It is sufficiently proved that the increase in the means of exchange 
resulted in the depreciation of wages and land rents, on the one 
hand, and the growth of industrial profits on the other. In other 
words: to the extent that the propertied class and the class of 
workers, the feudal lords and the people, sank, to that extent the 
capitalist class, the bourgeoisie, rose. 

There were yet other circumstances which contributed simultane- 
ously to the development of manufacturing industry: the increase of 
commodities put into circulation from the moment trade penetrated 
to the East Indies by way of the Cape of Good Hope; the colonial 
system; the development of maritime trade. . 

Another point which has not yet been sufficiently appreciated in 
the history of manufacturing industry is the disbanding of the 
numerous retinues of feudal lords, whose subordinate ranks became 
vagrants before entering the workshop. The creation of the 
workshop was preceded by an almost universal vagrancy in the 
fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. The workshop found, besides, a 
powerful support in the many peasants who, continually driven from 
the country owing to the transformation of the fields into pastures 
and to the progress in agriculture which necessitated fewer hands for 
the tillage of the soil, went on congregating in the towns during 
whole centuries. 

The growth of the market, the accumulation of capital, the 
modification in the social position of the classes, a large number of 
persons being deprived of their sources of income, all these are 
historical preconditions for the formation of manufacture. It was 
not, as M. Proudhon says, friendly agreements between equals that 
brought men together into the workshop. It was not even in the 
bosom of the old guilds that manufacture was born. It was the 
merchant that became the head of the modern workshop, and not 
the old guildmaster. Almost everywhere there was a desperate 
struggle between manufacture and the crafts. 

The accumulation and concentration of instruments and workers 
preceded the development of the division of labour inside the 
workshop. Manufacture consisted much more in the bringing 
together of many workers and many crafts in one place, in one room, 
under the command of one capital, than in the analysis of labour and 
the adaptation of a special worker to a very simple task. 

The utility of a workshop consisted much less in the division of 
labour as such than in the circumstance that work was done on a 
much larger scale, that many unnecessary expenses were saved, etc. 
At the end of the sixteenth and at the beginning of the seventeenth 
century, Dutch manufacture scarcely knew any division of labour. 

The development of the division of labour supposes the assem- 
blage of workers in a workshop. There is not one single example, 
whether in the sixteenth or in the seventeenth century, of the 
different branches of one and the same craft being exploited 
separately to such an extent that it would have sufficed to assemble 
them all in one place so as to obtain a complete, ready-made work- 
shop. But once the men and the instruments had been brought toge- 
ther, the division of labour, such as it had existed in the form of the 
guilds, was reproduced, necessarily reflected inside the workshop. 

For M. Proudhon, who sees things upside down, if he sees them at 
all, the division of labour, in Adam Smith’s sense, precedes the 
workshop, which is a condition of its existence. 

Machinery, properly so-called, dates from the end of the eighteenth 
century. Nothing is more absurd than to see in machinery the 
antithesis of the division of labour, the synthesis restoring unity to 
divided labour. 

The machine is a uniting of the instruments of labour, and by no 
means a combination of different operations for the worker himself. 

“When,” by the division of labour, “each particular operation has been simplified 
to the use of a simple instrument, the linking-up of all these instruments, set in motion 
by a single engine, constitutes a machine.” (Babbage, Traité sur l’Economie des machines, 
etc., Paris, 1833 [p. 230; cf. Eng. ed., p. 171).) 

Simple tools; accumulation of tools; composite tools; setting in 
motion of a composite tool by a single hand engine, by man; setting 
in motion of these instruments by natural forces; machines; system 
of machines having one motor; system of machines having an 
automatic motor—this is the progress of machinery. 

The concentration of the instruments of production and the 
division of labour are as inseparable one from the other as are, in the 
political sphere, the concentration of public powers and the division 
of private interests. England, with the concentration of the land, this 
instrument of agricultural labour, has at the same time division of 
agricultural labour and the application of machinery to the 
exploitation of the soil. France, which has the division of the 
instruments, the small holdings system, has, in general, neither 
division of agricultural labour nor application of machinery to the 
soil. 

For M. Proudhon the concentration of the instruments of labour is 
the negation of the division of labour. In reality we find again the 
reverse. As the concentration of instruments develops, the division 
develops also, and vice versa. This is why every big mechanical 
invention is followed by a greater division of labour, and each 
increase in the division of labour gives rise in turn to new mechanical 
inventions. 

