- In this chapter Marx looks at—surprise—the division of labor in manufacture. Oh, and in society at large, too.
- It helps to know that throughout the book, Marx looks at three types of production. Handicraft (making things by hand) is at one extreme, and at the other is large-scale industry (think factories). In the middle is what he called manufacture, which is capitalism's organization of handicraft producers into more efficient groups. The manufacturing period was from the middle of the 16th century up to about the end of the 18th century.
- Manufacture is organized by putting workers together in a single workshop under the control of a single capitalist, but this can be done in one of two ways. The workers can be from various handicrafts and each do their own thing, just in close cooperation in the single workshop instead of dispersed geographically, resulting in the finished commodity. Or the workers can all have the same sort of skill, such as needle-making. In either case, the workers become increasingly specialized, and their abilities are narrowed until they forget how to do other sorts of tasks.
- As manufacture develops, workers are increasingly stuck in one particular handicraft, using one particular set of tools. That's opposed to the greater freedom they had before. The good news for the capitalist is that specialization ups productivity. For example, workers don't waste time changing from one set of tools to another. More commodities are made, more surplus value is found. But the bad news for the worker is that his or her life becomes narrower.
- There's another way to distinguish between types of manufacture. One type is heterogeneous manufacture, such as watch-making, where the pieces of the commodity are made separately and then assembled together. The other type involves the assembly of the item going through sequential steps, as in needle-making, where the wire passes through the hands of up to ninety-two different types of specialized workers who do different operations in stages.
- Marx envisions a collective worker busy in manufacture, a sort of giant person made up of multiple persons. Each individual worker is just an organ of this single super-worker. More work gets done, but each person leads a reduced, narrower life. Capitalists like the collective worker, because space and time become more organized—workers don't waste as much time moving from place to place when they have an assigned spot—so productivity, and thus profit, increases.
- The organizational scheme winds up creating a hierarchy of workers, where some are regarded as more specialized than others and get paid more.
- The division of labor is a simple concept that describes how some people do some work, and other people do other work. For example, bakers do the work of baking, not forging, which is what we have blacksmiths for; the labor is divided up among various people. The division of labor makes society more productive.
- Marx distinguishes between the division of labor in society as a whole, which he calls the social division of labor, and the division of labor in an individual manufacturing workshop, which he calls the division of labor within manufacture. The two affect one another, but are distinct.
- The social division of labor originates from physiological differences in sex and age leading to different work for young versus old, male versus female. Then different tribes with different advantages trade with one another, dividing labor socially. Marx briefly says that an advanced division of labor is founded on the difference between towns and countryside, but he doesn't go into detail about it.
- Division of labor encourages more specialized tools to be created, and different geographic areas to specialize in different work. Such a specialized worker can't produce a commodity alone; commodities become group efforts.
- The division of labor in society results from the anarchy or chaos in capitalist trade, where competition forces businesses to become more efficient as they try to defeat one another. In contrast, the division of labor in manufacture is planned rationally by the workshop owners. Thus the division of labor in society could be described as anarchy, and the division of labor in manufacture as despotism (overbearing rule by a single person).
- Marx looks at ancient communities, where land was owned in common. Often there was a blending of agriculture and handicrafts and an unchanging division of labor. He also looks at medieval guilds, where strict rules fixed the division of labor in place across time.
- All the productivity advantages that come from the organization of workers in manufacture, as shown by the image of the collective worker, become advantages for capitalism.
- Ordinary cooperation mostly leaves each individual worker's life unchanged, but manufacture, by sharpening the division of labor, cripples workers' lives, suppressing their ability to expand beyond their specialty. They have to face a multipurpose capitalism while having lost multipurpose status themselves.
- The ancient Greeks looked at division of labor but only saw it in terms of the wide variety and quality of use-values it made available (see Chapter 1 for use-value).
- Division of labor in manufacture still leaves work based on handicraft. People are still working by hand, just in more organized, specialized, and productive ways. The development and wide use of industrial machinery in the 19th century will take society past the manufacture stage.