this single relation, that of town to country, became modified, so the whole society was modified in consequence. To view only this single phase of the division of labor you have the ancient Republics, or Christian feudalism; early England with its barons, or modern England with its cotton-lords. In the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, when yet there were no colonies, when America did not yet exist for Europe, when Asia only existed by the intermediary of Constantinople, when the Mediterranean was the centre of commercial activity, the division of labor had quite another form, quite another aspect, to that which it had in the seventeenth century, when the Spaniards, the Portuguese, the English, and the French had colonies established in all parts of the world. The extent of the market, and its physiognomy, give to the division of labor in the different epochs a physiognomy, a character, which it would be difficult to deduce from the single word division, from the idea, or from the category.

“All the economists,” says M. Proudhon, “since Adam Smith have designated the advantages and the inconveniences of the law of division, but have insisted very much more on the first than on the second, because that better served their optimism, and without any one of them ever asking himself what could be the inconveniences of a law..... How could the same principle, pursued rigorously to its consequences, conduct to effects diametrically opposed? No single economist, either before or since Adam Smith, has done more than perceive that there was a problem to solve. Say only goes so far as to recognise that in the division of labor the same cause which produces the good engenders the evil.”

Adam Smith goes farther than M. Proudhon thinks he does. He has clearly seen that “in reality the difference of natural talents between individuals is much less than is supposed. These dispositions so different, which seem to distinguish the men of different professions when they arrive at mature age, are not so much the cause as the effect of the division of labor.” In principle a porter differs less from a philosopher than a mastiff from a greyhound. It is the division of labor which has placed an abyss between the two. All this does not prevent M. Proudhon from saying, in another place, that Adam Smith had no doubt of the inconveniences produced by the division of labor. It is still this which makes him say that J.B. Say was the first to recognise “that in the division of labor the same cause which produces the good engenders the evil.”

But let us hear Lemontey: suum cuique. “M. J.B. Say has done me the honor of adopting in his excellent treatise on political economy the principle which I brought to light in this fragment on the moral influence of the division of labor. The somewhat frivolous title of my book has doubtless precluded him from citing me. I can attribute to no other motive than this the silence of a writer too rich in his own treasures to need to disavow so modest a loan.” (Lemontey, “Œuvres Complètes,” Vol. I., p. 245, Paris, 1840.)

Let us render him this justice: Lemontey has intellectually explained the evil consequences of the division of labor, as it is constituted in our days, and M. Proudhon found nothing to add thereto. But since, by the faults of M. Proudhon, we are now engaged in this question of priority, we may say in passing that long before M. Lemontey, and seventeen years before Adam Smith, the pupil of A. Ferguson, the latter clearly explained the subject in a chapter treating specially of the division of labor.

“There will ever be doubts as to whether the general capacity of a nation grows in proportion to the progress of the arts. Many mechanical arts.... succeed perfectly when they are totally destitute of the assistance of reason or sentiment, and ignorance is the mother of industry as well as of superstition. Reflection and imagination are likely to go astray, but the habit of moving the hand or foot depends upon neither the one or the other. Thus, we might say that perfection, as regards manufacture, consists in its being able to be dismissed from the mind, in such a manner that without an effort of the brain the workshop may be operated like a machine, of which the parts are men.... The general officer may be very accomplished in the art of war while all the merit of the soldier is limited to executing certain movements of the foot or hand. The one may have gained what the other has lost..... In a period where all is separated, the art of thinking may itself form a separate function.” (A. Ferguson, “Essai sur l’histoire de la Société Civile,” Paris, 1783.)

To terminate the literary view, we formally deny that “all the economists have insisted very much more on the advantages than on the inconveniences of the division of labor.” It is sufficient to name Sismondi.

Thus, as regards the advantages of the division of labor, M. Proudhon had nothing to do but to paraphrase, more or less pompously, the general phrases which everybody knows.

Let us now see how he derives from the division of labor, taken as a general law, as a category, a thought, the inconveniences which are attached to it. How is it that this category, this law, implies an unequal distribution of labor to the detriment of the equalitarian system of M. Proudhon?

