Page:Landmarks of Scientific Socialism-Anti-Duehring-Engels-Lewis-1907.djvu/243

 existence, upon another, and on the other hand productive labor instead of being a means of slavery will be a means towards human freedom, in that it offers an opportunity to everyone to develop his full powers, physical and intellectual, in every direction and to exercise them so that it makes a pleasure out of a burden.

This is no longer at the present time a phantasy, a pious wish. Owing to the present development of the powers of production, production has proceeded far enough, provided that society endows itself with the possession of the social forces and abolishes the checks and impediments, as well as the waste of products and productive forces, which springs from the capitalistic methods, to make a general reduction of labor time, to an amount, small as compared with present day ideas.

The abolition of the old method of division of labor is not an advance which would not be possible except at the expense of the productivity of labor, quite otherwise. It is a condition of production which has come about spontaneously through the great industry. "The machine industry does away with the necessity of constantly distributing groups of workmen at the different machines by keeping the worker constantly at the same task. Since the total product of the factory, proceeds not from the worker but from the machine, a continual changing about of individuals could not exist, without an interruption of the labor-process. Finally the speed with which work at the machine is learnt even by children does away with the necessity of training a distinct class of workmen exclusively as machine laborers." But while the capitalistic method of use of machinery does away with the old limited particularity of labor, and, in spite of the fact, that technique is rendered superfluous, machinery itself rebels against the anachronism.