In other words,, as previously described, it was not the division of labour that brings this about. First, the market, in the towns, expands; secondly, merchants have larger money profits from increased activity and inflation; thirdly, they can use these money profits to employ available labour. As Marx describes, in Capital, and Lenin sets out in his polemics against the Narodniks, under those conditions, its not even the case, nor necessary, that the capitalist buys labour-power, rather than the product of labour.
Suppose an independent hand-loom weaver produces a metre of cloth in 10 hours labour. Say, 10 hours labour is equal to £1 of new value. Now, because of economies of scale, in the workshop, a hand-loom weaver works for the same 10 hours, and is paid £1 for this new value created, but produces 1.1 metres of cloth. If the market value of cloth is determined by the former, then the capitalist, in selling 1.1 metres of cloth, will recover £1.10, having only paid £1 for the value added by labour, and that is before considering any economies they make in buying material in bulk and so on. The initial industrial workers, therefore, were able to choose to work for capitalists for only part of the week, to obtain money to make payments. The rest of the week, they were able to continue to work on their own account. Indeed, as Marx sets out, in Capital, bourgeois ideologists, at the time, bemoaned this freedom of the labourer to limit the hours worked.
Initially, therefore, what is involved is this bringing together of handicraft producers under one roof, and under the control of one capitalist, who is able to organise production on a larger scale to meet the needs of larger markets, and to obtain economies of scale.
“The utility of a workshop consisted much less in the division of labour as such than in the circumstances that work was done on a much larger scale, that many unnecessary expenses were saved, etc. At the end of the 16th and at the beginning of the 17th century, Dutch manufacture scarcely knew any division of labour.” (p 127-8)
In fact, as against a social division of labour, its impossible to have a significant technical division of labour, outside the workshop, because it implies a large enough scale of production to have several workers, each specialising in one aspect of production, and coordinating their production with others in the workshop.
“There is not one single example, whether in the 16th or in the 17th 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 workshop. But once the men and the instruments had been brought together, the division of labour, such as it had existed in the form of the guilds, was reproduced, necessarily reflected inside the workshop.” (p 128)
And, that was just the beginning. Once in the workshop, the individual tasks can be analysed and broken down into separate operations, as with Adam Smith's pin. Each worker becomes a detail worker, specialising in that specific task. Proudhon sees the machine as the antidote to this, for the worker, because the machine replicates all these separate tasks into one continuous process, again, now producing the end product. But, what Proudhon fails to see is that it is the machine that now brings together all these individual tasks, not the worker. The worker, who now has become simply a wage-worker, a seller of homogeneous, machine-minding, factory labour, is not the one who performs all these tasks of producing a pin, but the machine. The worker is not the producer of pins as commodities that they can sell, in the way that independent commodity producers did; it is the machine, and the machine is the property of the capitalist, and only exists because of capitalist factory production.
“Machinery, properly so-called, dates from the end of the 18th 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 unification 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 single instrument, the linking up of all these instruments, set in motion by a single engine, constitutes – a machine.”
(Babbage, Traite sur l’économie des machines [et des manufactures], Paris 1833 [p.230;cf. Eng.ed., p 71].)” (p 128)
Indeed, the development of machinery required the division of labour, to break down composite production into a series of discrete tasks, so that these simple tasks could be undertaken as a series of operations, by the machine.
“Simple tools; accumulation 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 one automatic motor – this is the progress of machinery.” (p 128)
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