“At this solemn hour of the division of labor the wind of the tempests begins to beat upon humanity. Progress is not accomplished for all in an equal and uniform manner;.... it begins by creating a small number of privileged persons..... It is this respect of persons on the part of progress which has created the old-established belief in the natural and providential inequality of conditions, and has given birth to castes, and has hierarchically constituted all societies.” (Proudhon, Vol. I, p. 97.)

The division of labor has made castes. But castes are the inconveniences of the division of labor; then it is the division of labor which has engendered inconveniences. Quod erat demonstrandum. Would you go further and ask what causes the division of labor to create castes, hierarchic constitutions and privileged classes? M. Proudhon will tell you: Progress. And what has made this progress? The limit. The limit for M. Proudhon is the respect of persons on the part of progress.

After philosophy comes history. This is no longer either descriptive history or dialectic history, it is comparative history. M. Proudhon establishes a comparison between the workman printer of to-day and the workman printer of the Middle Ages; between the workman of the Creusot ironworks and the country blacksmith; between the man of letters of our days and the man of letters of the Middle Ages; and he makes the balance lean to the side of those who appertain more or less to the division of labor such as the Middle Ages have constituted or transmitted it. He opposes the division of labor of one historical epoch to the division of labor of another historical epoch. Was this what M. Proudhon had to demonstrate? No. He ought to have shown us the inconveniences of the division of labor in general, of the division of labor as category. But of what use is it further to dwell upon this part of M. Proudhon’s work, since a little further on we shall see him formally retract all these pretended developments himself?

“The first effect of divided labor,” continues M. Proudhon, “after the degradation of the mind, is the prolongation of the periods of work, which grow in inverse ratio to the amount of intelligence exercised..... But, as the duration of these periods cannot exceed sixteen or eighteen hours a day, from the moment when compensation cannot be taken by additional time it will be effected in the price, and wages will fall..... This is certain—and that is all we are concerned to note—that the universal conscience does not put at the same rate the work of an overseer and that of a laborer. There is, then, a necessity for a reduction in the price of the day’s work, so that the worker, after having been afflicted in his mind by a degrading function, should not fail to be also stricken in the body by the meagreness of the remuneration.”

We will pass over the logical value of these syllogisms, which Kant would call paralogisms, and consider them as they are.

Here is their substance:

The division of labor reduces the worker to a degrading function; to this degrading function corresponds a depraved mind; with the depravity of the mind goes a constant reduction of wages. And, in order to prove that this reduction of wages is adapted to a depraved mind, M. Proudhon says, to absolve his own conscience, that it is the universal conscience which wills it thus. Is the soul of M. Proudhon counted in the universal conscience?

Machinery is, for M. Proudhon, “the logical antithesis of the division of labor,” and, in support of his dialectic he begins by transforming machinery into a factory.

After having supposed the modern factory in order to have poverty flow from the division of labor, M. Proudhon supposes poverty engendered by the division of labor in order to arrive at the factory, and to be able to represent it as the dialectic negation of this poverty. After having stricken the worker morally by a degrading function, and physically by the meagreness of his wages, after having put the worker in a position of dependence upon the overseer and reduced his work to the mere manual task of a laborer, he betakes himself again to the factory and to the machines in order to degrade the worker by “giving him a master,” and he finishes his humiliation by causing him to be “reduced from the rank of an artisan to that of a mere laborer.” What beautiful dialectic! And yet if he would only stick to that! But no, he must have a new history of the division of labor, no longer in order to derive contradictions therefrom, but in order to reconstruct the factory after his own fashion. To arrive at this end he has to forget all that he has just said about this division.

Labor is organised, and divided, variously, according to the instruments which it manipulates. The windmill supposes a division of labor quite other than that of the steam mill. To begin by the division of labor in general in order to arrive at a specific instrument of production, machinery, is therefore to fly in the face of history.

Machinery is no more an economic category than is the ox which draws the plough. Machinery is only a productive force. The modern workshop, which is based on the application of machinery, is a social relation of production, an economic category.

