3. DIVISION OF LABOUR AND MANUFACTURE 

Manufacture, the classic form of co-operation based upon 
division of labour, prevails from about 1550 to 1770. 

It arises: 

(1) Either through the throwing together of different crafts, 
each of which performs a detail operation (e.g., vehicle building), 
whereby the individual craftsman in question very soon loses his 
ability to pursue his whole handicraft, on the other hand doing his 
detail work so much better; and thus the process is converted into 
a division of the whole operation into its component parts. 
(Pp. 318, 319.) 

(2) Or many craftsmen doing the same or similar work are 
united in the same factory, and the individual operations, instead 
of being performed successively by one worker, are gradually 
separated and done simultaneously by several workers (needles, 
etc.). Instead of being the work of one craftsman, the product is 
now the work of a union of craftsmen, each of whom performs 
only a detail operation. (Pp. 319, 320.) 

In both cases its result is a production mechanism whose organs are 
human beings. The work retains a handicraft nature; each detail 
process through which the product goes must be performable by 
hand; hence any really scientific analysis of the production process ts 
excluded. Each individual worker is completely chained to a detail 
function because of its handicraft nature. (P. 321.) 

In this way labour is saved, as compared to the craftsman, and 
this is increased still more by transmission to succeeding genera- 
tions. Thus the division of labour in manufacture corresponds to 
the tendency of former societies to make a trade hereditary. 
Castes, guilds. (P. 322.) 

Subdivision of tools through adaptation to the various partial 
operations—500 kinds of hammers in Birmingham. (Pp. 323- 
24.) 

Manufacture, considered from the standpoint of its total 
mechanism, has two aspects: either merely mechanical assembly of 
independent detail products (watch), or a series of related 
processes in one workshop (needle). 

In manufacture, each group of workers supplies another with its 

raw material. Hence the basic condition is that each group produces 
a given quantum in a given time; thus a continuity, regularity, 
uniformity and intensity of labour of quite a different kind are 
created than in co-operation proper. Thus here we have the 
technological law of the production process: that the labour be 
socially necessary labour. (P. 329.) 

The inequality of the time required for the individual opera- 
tions stipulates that the different groups of workers be of different 
size and number (in type founding: four founders and two 
breakers to one rubber). Thus manufacture sets up a mathemati- 
cally fixed ratio for the quantitative extent of the separate organs 
of the collective worker, and production can be expanded only by 
employing an additional multiple of the whole group. Moreover, 
only after a definite level of production has been reached does it 
pay to make certain functions independent: supervision, transport- 
ing the products from place to place, etc. (Pp. 329, 330.) 

Combination of various manufactures into a united manufacture 
also occurs, but as yet it always lacks real technological unity, 
which arises only with machinery. (P. 331.) 

Machines appeared in manufacture at an early date— 
sporadically—grain and stamping mills, etc., but only as some- 
thing subordinate. The chief machinery of manufacture is the 
combined collective worker, who possesses a much higher degree of 
perfection than the old individual craft worker, and in whom all 
the imperfections, such as are often necessarily developed in the 
detail worker, appear as perfection. (P. 333.) Manufacture evolves 
differences among these detail workers, skuiep and unskmiep, and 
even a complete hierarchy of workers. (P. 334.) 

Division of labour: 1) general (into agriculture, industry, 
shipping, etc.); 2) particular (into species and subspecies); 3) in 
detail (an the workshop). The social division of labour also 
develops from different starting points. 1) Within the family and 
the tribe the natural division of labour according to sex and age, 
plus slavery through violence against neighbours, which extends it. 
(P. 335.) 2) Different communities according to location, climate, 
and level of culture, turn out different products which are 
exchanged where these communities come in contact. (P. 49.) Exchange 
with strange communities is then one of the chief means of 
breaking off the natural association of the community itself 
through further development of the natural division of labour. 
(P. 336.) 

Division of labour in manufacture thus presupposes a certain 
degree of development of the social division of labour; on the 

other hand, it develops the latter further—as in the territorial 
division of labour. (Pp. 337, 338.) 

For all that, there is always this difference between social 
division of labour and division of labour in manufacture that the 
former necessarily produces commodities, whereas in the latter the 
detail worker does not produce commodities. Hence concentration 
and organisation in the latter, scattering and disorder of competi- 
tion in the former. (Pp. 339, 341.) 

Earlier organisation of the Indian communities. (Pp. 341, 342.) 
The guilds. (Pp. 343-44.) Whereas in all these there exists division 
of labour in society, the division of labour in manufacture is a 
specific creation of the capitalist mode of production. 

As in co-operation, the functioning working body is a form of 
existence of capital in manufacture as well. Hence the productive 
power arising from the combination of labours appears as the 
productive power of capital. But whereas co-operation leaves the 
individual’s mode of working on the whole unchanged, manufac- 
ture revolutionises it, cripples the worker; unable to make a 
product independently, he is now a mere appendage of the 
capitalist’s workshop. The intellectual faculties of labour disappear 
as far as the many are concerned, to expand in scope for the one. 
It is a result of the division of labour in manufacture that the 
labourers are confronted with the intellectual faculties of the labour 
process as the property of another and as a ruling power. This process 
of separation, which begins as early as co-operation and develops 
in manufacture, is completed in large-scale industry, which 
separates science as an independent productive force from labour 
and presses it into the service of capital. (P. 346.) 

