Marx examines how Proudhon uses his thesis that the division of labour is a natural law to derive the “bad” things resulting from it. In particular, how does it lead to inequality rather than the equality that Proudhon chose as his moral imperative, towards which all social development is headed. He quotes Proudhon,
“At this solemn hour of the division of labour, the storm winds begin to blow over humanity. Progress does not take place for all in an equal and uniform manner.... It begins by taking possession of a small number of the privileged.... It is this preference for person on the part of progress that has for so long kept up the belief in the natural and providential inequality of conditions, has given rise to castes, and hierarchically constituted all societies.” (p 121)
Firstly, the claim is false. As Marx, Engels and Morgan and others established, the division of labour existed for thousands of years, within primitive communes, without any division of the commune into social strata or castes. There was no exchange within the commune, which operated on the basis of collective production and consumption. Division of labour, much as within the individual peasant household, was simply a means of increasing this collective social productivity. Exchange only occurs with other tribes, at the periphery.
It was not division of labour that led to social stratification but the creation of significant social surpluses, which are more the product of an increased development of technology than division of labour. What drives both the division of labour, and the development of technology? It is The Law of Value, the need to raise social productivity, to maximise the production of use values with limited labour/value, i.e. to reduce the unit value of products.
“Will you go further and ask what made the division of labour create castes, hierarchical constitutions and privileged persons? M. Proudhon will tell you: Progress. And what made progress? Limitation. Limitation, for M. Proudhon, is acceptance of persons on the part of progress.” (p 122)
And, herein lies the generally reactionary nature of petty-bourgeois socialism that seeks to remain within existing limitations, rather than break out of them, via revolutionary transformations. In the end, as Marx described, in The Communist Manifesto, and Lenin described, in his polemics against the Narodniks, they are historically pessimistic, as against the revolutionary optimism of the Marxist. Its why the petty-bourgeois moralists can so easily adopt the outlook of catstrophism, and the calls to slow down production, to avoid an imminent exhaustion of natural resources that never arises, and indeed, tends to move further and further into the future. as science and technology develops more efficient means of utilising existing resources, and develops new, more effective materials, resources, forms of energy and so on.
Marx describes this same petty-bourgeois pessimism in Proudhon.
“After philosophy comes history. It is no longer either descriptive history or dialectical history, it is comparative history. M. Proudhon establishes a parallel between the present-day printing worker and the printing worker of the Middle Ages; between the man of letters of today and the man of letters of the Middle Ages, and he weighs down the balance on the side of those who belong more or less to the division of labour as the Middle Ages constituted or transmitted it.” (p 122)
In other words, Proudhon does not show what his thesis required him to prove, which is that the division of labour, as a natural law, produces “bad” effects that must be removed by some antidote. Instead, he compares the division of labour in one historical period to the division of labour in another, concluding that its effect in earlier times were either not “bad”, or “less bad”, a lesser-evil, than they are now. But, Marx notes, later, Proudhon is to throw all of this into the air, and “retract all these alleged arguments” (p 122)
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