Let us see now how these things pass in the brilliant imagination of M. Proudhon.

“In society the incessant apparition of machinery is the antithesis, the inverse formula, of labor; it is the protest of industrial genius against fragmentary and homicidal labor. What, in effect, is a machine? A means of reuniting different particles of labor, which division had separated. Every machine might be defined as a summary of many operations..... Therefore, through the machine, there would be the restoration of the worker..... Machinery standing in political economy in contradiction to the division of labor, represents the synthesis, opposing, in the human mind, the analysis.... The division only separates the different parts of labor, leaving each to the speciality most agreeable to him: The factory groups the workers, according to the relation of each part to the whole.... it introduces the principle of authority into labor..... But that is not all: The machine or the factory, after having degraded the workman by giving him a master, finishes his humiliation by causing him to be reduced. from the rank of an artisan to that of a mere laborer..... The period through which we are now passing, that of machinery, is distinguished by a special character, it is that of the wage-worker. The wage-worker is posterior to the division of labor and exchange.”

A simple observation to M. Proudhon. The separation of the different parts of labor, leaving to each man the faculty of devoting himself to the speciality most agreeable to him, a separation which M. Proudhon dates from the beginning of the world, exists only in modern industry, under the régime of competition.

M. Proudhon afterwards gives us a “genealogy,” much too “interesting,” in order to demonstrate how the workshop is born from the division of labor and the wage-worker from the workshop.

1. He imagines a man who “has remarked that by dividing production into different parts, and causing each to be executed by a separate workman,” the forces of production might be multiplied.

2. This man, seizing the thread of this idea, “tells himself that in forming a permanent group of assorted workmen for the special object that he has in view, he will obtain a more regular and more abundant production, &c.”

3. This man makes a proposition to other men to get them to grasp his idea, and the thread of his idea.

4. This man, at the inception of the industry, acts as an equal to equals towards the companions who, later, become his workmen.

5. “He is sensible, in fact, that this primitive equality must rapidly disappear through the advantageous position of the master and the dependence of the wage-worker.”

That is a further sample of the historical and descriptive method of M. Proudhon.

Let us now examine, from the historical and economic point of view, and see if really the workshop or the machine has introduced the principle of authority into society subsequent to the division of labor; if it has on one hand rehabilitated the worker, while on the other subjecting him to authority; if the machine is the recomposition of divided labor, the synthesis of labor opposed to its analysis.

Society as a whole has this in common with the interior of a factory, that it also has its division of labor. If the division of labor in a modern factory, were taken as a model to be applied to an entire society, the society the best organised for the production of wealth would be incontestably that which had but one single master distributing the work, according to a regulation arranged beforehand, to the various members of the community. But it is not so. While in the interior of the modern factory the division of labor is minutely regulated by the authority of the capitalist, modern society has no other regulation, no other authority, to arrange the distribution of labor, than free competition.

Under the patriarchal régime, under the régime of castes, under the feudal and corporative régime, there was division of labor in the whole of society according to fixed regulations. Were these regulations established by a legislator? No. Originally born of the conditions of material production, it was not till much later that they were established as laws. It was thus that these various forms of the division of labor became to such an extent the bases of social organisation. As to the division of labor in the factory, it was very little developed in all these forms of society.

It might even be set up as a general rule, that the less authority presides over the division of labor in the interior of society, the more will the division of labor be developed inside the factory and the more absolutely will it there be subject to the authority of a single individual. Thus the authority in the factory and that in society, in relation to the division of labor, are in inverse ratio the one to the other.

It is now important to see what is this factory, in which the occupations are greatly separated, where the task of each worker is reduced to a very simple operation, and where the authority, capital, groups and directs the laborers. How has this workshop come into existence? To answer this question we shall have to examine how manufacturing industry, properly so-called, has been developed. I refer now to that industry which is not yet modern industry, with its machinery, but which is, at the same time, neither the industry of the artisans of the Middle Ages nor domestic industry. We will not enter into elaborate details; we will only give some summarised points in order to show that history cannot be made with formulas.

