Chapter II, The Metaphysics of Political Economy, 2. Division of Labour and Machinery - Part 2 of 10

Marx quotes Proudhon's claim that the economists had always seen the “good” side of the division of labour outweighing the “bad”, because it fitted their optimistic outlook. Marx says,

“Adam Smith goes further than M. Proudhon thinks. He saw clearly that

“the difference of natural talents in different men is, in reality, much less than we are aware of; and the very different genius which appears to distinguish men of different professions, when grown up to maturity, is not so much the cause as the effect of the division of labour.”” (p 120)

Proudhon claims that it was Say that first recognised that the same cause of the “good” side of the division of labour was also the cause of the “bad”. But, Marx refers to Lemontey's book of 1801, in which he set out those consequences of the division of labour, a book that Say had, himself referred to. However, nor was Lemontey the first. Adam Smith was a pupil of Adam Ferguson, and in a chapter in his 1783 book, “An Essay on the History of of Civil Society” , Ferguson notes,

““It may even be doubted, whether the measure of national capacity increases with the advancement of arts. Many mechanical arts... succeed best under a total suppression of sentiment and reason; and ignorance is the mother of industry as well as 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, without any great effort of imagination, be considered as an engine, the parts of which are men....

“The general officer may be a great proficient in the knowledge of war, while the skill of the soldier is confined to a few motions of the hand and the foot. The former may have gained what the latter has lost....

“And thinking itself, in this age of separations, may become a peculiar craft.”” (p 121)

Marx had drawn on such works to set out the division of labour between mental and physical labour, described in Capital. Finally, Marx notes the work of Sismondi, who certainly had not insisted on the advantages of the division of labour over its disadvantages. So, anyone who had actually studied the works of these earlier economists could simply have summarised their conclusions, but those conclusions did jot fit Proudhon's thesis, and so he simply bowdlerised them, much as do the petty-bourgeois moralists, today, who find that their current, practical politics, and their theoretical justification of them conflicts with the theoretical heritage they claim, and even with their own previous positions.

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