IV.7. The Division of Labour, and Machines

The accumulation of capitals and the lowering of the rate of interest almost always lead the manufacturer to use two expedients, which usually go together: the division of labour and machines. Both tend to reduce his cost of manufacture, and consequently to extend his sales. The division of labour presupposes that the undertaking is carried on on a much larger scale, since each worker, reduced to a single operation, must find a way of being constantly occupied with it; it therefore requires more circulating capital. On the other hand, the multiplication of machines that replace or shorten the labour of man always calls for a costly first establishment, a first advance that comes back only bit by bit; it therefore also presupposes the possession of idle capitals that can be withdrawn from present needs in order to found a kind of perpetual annuity with them.

The growing division of labour is, as we have already seen, the greatest cause of the increase in its productive powers. Each man does better what he does exclusively; and when at last all his labour is reduced to the simplest operation, he comes to perform it with such ease and speed that the eye cannot follow him, and one can hardly understand how the hand of man can attain such a degree of dexterity and quickness.

This division often brings it to light that, since the worker is now equivalent to nothing more than a machine, a machine can in fact replace him. Several great discoveries in mechanics applied to the arts have been the result of such an observation by the worker or by the man who employs him. But through this division man has lost in intelligence, in bodily vigour, in health and in cheerfulness all that he has gained in power to produce wealth.

It is through the variety of its operations that the soul develops. It is in order to make citizens of them that a nation wants men, not in order to make them machines much like those that fire or water set in motion. The division of labour has given value to operations so simple that children of the tenderest age are capable of them; and children, before they have developed any of their faculties, before they have known any of the enjoyments of life, are in fact condemned to turn a wheel, to work a tap, to wind a bobbin. More braid, more pins, more thread and more silk and cotton fabrics are the fruit of this great division of labour; but at what an odious price they have been bought, if it is by the moral sacrifice of so many thousands of men!

With the division of labour, a part of the national capital has always been fixed, not in a machine, but in the worker himself who performs its operations. He has needed a certain apprenticeship, a certain use of his time, a certain consumption of subsistence without revenue, in order to acquire the skill by which he is superior to the common run of men. The pin-maker, the weaver, the worker in a spinning mill know how to do something more than the ordinary labourer; they have acquired the knowledge of their trade through more labour and longer privations. The employment and loss of the capital that formed them goes unnoticed, because it is taken from their own small advances or from the small savings of their parents. Yet they have really cost a certain sum, and their labour ought to bring in the life annuity on it over and above the common wage. Quite the contrary often happens in every commercial crisis: one sees the factory worker working for a lower price than the navvy or the builder’s labourer would accept. The skill he has acquired has served only to make up the insufficient value of his labour, so as to bring it up to the price of his subsistence.

Although the uniformity of the operations to which all the activity of the workers in a factory is reduced would seem bound to harm their intelligence, it is only fair to say that, according to the observations of the best judges in England, factory workers are superior in intelligence, education and morality to the workers in the fields. They owe these advantages to the many means of instruction that have been brought within reach of every class of the people in that country. Living constantly together, less exhausted by fatigue and more able to give themselves to conversation, ideas have circulated more quickly among them; once their minds had begun to be stirred, emulation soon raised them far above the workers of any other country. This moral advantage is far more important than the increase of wealth; just as, on the other hand, the moral degradation that has been seen to follow the establishment of several manufactories is an evil that no increase of production could make good. It is a misfortune to have called into existence a man who has at the same time been deprived of all the enjoyments that give value to life, to have given the fatherland a citizen who has no affection for it and no attachment to the established order. It is at the same time a bad economic speculation, if this man does not by his labour give rise to a revenue equal to his expenditure, and if he does not replace the capital that had been accumulated to form him.

