Page:Karl Marx - The Poverty of Philosophy - (tr. Harry Quelch) - 1913.djvu/163

 156 THE POVERTY OF PHILOSOPHY

machines, the operative needs to call his faculties only into agreeable exercise... ..

“As his business consists in tending the work of a well-regulated mechanism, he can learn it in a short period; and when he transfers his services from one machine to another, he varies his task, and enlarges his views by thinking on those general combinations which result from his and his companions’ labors. Thus, that cramping of the faculties, that narrowing of the mind, that stunting of the frame, which were ascribed, and not unjustly, by moral writers, to the division of labor, cannot, in common circumstances, occur under the equable ‘distribution of industry..... It is, in fact, the constant aim and tendency of every improvement in machinery to supersede human labor altogether, or to diminish its cost, by substituting the industry of women and children for that of men; or that of ordinary laborers for trained artisans..... This tendency to employ inerely children with watchful eyes and nimble fingers, instead of journeymen of long experience, shows how the scholastic dogma of the division of labor into degrees of skill has been exploded by our enlightened manu- facturers.” (Andrew Ure, “Philosophy of Manufactures” (1835) pp. 15 and 16.)

That which characterises the division of labor within modern society is that it engenders specialities, species, and with them the stupefying of handicraft.

“We are struck with admiration,” says Lemontey, “in seeing among the ancients the same individual being at once, and in an eminent degree, philosopher, poet, orator, historian, priest, administrator and general. Our minds are awe-stricken at the contemplation of so vast a domain. Each one now plants his hedge and fences himself within