Page:Karl Marx - The Poverty of Philosophy - (tr. Harry Quelch) - 1913.djvu/157

 150 THE POVERTY OF PHILOSOPHY

of the division of labor inside the factory. A manu- factory consists very much more in the union of a large number of workpeople and many trades in a single place, in one apartment, under the control of one capital, than in the analysis of the different operations and the adaption of each worker to one simple task.

The utility of a factory consists much less in the di- vision of labor, properly so-called, than in the fact that the work is performed on a much larger scale, that much unproductive expenditure is thereby saved, &c. At the end of the sixteenth and the beginning of the seventeenth centuries, there was scarcely any division of labor in Dutch manufactories.

The development of the division of labor presupposes the union of workpeople in a factory. There is not even a single example, either in the sixteenth or seventeenth centuries, of the different branches of the same trade being separately exploited to such a point that it would have sufficed to bring them together in one place to obtain a complete factory. But once the men and the instru- ments of production were brought together, the division of labor, as it existed under the form of co-operation, was reproduced, was necessarily reflected, inside the factory.

‘For M. Proudhon, who sees things upside down, if indeed he always sees them, the division of labor, in the sense given to it by Adam Smith, preceded the factory which was a necessary condition of its existence.

Machinery properly so-called dates from the end of the eighteenth century. Nothing could be more absurd than to see in machinery the antithesis of the division-of labor, the synthesis giving unity again to divided labor.

The machine is a union of the instruments of labor,