One of the most indispensable conditions for the formation of the manufacturing industry was the accumulation of capitals facilitated by the discovery of America and the introduction of its precious metals.

It has been sufficiently proved that the augmentation of the means of exchange has resulted in, on one side the depreciation of wages and rent, and on the other the increase of industrial profits. In other terms, in proportion as the landlord class and the working class, the feudal lords and the people, fall, so the capitalists class, the bourgeoisie, rises.

There have been other circumstances which have operated simultaneously with the development of the manufacturing industry—the increase of the commodities put in circulation when commerce penetrated to the East Indies by way of the Cape of Good Hope, the colonial régime, and the development of maritime commerce.

Another point which has not yet been sufficiently appreciated in the history of manufacturing industry was the disbanding of the numerous retainers of the feudal lords, the subaltern members of which became vagabonds before entering the factory. The creation of the factory was preceded by an almost universal vagabondage in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. The factory found another powerful support in the numerous peasants, who, continually driven from the country districts by the transformation of the fields into pasturage, and through the progress of agriculture rendering a smaller number of hands necessary for cultivation, steadily flocked into the towns during whole centuries.

The growth of the market, the accumulation of capitals, the modification in the social position of classes, a crowd of people who found themselves deprived of their sources of income, these were the various historical conditions for the formation of the manufacturing industry. It was not, as M. Proudhon says, certain amiable stipulations between equals which brought men together in the factory. It was not even in the bosom of the ancient corporations that manufacture had its birth. It was the merchant who became the chief of the modern factory, and not the ancient master of corporations. Almost everywhere there was a furious struggle between the manufacturing industry and the handicrafts.

The accumulation and concentration of instruments of production and of workpeople preceded the development of the division of labor inside the factory. A manufactory consists very much more in the union of a large number of workpeople and many trades in a single place, in one apartment, under the control of one capital, than in the analysis of the different operations and the adaption of each worker to one simple task.

The utility of a factory consists much less in the division of labor, properly so-called, than in the fact that the work is performed on a much larger scale, that much unproductive expenditure is thereby saved, &c. At the end of the sixteenth and the beginning of the seventeenth centuries, there was scarcely any division of labor in Dutch manufactories.

The development of the division of labor presupposes the union of workpeople in a factory. There is not even a single example, either in the sixteenth or seventeenth centuries, of the different branches of the same trade being separately exploited to such a point that it would have sufficed to bring them together in one place to obtain a complete factory. But once the men and the instruments of production were brought together, the division of labor, as it existed under the form of co-operation, was reproduced, was necessarily reflected, inside the factory.

For M. Proudhon, who sees things upside down, if indeed he always sees them, the division of labor, in the sense given to it by Adam Smith, preceded the factory which was a necessary condition of its existence.

Machinery properly so-called dates from the end of the eighteenth century. Nothing could be more absurd than to see in machinery the antithesis of the division of labor, the synthesis giving unity again to divided labor.

The machine is a union of the instruments of labor, and not at all a combination of labors for the workman himself. “When, by the division of labor, each separate operation has been reduced to the operation of a simple instrument, the union of all these instruments, put in operation by a single motor, constitutes—a machine.” (Babbage, “Traité sur l’Economie des Machines,” &c., Paris, 1833.) Simple tools, accumulation of tools, composite tools, the putting in motion of a composite tool by a single manual motor, by man, the putting in motion of these instruments by natural forces, the machine, a system of machines with a single motor, a system of machines with an automaton for motor—such is the development of machinery.

The concentration of the instruments of production and the division of labor are as inseparable the one from the other as are, in the domain of politics, the concentration of the public powers and the division of private interests. England, with the concentration of land, the instrument of agricultural industry, has, at the same time, division of agricultural labor and the application of machinery to the exploitation of the soil. France which has the division of this instrument, the system of small property in land, has, generally speaking, neither division of agricultural labor nor the application of machinery to the cultivation of the soil.