Illustrative quotations.'*’ (P. 347.) 

Manufacture, in one aspect a definite organisation of social 
labour, is in another only a particular method of begetting relative 
surplus-value. (P. 350.) Historical significance precisely in this. 

Obstacles to the development of manufacture even during its 
classical period are limitation of the number of unskilled workers 
owing to the predominance of the skilled; limitation of the work 
of women and children owing to the men’s resistance; the 
insistence on the Laws oF APPRENTICESHIP Up to recent times, even 
where superfluous; continual insubordination of the workers, since 
the collective worker as yet possesses no framework independent 
of the workers; emigration of the workers. (Pp. 353, 354.) 

Besides, manufacture itself was unable to revolutionise the 
whole of social production or even merely to dominate it. Its 
narrow technical basis came into conflict with the production 

requirements that it had itself created. The machine became 
necessary, and manufacture had already learned how to make it. 
(P. 355.) | 

4. MACHINERY AND LARGE-SCALE INDUSTRY 

a. Machinery as Such 

The revolution in the mode of production, starting in manufac- 
ture with labour-power, here starts with the instruments of labour. 

All fully-developed machinery consists of 1) the motor mechan- 
ism; 2) the transmitting mechanism; 3) the machine tool. (P. 357.) 
The industrial revolution of the eighteenth century started with 
the machine tool. What characterises it is that the tool—in a more 
or less modified form—#is transferred from man to the machine, 
and is worked by the machine under the operation of man. At the 
outset it is immaterial whether the motive power is human or a 
natural one. The specific difference is that man uses only his own 
organs while the machine can, within certain limits, employ as many tools 
as demanded. (Spinning-wheel, 1 spindle; jenny, 12 to 18 spindles.) 

So far, in the spinning-wheel it is not the treadle, the power, but 
the spindle that is affected by the [industrial] revolution—at the 
beginning man is still motive power and tender at the same time 
everywhere. The revolution of the machine tool, on the contrary, 
first made the perfecting of the steam-engine a necessity, and then 
also carried it out. (Pp. 359-60; also pp. 361-62.) 

Two kinds of machinery in large-scale industry: either (1) 
co-operation of similar machines (power-Loom, ENVELOPE-MACHINE, Which 
combines the work of a number of detail workers through the 
combination of various tools), in this case technological unity 
already, through the transmission and the motive power; or 2) 
machine system, combination of different detail machines (spin- 
ning-mill). The natural basis for this is the division of labour in 
manufacture. But at once an essential difference. In manufacture 
every detail process had to be adapted to the labourer; this is no 
longer necessary here—the labour process can be _ objectively 
dissected into its component parts, which are then left to science, 
or to experience based upon it, to be mastered by machines.— 
Here the quantitative ratio of the several groups of workers is 
repeated as the ratio of the several groups of machines. 
(Pp. 363-66.) ; 

In both cases the factory constitutes a huge automaton (moreover 
perfected to that stage only recently) and this is its adequate form. 

(P. 367.) And its most perfect form is the machine-building 
automaton, which abolished the handicraft and manufacture 
foundation of large-scale industry, and thus first provided the 
consummate form of machinery. (Pp. 369-72.) 

Connection between the revolutionising of the various branches 
up to the means of communication. (P. 370.) 

In manufacture the combination of workers is subjective. Here 
there is an objective mechanical production organism, which the 
worker finds ready at hand, and which can function only through 
collective labour; the co-operative character of the labour process 
is now a technological necessity. (P. 372.) 

The productive forces arising from co-operation and the 
division of labour cost capital nothing; the natural forces: steam, 
water, also cost nothing. Neither do the forces discovered by 
science. But the latter can be realised only with suitable apparatus, 
which can be constructed only at great expense; likewise the 
machine tools cost much more than the old tools. But these 
machines have a much longer life and a much greater field of 
production than the tool; they therefore transfer a much smaller 
portion of value, comparatively, to the product than a tool, and 
hence the gratuitous service performed by the machine (which does 
not re-appear in the value of the product) is much greater than in 
the case of the tool. (Pp. 374, 375, 376.) 

Reduction in cost through concentration of production is much 
greater in large-scale industry than in manufacture. (P. 375.) 

The prices of finished goods prove how much the machine has 
cheapened production, and that the portion of value due to the 
instruments of labour grows relatively but declines absolutely. The 
productivity of the machine is measured by the extent to which it 
replaces human labour-power. Examples. (Pp. 377-79.) 

Assumed a steam plough takes the place of 150 workers getting 
an annual wage of £3,000, this annual wage does not represent all 
the labour performed by them, but only the necessary labour— 
however, they also perform surplus-labour in addition. If the steam 
plough costs £3,000, however, that is the expression in money of 
all labour embodied in it. Thus, if the machine costs as much as 
the labour-power it replaces, the human labour embodied in it is 
always much less than that which it replaces. (P. 380.) 