The use of machines to replace the labour of man is an operation analogous to the calling in and training of new workers. In the same way, the fall in the rate of interest prompts people to look for some productive employment for a superabundant capital. In the same way, the increase of production that results is an advantage if it is called forth by demand, and if it merely corresponds to an increase of consumption; but it is a cause of general suffering if it is determined only by the increase of capitals and not by that of revenues, if it gives the inventor no more than a means of making war on his fellow manufacturers and taking their customers away from them.

At the revival of the arts and of civilisation there was so much work to be done and so few hands; oppression had so reduced the poor class; there remained so much uncultivated land in the fields and so many abandoned trades in the towns, and sovereigns demanded so many soldiers for war, that it seemed labour could never be spared enough, and that any artisan turned out of one trade would always find ten others offering themselves to him. Circumstances are no longer the same today, and work is no longer enough for the workers. We have already pointed out some of the causes of this, and we shall see others; meanwhile, no one will dispute, surely, that there is an advantage in substituting a machine for a man only in so far as that man will find work elsewhere, and that it is better for the population to consist of citizens than of steam engines, even if the cloth made by the former should be dearer than that made by the latter.

A greater division of labour, always bound up with a greater circulating capital and the employment of a greater fixed capital, may offer an advantage to the entrepreneur and make his manufactory flourish, without our being entitled to conclude that a social advantage results from it. If he was led to this extension by a larger demand, the advantage is certain; for he will keep the same wage for his workers, although a greater circulating capital is employed to maintain a greater number of them; he will pay the same interest to the capitalists, although the machines he has had built employ new capitals; he will keep for himself the same proportional profit, although he levies it on a greater sum.

If the manufacturer has not been led on by a new demand, but by the offer of superabundant capitals that their owners are willing to set to work at a lower price, the use of these capitals to build machines that enable him to sell more cheaply, and consequently to seek new consumers further afield, may still be a national advantage, gained at the expense of foreign producers. He will give rise to a revenue from capitals that would have remained idle without him; he will take nothing from the wages of his fellow countrymen, although he makes his foreign competitors lose theirs; and from the same new capital, which will pay an interest to the lender, he will give rise to a mercantile profit for himself.

But if the manufacturer, with no increase of demand and no increase of capitals, merely converts part of his circulating capital into machines, dismisses a number of his workers proportionate to the work he has done by blind agents, and, without extending his sales, increases only his profit because he obtains more cheaply what he sells, the social loss is certain, whatever advantage he may find in it for himself.

These three different cases do not, however, present themselves in isolation. A slight increase in demand is often followed by a production that far exceeds it; the capitals devoted to new machines may be partly new and partly cut from the circulating capital that paid wages; and the result of these various combinations becomes so complicated that the manufacturer himself can rarely know whether he has called forth the demand or whether it has come to seek him out. In a country where produce is very cheap, a manufactory that employs much labour is suitable, because it multiplies the consumers of its produce. In the same way, in a country where capitals are very cheap, a manufactory that fixes much capital and requires very large advances may be suitable, because it will make fruitful capitals that found no employment. Yet it is easier still to move capitals than industry. The capitals that find no employment in a rich town can go and seek one in a poor town; but the workers who have been dismissed so that their work may be done by a machine run the risk of dying of hunger. The abundance either of produce or of capitals is a good indication of the direction that ought to be given to the industrious population of a country. It is not, in general, the same regions that offer manufactures both these advantages. In opulent towns where capitals are abundant, even when produce is cheap, living is dear, because rents are high. If some manufacture is established there, it should be one of those that employ much capital, much science and few hands. On the other hand, in poor countries where transport is difficult, where produce does not sell, and where agriculture languishes for want of consumers, if some manufactures are established, they should be those that employ many hands and little capital and little scientific power. Thus the manufacture of watches and jewellery is eminently suited to Geneva: the more it is perfected, the more funds and talent it requires, and the more suited it is to an opulent town where living is dear; and the more, on the other hand, the same town must give up the manufacture of lace, linen and woollens, in which common labour enters into the price for a larger share than the profits of capitals.