For M. Proudhon the concentration of the instruments of labor is the negation of the division of labor. In reality we find it to be quite the contrary. In proportion as the concentration of these instruments is developed, so also this division is developed, and vice versa. To this is due the fact that every great invention in mechanics is followed by a greater division of labor, and each advance in the division of labor brings in its turn new mechanical inventions.

We do not need to recall the fact that the great development of the division of labor began in England after the invention of machinery. Thus the spinners and weavers were, for the most part, peasants, such as we meet them to-day in the more backward countries. The invention of machines has completely separated the manufacturing from the agricultural industry. The spinner and the weaver, hitherto united in one family, were separated by the machine. Thanks to the machine the spinner can live in England while the weaver dwells in India. Before the invention of machinery the industry of a country was exercised principally on the raw material which was the product of its soil; thus in England wool, in Germany flax, in France silk and flax, in India and the Levant cotton, &c. Thanks to the application of machinery and of steam the division of labor has been able to assume such dimensions that the great industry, detached from the national soil, depends only upon the markets of the world, on international exchanges, and on an international division of labor. In fine, the machine exercises such an influence on the division of labor that when in the manufacture of any given product, means have been found to partially introduce mechanical appliances, the manufacture has been immediately divided into two exploitations entirely independent of each other.

Is it necessary to speak of the providential and philanthropic end which M. Proudhon discovers in the original invention and application of machinery?

When in England the market had become so fully developed that manual labor no longer sufficed to supply it, the need for machinery made itself felt. It was then that the application of mechanical science, which had been fully prepared during the eighteenth century, was thought of.

The organised factory marked its appearance by acts which were nothing short of philanthropic. Children were kept to work by blows of the whip; they were made objects of traffic, and were contracted for with orphanages and workhouses. All the laws on the apprenticeship of workpeople were abolished, because, to make use of the phrases of M. Proudhon synthesised workers were no longer needed. In fine, from 1825 all the new inventions were the result of conflicts between the worker and the capitalist, who sought at all costs to depreciate the speciality of the workman. After each strike, however unimportant, a new machine appeared. The workman was so far from seeing in the machines a kind of rehabilitation, of restoration, as M. Proudhon calls it, that, in the eighteenth century, he for a long time resisted the nascent empire of the automaton.

“Wyatt,” says Doctor Ure, “invented the series of fluted rollers, the spinning fingers usually ascribed to Arkwright.”.... “The main difficulty did not, to my apprehension, lie so much in the invention of a proper self-acting mechanism.... as in training human beings to renounce their desultory habits of work, and to identify themselves with the unvarying regularity of the complex automaton. But to devise and administer a successful code of factory discipline suited to the necessities of factory diligence, was the Herculean enterprise. The whole achievement of Arkwright.”

In short, by the introduction of machinery the division of labor within society has been developed, the task of the workman within the factory has been simplified, capital has been accumulated, and man has been further dismembered.

If M. Proudhon would be an economist, and leave for an instant “the evolution in the series of the understanding,” he would draw from Adam Smith his knowledge of the time when the automatic factory had scarcely come into existence; in fact, learn the difference between the division of labor as it existed in the time of Adam Smith and as we see it in the automatic factory. In order to make this clearly understood it will be sufficient to cite some passages from the “Philosophy of Manufactures,” by Doctor Ure:—

