Modern technology in fact has a powerful tendency to break down ancient divisions of labor by re-unifying production processes. Adam Smith's pins, for example, are no longer made by a worker who straightens the wire, another who cuts the length, a third who fashions the heads, a fourth who affixes them to the pins, a fifth who points the pins, a sixth who tins or whitens, another who inserts them into the paper, and so on. The entire process is re-unified in a single machine which transforms great coils of wire into millions of pins each day already papered and ready for sale. Now go back and read Adam Smith's arguments for the division of labor, arguments having to do with the dexterity gained in the constant application to one operation of a hand process over and over again and so on. You will notice that this modern technology has made a complete hash of these arguments. Not one remains with any force today. The re-unified process in which the execution of all the steps is built into the working mechanism of a single machine would seem now to render it suitable for a collective of associated producers, none of whom need spend all of their lives at any single function and all of whom can participate in the engineering, design, improvement, repair, and operation of these ever more productive machines. Such a system would entail no loss of production, and it would represent the re-unification of the craft in a body of workers far superior to the old craftsworkers. Workers can now become masters of the technology of their process on an engineering level and can apportion among themselves in an equitable way the various tasks connected with this form of production that has become so effortless and automatic.
The division of labor in a capitalist society, however, has to do with many other things besides the pace of production, which in most cases would not be injured if it were wiped out. It has to do, as Charles Babbage pointed out in the early nineteenth century, with differential pay rates, which dictate that the ignorance of the great masses of the workers and the concentration of all engineering knowledge in a few specialists are desirable and, in fact, essential conditions rather than, as it would seem from a human point of view, an abomination. Thus the capitalist mode of production enforces upon new processes devised by technology an ever deeper division of labor no matter how many possibilities for the opposite are opened by machinery. In this way two worlds of work are created: the world in which a very few managers and engineers grasp the process as a whole as their special monopoly, and the world of scheduling clerks, inventory clerks, timekeepers, machine tenders, machine repairers, stock chasers, forklift operators, warehouse attendants, and so on, each of whom performs simple labor in service to a complex machine and each of whom is expected to make a working life of from forty to fifty years out of these scraps of duties, none of which can engage the interests or capacities of a mature human or even of a child for more than a few weeks or a few months, after which they become sheer and mindless drudgery. Thus we may say that while production has become collective and the individual worker has been incorporated into the collective body of workers, this is a body the brain of which has been lobotomized, or worse, removed entirely. Its very brain has been separated from its body, having been appropriated by modern management as a means of controlling and cheapening labor power and labor processes.
We have briefly considered the production process. Let us turn now to its outcome. Let me say at once what cannot be denied and what is in fact capitalism's chief historic role. This unremitting drive on the part of the capitalists to extract an ever greater surplus from the working population, a drive in which the immense powers of science and technology have been enlisted in the service of the accumulation of capital, this drive has brought about an extraordinary development of the human powers of production. The productivity oflabor and hence the surplus which it makes available for further expansion have risen most remarkably in the developed capitalist countries. The owners of the corporations never tire of reminding us that they require great surpluses if they are to constantly enlarge the scale of production, and this is quite true. No change of social system can do away with it as a technical fact. If production is to grow, a portion of the product must be reinvested in the process of production rather than be consumed at once. This we may treat as a natural law, but it is no natural law that this surplus must become and remain the property of a tiny ruling class. This is rather a law of capitalism, and as a result of its workings there has been an immense accumulation of property at one pole of society, greater than at any time in human history.
How about the working population, by which I mean that portion of the population excluding the managers and the proprietors of industry and even excluding those somewhat privileged intermediate strata in professional occupations and in middle management who today make up what might be called a new middle class? The remaining mass, which I have called the working population but which one might call labor or the working class, this remaining mass which constitutes perhaps three quarters of all employment in the United States, is described in the census and in Labor Department statistics under six headings: craftsworkers, operative and kindred workers, laborers, clerical workers, service workers, and sales workers. Here we find close to 60 million out of the approximately 80 million persons, including owners, counted by the census of 1970 as among the working population, and here too we find those jobs characteristically of the sort which I have been describing. Now earlier in this talk I noted that the reduction of the typical job to the level of a few simplified tasks is one of the chief means of cheapening labor power, and I added that this helps to keep the value of labor power at the level of subsistence for the individual or below the level of subsistence for the family.
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