As a means of cheapening production, the machine must cost less 
labour than it replaces. But for capital its value must be less than that 
of the labour-power supplanted by it. Therefore, machines that do not 
pay in England may pay in America (e.g., for stonebreaking). 
Hence, as a result of certain legal restrictions, machines that 

formerly did not pay for capital may suddenly make their 
appearance. (Pp. 380-81.) 

b. Appropriation 
of Labour-Power Through Machinery 

Since machinery itself contains the power driving it, muscular 
power drops in value.— Labour of women and children; immediate 
increase in the number of wage-labourers through the enrolling of 
members of the family who had not previously worked for wages. 
Thus the value of the man’s labour-power is spread over the labour-power 
of the whole family, i.e., depreciated—Now four persons must 
perform not only labour, but also surplus-labour for capital that 
one family may live, where only one did previously. Thus the 
degree of exploitation is increased together with the material of 
exploitation. (P. 383.) 

Formerly the sale and purchase of labour-power was a relation 
between free persons; now minors or children are bought; the worker 
now sells wife and child—he becomes a slave-dealer. Examples (pp. 
384-85). 

Physical deterioration— mortality of workers’ children (p. 386), 
in industrialised agriculture as well. (Gane system.*) (P. 387.) 

Moral degradation. (P. 389.) Educational clauses and manufac- 
turers’ resistance to them. (P. 390.) 

The entrance of women and children into the factory finally 
breaks down the male worker’s resistance to the despotism of capital. 
(P. 391.) 

If machinery shortens the labour-time necessary to produce an 
object, in the hands of capital it becomes the most powerful 
weapon for lengthening the working day far beyond its normal 
bounds. It creates, on the one hand, new conditions that enable 
capital to do so, and on the other, new motives for so doing. 

Machinery is capable of perpetual motion, and limited only by 
the weakness and limitations of the assisting human labour-power. 
The machine that is worn out in seven and a half years, working 
twenty hours daily, absorbs just as much surplus-labour for the 
capitalist, but in half the time, as another that is worn out in 
fifteen years working ten hours daily. (P. 393.) 

The moral depreciation of the machine—psy superseding—is in 
this way risked still less. (P. 394.) 

Moreover, a larger quantity of labour is absorbed without 
increasing the investments in buildings and machines; thus not only 
does surplus-value grow with a lengthened working day, but the 
outlay required to obtain it diminishes relatively. This is more 
important in so far as the proportion of fixed capital greatly 
predominates, as is the case in large-scale industry. (P. 395.) 

During the first period of machinery, when it possesses a 
monopoly character, profits are enormous, and hence the thirst for 
more, for boundless lengthening of the working day. With the 
general introduction of machinery this monopoly profit vanishes, 
and the law asserts itself that surplus-value arises, not from the 
labour supplanted by the machine, but from the labour employed by 
it, that is, from the variable capital. But under machine production 
the latter is necessarily reduced by the large outlays. Thus there is 
an inherent contradiction in the capitalist employment of machin- 
ery: for a given mass of capital it increases one factor of 
surplus-value, its rate, by reducing the other, the number of workers. 
As soon as the value of a machine-made commodity becomes the 
regulating social value of that commodity, this contradiction comes 
to light, and again drives towards lengthening the working day. 
(P. 397.) 

But at the same time machinery, by setting free supplanted 
workers, as well as by enrolling women and children, produces a 
surplus working population, which must let capital dictate the law to 
it. Hence machinery overthrows all the moral and natural bounds 
of the working day. Hence the paradox that the most powerful 
means of shortening labour-time is the most infallible means of 
converting the whole lifetime of the worker and of his family 
into available labour-time for expanding the value of capital. 
(P. 398.) 

We have already seen how the social reaction occurs here 
through the fixing of the normal working day; on this basis there 
now develops the intensification of labour. (P. 399.) 

At the beginning, with the speeding-up of the machine, the 
intensity of labour increases simultaneously with the lengthening 
of labour-time. But soon the point is reached where the two 
exclude each other. It is different, however, when labour-time is 
restricted. Intensity can now grow; in 10 hours as much work can 
be done as ordinarily in 12 or more, and now the more intensive 
working-day counts as raised to a higher power, and labour is 
measured not merely by its length of time, but by its intensity. 
(P. 400.) Thus, in 5 hours of necessary and 5 hours of 
surplus-labour, the same surplus-value can be attained as in 6 

hours of necessary and 6 hours of surplus-labour at lower 
intensity. (P. 400.) 

How is labour intensified? In manufacture it has been proved 
(note 159, p. 401), pottery, for instance, etc., that mere shortening of 
the working day is sufficient to raise productivity enormously. In 
machine labour this was far more doubtful. But R. Gardner’s proof. 
(Pp. 401-02.) '** 

As soon as the shortened working day becomes law, the machine 
becomes a means of squeezing more intensive labour out of the