“When Adam Smith wrote his immortal elements of economics, automatic machinery being hardly known, he was properly led to regard the division of labor as the grand principle of manufacturing improvement; and he showed, in the example of pin-making, how each handicraftsman, being thereby enabled to perfect himself by practice in one point, became a quicker and cheaper workman. In each branch of manufacture he saw that some parts were, on that principle, of easy execution, like the cutting of pin wires into uniform lengths, and some were comparatively difficult, like the formation and fixation of their heads; and therefore he concluded that to each a workman of appropriate value and cost was naturally assigned. This appropriation forms the very essence of the division of labor..... But what was in Dr. Smith’s time a topic of useful illustration, cannot now be used without risk of misleading the public mind as to the right principle of manufacturing industry. In fact, the division, or rather adaptation of labor to the different talents of men, is little thought of in factory employment. On the contrary, wherever a process requires peculiar dexterity and steadiness of hand it is withdrawn as soon as possible from the cunning workman, who is prone to irregularities of many kinds, and it is placed in charge of a peculiar mechanism so self-regulating that a child may superintendent it..... The principle of the factory system, then, is to substitute mechanical science for hand skill, and the partition of a process into its essential constituents, for the division or gradation of labor among artisans. On the handicraft plan, labor, more or less skilled, was usually the most expensive element of production—but on the automatic plan skilled labor gets progressively superseded, and will, eventually, be replaced by mere overlookers of machines. By the infirmity of human nature 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, by occasional irregularities, he may do great damage to the whole. The grand object, therefore, of the modern manufacturer is, through the union of capital and science, to reduce the task of his workpeople to the exercise of vigilance and dexterity—faculties, when concentred to one process, speedily brought to perfection in the young.....

“On the gradation system, a man must serve an apprenticeship of many years before his hand and eye become skilled enough for certain mechanical feats; but on the system of decomposing a process into its constituents, and embodying each part in an automatic machine, a person of common care and capacity may be entrusted with any of the said elementary parts after a short probation, and may be transferred from one to another, on any emergency, at the discretion of the master. Such translations are utterly at variance with the old practice of the division of labor, which fixed one man to shaping the head of a pin, and another to sharpening its point, with most irksome and spiritwasting uniformity for a whole life..... But on the equalisation plan of self-acting machines, the operative needs to call his faculties only into agreeable exercise.....

“As his business consists in tending the work of a well-regulated mechanism, he can learn it in a short period; and when he transfers his services from one machine to another, he varies his task, and enlarges his views by thinking on those general combinations which result from his and his companions’ labors. Thus, that cramping of the faculties, that narrowing of the mind, that stunting of the frame, which were ascribed, and not unjustly, by moral writers, to the division of labor, cannot, in common circumstances, occur under the equable distribution of industry..... It is, in fact, the constant aim and tendency of every improvement in machinery to supersede human labor altogether, or to diminish its cost, by substituting the industry of women and children for that of men; or that of ordinary laborers for trained artisans..... This tendency to employ merely children with watchful eyes and nimble fingers, instead of journeymen of long experience, shows how the scholastic dogma of the division of labor into degrees of skill has been exploded by our enlightened manufacturers.” (Andrew Ure, “Philosophy of Manufactures” (1835) pp. 15 and 16.)

That which characterises the division of labor within modern society is that it engenders specialities, species, and with them the stupefying of handicraft.

“We are struck with admiration,” says Lemontey, “in seeing among the ancients the same individual being at once, and in an eminent degree, philosopher, poet, orator, historian, priest, administrator and general. Our minds are awe-stricken at the contemplation of so vast a domain. Each one now plants his hedge and fences himself within his own enclosure. I do not know if by this cutting up the field is extended, but I know very well that man is lessened thereby.”

The division of labor in the automatic factory is characterised by this, that labor there has lost all specialised character. But from the moment that all special development ceases, the need of universality, the tendency towards an integral development of the individual begins to make itself felt. The automatic factory effaces species and the stupefying of handicraft.

M. Proudhon, not having so much as comprehended this single revolutionary side of the automatic factory, takes a step backward, and proposes to the workman that he should not only make the twelfth part of a pin, but the whole twelve parts in succession. The workman would thus arrive at the science and conscience of the pin. Such is the synthetic labor of M. Proudhon. No one can deny that to make one movement forward and another backward, is equally to make a synthetic movement.

To sum up, M. Proudhon has not got beyond the ideal of the petty bourgeois. And in order to realise this ideal he thinks of nothing better than to bring us back to the companion, or at most to the master, workman of the Middle Ages. It suffices, he says somewhere in his book, to have made a masterpiece once in a lifetime, to have felt oneself a man for once. Is not that, in its form as well as in its basis, the masterpiece exacted by the trade guild of the Middle Ages?