one direction, because it vanishes in many others. What is lost by the detail labourers, is concentrated in the capital that employs them.[1] It is a result of the division of labour in manufactures, that the labourer is brought face to face with the intellectual potencies of the material process of production, ag the property of another, and as a ruling power. This separation begins in simple co-operation, where the capitalist represents to the single workman, the oneness and the will of the associated labour. It is developed in manufacture which cuts down the labourer into a detail labourer. It is completed in modern industry, which makes science a productive force distinct from labour and presses it into the service of capital.[2]
In manufacture, in order to make the collective labourer, and through him capital, rich in social productive power, each labourer must be made poor in individual productive powers. “Ignorance is the mother of industry as well as of superstition. Reflection and fancy are subject to err; but a habit of moving the hand or the foot is independent of either. Manufactures, accordingly, prosper most where the mind is least consulted, and where the workshop may … be considered as an engine, the parts of which are men.”[3] As a matter of fact, some few manufacturers in the middle of the 18th century preferred, for certain operations that were trade secrets, to employ half-idiotic persons.[4]
“The understandings of the greater part of men,” says Adam Smith, “are necessarily formed by their ordinary employments. The man whose whole life is spent in performing a few simple operations … has no occasion to exert his understanding.… He generally becomes as stupid and ignorant as it is
- ↑ A. Ferguson, l. c., p. 281: “The former may have gained what the other has lost.”
- ↑ “The man of knowledge and the productive labourer come to be widely divided from each other, and knowledge, instead of remaining the handmaid of labour in the hand of the labourer to increase bis productive powers … has almost everywhere arrayed itself against labour … systematically deluding and leading them (the labourers) astray in order to render their muscular powers entirely mechanical and obedient.” (W. Thompson: “An Inquiry into the Principles of the Distribution of Wealth. London, 1824,” p. 274.)
- ↑ A. Ferguson, l. c., p. 280.
- ↑ J. D. Tuckett: ‘A History of the Past and Present State of the Labouring Population.” Lond., 1846.
