Chapter 14: The Division of Labour and Manufacture

Joel Lazarus
Feb 21, 2018
6 min read

Welcome once again, dear readers!

To recall, in the last blog, we covered Chapters 12 and 13 and were introduced to the crucial concept of 'relative surplus value' (RSV). Remember that increases in absolute surplus value are achieved by capitalists by simply extending the length of the working day. However, this reaches limits, so capitalists then pursue increases in relative surplus value by technological innovations that increase labour's productivity. In Chapter 13, Marx spoke about the 'social productive power' of co-operation and how it was effectively a free gift to the capitalist, a gift the capitalist seeks to increase by expanding the scale of production and hence the concentration of capital. The use of a military theme was prevalent in the chapter. He described how the oversight and discipline of the workers in increasingly complex divisions of labour and forms of co-operation brought forth a 'rank of supervisors' just like the officers in an army. He described the capitalist as commanding in the field of production just as a 'general...commands in the field of battle'. Indeed, he described in Chapter 10 the struggle over the working day as a protracted internal civil war. Finally, he emphasised how, though imbricated in a system of co-operation, workers are actually united in division and are confronted by this system as an external force over which they have no or little control. They are alienated: from each other, from their product, from their labour-power. Hence, the way beyond is to take the means of production out of private hands and into collective common ownership where the workers themselves manage production for social need rather than private gain.

Now we arrive at two long chapters that chart an historical and revolutionary journey of the mid 16th to late 19th Century. It is a revolution in the means and mode of production: from handicrafts to manufacture and on to the large-scale factory.

Marx begins Chapter 14 by arguing that manufacture constituted the 'characteristic form of the capitalist process of production and was revolutionary primarily in terms of the larger-scale, spatially concentrated form it took. It evolved in two ways. The first involved products made up of many parts. Marx gives the example of a carriage. The rise of manufacturing sees formerly disparate crafts and craftspeople brought together in one workshop. Gradually, the process of carriage-building is split into more and more narrower tasks with each separate task 'crystallised into the exclusive function of a particular worker'. The second concerns simpler products that many workers are brought together to produce, e.g. making needles. At first, workers independently produce the whole thing, but gradually, as demand increases, they have to split up the task and the commodity becomes 'the social product of a union of craftsmen'. Whatever the starting point, what emerges is a 'productive mechanism whose organs are human beings' and in which working as a specialist in 'partial tasks' becomes a worker's 'life-long destiny'. Marx sees this as an evolutionary step beyond the 'tendency shown by earlier societies towards making trades hereditary', i.e. guilds and castes.

Marx identifies how the development of the manufacture mode of production establishes a particular relation between workers and a rhythm to the work. Each worker sets another to work. 'This creates a continuity, uniformity, regularity, an order, even an intensity of labour ' This is a qualitative relation, but also establishes a quantitative rule and a 'proportionality for the social labour process. Many scholars of capitalism identify successive regimes of production. In our era, we can, for example, identify the neo-liberal revolution of the 1970s as driving a revolution from a 'Fordist' (relatively stable factory work; relatively higher wages boosting workers' consumption power; standardised, low-cost commodities; strong state regulation, Welfarism, and Keynesian monetary policies) to a 'Post-Fordist (globalisation of manufacturing; shift in West to services and consumption; financialisation; unstable, low-paid work; worker as self-entrepreneur; state deregulation and monetarism) regime of production.

Remember that, first and foremost, capitalism is a system of social relations. Thus, the 'item of machinery' produced above all in the early manufacture mode of production is 'the collective worker'. But, what also develops are 'hierarchies of labour-powers' and a subsequent hierarchy of wages with skilled workers on top and unskilled workers on the bottom.

Marx then characteristically zooms out to offer the grand evolutionary perspective on successive modes of production. Divisions of labour are general (genera), e.g. industry, agriculture, particular (species) e.g. watch-making, and detailed e.g. within workshops. Divisions of labour derive from the different means of production and of subsistence in natural environments and the physiological differences within a tribe and family. These difference generate exchange between different tribes, different communities. As exchange increases what was initially independent (the social division of labour within a given community) becomes dependent (on exchange) and what was dependent (exchange) becomes independent. What emerges from this historical development is effectively the 'separation of town from country' and 'the whole economic history of society is summed up in the movement of this antithesis'.

Coming back to the emergence of manufacture as a capitalist mode of production, Marx points out one remarkable and, still today, utterly relevant and crucial contradiction in capitalist ideology and practice:

'The same bourgeois consciousness which celebrates the division of labour in the workshop, the lifelong annexation of the worker to a partial operation, and his complete subjection to capital, as an organization of labour that increases its productive power, denounces with equal vigour every conscious attempt to control and regulate the process of production socially, as an inroad upon such sacred things as the rights of property, freedom and the self-determining 'genius' of the individual capitalist. It is very characteristic that the enthusiastic apologists of the factory system have nothing more damning to urge against a general organization of labour in society than that it would turn the whole of society into a factory.'

What Marx is pointing out so powerfully here is that within capitalism, while the whole media system of the ruling class constructs a world in which the only way for society to manage production is through the supposedly unplanned, free, and competitive marketplace, the same ruling class runs their own businesses with authoritarian discipline and neurotic bureaucratic planning. In short, we have 'anarchy in the social division of labour and despotism in the manufacturing division of labour'. The notion that collective planning in the production, distribution, and consumption of goods might be possible let alone more efficient has not really even been allowed in our collective discourse in recent decades. The space for such a notion is certainly growing since the crash of 2008 and, in the UK, especially since the election of Jeremy Corbyn as Labour leader. Now ideas of collective ownership and management of public service providers such as transport, water, and energy (not necessarily at state level) are being explored and developed most fruitfully.

Marx finishes Chapter 14 with reflections of the 'capitalist character of manufacture' overall. He argues that capitalist manufacture revolutionises social relations of production, converting the worker into a specialist automatons, 'suppressing a whole world of productive drives and inclinations', and turning him into a 'crippled monstrosity'. 'In manufacture, the social productive power of the collective worker, hence of capital, is enriched through the impoverishment of the worker in individual productive power'. Every successive regime of accumulation requires a different kind of worker and thus has different ideological and educational needs. Regarding manufacture, ignorance is beneficial and, indeed, the nature of the work itself, as Adam Smith pointed out, makes the worker 'as stupid and ignorant as it is possible to become'. But, as Marx highlights, for Smith, that was the price to pay for 'civilization' and the 'wealth of nations'. Smith writes:

'But in every improved and civilized society, this is the state into which the labouring poor, that is, the great body of the people, must necessarily fall.'

This incredible increase in a nation's collective productive powers to produce unprecedented wealth must and can only be achieved apparently by the immiseration, impoverishment, and stupefaction of the majority of citizens! Smith's prize for such 'wisdom' is being placed on the back of the UK £20 note!!!