{"resolved":true,"match_type":"uuid","source_type":"original_book","book_id":"bde76793-4c65-415a-a237-6ccacc2e0802","title":"Labor and Monopoly Capital The Degradation of Work in the Twentieth Century","author":null,"edition":null,"publisher":null,"year":null,"isbn":"0853459401","requested_by":"printed_page","book":{"source_type":"original_book","book_id":"bde76793-4c65-415a-a237-6ccacc2e0802","id":"bde76793-4c65-415a-a237-6ccacc2e0802","uuid":"bde76793-4c65-415a-a237-6ccacc2e0802","title":"Labor and Monopoly Capital The Degradation of Work in the Twentieth Century","normalized_title":"laborandmonopolycapitalthedegradationofworkinthetwentiethcentury","author":null,"edition":null,"publisher":null,"year":null,"isbn":"0853459401","isbns":["0853459401"],"parsed":true,"ai_readable":true,"document_type":"book","page_count":183,"navigation_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/ai/book/bde76793-4c65-415a-a237-6ccacc2e0802","title_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/ai/title/Labor%20and%20Monopoly%20Capital%20The%20Degradation%20of%20Work%20in%20the%20Twentieth%20Century","fixed_page_url_template":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/ai/book/bde76793-4c65-415a-a237-6ccacc2e0802/page/{printed_page}","path_api_url_template":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/book/bde76793-4c65-415a-a237-6ccacc2e0802/page/{printed_page}","read_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/read/bde76793-4c65-415a-a237-6ccacc2e0802","page_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/books/bde76793-4c65-415a-a237-6ccacc2e0802/page","search_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/books/bde76793-4c65-415a-a237-6ccacc2e0802/search"},"page":{"printed_page":"50 / 51","pdf_page":38,"physical_index":38,"physical_index_base":0,"printed_page_status":"recognized","page_sha256":"740a21712d4be6ad15fd4253990c9b608db2d484593c459fea402c8df8b67bfa"},"chapter":"Acknowledgments","content":"Herskovits gives us here a picture of a division of labor into crafts, a differentiation which in the beginning owes much to sex roles. By and large, however, there is no division of tasks within the crafts. While men or women may habitually be connected with the making of certain products, they do not as a rule divide up the separate operations involved in the making of each product.\n\nThis form of division oflabor, characteristic of all societies, is, if we follow Marx's terminology, called the social division of labor. It is a derivative of the specific character of human work: “An animal forms things in accordance with the standard and the need of the species to which it belongs, whilst man knows how to produce in accordance with the standard of every species.\"² The spider weaves, the bear fishes, the beaver builds dams and houses, but the human is simultaneously weaver, fisherman, builder, and a thousand other things combined in a manner which, because this takes place in, and is possible only through, society, soon compels a social division according to craft. Each individual of the human species cannot alone “produce in accordance with the standard of every species\" and invent standards unknown to any animal, but the species as a whole finds it possible to do this, in part through the social division of labor. Thus the social division of labor is apparently inherent in the species character of human labor as soon as it becomes social labor, that is, labor carried on in and through society.\n\nAs against this general or social division of labor, there stands the division of labor in detail, the manufacturing division of labor. This is the breakdown of the processes involved in the making of the product into manifold operations performed by different workers.\n\nThe practice of regarding the social and the detailed divisions of labor as a single continuum, a single abstract technical principle, is by far the greatest source of confusion in discussions of this subject.\\* The division of labor in society is characteristic of all known societies; the division of labor in the workshop is the special product of capitalist society. The social division of labor divides society among occupations, each adequate to a branch of production; the detailed division of labor destroys occupations considered in this sense, and renders the worker inadequate to carry through any complete production process. In capitalism, the social division of labor is enforced chaotically and anarchically by the market, while the workshop division of labor is imposed by planning and control. Again in capitalism, the products of the social division of labor are exchanged as commodities, while the results of the operation of the detail worker are not exchanged within the factory as within a marketplace, but are all owned by the same capital. While the social division of labor subdivides society, the detailed division of labor subdivides humans, and while the subdivision of society may enhance the individual and the species, the subdivision of the individual, when carried on without regard to human capabilities and needs, is a crime against the person and against humanity.\n\nThe view which ignores the distinction between the social and detailed divisions of labor is given typical expression in the following comments: “Social differentiation and division of labor are universal attributes of human society. Contrary to the view persisting into the recent past that primitive man lives in completely homogeneous and amorphous groups, modern knowledge of primitive and peasant communities reveals much complexity and specialization. . . . Modern specialization cannot therefore be contrasted with an assumed society or period having no division of labor. The difference is one of degree and not of kind.\"4 Wilbert Moore here forces us to assume that the division of society among trades, crafts, professions “cannot be contrasted\" with the breakup of those occupations, that there is no difference “in kind\" between the practice of farming, cabinetmaking, or blacksmithing, and the repeated tightening of a single set of bolts hundreds of times each day or the key punching of thousands of cards each week throughout a lifetime of labor, because all are expressions of the “division of labor.\" On this level of abstraction, obviously, nothing can be learned about the division of labor, except the banal and apologetic conclusion that being “universal,\" each of its manifestations is probably inevitable. Needless to say, this is precisely the conclusion that bourgeois society prefers.\n\nIt is for this reason that the popularity of Emile Durkheim's work, The Division ofLabor in Society, has grown as its applicability to the modern world has dwindled. Durkheim adopts just such a level of abstraction in his approach: “The only way to succeed in objectively appreciating the division of labor is to study it first in itself, entirely speculatively, to look for its use, and upon what it depends, and finally, to form as adequate a notion as possible of it.\"⁵ He proceeds in this fashion, determinedly avoiding the specific social conditions under which the division of labor develops in our epoch, celebrating throughout his proposition that “the ideal of human fraternity can be realized only in proportion to the progress of the division of labor,\" until in the last tenth of his work he discovers the division of labor in the factories and offices of modern capitalism, and dubs them “abnormal forms.\" But, as has been noted by a recent critic, M. C. Kennedy, “when we inspect these abnormal forms throughout the world, it becomes difficult to find one clear-cut case of the normal division of labor.\" Kennedy is absolutely right when he calls Durkheim's “normal\" form of the division of labor \"the ideal of a moralistic sociologist and not a sociologist of morals.\"7 \\*\n\n50\n\nLabor and Monopoly Capital\n\nThe Division of Labor\n\n51\n\n\\* “But, in spite of the numerous analogies and links connecting them,\" Marx warned, \"division of labour in the interior of a society, and that in the interior of a workshop, differ not only in degree, but also in kind.\"3","previous_page":37,"next_page":39}