When the Capitalist gathers the workers to perform the various tasks, which make up all of the labor for a commodity, in his workshop, he gives an entirely special nature to simple cooperation; he establishes the division of labor and manufacturing; which is none other than “a productive mechanism whose parts are human beings” (Marx, Capital, vol. 1, ch. 14, sec. 1).

Although manufacturing is always based on the division of labor, it also has a double origin. In fact in some cases manufacturing has brought together the different processing needs for the completion of a commodity in the same workshop, which first, like so many special trades, used to be distinct and divided up; in other cases it has divided, while keeping them in the same workshop, the different work operations, that before used to make up a whole of the completion of a commodity.

“A carriage, for example, was formerly the product of the labor of a great number of independent artificers, such as wheelwrights, harness-makers, tailors, locksmiths, upholsterers, turners, fringe-makers, glaziers, painters, polishers, gilders, &c. In the manufacture of carriages, however, all these different artificers are assembled in one building where they work into one another’s hands. It is true that a carriage cannot be gilt before it has been made. But if a number of carriages are being made simultaneously, some may be in the hands of the gilders while others are going through an earlier process” (Marx, Capital, vol. 1, ch. 14, sec. 1).

The production of a pin was divided into more than twenty partial processes, which form the parts of the complete manufacture of a pin. Manufacturing, therefore, sometimes brings many trades together into only one, and sometimes divides a trade into many more.

Manufacturing multiplies the forces and instruments of labor, but renders them predominantly technical and simple, constantly applying them to one sole and unique basic operation.

Great are the advantages that capital realizes in manufacturing, allocating different labor forces to the same basic operations constantly. Labor power gains very much in intensity and precision. All of those little intervals, which one finds like pores between the different phases of production of a good created by only one individual, disappear when this individual always executes the same operation. The worker needs no more than an hour to learn all about a trade albeit a simple one, a unique operation of the trade itself, which he learns in much less time and with less expense than how much was needed to learn a trade in its entirety. This diminishing of expense and time is a diminishing of things needed for the worker, i.e. a diminishing of necessary labor, and a corresponding growth of overwork and surplus value. The capitalist, really a parasite, always grows fatter at the expense of labor, and the worker suffers greatly.

“While simple cooperation leaves the mode of working by the individual for the most part unchanged, manufacture thoroughly revolutionizes it, and seizes labor-power by its very roots. It converts the laborer into a crippled monstrosity, by forcing his detail dexterity at the expense of a world of productive capabilities and instincts; just as in the States of La Plata they butcher a whole beast for the sake of his hide or his tallow. Not only is the detail work distributed to the different individuals, but the individual himself is made the automatic motor of a fractional operation, and the absurd fable of Menenius Agrippa, which makes man a mere fragment of his own body, becomes realized” (Marx, Capital, vol. 1, ch. 14, sec. 5).

“Dugald Stewart calls manufacturing laborers ‘living automatons ... employed in the details of the work’” (Marx, Capital, vol. 1, ch. 14, fn. 40).

“If, at first, the workman sells his labor-power to capital, because the material means of producing a commodity fail him, now his very labor-power refuses its services unless it has been sold to capital. Its functions can be exercised only in an environment that exists in the workshop of the capitalist after the sale. By nature unfitted to make anything independently, the manufacturing laborer develops productive activity as a mere appendage of the capitalist’s workshop. As the chosen people bore in their features the sign manual of Jehovah, so division of labor brands the manufacturing workman as the property of capital” (Marx, Capital, vol. 1, ch. 14, sec. 5).

Heinrich von Storch says: “The worker who is the master of a whole craft can work and find the means of subsistence anywhere; the other (the manufacturing laborer) is only an appendage who, when he is separated from his fellows, possesses neither capability nor independence, and finds himself forced to accept any law it is thought fit to impose” (Marx, Capital, vol. 1, ch. 14, fn. 42).

“Intelligence in production expands in one direction, because it vanishes in many others. What is lost by the detail laborers, is concentrated in the capital that employs them. It is a result of the division of labor in manufactures, that the laborer is brought face to face with the intellectual potencies of the material process of production, as the property of another, and as a ruling power. This separation begins in simple cooperation, where the capitalist represents to the single workman, the oneness and the will of the associated labor. It is developed in manufacture which cuts down the laborer into a detail laborer. It is completed in modern industry, which makes science a productive force distinct from labor and presses it into the service of capital” (Marx, Capital, vol. 1, ch. 14, sec. 5).

“In manufacture, in order to make the collective laborer, and through him capital, rich in social productive power, each laborer must be made poor in individual productive powers.

