Page:Karl Marx - The Poverty of Philosophy - (tr. Harry Quelch) - 1913.djvu/155

 148 THE POVERTY OF PHILOSOPHY

It might even be set up as a general rule, that the less authority presides over the division of labor in the interior of society, the more will the division of labor be developed inside the factory and the more absolutely will it there be subject to the authority of a single individual. Thus the authority in the factory and that in society, in relation to the division of labor, are in inverse ratio the one to the other.

It is now important to see what is this factory, in which the occupations are greatly separated, where the task of each worker is reduced to a very simple operation, and where the authority, capital, groups and directs the laborers. How has this workshop come into existence? To answer this question we shall have to examine how manufacturing industry, properly so-called, has been developed. I refer now to that industry which is not yet modern industry, with its machinery, but which is, at the same time, neither the industry of the artisans of the Middle Ages nor domestic industry. We will not enter into elaborate details; we will only give some summarised points in order to show that history cannot be made with formulas.

One of the most indispensable conditions for the forma- tion of the manufacturing industry was the accumulation

of capitals facilitated by the discovery of America and the introduction of its precious metals.

It has been sufficiently proved that the augmentation of the means of exchange has resulted in, on one side the depreciation of wages and rent, and on the other the increase of industrial profits. In other terms, in pro- portion as the landlord class and the working class, the

feudal lords and the people, fall, so the capitalists class, the bourgeoisie, rises.