Turning to the division of labour, Duhring says,
“In Plato’s writings on the state, people ... claim to have found the modern chapter on the economic division of labour”. (p 292)
Engels notes that this undoubtedly was a reference in Capital I, Chapter XII, in which Marx noted that “the views of classical antiquity on the division of labour are on the contrary shown to have been “in most striking contrast” with the modern view.” (p 292), i.e. the view presented by Duhring.
Plato's view, for his time, Engels notes, was full of genius, and yet Duhring has only contempt for it. Plato, basing himself on the commodity production and exchange of the Greek City state, analysed the developing social division of labour that is synonymous with the expansion of the market. But, Duhring complains that Plato did not refer to,
the “limit set by the actual extent of the market to the further ramification of professions and the technical dissection of special operations... only the conception of this limit constitutes the knowledge thanks to which this idea, which is otherwise hardly fit to be called scientific, becomes a major economic truth.” (p 292)
Plato may not have done so, Engels notes, but Xenophon did. According to Duhring, who, here, basically reiterates the view of Roscher, it is capitalist production that establishes the division of labour. A similar view was presented by Proudhon, and dealt with by Marx in The Poverty of Philosophy. Adam Smith had seen the social division as arising from trade. Marx shows that was wrong. Before trade within communities, even within households, a division of labour naturally arises, because its quickly seen that different people have different skills and aptitudes, and that productivity is raised by utilising that fact. It is not trade that begets the division of labour, but this division of labour that begets trade, first trade between different communities, and later, as the communes dissolve, trade between individuals.
What has also to be distinguished is this social division of labour that is synonymous with the expansion of trade, and the technical division of labour that only becomes possible within the factory, on the basis of large-scale production, and described by Smith in relation to the production of a pin.
“In a society in which commodity production is the dominant form of production, “the market”—to adopt Herr Dühring’s style for once—was a “limit” very well known to “business people”. But more than “the knowledge and instinct of routine” is needed to realise that it was not the market that created the capitalist division of labour, but that, on the contrary, it was the dissolution of former social connections, and the resulting division of labour that created the market (see Capital, Vol. I, Ch. XXIV, 5: “Creation of the Home-Market for Industrial Capital”).” (p 293)
In short, the dissolution of existing social relations, the freeing of serfs from the land, and their movement to the owns, leads them to become independent commodity producers. Each specialises in their own type of commodity production – a social division of labour – which is synonymous with the expansion of the market. You can only exchange with someone else if they produce something different to you. The market implies competition. Competition begets winners and losers, a differentiation into bourgeois and proletarians. It begets capitalist production. Capitalist production, on a large scale, in factories, begets a technical division of labour, within the factory, as each task is divided, and subdivided. At a certain point, even the production of these different components becomes the subject of a new branch of production, a new social division of labour, and the end result is globalisation of production, a global social division of labour, a single global economy.
No comments:
Post a Comment