“‘Ignorance is the mother of industry as well as of superstition. Reflection and fancy are subject to err; but a habit of moving the hand or the foot is independent of either. Manufactures, accordingly, prosper most where the mind is least consulted, and where the workshop may ... be considered as an engine, the parts of which are men’ (Adam Ferguson).

“As a matter of fact, some few manufacturers in the middle of the 18^th century preferred, for certain operations that were trade secrets, to employ half-idiotic persons.

“‘The understandings of the greater part of men,” says Adam Smith, “are necessarily formed by their ordinary employments. The man whose whole life is spent in performing a few simple operations ... has no occasion to exert his understanding... He generally becomes as stupid and ignorant as it is possible for a human creature to become.’

“After describing the stupidity of the detail laborer he goes on:

“‘The uniformity of his stationary life naturally corrupts the courage of his mind... It corrupts even the activity of his body and renders him incapable of exerting his strength with vigor and perseverance in any other employments than that to which he has been bred. His dexterity at his own particular trade seems in this manner to be acquired at the expense of his intellectual, social, and martial virtues. But in every improved and civilized society, this is the state into which the laboring poor, that is, the great body of the people, must necessarily fall.’

“For preventing the complete deterioration of the great mass of the people by division of labor, A. Smith recommends education of the people by the State, but prudently, and in homeopathic doses. G. Garnier, his French translator and commentator, who, under the first French Empire, quite naturally developed into a senator, quite as naturally opposes him on this point. Education of the masses, he urges, violates the first law of the division of labor, and with it ‘our whole social system would be proscribed.’ ‘Like all other divisions of labor,’ he says, ‘that between hand labor and head labor is more pronounced and decided in proportion as society (he rightly uses this word, for capital, landed property and their State) becomes richer. This division of labor, like every other, is an effect of past, and a cause of future progress... ought the government then to work in opposition to this division of labor, and to hinder its natural course? Ought it to expend a part of the public money in the attempt to confound and blend together two classes of labor, which are striving after division and separation?’” (Marx, Capital, vol. 1, ch. 14, sec. 5).

Ferguson says: “And thinking itself, in this age of separations, may become a peculiar craft” (Marx, Capital, vol. 1, ch. 14, fn. 48).

“Some crippling of body and mind is inseparable even from division of labor in society as a whole. Since, however, manufacture carries this social separation of branches of labor much further, and also, by its peculiar division, attacks the individual at the very roots of his life, it is the first to afford the materials for, and to give a start to, industrial pathology” (Marx, Capital, vol. 1, ch. 14, sec. 5).

“Ramazzini, professor of practical medicine at Padua, published in 1713 his work ‘De morbis artificum,’ which was translated into French 1781, reprinted 1841 in the ‘Encyclopédie des Sciences Médicales. 7me Dis. Auteurs Classiques.’ The period of Modern Mechanical Industry has, of course, very much enlarged his catalog of labor’s diseases. See ‘Hygiène physique et morale de l’ouvrier dans les grandes villes en général et dans la ville de Lyon en particulier. Par le Dr. A. L. Fonteret, Paris, 1858,’ and ‘Die Krankheiten, welche verschiednen Ständen, Altern und Geschlechtern eigenthümlich sind. 6 Vols. Ulm, 1860,’ and others. In 1854 the Society of Arts appointed a Commission of Inquiry into industrial pathology. The list of documents collected by this commission is to be seen in the catalog of the ‘Twickenham Economic Museum.’ Very important are the official ‘Reports on Public Health.’ See also Eduard Reich, M. D. ‘Ueber die Entartung des Menschen,’ Erlangen, 1868” (Marx, Capital, vol. 1, ch. 14, fn 50).

David Urquhart says: “To subdivide a man is to execute him, if he deserves the sentence, to assassinate him if he does not... The subdivision of labor is the assassination of a people.” (Marx, Capital, vol. 1, ch. 14, sec. 5).

“Hegel held very heretical views on division of labor. In his ‘Rechtsphilosophie’ he says: ‘By well educated men we understand in the first instance, those who can do everything that others do’” (Marx, Capital, vol. 1, ch. 14, fn. 51).

“In its specific capitalist form – and under the given conditions, it could take no other form than a capitalistic one – manufacture is but a particular method of begetting relative surplus-value, or of augmenting at the expense of the laborer the self-expansion of capital – usually called social wealth, ‘Wealth of Nations,’ &c. It increases the social productive power of labor, not only for the benefit of the capitalist instead of for that of the laborer, but it does this by crippling the individual laborers. It creates new conditions for the lordship of capital over labor. If, therefore, on the one hand, it presents itself historically as a progress and as a necessary phase in the economic development of society, on the other hand, it is a refined and civilized method of exploitation” (Marx, Capital, vol. 1, ch. 14, sec. 5).