Page:Karl Marx - The Poverty of Philosophy - (tr. Harry Quelch) - 1913.djvu/158

 THE METAPHYSICS OF POLITICAL ECONOMY 151

and not at all a combination of labors for the workman himself. “When, by the division of labor, each separate operation has been reduced to the operation of a simple instrument, the union of all these instruments, put in operation by a single motor, constitutes—a machine.” (Babbage, “Traité sur l’Economie des Machines,” &c., Paris, 1833.) Simple tools, accumulation of tools, com- posite tools, the putting in motion of a composite tool by a single manual motor, by man, the putting in motion of these instruments by natural forces, the machine, a system of machines with a single motor, a system of machines with an automaton for motor—such is the development of machinery.

The concentration of the instruments of production and the division of labor are as inseparable the one from the other as are, in the domain of politics, the concentration of the public powers and the division of private interests. England, with the concentration of land, the instrument of agricultural industry, has, at the same time, division of agricultural labor and the application of machinery to the exploitation of the soil. France which has the di- vision of this instrument, the system of small property in land, has, generally speaking, neither division of agricultural labor nor the application of machinery to the cultivation of the soil.

For M. Proudhon the concentration of the instruments of labor is the negation of the division of labor. In reality we find it to be quite the contrary. In proportion as the concentration of these instruments is developed, so also this division is developed, and vice versa. To this is due the fact that every great invention in mechanics is followed by a greater division of labor, and each advance in the division of labor brings in its turn new mechanical inventions.