We need not recall the fact that the great progress of the division 
of labour began in England after the invention of machinery. Thus 
the weavers and spinners were for the most part peasants like those 
one still meets in backward countries. The invention of machinery 
brought about the separation of manufacturing industry from 
agricultural industry. The weaver and the spinner, united but lately 
in a single family, were separated by the machine. Thanks to the 
machine, the spinner can live in England while the weaver resides in 
the East Indies. Before the invention of machinery, the industry of a 
country was carried on chiefly with raw materials that were the 
products of its own soil; in England — wool, in Germany — flax, in 
France — silks and flax, in the East Indies and the Levant — cotton, 
etc. Thanks to the application of machinery and of steam, the 
division of labour was able to assume such dimensions that 
large-scale industry, detached from the national soil, depends 
entirely on the world market, on international exchange, on an 
international division of labour. Finally—the machine has so great an 
influence on the division of labour, that when, in the manufacture of 
some object, a means has been found to produce parts of it 
mechanically, the manufacture splits up immediately into two 
branches independent of each other. 

Need we speak of the providential and philanthropic aim that M. 
Proudhon discovers in the invention and first application of 
machinery? 

When in England the market had become so far developed that 
manual labour was no longer adequate, the need for machinery was 
felt. Then came the idea of applying mechanical science, already 
quite developed in the eighteenth century. 

The automatic workshop opened its career with acts which were 
anything but philanthropic. Children were kept at work by means of 
the whip; they were made an object of traffic and contracts were 
undertaken with the orphanages. All the laws on the apprenticeship 
of workers were repealed, because, to use M. Proudhon’s phraseolo- 
gy, there was no further need of synthetic workers. Finally, from 1825 
onwards,83 almost all the new inventions were the result of collisions 
between the worker and the employer who sought at all costs to 
depreciate the worker’s specialised ability. After each new strike of 
any importance, there appeared a new machine. So little indeed did 
the worker see in the application of machinery a sort of rehabilita- 
tion, restoration—as M. Proudhon would say—that in the eighteenth 
century he resisted for a very long time the incipient domination of 
automation. 

“Wyatt,” says Doctor Ure, “... invented the series of fluted rollers (the spinning 
fingers usually ascribed to Arkwright).... The main difficulty did not ... 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 automation. To devise and administer a successful code of 
factory discipline, suited to the necessities of factory diligence, was the Herculean 
enterprise, the noble achievement of Arkwright.’* 

In short, with the introduction of machinery the division of labour 
inside society has increased, the task of the worker inside the 
workshop has been simplified, capital has been concentrated, the 
human being has been further dismembered. 

When M. Proudhon wants to be an economist, and to abandon for 
a moment the “evolution in serial relation in the understanding”, 
then he goes and draws erudition from Adam Smith, from a 
time when the automatic workshop was only just coming into 
existence. Indeed, what a difference between the division of labour 
as it existed in Adam Smith’s day and as we see it in the automatic 
workshop! In order to make this properly understood, we need only 
quote a few passages from Dr. Ure’s Philosophie des manufactures. 

“When Adam Smith wrote his immortal elements of economics, automatic 
machinery being hardly known, he was properly led to regard the division of labour 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 labour.... 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 labour 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 superintend 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 labour among artisans. On the handicraft plan, labour more or less 
skilled was usually the most expensive element of production ... but on the automatic 
plan, skilled labour 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 concentrated 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 labour, which fixed one 
man to shaping the head of a pin, and another to sharpening its point, with most 
irksome and spirit-wasting uniformity.... 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’ labours. Thus, that cramping of the 
faculties, that narrowing of the mind, that stunting of the frame, which were ascribed, 
and not unjustly, ... to the division of labour, cannot, in common circumstances, occur 
under the equable distribution of industry... 

“Tt is, in fact, the constant aim and tendency of every improvement in machinery to 
supersede human labour altogether, or to diminish its cost, by substituting the 
industry of women and children for that of men; or that of ordinary labourers 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 labour into degrees of skill has been exploded by our 
enlightened manufacturers.” (André Ure, Philosophie des manufactures ou Economie 
industrielle, t. I, chap. I [pp. 27-30, 32-35; Eng. ed., pp. 19-23].) 

What characterises the division of labour inside modern society is 
that it engenders specialities, specialists, and with them craft-idiocy. 

“We are struck with admiration,” says Lemontey, ‘when we see among the 
ancients the same person distinguishing himself to a high degree as philosopher, poet, 
orator, historian, priest, administrator, general of an army. Our souls are appalled at 
the sight of so vast a domain. Each one of us plants his hedge and shuts himself up in 
his enclosure. I do not know whether by this parcellation the field is enlarged, but I do 
know that man is belittled.” (Op. cit., p. 213.] 

What characterises the division of labour in the automatic 
workshop is that labour has there completely lost its specialised 
character. But the moment every special development stops, the 
need for universality, the tendency towards an integral development 
of the individual begins to be felt. The automatic workshop wipes out 
specialists and craft-idiocy. 

