If the machine is fetishized, the division of labor in its present form is the subject of a veritable religion. Consider this from the author of a book on modern science and society:
The industrial assembly line, for instance, is an important social invention in the division of labor, and modern machine technology is impossible without it no matter how much scientific knowledge we have. Therefore, since science and technology are now extremely interdependent and fructifying for each other, both are fundamentally dependent upon the maintenance of that great division of labor
The chief advantage of the industrial assembly line is the control it affords over the pace of labor, and as such it is supremely useful to owners and managers whose interests are at loggerheads with those of their workers. From a technological point of view, it is extraordinarily primitive and has little to do with “modern machine technology."Nevertheless, in such barbarous relics is found the seat of“scientific knowledge" and the basis for technology. Apologists for chattel slavery, from Greece to the American South, used to argue that the labors of their fieldhands and domestic slaves were necessary so that they could preserve and develop art, science, and culture. Modern apologists go further and instruct the workers that they must keep to their places on the “industrial assembly line" as a precondition for the development of a science and technology which will then devise for them still better examples of the division of labor. And it is truly in this way that workers, so long as they remain servants of capital instead of freely associated producers who control their own labor and their own destinies, work every day to build for themselves more “modern," more “scientific," more dehumanized prisons of labor.
Notes
160 Labor and Monopoly Capital
Machinery
161
law. Modern Industry, indeed, compels society, under penalty of death, to replace the detail-worker of to-day, crippled by life-long repetition of one and the same trivial operation, and thus reduced to the mere fragment of a man, by the fully developed individual, fit for a variety of labours, ready to face any change of production, and to whom the different social functions he performs, are but so many modes of giving free scope to his own natural and acquired powers."51 This, extracted from its context, has been understood to mean that Marx was predicting that with the further development of capitalism an “educated" and “technical" working class would be created by modern industry. In fact, that was not his thought at all, as a reading of the section in question makes clear. He saw capitalism as being in direct contradiction to the tendency of modern industry to call into being a new type of worker, a “fully developed individual," and what he is saying here is that society itself is threatened with extinction unless it rids itself of the capitalist system which, the more modern scientific industry makes it obsolete, the more tenaciously it holds on to and even deepens an outmoded division of labor. "Although then," he says in another place, "technically speaking, the old system of division of labour is thrown overboard by machinery, it hangs on in the factory, as a traditional habit handed down from Manufacture [that is, hand industry] and is afterwards systematically re-moulded and established in far more hideous form by capital, as a means of exploiting labour-power." And at this point he has a footnote assailing Proudhon for interpreting machinery as a synthesis of detail operations for the benefit of the worker.³² Every line Marx wrote on this subject makes it clear that he did not expect from capitalism or from science and machinery as used by capitalism, no matter how complex they become, any general increase in the technical scope, scientific knowledge, or broadening of the competence of the worker, and that in fact he expected the opposite.