Marx quotes Proudhon's account of the “bad” effects of the division of labour, in industry, in terms of the mental effects of routine labour, and extended shifts, but, also, of supposedly leading to immiseration.
“Machinery is, for M. Proudhon, “the logical antithesis of the division of labour,” and with the help of his dialectics, he begins by transforming machinery into the workshop.” (p 123)
Machinery, of course, only becomes possible when production is conducted on a large-scale, and large-scale production is only possible on the basis of large, concentrated markets for what is produced. Even to go from the hand-held spindle to the spinning wheel, to produce yarn, requires that the spinner is no longer producing yarn for their own direct production, but for a market. To make it possible to move from a spinning wheel to a spinning machine, with ten spindles requires a national market, and to move to one with a hundred spindles requires a world market. Moreover, the spinning machine needs power from water or steam, and requires a factory. It requires the resources of a capitalist to buy the factory and machines, and to buy the material in the quantities to be processed. It implies large-scale, capitalist production.
“After presupposing the modern workshop, in order to make poverty the outcome of the division of labour, M. Proudhon presupposes poverty engendered by the division of labour, in order to come to the workshop and be able to represent it as the dialectical negation of that poverty.” (p 123)
As Lenin describes, in his polemics with the Narodniks, and analysis of the development of capitalism in Russia, the social division of labour arises simultaneously with the expansion of the market. They are two sides of the same coin. The weaver can only find a market for cloth amongst spinners if spinners no longer also produce cloth, and vice versa. This is not a basis of social stratification or immiseration, particularly if the exchanges between the two are based on equal values, equal amounts of universal labour. Indeed, although the unit values of yarn and cloth fall, the quantity of use-values and so welfare of both rise.
What is a basis of such stratification and immiseration is that competition between spinners, and between weavers, shows them not to be equal. Some spinners will be more efficient than others, leading to the less efficient failing, and the same will be true amongst weavers. In other words, the basis is not unequal exchange, but competition itself, a fact that modern petty-bourgeois “anti-imperialists” also fail to understand. In past societies those that failed became serfs, slaves, servants or paupers, but this is a result of competition and commodity production, not division of labour. Yet, Proudhon wishes to retain commodity production and exchange.
As Marx describes in Theories of Surplus Value, where capitalist production differs from the past condition is that, where the independent producer fails, they now become transformed into a wage labourer, employed by their successful competitors, who also now buy up the former's means of production. Its on this basis that, initially, rather than increasing/accumulating means of production, they simply centralise them, and centralise production in the workshop. And, as Marx describes in Capital, it is only after the independent producers have failed and are taken into the capitalists' workshop, still as handicraft workers that the process of division of labour, inside the factory, gets underway.
“After striking the worker morally by a degrading function, physically by the meagreness of the wage; after putting the worker under the dependence of the foreman, and debasing his work to the labour of a mechanic’s assistant, he lays the blame again on the workshop and the machinery for degrading the worker “by giving him a master,” and he completes his abasement by making him “sink from the rank of artisan to that of common labourer.” Excellent dialectics! And if he only stopped there! But no, he has to have a new history of the division of labour, not any longer to derive the contradictions from it, but to reconstruct the workshop after his own fashion. To attain this end he finds himself compelled to forget all he has just said about division.” (p 123)
And, here is where the role of changes in technology becomes manifest. The handicraft workshop or manufactory, as with The Putting Out System, basically takes the existing independent, handicraft producers, and their means of production, and puts them under the control of a private capitalist. The merchant who sold material to a spinner, now, provides that material to them for free, but negotiates a price for the yarn, whereas previously, the spinner would have sold the yarn to the merchant.
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