M. Proudhon, not having understood even this one revolutionary 
side of the automatic workshop, takes a step backward and proposes 
to the worker that he make not only the twelfth part of a pin, but 
successively all twelve parts of it. The worker would thus come to 
know and realise the pin. This is M. Proudhon’s synthetic labour. 
Nobody will contest that to make a movement forward and another 
movement backward is also to make a synthetic movement. 

To sum up, M. Proudhon has not gone further than the 
petty-bourgeois ideal. And to realise this ideal, he can think of 
nothing better than to take us back to the journeyman or, at most, to 
the master craftsman of the Middle Ages. It is enough, he says 
somewhere in his book, to have created a masterpiece once in one’s 
life, to have felt oneself just once to be a man. Is not this, in form as 

in content, the masterpiece demanded by the craft guild of the 
Middle Ages? 

§3. COMPETITION AND MONOPOLY 

Good side of “Competition is as essential to labour 
competition as division.... It is necessary ... for the 
advent of equality.” [1 186, 188] 

“The principle is the negation of 

Bad side of itself. Its most certain result is to ruin 

competition those whom it drags in its train.” [I 
185] 

“The drawbacks which follow in its 
wake, just as the good it provides ... 

both flow logically from the principle.” 
[I 185-86] 

General reflection 

“To seek the principle of accommoda- 
tion, which must be derived from a law 
superior to liberty itself.” [I 185] 

Variant 
Problem to be aa 

solved There can, therefore, be no ques- 

tion here of destroying competition, a 
thing as impossible to destroy as liber- 
ty; we have only to find its equilibrium, 
I would be ready to say its police.” [I 
223] 

M. Proudhon begins by defending the eternal necessity of 
competition against those who wish to replace it by emulation.* 

There is no “purposeless emulation”, and as “the object of every passion is 
necessarily analogous to the passion itself—a woman for the lover, power for the 

ambitious, gold for the miser, a garland for the poet—the object of industrial 
emulation is necessarily profit.... Emulation is nothing but competition itself.” [I 187] 

Competition is emulation with a view to profit. Is industrial 
emulation necessarily emulation with a view to profit, that is, 
competition? M. Proudhon proves it by affirming it. We have seen 
that, for him, to affirm is to prove, just as to suppose is to deny. 

If the immediate object of the lover is the woman, the immediate 
object of industrial emulation is the product and not the profit. 

Competition is not industrial emulation, it is commercial emula- 
tion. In our time industrial emulation exists only in view of 
commerce. There are even phases in the economic life of modern 
nations when everybody is seized with a sort of craze for making 
profit without producing. This speculation craze, which recurs 
periodically, lays bare the true character of competition, which seeks 
to escape the need for industrial emulation. 

If you had told an artisan of the fourteenth century that the 
privileges and the whole feudal organisation of industry were going 
to be abrogated in favour of industrial emulation, called competition, 
he would have replied that the privileges of the various corporations, 
guilds and fraternities were organised competition. M. Proudhon 

* The Fourierists. F. E. [Note to the German edition, 1885.} 

does not improve upon this when he affirms that “emulation is 
nothing but competition itself”. 

“Ordain that from the first of January 1847, labour and wages shall be guaranteed 
to everybody: immediately an immense relaxation will succeed the high tension of 
industry.” [I 189] 

Instead of a supposition, an affirmation and a negation, we have 
now an ordinance that M. Proudhon issues purposely to prove the 
necessity of competition, its eternity as a category, etc. 

If we imagine that ordinances are all that is needed to get away 
from competition, we shall never get away from it. And if we go so 
far as to propose to abolish competition while retaining wages, we 
shall be proposing nonsense by royal decree. But nations do not 
proceed by royal decree. Before framing such ordinances, they must 
at least have changed from top to bottom the conditions of their 
industrial and political existence, and consequently their whole 
manner of being. 

M. Proudhon will reply, with his imperturbable assurance, that it is 
the hypothesis of ‘“‘a transformation of our nature without historical 
antecedents”, and that he would be right in “excluding us from the 
discussion” [I 191], we know not in virtue of which ordinance. 

M. Proudhon does not know that all history is nothing but a 
continuous transformation of human nature. 

“Let us stick to the facts.... The French Revolution was made for industrial liberty 
as much as for political liberty; and although France, in 1789, had not perceived—let 
us say it openly—all the consequences of the principle whose realisation it demanded, 
it was mistaken neither in its wishes nor in its expectations. Whoever attempts to deny 
this loses, in my view, the right to criticism. I will never dispute with an adversary who 
puts as principle the spontaneous error of twenty-five million men.... Why then, if 
competition had not been a principle of social economy, a decree of fate, a necessity of the 
human soul, why, instead of abolishing corporations, guilds and fraternities, did nobody